The next day, the preacher can be found back in the pulpit.
It is the last Sunday in March, and Doc is using his sermon at Washington National Cathedral to lift his own spirits.
Determined to fight the despondency dragging him down, he looks to one of the brightest passages in the Book of Revelation: “Behold, I make all things new; former things are passed away.”
He points out how, just as Rip van Winkle slept through the American Revolution, there are those among the parishioners sleeping through the day’s revolution. There are those among them missing all that is new. The new and most compelling revolution is the one for human rights, “the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world.”
That revolution will not wait. It will not slow down for those who claim that progressives like Doc are moving too quickly. It will not be quieted by those who claim that “the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
These antirevolutionaries “never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil.… It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
Doc links racism to the issue that allows him no peace: poverty.
“Like a monstrous octopus, poverty spreads its nagging, prehensile tentacles into hamlets and villages all over our world. Two-thirds of the people of the world go to bed hungry tonight. They are ill-housed; they are ill-nourished; they are shabbily clad. I’ve seen it in Latin America; I’ve seen it in Africa; I’ve seen this poverty in Asia.”
Doc brings the message home to America, speaking about his trip to Marks, Mississippi. “I saw hundreds of little black boys and black girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear. I saw their mothers and fathers trying to carry on a little Head Start program, but they had no money.”
He speaks of his recent visits to the tenements of Newark and Harlem and the frustrations that he faces as a man determined to force the country he loves to heed the cries of the dispossessed.
And, of course, he speaks of his Poor People’s Campaign.
“In a few weeks some of us are coming to Washington to see if the will is still alive… in this nation.… Yes, we are going to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses.… We are going to bring those who have come to feel that life is a long and desolate corridor with no exit signs. We are going to bring children and adults and old people, people who have never seen a doctor or a dentist.…
“We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not coming to tear up Washington.… We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago,” he urges, repeating the admonition that he first articulated during his “I Have a Dream” speech five years earlier.
“We are coming,” he continues, “to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between the promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.”
Doc makes visible his most vehement critics by telling the story of a newsman who confronted him:
“Dr. King,” he asked, “don’t you think you’re going to have to stop, now, opposing the war and move more in line with the administration’s policy?… It has hurt the budget of your organization, and people who once respected you have lost respect for you.”
“I’m not a consensus leader,” Doc replied. “I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.”
“Ultimately,” Doc tells his congregants, “a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.
“Cowardice asks the question—is it safe? Expedience asks the question—is it politic? Vanity asks the question—is it popular? Conscience asks the question—is it right?”
Doc closes by declaring that he will not “yield to a politic of despair. I’m going to maintain hope as we come to Washington in this campaign. The cards are stacked against us. This time we will really confront a Goliath. God grant that we will be that David of truth set out against the Goliath of injustice, the Goliath of neglect.…
“Our goal is freedom, and I believe we are going to get there because however much she strays away from it, the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be as a people, our destiny is tied up in the destiny of America.”
But what of Doc’s destiny?
Even before the Memphis riot, the FBI has been working overtime to undermine him. On one front, it issued fraudulent news leaks in the North about how SCLC, flush with cash, was not in need of funds. Meanwhile, FBI agents wrote letters to supporters in the South saying that there was “no provision to house or feed marchers” in the upcoming Washington campaign, whose purpose was only “King’s personal aggrandizement.”
“Prepare the letters on commercially purchased stationery,” J. Edgar Hoover instructed his underlings, “and take all necessary precautions to insure they cannot be traced back to the Bureau.”
After Memphis, the bureau’s anti-King campaign grew even nastier. A memo was sent to the media claiming that “the result of King’s famous espousal of nonviolence was vandalism, looting, and riot.” Doc was seen as “like Judas leading lambs to slaughter.” Hoover told his friends in the press that “King led the marchers to violence, and when the violence broke out, King disappeared.” Rather than go to the Lorraine, “owned and patronized exclusively by Negroes,” Doc preferred “the plush Holiday Inn Motel, white owned, operated, and almost exclusively white patronized.”
Doc knows nothing about these assaults on his character and campaign. He does know, however, that the upcoming presidential elections will have an enormous impact on the poor.
With that in mind, on the Sunday afternoon following his Washington National Cathedral sermon, Doc and Andy Young meet with Michigan congressman John Conyers and Gary, Indiana, mayor Richard Hatcher to discuss which of the candidates—Eugene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy—might better serve the needs of the underprivileged. Either way, Doc is vehemently opposed to the renomination of President Johnson.
Even in the midst of the political discussion, though, Doc is still clearly caught up in a state of dejection.
“I don’t know when I have ever seen him as discouraged and depressed,” Young will later say.
Sunday evening Doc watches the president address the nation. The shock of Johnson’s announcement changes Doc’s dark mood, if only for the moment:
“I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party as your President.”
The statement is startling. No one expected Johnson to leave the race. It is, in some respects, a victory for those who, like Doc, have tirelessly opposed his war policy. It is recognition of the reality that such a policy has rendered LBJ politically impotent.
Doc is gratified that, adhering to the hawks, Johnson cannot sustain his presidency. At the same time, Doc’s heart cannot help but feel for a man who courageously supported the cause of racial equality.
In 1963, shortly after the assassination of John Kennedy, it was Johnson who turned to Doc to offer support for his cause.
In 1965, after the riots broke out in Watts, it was Johnson who called Doc to gain a deeper understanding of the disturbance.
And, of course, it was Johnson who invited Doc to the White House on many occasions, not only to personally confer with the president but to witness the signing of the historic legislation that the two allies—the shrewd politician from Texas and the Baptist preacher from Georgia—labored long and hard to bring to life: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Doc remembers that it was Johnson who, addressing the cause of black Americans, said, “Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray for wise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevant differences.”
And yet other essential and earth-shattering differences cannot be set aside:
Johnson pursues a war that Doc considers one of the great disasters of American history. Through his FBI director, Johnson is aggressively working to decimate Doc’s effort to activate his Poor People’s Campaign. Even as Johnson’s political currency is on the verge of bankruptcy, the president’s minions are manipulating the media to demonize Doc and destroy his plans.
On this last day of March, the day of Lyndon Johnson’s surprise statement about his political future, Doc has no choice but to focus on the future of his own political plans.
The future is obviously not about LBJ.
Nor is the future about a futile attempt to win an unwinnable war.
In Doc’s mind, the future continues to be about one place, and one place only.
Memphis.