March–April 1967
TREPIDATION and infighting over Vietnam shaped King’s decisive next step to Riverside Church, while ugly racial transitions nagged for attention. In Natchez, Mississippi, Wharlest Jackson punched off-duty from Armstrong Tire and Rubber at 8:01 P.M. on Monday, February 27, ending his first shift on a cement-mixer job previously restricted to white workers, which earned a raise of 17 cents per hour, but an explosion nine minutes later hurled his mangled corpse fifty yards. Investigators said a heat-fuse bomb under Jackson’s pickup resembled one that nearly killed George Metcalfe, Jackson’s fellow NAACP officer and carpool rider from the Armstrong plant. That night at Mississippi State’s Old Maroon Gym, Perry Wallace of Vanderbilt broke the state’s color line for Southeastern Conference sports. (Rival Ole Miss had dodged the hurdle by canceling its home game with Vanderbilt’s freshman basketball team.) Spectators waving a noose rained down betrayal coins, calls of “nigger!” and bone-rattling choruses of “Dixie.” Elsewhere, a bomb ruined the new Head Start preschool of Liberty, Mississippi, while arson fires in Lowndes County, Alabama, destroyed a black church and the makeshift anti-poverty office.
Wharlest Jackson’s murder would remain unsolved, like the Metcalfe bombing, and a local trial with spectacular revelations soon freed a defendant who confessed the random murder of Ben Chester White during the previous summer’s Meredith march (“Jury Told of Plot to Slay Dr. King / Killing of a Negro Intended as Lure, Sheriff Testifies”). By contrast, Justice Department prosecutors advanced tenaciously against the Mississippi Klan, winning reindictment that same February 27 of thirty-one conspirators in two landmark cases: the 1966 firebomb murder of Vernon Dahmer and the 1964 triple lynching of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Not a few politicians bemoaned the federal effort more than the crimes themselves. Clark Reed, head of Mississippi’s renascent Republican Party, complained on statewide television that the Wharlest Jackson murder “has done more toward destruction of states’ rights than the liberal extremists could have brought about on their own.”
In Washington, one political drama climaxed on March 1 with House rebellion against a select investigating committee and the leadership of both political parties, which proposed formally that Adam Clayton Powell be admitted once he paid a fine of $40,000 for misuse of funds, surrendered all seniority, accepted garnishment of his congressional salary to pay a court judgment from the Esther James libel case, and stood mute under custody for censure in the well of the House. A few defenders objected that miscreants had retained House standing even in prison without such chastisement, but an opposing groundswell sought riddance of Powell altogether. Republican leader Gerald Ford coyly observed that although the Constitution required a two-thirds vote to expel a seated member, the House could exclude anyone in Powell’s un-sworn limbo status by simple majority without stating a cause. Democrat Emanuel Celler, floor manager for the major civil rights bills, threatened to impeach any Supreme Court Justice who ruled differently. “Mr. Speaker, I have a reasonably strong stomach,” announced Representative H. R. Gross, “but it will revolt at the aroma that will arise if today Adam Clayton Powell is offered a seat in this chamber.”
Only Drew Pearson, the muckraking columnist, questioned the central complaint that scofflaw Powell refused to pay the libel judgment due a constituent whose integrity he maligned, pointing out in one column that Esther James had a record of gangster arrests back to 1933. Neither Pearson nor the select committee mentioned the libel’s origin in ten extraordinary House speeches that listed her among hundreds of names on “police pads” for the Harlem underworld. Ignored, Powell had repeated his radioactive charges publicly in 1960, arguably losing constitutional immunity, and while his lawyers produced ample testimony that criminals gave regular payoffs to Esther James, it would take wrenching scandals well after Powell’s death to prove completed transfers into the chain of police command. Silence smothered his cries against the protected scourge of numbers and narcotics rackets (“All pads are due on the first of the month”), especially since the impish crusader himself sometimes claimed to seek only a fair share for black officers in the corruption dominated by New York City’s all-white corps of 212 police captains. Prevailing fiction suggested that Powell gratuitously insulted a lowly “bag woman” on the streets. The New York Times, which argued that hesitancy to punish Powell marked him the beneficiary rather than the victim of prejudice, nurtured a sympathetic widow’s image for Esther James: “a 66-year-old domestic who lives on her earnings as a servant and her late husband’s railroad pension.” When reporters encamped near his Bimini island hideaway relayed the 307–116 House vote for permanent exclusion, Powell shrugged with affected nonchalance from his boat Adam’s Fancy.
The next afternoon, March 2, Robert Kennedy proposed to suspend the bombing of North Vietnam. After weeks of fitful preparation, Kennedy carefully chose words from divided contributors, including Richard Goodwin. He opposed military withdrawal, affirming “determination and intention to remain in Vietnam until we have fulfilled our commitments,” but he urged risks to end the horror he confessed helping to create there under President Kennedy. “It is we who live in abundance and send our young men out to die,” he said. “It is our chemicals that scorch the children and our bombs that level the villages. We are all participants.” If a bombing halt did not succeed, he argued, it would shift the onus for war more clearly upon North Vietnam. While Kennedy addressed a packed Senate gallery, the President tried vainly to overshadow him in the news—visiting Howard University by surprise to reiterate his goal of redress for segregation, holding a spontaneous press conference, disclosing an expected first grandchild. More successfully, Johnson arranged instant rebuttals and prodded senators from both parties to cross-examine Kennedy before he left the Senate floor about bombing halts already tried and failed. (“All right,” Richard Russell promised. “I have some misgivings about getting into a debate with the little piss-ant, but I’ll see about it.”) More ominously, having ordered a compilation of FBI secrets two weeks earlier, Johnson signaled grave political retribution at stake. Headlines about Kennedy’s Vietnam speech coincided with the next day’s first corrosive story alleging his secret involvement in CIA assassination plots against Fidel Castro, which may have “backfired against his late brother.” (“President Johnson is sitting on an H-bomb,” wrote Drew Pearson.) Republican presidential contender Richard Nixon needed no cue to denounce Kennedy for “prolonging the war by encouraging the enemy.”
King followed the uproar into New York for a March 6 consultation at Harry Wachtel’s law office on Madison Avenue. The scheduled agenda—last-minute revisions for King’s book, chronic money trouble, and deferred crisis over Hosea Williams—gave way to a renewed deadlock on the April 15 antiwar march to United Nations Plaza. All senior advisers strenously opposed King’s participation. Bayard Rustin said it would ruin any hope of future cooperation with President Johnson. Historian Lawrence Reddick among others said the march would be sectarian and ineffective because the organizers welcomed all voices, including partisans of the Vietcong. Andrew Young joked that a Communist was said to be the most rational voice in the protest coalition. King first rescued the subject from swift oblivion with comments of critical sympathy. His recurring doubts extended debate past mild surprise into vexation, provoking wary looks at James Bevel as the sole advocate for the march. Stanley Levison, who rarely repeated what his unique access allowed him to tell King alone, stressed that the absence of elected officials on the platform would leave King foolishly weakened among a “squabbling pacifist, socialist, hippie collection,” and Cleveland Robinson agreed even though he was a march sponsor himself. Concerted objections wore down but failed to break King’s refrain that it would be cowardly to shun a just cause for fear of isolation. Agreeing only to postpone his decision a few days, he rushed an hour late to an evening fund-raiser hosted by wealthy New Yorkers. After a distracted presentation there on civil rights history since Rosa Parks, King hinted privately at his dilemma. William vanden Heuvel, a Kennedy adviser who had accompanied Edward to Mississippi and Robert to South Africa, told him to expect a vale of woe for any public break on Vietnam.
King flew home to manage a daring internal counteroffensive by Hosea Williams, who lodged a manifesto blaming Bevel for personal dissolution and leadership failures throughout SCLC: “Our staff problems are unbelievable.” His travels had him return through Washington on March 13, but King abruptly canceled an appointment he had secured with the President for that day. From his close reading of Johnson—a volatile mix of regret and determination being dragged from civil rights to Vietnam—King mingled distress about how to approach him with stewing delay over his own protest stance. The latest weekly report of 1,617 American war casualties—232 killed, 1,381 wounded, four missing—broke the January record by four hundred. In the wake of Robert Kennedy’s Vietnam speech, headlines tracked extraordinary press competition to unearth details of the Oval Office encounter a month earlier. The New York Times borrowed news from Time magazine’s current issue: “Discussion with Johnson Bitter, a Time Article Says.” Anonymous sources said the two men had accused each other of spilling innocent blood, with Kennedy calling Johnson a son of a bitch and Johnson vowing “all you doves will be destroyed” within six months. A historian of the feud later catalogued the excited phrases by political reporters who “raided their arsenals of hackneyed military metaphors” about throwing down gauntlets and crossing the Rubicon.
In New York, King’s advisers frantically canvassed potential antiwar leadership. Their ostensible mission was to broaden the April 15 mobilization rally, but their real hope was to break the spell of King’s compulsion to be there. They offered pained reminders of Bevel’s unstable history, including his latest “visit from Jesus,” and gathered new evidence to reinforce their argument that King should not fall sway to a lunatic “over-simplifier.” As march coordinator, Bevel did compensate for his mercurial style by hiring Bernard Lafayette and Paul Brooks, a biracial team of Freedom Riders steeped in nonviolent diplomacy from James Lawson’s Nashville workshops. Co-workers complimented Bevel’s “way of shaking cobwebs from the mind,” and he gained publicity with a colorful vow that a peace movement “must take the position of the folks whose kids were burned up this morning.” On the other hand, he flummoxed Mobilization headquarters with strange edicts—“What this demonstration needs is some Indians!”—and unsettled activists who had expected a civil rights figurehead of reverent appeal. The local chapter of Women Strike for Peace complained to Bevel of his “emphasis on ‘mass murder’ and talk of sending a ship of volunteers to North Vietnam.” He fared worse with novel shock theater, barging in on the CALCAV founders with plaintive cries that his brother had died that day in Vietnam, cultivating shared personal grief until he unveiled a trick lesson that the movement should treat every soldier and victim as family. “Jim Bevel has scared the daylights out of John Bennett and Abraham Heschel,” a CALCAV letter confided. Not even these committed religious leaders would go near the Mobilization protest, reported Levison, Rustin, and Wachtel, strengthening their unified insistence that King must find another venue, and word of his contrary resolve on March 14 pitched them into disbelief bordering on rebellion. “I’m gonna march,” said King. “I promised Bevel.”
ANDREW YOUNG sent out a resigned note that King “feels conscience-bound to participate,” then scrambled with colleagues to limit the damage. Their first move was a tactical demand that King speak first and leave early, lest his usual closing slot trap him on the platform through inflammatory speeches by Stokely Carmichael and others. Young also solicited from John Bennett an invitation for King to lecture in the chapel of Union Theological Seminary a few days beforehand, hoping to cushion the anticipated hostile reception with a controlled presentation of his Vietnam message.
Bennett assigned arrangements to CALCAV’s executive secretary Richard Fernandez, which became a mixed blessing for King’s advisers. Fernandez was an awkward career misfit among Congregationalist clergy—son of a Boston oil executive, not quite accepted to lead any congregation because he carried a Hispanic surname but spoke no Spanish. He had hitchhiked to interview King and Abernathy for a term paper on the bus boycott, gone to jail with fellow New England seminarians in North Carolina, and ventured on his spring leave as a campus chaplain into Birmingham’s nonviolent youth workshops just before the seminal marches of 1963. When interviewed in 1966 for the CALCAV position, Fernandez brashly informed Bennett, Heschel, and Coffin that they would never turn public opinion against the war with theological pedigrees and sermons. Within a year, he raised the number of active CALCAV chapters from eight to sixty-eight by goading clergy into systematic outreach beyond the comfort of friends. Within a week of the King assignment, Fernandez informed Bennett and Young of three requirements to build effective “cover” for the intended march with Bevel. First, they should transfer the preview lecture into the immense Riverside Church, which CALCAV secured for the evening of April 4. Second, they should engage a professional publicist, Fred Sontag, who would donate his services on a final condition: King must agree for once to submit a speech text at least five days in advance. “This would give us a maximum amount of time,” Fernandez wrote with demanding emphasis on March 21, “to reproduce it for the press.”
Stanley Levison flew to Atlanta with an appeal to reconsider the Vietnam thrust altogether. (“I lost,” he reported home over his wiretapped phone line, “and we’ll just have to live with the consequences.”) King departed for Chicago behind schedule on March 24, leaving Young only a four-part outline of the Riverside Church address. For an orator trained in synthetic improvisation, who often conceived speeches on a last-minute briefing, the imminent deadline would have been a shock even without extra handicaps. Trusted assistants stalled the project, which obliged Young to farm out the drafting assignment to scattered volunteers, including professors Vincent Harding of Spelman and John Maguire of Wesleyan. King tried to relay comments from the maw of a floundering movement in Chicago, where he apologized for his three-month absence at a rally packed into Liberty Baptist Church. A press conference followed with volleys of skeptical questions about the stalled summit agreement, a “miserably failed” registration drive, the chance of riots, and Mayor Daley’s public charges that King’s return was a “politically inspired” trespass into the mayoral campaign. “I have made it clear over and over again that the issue in Chicago is injustice,” King replied. “It was injustice before Mayor Daley was elected. If he is re-elected, it will be injustice then.” He punctuated a blur of private councils with a March 25 speech at the Chicago Theological Seminary, praising standout progress in the drive to integrate the workforces of all-white companies under Jesse Jackson, the precocious director of SCLC’s local Operation Breadbasket. At noon, King and Dr. Benjamin Spock led five thousand supporters in a Chicago Area Peace Parade from Wacker Drive along State Street through the downtown Loop. A few hecklers seized passing placards—“Draft Beer, Not Boys,” “Would Napalm Convert You to Democracy?”—and threw them in the Chicago River. At the Coliseum on South Wabash, King earned standing ovations with a reprise of his Beverly Hills speech on Vietnam. “This war is a blasphemy against all that America stands for!” he cried.
White House officials noticed the reemergence. “He’s canceled two meetings with me, and I don’t understand it,” dictated President Johnson, wondering in the midst of greater war travails why his aide Louis Martin did not bring King to see him. The latest Pentagon figures of March 23 put the week’s American casualties above two thousand for the first time at 2,092, with 211 killed. Famed British historian Arnold Toynbee declared victory in Vietnam an illusion “unless the American army is prepared to stay there forever.” North Vietnam released worldwide the recent exchange of secret letters in which Johnson’s offer of peace talks and a bombing halt, on condition of a military freeze, met plainspoken rejection “Vietnam is thousands of miles from the United States,” wrote Ho Chi Minh. “The Vietnamese people have never done any harm to the United States…. They will never accept talks under the threat of bombs.” Worst for Johnson, General Westmoreland had just contradicted the administration’s public assurance of military headway with a classified request for another 200,000 soldiers, which would raise the authorized troop ceiling to 670,000.
Levison, far from reconciled to King’s plans, called Chicago after midnight with a new battery of arguments. Contributors would feel betrayed because SCLC’s fund-raising letters had never solicited for protest against the war, he said, and King’s civil rights currency was so weak that literary agent Joan Daves could not find even a small magazine to publish a promotional excerpt from the new book. Most harshly, Levison reported an angry aside from Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins that wrongheadedness on Vietnam would reduce King’s reputation to mud. “I anticipated some of this,” King replied, “and it doesn’t bother me at all.” He tried to mollify Levison on March 27 with a cheerful report that at least a thousand Negroes joined the Chicago march, easing fears that King would become a token leader for white ideologues. Levison vacillated between approval and despair over King’s public emphasis that he was protesting out of love for America. That positive message was a weak candle, Levison feared, against a Vietnam storm darkening right over the stubborn end of segregation, causing anger in young people so intense that it “does boil down” to alienation from the entire country. “You can’t be identified with that,” Levison pleaded. “I’m not just talking opportunistically. It’s not sound thinking.” He declined King’s urging to pursue the issue among the long-winded SCLC preachers assembling in Kentucky.
Muhammad Ali, with improbable assistance from Hosea Williams, had his hometown brewing over race and Vietnam before King reached Louisville late on March 28. In the ninth defense of his heavyweight championship, a frustrated, vengeful Ali toyed with Ernie Terrell through six rounds once the challenger stood woozy and aimless, with Ali shouting “What’s my name?” over jabs, punishing the scornful denial of his right to name himself. Purple headlines detected fiendish cruelty in the ring: “Cassius Reveals His Wickedness.” Jimmy Cannon of the New York World-Journal & Telegram acidly concluded that “Cassius Clay had a good time beating up another Negro”; Arthur Daley of the Times called him “a mean and malicious man.” Ali compounded the press furor by announcing that he would defy on religious grounds his conscription order to report for Army duty in April, and King escaped the tempestuous SCLC board for two hours on March 29 to meet privately with Ali about the likely repercussions—being deprived of his boxing title and sent to prison. Chafing that the sectarian Nation of Islam forbade participation in America’s “slavemaster” politics, including war protest, Ali whispered that he might disobey Elijah Muhammad and appear at the April 15 Mobilization. When they emerged, King deflected personal questions into more general controversy. “My position on the draft is very clear,” he said. “I’m against it.”
Irrepressible Ali chided the jostling reporters for getting “shook up” that such diverse black men could talk civilly, “like Kennedy and Khrushchev,” but he revealed one sharp disagreement: he had spurned SCLC’s local campaign to break out of segregated neighborhoods. “Black people should seek dignity and self-respect before they seek open housing,” Ali said, and dismissed journalists with Elijah Muhammad’s separatist gibe that Negroes still “lost” to self-hatred could turn mansions into slums within a day.
Offsetting Ali’s scorn, the local integration drive received a boost in publicity from Hosea Williams, who with a dozen staff aides had mounted a shrewd retreat from Chicago ahead of the SCLC board meeting. Williams vowed in the midst of the demonstrations that unless Louisville broke the racial confinement into city areas called Parkland, Smoketown, and Little Africa, where black families still raised hogs and chickens, SCLC would send pickets and protest dashers into the manicured glory of the May 6 Kentucky Derby. The very thought scandalized Kentuckians, including many civil rights leaders, but it won surprise endorsement from Rev. A. D. King. “We can start by planning to disrupt the horses,” he said, “since white folks think more of horses than of Negroes.”
The younger King, who was hosting the SCLC board sessions at his Zion Baptist Church, carefully picked another moment to extricate his brother for a scripted personal word with Georgia Davis, the candidate soon to be elected Kentucky’s only black state senator. “Martin has been thinking about you since you last met,” he told her. “After the meeting tonight, ride with me to the Rodeway Inn and meet him there.”
The stark proposition froze Davis. The elder King studied her and said only, “Yes, I’d like for you to come,” before hurrying on. Davis, who had been on the charter flight that picked up King in Atlanta for the final leg of the Selma march, contemplated her choice with starstruck savvy about the terms of discretion available to black females. Toward midnight, she cringed inwardly as A. D. King vouched for her past a posted police guard she knew by name, and King soon arrived with apologies for the precautionary approach through his brother. “I had no choice,” he said with a sigh, beginning a furtive, occasional affair.
The next day, March 30, some SCLC board members accused King of trying to impose his Vietnam resolution like a bishop. “This is no Methodist Church!” shouted Rev. Roland Smith, proclaiming himself a staunch supporter of his government’s anti-Communist crusade. Parliamentarians stalled with quibbles about the composition and voting status of the fifty-seven-member board. Someone complained that lunch was getting cold. Hosea Williams would recall that Daddy King himself helped vote down a resolution that approved SCLC resistance to the war, but a weaker version passed amid calls not to embarrass SCLC’s president. King, breaking away for an interview with New York Times correspondent John Herbers, confirmed plans to give “a major policy paper” about Vietnam the next Tuesday at Riverside Church.
On April 2, when his interview appeared on the front page of the Sunday Times, King preached at Ebenezer while cobbling together speech changes past the deadline crunch. Andrew Young telephoned revisions for three sections submitted from Atlanta, but Al Lowenstein delivered his negotiated draft of a fourth part straight to CALCAV headquarters in New York. Richard Fernandez rushed assembled copies to Rabbi Heschel and Union Seminary president John Bennett, who had agreed to close the eight o’clock Riverside program with commentary on King’s speech. A third responder, historian Henry Steele Commager, received his copy on arrival from Cambridge, England. By Tuesday morning, promotional releases drew a full turnout for King’s preview reception at New York’s Overseas Press Club, where publicist Fred Sontag distributed embargoed speeches and promised “live and remote pickups” for broadcasts.
While busloads of CALCAV supporters converged from Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and other neighboring states, advisers in King’s suite at the Americana Hotel fretted all afternoon over their paradoxical success. Their intended buffer of a seminary lecture loomed instead with consequence, and the rumbling signs of a big political event magnified sudden alarm over the neglected speech. Levison and Harry Wachtel, who seldom agreed on political language or style, huddled in the bedroom to draft an emergency substitute for dissent they found too personal and raw. Realizing that noticeable deviation from the press text would be criticized, they collaborated in a futile effort to compress King’s Vietnam stance into a poetic but impregnable new introduction. King used the same charged moments to absorb by remarkable shorthand memory an orator’s rhythm for words he already found comfortable. He discarded the preface as they rushed uptown to Riverside Church, where a processional march of one hundred clergy gathered in the narthex. All 2,700 pew spaces and 1,200 portable seats were filled, and an overflow line stretched toward 120th Street as in the halcyon 1930s when King’s idol Harry Emerson Fosdick first preached at the Gothic cathedral financed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Wachtel squeezed into a VIP room in the Riverside library, but acute foreboding sent Levison straight home to bed.
A STANDING ovation died down to cavernous tension before King imposed deeper quiet with a meditation on hesitant voices. “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice,” he said. Paying tribute to the first line of Robert McAfee Brown’s CALCAV statement on Vietnam—“A time comes when silence is betrayal”—King confessed that the emotional vortex of war left doubters “mesmerized by uncertainty” and had made his pulpit “a vocation of agony” for the previous two years “as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart.” He still felt the forceful admonishment to leave Vietnam policy alone, King allowed, but it left him “nevertheless greatly saddened” that so many people considered the topic a senseless and disconnected shift from civil rights. That presumption fitted those who “have not really known me” or understood the movement, he lamented. “Indeed,” said King, “their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.”
He undertook to explain “why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church…leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.” Seven reasons began with two lesser ones confined to race. Vietnam had “broken and eviscerated” the historic momentum for justice since the bus boycott, he asserted. Moreover, circumstance compelled poor black soldiers to kill and die at nearly twice their proportion for a stated purpose to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia that remained myths at home, fighting “in brutal solidarity” with white soldiers “for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools.” King derived a third theme from young rioters who had countered his pleas for nonviolence with quips that the nation itself relied on “massive doses of violence” to solve social problems. “Their questions hit home,” he intoned, “and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.”
This naked pronouncement further hushed Riverside as King moved through reasons centered in patriotism, his Nobel Prize commission, and religious imperative. Just as the movement always had adopted America’s larger, defining goal of a more perfect democratic union—helping to spread concentric ripples of freedom behind rights for black people, liberating white Southerners themselves from segregation—so King argued by reverse synergy that a hardening climate of war could implode toward fearful subjugation at home. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned,” he warned, “part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam.’” He marveled that religious leaders so readily evaded their core convictions to excuse violence. “Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them?” he asked. “What then can I say to the Vietcong, or to Castro, or to Mao, as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with them my life?” Finally, he declared for Vietnam an impetus broader than American ideals but short of religious apocalypse or perfection. “We are called upon to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls enemies,” he said. “No document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.”
King quickened his pace to describe decades of nearly continuous war from the viewpoint of ordinary Vietnamese. “They must see Americans as strange liberators,” he said. His historical sketch grew relentlessly more intimate past the “tragic decision” of 1945 to revoke independence with a nine-year attempt to reestablish French colonial control. “Now they languish under our bombs,” said King, “and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, their real enemies.” He filtered out geopolitical labels to highlight personal realities on the ground. “They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps,” said King. “They watch as we kill a million acres of their crops…. They wander into town and see thousands of the children homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals.” Villagers and soldiers degraded each other as Americans subjected their own troops to inner scars beyond the hazards of war. “We are adding cynicism to the process of death,” he charged, “for they must know after a short period…that their government has sent them into a struggle among the Vietnamese….
“Somehow this madness must cease,” King declared, but he predicted no peace initiatives to match the appetite for war: “The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve.” His audience stirred as from shock when he presented five proposals drawn from Lowenstein’s draft, including a permanent bombing halt and a unilateral cease-fire. Applause first greeted the final brisk point: “Five, set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.” A renewed wave of approval swept over his immediate call for a national effort to “grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime.” King did not hide from the stigma of military defeat by Communists, nor quibble about negotiating terms. Yet neither did he discount anyone’s yearning for democracy, whether a faceless peasant’s or Lyndon Johnson’s. Instead he offered bare, conflicted remorse for “sins and errors in Vietnam” that had neglected, spoiled, and trampled essential bonds of solidarity in freedom. By treating the Vietnamese more as subject “natives” than citizens, the American example long since undermined a democratic road to independence.
The Riverside crowd embraced King’s message as though relieved to hear biting reflection sustained with nuance so devoid of malice, and perhaps also because his candid doubts of practical impact rang humbly true. They clapped for his endorsement of draft resistance and again for his praise of seventy declared conscientious objectors thus far from his Morehouse alma mater alone. He said each listener should weigh methods by individual conscience and collective promise—“But we must all protest.” Witness to belief was more important than immediate results, he told them to more applause, “and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing Clergymen and Laymen Concerned committees for the next generation.” The crowd stayed with King through skeins from his speeches since the Nobel Prize lecture. He called Vietnam symptomatic of a tragic impulse to meet rising hope in the world’s “barefoot and shirtless people” with military force disguised as American values. “Communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolution that we initiated,” he declared. Summoning a renewed freedom movement “out into a sometimes hostile world,” seeking to overcome poverty, racism, and war, King’s peroration ran past his text to extol again the biblical vision of the prophet Amos—“when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
A second standing ovation gave way to hurried comments by the sponsors. “There is no one who can speak to the conscience of the American people as powerfully as Martin Luther King,” said John Bennett. “I hope that he will make us see the monstrous evil of what we are doing in Vietnam.” Reporters converged afterward to grill King about the chances for nuclear escalation, Communist exploitation, or antiwar sabotage, and one asked how a rabbi could condone any comparison of American policy to Hitler. “I am not aware that Dr. King made such an analogy,” replied Heschel. “He only made reference to concentration camps, which apparently in the mind of this listener conjured up such an analogy.” Among surprise well-wishers pushing through the throng came Morehouse schoolmate and Juilliard musician Robert Williams, who had composed his first published choral work, “I Can’t Turn Back,” one traumatized night during the bus boycott. From Riverside back to the Americana Hotel, Williams reclaimed his old Montgomery role as volunteer escort for a friend now euphoric with relief. Whatever happened, said King, the manifest attention to his speech meant that at least he was making plain to the world his brief for peace in Vietnam.
KING FIRST blamed distorted news coverage for a rude shock, which one historian called “almost universal condemnation” beyond the walls of Riverside. When he beseeched advisers to defend his real position, Harry Wachtel recruited Rabbi Heschel—and reported back his gratifying pledge that “any attack on you is an attack on him”—to answer Jewish war veterans who branded King’s Vietnam dissent a slander on their resistance to the Nazi Holocaust. When Reinhold Niebuhr, the aged and impaired theologian, managed to write an introduction for CALCAV’s pamphlet of the collected Riverside addresses, King fervently hoped over wiretapped phone lines that “it would help to clarify things” if newspapers would publish excerpts, or even his own statements of correction, but Stanley Levison considered the speech itself an obstacle to public understanding. “I do not think it was a good expression of you,” he bluntly advised, “but apparently you think it was.” With his trademark directness, Levison called it unwise to focus on Vietnamese peasants rather than average American voters. “The speech was not so balanced,” he told King. It was too “advanced” to rally his constituency, and covered so many angles that reporters sidestepped his message by caricature and label. “What on earth can Dr. King be talking about?” wrote a Washington columnist on April 5, wondering how any civil rights leader could overlook the benefits of integrated combat. “If there hadn’t been a war, it would have served the Negro cause well to start one.”
White House aides reacted strongly to King. Trusted counsel Harry McPherson warned President Johnson an hour before the Riverside event: “Martin Luther King has become the crown prince of the Vietniks.” John Roche of Brandeis, who had succeeded Eric Goldman as Johnson’s academic liaison, far outstripped McPherson’s rare agitation the next day with a shrill judgment that King “has thrown in with the commies.” In an “EYES ONLY” report to the President, Roche claimed inside knowledge that King, “who is inordinately ambitious and quite stupid (a bad combination)…is painting himself into a corner with a bunch of losers.” White House aide Clifford Alexander more diplomatically called King to argue in detail that the administration was maintaining budgetary commitments to equal rights despite soaring Vietnam costs. Alexander and others mobilized civil rights leaders to isolate King’s threat to their White House alliance. Former ambassador Carl Rowan angrily told King that millions of their fellow black people would suffer for his insults against the greatest civil rights President in American history. He ascribed sinister motives to King in a syndicated column later expanded for Reader’s Digest, and King’s folly became a front-page theme within a week of Riverside. “N.A.A.C.P. Decries Stand of Dr. King on Vietnam / Calls It a ‘Serious Tactical Mistake’ to Merge Rights and Peace Drives,” announced the April 11 New York Times, which followed two days later with a headline about United Nations undersecretary Ralph Bunche, the only other black American Nobel Peace laureate: “Bunche Disputes Dr. King on Peace.” When President Johnson pressed to find out what King actually said at Riverside, he had to wait for a text supplied by J. Edgar Hoover.
King launched crisis consultations on his way to California. Stanley Levison set aside his reservations about the Riverside address to dictate a vigorous defense statement for an overflow press conference at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, calling it a myth that King advocated a merger of organizations or goals, challenging critics to take a “forthright stand” on the war. Pressed for an admission that his peace talk did harm to Negroes, King lapsed into testiness that went unreported: “The war in Vietnam is a much graver injustice to Negroes than anything I could say against that war.” After a speech at Occidental College, he kept telling advisers that the phalanx of rejection left him “temporarily at a loss.” When he called Bunche, King reported, the diplomat had dissembled so miserably that “I felt sorry for him,” Bunche claiming to have misunderstood Riverside as a mandate to “fuse” civil rights with peace groups, promising to make clear now how much he agreed with King on the war itself. “He wasn’t telling the truth and he was trembling and all,” said King. “So I just got off him.” He said even the White House aides half-apologized for their political offensive, complaining of war hawks on the other side. The only consolation King wrung from his plight was a dawning reminder of similar distress “in every movement we have started,” and a night’s reflection clarified the pattern. “This was very true in Birmingham,” he told Levison. From President Kennedy on down, even nonsegregationists had opposed the disruption and protest, and no one had conceded any chance of a positive outcome. “The press was against me,” said King. “The middle-class Negro community was against me, and finally they came around.” The antiwar movement needed to fashion a breakthrough, like the children’s marches or the confrontations on Pettus Bridge.
Levison cautioned against dangerous hopes. “It will be harder than Birmingham,” he told King, which was disheartening indeed. Levison already conceded that the burden went deeper than specific words of the Riverside address or his own vanity as a speechwriter. American public discourse broadly denied King the standing to be heard on Vietnam at all. It invested mountains of calculation into military prospects but recoiled from any thought of withdrawal, especially on the recommendation of a civil rights preacher, and future generations would remain locked in what Andrew Young called debilitating paralysis between “those who are ashamed that we lost the war and those who are ashamed that we fought it.” King offered a precarious narrow course that demonized neither side, restrained by a nonviolent imperative to find slivers of humanity in the obscene polar conflict. While upholding for his own country, personified by Lyndon Johnson, a supreme but imperfect commitment to democratic norms, he granted the Vietnamese Communists a supreme but imperfect resolve to be free of external domination. On balance among Vietnamese, war by foreigners entrapped the complicit United States in a colonial past that forfeited liberating status. To curtail unspeakable cruelty and waste, Americans must refine their cherished idea of freedom by accepting that they could support but not impose it in Vietnam. To honor sacrifice with understanding, Americans must grant the Vietnamese people the elementary respect of citizens in disagreement. The lesson was at once wrenching and obvious, in the way modern people might be chastened by the centuries it took to establish that the Inquisition’s bloody enforcement profaned rather than championed Christian belief.
King flew north to San Francisco, still stung. He complained most of featured editorials in two nationally respected newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, respectively a supporter and a critic of the war. While neither paper engaged the substance of his Riverside argument, both archly told him to leave Vietnam alone for his own sake. “Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence,” declared the Post. “He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people.” Editors at the Times pronounced race relations difficult enough without his “wasteful and self-defeating” diversions into foreign affairs. In “Dr. King’s Error,” they summarized the Riverside speech as “a fusing of two public problems that are distinct and separate,” and predicted that his initiative “could very well be disastrous for both causes.”
The call for segregated silence on Vietnam dashed any expectation that King’s freedom movement had validated the citizenship credentials of blacks by historic mediation between the powerful and dispossessed. It relegated him again to the back of the bus, conspicuous yet invisible. King felt cut off even from disagreement, in a void worse than his accustomed fare of veneration or disfiguring hostility, and he broke down more than once into tears.
A JOURNEY of parallel emotion swallowed up Robert Kennedy. At the Jackson airport, a waiting bodyguard of a dozen U.S. marshals escorted him on April 9 through Klan flags, epithets, and hostile picket signs: “Send Bobby to Hanoi,” “Race Mixers Go Home.” Nearly a thousand people crowded into the ballroom of the Hotel Heidelburg for an unprecedented drama the next day, when Mississippi’s most widely honored politician—whose youthful courage in the Senate had helped puncture the paranoid hysteria from Joseph McCarthy, and whose long service would gain recognition in the namesake aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis—appeared before a subcommittee of peers to duel unlettered witnesses from the civil rights movement, including Amzie Moore and Fannie Lou Hamer. Stennis renewed his campaign against a “national scandal” of new poverty programs, chiefly Head Start for preschool children, testifying that grant recipients were “throwing money away” on lavish expenses and indirect support for racial agitation. Unita Blackwell of Issaquena County chided Stennis for glossing over the poverty itself. “We have children who have never had a glass of milk,” she said. NAACP counsel Marian Wright rebutted Stennis on charges of fraud. “He is wrong,” she testified, to gasps in the ballroom, citing audits that contradicted the investigators Stennis had sent to scrutinize and shut down the fledgling county efforts run by the poor. Wright challenged the subcommittee to examine people instead of numbers. “Starvation is a major, major problem now,” she testified.
A few subcommittee members ventured the next day by chartered airplane into the Mississippi Delta, where more than three-quarters of black adults had not finished elementary school. In Greenville, they visited new adult literacy classes sponsored by the federal anti-poverty agency, the Office of Economic Opportunity, under the aegis of the Roman Catholic diocese. They accompanied some parents home to the Delta Ministry’s Freedom City, an encampment maintained more than a year now for refugees who had tried to occupy the old Greenville Air Base. Ida Mae Lawrence told senators she had been stripped of her midwife’s license for registering to vote. Mothers said they could not afford the $2 per month charge to obtain Food Stamps. “What did you have for breakfast?” Robert Kennedy asked a boy. “Molasses.” “For supper?” “Molasses.” “For lunch?” “Don’t have no lunch.” For Marian Wright, who had assumed the senators were jockeying for headlines on the hunger issue, most of the skeptical distance natural to a SNCC founder and Yale lawyer collapsed as Kennedy pushed into places she would never go herself. He sat on primitive cots and dirt floors that smelled of urine, holding nearly naked children with distended bellies and open sores. Badly shaken, he would call the day an epiphany that turned stale all prior achievements of a lifetime, but he recovered enough steely reserve to tell reporters only that he was not sure the poverty programs “have been implemented in the best way.” Republican Senator George Murphy of California said Americans who really saw Mississippi would declare a national emergency. All nine members of the subcommittee signed a letter to President Johnson reporting personal and scientific evidence of famine, and Kennedy was moved to appeal separately across the gap of their contentious personal history. “I cannot agree with you more that something must be done,” he wrote Martin Luther King. “If you have any suggestions, I would appreciate hearing from you.”
KING REMAINED in California for a final bombardment of cross-country advice. Rabbi Heschel, still worried that Bevel would degrade the cause with his marching delegation of Sioux Indians billed to represent the “first victims” of genocide by the United States, sent word that it was not too late for King to pull out of the antiwar Mobilization in New York. King qualified the underlying dispute. “I don’t want to be up on that stage debating Bevel,” he told Harry Wachtel, fretting that he “would have to say too much” to distinguish between Bevel’s intemperate tone and his racial interpretation of Vietnam. King said he frankly agreed that future wars were likely to target nonwhite people in formerly colonized areas of the world, but he thought Stokely Carmichael’s high media profile made him a much bigger tactical liability than Bevel. Andrew Young concurred. NBC News had just broadcast four minutes of the SNCC chairman exhorting black people to resist the “racist war” in Vietnam by any means necessary, he observed on a conference call, “and I know that scared the hell out of white folks.” Harry Belafonte volunteered to host a truce meeting with Carmichael and other fractious civil rights leaders. King predicted that protest numbers would determine the impact more than message—ten thousand or less would be ruinous, a hundred thousand or more would force attention. If there were few black people among them, he expected critics to say he was losing his constituency. If many, it would amplify charges that he was merging incompatible movements. These political landmines helped Stanley Levison persuade King to adjust his Riverside call for unilateral withdrawal. Levison argued that a straightforward campaign to leave Vietnam, no matter how carefully explored or mournfully presented, would make King an “easy mark” for the combined furies of war, defeat, and surrender. His revision sheltered the central message instead among public figures advocating a negotiated settlement.
King flew overnight from a speech at Stanford University to join the April 15 Mobilization in New York’s Central Park. As crowds gathered through the morning, a rump group of about seventy Cornell students burned their Selective Service cards in the first large ceremony of its kind, attesting in signed pledges to resist conscription even into prison if their collective number reached five hundred, and onlookers added a hundred more cards to the tiny pyre in a Maxwell House coffee can. FBI surveillance units hovered to record evidence of the federal crime, while police commanders relayed to King intelligence reports of a sniper plot to kill him. SNCC’s Ivanhoe Donaldson, repeating the haphazard precautions from Selma two years earlier, helped arrange peace marshals loosely ahead of front ranks that stepped off shortly after noon with Dave Dellinger, Belafonte, Bevel, King, Benjamin Spock, Stokely Carmichael, and student mobilization leader Linda Dannenberg among notables linked arm in arm. A street-wide swath of marchers spilled behind them steadily for four hours, turning south on Madison Avenue and east again on 47th Street into United Nations Plaza. Scattered hecklers threw red paint; a few workers pelted marchers with nails from a construction site on Lexington Avenue. The security threat made it easier for King to stay off the platform except for his own speech, which repeated much of Riverside with a tamer refrain: “Stop the bombing! Stop the bombing!” He remarked privately that the magnitude of the rally exceeded the March on Washington, then navigated a tempestuous summit at Belafonte’s apartment late into the night. In the quiet afterward, the singer’s assistant expressed chagrin that Carmichael “talked down” to King with measured approval for shifts toward his own “radical” peace position. Levison replied over a wiretapped line that King had calmed him on the same subject with a reminder to look beneath personality fireworks, observing that Belafonte was drawn to the intensity and flair of SNCC protest but would stick with King on the integrity of nonviolence.
Opening words fixed the tone for the next morning’s live telecast of Face the Nation: “Dr. King, yesterday you led a demonstration here which visibly featured the carrying of Viet Cong flags, a mass burning of draft cards, and one American flag was burned…. How far should this go?” King fended off the half-hour barrage. No, he did not consider Secretary McNamara a racist. Yes, he did think racial factors excluded Adam Clayton Powell from Congress. No, he “would never call the President a fool,” and he had never promised to shun Stokely Carmichael or anyone else. Press disputes clouded the number and character of the April 15 demonstrators. The New York Times counted 100,000, which was 25,000 fewer than the police estimate and a fraction of King’s insistence on “fully 300,000 and perhaps 400,000 people.” Andrew Young thought there were more than a million. The Daily News expressed relief: “CITY SURVIVES PEACE MARCH.” Time magazine perceived a motley host: “anarchists under black flags; Vassar girls proving that they are, too, socially conscious; boys wearing beads and old Army jackets; girls in ponchos and serapes, some with babes on their shoulders…many of them carrying posters, all of them out for a spring housecleaning of their passions.” Social critic Marya Mannes of the Times considered the protesters strong on courage but short on dignity. One study found that nearly half the 531 people aboard a ten-car train delegation from Cleveland were attending their first demonstration. A high school teacher from Indiana was fired for “bad judgment” when he wrote the Bloomington Tribune about why Korean War service compelled him to attend the rally in New York.
President Johnson chose Mobilization Day to announce that FBI director Hoover was sending him regular reports on the antiwar movement. It was a subtle but powerful signal. Johnson stopped short of bellicose language or the full war mobilization urged by hawkish advisers, because he remained worried that uncontrollable national fury could obliterate Vietnam without achieving the political goal of stable free government. Still, his timing alone generated headlines of suspicion—“F.B.I. Is Watching ‘Antiwar’ Effort President Says”—that offered more than enough encouragement for Hoover to step up propaganda. The Director had just approved leaks to friendly news sources that “would cause extreme embarrassment to King,” and stories reached even the prestige newspapers. In “The Struggle to Sway King,” the Washington Post unearthed internal deliberations from 1965 to Riverside in considerable detail (“Ranged against Bevel and Young on that point were most of Dr. King’s older advisers”), and reported the conclusion of “high Administration officials” that King had “leaped headlong into peace campaigns partly in search of money and headlines” and also because “he is just terribly naive.” On April 19, Hoover sent DeLoach to the White House with a top secret summary that collapsed the FBI’s own wiretap evidence into stark falsehood about a maleable King pushed into war protest by his inner circle, telling President Johnson that he “is an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our Nation.” War hardened the FBI stereotype of King as a minstrel stooge for evil masters. In his 1995 memoir, written two decades after pained revelations had discredited the FBI’s vendetta, DeLoach managed only a barbed concession that King “operated with far less discipline and far less cunning than seasoned communists,” and still blandly alleged that conspirators like Levison “aimed him and pulled his trigger with apparent ease.”
KING TESTED new protest vehicles to escape the polarized rancor. On April 23, he appeared with a youth coalition at Christ Church of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to announce Vietnam Summer, modeled consciously on the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, in which students and other volunteers would knock on doors for peace. “I think the war in Vietnam has strengthened the forces of reaction in our country,” King lamented, “and has excited violence and bigotry.” On April 24, he joined veteran political activists in New York for the founding of Negotiation Now. Civil rights lawyer Joe Rauh, who had criticized King’s Riverside speech for fear that its frontal attack would only elect Richard Nixon in 1968, outlined plans to gather a million signatures on peace petitions, but reporters besieged King about news leaks out of Cambridge that he planned to run for President himself. King denied the reports while fuming privately that overbearing peace intellectuals simply publicized as fact what they wanted him to do. (“I begin to see why Spock has difficulty with these people,” Levison told King.)
The next day in Washington, war critics took the Senate floor with arguments for peace negotiations on a fine line between escalation and withdrawal. “No senator is suggesting that we pull out of Vietnam,” stated the forthright dove George McGovern of South Dakota. “Not a single senator has suggested that.” Two days later, in the first address to Congress by a wartime field commander, General William Westmoreland denounced passivity in Vietnam as a formula for retreat. His report stirred ovations with praise for the soldiers. “They believe in what they are doing,” said Westmoreland. “They are determined to provide the shield of security…for the future and freedom of all Southeast Asia.” That same week, George Wallace declared that he would run for President in 1968 as the candidate of victory in Vietnam and backlash at home—not white backlash, he insisted, but “backlash against big government in this country.”
In Cleveland, where King rushed on April 25 to lay ground for a voter registration campaign, Rev. O. M. Hoover regaled a preachers’ dinner with stories of the group journey to Oslo for the Nobel Prize, and colleagues leavened apprehension of riot or failure with rounds of fraternal jokes. Reporter David Halberstam preserved a punch line about an old minister wrestling with temptation to seek a new forty-year-old wife: “Lord, would two twenties be all right?” King left for a speech at Berkeley, after which a graduate student blocked his way with a grandiose but piercing request not to dismiss so easily a run for president. “You’re the most important man we’ve got,” the student pleaded on behalf of draft resisters. “So please weigh our jail sentences in the balance when you make your decision.” The appeal flustered King, who composed himself to compliment “a moving and persuasive statement” before flying on to Minnesota and Wisconsin for various engagements. In Chicago, he announced agreement with Jewel food stores to open 512 jobs for black applicants. To mark the promotion of Jesse Jackson into Bevel’s vacant post as Chicago director of SCLC, King agreed to a three-hour stopover in Greenville, South Carolina, for a program at the city auditorium after a thorough bomb search, followed by hurried professional photographs at Jackson’s family home. Back in Louisville for renewed brinkmanship that spared Proud Clarion to win the Kentucky Derby, he read out loud from the proofs of Where Do We Go from Here and took solace in an unguarded remark to Georgia Davis, “I really am a writer.” Both King and his brother A.D. would be hit by rocks during sporadic demonstrations that overlapped the drama about the native celebrity who, accompanied by King’s Chicago lawyer, Chauncey Eskridge, quietly fulfilled his public vow to refuse Army induction in Houston on April 28. The boxing world stripped Muhammad Ali of his title and license within an hour, well before indictment or trial, as the cover story in Sports Illustrated went from “Champ in the Jug?” to “Taps for the Champ.”
In Atlanta King ran into his neighbor Vincent Harding, the Spelman professor who had drafted most of the Riverside speech, and teased him for causing a month of ceaseless trouble. He complained of having to fight suggestions at every stop that his Vietnam stance merely echoed the vanguard buzz of Stokely Carmichael. Harding sensed Carmichael was swept up by a peculiarly American phenomenon in the mold of Malcolm X, built on the sensational illusion that violence alone measures power and that menacing language accordingly registers heroic strength rather than noise. Having devoted himself to Mennonite peace theology since his own military service in Korea, Harding still believed as a mentor that Carmichael and peers had been not only stronger through SNCC’s formative era but also more “radical” in the true sense of going to root causes and solutions for injustice. King kept trying to reach SNCC veterans on precisely this point, stressing the bonds of common experience in the South. He startled Carmichael with a personal call near midnight on April 29, fairly begging him to attend church for once at Ebenezer the next morning.
With Carmichael seated in a front pew, King apologized for the rare use of a manuscript. His sermon embellished recent Vietnam speeches with confessions on the cumulative burden of nonviolence. He acknowledged resentment that history’s victims remained so accountable for the overall state of race relations, still obliged to catalyze progress by further suffering and improvisation, and he bridled like Malcolm X that America admired nonviolence mostly when practiced by blacks for the comfort of whites. “They applauded us on the freedom rides when we accepted blows without retaliation,” King declared with an edge of sarcasm. “They praised us in Albany and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Oh, the press was so noble in its applause and so noble in its praise that I was saying be nonviolent toward Bull Connor.” His trademark passion, while quivering to defend a steady course, let slip rage at being patronized and misunderstood: “There is something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say be nonviolent toward Jim Clark, but will curse you and damn you when you say be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children!” The congregation broke into applause. “There is something wrong with that!”