March 30–April 7, 1965
FROM San Francisco, by way of Los Angeles and Atlanta, King touched down in Detroit long enough to attend Tuesday’s high requiem mass for Viola Liuzzo on the second day of mourning as proclaimed by Governor George Romney of Michigan. Forty photographers delayed the funeral to record him among the dignitaries, which featured a rare joint appearance by rival union presidents Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and James R. Hoffa of the Teamsters. Afterward, when the crowd filed out of the Immaculate Heart of Mary church behind Viola Liuzzo’s maple coffin, one reporter tartly observed that “We Shall Overcome,” the recessional hymn, “soon died out because few knew the words.”
King and Bernard Lee broke away early to catch a midday flight to New York’s JFK Airport. Observed from the gate by FBI surveillance agents, Bayard Rustin and Harry Wachtel rushed them to an afternoon speech in Manhattan and an evening event at Temple Beth El in Great Neck, Long Island. King’s mental state alarmed his advisers to the point that Wachtel wanted him to consult a psychiatrist. Always vulnerable to depression at peaks and valleys, King suffered a letdown from Selma that collided with pressure to expand the movement. He displayed a bone-weary paralysis, confessing inability to discern what was important. The advisers found him still in possession of mementos he had promised to Viola Liuzzo’s relatives. He had received a windfall gift of $25,000 for SCLC from his passing introduction to Hoffa, but seemed far more agitated about the Teamster president’s pained unwillingness to support the call for a boycott of Alabama products.
Wachtel forwarded the papers to Anthony Liuzzo, covering with a note that King had been too upset to deliver them personally. Rustin maneuvered delicately to extricate King from a boycott strategy that he privately called “stupid.” On Wednesday, March 31, en route to Baltimore, Rustin blamed the impetuous staff—chiefly Bevel—for announcing in King’s name a plan to remake Alabama with momentum from the Selma march. (Unless Governor Wallace acted positively on the freedom petition, said Bevel, “we want the federal government to come in here, register Negroes, and throw out the present government as un-Constitutional.”) King had felt obliged to endorse the boycott on Meet the Press, which loosed a gale of criticism. The White House issued a statement of nonsupport. The New York Times dismissed the proposal as “wrong in principle” and “unworkable in practice.” King’s political goals “are of course admirable,” the editorial stated tersely. “But they can and should be reached by orderly, lawful methods.” Other newspapers decried the notion as “vindictive” and “dangerous.” Civil Rights leader Whitney Young, executive director of the business-oriented National Urban League, objected that a commercial boycott of one state would require union and business supporters to violate legitimate contracts elsewhere. Radio evangelist Solomon Michaux threw up a picket line around the Lord Baltimore Hotel, where the SCLC board met through the week, protesting that the economic weapon would “throw thousands of Negroes in Alabama out of work and into breadlines.”
The irrepressible Bevel denounced critics of the boycott, calling Whitney Young a stuffed shirt “with a fifty-dollar hat on a two-dollar head,” but he recognized fateful signs when implementation slipped late on the agenda. Andrew Young proposed instead that SCLC take the nonviolent movement from Selma into the cities of the North, as King himself had suggested, and the board’s reluctant approval touched off a crossfire of grumbling. The board of Southern preachers fretted about trying to expand into Northern territory, where they had no base of churches and the established NAACP had bristled repeatedly against competitive intrusion. Bevel wondered what could trouble city Negroes compared with the woes of voteless Southern sharecroppers. Others emphasized a new SCLC program to get at the root of racial conflict through dialogue, separate from protest, by working with distinguished consultants such as anthropologist Margaret Mead and novelist Ralph Ellison. Rustin, who favored attention to issues of economic justice,* nevertheless stressed a gradual approach to preserve the movement’s hard-won coalition. Much of the nation saw race as a matter of gross injustice peculiar to the South, he warned. Too rapid a shift of view would alienate supporters in the North, including the press, which in turn would undermine the historic mobilization of the federal government—“for the first time since 1867”—to support racial equality. “We must not split what we have got for the first time,” Rustin told the SCLC board. “No social movement has ever been successful in this country which did not involve as an ally the hard-core white middle classes.”
Hosea Williams seized upon Rustin’s argument to promote his Summer Community Organization and Political Education, called SCOPE by its acronym, which would import two thousand college students on extremely short notice to register Negro voters across 120 counties of the Black Belt South that summer. King’s blessing allowed the SCLC board to embrace the SCOPE alternative more heartily than the Alabama boycott, in a sign that Bevel’s hasty proposal already damaged his high standing as a creative strategist. Control of fieldworkers shifted toward Williams, which escalated recriminations between the bitterest antagonists on the headstrong SCLC staff. Williams charged that Bevel tried to dodge the personal witness of nonviolence with grandiose schemes. Bevel countered that Williams had a stunted idea of nonviolence, and that the SCOPE proposal merely copied SNCC’s Mississippi Summer Project from the previous year. Williams complained that Bevel campaigned to undermine him with King’s executive staff. Loyalists of Williams predicted miracles from his dedication, while others worried about his possessed, domineering bravado. In Baltimore, Williams told FBI agents on the Liuzzo case that he had left all the transportation records from the Selma march in the trunk of a rented car parked somewhere at the Atlanta airport. He ducked subsequent interview requests with a message that the FBI had been nothing but a nuisance, and finally excused persistent agents with a parting comment that his staff had jumped overnight from three to thirty-one people, “and I am busier than Hoover, King, Johnson, or anyone else.”
Pressures of the world stage strained an organization steeped in folkways of the pulpit. Board members still made their customary late entrances, and many delivered the required personal donation to SCLC with an extended, self-centered homily. While Andrew Young reported that King was demanded as a peacemaker in London, Vietnam, and even South Africa, board members from Virginia to Florida complained of neglect during the Selma campaign. Rev. Roland Smith of Atlanta recommended that extra staff be assigned during crises to maintain liaison with the board. Rev. Walter Fauntroy of Washington warned not to take passage of the voting rights bill for granted. Historian Lawrence Reddick urged support for the upcoming launch of Head Start among trial federal programs to help poor children learn. Rev. D. E. King of Kentucky wondered when Negroes would be eligible to enlist in the National Guard units of southern states.
KING INTERRUPTED the flow of business with a personal request to “consider seriously and carefully the matter of presidential succession in SCLC,” by formally designating an heir in the event of his demise. “I know of no one that articulates my ideas more thoroughly than Ralph Abernathy,” he said. Board members first recoiled in shock. Ministers devoted to funeral oration spoke instead about ways to amend the SCLC bylaws. Board members who preached often on the nearness of death—which King invoked for himself by the circumspect phrase “certain realistic actualities”—took refuge in practical details such as whether Abernathy should continue also as SCLC’s treasurer. Daddy King channeled resentment of Abernathy into an impassioned speech about money. He scolded his colleagues over their failure to guarantee security for his four small grandchildren and Coretta in the event hatred snatched their provider, his dear son, at the age of thirty-six.
On emergency subcommittees, overwrought board members consulted feverishly about King’s morbid surprise. Many knew he had been depressed before Selma, since the Nobel Prize trip of December and the realization that Hoover’s FBI was blackmailing him toward suicide with surveillance tapes of his private life. Although King had resolved to curtail the risk of scandal against the movement by giving up his illicit consolations—vowing so to some friends with mortified confession, to others with sighs of resentment—he had succumbed already. Even in the vortex of twenty-hour days around the marches, he managed travel with a new black mistress of stylish discretion, who moved easily across the color line among prominent, mostly wealthy, men. Wild rides gave way to bouts of self-reproach. The pattern of King’s life was exacerbated this time by his piercing failure to keep the high-stakes pledge for his own vulnerable cause, and by parallel discomforts at home. Settlement was imminent in April on Coretta’s quest for them to buy a first home in Atlanta after five years as renters, but King still resisted. To him, even a modest house of $10,000 was a haunting luxury, unbecoming his commitment to the poor. His renunciations of material comfort and bourgeois ambition vexed Coretta, especially since his constant journeys most often left her behind with four children in a cramped space. She accommodated what she called the “guilt-ridden” barbs of a man whose “conscience fairly devoured him.”
In Baltimore, the Afro-American devoted an issue to the SCLC meeting as earth-shattering news and reported its glowing public events by the minute—tribute by Lawrence Cardinal Sheehan at 9:41 P.M., standing ovation for Daddy King six minutes later, entrance by Abernathy at 10:13. By contrast, the dominant Baltimore Sun covered the proceedings modestly on the back pages, next to an account of fraud arrests at a local barber school. In private, Rev. C. K. Steele admonished King for springing a chosen heir without prior notice to the board, and small factions stirred against Abernathy. Staff members of King’s inner circle staff tended to discount the succession idea as a cosmetic truce between Abernathy and King. They had watched Abernathy mortify King by fits of jealousy at the Nobel ceremonies in Oslo, grasping for an equal share of royal treatment and half the prize money that King resolved to give away. Since then, King had been obliged to beg his sulking colleague to take part in the Selma campaign, and they did not begrudge his right to mollify Abernathy with an empty title, based on wishful presumption that SCLC had a future beyond King. What puzzled them was King’s personal attachment. Rustin disparaged Abernathy as a sleepy-headed showboat, but conceded that King could not abide jail “for fifteen minutes” without him. Young, Bernard Lee, and others appreciated Abernathy as a gifted preacher, bonded to King through a base identity in the Negro church. King possessed all Abernathy’s raw hunger, thrown against his own leveling obsession with stubborn, flawed human nature. The combination made a furnace of his prophetic voice at full throttle. In repose, it revealed astonishing breadth and beguiling good nature, tinged with depression.
King’s aides fully expected him to snap back, as always, to the burden of his indispensable role. A few decided that his ordeals of personal despair and penance in fact were necessary, so that he could renew his inner drive to public sacrifice in the movement. Some advisers pressed him to hurry, and only one argued that they should leave him alone. “Who are we,” asked lawyer Harry Wachtel, “to say Martin must go on no matter what the cost?”
The board reconvened to adopt the succession plan. “We must by all means protect his symbolism,” said Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, urging his colleagues to unite behind King. New motions approved insurance and pension benefits for the family. Hosea Williams recommended that something be done to honor Abernathy on his birthday. Bolder members mandated a vacation for King’s health, passed a resolution to pay for it, then provided a parallel trip for Ralph and Juanita Abernathy.
Leaving Baltimore, a distressed King sought out Stanley Levison to ask for perspective on his world after Selma.
“Dear Martin,” replied Levison, who was still technically in exile from King on the demand of the late President Kennedy. Although King had proclaimed a unilateral “pardon” weeks earlier, Wachtel and others slowly accommodated his full return to their ranks. Even if they could imagine their bosom friend to be a treasonous agent of Soviet influence, bent upon destruction of American freedom, it seemed absurd that the government’s murky, lame response was to interdict his volunteer work for King. The separation made sense to them only as naked obeisance to J. Edgar Hoover, but they proceeded with abundant caution because Hoover survived Kennedy. Out of their sight, Hoover stayed on the political offensive by ordering FBI offices to scour future SCOPE workers for subversive backgrounds and to find out whether King had visited Highlander Center more than once. “If we can obtain information disproving King’s claims which he recently made before ‘Meet the Press,’” Hoover instructed, “we would have some counterintelligence possibility.”
Since late 1963, Levison had read to fill hours long devoted to fund-raising and other practical services for King. He tried to make up for a weakness in liberal education by studying classical political literature, such as Cervantes, Zola, Hugo, and Tolstoy. He visited gyms in Manhattan to observe the “gentle arts” of jujitsu as a metaphor for nonviolence. He even analyzed popular films, adopting as a motto Humphrey Bogart’s statement to predatory mobsters in The Harder They Fall: “You can’t buy me and you can’t scare me.” His favorite new author was Victor Hugo, for his ability to summarize “mighty” events in spare language. Hugo called Waterloo “a turning point in the universe.”
“Selma was bigger than Birmingham though it was smaller in scope,” Levison wrote King, “because for the first time whites and Negroes from all over the nation joined the struggle in a pilgrimage to the deep south.” Whereas Birmingham moved millions “from paper resolutions of support to sympathy,” he observed, Selma mobilized “a true cross-section of America.” Levison had seen for himself. “In the Montgomery airport I was struck by the unfamiliarity of the participants,” he continued. “They were not long-committed white liberals and Negroes. They were new forces from all faiths and all classes…from business men to pacifist radicals.”
Levison praised “President Johnson’s magnificent address” as a vital and necessary expression of popular will, but he insisted that the motive force in history belonged to the movement. “The leadership was yours,” he advised, and momentum from Selma made King “one of the most powerful figures in the country—a leader now not merely of Negroes, but of millions of whites in motion.” He may have underscored the point to lift King from an appealing but relentless modesty that Levison considered a flaw. King was “too humble,” he often said, yet far from insecure, and Levison offered his usual unsparing criticism. “The casual manner of proposing [the] boycott, and the impression that this was your central program caused deep disquiet….” he wrote. “It was not the best selection of alternatives for action, and it was not logical to emerge from a struggle for voting rights.” By contrast, he sketched the sounder path of historic choices made by Frederick Douglass during and after the Civil War.
“The movement you lead is the single movement in the nation at this time which arouses the finer democratic instincts of the nation,” Levison asserted. Laboring to explain why, he focused on method. “Nonviolent direct action was proven by Selma to have even greater power than anyone had fully realized,” he wrote. “We would be at fault if we believed our own propaganda that Selma was a terrible expression of brutality and terrorism. Considerable restraint was exercised by the authorities. The degree of violence was shocking and startling, but not extensive.” Levison argued that the violence of Birmingham—let alone the spectacle lynchings of recent decades—was much worse, and that the power of Selma arose from the cumulative inspiration of the method itself. Nonviolence evoked courage. When sustained and crafted, it built political engagement almost inexorably. “Someone asked a Negro if he thought they would win,” Levison informed King, “and he responded, ‘We won when we started.’ This is profound.”
Levison wrestled with the limits of nonviolence. He could trace its “finer democratic instincts” to thousands of practitioners who risked and absorbed violence without striking back, as their disciplined witness affirmed the daring American theory that people can govern themselves without imposed rulers or guardians. By nearly superhuman forbearance, and a matching faith in common humanity, nonviolent demonstrators invited their own oppressors into the Founders’ novel compact of political equals. They challenged hierarchy and heredity, like the original patriots, to transform “the relationship between government and the people,” Levison wrote.
For all his balanced wisdom, Levison was not a seer, and his letter to King understated the watershed of Selma. He predicted the overthrow of segregation’s “agrarian interests,” but not the resulting miracle of Sunbelt prosperity for the South. He believed optimistically that the movement could “go far in changing slum conditions,” but he did not foresee corollary ripples of freedom beyond race or economics. Once loosed, doctrines of equality and nonviolent strength resonated broadly against traditional niches of authority. If the depth of potential could be glimpsed in the extraordinary saga of pilgrims to Selma, such as Viola Liuzzo and Jonathan Daniels, the breadth of impact would be felt everywhere from altars and bedrooms to Olympic Games in distant nations. Binding energy from the movement would transform culture and hearth with implications that rattled civil rights leaders themselves, just as the original American Founders had been shaken by a clatter of dollars and frontier brawlers who were not above electing a broomstick, George Washington caustically observed, fearing an excess of democracy in his retirement. Changes beyond imagination soon became commonplace. Inspired by the civil rights movement, a Cincinnati student in 1972 would be ordained the first female rabbi in two thousand years of rabbinical Judaism. “We must face the realities of life,” Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath told his board at the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. “Women are here to stay.”
Still less did Levison anticipate the spectacular trends of countervailing thought. Both inside and outside the movement, nonviolent politics would drop from scholarly or popular interest at the same time that its inexorable momentum began to spawn lasting achievements. As King warned in his Montgomery speech, revisions of recent history would minimize hope for nonviolent democracy while magnifying its fears. War, even in failure and contradiction, would become again a common measure of freedom, and people sought refuge from unsettled times in what the revolutionary Benjamin Franklin called “a natural inclination in mankind to Kingly Government.” A new consensus eventually made people’s government the perceived scourge of freedom rather than its unsteady instrument. Phoenix-like, opponents of civil rights landmarks would refine themselves to govern.
King took Levison’s long letter on retreat to Jamaica. It was warm counsel for the political maelstrom of his short future. All the twists ahead would be a consequence of, or reaction to, the ten-year crest of the nonviolent movement in March of 1965. Beyond the three years allotted to him, they would shape history into the next century.