Coretta is not happy. While Doc is crisscrossing the country, she is most often alone at home with their four children. She has repeatedly asked him to provide her with a housekeeper, but he has refused. Given his calling as a preacher and advocate for the poor, he feels that they must live modestly. There’s also the question of his unwillingness to provide for their children’s futures. The Kings’ personal finances mirror the finances of SCLC. They barely scrape by.
The larger question is Coretta’s role in the movement. She wants to travel and speak more. Two days before Eartha confronted the Johnsons, Coretta was in Washington with a silent brigade of five thousand women who walked through the snow to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam. She was among the elite group who entered the Capitol to present the official antiwar petition to members of Congress.
Yet when it comes to Coretta’s high profile involvement, Doc isn’t always enthusiastic.
“Martin has very traditional ideas about women,” Coretta says. She struggles to make him understand that she cannot sublimate her own calling to serve. In 1966 she told the press that “not enough attention has been focused on the roles played by women in the struggle. By and large, men have formed the leadership… but… [w]omen have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movement.”
Doc cannot disagree. But he also cannot deny his deep ambivalence. Part of Doc wishes that she would simply stay home and care for the children. But another part appreciates the acuity of her intellect and the vital role that she has played in his moral and political growth.
It was Coretta who spent long hours discussing Gandhi with Doc. She understood both the spiritual and the practical properties of nonviolence. Without her encouragement he might have abandoned its principles. In fact, there was a time when he came close to doing just that.
It was during those frightening days in Montgomery. In 1956, the King family home had been bombed. Coretta and the kids had escaped injury, but the trauma remained. Supporters, including Daddy King, urged Doc to hire armed guards. Shaken to the core, Doc applied for a license and bought a gun. It was Coretta who helped persuade him to give up the weapon.
“I reconsidered,” Doc would later say. “How could I serve as one of the leaders of a nonviolent movement and at the same time use weapons of violence for my personal protection? Coretta and I talked the matter over for several days and finally agreed that arms were no solution.… We tried to satisfy our friends by having floodlights mounted around the house, and hiring unarmed watchmen around the clock.… I was much more afraid in Montgomery when I had a gun in my house. When I decided that I couldn’t keep a gun, I came face-to-face with the question of death and I dealt with it. From that point on, I no longer needed a gun nor have I been afraid. Had we become distracted by the question of my safety we would have lost the moral offensive and sunk to the level of our oppressors.”
Coretta emboldened him. But then again, she always had.
When he met her in 1951 he was immediately smitten. He was a twenty-two-year-old student working on his PhD at Boston University’s School of Theology. She was a great beauty, a brilliant twenty-three-year-old graduate of prestigious Antioch College and a voice student at the New England Conservatory. Within weeks, Doc was telling his family back in Atlanta that he had met the woman he would marry.
In a love letter written during their courtship when they were temporarily apart, Doc wrote, “My life without you is like a year without springtime which comes to give illumination and heat to the atmosphere of winter.… Oh, excuse me, my darling. I didn’t mean to go off on such a poetical and romantic flight. But how else can we express the deep emotions of life other than in poetry? Isn’t love too ineffable to be grasped by the cold calculating hands of intellect?”
Coretta waited six months before accepting Doc’s marriage proposal.
In June 1953, Daddy King officiated at the wedding ceremony; tellingly, Coretta insisted that the vows exclude all mention of the wife’s obligation to “obey” her husband. Coretta had no interest in being a subservient wife.
When Doc’s political activism kicked off in Montgomery in 1955, Coretta was by his side. She marched on the front lines. In 1957, she journeyed with him to Ghana to celebrate that nation’s independence. In 1958, she joined him on a trip to India, where they paid homage to the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. In 1962, she traveled alone to Geneva, Switzerland, where she was a delegate to the Women’s Strike for Peace. In 1964, she participated in an early incarnation of the Women’s Strike Force.
Since then Coretta has gone to mobilization rallies, where she is often asked to speak—not as Doc’s surrogate but as a respected activist who uses a voice uniquely her own.
His ambivalence remains: while he values and loves her for who she is, he also wishes she could be a little more submissive. He has enough rebellious subordinates without having to count his wife among them.
Of all his subordinates, James Bevel is the most idiosyncratic—a man who, in the view of many, walks the thinnest of lines between brilliance and insanity. It is Bevel who suggests that many of the ministers attached to SCLC are burdened by the guilt of extramarital affairs. They need to confess their sins to their wives.
Doc’s reaction is immediate: That’s crazy. That’s out of the question. That would accomplish nothing. Besides, many of Doc’s spiritual-theology heroes have been sexually preoccupied. Saint Augustine. Martin Luther. The philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich. Bevel rejects the argument. That was their problem. Our problem is to unburden our souls and be honest with our wives. Doc remains unmoved.
He thinks back to one of his earliest love affairs. It took place before he met Coretta, during his time at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. He was barely twenty-one. She was a white girl of German heritage. She was involved with a professor, but Doc quickly won over her heart. Their six-month romance was torrid. Doc fell head over heels in love. He spoke of marriage. His friends warned that such a union would prevent him from pastoring a church in the South, not to mention enrage his mom and dad. With great anguish and reluctance, he broke off the relationship.
Since his marriage to Coretta, Doc has been able to manage their emotional relationship, forming a tricky balance between love, devotion, responsibility, and guilt.
That delicate balance is upset, though, later in January 1968, when he learns that Coretta requires surgery for a stomach tumor. The thought of losing his wife fills him with fear. He cancels all engagements and remains by her side and in deep prayer. When the operation is successful and the tumor is seen as benign, he rejoices.
Then—quite remarkably and unexpectedly—Doc does the one thing he told James Bevel that he would never do: he confesses to Coretta that he has had an adulterous relationship. The confession is not comprehensive. But in Doc’s mind the very fact of admitting infidelity is at least a move in the right direction. He will cut off this relationship. From now on, he promises his wife, he will walk the straight and narrow.
Having heard rumors of Doc’s affairs, Coretta isn’t shocked by his admission, but she is nonetheless hurt and angry. Even more furious is Juanita Abernathy, Ralph’s wife, who cannot understand why Doc has chosen this delicate moment in Coretta’s recovery to make his belated confession. Surely this is the wrong time and the wrong place.
The answer is simply that, in the aftermath of his wife’s sudden surgery, guilt has overtaken him. Bevel had argued that confession is good for the soul. Doc’s soul is in tremendous pain. To relieve that pain he needs to be honest with the wife whom he loves so dearly. To get himself right, he needs to get right with the mother of his children.
Spring is only a few months away, and after spending so much time and effort trying to sell his troops on the poverty campaign, and then so much time at home, Doc feels that there’s no time to waste: he needs to give himself over to the upcoming poverty campaign in Washington.
And at the very moment when it seems that Doc’s organization might finally be sold, the supporter for whom he has utmost respect restates his opposition to Doc’s plan.
During several difficult seasons, Bayard Rustin argues that these upcoming protests in Washington will lead to “further backlash and repression.” This is just what Doc does not want to hear. Doc desperately wants Bayard to back him. He needs the enthusiastic encouragement of a man respected as an exceptional strategist and deep thinker. If only Bayard could be on his side, Doc’s political life at this point would be so much easier.
But Bayard, like Doc, is independent of mind. He is also a pragmatist convinced that his friend has lost his way. When it came to the great civil rights events that turned the tide of American history, their hearts and minds worked in harmony. It was a strong partnership: two towering intellectuals, two men instrumental in the formation of SCLC, two pacifist warriors risking their lives for the cause of equality. To lose Bayard’s support leaves Doc that much more vulnerable—especially because so many other active participants in the movement have now joined the ranks of observers. They have moved to the sidelines to watch and critique.
Martin Luther King Jr., a man who has continually played offense, is now playing defense. Doc spends an inordinate amount of time defending himself against the sniping of critics, including former allies.
Among the most persistent critics is Adam Clayton Powell, who has ended his Bahamian exile and landed in California. Continuing his assault on Doc’s creed of nonviolence, Powell tells the New York Times that the black revolution will soon become the “Second American Civil War.”
Doc knows full well what Powell is doing: he is attempting to change with the changing times. Doc argues for the other path. He makes it clear that the job of the true believer—he who embraces the radical love ethos at the heart of Christianity—is not to change with the times but, through the force of his constant conviction, to change the times.
On February 1, Doc picks up the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and reads that the administration’s military strategy in Vietnam has suffered a powerful blow. In what will soon be termed the Tet Offensive, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese have launched a series of surprise attacks. American and South Vietnamese forces are reeling. Tet is being called the largest operation in the history of this agonizingly long conflict, a stunning setback for Johnson and his hawks. Antiwar protestors are emboldened.
The very next day, the newspaper runs another item that catches Doc’s eye, but this one is closer to home. It is a small story, but it greatly unsettles Doc’s spirit.
In the midst of a thunderous rainstorm, two sanitation workers—Robert Walker, twenty-nine, and Echol Cole, thirty-five—were riding inside the compression unit of a garbage truck. According to city rules, there was only one place that black employees could seek shelter: in the storage cylinder containing the garbage. On this tragic day, the mechanism misfired and the men were crushed to death.
Doc is horrified.
He notes the dateline on the story:
Memphis, Tennessee.