Someone yelled: “We’re nonviolent, but they ain’t!”

Then an empty whisky bottle flew through the air and hit George’s forehead. He climbed down from the roof of the car. He touched his head. It hurt, but it was not bleeding.

Others took up his cry. Verena appeared with several movement leaders and preachers, and they all mingled with the crowd, trying to talk people down. A. D. King got up on a car. “Our home was just bombed,” he cried. “We say, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. But you are not helping—you are hurting us! Please, clear this park!”

Slowly, it began to work. Bull Connor was nowhere to be seen, George noted: the man in charge was Chief of Police Jamie Moore—a law enforcement professional rather than a political appointee—and that helped. The police attitude seemed to have changed. Dog handlers and firemen no longer seemed eager for a fight. George heard a cop saying to a group of Negroes: “We’re your friends!” It was bullshit, but a new kind of bullshit.

There were hawks and doves among the segregationists, George realized. Martin Luther King had allied himself with the doves, and thereby outflanked the hawks. Now the hawks were trying to reignite the fires of hatred. They could not be allowed to succeed.

Lacking the stimulus of police aggression, the crowd lost the will to riot. George began to hear a different kind of comment. When the burning grocery store collapsed, people sounded penitent. “That’s a doggone shame,” said one man, and another said: “We gone too far.”

At last the preachers got them singing, and George relaxed. It was all over, he felt.

He found Chief Moore on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. “We need to get repair crews to the motel, chief,” he said politely. “Power and water are out, and it’s going to get unsanitary in there pretty quickly.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Moore, and put his walkie-talkie to his ear.

But before he could speak into it, the state troopers arrived.

They wore blue helmets and they carried carbines and double-barreled shotguns. They arrived in a rush, most in cars, some on horseback. Within seconds there were two hundred or more. George stared in horror. This was a catastrophe—they would restart the riot. But that was what Governor George Wallace wanted, he realized. Wallace, like Bull Connor and the bombers, saw that the only hope now for the segregationists was a complete breakdown of law and order.

A car drew up and Wallace’s director of public safety, Colonel Al Lingo, jumped out, toting a shotgun. Two men with him, apparently bodyguards, had Thompson submachine guns.

Chief Moore holstered his walkie-talkie. He spoke softly, but carefully did not address Lingo by his military rank. “If you’d leave, Mr. Lingo, I’d appreciate it.”

Lingo did not trouble to be courteous. “Get your cowardly ass back to your office,” he said. “I’m in charge now, and my orders are to put those black bastards to bed.”