It’s another verbal slugfest, another contentious SCLC conference in Frogmore, South Carolina.
It’s the same old story—only this time it’s worse. Among Doc’s supporters, the disenchantment is deepening and Doc’s lieutenants are fighting to take the campaign in different directions. James Bevel is unrestrained and long-winded in his opposition to redirecting SCLC efforts to address poverty. Backing Bevel, Jesse Jackson leaves early on a fund-raising trip that Doc suspects will serve Jesse’s ambitions to start a splinter group of his own. Hosea Williams fiercely attacks Doc’s choice for the new SCLC executive director: William Rutherford, a Chicago Negro with a PhD from the Sorbonne, who has lived in Europe for well over a decade.
“That nigger don’t know nothing about niggers!” Williams screams in Doc’s face.
Even before Frogmore, Doc faced another roadblock, during a meeting with Olympic athletes who would be competing in the 1968 Summer Olympic Games. They wanted to use the event to dramatize their stance against racism. Doc wanted to help them formulate a plan, but it was no use. For now, Black Power militants undermined the prospect of the athletes conducting a peaceful protest—though this does turn out to be the Olympic Games at which John Carlos and Tommie Smith hold up their black-gloved fists.
In this moment, militancy and violence—all the rage among the avant-garde black activists during the winter of 1967—are increasingly on Doc’s mind.
“The riots are now in the center of the stage,” he says. “Some Negroes argue that they are the incipient forms for rebellion and guerrilla tactics that will be the feature of the Negro revolt.”
He argues long and hard against the efficacy of this approach while pointing to its moral bankruptcy. He realizes that the political currents are against him. He tells a story about flying from New York to London in 1956 on a propeller plane. The trip took more than nine-and-a-half hours, but the return flight was three hours longer. Doc asked the pilot why. “When we leave New York,” said the captain, “a strong tail wind is in our favor, but when we return a strong head wind is against us.” The pilot added, “Don’t worry, these four engines are capable of battling the winds.”
“In any social revolution,” Doc tells his dissatisfied troops, “there are times when the tail winds of triumph and fulfillment favor us, and other times when strong head winds of disappointment and setbacks beat against us relentlessly. We must not permit adverse winds to overwhelm us as we journey across life’s Atlantic. We must be sustained by… engines of courage.… This refusal to be stopped, this courage to be, this determination to go on in spite of, is the hallmark of great movements.…
“I’ve decided that, on this question of non-violence, I’m going to stand by it. I’m going to love because it’s just lovely to love. I’m going to be non-violent because I believe it is the answer to mankind’s problems. I’m not going to bargain with reality.… I’ve taken a vow—I, Martin Luther King, take thee, non-violence, to be my wedded wife, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer… in sickness and in health, until death do us part.”
Doc sets out his plan for a series of rallies, sit-ins, and encampments to protest poverty—a Poor People’s Campaign—that will start in Washington. “If we will do this,” he says, “we will be able to turn this nation upside down and right side up, and… cry out that we are children of God, made in his image. This will be a glorious day; at that moment the morning stars will sing together, and the souls of God will shout for joy.”
Doc’s staff members, though, are not shouting for joy. They continue to question the likelihood of signing up three thousand nonviolent volunteers to join the protest.
“I’m serious about this,” Doc replies. “I’m on fire about this thing.”
When his aides’ doubts keep coming, Doc keeps firing back. He talks about Peter being fired up for Jesus on the day of Pentecost, when his sermon converted three thousand souls. He talks about concentration camp survivors who clung to hope; baseball teams that pulled out a victory in the bottom of the ninth; a violinist who, having snapped his A string, found a way to transpose the composition midperformance. He cites the Book of Revelation: “Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have found your deeds unfinished in the sight of my God.”
Doc feels compelled to finish his work.
“We’ve gone for broke before,” he declares, “but not in the way we’re going this time. If necessary I’m going to stay in jail six months.”
When the conference is over, the New York Times quotes Doc about his plans for “massive civil disobedience,” which are to include “mass sit-ins inside and at the gate of factories and thousands of unemployed youths camping in Washington as the bonus marchers did in the thirties.… I am convinced civil disobedience can curtail riots.” He expects whites to join in the protests.
It is the issue of Vietnam, though, not the issue of poverty, or nonviolent solutions, that continues to attract the vast majority of the country’s attention.
At the end of November, Eugene McCarthy, a Democratic senator from Minnesota, beats Bobby Kennedy to the punch by announcing his candidacy in the presidential primaries. McCarthy’s anti-Johnson crusade is centered on a single issue: opposition to LBJ’s war. In the autumn of 1967, the story of Doc’s Poor People’s Campaign is buried by the increasingly heated contest within the Democratic Party to oust their seated president.
On the orders of his physician, Doc takes a short break during the first week of December. He flies to Bimini, in the Bahamas, for a few days of relaxation, and he is invited to the home of Adam Clayton Powell, who, due to budgetary mismanagement of the House committee that he chairs, had been excluded from the Ninetieth Congress, only to win a special election in his Harlem district. His legal status uncertain, Powell has decided to stay in Bimini indefinitely.
Dinner with Powell does little to relax Doc. The congressman spends the evening making disparaging remarks at Doc’s expense. According to Powell, not only is America going to hell in a handbasket, but the Negro people no longer have a leader they can admire. Doc is fooling himself if he thinks he still makes a difference; Doc should wake up to the facts and admit that this nonviolence business is obsolete. His movement has failed; no one takes SCLC seriously anymore. The militants have won over the heart of the people, and the militants are right. No movement can succeed without exerting physical power. Violence is necessary. Any fool knows that to be true.
Realizing that any attempt to counter Powell’s arguments would fall on deaf ears, Doc just sits and listens. The congressman likes bullying his guest. He enjoys dishing out insults. At the head of the long dining room table, the black prince in exile speaks with unwavering authority on all matters, especially the precipitous decline in Doc’s national status.
Doc deftly ignores the taunting. After all, he’s on vacation. He’s come to the Bahamas to relax, not argue. But Powell is persistent, gung ho about getting his guest to admit that his Gandhi-like approach to social change has run its course. Doc will admit no such thing. He simply smiles, gets up from the table, and walks to the veranda. The sky is ablaze with stars. The sea sparkles with moonlight. Night-blooming flowers scent the air. Back in the dining room, Powell is still pontificating. In the darkness, standing alone, Doc seeks peace.