It is Saturday, March 23, and Doc introduces his two young sons, Martin III and Dexter, to the crowd in Waycross, Georgia, where he continues his recruitment for the Poor People’s Campaign.
The old Cessna, with one misfiring engine, carries a nervous Doc and his excited boys all over the state as he continues to paint the picture of springtime in Washington, when an encampment of unprecedented size will awaken an indifferent nation to the plight of the poor.
When a writer wonders whether it’s a good idea for Doc to be traveling in the rural South without a bodyguard, Doc waxes philosophical:
“I’d feel like a bird in a cage.… There’s no way in the world you can keep somebody from killing you if they want to kill you.”
Because of the malfunctioning plane, he arrives four hours late in Augusta, where he makes his impassioned pitch for Georgians to join his grand crusade.
On a wing and a prayer, the Cessna makes it back to Atlanta. The boys are driven home to Coretta while Doc boards a late-night flight to New York so that he can arrive in time to preach a Sunday sermon in Harlem.
He’s exhausted.
Aides remind him that SCLC funds are exhausted too. For all Doc’s herculean efforts, recruits are not enlisting in anywhere near the number that he had hoped.
His only comfort is in sleep—and the knowledge that in a few hours he will be helping an ex-assistant and trusted friend move into a position of greater prominence. He does not envision that even this happy occasion will be marked by an ugly confrontation.
Arriving at Canaan Baptist Church, the last thing in the world Doc expects is a protest by Adam Clayton Powell, returned from Bimini and enraged at Doc and Doc’s former chief of staff Wyatt Tee Walker, who this very morning is being inaugurated as pastor of the Harlem church. In a display of great loyalty, Doc has come to lend his prestige to the man with whom he shared a jail cell back in Birmingham. He sees Walker as one of his best and brightest soldiers.
Powell is incensed. He accuses Walker of luring congregants away from his own Abyssinian Baptist Church, where Walker once served as his assistant minister, before Powell publicly fired him. In a broader attack, Powell tells the press that “the white man is finished. I don’t call for violence or riots, but the day of Martin Luther King has come to an end.” He insists that pacifists will never again control the black movement.
In his own press conference that day, Doc again refrains from attacking Powell. He sticks to the principles, insisting that “reasonable, meaningful non-violence” is as relevant as ever. In fact, he says, “I think it’s just arrived.”
The Monday meeting with SCLC staffers in Manhattan is another heartache. The same laments: the lack of money, the disagreements over the upcoming Poor People’s Campaign. With all issues unresolved, Doc rushes off to a small airport where he boards a tiny one-engine for a bumpy flight to the Catskill Mountains. He’s there to fulfill his promise to speak to the Sixty-Eighth Rabbinical Assembly.
“Where in America today,” asks his great friend Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “do we hear a voice like the voice of the prophets of Israel? Martin Luther King is a sign that God has not forsaken the United States of America.… The situation of the poor in America is our plight, our sickness. To be deaf to their cry is to condemn ourselves.”
Doc uses the occasion to ask the rabbis to help him recruit volunteers for his spring crusade.
“We need bodies,” he says, “to bring about the pressure to get Congress and the nation moving in the right direction.”
At the evening’s end, the rabbis serenade the Baptist preacher with a Hebrew version of “We Shall Overcome.”
The prop plane flies him back to Manhattan, where that evening he’s due for dinner at his physician Arthur Logan’s home for what he hopes will be a relaxing night.
The evening is anything but relaxing. Doc engages in heavy drinking and even heavier disputations with Logan’s wife, Marian, the SCLC board member vehemently opposed to his Poor People’s Campaign. Her husband’s attempt to change the subject falls on deaf ears. Doc can’t fathom how a bright woman like Marian can’t understand the urgency of his plan. Marian can’t understand how a bright man like Doc can’t understand its impracticality. Their argument goes on for far too long. In Marian’s view, Doc is “losing hold.”
They call it stormy Monday
But Tuesday’s just as bad
On Tuesday, his head aching from the night before, Doc leaves the Logans’ elegant East Side brownstone for a Harlem tenement, where, in a press event geared to highlight the impoverished state of urban America, he visits a welfare mother of eight, followed by a meeting with community activists, followed by an address to clergymen in Queens, followed by a speech at the Convent Avenue Baptist Church back in Harlem.
On Wednesday, he rides through the Lincoln Tunnel to New Jersey, where, in Newark, scene of last summer’s calamitous riot, he meets with two dozen businessmen, asking that they back his Poor People’s Campaign, before telling a rally of fourteen hundred students and teachers at the predominantly black Southside High, “Stand up with dignity and self-respect.… I’m black and beautiful!”
Before leaving Newark for recruitment rallies in churches in two of the state’s poorest cities—Paterson and Jersey City—Doc visits two welfare families and then pays a surprise visit to the home of LeRoi Jones (who would later change his name to Amiri Baraka), a celebrated black playwright and intellectual and an impassioned militant who has openly ridiculed Doc’s pacifism. Jones is facing a weapons charge brought during last summer’s Newark riots.
“Hello, LeRoi,” says Doc, standing on Jones’s porch. “You don’t look like such a bad person. People told me you were a bad person.”
The purpose of the meeting is to show Jones, one of his most vociferous critics, that Doc is willing to hear him out. Doc is also concerned that if Jones works to provoke another riot, it will impede the Poor People’s Campaign.
When the press asks Jones about the meeting, his remarks are surprisingly measured. By simply listening to his adversary, Doc’s loving spirit has impacted the fiery revolutionary.
“We talked about unifying the black people,” Jones says with untypical humility.
Because he allows so many opponents to speak for so long, Doc is habitually late. Today is no different. After a half-dozen grueling events in New Jersey, he hurries through the Holland Tunnel and up Manhattan’s West Side Highway, where, hours behind schedule, he shows up at the apartment of Harry and Julie Belafonte for a big fund-raiser party for SCLC.
In addition to supporters, there are a number of writers in attendance, including Tom Wicker and Anthony Lewis of the New York Times. Doc speaks eloquently about his Poor People’s Campaign. But when the reporters and supporters leave, and it’s just Harry, Julie, Doc, and a few of Doc’s closest aides, Doc takes off his tie, kicks off his shoes, and throws back a little sherry.
His mood turns dark.
“What bothers you, Martin?” asks Harry. “What’s got you in such a surly mood?”
“Newark. Beyond what an eruption in that city would mean, how it would take us off-course, I’m just so disturbed at what I’m hearing.… Frustration over the war has brought forth this idea that the solution resides in violence. What I cannot get across to these young people is that I wholly embrace everything they feel. It’s just the tactics we can’t agree on. I have more in common with these young people than with anybody else in the movement. I feel their rage. I feel their pain. I feel their frustration. It’s the system that’s the problem, and it’s choking us to death!”
When Andy Young breaks in to say, “Well, I don’t know, it’s not the entire system. It’s only part of it, and I think we can fix it,” Doc loses his cool and admonishes Andy, who continues to harbor grave doubts about the Poor People’s Campaign. Doc can tolerate dissent coming from those, like LeRoi Jones, who oppose him. But his patience with dissent from within his own troops is wearing thin.
“The trouble,” he tells Andy, “is that we live in a failed system. Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level.”
Reminded that there has been success with the struggle against that system, Doc rejoins, “Yes, we’ve fought hard and long, and I have never doubted that we would prevail in this struggle. Already our rewards have begun to reveal themselves—desegregation, the Voting Rights Act.… But what deeply troubles me now is that for all the steps we’ve taken toward integration, I’ve come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house.”
“If that’s what you think, what would you have us do?” asks Harry.
His answer comes unhesitatingly:
“We… have to become firemen.”
The heat is coming from Memphis.
Tomorrow—Thursday, March 28—Doc will lead the rescheduled march through the middle of Memphis.
Tonight, though, he’ll catch a couple of hours of sleep before making the early morning airport run.
He’d like to take a break. He’d like to have a few days at home, a few days away from the pressure and the press and the overstimulation of these tumultuous public demonstrations.
But there’s not a chance in the world that he’ll skip Memphis.
After all, he looked the strikers in the eye and gave his word.
His commitment to their cause is ironclad.
Here, at the end of another crazy, draining day of overexertion, over-speaking, over-listening, his thoughts keep coming back to Memphis.
And here, at the break of dawn, his head throbbing, so many ideas, so many dreams, so many hopes, so many fears…
Memphis stays on his mind.