The year begins ominously.
The war is six years old, soon to be the longest in American history—nearly sixteen thousand Americans killed and a hundred thousand wounded so far. Hoping to finally destroy the enemy, in the first month of 1968 President Johnson unleashes an eleven-week bombing attack on North Vietnam.
J. Edgar Hoover renews his own attack, doubling down on his plans to destroy Doc through the FBI’s network of paid informers.
Doc’s allies Benjamin Spock and William Sloane Coffin are indicted by the Justice Department for helping young men oppose the draft. Infuriated, Doc calls a press conference in which he attacks the indictments, speaks favorably of Eugene McCarthy’s campaign to unseat Johnson, and criticizes Bobby Kennedy for being lackluster in his opposition to the war.
Maintaining his furious pace, Doc flies to California to support Joan Baez, still imprisoned in Oakland for blocking the entrance to a military center. After the visit, he addresses the press.
There are tough questions about his relationship to Adam Clayton Powell, who has publicly announced that Martin Luther King Jr. no longer subscribes to nonviolence. Coming on top of the insults he suffered in Bimini, this takes Doc by surprise. With all due respect to the congressman, he unequivocally refutes the statement. Yet in spite of this blatant misrepresentation, Doc sends a gracious letter to Powell, urging him to return to New York, where his leadership is needed. “You beat the white man at his game,” Doc writes, “and became a fighting symbol of power.”
His aides are astounded that Doc is able to turn the other cheek and offer the congressman such support.
“Radical love,” Harry Belafonte will later reflect, “is Doc’s great hallmark. Loving those who are twisting your words. Loving those moving against you. Loving those looking to take your spot and undermine your authority. In the end, Doc is not only offering unconditional love, but he’s supporting every organization and individual fighting for the liberation of people throughout the globe. He never allows political discourse to overwhelm his revolutionary moral vision.”
Doc’s next challenge is to sell his vision to SCLC.
He tells the press that tomorrow he’s off to Atlanta, where he will give his troops “marching orders to go into fifteen communities where we will be mobilizing people by the thousands for a massive demonstration in Washington on a quest for jobs and income.”
His mission at this latest SCLC staff meeting is clear: this time he will finally and firmly establish the fact that his priority is a Poor People’s Campaign in the spring, and that his priority will prevail.
But will it? In Atlanta, the staff remains in revolt. Dissent erupts from the get-go. Doc has to deal with the heated resistance of James Bevel and Jesse Jackson, who are, in the words of one of Doc’s aides, “competing with him for leadership.” The infighting is brutal. At the end of the day, his patience stretched to the limit, Doc is ready to leave. But Andy Young won’t allow it. At that moment the staff breaks into a spirited “Happy Birthday!” Typically, Doc’s staff would get him a new suit for his natal day. But this year he is lovingly toasted and presented with a couple of gag gifts: a jar of shoestring potatoes (because Doc has complained about the bad food and shoestring policy of the Birmingham prison) and a mug that reads, “We are cooperating with Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Drop coins and bills in the cup.”
Doc smiles and expresses earnest gratitude.
On this day—just another rough-and-tumble workday in the life of a minister who cannot stop working—he turns thirty-nine.
At noon the next day, he’s back at it, standing before a bevy of reporters to announce the kickoff of his poverty campaign. He envisions armies of protestors encamped in the nation’s capital. His tactics are, in his words, “patterned after the bonus marches back in the thirties.… The only difference is that this time we aren’t going to be run out of Washington.”
His plan is vague—only that the campaign will start in the spring. His inability to unify his own troops is obvious. In private, one aide questions his judgment by asking, “What’s going to happen when we bring these people to Washington and Stokely’s going to be there?” Doc confesses that he harbors doubts but says, “I don’t want to psychoanalyze anybody but myself.”
After days of debate, all he can tell his staff is, “Just go to Washington.” The ambiguities of the plans should not get in their way. The plans for the Montgomery Bus Boycott were also sketchy, but look what happened.
“We got to be fired up ourselves,” Doc keeps preaching to the unconverted supporters.
The supporters remain resistant. The wrangling goes on ad infinitum. One workshop on finances and fund-raising is especially long and arduous. Usually a patient listener, Doc is on the verge of losing it. Rather than run the risk of appearing cranky, he excuses himself for a bathroom break. But instead of heading to the men’s room, he quietly exits a side door and walks to his car. Feeling like a truant student escaping school, he drives to the home of Dorothy Cotton, a close aide and director of the Citizenship Education Program of SCLC.
Dorothy is surprised to see him at her front door. Why isn’t he at the workshop? What’s wrong?
“Don’t tell anyone,” he whispers in a mischievous voice, “but I snuck out. I just couldn’t take another minute.”
Dorothy understands. She has been to dozens of such meetings herself. She ushers him into the living room, where he sits in a wooden rocking chair painted yellow. Yellow, she points out, is a calming color. Doc could use a little calm.
He agrees. Calm is just what he lacks; calm is just what he needs. He gets to gently rocking and finds the motion calming.
Clarence Jones is right: Doc will never go to a psychiatrist, but in the presence of a trusted friend like Dorothy Cotton, he is able to reflect inwardly and speak of heavy matters weighing on his heart.
He talks about being despondent. He talks about being exhausted. He expresses doubt about the effectiveness of his leadership. He describes his organization’s senior staff as “a team of wild horses.” He’s bone tired of trying to get them to back his agenda. There comes a time when arguments are futile, a time when a man has to see that he’s no longer useful. It’s obvious that the political climate has turned against him. Why not move on?
“To where?” asks Dorothy.
To England, Doc explains. A church in Great Britain has offered him a pastorate. A prestigious church. A progressive church. A church where he could write and preach and commune with God without the endless strife that has become his increasingly troubled life in America.
Dorothy wonders whether he is serious.
Doc assures her that he is.
She doesn’t respond. She realizes that he needs to vent, needs to express these mounting frustrations, needs to comfort himself with thoughts of an easier life.
But a pastorate in England, like the presidency of a university, is a romantic fantasy. It’ll never happen. Sitting in the yellow chair, rocking late into the night, Doc realizes—as does Dorothy—that he will never abandon the struggle.
Those few hours with Dorothy help revive his spirit.
On the following night, January 16, he is back home with Coretta and the children. After a quiet dinner, he turns on the television to watch Johnson’s State of the Union address.
The president argues that this war in Vietnam is winnable. He vigorously defends his military strategy and, amid his ambitious plans to address pressing domestic issues, makes a point of underscoring the threat of urban crime. “The American people,” he says, “have had enough of rising crime and lawlessness in this country.”
Beyond being disappointed that LBJ shows no inclination to reverse his disastrous military course, Doc hears “crime and lawlessness” as code words for unrest in the black ghettoes. He worries about white backlash and wonders if Johnson is fueling new fire.
Fewer than twenty-four hours pass before Doc picks up the newspaper and is captivated by an incident at the White House that’s causing a furor.
The day after the State of the Union address, Lady Bird Johnson hosts a Women Doers’ Luncheon at the White House. Arranged by the first lady’s social secretary, the event brings together distinguished women involved in social causes. The topic at hand is how to deal with the rising tide of crime.
Among those guests is Eartha Kitt, the Negro singer, actress, and political activist. Uncomfortable sitting through the innocuous speeches, she bristles when President Johnson himself makes a surprise appearance and a few facile remarks about how crime fighting should be left to the states, not the federal government.
Before LBJ can get away, Eartha confronts him: “But what do we do about delinquent parents, the parents who have to work, for instance, who can’t spend the time with their children as they should?”
Social Security provides for day care, Johnson says. He dismisses her by adding, “I think that is a very good question for you to ask yourselves, you women here, and you all tell me what you think.”
With that, he rushes out of the room.
There is more talk, more platitudes spoken by respectable women voicing their fears over the spread of lawlessness across the land.
When Lady Bird finally entertains questions from the floor, Eartha immediately raises her hand. This is the moment she has been waiting for.
Eartha lets loose. In plain language, she lets the first lady know that she has “lived in the gutters” and knows what she’s talking about. She says that anger in the cities can be traced back to anger over the war, “a war going on that Americans do not understand.” She talks about young men “being snatched away from their mothers and being sent off to Vietnam.… I am talking as a mother who has a child… so I know the feeling of having a baby coming out of my guts, particularly when it’s a boy.… You take the best of the country and send them off to a war and they get shot.”
Shocked and offended by this outburst of emotion, the first lady tries to mount a defense. Along with the other women in the room, she is outraged by the effrontery. There are tears in her eyes.
When the luncheon is over, the ladies gather around Lady Bird in solidarity, expressing their regret that their lovely luncheon has been marred by such rudeness. Meanwhile, Eartha leaves the White House alone. Among the many ladies in attendance, she doesn’t have a single supporter.
After reading the account, Doc jumps to her defense. This is a woman after his own heart. Hers is the kind of courage that he respects. He makes a point of telling the New York Times that he considers Eartha’s remarks “appropriate both as to content and place” while finding her comments to the first lady “a very proper gesture.”
He personally calls Eartha to say that she’s made him proud. In short, Doc is delighted that a strong independent woman from the black community is giving the Johnsons hell.
Doc is drawn to strong independent women. And in January 1968, Doc’s relationship with his wife, the strongest woman in his life, is—like everything else—under tremendous strain.