July–November 1967
J. Edgar Hoover sent his liaison to the White House on July 10 with a secret report that King and Stokely Carmichael opposed the Vietnam War in order “to replenish their empty larders” among other nefarious motives. “It was indicated,” Deke DeLoach reported back to headquarters, “that the general public is gradually beginning to realize that the civil rights activities of these men have been phoney since their start.” In response, President Johnson urged DeLoach to arrange leaks against Carmichael but not King. His careful evasion was a double letdown for Hoover, because Johnson still shielded King and declined to undertake leaks himself. “I assume we have to do it,” Hoover grumbled, “but I don’t like it.” He knew that only a President had the stature to generate derogatory King stories without implicating the FBI as his source.
Two days later, Johnson imposed a Vietnam policy truce in the Cabinet Room. “There is not a military stalemate,” Secretary McNamara agreed from his latest inspection trip to Vietnam. General Earle Wheeler echoed the desired words—“There is no stalemate”—for the Joint Chiefs, who trimmed the pending troop request by 100,000. McNamara insisted they could make do with less, but he declared for the first time in council that the prescribed steady course would win the war. He and Wheeler thought American war reporters were “in a very bad mood,” which obscured progress, and President Johnson recessed negotiations on a note of grim consolation. He said constant reminders of ten thousand war dead since 1965 left him certain North Vietnam must feel the loss of that many in the past sixty days alone.
That night, taxi driver John Smith was reported tailgating a police cruiser in Newark, New Jersey, which would have been strange behavior even if Smith’s driver’s license had not been revoked for a series of eight minor accidents. Shortly after 9:30, taxi dispatchers relayed word that Smith was seen dragged prostrate into the Fourth District police station behind his passenger. Upward of two hundred people gathered, and several Molotov cocktails smashed against the station’s exterior wall, before a joint delegation of citizens and police commanders refuted rumors of lynching but confirmed Smith’s transfer to a hospital. When the community leaders tried to channel the hostility into a midnight march, broken store windows littered the route.
Mayor Hugh Addonizio declared early on Thursday, July 13, that the isolated trouble was over, and a front-page New York Times story—“Racial Violence Erupts in Newark”—outlined local controversies preceding the Smith incident. The mayor had just appointed a white precinct worker with a high school education to become superintendent of a school system abruptly turned 70 percent black. (Since 1960, seventy thousand white residents had left the city of 400,000.) Eighty percent of crime took place in a dilapidated ghetto where officials proposed to condemn 150 acres for a medical school. By afternoon, picketers outside City Hall were demanding housing instead, and cries of “Black Power!” scorned news that the city agreed to hire its first Negro police captain. A distant glow of store fires scattered police officers and reporters along with the crowd.
In a sitting room of the White House residence, President Johnson had summoned news photographers to display what he called “a meeting of the minds.” One by one, he polled McNamara and the Joint Chiefs about whether an unspecified number of reinforcements would meet all military requirements for Vietnam, and cameras recorded each emphatic assent. Through a night of escalating riot bulletins, Johnson agreed with New Jersey Governor Richard J. Hughes, a staunch political ally, that state forces could handle Newark without emergency federal assistance. State troopers entered the central ghetto at dawn Friday, and National Guard soldiers threw up 137 roadblocks by afternoon. Sporadic gunshots punctuated fires and generalized looting. Newark Police Commissioner Dominick Spina would testify that much of the alleged sniper fire was stray shots from police officers, troopers, and Guardsmen, whose separate radio frequencies did not allow them to communicate. A small girl lost an eye and her hearing to a bullet that penetrated her bedroom wall. When Spina ducked into the Hayes Housing Project, a resident told him teenagers on the fourth floor were dropping cherry bombs, but massive retaliation from the street killed two mothers and a grandmother on the tenth floor, where an orphaned son vacantly collected a dozen spent bullets in a coffee can. When violence subsided on Monday, Newark counted 1,200 people jailed, six hundred injured, and twenty-three dead, including two white officers and two small children. Images flashed around the world of soldiers standing over prostrate looters outside the burned shells of ghetto stores. A leading newspaper in Johannesburg archly observed that stubborn Yanks should understand at last the moral necessity of South African apartheid. “America’s obsession with integration only causes chaos, strife and destruction,” argued Die Vaderland.
Detroit police raided five “blind pigs,” or unlicensed speakeasies, toward dawn the next Sunday. Four raids netted the usual handful of inebriated gamblers, but the fifth ran into eighty-two people celebrating the safe return of two black veterans from “the ultimate riot,” as some soldiers called Vietnam duty. Scuffles, sirens, and accelerated calls for backup marked protracted efforts to haul away all the prisoners, and some 540 police officers responded by 8:30 that morning to showers of rocks and pockets of looting. U.S. Representative John Conyers appealed for calm but was hooted down and his district office ransacked. Looters beat to death a black man who tried to protect his store. A rioter ripped open his shirt before a cowed reporter and said of an ugly scar, “I got that in Germany. I was in Korea, too. I’m 42, and I can’t get a job.” Governor George Romney, flying over in a helicopter, ordered seven thousand Michigan National Guard troops into what he said looked like a bombed city. Attorney General Ramsey Clark woke President Johnson at 2:45 A.M. on Monday, July 24, with word that Romney was inquiring about federal troops. Johnson yanked Cyrus Vance from his fresh retirement into Detroit as an ad hoc emissary, and McNamara rushed two airborne brigades into Selfridge Air Force Base outside the city.
“There were dark days before,” King told a conference call of advisers that night, “but this is the darkest.” He approved Stanley Levison’s doleful statement warning that any nation failing to provide jobs ultimately cannot govern. He would remind people that a prostrate, Depression-era America had treated employment conditions no worse than those in black Newark and Detroit as a national emergency, but he knew most Americans heard him only when he dutifully denounced violent crime and supported federal intervention to restore order. By coincidence, the deadline to abort his trip to the Middle East fell just when responsibility seemed urgent at home and his nonviolent message most awkward for triumphant Israel. A visit centered in annexed Jerusalem would provoke antagonisms, King said, “and any way you say it they don’t plan to give it up.” So he canceled.
President Johnson anguished late Monday over a final decision to deploy the airborne brigades. “Well, I guess it’s just a matter of minutes before federal troops start shooting women and children,” he said morosely. Vance reported fires raging out of control, 1,200 arrests, and a disorganized, ill-trained Michigan Guard. Justice Fortas was drafting legal proclamations based on President Franklin Roosevelt’s precedent in the 1943 Detroit race riots. Some hesitation was political, as Governor Romney, a Republican presidential contender for 1968, was loath to declare the situation beyond state control. Democrats jockeyed with Republicans over shadings of blame and intrusion. When Vance urged that the Guard be federalized to gain experienced command, Johnson worried out loud that critics would say, “We cannot kill enough people in Vietnam, so we go out and shoot civilians in Detroit.” General John Throckmorton said his men would fire only upon life-threatening provocation. J. Edgar Hoover rushed into the Oval Office with ominous intelligence that Detroit was lost and Harlem would be “torn to pieces” in half an hour. The President went on national television just before midnight to explain his dispatch of troops.
Two thousand Army paratroopers proved decisive while firing a minuscule total of 205 bullets over five days. The sole military fatality died in crossfire between Michigan National Guard units at a poorly marked roadblock, as inexperienced Guard troops ignored Throckmorton’s orders to unload weapons. One unit fired several thousand rounds into a single house, then delivered three occupants to an “alley court” of police officers who tried to extract confessions that they were the riot masterminds. The result was concussion for absentee landlords trying to safeguard their property, but an immediate wire service account folded the mistake into sensational coverage: “Two National Guard tanks ripped a sniper’s haven with machine guns Wednesday night and flushed out three shaggy-haired white youths…. Detroit’s racial riot set a modern record for bloodshed.” Press reports of $500 million in property damage exaggerated by a factor of twenty, according to the subsequent national inquiry on civil disorders. “We deplore the few who rely upon words and works of terror,” President Johnson declared on Thursday, July 27, announcing the bipartisan study commission to be headed by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner. Forty-three people were killed in downtown Detroit. Groping for perspective, a shell-shocked New York Times editorial observed that the cumulative toll from Newark and Detroit fell far beneath the Pentagon’s latest casualty report in Vietnam, which was the lowest weekly total for 1967: 164 Americans killed and 1,442 wounded. Selective panic hushed savagery but magnified suspicion. John Hersey, author of Hiroshima, was asked to investigate riot mysteries for the Kerner Commission and became transfixed by the case of police officers who had rounded up ten unarmed black men and two young white prostitutes for interrogation in a motel, after which all suspects emerged beaten, unclothed, and terrified except for three found executed on the floor.
In California, Governor Reagan denounced “mad dogs against the people,” and a hundred Los Angeles police stormed the Muslim mosque again on a false tip about concealed arms. President Johnson called J. Edgar Hoover about stories that former President Eisenhower accused him of failing to see or control a “pattern of insurrection.” Hoover called Johnson with electrifying reports that Martin Luther King himself was implicated in plans to destroy the Chicago Loop. This absurd contention receded when Chicago stayed quiet, but Johnson clung to notions that his torment was plotted and artificial. “I don’t want to foreclose the conspiracy theory now,” he instructed his Cabinet.
Black power enthusiasts fed speculation with competitive rhetoric. From Bimini, Adam Clayton Powell predicted riots for thirteen new cities in “a necessary phase of the black revolution.” (He praised rioters for attacking John Conyers, who had served on the House committee that investigated him, and quipped, “No wonder he was hit by a rock.”) Rap Brown became famous between Newark and Detroit, beginning with a news squib that it might be time for “guerilla war on the honkie white man.” President Johnson called Hoover about a remark quoted from Washington’s Episcopal Church of the Incarnation—“If you give me a gun and tell me to shoot my enemy, I might shoot Lady Bird”—and Brown coined in the same pulpit speech an epigram that gripped the country as truism or demonic slander: “Violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.” Some fourteen charges of incitement had already been lodged when a manhunt located the SNCC chairman in a Virginia airport on July 26, during the Detroit riots. (Hoover’s success bulletin to the White House preserved a whisper of FBI reform: “I took occasion to have a Negro Agent participate in the arrest.”) Ex-chairman Stokely Carmichael released a statement the next day on arrival in Havana as a guest of Cuban Premier Fidel Castro: “We are preparing groups of urban guerillas for our defense in the cities.” Roy Wilkins, newly appointed to the Kerner Commission, all but shuddered on a televised news panel. King, asked if he wished to interpret for viewers Carmichael’s uncanny timing or purpose, said, “No.”
President Johnson allowed an interval of recovery before making harsh summer news on August 3. To curb inflation, and reduce a budget deficit projected to exceed $28 billion, he called for a 10 percent income tax surcharge. He also announced his decision to send another 55,000 soldiers to Vietnam, toward a new ceiling of 525,000 by mid-1968. The Pentagon request for 200,000 reinforcements remained officially secret, but a seminal New York Times story debunked the labored claim of slow victory only days later. It provoked Johnson enough to call the military press office in Saigon and denounce Communist influence behind the radioactive thesis, “Vietnam: The Signs of Stalemate.” The President demanded action to root out commanders who disclosed to reporter R. W. Apple that they expected years more combat because enemy troop strength actually had increased despite thirty months of rising carnage: an estimated 200,000 enemy dead with 12,269 Americans killed and 74,818 wounded. On Meet the Press, meanwhile, correspondents pressed King to choose whether he would seek to revive nonviolent demonstrations against Vietnam or the race riots. They said colliding passions weakened either course. “The tragedy is that we are today engaged in two wars and we are losing both,” King replied. “We are losing the war against poverty here at home. We are losing the war in Vietnam morally and politically.”
KING HAD promised to clarify a new strategic role at his annual SCLC convention. He flew to San Francisco, where he spoke privately of ambitious hopes and then addressed an association of black real estate agents on their obligation to “the least of these.” Back east the next day, he paid tribute to high-spirited radio pioneers such as Purvis Spann, the Magnificent Montague, and Georgia Wood of Philadelphia before an audience of minority disc jockeys. “No one knows the importance of ‘Taul Paul’ White in the massive nonviolent demonstrations of the youth of Birmingham in 1963,” said King, adding with levity that it was a miracle to hear “joyful rhythms” from the cocoon of his own youth flung all around the globe and now “coming back across the Atlantic with an English accent.” He praised the radio crowd for using the vitality of black music to build crossover bridges on the strength of nonviolence. “Yes, you have taken the power which Old Sam had buried deep in his soul!” King cried, soaring on hyperbole above laughter and applause. “And through amazing technology performed a cultural conquest that surpasses even Alexander the Great and the culture of classical Greece.” Yet he said they had barely begun the larger quest for freedom. He exhorted them to nourish comfort in being black—“We’re gonna start with ourselves by freeing our own psyche”—and move resolutely against the evil triumvirate of poverty, racism, and war.
From a brisk overnight trip for Meet the Press, King returned home for the opening SCLC banquet on August 14. Mayor Ivan Allen welcomed 1,400 guests to the ballroom of Atlanta’s new Hyatt Regency Hotel. Aretha Franklin performed her hit songs “Respect” and “Baby I Love You,” which shared the top of the current music charts with the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album and Scott McKenzie’s rhapsody on a flowering San Francisco youth movement. Actor Sidney Poitier described his pioneer screen roles since being stranded years ago on the “colored” side of the Atlanta bus station, and proclaimed King “a new man in an old world.” Over three more days, Benjamin Spock addressed an overflow session on peace in Vietnam, and King explained to a heritage workshop that the convention’s “Black Is Beautiful” posters signaled a drive to upgrade negative connotations buried deep in the English language.* “They even tell us that a white lie is better than a black one,” he said. Delivering the annual president’s report from his own pulpit, King recalled that when a handful of black preachers had gathered there at Ebenezer to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, just after the Montgomery bus boycott, such a glamorous banquet with three hundred white participants was scarcely conceivable. Libraries, white-collar jobs, and “the fresh air of public parks” had been off-limits to black people. Even casual association between races, when not illegal, was suffused with danger. “A decade ago, not a single Negro entered the legislative chambers of the South except as a porter or chauffeur,” he said. To confront poverty and war above the stupendous legal achievements taking hold on the civil rights front, King called for renewed dedication to nonviolence. He waxed philosophical about a narrow path between anemic love and abusive power, preaching as though to himself on the trials of ministry in public service. “What I am trying to get you to see this morning is that a man may be self-centered in his self-denial and self-righteous in his self-sacrifice,” King declared. “His generosity may feed his ego and his piety may feed his pride. So, without love, benevolence becomes egotism and martyrdom becomes spiritual pride.”
King connected these difficult ideas with inspirational oratory on freedom, but his themes lacked practical direction. Priorities scattered under the compound trauma of hardship, fatigue, riots, and foreign war. A delegate from Birmingham complained that he could not understand a word of the seminar on poverty. Former SNCC chairman John Lewis stayed up all night arguing against “the politics of alienation” with Stanley Wise and Willie Ricks, who said black militants should jettison deadweight liberals in favor of political alliances overseas. Personal disputes and alcohol plagued leaders behind the scenes. When Bayard Rustin and Kenneth Clark did not appear for their panel on the urban crisis, King filled in alone. He attacked Congress in unusually strong language for hooting down President Johnson’s modest rat-control bill that aimed to reduce the 14,000 bites reported per year, mostly of children: “The tragic truth is that Congress, more than the American people, is now running wild with racism.” Of ghetto conditions, King said it was “purposeless to tell Negroes not to be enraged when they should be,” and he sketched a plan to channel grievances into organized nonviolence. “Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force,” he asserted. Demonstrations could curtail violence “if we set to the task.”
These remarks received an unfriendly reception on front pages everywhere. “Dr. King Planning Protests to ‘Dislocate’ Large Cities,” headlined the August 16 New York Times. In “Formula for Discord,” an editorial the next day said King courted disaster “in the present overheated atmosphere.” The announcement alone had damaged his cause “whether or not Dr. King goes ahead with his perilous project,” the Times added, because it strengthened “powerful Congressional elements already convinced that the answer to urban unrest lies in repression.” Similar reactions followed, and King’s own staff confessed shock that he laid out such an undigested plan. If the goal of the Chicago movement had to be scaled back from ending slums to denting residential segregation, how could a national drive on cities lead to better results? In the wake of the SCLC convention, Stanley Levison guessed King must see opportunity in a surprisingly mild public reaction to the riots—measured by low constituent mail to Congress and a national poll showing that two-thirds of Americans still favored aggressive steps to eliminate ghettoes. Some aides thought King was laying ground to shift the venue from Northern cities back to Southern ones, or the method from protest to political action, or the issue from poverty to Vietnam. To sort through the options, King scheduled a retreat with key advisers after a Labor Day conference in Chicago.
LEVISON URGED King not to attend the National Conference for New Politics at all. Two years in the making, the event brought together nearly three thousand delegates from 372 political reform groups, but ethnic and ideological splits already paralyzed the sponsors. One board member resigned to protest the excesses of black power, and another proposed an internal truce committee to deal with “the ancient corruptions of populism”: white racism and anti-Semitism. Harvard instructor Martin Peretz, the NCNP’s principal architect, had expelled young activists from his home for singing anti-Israeli songs about the Six Day War. Peretz wanted King to develop a Vietnam peace constituency for the 1968 presidential election, but others either manipulated King to run himself or called him an Uncle Tom. “What rubs off on you,” Levison warned, “is that you are dealing with people who do not know their politics.” King said it was too late to abandon Spock and William Sloane Coffin, especially since they supported his notion of civil disobedience in distressed cities. Hoping for the best, he gave the kickoff speech on August 31.
Bongo drummers mocked his arrival outside the Chicago Coliseum with a rhythmic chant, “Kill whitey, kill whitey,” and Ralph Abernathy confided that King hesitated to speak because of threats from delegates inside. Pre-set groups heckled King from the perimeter as he presented a new line of advocacy for Vietnam peace. He argued plainly for U.S. military withdrawal, having resolved that calls for negotiations, bombing halts, and deescalation only evaded the necessary hard decisions. To make his case, King wrestled the most compelling justification for the war—democratic solidarity with anti-Communist Vietnamese. (“I do not want to be on any ‘hate Johnson’ thing,” he had insisted on a wiretapped phone line.) His restrained political stance only inflamed the confrontational moods in the Coliseum. Pickets carried banners such as “Down with Non-Violence,” and decoys distracted the crowd with shouts of “Make way for Rap Brown!” It was “awful,” King told Levision after woodenly completing the address. “The black nationalists gave me trouble. They kept interrupting me, kept yelling things at me.” A police surveillance report noted that King looked “afraid, worried and tired” as he left the Coliseum. He ducked out of Chicago early the next morning. Foreboding and clashes in the hallways made Julian Bond abandon the conference, too, even though he was its national co-chair.
Chaos reigned for the five-day conference beneath ballroom chandeliers at the Palmer House Hotel, where the Chicago housing summit had concluded the previous summer. Some three hundred black delegates withdrew to the Hyde Park Methodist Church, which they threatened to burn down until the host clergy and all white visitors departed. One speaker proposed to burn the many black churches whose pastors still refused them space. Others suggested thirteen disparate resolutions—“Condemn the imperialistic Israeli government,” and “Demand the immediate re-seating of Adam C. Powell”—that were dispatched to the Palmer House as a nonnegotiable condition for black delegates to rejoin the main conference. A tumultuous vote there to acquiesce prompted a minority lament from NCNP founder Arthur Waskow that “a thousand liberals thought they could become radicals by castrating themselves.” Next the black caucus forwarded a new ultimatum that it would stay in Hyde Park unless granted half the ballots on every formal vote—to redress the legacy of racism—and a Michigan State professor helped persuade the main body to accept the heavily weighted formula. “We are just a little tail on the end of a very powerful black panther,” he said. By then the Palmer House was a maze of caucuses and manifestos. Burly guards admitted only black delegates to Rap Brown’s rambling speech: “The only difference between Lyndon Johnson and George Wallace is that one of their wives got cancer…. We should take lessons in violence from the honkies. Lee Harvey Oswald is white. This honky who killed the eight nurses is white…. You see, it’s better to be born handicapped in America than to be born black.” In the ballroom, James Forman rammed through resolutions about Africa without bothering to call for the “nays.” When two women moved that half the delegates should be female, men drove them from the microphone with catcalls and wolf whistles. Charles Sherrod, then in his sixth year of SNCC fieldwork in Albany, Georgia, pleaded against posturing games: “I am here to remind you that there are still people in the South fighting to be free.” James Bevel, who later branded the delegates “masochistic fascists,” said he believed the angry men who promised to kill him if he opposed the anti-Israel resolution.
Of the nonsectarian press, only The New York Review of Books claimed for the NCNP deliberations a shining political discovery. “The organizers are ‘the movement,’” wrote Andrew Kopkind. Everyone else saw fiasco and folly. New Yorker correspondent Renata Adler, who had been bemused at times but captivated by the long trek from Selma to Montgomery, ridiculed the self-absorption of organizers as a fantasy detachment from the citizenry at large. “Throughout the convention,” she wrote, “delegates seemed constantly to emerge, wet-lipped and trembling, from some crowded elevator, some torrent of abuse, some marathon misrepresentation of fact, some pointless totalitarian maneuver, or some terminal sophistry, to pronounce themselves ‘radicalized.’” Most participants lapsed into delusion or searing regret. “I am afraid that many of our friends are so flipped out that they think events in Chicago were just marvelous,” Martin Peretz wrote Andrew Young. NCNP executive director William Pepper went so far as to extol the convention as “the most significant gathering of Americans since the Declaration of Independence.”
To answer a volley of protest from Jewish political leaders, and at least thirty letters from rabbis, King busily disclaimed the NCNP’s unbalanced resolution against Israel.* Diminishing press coverage relieved the larger embarrassment, as mainstream reporters rapidly lost interest in the squabbling caucuses once delegates dropped any pretext of concerted action on Vietnam or their stated agenda—especially the newsworthy goal to unite behind a presidential candidate or third party for the 1968 election. Still, the unseemly disintegration of a citizens’ mass movement was a blow for King. It raised the odds against both alternative new campaigns. It hardened prior resistance to his Riverside speech on Vietnam and his call for nonviolent protest in riot-torn cities. Far more openly than Mississippi Freedom Summer, it revealed the strain of fresh cross-cultural alliances besieged by old habits of race and war. “Coalitions are virtually impossible in this reactionary climate,” Andrew Young wrote the Singer heiress Anne Farnsworth, a large contributor to SCLC with her husband, Martin Peretz. Depression left him on the verge of giving up, Young added on September 6—“about three steps away from ‘the Hippy solution’”—but he recalled the Selma breakthrough and said maybe they could find another one.
KING’S FIRST attempt to set a course for nonviolent struggle collided with his headstrong inner circle. On Wednesday, September 12, when SCLC’s executive staff gathered at the Airlie House conference center in rural Virginia, James Bevel enjoyed a prodigal’s welcome south after two years in Chicago and the peace movement, but celebrations turned into a strategic dispute. Folksinger Joan Baez favored a coordinated offensive to resist the war in Vietnam. She outlined her own preparations for pacifist demonstrations at military posts and conscription centers, protesting the coercion of young Americans to kill and be killed. In sharp contrast, the young lawyer Marian Wright maintained a priority to uplift the invisible poor. She said that whereas the antiwar movement already had legions of recruits, national attention was turning away from people like her clients in Mississippi. She proposed to transport into Washington a representative host of faces from every region and race—men who never worked, women who could not read, children who seldom ate—for educational witness until Congress provided jobs or income. Wright modeled her notion on the Bonus Army of World War I veterans, who had occupied the capital to seek relief from the Great Depression.
Hosea Williams attacked both ideas. Civil rights had stalled over black power and urban riots beyond its Southern turf, he said, while even Willie Bolden’s mother complained that “Dr. King went too far” to question foreign policy in wartime. Williams favored training new voters from the last great success at Selma, and still resented the reduction of his own South-wide staff from 180 fieldworkers to roughly a dozen. Bevel eloquently rebutted Williams, as usual. He argued that peace must be the first priority for any vanguard, prophetic movement, because Vietnam was devouring the spirit and treasure for any other national purpose. Jesse Jackson, Bevel’s protégé, opposed either national drive before a catalyzing local success like Birmingham. For him, a move from weakness only invited humiliation. Jackson wanted first to rebuild SCLC’s movement in heartland Chicago, where he said abundant numbers could be mobilized either for peace marches or the destitute poor.
King mostly listened. Abernathy and Young occasionally made favorable comments about a poverty caravan, but they reflected King’s guarded wish rather than their own conviction. In fact, King alone had received Marian Wright’s proposal like an answered prayer. Its focus on abject poverty opened an important but neglected dimension in human rights, where there was ample space for democratizing nonviolence outside the factional glare of the peace movement. Also, having been stumped about how to dramatize poverty from remote Mississippi or Alabama, King welcomed the inspiration to bring its faces and stories into the capital instead. Wright got the gist of her idea from Robert Kennedy, who told her after the hearings in Mississippi that Congress would address such misery only if someone made it more uncomfortable not to.
Warring critiques elevated tension at Airlie House for five days. Historian Lawrence Reddick, King’s first biographer, stalked out with a prickly declaration that he would hear no more grandiose plans while SCLC remained functionally incompetent and nearly bankrupt. When King tried a musical metaphor, imagining poverty harmonized in diverse strains from black and native Indian to Appalachian white, Joan Baez tartly questioned all that effort tuning an orchestra for slaughter in Vietnam. When Wall Street lawyer Harry Wachtel asked whether Operation Breadbasket really hoped for more than token jobs and corporate write-offs, Jesse Jackson bristled against doubt from “a slavemaster.” King rebuked Jackson, then invited him to preach reconciling devotionals, and Jackson dazzled his detractors with eloquence on Ezekiel’s vision of new life from dry bones. To counter King’s worry about surging hostilities that fragmented and discredited the Vietnam protest, Bevel belittled the poverty campaign as bus fare next to the crisis of a misguided war. He said the first duty of nonviolence was to resist organized brutality. If Washington and Jefferson risked “crucifixion” by kings to establish democracy, he preached, the lowliest American should do no less to refine the spirit and practice of equal citizenship. Late one night, King literally howled against the paralyzed debate. “I don’t want to do this any more!” he shouted alone. “I want to go back to my little church!” He banged around and yelled, which summoned anxious friends outside his room until Young and Abernathy gently removed his whiskey and talked him to bed.
King greeted colleagues sheepishly the next day. “Well, now it’s established that I ain’t a saint,” he told newcomers before the retreat ended on Sunday, September 17.
Back on the road, King renewed a determined search for executive staff to help resolve the strategic impasse. In Cleveland and San Francisco, pressed for comment about the interracial marriage of Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s daughter, he called the ceremony at Stanford “a mighty fine thing.” The cover story of Time magazine recorded President Johnson’s emphatic assurance that the Secretary of State need not resign, and emerging private details included the formal stipulation by Rusk of disregard for a deeded covenant still prohibiting the resale of his Washington home to any descendant of Africa, Asia, or “a denizen of the Ottoman Empire.” The New York Times described several pioneer weddings made possible by the Supreme Court’s Loving decision—“Negro and White Wed in Nashville”—and other scattered events marked lighter anxiety after the grim summer of riots and war. FBI agents in the Grand Bahamas tracked a ring of pranksters who skillfully covered George Washington’s portrait on dollar bills with an image of King. Republican U.S. Representative George Bush pronounced himself satisfied that seven new microscopes in his Houston district were academic and benign, not rifle scopes secretly retooled for insurrection as he had suggested in a speech about miscellaneous purchases under the federal anti-poverty program. Governor Lurleen Wallace, though gravely ill, pushed through an amended resolution for the song “Dixie” and a presentation of Confederate colors to precede every football game at a public school or site in Alabama—not just the homecoming game, as legislators had proposed.
King worked to convince the mild-mannered Bernard Lafayette, who had shifted from SNCC to Quaker-sponsored slum projects in Chicago, that he was fierce enough in nonviolence to supervise the combative energies of Bevel, Jesse Jackson, and Hosea Williams. In public, meanwhile, King and Harry Belafonte launched an eight-city fund-raising tour that sorely disappointed their hopes to replenish the SCLC treasury. Audiences fell short, and performers even quarreled on stage. At the Oakland Coliseum, singer Sammy Davis warned a meager first-night crowd not to stray from traditional civil rights issues, and promoted his goodwill trip to entertain U.S. troops in Vietnam. Joan Baez promptly challenged Davis to beckon the soldiers home instead, winning mixed applause for her resolve to blockade the Army induction center nonviolently at dawn. As Baez stayed behind to serve ten days in jail with 123 fellow resisters, a bomb-threat evacuation delayed another small concert the next evening in Los Angeles.
AUDIENCE APPEAL for King dipped into a kind of public relations trough, obscured between dramatic youth clashes over Vietnam and nostalgia for simpler racial heroes and villains. Early in October, a showcase federal trial finally commenced in the lynch-murder of three civil rights workers more than three years earlier on the first night of Mississippi Freedom Summer. With an all-white jury impaneled, a jovial mood prevailed when one of the first prosecution witnesses was asked if the murder victims really had recruited “young male Negroes to sign a pledge to rape a white woman once a week during the hot summer of 1964.” On objection, asked to supply legal ground for the lewd inquiry, the defense lawyer disclosed that the handwritten speculation had just been passed to him from defendant Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen. U.S. District Judge Harold Cox banged his gavel to silence laughter in the Meridian courtroom. “I’m not going to allow a farce to be made of this trial,” he declared. Cox, though himself an ardent segregationist, fixed a tone of decorum for proceedings marked by jolting surprise. FBI Inspector Joseph Sullivan delivered witnesses who elicited gasps by revealing that they had worked for the FBI from inside the local White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. A local police officer identified prominent fellow Klansmen, including several mortified defense lawyers. Rev. Delmar Dennis said he had turned against the White Knights because of sickening violence and the chronic refusal of rowdies to pay fines levied by the Klan chaplain for vulgar language. He described firsthand an elaborate plot consummated with orders for Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price to hold the civil rights workers in jail while a lynch party was assembled, quoting boastful but inaccurate congratulations from White Knights founder Sam Bowers: “It was the first time that Christians planned and carried out the execution of a Jew.” After the trial, Dennis would remain besieged under threat, abandoned by his family and ambushed more than once as a turncoat to the Klan. Almost daily, the trial revealed bombshell witnesses who had confessed their part in the systematic murder of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. James Jordan, pale with heart trouble and remorse, petrified of Klan retribution, recounted details of the night’s frantic coordination to bury the three bodies fifteen feet deep in a fresh earthen dam.
Courtroom drama from Mississippi shared headlines with National Draft Resistance Week. On Monday, October 16, hours after the Joan Baez group was arrested in California, one hundred clergy led four thousand people from the Boston Common to historic Arlington Street Unitarian, which rested on 999 pilings sunk in Old Back Bay. Bells tolled “We Shall Overcome” while police lines restrained crowds of hecklers, and nearly three hundred prescreened volunteers filed solemnly into the last home church of the Selma martyr James Reeb. Sixty-seven of them burned their draft cards with a church candle in front of whirring cameras from the television networks. Another 214 surrendered cards to Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, who announced that senior counselors would share the risk of punishment by presenting the cards to Washington authorities on Friday in ritual defiance of conscription laws. “Are we to raise conscientious men,” Coffin cried from the pulpit, “and then not stand by them in their hour of conscience?”
Across the country in Oakland, a coalition of militant student groups took their turn trying to shut down the Army induction center by more aggressive tactics than the previous day’s pacifists, whom they derided as “jailbirds.” A series of blockades, feints, and rolling jeers led to a police countercharge that cleared entrances quickly at the cost of some fifty arrested or wounded students. The incident, dubbed “Bloody Tuesday,” attracted thousands from Berkeley and San Francisco, some with makeshift helmets and shields behind street barricades, to harass the induction center in “urban guerrilla” fights modeled on the 1871 Paris Commune.
On Wednesday, a demonstration in Wisconsin telescoped protest moods from the entire decade. University students jammed Commerce Hall to block job interviews on the Madison campus with representatives of Dow Chemical Company, which manufactured napalm. Nearly all were inexperienced and curious, with vague anticipations of a sit-in, while a few activists circulated leaflets calling for decisive physical resistance. When police officers pushed through to clear access to the interview room, students prevented removal of those arrested by locking arms around their ankles. When the police chief sought a path in close quarters to retreat back outside, students suggested he jump out the window. Claustrophobia bred skittering fear. Trapped females heard ominous advice to remove earrings, and police reinforcements covered badges before they barged inside after their comrades. Some officers were struck with their own nightsticks, but most clubbed through flailing arms and flying objects. Forty-seven students and nineteen officers left by ambulance, many bleeding profusely from head wounds, in mayhem that stunned the several thousand bystanders. Clumps of enraged students shouted “Sieg heil!” at officials and called uniformed officers “pigs,” adopting hostile slang from the black power rebellion. It took the first tear gas ever fired in the academic enclave to disperse them, and author David Maraniss, who later reconstructed the clash from all sides, traced a sharp transformation in most participants. Casual protest vanished quickly, along with any hopes to emulate the nonviolent discipline of the civil rights era, and a typical student proposed drastic measures to the first strategy meeting in the aftermath. “I’m a radical!” she declared. “I don’t know what it means, but will someone please explain it to me? I’ve just become a radical.”
FBI wiretappers overheard Stanley Levison relay assurance that his son Andrew, a freshman at Wisconsin, was not beaten or arrested—“only gassed”—during Wednesday’s upheaval. “It was a brutal business,” said Levison. The younger Levison wanted to “stand up” by renouncing a draft card before he was old enough to have one, but his father advised against rashly forfeiting his freedom. Levison also tried to steady King, who called from Houston in acute distress about a third failure on the Belafonte tour. When King complained of a “vicious” editorial, which urged Negroes to boycott the local concert because his Vietnam stance “borders on treason,” his intercepted words rocketed to FBI headquarters with a proposal to distribute the editorial clandestinely among “friendly news media sources,” especially in the last five cities on the concert schedule. Hoover secretly approved the dual scheme to suppress SCLC’s revenue with attack material shown to be “extremely irritating” for King.
That same Wednesday, Inspector Sullivan embodied the FBI’s public mission during summations in the Mississippi Klan case. John Doar confessed to the Meridian jury that this was only the second trial he ever handled personally. Representing the United States, he acknowledged in open court the gaps and limits of the extraordinary investigation. “Midnight murder in the rural area of Neshoba County provides few witnesses,” he explained. His spare, motionless oration broke only with a raised finger at Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price to illustrate broad stains from the crime. “Price used the machinery of law—his office, his power, his authority, his badge, his uniform, his jail, his police car, his police gun,” Doar said slowly. “He used them all to take, to hold, to capture and kill.” The assistant attorney general from small-town Wisconsin stressed that judgment rested entirely with citizens of Mississippi, and he could devise no better conclusion than a paraphrase of Lincoln at Gettysburg. “What I say, what the other lawyers say here today…will soon be forgotten,” Doar told the jury, “but what you twelve people do here today will long be remembered.”
In Washington, government officials braced for the weekend National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. To discourage attendance, they publicized fear of Communist saboteurs and refused to supply portable toilets or water fountains. To reinforce two thousand police, they nationalized 1,800 National Guard troops, imported four battalions of military police plus units of the 82nd Airborne, and concealed reserves in the basement of the Commerce Department. McNamara warned President Johnson that the jails available would not hold mass arrests that could stretch into thousands. Johnson discarded advice to be elsewhere, vowing that demonstrators “are not going to run me out of town,” but then flummoxed his national security advisers by asking what would happen if he refused to seek reelection in 1968. (“You must not go down,” pleaded Rusk.) In a pensive interview on Thursday, October 19, the President brazenly denied that he ever questioned or regretted the basic decisions to intervene and bomb in Vietnam. More candidly, he complained of sour results from his decision to present the war as a measured cause rather than a crusade against demons. “If history indicts us for Vietnam,” Johnson predicted with a sigh, “it will be for fighting a war without trying to stir up patriotism.”
On Friday, a day ahead of the Mobilization protests, William Sloane Coffin joined Dr. Spock and nine anxious peace counselors at the Justice Department. They presented statements of their complicity in breaches of the Selective Service Act, along with a briefcase containing 994 draft cards surrendered in ceremonies nationwide—all those from Boston plus 298 from California Resistance, forty-five from Chicago Resistance, and so on. “Dr. Coffin, am I being tendered something?” John McDonough asked blankly. The assistant deputy attorney general recoiled each time the Yale chaplain handed him the briefcase. Coffin tried to make light of the macabre standoff in their attempted surrender for multiple felonies, but Arthur Waskow, who had prepared himself for a life-changing arrest, exclaimed archly that McDonough was abusing his childhood respect for the law. “And you, sir, refuse the evidence?” he cried. “Where, man, is your oath of office?” The counselors left the briefcase untouched.
While demonstrators poured into Washington, the Meridian Star perceived a new curse attached to “the Friday after Friday the 13th.” In the first civil rights convictions ever rendered by and against white Mississippians, jurors that morning reached guilty verdicts on seven of eighteen Klansmen, including Deputy Price and Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers. John Doar gave thanks and soon retired from eight arduous years in the Justice Department. King, heading for a Chicago concert with Belafonte, was “pleasantly surprised” by what he called “a first step in a thousand-mile journey.”
Defiantly, the White Knights had intensified terror attacks in the face of the criminal charges. Just before the trial, they destroyed Temple Beth Israel in Jackson and the home of a Tougaloo College dean; afterward, they bombed the homes of a black minister, a rabbi, and a Polish family mistakenly believed to be Jewish. While free pending sentence, Bowers himself turned up once in action when a traffic constable stumbled on him with a .45-caliber submachine gun and a young passenger who later confessed a dozen Klan bombings. Bowers served six years under the weak federal statute that protected the exercise of civil rights, then resumed on parole in 1976 a professed calling as “preacher of Jesus the Galilean.” (His Christian Identity sect held that Jesus was not a Jew but the incarnation of “lost” Aryan tribes.) It would be another twenty-two years before local officials tried and convicted him under state law for ordering the 1966 firebomb murder of Vernon Dahmer. And not until 2005 would the climate and conscience of Mississippi produce the first landmark of local jurisprudence in Neshoba County, with a jury verdict against seventy-nine-year-old Edgar Ray Killen for the three murders more than four decades earlier.
In Washington, during Saturday’s speeches at the Lincoln Memorial, reporters observed a “sprinkling of Negroes” reach informal consensus not to join the ensuing confrontation. “We don’t want to play Indian outside the white man’s fort,” John Lewis informed Mobilization leader David Dellinger, who led nearly fifty thousand remaining marchers across the Potomac to besiege the Pentagon with vigils, skirmishes, and bonfires for thirty-three hours. Demonstrators dropped flowers into the gun barrels of blockading soldiers, and fierce or stealthy forays sometimes breached one of the Pentagon entrances. Abbie Hoffman’s hippie troupe failed to “exorcise” the gargantuan building by levitation, as merrily advertised, but they did urinate along its outer walls. Protest factions, though suffering volleys of tear gas and countercharges by club-wielding U.S. marshals, drew attention to themselves rather than government policy in Vietnam. Norman Mailer declared a new literary species for his quick book about the spirited joust, subtitled “History As a Novel, the Novel as History.” Mailer was one of nearly seven hundred arrested, but none of the two hundred Wisconsin students was among them. Freshly traumatized by the bloody shock on their campus, many scorned the constraining faith of “liberals” that they could and should stop the war without violent systemic change, yet could not quite attack “enemy” soldiers so close across the lines. Some shared a premonition with Times columnist James Reston that obscene chants and banners vilifying President Johnson—“LBJ the Butcher”—would backfire “almost enough to retrieve his declining fortunes at the polls.” At home in Madison, opposing students flocked to job interviews with Dow Chemical.
ALMOST UNNOTICED, King slipped into the aftershock of the Pentagon siege on Monday, October 23. His testimony before the Kerner Commission remained confidential, but it groped for anti-poverty tactics of “escalating nonviolence” somewhere between timid supplication and destructive riots. “Well,” he told reporters outside, “I think that the time has come, if we can’t get anything done otherwise, to camp right here in Washington just as they did with the Bonus March—just camp here and stay here by the thousands and thousands.” These remarks, which the Washington Post called an “appeal to anarchy,” earned no better public reception than his Washington concert with Belafonte and Aretha Franklin. During final stops that week in Philadelphia and Boston, secretary Dora McDonald asked Levison to console King through a worrisome despondence over the paltry crowds, and lawyer Chauncey Eskridge warned that the entire series “will be lucky to break even.” In Boston, King discovered Bernard Lafayette in the process of taking another job because of SCLC’s paperwork delays. “I thought you were coming to Atlanta,” he pleaded, pausing to repair one of several logistical tangles. Helpers feverishly solicited a donated private plane to meet King in rural Iowa so he could honor a promise to address Sunday’s fall convocation at tiny Grinnell College, where his mentor Benjamin Mays received an honorary degree, without flouting, hedging, or seeking even routine delay of the final court orders to surrender for jail on Monday.
He rushed home long enough to change into dungarees and return with three fellow defendants for an airport ceremony, on legal advice that they would become muted prisoners the moment they landed on Alabama soil. King told Atlanta reporters the sentence was “a small price to pay for the historic achievement” initiated in 1963 when “thousands of Negro citizens, facing dogs, fire hoses, mass arrests, and other outrages against human dignity, bore dramatic witness to the evils which pervaded in the most segregated city in our nation.” At the same time, he cited the four dissenting Supreme Court Justices to excoriate the majority decision as churlish, vindictive, and dangerous. It was worse than jailing Boston patriots retroactively for dumping tea from Britain, because no theft or vandalism was at issue from the freedom marches. “As we leave for a Birmingham jail today,” said King, “we call out to America: ‘Take heed. Do not allow the Bill of Rights to become a prisoner of war.’” Armed Alabama deputies, who boarded the departing flight with King’s party, asserted control on arrival to wave wide-eyed regular passengers out of the airplane through a double line of officers forming in the rain. A hundred movement supporters waited in the Birmingham terminal to greet the four prisoners, only to watch them hauled off by police cars that darted onto the runway. Photographers captured King carrying three books to jail under his arm: the Bible, an economics text, and The Confessions of Nat Turner. A rare, two-part review in the New York Times had just praised William Styron’s historical novel for bringing “coherent voice to a catastrophe we hardly knew had happened,” but black critics faulted the author for projecting too glibly a writer’s hold on inner thoughts from the bloody 1831 slave rebellion. “I absorbed by osmosis,” Styron maintained, “a knowledge of what it is to be a Negro.”
Alarm radiated from an empty Birmingham jail Monday night, attracting an agitated crowd of five hundred until Sheriff Melvin Bailey acknowledged that he had diverted King to a facility eighteen miles away. No visitors were permitted there, but Tuesday’s vigil outside a county jail in Bessemer featured a man praying as if possessed through a downpour, and by Wednesday the four prisoners were transferred secretly back downtown. With a smuggled camera, cellmate Wyatt Walker took a photograph of King staring through the bars. King complained of flu, and did not fulfill a notion to write a sequel for his Letter from Birmingham Jail. He made only tactical notes—including one for Harry Wachtel to reconvene at Union Seminary the fractious talks comparing Vietnam with the Six Day War in the Middle East—and he sketched a proposed “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged.” His model was the 1944 GI Bill of Rights, and to a lesser degree the Bonus Act of 1936. The latter had passed over President Franklin Roosevelt’s veto, reversing more than three years of sporadic government action to rout impoverished World War I veterans encamped in Washington. The GI Bill, which FDR passively and unhappily approved, helped transform the American economy with the offer of college tuition grants for 11 million World War II veterans. In jail, King began an opinion piece for the New York Times, arguing by analogy that the nation must take another leap of faith toward redress and opportunity.
Otherwise he sifted prison gossip about Birmingham authorities who, while interpreting the Supreme Court victory to mean that Negroes themselves were to blame for the lingering stigma of dogs and fire hoses, suffered with protesters actually in custody again. Deputies fretted over a prediction by one fortune-teller that buildings would be leveled after King’s assassination on their watch. When a local judge obligingly cut short the sentence, a spontaneous Friday night mass meeting celebrated the freed prisoners at Tabernacle Baptist. “This looks like ’63!” Rev. Ed Gardner shouted above the music. King’s brother A.D. told cellblock stories. Abernathy roasted his lawyers for letting preachers go to jail, joking that he was “off the hook” on a reciprocal pledge to keep the lawyers out of hell. He claimed prison converts for the movement and regaled the crowd with his hardship pitch to white jailers: “Think what we live on—white potatoes, neck bones, pig feet, and hog snoots!” Abernathy’s yarns coaxed mirth from King, who covered his mouth behind the pulpit and agreed to speak briefly despite the flu. “Our movement isn’t over,” he said. “Some of us are going to have to pack our little [jail] bags and make our way to Washington.”
King returned to Cleveland for the off-year elections. A dozen SCLC staff members had been deployed there since the summer, when King himself averaged roughly two days per week dashing through registration rallies. On election night, November 7, candidate Carl Stokes left King and Abernathy in a hotel suite with a promise to summon them downstairs if he should become the first black mayor of a major city, the nation’s seventh largest. They watched late returns gain what reporters called a narrow wonder—“Stokes, the great-grandson of a slave, defeated Seth Taft, the grandson of the 27th President of the United States”—but King slowly deflated when no signal came for him to join the televised victory statements. Andrew Young interpreted the rebuff as cold politics. Having imported allies to turn out an astonishing 75 percent of the isolated black wards, Stokes avoided association with controversial figures who might offend broader support. Stung, King asked Levison to meet him for consultation in Chicago, where he spoke over Veterans Day weekend. Levison had welcomed prior success in the Cleveland primary as a boost for King’s public standing, saying progress there might answer critics who “tried to pronounce you dead in Chicago,” just as Birmingham once rebutted claims that segregation had crushed him in Albany. Now Levison was obliged to shore up King’s commitment to the role of prophet above politician.
In colonial Williamsburg, ending a 5,100-mile speaking tour on Vietnam, President Johnson was shown on November 12 to George Washington’s front pew at the historic Bruton Parish Episcopal Church—organized 1633, completed 1715 in cruciform brick. Rev. Cotesworth Pinckney Lewis, descended from two signers of the Constitution, interrupted an orthodox sermon to address Johnson directly. “I feel presumptuous even in asking questions,” he said. “But since there is a rather general consensus that something is wrong in Vietnam…we wonder if some logical, straightforward explanation might be given without endangering whatever military or political advantages we now enjoy.” Lady Bird Johnson “turned to stone on the outside and boiled on the inside,” she recalled, as Lewis expressed his plainspoken bafflement. He said most of the world considered the American role in distant Vietnam a neocolonial blunder of “appalling” civilian casualties, triple the military toll, while brave commanders felt “inhibited” by constraints they thought prolonged the conflict. “While pledging our loyalty,” Lewis concluded, “we ask respectfully, why?” The Johnsons managed smiles as they shook hands from the postlude into a tempest. Virginia’s governor called the sermon an unpardonable lapse of courtesy. Bruton’s vestry rebuked its rector, who refused further comment, and members of Congress roundly denounced him for effrontery. Beneath command levels, an avalanche of citizen mail thanked Lewis for his candor, and almost 90 percent of Virginia correspondents scolded their governor for putting social deference above the stakes of war.
King departed for northern England to accept an honorary degree from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, known for Roman antiquities at the far outpost of Emperor Hadrian’s stone border. He left his country stirred senseless by upheavals from silly to profound. The New York State Journal of Medicine released a scientific study of young people who smoked dried banana peels, finding their craze entirely a “psychologic elaboration” because the chemicals were inert. The editors of Newsweek, openly proclaiming an advocacy stance for the first time, published a special issue on the crisis of race—“What Must Be Done”—with stories dissecting massive barriers to keep black people poor and invisible: “The Cold Fact Is That the Negro in America Is Not Really in America.” Newsweek’s task force recognized that the most immediate obstacle to its uphill agenda “is obviously Vietnam,” but nothing made the war an exclusive or supreme priority. Indeed, for King, the cognitive force of Newsweek solidified two reasons behind his instinctive preference for a poor people’s campaign. Whereas Vietnam protest strongly implied a negative or limited purpose to desist from war, the poverty crusade sought constructive change grounded in civil rights exhortations for America to “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” Tactically, antiwar protests already teemed with chaotic energy, including groups intoxicated by violence themselves, but the anti-poverty field remained fallow and fertile for movement discipline. King let Stanley Levison draft arguments why black people remained the vanguard of nonviolence, and dropped any pretense of neutrality about his next passion.
HE VOWED to lead a “camp-in” of poor people to Washington. “I’m on fire about the thing,” King told seventy SCLC staff members at the Penn Conference Center in Frogmore, South Carolina. He said reflection and prayer made him wish they had extended their 1966 anti-slum campaign into Cicero, so that, by enduring the brutality that loomed there, they could have raised a hopeful standard of urban witness before the riots of 1967. King said they must rise above violent symptoms spreading from foreign war and domestic despair. At the week-long retreat, beginning on November 26, he warned that only hysteria looked for rage to sustain idealism. “Violence has been the inseparable twin of materialism, the hallmark of its grandeur,” he said. “This is the one thing about modern civilization that I do not want to imitate.” He confided that he had just met with Olympic athletes trying to craft a protest of racism for the Mexico City Summer Games, only to find them disillusioned and abused by a black power conference at which delegates threatened to beat each other. Their ordeal underscored a lesson for King that “hate has no limits.” He said, “I refuse to hate. Many of our inner conflicts are rooted in hate.” King declared a moral imperative to dispel national hostility now clouding miracles from the civil rights movement. If resistance in Washington exceeded the travail of Birmingham or Selma, he pledged to intensify sacrifice accordingly. “So I say to you tonight that I have taken a vow,” he announced at the retreat. “I, Martin Luther King, take thee, nonviolence, to be my wedded wife.”
Bevel objected that no dramatic plunge could rescue a misguided strategy. Predicting that Americans would ignore the “camp-in,” he argued that Vietnam rightly demanded the focused energy of a movement devoted to democratic values. Bevel disputed King’s constitutional basis for a campaign to raise the standard of living, and preached so vigorously that FBI intelligence reports of leadership friction reached President Johnson within days: “[Bevel] addressed the retreat at great length opposing King’s plans…. King was visibly angry at Bevel for opposing him in this regard.” Jesse Jackson criticized King more subtly. He said the plan rested too narrowly on demonstrations and support from the poor, then broke away to meet top investment bankers in New York. An Episcopal bishop had interceded by telephone and letter for King to excuse Jackson from South Carolina in light of his precocious skill with important donors—“his ability to confront without repelling.” Hosea Williams, meanwhile, opened a third line of attack. While reserving judgment on the Washington campaign itself, he alone rebelled when King went around the room for endorsement of the new SCLC executive director, William Rutherford, lately of Zurich, Switzerland. “I can’t support you,” said Williams. He exploded against every credential King cited for Rutherford as the proven administrator SCLC grievously had lacked—his management companies, his roots in Southside Chicago, his doctorate from the Sorbonne. Williams bridled against supervision by a big shot virtual foreigner without a day’s experience in civil rights. Privately, he answered King’s wounded appeals with a raw howl against Rutherford: “That nigger don’t know nothin’ about niggers!”
Andrew Young settled the retreat with an analysis of civil disobedience that might arise in Washington. More than Birmingham’s blatant color line, or Selma’s biased voting standards, Young said the staff should prepare for actions to explain and carry out “noncooperation” with otherwise just laws—targeted demonstrations to dramatize smothered rights and misplaced priorities, general ones to impede normal life in the capital. When staff members examined Young about philosophical distinctions, or questioned the value of blocking access to the Agriculture Department, King urged them to work through their misgivings. “The great burden of this will be on you,” he said. “I can’t do it by myself. Andy can’t do it by himself.” He said he would try to neutralize rivals and doubters in advance by letting them “curse me out about the ineffectiveness of this.” No one yet could show that nonviolence was unsuited to intractable economic issues, he argued, any more than a single bucket on a burning house proved water could not quench fire. King pictured starting with one delegation of unemployed people to present demands for jobs or income at the Labor Department, then spread out to lobby Congress while other poor groups made their way to Washington from ghettoes and Indian reservations and white Appalachia and rural plantations, some walking or riding mules “through the tough areas, that’s drama right there.” They could invite allies to join nonviolent witness in the capital—clergy, college students, President Johnson’s poverty experts, Newsweek readers, the peace movement. “Now they may not respond,” said King. “I can’t promise that, but I do think we’ve got to go for broke this time.” The alternative was surrender or riots. “I figure our riots last about four days,” he said forlornly, “and then you see these helpless mothers standing in line trying to get some milk for their children.”
King and Young stepped aside beneath the Penn Center pine trees to check for culture shock in Rutherford, who had expatriated to Europe in 1949 with a steamer trunk and a one-way boat ticket, pulled apart by race. (His sister worked as a maid; his parents rebuffed white friends he brought home as one of only seven black students at the University of Chicago.) Eighteen years later in Geneva, when Rutherford translated spontaneously for French and German reporters who surrounded King at the Pacem in Terris convention, the chance introduction turned into a swift agreement for him to sell or license his businesses, resign the publicity chairmanship of the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce, and leap home into the revolution he had missed. The new partners exchanged confidences. King brushed aside Rutherford’s cautionary disclosure of car theft buried in his childhood past as a Chicago gang apprentice called “Wild Bill.” When Rutherford confessed discomfort to see his revered chief executive sit through blistering criticism from subordinates, King replied that movements ran on tempered lunacy, which demanded respect for anyone who inspired others to risk nonviolence. Bevel should be accepted as a free spirit, King advised, but he greeted Rutherford with two secret assignments steeped in suspicion. First, he asked how Hosea Williams and SCLC comptroller James Harrison managed to keep an extra apartment on their meager salaries, and whether Williams was involved in any embezzlement to pay the rent. “I want you to find out,” King said. Second, he charged Rutherford to determine whether Jesse Jackson’s vexing independence sprang from breakaway ambition. “I either want him in SCLC or out,” he ordered bluntly. “You go whichever way you want.” Rutherford promised to hone SCLC for King’s purpose so long as he kept the one chisel he had demanded: the unfettered authority to fire staff. “Even Lillian?” asked King, of the indispensable office manager Lillian Hunter, then numbly confirmed his assent.
The poverty campaign stagnated all week in the Frogmore workshops. Only Bernard Lafayette, SCLC’s new program director, pitched himself into the operational plans for his mandate, and Rutherford, the enthusiastic technician, found the mood of his native country distinctly unfavorable. (“Public preoccupation with Vietnam is stunning,” he told Young.) King worked from a blackboard, batting down objections. “The day of the demonstration isn’t over,” he said. “And I say to you that many of our confusions are dissolved—they are distilled in demonstrations.” He denied that the campaign slogan, “Jobs or Income,” was indecisive or inadequate. Their public goals had been simple in Birmingham and Selma, King insisted, and the program of Jesus himself boiled down to the word repent. “You see, I don’t care if we don’t name the demand,” King declared. “Just go to Washington!” He said more than once that this might be the last campaign, because poverty was bigger than race. One of King’s remarks—“the victory we seek, we’ll never win”—provoked an eruption from Hosea Williams that it was wrong to stir up vulnerable people for a losing battle. (“I got really upset,” Williams recalled. “I just get cooking.”) King pleaded with the staff not to shrink from lost causes or association with outcasts—“I would hope that we in SCLC are the custodians of hope”—in exhortations that rambled at times into distracted theology. “I’m not talking about some kind of superficial optimism which is little more than magic,” said King. “I’m talking about that kind of hope that has an ‘in spite of’ quality.” A distinctive rendition of one Bible verse bubbled up: “There is something in the book of Revelation which says, ‘Make an end on what you have left, even if it’s near nothing.’”
King overrode doubt and dissent. He went straight home to a press conference on Monday, December 4—exactly eight months since taking on the furors of Vietnam at Riverside Church, one day before the twelfth anniversary of his debut speech for the bus boycott. Unlike the reluctant spokesman whose thunderclap oratory first caught up with Montgomery’s local protest, now he conjured up a resurgence by sheer force of will. “The Southern Christian Leadership Conference will lead waves of the nation’s poor and disinherited to Washington, DC next spring,” King announced. The campaign would begin with three thousand pilgrims “trained in the discipline of nonviolence,” and last until the country responded. “We don’t know what will happen,” he declared. “They may try to run us out. They did it with the Bonus Marches years ago, you remember.” Fielding questions about potential clashes, he vowed to desist only if the protesters themselves indulged in violence. “The Negro leader’s mood seemed deeply pessimistic,” reported the New York Times, and the front page heralded trouble: “Dr. King Planning to Disrupt Capital in Drive for Jobs.”