Doc’s close associates love to analyze his motives, methods, and psychology. This is only natural. Charismatic characters are always subjects of speculation. We want to know what makes them tick. Some say that Doc’s feverish drive is fueled by the pure passion of his sociopolitical convictions. Others say that his restlessness is rooted in some deep dissatisfaction with a conventional church-and-home life that cannot pacify his adventuresome spirit. Some view him as a modern version of the itinerant country preacher, traveling from one community to another to spread the Word.
Doc has heard all these theories, and while they hold some interest for him—he is, after all, no stranger to introspection—he ultimately dismisses the conjecture. He may be exhausted, he may be despondent, he is surely battle weary, but that’s not important: all that matters is that he has a plane to catch, a rally to attend, a war to stop.
The Six-Day War shocks the world. The armies and air power surrounding Israel are decimated with deadly precision. It is a historic victory for the Jewish state and a crushing blow for Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. It also changes the dynamic of the Negro-Jewish coalition in America that has long fought for civil rights and, more recently, protested the war in Vietnam.
Doc is a staunch supporter of Israel. A week before the war, he was one of eight church leaders who signed a letter to the New York Times urging the Johnson administration to back Israel. Among his closest colleagues, though, he expresses concern that the very nature of the sweeping victory—and the fact that Israel has occupied the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank of the Jordan River—could injure the soul of the Jewish state. The captured land gives Israel a defensive buffer against its sworn enemies. But now some six hundred thousand Arabs will be living in the West Bank under Israeli control. “Israel,” Doc tells his confidantes, “faces the danger of being smug and unyielding.”
Once seen as the underdog fighting for its very survival, Israel is suddenly transformed into a military power of unprecedented effectiveness. The nation is now an occupying power. And while the lightning victory has emboldened the spirits of Jews worldwide and, in the aftermath of Hitler’s Holocaust, given credence to the cry “Never again!,” Doc worries about an impact on the antiwar movement in America. As he says to Stanley Levison, “It has given Johnson the little respite he wanted from Vietnam.”
Two conflicting movements are on the rise: a significant segment of American Jews is becoming increasingly obsessed with Israel while black nationalism is finding favor among black youth. Doc stands outside both of these movements. His drive to underscore the evils of poverty, racism, and militarism does not fit into a paradigm of nationalism, Jewish or black.
Doc feels the tension building and races up to New York on June 12 for a secret meeting at Union Theological Seminary with, among others, activist priest Daniel Berrigan and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. The rabbi, recently returned from Jerusalem, is ecstatic over the Israeli victory. “It is as if,” he says, “the prophets had risen from their graves.”
Doc worries about what reveling in military victory will do to the spirit of nonviolence. His own spirit is further assaulted when on this same day the Supreme Court, in a five to four decision, grants the state of Alabama the right to reimprison him for his refusal to follow a 1963 injunction that prohibited him from protesting in Birmingham. It doesn’t matter that an editorial in the New York Times calls the decision “profoundly embarrassing to the good name of the United States” or that Chief Justice Earl Warren has vigorously dissented. Doc is going back to jail.
“Even the Supreme Court has turned against us,” he tells his friends.
The next day Lyndon Johnson nominates Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. Once confirmed, he will be America’s first Negro high court justice. As the man who successfully argued the 1953 Brown v. Board of Education case outlawing public school segregation, Marshall is a highly respected attorney—although he is no fan of Martin Luther King Jr.
Unlike Doc, Marshall backs Johnson on Vietnam. He also opposes Doc’s protest marches and civil disobedience, calling him a “boy on a man’s errand.” Later he will reluctantly acknowledge King’s role as a leader, saying, “As an organizer he wasn’t worth shit.… He was a great speaker… but as for getting the work done, he was not too good at that.… All he did was to dump all his legal work on us [the NAACP], including the bills. And that was all right with him, so long as he didn’t have to pay the bills.”
No love is lost between Doc and Thurgood, and no time is wasted during Doc’s appearance on ABC’s Sunday morning news program Issues and Answers, where he is asked about the infighting among Negro leaders. As usual, Doc rises to the occasion. He takes the high road.
“No movement worth its salt is devoid of philosophical debate,” he tells the national audience, “and there are moments in any social revolution where you have peaks of united activity and you have other moments of debate and even dissension.”
A reporter quotes Where Do We Go from Here to question the soundness of Doc’s approach as laid out in his new text. Doc has written, “We [the Negro community] must develop, from strength, a situation in which the government finds it wise and prudent to collaborate with us.”
“How can you speak out against the administration’s policies in Vietnam,” asks a journalist, “and achieve this end? Aren’t you in effect defeating the purpose?”
Doc replies, “We have never achieved anything, we haven’t made a single gain without the confrontation of power with power.”
When asked to comment on the Middle East, he asserts, “All people of good will must respect the territorial integrity of Israel.… We must see what Israel has done for the world. It is a marvelous demonstration of what people together in unity and with rugged determination can do in transforming almost a desert land into an oasis. But the other side is that peace in the Middle East means something else.… The Arab world is part of that third world of poverty and illiteracy and disease and it is time now to have a Marshall Plan for the Middle East.… We must see that there is a grave refugee problem that the Arabs have.”
Before the interview is over, Doc’s support of Muhammad Ali is challenged once again. Given that Ali is a man who makes his living fighting in a ring, isn’t it inconsistent for him to refuse to fight for his country?
“I don’t find it inconsistent at all,” says Doc. “I find it a very great act of courage.” He adds that he hopes Ali’s position “will cause many young people to take a greater stand against the draft and to refuse to fight in the war in Vietnam.”
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? is published with little fanfare. The road to publication has been rocky. When Doc first showed the text to Stanley Levison, his friend was alarmed by the absence of fresh material. He pointed out that Doc was actually plagiarizing from his previous book, Why We Can’t Wait. Doc owned up to his mistake, writing to his editor, “I made a definite literary mistake.… I lifted a great deal of what I had said in the last chapter of Why We Can’t Wait because I felt it was so relevant at this point.”
Doc did write a new chapter analyzing Black Power that the publisher felt was strong enough to garner interest. Yet Joan Daves, Doc’s literary agent, encounters stiff resistance in her attempt to sell an excerpt of the book. Doc’s politics are considered too well-known and obvious. The media wants something new and strong, not a rehash of previous positions.
The reviews are lukewarm to outright hostile.
Eliot Fremont-Smith, in the New York Times, mentions Doc’s advocacy of “legal political Black Power” and his call for a “return to nonviolence, an alignment of Negroes and poor whites to force the massive Federal poverty-civil rights program once advocated by the President.”
In Commonweal magazine, though, David Steinberg claims that “King’s book seems to be groping for something which it never finds.” He sees Doc in a state of “great confusion and doubt.”
Writing in the New York Review of Books, one of the most prestigious intellectual journals in the country, Andrew Kopkind is caustic: “He [King] has simply, and disastrously, arrived at the wrong conclusions about the world.… Whites have ceased to believe him, or really to care; the blacks hardly listen.” Viewing Doc as the standard-bearer of liberalism, Kopkind writes that issues surrounding the Vietnam War and black militancy “have contrived this summer to murder liberalism… and there are few mourners.”
Realizing the devastating effect of these barbed reviews, Stanley Levison sends a more positive notice from the Washington Post, along with a letter to Doc in which he writes, “Many of the reviewers seem to be so pessimistic they are shaken up because you are not in black despair. I believe they are reflecting the unhappy defeatist mood of intellectual America at the moment. The fact that the book insists on not burying the positive indicates how much this lesson needed to be expressed.”
In the Post, Martin Duberman sees the book as Doc’s attempt “to summarize the recent conflicts within the civil rights movement, to consider the larger context, both national and international, which helps to account for these conflicts, and finally, to suggest possible lines for action.” He points to Doc’s practical programs versus Stokely Carmichael’s reliance on slogans without substance. “Yet when King himself comes to spelling out a program for pooling black resources, economic and political, its stock generalities prove vulnerably close to Carmichael’s sloganeering.” In the end, the review concludes on a pessimistic note: “King’s position seems to me impeccable in theory, but it suffers, as he himself must realize, from the lack of available allies for the coalition he advocates.”
The lack of allies.
In a year of best sellers like William Manchester’s tome on Kennedy—The Death of a President—Doc’s book sells poorly and soon vanishes from the shelves.
Doc is out of style and out of step. Even the language of the day outdates him: he is the ultimate Negro at a time when Negroes are seeing themselves as blacks. The hope that his new text might reassert his relevance—by quieting his critics and winning back those increasingly disillusioned with his nonviolent strategy—has been dashed. On a professional level, there can be no doubt: Doc has the blues.
On a personal level, Doc’s blues deepen when, on a Saturday night in the third week of June, he gets a frantic call from brother A. D. in Louisville.
In light of the Supreme Court decision that came down earlier in the month, A. D. is ranting about how he, along with Doc and others, will have to go back to jail. But it’s more than a political rant that Doc is hearing from his brother. A. D. has fallen into a drunken stupor. He has suffered with debilitating depression before, but this time he speaks of taking his own life.
The words chill Doc’s heart and take him back to a dark childhood day. It was 1941. Martin was twelve years old; A. D. was eleven. It was a morning when Martin was keen on seeing a local parade. He loved the brassy sounds of marching bands and the sight of the high-stepping majorettes. He had chores to do at home and his mother and father nixed the idea, but Martin had a stubborn streak and defied his parents. He ran off to watch the parade.
A few hours later, he returned home to a tragic scene. His maternal grandmother, whom he adored, had suffered a fatal heart attack. Sliding down a banister, A. D. had unwittingly crashed into her and knocked her to the floor. Martin blamed himself. If he hadn’t run off to the parade, he would have been around to supervise his brother—and his grandmother would still be alive. Later he would be told that her encounter with A. D. did not cause the heart attack. But that was after Martin was so despondent that, in what he later called a suicide attempt, he jumped from the second story of the family home. He was merely bruised, but the bruises to his psyche were severe and long lasting. For days he wouldn’t leave his bedroom.
Serious melancholia plagued Doc as a child and as an adult. The same was true for brother A. D.
Now, alarmed by A. D.’s threats to take his own life, Doc gets on the phone and rounds up a group of his Louisville friends to minister to his brother. His friends are able—at least for the time being—to bring his brother around.
The blues are on Doc’s mind the next day, a Sunday morning, as he ascends to the pulpit to preach at Ebenezer in Atlanta. Not just his blues and his brother’s blues but America’s blues. Hawk versus dove, young versus old, black versus white, black versus Negro—it feels as though his country, like his brother, is on the verge of a nervous collapse. These are dark, dark days.
In contrast to darkness, Doc preaches about light. Darkness is brought on by ingratitude, the subject of his sermon. The dangers of ingratitude are many, and the antidote, of course, is gratitude. Gratitude, Doc argues, is what protects us from arrogance. Gratitude is our link to sanity. He talks about a rich Negro who boasts in public of his exalted position without giving gratitude to the man and woman who brought him into the world. Without gratitude, ego runs amok. Without gratitude, there is no humility. Doc points out that “we wouldn’t have a civil rights bill today if some three thousand children hadn’t packed up the jails in Birmingham, Alabama.” Gratitude grounds us in God. “Ingratitude,” he preaches, “is a sin because it causes one to fail to realize his dependence on God.” He sees God as the creative power of the universe.
Doc’s preaching reaches beyond the realm of practical politics or moral behavior. He lifts the congregation—he lifts himself—with talk of dreams and blessed sleep.
“You dream,” he says, “and you dream about things and you see things and you are away from everything. But then early in the morning you wake up. That’s a miracle to me. And this morning I want to thank God for sleep.”
“Sure we got the blues,” blues singer John Lee Hooker once said. “But singing the blues is how we lose the blues. When we singing, we free.”
In the sanctity of the pulpit, Doc loses his blues—if only for the moment. His words relieve the burdens weighing on his heart. His blues sermons are exercises of praise and worship that allow him to transcend the mundane and rise above the muck and mire of a nasty world marred in endless disputation. His blues sermons allow him to soar. They strengthen his resolve and fortify his troubled soul.
This is Sunday, the Lord’s day.
But here comes Monday. For good reason they call it stormy Monday, and Tuesday’s just as bad. Doc is back in the world of endless disputations, an all-too-real world that grows nastier by the day.