New York
April 4, 1967
Christian churches were shaped like crosses to symbolize the church as the body of Christ. Their steeples scraped the sky to connect earth with heaven. The tallest point on Manhattan Island, high over the Hudson River, was Morningside Heights, home of Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary. Upon this promontory the Rockefeller family, staunch Southern Baptists, built nondenominational Riverside Church in the depth of the Great Depression. Its twin steeples soared higher than those of the twelfth-century French cathedral at Chartres, its model.
Like a medieval castle towering over a valley of serfs, the Rockefellers’ grand cathedral stood heavenly guard over the valley of Harlem down below. Once the crown jewel of African-American cultural revival and economic hope, this black community that had been the promised land for many southern immigrants had sunk since the Depression into an impoverished ghetto. Like poor blacks in other cities, thousands of its citizens rose up in revolt during a hot summer the year before Watts.
“I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight,” Martin Luther King Jr. declared to the audience overflowing the long nave, “because my conscience leaves me no other choice.” He affirmed the sponsoring group, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, and its statement that “a time comes when silence is betrayal, and that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.”
He had preached at Riverside Church before; this would be his last time there. He was on familiar intellectual ground. Riverside’s ministers, founder Harry Emerson Fosdick and successor Robert McCracken, had influenced his preaching. The luminaries of Union Seminary next door, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, had shaped his thinking, especially about justice and love. Although he supported the war, Niebuhr bore witness in the audience that night.
“Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night,” King continued, “have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony. But we must speak.” He spoke not only to break the betrayal of his own silence, but to break the ghastly silence of the war’s victims. In a larger sense he sought to give voice to voiceless humanity, forever the prophet’s duty.
He felt compelled to condemn the war for multiple reasons that bled into each other. First was the war’s destruction of the war on poverty at home that had appeared as a beacon of hope for America’s poor. “I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor, so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube, so I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor.”
Grievously, this demonic suction tube was ripping poor youth from their families to “fight and die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. We have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. We watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”
How could he ask the angry and desperate young men of the inner cities to trade their Molotov cocktails for picket signs when they would ask him: What about Vietnam? “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.”
Giving voice to the muted murmurs of the world’s faiths that all people were One, he imagined how the war, and the American government, were experienced by Vietnamese peasants and the “enemy,” not easily distinguished from the peasant sea. He encapsulated the history that few Americans knew: how the United States had refused to back Vietnamese independence after World War II, had paid for the French war to reconquer its former colony, had tricked Vietnamese nationalists in 1954 to accept temporary partition, had supported the corrupt Saigon regime in defying mandated elections to reunify the country, and had protected the regime with military advisers, covert action, air power, and finally ground troops, when repression, especially against Buddhists, provoked indigenous revolt led by communists.
“Surely we must understand their feelings,” King spoke of South Vietnam’s National Liberation Front (NLF), “even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves.” Americans must have the wisdom to learn from the adversary’s story. Only then could a middle way of truth be found.
After calling for cessation of bombing and a cease-fire, he urged Americans to protest. He encouraged draft-age men to apply for conscientious objector status. He told his audience that they must understand the war as “but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people,” the triple evils of racism, materialism, and militarism “are incapable of being conquered.” He warned of future Vietnams in other Third World countries where U.S. foreign policy served the needs of corporate investment, rather than support the striving of the world’s poor for freedom from economic bondage.
“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing oriented society to a person oriented society. A nation that continues year after year to spend more on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
“These are revolutionary times. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.”
He did not stop there. “Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for mankind. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life.”1
In his softly incendiary address, he gave air to “the burnings of my own heart.” He not only put forth, in the most public way, in the world’s media capital, a wrenching critique of U.S. policy in Vietnam; not only called for the obligation of protest and refusing to fight the war; not only condemned what leftists called imperialism. Sounding for all their differences like Malcolm X in his climactic year, he urged Americans to stop resisting the revolutionary tide in the world, rather to lead a world revolution against poverty, injustice, and exploitation. At the moment when “revolution” was starting to be fashionable, even faddish, among young radicals and the media, he exhorted Americans to make a true revolution driven by the power of love. He faced an uphill battle to make revolution, once again, a patriotic call, resonating with the American creed.
Unlike many Americans who came to oppose the war by 1967 or 1968, King never had any illusions about its moral soundness, never doubted whether it was right or wrong. Other influential Americans had been held back by ignorance, denial, partisanship, or uncertainty. What held King back from condemning the war unequivocally was a mix of fear, exhaustion, and concern about his effectiveness. He dreaded an ugly, all-out battle with the president who had done more for African Americans and civil rights than any president except Lincoln, more for poor people than any except FDR. King admired Johnson for his domestic reform (despite its shortcomings) as much as he loathed his bellicosity overseas. They had had an amicable personal relationship that it was important to King to preserve.
His own moral cowardice and hypocrisy had anguished him for two long years. To be sure, he had spoken out against the war from time to time, especially during the first six months of major escalation. But he had pulled his punches and spoken where he thought the media would not pay much attention. He was taken aback when his criticisms at a July 1965 civil rights rally in rural Virginia made news and upset President Johnson. King verged on apologetic in a phone conversation with him a few days later. He realized that he could not attack the war without directly attacking his nation’s commander-in-chief.
King’s early antiwar stand was bolstered by a letter he received in June 1965 from a South Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, who pleaded with him to oppose the war loudly. The letter tried to explain why his brother monks had immolated themselves in protest, which had spurred MLK’s initial opposition:
The Vietnamese monk, by burning himself, says with all his strength and determination that he can endure the greatest sufferings to protect his people. The importance is not to take one’s life, but to burn. What he really aims at is the expression of his will and determination, not death. To express will by burning oneself, therefore, is not to commit an act of destruction but to perform an act of construction, i.e., to suffer and die for the sake of one’s people.
I am sure that since you have been engaged in one of the hardest struggles for equality and human rights, you are among those who understand fully, and who share with all their hearts, the indescribable suffering of the Vietnamese people. The world’s greatest humanists would not remain silent. You yourself cannot remain silent. You cannot be silent since you have already been in action and you are in action because, in you, God is in action, too.2
King must have been struck by the consanguinity of the burning monks’ passion to that of Jesus dying on the cross, their faith like his that their unearned suffering would prove redemptive. Like Christian stalwarts the Buddhist monks strove to forge the fire of suffering into an instrument of social rebirth. The difference was also striking. The Buddhists chose this path of self-destruction, lit their own fire. Although King like Christ was suffering deeply for his commitments, and knew he would sacrifice his life, he did not feel it was his choice to die and he did not want to die before his appointed time. He would live a long life, if it were in his hands. The Buddhists had no God to make this decision; they had to decide for themselves. King’s own actions, like those of Jesus, were nonetheless sealing his fate. Like Jesus, he could have turned back at any time. But instead of turning back, he would keep doing God’s will until forces beyond his control hammered him to the cross.
King took his antiwar candle to the SCLC convention in August 1965. Four days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, handing the first pen to King, the SCLC chief announced to the Birmingham convention that he was launching his own peacemaking mission. The recent Nobel Peace Prize laureate wrote to leaders of all nations involved in the war, particularly LBJ and North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, urging serious negotiations. He called on Johnson to stop the bombing and to talk with the NLF. A resolution supporting King’s initiative cautioned that SCLC should not be distracted from the civil rights cause.
The White House blindsided him. Johnson had him briefed by U.N. ambassador Arthur Goldberg about apparent peace feelers that his effort might harm. Then the White House got Senator Thomas Dodd and other Congress members to rip his ineptness and disloyalty. He expressed his distress in a conference call with Stanley Levison, Andrew Young, and other advisers, in mid-September 1965, recorded by the FBI.
“The press is being stacked against me,” he complained. They would accuse him of being “power drunk and that I feel that I can do anything because I got the Nobel Prize and it went to my head. I really don’t have the strength to fight this issue and keep my civil rights fight going. They have all the news media and TV and I just don’t have the strength to fight all these things. The deeper you get involved the deeper you have to go, and I’m already overloaded and almost emotionally fatigued. I think we have to admit that I am going too far.” Without objection from his advisers he decided to drop his peace mission.
“I have to find out how I can gracefully pull out,” he told them, “so that I can get on with the civil rights issue, because I have come to the conclusion that I can’t battle these forces who are out to defeat my influence,” that “are going to try to cut me down.” A year and a half later he confided to his staff that “my name then wouldn’t have been written in any book called Profiles in Courage,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning best-seller by John F. Kennedy.3
He might have been emboldened to carry on had he been supported by the civil rights community, but his initiative—not wholly backed by his own organization—was criticized by mainstream groups such as the NAACP. Nor did SNCC or CORE embrace his actions.
Like King, SNCC activists had nursed anger about the war since early 1965, especially when field staff were called for induction. A handful refused to go and were handed maximum five-year terms by southern federal judges. But except for Robert Moses, whom American Nazis had pelted with red paint in an August protest, they had remained fairly quiet. By January 1966 SNCC leaders could no longer contain their outrage. They put out a strong statement opposing the war, reviling the government for hypocrisy in pretending to defend freedom and democracy in Southeast Asia when it refused to do so in southeast America. The statement supported those who resisted the draft in order to build democracy at home. It asked plaintively, “Where is the draft for the freedom fight in the United States?”4 Protesting at the Atlanta induction center, SNCC coined the slogan “Hell no, we won’t go!” SNCC was attacked by the media, politicians, and black moderates. The Georgia legislature refused to seat newly elected state representative Julian Bond, a SNCC activist, for opposing the war. King lambasted the legislature for violating the Constitution and suppressing dissent.
Although SNCC had not joined King earlier against the war, now they were pushing him to speak out more strongly, partly to give their own antiwar stand legitimacy, to shield themselves from recrimination. Stokely Carmichael, who replaced John Lewis as SNCC’s chairman in May 1966, made it his mission to move King forward on the war. As the Black Power movement emerged out of Lowndes County, Alabama, it condemned the war as fiercely as it did racism, seeing them as sides of the same coin.
Throughout 1966 King spoke occasionally against the war and the massive bombing and once appeared with Thich Nhat Hanh at a Chicago press conference. Although SCLC officially scorned the war, he turned down invitations to speak at peace rallies, rallies he had earlier encouraged. A few times he asked Coretta King, longtime pacifist and member of Women Strike for Peace, to speak in his place. King and advisers rationalized his rationing of antiwar rhetoric as more effective than continuous salvos. But he was lying low, praying for peace but not acting, risking. The slamming of his 1965 peace mission taught him that Vietnam was a political minefield. Unlike Vietnamese monks, he was not ready to burn. And he did not want the lash of Lyndon Johnson’s wrath. If nonviolence was about turning enemies into friends, he was unhappy about turning his tall Texan friend into a foe.
But the war kept hemorrhaging. By end of 1966, nearly four hundred thousand U.S. troops were deployed in South Vietnam, twice as many as a year earlier. Several thousand had come home in coffins. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians had been killed; hundreds of thousands were forced to flee their villages. The negotiation route was going nowhere. King’s outward passivity belied his growing disquiet, the rumbling of his conscience. Friends joining him for the 1966 Thanksgiving holiday recalled his obsession with the war and nonstop arguments. He was groping his way out of his prison cell of silence.
The point of no return came in mid-January 1967. He was waiting for a plane at Atlanta airport, flying to Jamaica for a month of rest and reflection and to write his fourth and final book, Where Do We Go from Here. He bought a copy of Ramparts, the glossy New Left magazine, at a newsstand. Over lunch his eyes seized on an article, “The Children of Vietnam,” graphic photos of kids fiendishly burned by American napalm bombs. His aide Bernard Lee recalled that “he froze as he looked at the pictures from Vietnam. He saw a picture of a Vietnamese mother holding her dead baby, a baby killed by our military.” He pushed his plate away from him.
“Doesn’t it taste any good?” Lee knew how his boss loved to eat.
“Nothing will ever taste any good for me,” he replied testily, “until I do everything I can to end that war.”5 This was the moment that he committed himself to stop it, regardless of the political or personal cost.
SMALL PROTESTS AGAINST the Vietnam intervention, organized mainly by radical pacifists, had occurred sporadically ever since an August 1963 demonstration against the Saigon regime’s harsh persecution of Buddhists, some of whom had set themselves on fire. The groundswell had become a “movement,” though small compared to its civil rights sister, when in April 1965 Students for a Democratic Society pulled off an unexpectedly impressive march of about twenty-five thousand who picketed the White House, rallied at the Washington Monument, and marched on the Capitol. A month earlier University of Michigan students and faculty organized an all-night “teach-in” that drew thousands. The idea was quickly copied at a hundred other campuses. Antiwar scholars debated State Department “truth teams” before large audiences.
That summer, during the twentieth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings, the “Assembly of Unrepresented People” gathered in Washington for workshops and direct action. It was designed to connect Vietnam with voting rights and other issues, to create a peace and freedom movement. On the final day a few hundred were arrested as they tried nonviolently to invade the Capitol with a “Declaration of Peace.” On the West Coast, protesters in Oakland sat down in front of army trains carrying soldiers bound for Vietnam. The Assembly of Unrepresented People gave birth to the first antiwar coalition, composed of thirty-three organizations. In mid-October 1965 a worldwide protest filled the streets of a hundred cities from New York to Tokyo. Another big Washington march took place over Thanksgiving.
As the war expanded, opponents felt an increasing urgency to end it, testified by the hundreds who engaged in civil disobedience. A handful chose to sacrifice everything. In early November Norman Morrison, a thirty-two-year-old Quaker from Baltimore, sat down below Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s office window at the Pentagon, poured kerosene over his body, and died in a small inferno.
“I reacted to the horror of his action,” McNamara recalled, “by bottling up my emotions and avoided talking about them with anyone—even my family. I knew Marg and our three children shared many of Morrison’s feelings about the war, as did the wives and children of several of my cabinet colleagues. I believed I understood and shared some of his thoughts. The episode created tension at home that only deepened as dissent and criticism of the war continued to grow.”6
A week later Roger LaPorte, a young Catholic worker who had just witnessed a draft-card burning—hecklers had yelled, “Burn yourselves, not your cards!”—immolated himself in front of the United Nations. Alice Herz, an eighty-two-year-old refugee from Nazi Germany, had set herself aflame on a Detroit street. She wrote a note to her daughter: “I choose the illuminating death of a Buddhist to protest against a great country trying to wipe out a small country for no reason.”7
The movement that grew so quickly in 1965 appeared to drag its feet the next year. Little noticed by the media, much was stirring at the grass roots, especially on campuses. Activists were building for the long haul. Key events took place that enlarged the opposition, including Senator J. William Fulbright’s televised Vietnam hearings, peace campaigns for Congress, and more marching. Antiwar pop songs climbed to the top of the charts, notably Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction.”
Though belied by his official rhetoric, the commander-in-chief seemed to be getting the message. With the failure of air attacks on oil-storage depots in North Vietnam, the Joint Chiefs of Staff pushed Johnson to order unrestrained bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong in late 1966. At his request they brought a team of Pentagon “whiz kids” to the Oval Office to prove their case.
“I have one more problem for your computer,” said LBJ. “Will you feed into it how long it will take five hundred thousand angry Americans to climb that White House wall out there and lynch their president if he does something like that?”8 Although some populated targets remained off-limits, the air war steadily expanded. American troops kept pouring into South Vietnam, to reach half a million by end of 1967. The war seemed as relentless and intractable as it was indeterminate. It was truly a “stalemate machine,” as Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg called it.9
Despite his mystical aura and prophetic bearing, James Bevel was not as demonstrative about talking to God as was King, who did not hesitate to inform meetings large or small that God was speaking through him. He would habitually interrupt staff meetings to divine God’s answers to their strategic or tactical questions. But it was Bevel’s hearing of God’s voice in a reading of Isaiah, which landed him in a Baptist seminary in Nashville, that led him to the freedom movement. Now nearly a decade later he was living in Chicago’s west side. The hero of Birmingham and Selma was heading up SCLC’s first and most extensive northern campaign, to transform slum conditions in the nation’s largest black ghetto. King’s decisive encounter with divinity occurred in his kitchen. Bevel’s took place in the basement laundry room of his Chicago tenement, while he was washing his baby son’s diapers.
He heard a voice firmly instructing him to stop the war. “James Bevel, my children are dying in Vietnam. My children are suffering. They are your brothers and sisters too. You must help them.” He was certain it was the voice of Jesus. It admonished him for urging nonviolence in the American South but not toward the Vietnamese. It was hypocritical for him to denounce protesters for throwing rocks in Birmingham or Chicago and not to denounce the President for raining bombs on women and children. Bevel tried to defend himself, but the voice would have none of his rationalizations. “I can’t answer your prayers here in this country,” it insisted, “if you are killing people in Vietnam.”
Bevel told his story to a skeptical Andrew Young, who urged him to talk to King when he returned from Jamaica. He could not wait. Impulsive as ever, he borrowed money to fly to Jamaica in January 1967 and found a cab driver who knew where King was hiding out. King and Bernard Lee were astonished to see him getting out of a cab at their beach house. After sharing his conversation with Jesus, Bevel pressed his boss to take the risk of all-out opposition to Johnson’s war. King may well have already decided to act. These secondhand words from Jesus no doubt fortified his resolve. He spent a good deal of his time in Jamaica praying and meditating about the war, what God wanted him to do.
Bevel had taken leave from his labors in Chicago to accept an offer from A. J. Muste and Dave Dellinger to take charge of the Spring Mobilization Committee’s mass protests against the war on April 15. They chose him partly in hopes that he would bring King on board, as well as a large black constituency. The national antiwar coalition had trouble staying intact during 1966 due to factional conflicts of Communists, Trotskyists, and pacifists. A fragile unity was maintained by the war’s urgency and by Muste’s skillful piloting. King’s involvement would not only put more bodies in the street but provide a veneer of solidarity. Bevel was determined that King would lead the peace march from Central Park to the United Nations.
Two weeks after returning from Jamaica, King delivered his first full speech on Vietnam at a Los Angeles symposium. The featured speaker on a panel with four antiwar senators, he spelled out the human, moral, political, and diplomatic casualties of the war—in Vietnam, the United States, and around the world.
“We must combine the fervor of the civil rights movement with the peace movement,” he concluded. “We must demonstrate, teach, and preach, until the very foundations of our nation are shaken.” On March 25 in Chicago, where like Bevel he had been living in a slum while campaigning for housing rights, he delivered the same fighting words at his first peace march, organized by Veterans for Peace. He led the march with famed baby doctor Benjamin Spock, who had also been nudging him to act.10
. . .
DESPITE THEIR PERSONAL HOSTILITY to the war, hardly any SCLC staff, advisers, or board members backed King’s walking out on a limb, or down the gangplank. Many were concerned about losing financial support at a precarious time when SCLC was laying off staff. Andy Young wanted King and SCLC to oppose the war but on SCLC’s terms. As in Birmingham and Selma, he wanted SCLC to be in control. Worried that King’s message would be distorted or misunderstood in the cacophony of April 15, Young arranged his address at Riverside Church. Young was also King’s liaison with the Spring Mobilization Committee, headed by Dellinger following Muste’s death in February at age eighty-one. Muste had just returned from a peace journey to North Vietnam, where he talked with Ho Chi Minh.
As before, the Mobilization Committee comprised a coalition of contentious leftists: radical pacifists, progressive clergy, SNCC, student activists, Trotskyites, and Communists. King and Young were alarmed about the presence of Communist Party members, the result of a nonexclusion policy meant to be a final repudiation of McCarthyism, as well as to broaden support. But CP involvement had kept Norman Thomas, other democratic socialists, and influential liberals from joining up. Young pressured the committee to remove a Communist from its list of sponsors, to no avail. King was also troubled by the prospect of sharing the platform with his friend Stokely Carmichael, who had abandoned nonviolence in pushing for greater black militancy.
In a mid-March letter to Bevel and Dellinger, Young pointed to the underlying conflict between radical and liberal peace leaders. Rustin and Levison had been steering King through the thickets of liberal/radical animosity for several years. Although the radical peace leaders had bitter differences among themselves, especially Stalinists and Trotskyites who had battled for decades, their common goal was to build a broad American left. Over time they foresaw the left growing into a majority force for progressive, even revolutionary change. Liberals and democratic socialists, on the contrary, strove to build a majority coalition to win political power. Some like Rustin believed they were unlikely to get a better deal than the Johnson administration and its Democratic Congress. Others, like Allard Lowenstein, favored replacing Johnson with a president as strong on peace as LBJ had been on civil rights and poverty, possibly Senator Robert Kennedy.
The Spring Mobilization Committee was pleased with the breadth of their coalition in unifying the left. But for liberals and democratic socialists, this leftwing solidarity meant the exclusion of the vast majority of Americans. In their eyes the strategy of deferred transformation was not only pie in the sky but jeopardizing the short-term prospects for a majority movement to stop the war.
Young conveyed King’s concern that their base of support was not wide enough to win over the uncommitted. Would they be preaching to the choir? King wanted more diverse speakers, including liberal academics and labor leaders, and a plan for withdrawal that ordinary Americans could rally around. Hoping to draw in peace activists who were feeling uncomfortable, he proposed a meeting to fashion a principled compromise to expand participation from liberals and moderates. That meeting apparently never happened. Prominent liberals like Norman Thomas and Norman Cousins sat out the march.
“Never has there been so much opposition to a war,” Young’s letter concluded, “or so pregnant a climate to witness for Peace. This sentiment must not be allowed to become splintered into a thousand institutional factions and rendered ineffective and irrelevant. There is a real opportunity to organize the prevailing mood and lead the newly awakened consciences into a meaningful political program for the ending of the War.”11
Despite threats of funding cutoffs by big SCLC donors, reservations about militant speakers like Carmichael whose words might overshadow his, and an assassination plot, King resolved to speak his mind on April 15.
“At times you do things to satisfy your conscience,” he told Levison in an FBI-recorded phone call, “and they may be altogether unrealistic or wrong tactically, but you feel better. I will get a lot of criticism and I know it can hurt SCLC.” But, he insisted, “I can no longer be cautious about this matter. I feel so deep in my heart that we are so wrong in this country. The time has come for a real prophecy and I’m willing to go that road.”12
Withstanding rain, light then heavy, a quarter to half a million people gathered at sprawling Sheep Meadow in New York’s Central Park on Saturday, April 15, 1967—a diverse assemblage of all ages and races, predominantly young, white, and middle-class. Myriads of hippies flowed through the crowd with painted faces and flowered hair. The nonviolent tenor of the day was expressed by such posters as “They Are Our Brothers Whom We Kill.” Some carried Vietcong flags. A front line of notables—King, Spock, Carmichael, Bevel, and a towering photograph of Muste—led the peace army along 59th Street and down Madison Avenue to the U.N. It was so vast that tens of thousands never got out of Central Park. The organizers were dizzied by the size of the march, and the one in San Francisco to which Coretta King spoke.
King turned to Dellinger on the speakers’ platform at the U.N. and told him that more people had turned out than for the 1963 March on Washington. It was the largest demonstration in American history. Dellinger believed that at last they had a real peace movement. “I somehow felt like ‘we’re in.’ ”13 Carmichael’s angry speech evoked chants of “Black Power!” King’s talk was toned down from his Riverside jeremiad.
“The promises of the Great Society,” he said, “have been shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam. The bombs in Vietnam explode at home. They destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.”
Responding to critics of his Riverside address, he explained: “I have not urged a mechanical fusion of the civil rights and peace movements. There are people who have come to see the moral imperative of equality but who cannot yet see the moral imperative of world brotherhood. I would like to see the fervor of the civil rights movement imbued into the peace movement to instill it with greater strength, but I am not urging a single organizational form.
“I believe everyone has a duty to be in both the civil rights and peace movements, but for those who presently choose but one, I would hope they will finally come to see the moral roots common to both. I hope they will understand that brotherhood is indivisible, that equality of races is connected with the equality of nations in a single harmonious coexistence of all human beings.”14
Earlier in the day at Sheep Meadow, in an action not approved by the march officialdom, about seventy young men, many of them Cornell students, stood on a rocky cliff facing TV cameras and burned their draft cards in a coffee can filled with paraffin. A few were lit by supportive wives and women friends. As they finished their task, the contagious spirit of shared defiance moved a hundred more to come up from the edges and put their cards to flame.
DRAFT RESISTANCE IN AMERICA had been around for a century, ever since conscription was first instituted during the Civil War, two months after the Emancipation Proclamation. In July 1863 poor whites in New York City, largely Irish immigrants, rioted against the draft, incensed that rich people could buy their way out. Mobs attacked those supporting the Union cause. They targeted African Americans with venomous rage, since they were being forced to fight and die to free the slaves, when they themselves were hardly free. Over a hundred New Yorkers, mainly blacks, were killed in five days of burning, looting, and carnage.
In the twentieth century resistance to conscription took peaceful and nonracist forms. Five hundred were imprisoned for draft refusal during World War I. During the Second World War those who were granted conscientious objector status for religious reasons were sent to civilian public-service camps. About six thousand pacifists refused this option out of principle and served time in federal prison—among them King’s advisers Bayard Rustin and Glenn Smiley.
Draft resistance during the Vietnam era involved only the isolated burning of draft cards until the draft system itself provoked widespread dissent. In February 1966 the crusty czar of selective service, General Lewis Hershey, declared that draft boards could induct male college students with lower academic standing. With draft calls approaching forty thousand per month, middle-class students were no longer insulated from the war. Only a small proportion of students were inducted while in college; most of these were black, brown, or working-class. But the draft, seen as inseparable from the war that it fueled, had emerged as the most critical issue facing students. It became the driving force of mass antiwar opposition among the younger generation.
As an organized movement, draft resistance grew up both in and outside of SDS. Thousands of college students signed “We Won’t Go” pledges. The influence of SNCC was pervasive—its early support of draft defiance, draft refusal by several SNCC activists, and the controversial decision that whites should leave SNCC and organize their own people.
The day after the great peace march, King was interviewed on CBS’s Face the Nation. He was asked how he felt about protesters burning draft cards and carrying Vietcong flags. He averred that the Mobilization Committee had nothing to do with either and did not condone them.
“I do feel, however, that this war has gone so far and has done such damage to the nation and to many of the values that we hold very dear that something must be done on a much more massive scale to oppose it. I do not at this point advocate civil disobedience. I think we have to do a lot of groundwork in massive education before that,” reflecting his Gandhian approach. He reiterated his encouragement of young men to apply for conscientious objector status. He probably did not know how discriminatory the CO process was. A person of color, especially from a poor family, had little chance of being granted CO status by his local draft board. Even articulate white middle-class men not associated with a peace church like the Quakers had a tough time getting through the hoop. Draft boards frowned upon CO applicants, considering them unmanly if not un-American. It would be all the harder for a young black man to face inquisition by an all-white board.
Reporter Martin Agronsky asked King if he advocated draft resistance.
“Well, I have certainly advocated this,” he replied, now speaking to an audience of millions, “because I myself would be a conscientious objector if I had to face it.” But a CO was not a resister. With his usual ambiguity he seemed to be calling for noncooperation within the law. One might have seen a parallel with the Montgomery bus boycott’s initial demand for more reasonable segregation within the law.
“In the true spirit of nonviolence,” he explained, “I have only advocated doing what we do to resist it openly, cheerfully, and with a desire to reconcile rather than to estrange.”15 He opposed burning draft cards (a federal crime) not only because it was inflammatory but because, by destroying the evidence, it might be seen as evading prosecution. No one asked him where he stood on publicly breaking the draft law with willingness to accept the consequences, the kind of “extreme” action he had promoted with such passion in his letter from Birmingham jail.
Such an approach had been set forth at the huge rally in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park the day before. In the winter David Harris, Dennis Sweeney, and other members of the Peace and Liberation Commune in East Palo Alto, California, had joined with Berkeley activists to create “the Resistance.” They named it after the French struggle against the Nazis. At the San Francisco rally Harris announced the newborn group’s call for a nationwide “turn-in” of draft cards in October. A former high school football star from the farm town of Fresno, where he had been Boy of the Year, bearded, scruffy-haired Harris had recently resigned as Stanford student-body president to pour his energy into antidraft organizing. He and his commune brothers had already sent their draft cards back to the government and were preparing to go to prison.
Harris and Sweeney had worked with SNCC in Mississippi and envisioned the Resistance as a “white SNCC.” It came to life as a blend of the risk-taking, openness, and direct democracy of SNCC, principles of Gandhian nonviolence, and an “exploration of selfhood” that arose from the flourishing California counterculture with its libertarian values.16 They saw defying the draft as an existential act of self-liberation—from the manipulation of life choices that the government called “channeling,” from the “white skin privilege” of deferments, and above all, from immoral complicity in the war machine. It was a “personal, deep communication type of politics,” as SDS activist Tom Bell put it, a fusion of the personal and the political that would build, they dreamed, toward a nonviolent revolution.17
As an immediate strategy, draft resisters believed noncooperation could provide crucial leverage to stop the war. Organizer Paul Rupert commented that the Resistance “had a very material grasp that we were potential cannon fodder and could have a real part in making it impossible for the war to be waged.”18 Success hinged on getting enough men to take the first big step of renouncing their deferments and facing induction.
KING ANTICIPATED CRITICISM for his antiwar stand from both allies and adversaries; he had been through this before. He did not expect the deluge of recrimination. Nor did he expect the biting condescension that he felt as veiled racism: denying his right to speak out. The liberal media led the charge, right after his Riverside crossing of the Rubicon. Lambasting his “sheer inventions of unsupported fantasy,” the Washington Post accused him of “grave injury to those who are his natural allies. Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence. He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country and to his people. And that is a great tragedy.”19 He was stung by these words.
Critics zeroed in on his alleged effort to “fuse” the civil rights and antiwar movements. His ambiguity did not help him. “In linking the civil rights movement with total opposition to our position in Vietnam,” Life editorialized, he “comes close to betraying the cause for which he has worked so long. He goes beyond his personal right to dissent when he connects progress in civil rights here with a proposal that amounts to abject surrender in Vietnam,” negotiating with the NLF, and urged youth to become COs rather than serve. “Much of his speech was a demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.”20
He was criticized though less vehemently by the black press, a campaign orchestrated by the President’s black assistant Louis Martin, who brought African-American publishers to the White House to hear LBJ’s rebuttal.21 Some newspapers and commentators praised King’s stand, but they were drowned out by the media’s big guns.
Out of necessity King had grown a thick skin to absorb white criticism, but he was wounded by black attacks, brought to tears. Baseball legend Jackie Robinson, a friend, questioned his judgment. The NAACP officially rebuked him, warning that merging the peace and freedom movements would be a serious mistake. Whitney Young of the Urban League attacked him harshly. A month earlier he and Young had nearly come to blows at a fund-raising dinner on Long Island. Young had scolded him for his recent antiwar talk in Los Angeles because it might have angered LBJ. King told his colleague that he didn’t have to agree with his position, but “I do expect you to defend my right to say it.” The movement generals lit into each other.
“Whitney,” King let loose, “what you’re saying may get you a foundation grant, but it won’t get you into the kingdom of truth.” Young, whose daughter was hunger-fasting against the war at Bryn Mawr, pointed at King’s paunch: “You’re eating well.” An aide pulled King away. As his anger died down, he felt disgusted by his behavior and called Young later to apologize. Before long Young backed away from his unequivocal support of the war and confessed in later years that King was right.22
When the attacks rained down on him in April, King vigorously defended himself. He argued that he had the obligation to speak about the war not only as a citizen, but as a minister and a Nobel Peace Prize winner. He was offended by the New York Times and others who belittled him for ignorance of world affairs. He had closely followed his country’s involvement in Southeast Asia and was well briefed by European journalists he had befriended over the years.
On fusing the two movements he tried to explain that they were linked by their content but not form, raising more questions than he answered. Was he being disingenuous? Surely Bevel and other antiwar colleagues he respected were seeking to merge civil rights, economic justice, and peace into One Big Movement. This had been the aim of SNCC and the New Left for a while. Although it opposed the war, he had no desire for SCLC to become an antiwar organization. But he expected that it would join in peace coalitions if they reached further into the mainstream than the April 15 alliance and involved more people of color.
President Johnson “flushed with anger” when he got wind of King’s Riverside speech. Aides fed his hostility and paranoia. Cold War liberal John Roche, a political scientist and ex–democratic socialist, was his assistant in charge of wringing support from intellectuals. He reported to his boss that King, “inordinately ambitious and quite stupid,” had “thrown in with the commies,” jettisoning his black leadership. The “Communist-oriented ‘peace’ types have played him (and his driving wife) like trout.” FBI’s Hoover echoed this line to LBJ: “Based on King’s recent activities and public utterances, it is clear that he is an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation.”23 King and his staff right away felt stepped-up surveillance by Hoover’s men: more frequent phone clicks, unmarked cars tailing them.
No one could doubt that King’s spring peace offensive, with all its fateful ramifications, marked a major turning in his life, politically, emotionally, and spiritually. It also brought an irreparable rupture of his relationship with the President. Ever since he began the Vietnam escalation two years before, LBJ had felt more and more besieged by the media and opponents left and right. He knew better than anyone that Vietnam was a lost cause. If King was hurt most by black people attacking him, Johnson was unhinged by disloyalty and betrayal. King, for whom he had done so much, for whom he had risked his presidency, had turned against him, had made him the enemy. Armed with the full power of his office, he would now turn on King, make him the scapegoat. He blamed “that goddamned nigger preacher” for all his troubles.24
On Sunday, April 9, King preached at a Chicago church. “I don’t know how long I’ll live,” he exclaimed, “but I hope I can live so well that the preacher can get up and say he was faithful. That’s all, that’s enough.
“That’s where I want to go from this point on, the rest of my days. ‘He who is greatest among you shall be your servant.’ I want to be a servant. I want to be a witness for my Lord, do something for others.”25
The stormy spring of 1967 marked a turning point not only for Martin King, the antiwar movement, and Lyndon Johnson, but for the nation and the world. Vietnam was the axis around which the whole planet seemed to be seeking new directions, new ways out of darkness. The coming twelve months would draw a dividing line in world history as critical as any in the twentieth century.
Amid the vertigo of events King may not have known whether he wanted one movement or two, or what their relationship ought to be. His double consciousness allowed him to see the peace and justice movements as both separate and combined; it depended partly on the audience he was speaking to. For several weeks in April and May he felt called to lead both movements. The dramatic entrance of the most prominent American to oppose the war had energized the movement like nothing else. Many thousands marched in New York because King was there.
Yet though he was used to the quarrelsome civil rights movement, he was not prepared for the chaotic new movement whose divisions made the civil rights community look harmonious. Unlike the latter, antiwar leaders desired King’s symbolic might as much as they spurned his calling the shots. The peace train did not hanker for a new Gandhi.
But during the weeks that he stood front and center he focused on charting a viable strategy to end the war. Bevel and key white activists had threatened mass civil disobedience in Washington as the next step. King insisted that he was not ready to support civil disobedience. Nor at the other extreme would he heed pressure to run for president in 1968 as a peace candidate. He considered meeting with North Vietnamese leaders in Paris, but decided it would not be prudent. He gave guarded support to the “Dump Johnson” effort while promoting grassroots pressure for “negotiations now.” He proposed a march on Washington like the one in 1963, that would link the war with poverty-program cuts. That sounded too tame for most antiwar leaders, who wanted to escalate their tactics—but were not sure how.
He joined with Spock in launching Vietnam Summer, an effort to mobilize thousands of students to go door-to-door and educate their communities about the war, to build the mainstream opposition that he felt essential to stopping the war. And he took a further step toward advocating outright resistance to the draft.
In February 1964, when young Cassius Clay won the world heavyweight boxing title, he announced that he had joined the Nation of Islam (he had secretly joined in 1961) and changed his name to Muhammad Ali. Three years later, now a Black Muslim minister and a captain of Elijah Muhammad’s elite guard, he professed to be a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. His white draft board denied his CO claim and ordered him into the army. After his lawyers exhausted all appeals up to the Supreme Court, he refused induction on April 28, 1967, in Houston.
“I’ll never wear the uniform of the United States military forces,” he told the press in Chicago. “I am not going ten thousand miles from here to help murder and kill and burn another poor people simply to help continue the domination of white slave masters over the darker people the world over.” At the induction center “I will meet them head-on,” the champion asserted, “and I’ll be looking right into their pale blue eyes.”26 The government swiftly indicted him for induction refusal. He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. The boxing associations stripped him of his title. Whatever their opinion of Black Muslims, African Americans felt the assault on their hero as an assault on them all.
In a major sermon at Ebenezer spelling out his Vietnam stand—Carmichael tapping his feet in the front pew—King congratulated Ali for his moral courage. “Here is a young man willing to give up fame, if necessary, willing to give up millions of dollars in order to stand up for what conscience tells him is right. It seems that I can hear the voice crying out through all the eternities saying to him this morning, ‘Blessed are ye when men shall persecute you and shall call you all manner of evil for righteousness’ sake.’ ”
As for himself, he declared, “I answered a call, and when God speaks, who can but prophesy?” He called for Americans to repent. “The kingdom of God is at hand.” He heard God saying to America, you are too arrogant. “If you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power.” Ali was showing the way. Americans must take up the cross. “Before the crown we wear there is the cross that we must bear.”27 He was speaking, of course, to a Christian congregation. Other faiths had their own strong metaphors for sacrifice and redemption.
Ten days later, at an open-housing protest in Louisville, Kentucky, King was hit in the head by a rock after trying to reason with white teenagers menacing his car. “We’ve got to learn to live together as brothers,” he had told them.28 That night he gripped the rock in his hand as he spoke at a rally. Soon after, he and Coretta picketed the White House with other activists in their first joint antiwar action. She had been protesting the war for years, quietly urging her husband along. Finally he was following her example. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was used to talking with presidents face-to-face was now joining ordinary citizens who had to shout their peace chants through the wrought-iron White House gates.
AT THE END OF MAY SCLC held a staff retreat at a Quaker center on St. Helena Island off the coast of South Carolina. The center was originally one of the first schools for freed slaves. For three centuries black people slaving in the rice plantations had held tight to African customs on the sea islands, a cultural way station between West Africa and mainland America. The balmy seaside setting hardly distracted participants from the crisis they faced.
SCLC staff, mostly men with large egos, had always fought each other for King’s favor. He encouraged among his subordinates the verbal sparring he was unable to engage in himself. Much of the internal conflict was healthy and productive. But since the stymied Chicago campaign, infighting had swung out of control.
King was a harried chief wearing three heavy hats—Ebenezer pastor, prophetic voice, and SCLC executive. Yet he had been unable to bring in a strong manager to handle the chaos, unwilling to give up the illusion of control. Morale had plummeted with confusion over SCLC’s mission and funding cuts that resulted partly from King’s Vietnam stand. The staff had to downsize. Except in Grenada, Mississippi, SCLC’s fieldwork in the South had virtually dissolved. Was the civil rights movement over? Did SCLC have a future?
He answered yes to both questions at the retreat in a lengthy talk, “To Chart Our Course for the Future.” King had often turned to oratory as an arbiter of or an escape from conflict, as if the power of his words could transcend the sticky wickets of human impasse, lifting himself and others to their higher selves, if only long enough to change the subject.
“It is necessary for us to realize,” he explained, “that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights. When you deal with human rights you are not dealing with something clearly defined in the Constitution. They are rights that are clearly defined by the mandates of a humanitarian concern.”
During the previous two years, when it became evident that the historic civil rights laws would not sweep away racism or poverty, he had come to see the inadequacy of individual rights. He grasped that “civil rights” carried too much baggage of the dominant tradition of American individualism and not enough counterweight from a tradition of communitarian impulses, collective striving, and common good. This subterranean tradition had been kept alive by peoples of color, especially blacks and American Indians. The polar strains of individualism and collectivism needed to be reconciled, as he strove to reconcile other opposites. His conception of rights shifted to a richer, comprehensive meaning that reflected his underlying biblical values.
By 1967 King seemed to be following the example of Malcolm X, who near the end of his life stressed the need to “expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level—to the level of human rights.” If the two leaders had been able to compare notes during Malcolm’s last year, they would have discovered that each was drawing similar conclusions about the necessity to go beyond constitutional rights.
Both Martin and Malcolm were reconstructing the legacy of their forebears, such as Gabriel Prosser, Frederick Douglass, John Mercer Langston, Ida B. Wells, and Du Bois. From the end of the eighteenth century, African-American leaders had grounded their interpretation of rights in black spirituality and in what they saw as the divinely authorized Declaration of Independence, with its “amazing universalism,” in King’s words. Many African Americans had perceived their human rights, no matter how poorly fulfilled, as a covenant with their personal God intervening in history on the side of justice. “Blacks always believed in rights in some larger, mythologic sense—as a pantheon of possibility,” legal scholar Patricia Williams noted.29
According to this deeper view that King took on, rights were more than private possessions. They were a moral imperative that transcended individual needs. He was rehabilitating the old preindustrial meaning of right: something that was right or just (righteous), that one therefore had a “right” to. Rights rightly understood were not whatever a person claimed as his or her due, with no boundaries; but what was required for all people, and thus for each, by the higher laws of justice and love. They were those entitlements that constituted the moral foundation of the beloved community.
Proper rights were limited by the same moral laws. Rights and responsibility were not a dichotomy but interwoven. Individuals had a moral responsibility to secure just rights for themselves and others. That was why, rooted in biblical faith, many African Americans experienced rights as shared resources. And why many have felt a duty to realize them not just on an individual basis, but for their people as a community or nation. This perspective diverged sharply from the classic liberal ideology of unbounded rights, owned by isolated, unencumbered selves devoid of community ties. King came to have hardly more affinity for such individualistic rights than he had for unbounded freedom or democracy, coins of the same realm.
“The great glory of American democracy,” he said many times, “is the right to protest for right.” The right to protest was authorized by the rightness or justice of the moral aim, not simply as a constitutional right justified in and of itself. “It is morally right,” he wrote in his last book, “to insist that every person have a decent house, an adequate education, and enough money to provide basic necessities for one’s family.”30 Rights could no longer be traded off or compartmentalized. They were a body, indivisible, as illustrated by the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, which Malcolm had tied his kite to.
King had moved beyond the principle of compensatory justice—that disadvantaged African Americans, and whites as well, deserved an economic bill of rights justified by slavery. This was a linchpin of his 1964 book, Why We Can’t Wait. All people had human rights, he now believed, because they were children of God. No further justification was needed. On the sunny sea island he was calling for a full-blown human rights movement, a “human rights revolution” that would place economic justice at the center.
The aim of the human rights movement would be to achieve genuine integration—meaning shared power—and genuine equality, requiring a “radical redistribution of economic and political power.”
“For the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement.” But “after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution. We must see the great distinction between a reform movement and a revolutionary movement. We are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society.” The rules must be changed. There must be a revolution of values. Only by reallocating and redefining power would it be possible to wipe out the triple interlocking evils of racism, exploitation, and militarism.
“You really can’t get rid of one without getting rid of the others,” he said. “Jesus confronted this problem of the interrelatedness of evil one day.” In the Gospel of John a rich man named Nicodemus came to Jesus and asked, What must I do to be saved?
“Jesus didn’t get bogged down in a specific evil. He didn’t say, now Nicodemus you must not drink liquor. He didn’t say, Nicodemus you must not commit adultery. He didn’t say, Nicodemus you must not lie. He didn’t say, Nicodemus you must not steal. He said, Nicodemus you must be born again. Nicodemus, the whole structure of your life must be changed.
“What America must be told today is that she must be born again. The whole structure of American life must be changed.”31
When he finished his talk the gathering sang a rousing “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More,” his lovely baritone clear as a bell.
WHETHER SINGING ISAIAH’S CALL for peace or invoking the Israelites’ defeat of Pharaoh’s forces to escape from Egyptian slavery, African Americans lived the Hebrew Scriptures in the present tense. It was a shock to the world, no less to the fighters themselves, when modern Israelites trounced Egypt and its neighbors in a six-day blitzkrieg and reconquered Jerusalem after two millennia of exile. The Bible was born again in June 1967.
During the spring, while much of the world was watching Vietnam and the American peace movement, hostile moves by Israel and surrounding Arab states rose to a level not seen since the Suez crisis of 1956. After Israel shot down Syrian jet fighters, Egyptian president Nasser mobilized his army menacingly on Israel’s southern border. Suddenly on the morning of June 5, hundreds of Israeli jets swooped down on Egyptian air bases and in minutes pulverized Egypt’s air force on the ground. Then Israeli jets decimated the Syrian and Jordanian air forces. With mastery of the air, Israel defeated Egyptian, Jordanian, and finally Syrian troops on their own turf. After a fierce battle between the Israeli and Jordanian sectors of Jerusalem, Israeli soldiers marched deliriously through the Lion’s Gate into the Old City. They prayed in awe at the Western Wall, where the Jewish temple had been destroyed by Romans forty years after Jesus died.
No one at the time foresaw that Israel would hold on to the occupied Palestinian territories into the twenty-first century. The Arab states were humiliated by their defeat, but Palestinians were the real losers. Under Yasser Arafat’s leadership they launched a guerrilla war that adopted terrorist tactics, emulating the pre-1948 Jewish resistance, out of desperation. For Israelis, the victory soured, as peace remained a mirage.
King was shaken by the Israeli blitzkrieg, which he heard about while returning from the second Peace on Earth conference in Geneva. Besides thousands of deaths, overwhelmingly the darker skinned, he realized that Israel’s victory, and the triumphalism of most American Jews, would set back his peace work. The Six-Day War stole headlines from the Vietnam drama, providing cover for Johnson to pour in more troops. More serious was the long-term damage of dividing the peace forces, already fractious enough. “Half of the peace movement is Jewish,” Stanley Levison observed, “and the Jews have all become hawks.”32 Many leftist Jews devoutly backed what they saw as Israel’s war of self-preservation. But many other activists supported Palestinian self-determination.
Despite his warnings about Dante’s inner circle of hell, King tried to remain noncommittal about Israel’s war, while steadfastly defending its right to exist. For years he had condemned anti-Semitism, considering it racism. He even supported a moderate Zionism. But he believed that “the great powers have the obligation to recognize that the Arab world is in a state of imposed poverty and backwardness that must threaten peace and harmony.” Lust for oil was “the heart of the problem.” He called for a Marshall Plan for the Middle East.33
As he feared, besides militarizing the Mideast and ramping up the Cold War, the Six-Day War dealt a blow to the American left, making the prospect of unity more elusive. This became evident when SNCC leaders embraced Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. The heretical stand, which marginalized SNCC more than had its Vietnam opposition, complicated efforts to forge a broader antiwar coalition.
Rather than talk about war in the Mideast or in Vietnam, King spent most of June 1967 promoting his new book, published by Harper & Row, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? He had taken up Levison’s suggestion to write his fourth book during fall 1966 when, at a low ebb, he felt that his message wasn’t getting across. This was in part because he wasn’t clear what it was. The fading of the southern movement, the upheaval in northern cities, the impetuous rise of Black Power, the stalemate of SCLC’s Chicago drive, and the mad horror of the war—all of these, sewn together in his mind, signified that the strategies and goals of the decade after Montgomery had to be refigured before they were made irrelevant by the crush of global revolt.
Fitting for a revolutionary time, he would write a book about power. Starting with an overview of the movement at this crossroads, it explained and challenged the Black Power phenomenon and, in an end run, offered an alternative picture of power serving an alternative vision of revolution—to create a “socially conscious democracy” that reconciled the opposing truths of individualism and collectivism.
The book was also an exposition of the lessons King thought he had learned from the movement’s successes and failures, most recently in the Chicago campaign. While the Black Power movement in the South began in spring 1965 when SNCC joined forces with the Lowndes County Freedom Organization to run candidates for county office, organized Black Power in the North originated in SCLC’s August 1965 decision, just after the Watts revolt, to launch a major campaign in Chicago, the nation’s most segregated metropolis. They were invited in by the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), a grassroots federation that had made headway in fighting school segregation. Bevel took a leave as SCLC’s director of direct action to work with an interracial group on the west side that had been applying militant nonviolent action to ghetto problems. When King appointed him director of the Chicago campaign, he got SCLC to embrace a strategy to create a federation of neighborhood tenant unions to empower residents to eliminate slum conditions. Bevel and his coworkers sought to combine CCCO’s well-tested community organizing with SCLC’s mass direct action. They aimed at mobilizing a nonviolent army to confront Chicago’s power structure much as SCLC had done in Birmingham.
To dramatize slum conditions and his own commitment, King moved with his family into a dingy, urine-stenched tenement in one of the Windy City’s worst slums. But the vision of “Unions to End Slums” proved to be only that. The Chicago Freedom Movement shifted from transforming the ghetto from within to fighting the financial and real-estate interests that intentionally segregated the city for their own profit. By summer 1966 the thrust of the campaign was to march against housing discrimination in ethnic white neighborhoods. The marches brought hostility from working-class mobs that King, who was felled by a rock in the head, felt was worse than anything he had encountered in the Deep South. He found Mayor Richard Daley’s political machine, which had co-opted many black leaders, to be impregnable. He had ignored Rustin’s warning to stay away from Chicago.
A summit meeting with Daley in August 1966 achieved a “half a loaf” compromise agreement with hollow promises for housing integration. A subsequent voter registration campaign led by Hosea Williams, aimed at challenging the Daley machine, proved a failure. King’s turn toward the war in spring 1967 was, besides its moral impulse, a way of saving face after the Chicago disgrace.
WHILE IN Where Do We Go from Here King criticized Black Power as a slogan without program, as flash without back, he praised its essential meaning. He suggested that Black Power and the urban riots did not cause the growing white backlash—“massive resistance” of the 1950s gone national—but were the consequence. Black militancy slouching toward violence was the bitter fruit of promises unfulfilled, rights not implemented, lack of economic justice. The call for Black Power was a “psychological reaction to the psychological indoctrination that led to the creation of the perfect slave,” he wrote. It was a healthy response to slavery’s emasculation of black manhood, black humanity, its demonization of blackness.
“Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery.” Certainly he valued this trait in himself and knew its potency. His gift of self-esteem set him apart from most other leaders, black or white, whose elephantine egos tried to fill their void of self-regard. He embraced Black Power’s celebration of black pride and racial identity, a staple of his own rhetoric since he had first exalted the “new Negro in the South.” Sounding like Du Bois, he interpreted Black Power as the latest manifestation of a centuries-old struggle by black people to reconcile their African past with their American present and future.
“The Negro’s greatest dilemma is that in order to be healthy he must accept his ambivalence. The problem is that in the search for wholeness all too many Negroes seek to embrace only one side of their natures. The old Hegelian synthesis still offers the best answer to many of life’s dilemmas. The American Negro is neither totally African nor totally Western. He is Afro-American, a true hybrid, a combination of two cultures.”
While King was preparing his manuscript, black was replacing Negro among many segments of the black community, especially in the urban North. If his book had come out just a year later, many readers would have found his use of Negro outdated, for some offensive. The book appeared in a moment of transition between Negro and black that corresponded to the end of the civil rights movement and the takeoff of black liberation.
King endorsed Black Power in principle but objected to how most militants practiced it: rejection of integration for separatism, swaggering nationalism, inflammatory rhetoric, support, even glorification, of violent resistance, dehumanization of white people. He criticized its prioritizing of race over class (Black Panthers did the reverse), self-determination over economic justice, instead of exploring their interdependence, the task he took on in this book. He was troubled by its lack of effectiveness. They might celebrate black pride and beauty till kingdom come, but it might not make a dent in chronic black joblessness, or transforming the ghetto into a livable community. Dignity was no longer enough.
A treatise on power must be anchored in first principles. King wrote that power was the ability to achieve purpose, especially moral purpose. Philosophers culminating in Nietzsche had mistakenly divorced power from love, making them polar opposites. King professed that the “collision of immoral power with powerless morality” constituted the major crisis of our times, echoing his mentors Tillich and Niebuhr. Power without love was “reckless and abusive.” Love without power was “sentimental and anemic.” The rightful exercise of power was “love implementing the demands of justice,” which was “power correcting everything that stands against love.” If these principles were left in such airy abstraction, a contemporary Nietzsche might have dismissed them as more idealistic Christian weakness that sapped the will to power. But King got down to earth.
He confessed that his own attempt to exercise moral power, and that of the civil rights movement, had fallen short. He confirmed much of the growing criticism by the left, especially from SNCC.
“In candor and self-criticism it is necessary to acknowledge that the tortuous job of organizing solidly and simultaneously in thousands of places was not a feature of our work.” SCLC and other civil rights groups often defeated themselves by lackluster organization, by disunity and “petty competition.” He did not object to healthy debate about contending strategies. Nor did he mind SNCC’s refusal to “canonize me.” In an unpublished draft he wrote: “I have never been sensitive to being called ‘De Lawd’ by many younger activists,” which he saw as fending off a damaging cult of personality. The nickname was also a sign of backhanded reverence.
The disunity that was destructive, he continued in the early draft, was “that which embodies misrepresentation and distortion.” When, to make organizational hay, “false rumors are circulated that some leaders have ‘sold out’ to the power structure”—himself?—“or are opportunistically making alliances with one or another major political party to gain individual advantage, the whole movement suffers.”34 Such was immoral power born of powerless morality.
In the book he criticized SCLC for overstressing media drama and explosive events that did not “assemble and unify the support for new stages of struggle. Recognizing that no army can mobilize and demobilize and remain a fighting unit, we will have to build far-flung, workmanlike and experienced organizations in the future. We shall have to have people tied together in a long-term relationship instead of evanescent enthusiasts who lose their experience, spirit and unity because they have no mechanism that directs them to new tasks.”
He called for a creative array of new organizations to be vehicles for expressions of democratic power. In addition to reinvigorated and democratized labor unions, they would include unions of tenants and of welfare recipients, their rights protected by a new Wagner Act relevant to a mature welfare state. Such grassroots unions of the poor and disadvantaged would coalesce with other groups into a bottom-up coalition, a “true alliance.”
A true alliance, he explained, was “based upon some self-interest of each component group and a common interest into which they merge. For an alliance to have permanence and loyal commitment from its various elements, each of them must have a goal from which it benefits and none must have an outlook in basic conflict with the others.” One would not ally with a group that disagreed on fundamental values or principles, like antiracism, even if sharing the same goals. The idea was to create alliances broader and deeper than the April peace mobilization, for example, but not so loose as to be “least common denominator” coalitions that agreed only on the narrowest single-issue objective. Rather than top-down coalitions jealously guarded by movement generals, true alliances would have mechanisms of participatory decision making built in. Those who knew King’s decision-making style might have found his plea for internal democracy unconvincing.
Hierarchy and authoritarian control told only part of the story of King’s leadership, however. They contrasted with, yet made room for, his keen ability to listen, pay attention, learn. People who knew him were struck by his gift for patient listening. Top-down control reverberated with democratic intimacy to produce a mode of leadership whose authority, whose claim to obedience and loyalty, was rooted in his engaged relationship with subleaders and followers. Until the last season of his life, his leadership offered a trusted setting for volatile, freewheeling deliberation and dissent, encouraging conflict but keeping it in bounds. His charisma and personal power, like those of Lincoln, another grand master of the authority and democracy dialectic, proved compelling because they were embedded in a personal connection, felt as mystical by some. He sought to create with participants the “I and Thou” relationship that he held as a personalist ideal.
Over the years he had striven to exercise authority with compassionate understanding, even if the former often trumped the latter. Although he knew that he had made mistakes, had been undemocratic and manipulative, he was drawn to the “personal, deep communication” politics that animated younger activists. Despite his authoritarian manner, he had exemplified reciprocal leadership through fostering relationship. A decade of democracy in the streets, which he had helped midwife, could not have helped but wean him from his black Baptist orientation of preacher as boss. He was searching for better ways to express loving power and powerful love.
Only a true alliance, or alliance of true alliances, he believed, could eliminate the triple evils of racism, exploitation, and militarism—and as an eventual electoral coalition, move toward a democratic socialist society that would institutionalize power guided by compassion. The Johnson administration had shown in 1964 and 1965 that an American-style social democracy was not impossible. But LBJ sabotaged his Great Society and his own greatness by immoral power carried to the extreme: his Ahab-like obsession with the Moby Dick of Vietnam.
Even if it better fit his temperament and training, King was finding himself less able to lead the top-down coalition that he was familiar with. Gone were the days when he played the mediator between generals on the left and right of the civil rights movement. Terrain had shifted. As he had prophesied in his letter from Birmingham jail, the center that he commanded had moved to the left, moderate had become radical, perhaps even revolutionary. SNCC and CORE had abandoned the grand coalition, leaving King holding down its left end, an untenable position.
A sign of how much had changed for him, politically and emotionally, was how hard it had become to keep his anger wrapped up, especially in face-to-face meetings that he had usually handled with agility. He always had a deep well of anger, inherited from his father and the cruelty inflicted on his race. We saw his fury at fifteen when he was forced to move to the back of a bus in rural Georgia. But one of his supreme gifts, tied to the strong self-esteem that his parents had drummed into him, was his capacity to cap his anger and transform its energy into disarming humor and oratorical passion. Reeling now from the onslaught of invective for his Vietnam stand, he lost his temper more and more frequently. His ease with banter left him.
In a summit meeting with Wilkins, Whitney Young, and other leaders in late May 1967, he blew up at Wilkins when the combative NAACP chief did not let up on King’s Vietnam apostasy. His longtime friend Kenneth Clark, the social psychologist, who had gathered the leaders at his home near New York, said it was “the first time I’d ever seen Martin angry.”35 The bitter exchange was escalating when Young, who had also skirmished with King on the war, jumped in to cool the fire. Getting nowhere, the leaders agreed to meet again soon.
SCLC colleagues were more concerned than ever about their boss’s emotional state. Septima Clark had worked with him longer than anyone except Abernathy. “I have never seen you in the kind of mood that I witnessed” in early June, she wrote in a note. “Dr. King, if we are to keep a world renowned leader healthy, wholesome and efficient, some of the burdens must be shared.” In Atlanta and in field offices she had encountered “many smoldering grievances.” As a friend, she worried about his survival. “You are certainly more valuable healthy than sick, and God help us all if you become exhausted to the point of a non-active person. May God help you to help yourself.”36
His physical and emotional exhaustion along with a lull in the peace campaign pushed him to brake his antiwar drive. At May’s sea island retreat SCLC had committed to a summer program in Cleveland that would, they hoped, get better results than Chicago. The Ohio city had suffered rioting over the previous summer; its racially primitive white mayor only made things worse. The black ministers’ association, with the blessing of the local NAACP, invited King to help alleviate the city’s racial crisis. In June SCLC staff launched a community-organizing campaign that focused on tenant organizing, voter registration, and an Operation Breadbasket project to get jobs for poor blacks from local companies. The Chicago Breadbasket campaign, led by movement prodigy Jesse Jackson, a divinity student from South Carolina, had forced deals with two giant supermarket chains, garnering over a thousand jobs and sales of black products. Breadbasket, SCLC’s most dependable success, was about to go national.
When King met again with fellow civil rights generals in mid-June, tension over Vietnam had calmed because he and SCLC were jetting up their northern campaign after the Chicago slump. King insisted that his priority was poverty but that the media ran amok with his comments on Vietnam. Wilkins, Young, and other leaders threw their support to the Cleveland project, the focal point of their unity statement. The alliance of black forces in Cleveland boded well for the summer.
SEEMINGLY IN SYNC with the war in Southeast Asia, the war in America’s “domestic colonies” had escalated every summer since the Harlem riot of 1964, then Watts the next year, both of which King had tasted firsthand. In Harlem, acting at the mayor’s behest, he had alienated militants by appearing to be on the side of the Man. In Watts he played an after-the-fact role but found the rebels and the rulers in utterly different worlds.
Racist police practices, lack of jobs, subhuman housing, and related ills had produced an “explosive mixture which had been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II,” the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders concluded in early 1968.37 The unfulfilled promises of the freedom movement, and its lip service to cities outside the South, persuaded many young ghetto dwellers that they would have to act on their own, without plan, organization, or allies. A black reporter arrested in the Detroit riot noted that the majority of his jailmates “were hustlers and two-bit gangsters. They boasted about how much loot they got. Listening to them I became convinced there was no outside conspiracy or special organization that welded them together.” They were bonded by hatred for the cops.38
In July 1967, as SCLC was signing up voters and organizing slum tenants in Cleveland, the ghettos’ spontaneous combustion verged on civil war in Newark and Detroit and scores of other cities. Pent-up powerlessness in Newark resulting from an unresponsive city hall fueled a rampage of looting and wreckage. It was triggered by the police beating of a black cab driver. Poorly led police and national guard units stifled the revolt with indiscriminate gunfire, often against imaginary snipers. Half of the two dozen blacks they killed were not involved, including a seventy-three-year-old man, six women, and two young children.
The most catastrophic urban rebellion in U.S. history erupted a week later in Detroit. The Motor City had seen a bloody race riot in 1943, mainly whites attacking black newcomers. By the mid-1960s, after further migration from the South, the once integrated area around 12th Street was one of the nation’s most densely populated districts, with overcrowded, dilapidated tenement buildings and rampant unemployment. Black residents and white cops were at war.
A late-night raid of a black club drew a furious crowd that started a chain reaction of looting and burning. Young blacks seemed to be “dancing amidst the flames.” Dodging high-powered bullets, they howled and shrieked as they ran off with TVs and stereos and enough shoes to open a store.
How did it all start? a looter was asked.
“It takes too long to tell you.”
“Yeah, it start two hundred years ago,” his buddy replied.
“Why did it start now?”
“It didn’t start now. You know a rash? You know how it spread. That’s what this is. This is a rash and it spreadin’ and spreadin’.”39
Most of several hundred gutted buildings were hit by spreading, windswept fires. Firefighters reportedly withdrew three hundred times when police failed to protect them. Governor George Romney, then the GOP presidential front-runner, flew over the battleground at dusk on the second day. “It looked like the city had been bombed on the west side,” he testified later. “There was an area two-and-a-half miles by three-and-a-half miles with major fires, with entire blocks in flames.”40 Five thousand Michigan national guardsmen were reinforced by four thousand army paratroopers dispatched reluctantly by President Johnson; he didn’t want to help his likely opponent. He insisted to the commanding general that the troops not have bullets in their guns. “I don’t want it said that one of my soldiers shot a pregnant nigger.”41
As in Newark and Watts the devastation was compounded by chaos within the armies of the law. Guardsmen and state police often did not know who, where, or why they were shooting. Most of the forty-three reported deaths from the weeklong carnage, thirty-three of them blacks, were “accidental.” Detroit’s congressman and others believed the true death toll to be over a hundred.
During the Newark and Detroit riots King was shuttling between Atlanta, Chicago, and Cleveland. “There were dark days before,” he told Levison over the phone, “but this is the darkest.” In a conference call he and his advisers debated how to respond to the urban violence and decided he would send a public telegram to LBJ, who had denounced the rioting without offering a remedy.
King confided to his advisers that Chicago contacts “gave me the plan” for a Chicago revolt. “They don’t plan to just burn down the west side, they are planning to get the Loop in Chicago.”42 FBI wiretappers sent this instantly to Hoover, who alerted Johnson within the hour that King knew about a conspiracy to torch Chicago’s downtown. Since April the President had been hungry for juicy evidence to tar King with subversive militancy. Chicago did not burn this time.
He was far less interested in King’s telegram, announced at an Ebenezer press conference on July 24.
There was no question that the violence and destruction must be halted, King wired his erstwhile ally, “but Congress has consistently refused to vote a halt to the destruction of the lives of Negroes in the ghetto.” He lambasted defeat of a rent-supplement bill and even a rat-control program that lawmakers laughed at. They had never seen a black infant chewed up by a voracious rodent. “The suicidal and irrational acts which plagued our streets daily are being sowed and watered by the irrational, irrelevant and equally suicidal debate and delay in Congress,” which he called “moral degradation” and hypocrisy.
White society bore ultimate responsibility for the rioting. “The turmoil of the ghetto is the externalization of the Negro’s inner torment and rage. It has turned outward the frustration that formerly was suppressed in agony.” He identified with this rage and the need to release it.
Because this was a state of emergency and “the life of our nation is at stake,” he urged the President to deal with the root problem of unemployment by creating a new federal agency, modeled on the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), dear to LBJ’s heart. The proposed agency would provide jobs for the jobless.43 But the President was in no mood to be lectured by his Judas.
After reading the telegram King fielded reporters’ questions. This time, he explained, he was not going to Detroit or Newark to help calm the flames. His job was not to stop riots but to prevent them from starting, to wipe out the conditions that stoked them. Thus he would continue his local empowerment efforts in Cleveland and Chicago. He had gone to Harlem and to Watts as a fireman, fool’s errands. He no longer had time to put out fires, rather to build a larger fire of the Spirit to extinguish fires of the flesh.
“These are evil times,” he preached to his Ebenezer faithful in early August. Their nation was still the “greatest purveyor of violence,” in the ghetto jungles as well as in Asian ones.
He recounted that the other day a young man had told him that he needed to take a trip. No, he replied, he was on the road far too much already. “I’m tired of all this traveling I have to do,” he complained to his flock. “I’m killing myself. Always away from my children and my family.” He didn’t need another trip. That wasn’t what he meant, the fellow had rejoined. To relieve his troubles, to be born again, he wanted King to take LSD.44
. . .
IT WAS THE SUMMER of bitter despair. It was the Summer of Love. While desultory black youth threw Molotov cocktails in the inner cities, other young people, mainly of lighter skin, were calmly seeking liberation through marijuana and psychedelic drugs. Although both camps used illicit drugs, reveled in rock or soul, and considered themselves social outcasts, they were worlds apart, rent by class as much as race. Yet the bearded or bra-less hippie proselytizing LSD was very much the scion of the black hipster of the nation’s dark ghettos.
The semimythical Summer of Love was launched in January 1967 with the Gathering of the Tribes festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Amid acid rock and surreal pageantry, an anarchist cadre called the Diggers handed out LSD to thousands. The organizers of the “Human Be-In” aimed at joining together youth turned on by drugs with those turned on by radical politics (many were both). The name itself reflected the mission. If sit-ins had conjured one kind of beloved community, be-ins conjured another. Each was a conjuring of the kingdom of God, a new Jerusalem. It did not take prophesy to imagine the power of merging the political and cultural rebels, making the youth movement one.
The mass media ran wild with the Human Be-In and lured a multitude of young people to San Francisco wearing flowers in their hair. They settled in a rundown neighborhood called Haight-Ashbury. While playing with psychedelics and free sex, they also set up an instant cooperative commonwealth of communes, “free stores,” free clinics, and other free spaces. Little Haight-Ashburys sprang up in other cities. Here was a revolution of values, but very different from the one King had in mind. Or was it?
Ten years before, writing about the Beat Generation, Norman Mailer had explored the confluence of cultural and political nonconformity in America. “If the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death,” the threat of annihilation, “then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. One is Hip or one is Square, one is a rebel or one conforms. So it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries.”
The common ethos of hip blacks and whites, said Mailer, was their “burning consciousness of the present,” to be engaged “in one primal battle: to open the limits of the possible for oneself. Yet in widening the arena of the possible, one widens it reciprocally for others as well,” such that each person’s fulfillment contains “its antithesis of human cooperation.”
Writing after the triumph of the Montgomery bus boycott, Mailer foresaw that if black people continued to break free of their chains, it might unleash the hipster’s “psychically armed rebellion” upon the broad expanses of American life; to “bring into the air such animosities, antipathies, that the mean empty hypocrisies of mass conformity will no longer work. A time of violence, new hysteria, confusion and rebellion will then be likely to replace the time of conformity.”45 The armies of the night were stirring.
Black and white activists, and eventually the hippie hordes, dressed themselves in the cool, existential style of the rebel, the “psychic outlaw.” Grandchildren of Walt Whitman and the transcendentalists, hippies took participatory democracy to deeper regions of the psyche. The counterculture offered a world of spontaneous pleasure to mold cooperatively. While SNCC and the New Left arose partly as an answer to conformist alienation, the counterculture made this their Goliath. They took King’s call to be creatively maladjusted to an extreme that would appall him.
The counterculture’s motley mobilization assaulted the mores of the technocratic “death culture,” including the scientific worldview and the capitalist work ethic. In a twist on Orwell, hippies were showing how Work was to be Play. They were subverting technique, efficiency, and joyless labor with the power of imagination, challenging not merely authority but its ethical grounding. A new culture appeared to be gestating in which spiritual capacities that “take fire from visionary splendor and the experience of human communion” were storming the barricades of a psychologically dying world.46
. . .
KING WAS NOT COMPLETELY ALIEN to the philosophy of the counterculture. Indeed he had inadvertently helped father it. For a long time he had preached that the worst evil was “psychological death”—worse than physical death, than physical suffering. Psychological death took many forms, from the sacred to the profane. It was the death of human personality, of the soul, of the Spirit within. Psychological death was depersonalization, the bitter fruit of racism, exploitation, and militarism, and of the soulless society that bred them.
Depersonalization meant that one’s personality dis-integrated, one’s divine essence severed from the rest of one’s self, from other persons, from society. King saw this most frighteningly in the ghetto. “The depersonalized manipulation of persons as though they were things,” he testified to a Senate hearing, “is as much responsible for the perpetuation of grief and misery in our cities as is the absence of wealth and natural resources.”47 When people were depersonalized they were turned into things—objects, numbers, commodities, caseloads. The “I-it” relationship replaced the possibility of “I and Thou,” I itself reduced to “it.” Objectification by the society, and worse, by one’s own self. As the hippies and the ghetto dwellers acted out in their arenas, as writers like Ralph Ellison had spelled out in prose, as singers like Otis Redding and Simon and Garfunkel cried out in song, alienation was the plague of modern humanity. In Tillich’s simple words, “Sin is separation.”
While racism and segregation were the most blatant forms of alienation, and served as metaphors for the larger evil, King also spoke out against more subtle and insidious manifestations. He had come of age in the early Cold War era, when social critics like David Riesman, William H. Whyte Jr., and Erich Fromm were warning Americans of the dangers of mass conformity. He was familiar with Riesman’s 1950 best-seller, The Lonely Crowd, its thesis that postwar America’s mass-consumption society had replaced an “inner-directed” personality type who “acquire early in life an internalized set of goals” with an “other-directed” personality in tow to others’ expectations, ruled by peer pressure, loyal to prevailing norms.48
As far back as May 1956, McCarthyism just past its peak, King questioned the concept of “maladjustment,” which he called “the ringing cry of the new child psychology.” Speaking to an NAACP gathering, he declared “there are some things in our social system to which I am proud to be maladjusted, and to which I suggest that you too ought to be maladjusted”—including segregation, discrimination, exploitation, and the “madness of militarism.”49 He was drawn to the new field of humanistic psychology, relevant both to his philosophy of personalism and to his pastoral counseling. Besides encouraging “creative maladjustment” to harmful norms and conformism, he spoke about internalized oppression and about subconscious destructive forces in society, a Jungian collective unconscious that needed to be healed through public witness. His political strategy of exposing the brutal underside of segregation in places like Birmingham, St. Augustine, and Selma was a means of healing the repressed id of subconscious racism that he believed all Americans shared.
He understood that science and technology had become a new religion threatening to extinguish traditional religious faiths. He also saw the technological revolution as the material force behind the emergent “new age” with its seemingly unlimited possibilities. He extolled technology’s capacity to make the world a neighborhood, even while organized religion had failed to make it a “brotherhood.” With all of its promise, however, he saw technology as more a curse than a blessing. Nowhere was he more prophetic than in his condemnation of automation and cybernetics, metaphors as well as touchstones of depersonalization.
Critiques of automation and cybernetics set off alarm bells in the mid–twentieth century that stopped tolling by century’s end. Once portrayed as dehumanizing, these wonders of “progress” were later, by force of the Information Revolution, treated as liberating. Influenced by Bayard Rustin, King worried not only about the millions whose jobs would be replaced by machines—black workers the most vulnerable—but about the psychological deadening inflicted on the remaining workers controlled by technology rather than controlling it. Robotization would not only replace workers with robots robbing their jobs. It would turn them into robots.
He could already see how computers were regimenting the workplace—regimenting minds—in ways that Frederick Taylor’s time and motion engineers could barely have dreamed of. The educated world was adopting a new faith that computer technology would emancipate humans from ignorance and drudgery. King saw the potential for psychological freedom, but he feared a greater danger of enslavement—just at the time when African Americans were throwing off the yoke of mental slavery that had endured for a century after the Civil War.
By 1967, biographer Marshall Frady suggested, “King had come to feel an unease of soul that he was trapped in some accelerating contest between the last hopes for a true, interconnected human community in America and the progressive deadening of its heart by the advance of a new sort of technotronic, corporate totalitarianism—a national order of power, composed of the megaconglomerates and the huge machineries of government acting in their interests, that was working a systematic impoverishment of modern man’s very humanity, conducting the country ever further into a computerized, materialistic void. His forebodings about this brought him to a radicalization of perspective ranged against, as it were, the very nature and shape of his times.”50
He did not have to look far to see how modern technologies were depersonalizing people. He took aim at the technology of bureaucracy. Since the 1964 Berkeley revolt students in the “multiversity” were protesting not only suppression of free speech and complicity with the war machine, but how they were bent, spindled, and mutilated like IBM cards—not educated for life, but trained for the work of death. Young men defied the draft not only because they despised the war, but also because they hated being channeled by the “pressurized guidance” of the Selective Service System, its “club of induction” terrifying registrants into conformity. Most degrading was the welfare bureaucracy, which helped poor families survive physically at the price of psychic servitude, druglike dependency.
In his December 1966 Senate testimony King tore into the welfare bureaucracy for its manipulation of the poor (others called it regimentation) and backed recipients’ demands for dignity as well as decent benefits. “With the expansion of government and private bureaucracy,” he told senators investigating the urban crisis, “and the growing complexity of society as a whole, the question of what are the rights of citizens becomes increasingly crucial.” Poor people “are forging new forms of rights in relation to the welfare state which are important for all Americans, not only the poor and Negro.
“What is the citizen’s right of participation,” he asked, “in the decisions which so directly affect his community? Are these decisions to be made by professional elites?” Government by the people was needed, especially in public bureaucracies, that “involves the citizen in new and significant ways.” He was implicitly criticizing the charade of poor people’s participation in antipoverty programs. The “enhanced role of the citizen,” he suggested, “may be as vital as additional money to the reemergence of the city as the springboard of hope for its populace.”51 Democratizing bureaucracies might be the only way to humanize them, forcing them to treat their clients as persons. More than ever he was embracing, in words at least, the ethos of participatory democracy that was the zeitgeist of the 1960s.
Fighting depersonalization, moreover, must begin at home. He believed that his movement, and any that he associated with, should set an example and refuse to be complicit in society’s depersonalizing of citizens. Progressive movements had a moral responsibility, he felt, to offer an alternative stance that affirmed people’s humanness while standing up to behavior that depersonalized others, inside or outside the movement. If activists did not strike a balance between asserting their responsibilities and respecting the rights of others, an equilibrium between justice and love, they would depersonalize not only their adversaries but themselves and their allies. They would lose their own humanity, and ultimate effectiveness, in the name of moral correctness.
If Martin King had had more time to reflect, if he had been able to take the sabbatical from the movement that he lusted for, he might have expanded his critique of depersonalization into a full-fledged philosophy. He started pursuing these ideas during the bus boycott and its aftermath as a way to flesh out his understanding of how to integrate personal and social reformation. The American sickness was simultaneously institutional and personal. He witnessed how in myriad ways the boycott and the ensuing civil rights crusade had engaged this duality. He was alarmed now that the two poles of liberation, personal and structural, were shooting off in opposite directions. “Do your own thing,” “anything goes,” whether smoking grass or looting stores, was not his idea of freedom but a mockery. Neither hippies nor hipsters were looking beyond their own pleasure to the “principalities and powers” that created the gaping chasm between white middle-class kids who were free to drop out and turn on and the black ghetto youth who were forced to. For the latter, freedom meant “nothing left to lose,” the refrain of a Janis Joplin hit song.
Yet the young Marxists and black nationalists had become so obsessed with “structure” that they lost sight of the actual people inhabiting the structures. King understood that the religions of structurelessness and of soulless structuralism—quests for meaning, for truth, for certitude—each led to dead ends, to a nihilism of the Spirit.
As he surveyed the shattered landscape of summer 1967, the summer of love and hate, he agonized not only about broken promises, his and others, but about all the centrifugal forces pulling the society apart. Chaos was drowning community. After all the movement’s trials and triumphs over the past decade, how could so many alienated youth of all colors hold such shallow understandings of freedom? How had he contributed to this tragic misunderstanding? “Freedom now” did not mean freedom from responsibility. Black Power should not mean freedom to shoot cops, to “burn, baby, burn.” As Plato had warned in his slamming of democracy, as Tocqueville had feared, freedom—which so many black people had died for—had become license, whether in the Haight-Ashbury hippie ghetto or on Detroit’s flaming streets. And, on a far grander scale, in the corporate boardroom, the congressional cloakroom, the White House situation room.
In an Ebenezer sermon at the beginning of July 1967, King seemed to foresee the conflagration that would engulf over a hundred cities by the end of the month.
“America is a great nation,” he shouted out, but if America doesn’t deal with its racism, “I’m convinced that God will bring down the curtains on this nation, the curtains of doom.
“You know,” he said, “there are times that you reap what you sow in history.” He pounded his big King James Bible on the pulpit. “I believe it! Be not deceived. God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. America must resolve this race problem, or this race problem will doom America.”52
Like the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah whom he personified, he believed he was speaking God’s own words in calling Americans to repent in order to ward off Armageddon. But he was pained as much by his emptiness of answers as by the overarching dilemma. He knew not what to do, where to go, to forestall civil war, to save the Union, to heal the national trauma. “We’ve got to learn to live together” was all he was sure of.
WITH THE FORTITUDE of a black woman reared in the rural South, Coretta King had lived with the ebbs and flows of her husband’s worsening depression for several years. She and his close aides could no longer deny his condition when it nearly incapacitated him on his Nobel Prize journey in December 1964. We will never know how much his chronic depression was caused by current stresses, genetic predisposition, early childhood pressures, or growing up black. He was never treated by psychotherapy or drugs, neither of which he would have considered.
Instead he self-medicated. On the road at least three weeks out of four, he was usually able to control his mood by willpower, frenetic activity, and partying. At home in Atlanta the depression was harder to keep hidden. Coretta bore the brunt of it. But through all the storm and stress she remained his most loyal and steadfast supporter. More than once she kept him from falling apart. Her faith in him and in “God with us” was unshakable.
Although she had seen him through many black moods, she was more worried than ever at the time of the July riots. He fell into a state of depression “greater than I had ever seen it before.”
“People expect me to have answers,” he confided to her. “I don’t have any answers. I don’t feel like speaking to people.” This was the man who thrived on human interaction. “I don’t have anything to tell them.”
She remembered a plaintive phone call from him at the Atlanta airport, on the edge of tears, telling her he had missed his flight to Louisville for a voter registration rally.
“I know why I missed my flight,” he said. “I really don’t want to go. I get tired of going and not having any answers.”
He had “begun to take this very personally,” she recalled, not knowing where the movement should head. “He would take on all these problems” as personal failures—the ghetto revolts, the unending brutal war—as if it were his God-given obligation to solve single-handedly the nation’s ills, to prevent the nation’s imminent doom. This was his voluminous public self speaking, his Whitmanesque cosmic self. It was all or nothing, opposite extremes. Was there no solid middle ground he could rest upon?
“People feel that nonviolence is failing,” he told her.
“This is not so,” she countered. “You mustn’t believe that people are losing faith in you. There are millions of people who have faith in you and believe in you and feel that you are our best hope. I believe in you, if that means anything.”
“Yes, that means a great deal.”
“Somehow,” she said, “you’ve just got to pull yourself out of this and go on. Too many people believe in you, and you’re going to have to believe that you’re right.”
Once again he groused that he didn’t have any answers.
“Somehow the answers will come,” she consoled him. “I’m sure they will.”53 Several hours past his usual lateness, he finally landed in Louisville and rallied the troops, despite his own despondency. He could count on his public self to go on automatic pilot when his inner self ran out of fuel.
He would not allow America to rest, he told the people in Louisville.
HE HAD HABITUALLY USED rich metaphors of darkness as a rhetorical device, sometimes sounding melodramatic. But now when he said it was “midnight in our world today,” he meant it. “We are experiencing a darkness so deep,” he told a Los Angeles congregation, “that we can hardly see which way to turn.”54 In his soul’s relentless tug-of-war between hope and despair, he usually managed to give hope the edge, in his public words anyway. But now the dark chambers of pessimism were closing in on him like claustrophobic jail cells.
He clung to his faith, however, that the divine force was buried in the deepest darkness. That if he carried his candle of faith deeper and still deeper into the heart of darkness, the darkness at the heart of life, he would discover the blinding light at the center of God’s creation, the fire at the core of his own soul. Like ebony skin, the darkest dark emitted the brightest glow. The dark, absorbing all light, was not the absence but the fullness of light. But the light in deepest darkness was invisible to the mortal eye.
FEELING GUILTY AND UNWORTHY for not having answers, he nevertheless knew, like Augustine and all true Christians, that his faith had integrity only if it was permeated by doubt. His faith would be weak if it did not wrestle ceaselessly with doubt. Faith had no meaning, certainly no might, unless it was called into question, raked over the coals of inquisition. In a paradox of the Spirit, doubt fortified his faith. Faith tested by doubt, doubt enlightened by faith, lay at the core of his double consciousness. He lived in both worlds at once.
Notwithstanding his perpetual questioning, he had always felt so certain of what was right and wrong, to the point of preacherly arrogance, but his moral certainties were not helping him to find the right way forward. While generally praising, reviewers of his new book found a “weariness and bewilderment” in his prognosis, “confusion and doubt” in his ideas, a book “groping for something which it never finds.”55 He did not intend the work to be programmatic, but neither did he want it read as a confession of paralysis. Why We Can’t Wait had answered its question. Where Do We Go from Here did not.
Where to go was a much tougher question, perhaps unanswerable in 1967. In calling for new expressions of grassroots democratic power, King was following Bob Moses’s precept that good leaders ask certain questions and ordinary people answer them. Asking the right questions, in the right ways, might be the best servanthood he could offer.
SCLC PULLED OUT all the stops for its tenth-anniversary convention at Ebenezer in mid-August 1967. Even a special award for and speech by actor Sidney Poitier, first black winner of a best-actor Oscar, did not upstage King’s centrality. Firmly in command, he betrayed little hint, except on his weary face, of his ravaging doubts, his beleaguered faith. That was reserved for his inner circle. In his presidential address, probably the most militant he ever gave, he dwelt on the overriding theme of revolution in the streets. He did not mince words.
He commenced by quoting Victor Hugo, whose Les Misérables was a favorite novel: “If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.”
The leaders of white society caused the darkness. “They created discrimination. They created slums. They perpetuate unemployment, ignorance, and poverty.” The crimes of the rioters were “derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.
“Let us say it boldly, that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and were compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.” Congress, which dutifully spent billions on the war but had refused paltry millions to free children from rats, “is now running amuck with racism.”
He quoted the warning of the conservative McCone commission after Watts that “the existing breech, if allowed to persist, could in time split our society irretrievably.”
He was far from condoning violent revolt. He denied that the riots were insurrections, because they were leaderless, unorganized, and lacked goals, thus flaming out quickly. He deplored the recklessness of “self-styled revolutionists” like Carmichael and Rap Brown who called for insurrection without foot soldiers, without chance of victory. Their rhetoric was not even helpful to raise consciousness because lack of broad support for revolt doomed it to defeat, bringing “deeper despair and helplessness.” If armed struggle could not win victories, it could never win a mass following. But it was equally self-defeating for moderate leaders, as they had done from Birmingham to Detroit, to urge enraged black people not to ruffle white feathers.
King’s prophecy from his Birmingham jail cell, which he himself had left fallow, was now bursting from him like overripe fruit. He was advocating a dynamic middle course between pseudo-insurrection and complacent gradualism that pursued the creative extremism of militant civil disobedience. He called it the “militant middle.” He explained that mass marches had been powerful tools in the South because they were outlawed. It was rebellion. But in northern cities mass marches were familiar, respectable, and generally nonthreatening. Something more audacious was needed to turn the ghettos around.
“To raise protest to an appropriate level for cities,” he announced, “to invest it with aggressive but nonviolent qualities,” it was now necessary to apply mass civil disobedience as an alternative to rioting. “To dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot because it can be longer lasting, costly to the society but not wantonly destructive. Moreover, it is more difficult for government to quell it by superior force. Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force. It is purposeless to tell Negroes they should not be enraged when they should be. Indeed”—here he sounded like anticolonial revolutionary Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, the bible of black nationalism—“they will be mentally healthier if they do not suppress rage but vent it constructively and use its energy peacefully but forcefully to cripple the operations of an oppressive society.” He believed that nonviolent insurrection could finally free poor blacks from the psychological death of ghetto slavery.
He pointed out that civil disobedience had never been tried on a mass scale in the North. Even in the South it had “rarely been seriously organized and resolutely pursued.” Too often “it was employed incorrectly” and “resorted to only when there was an absence of mass support and its purpose was headline-hunting.” Was he pointing the finger at himself? He recommended to this full house of organizers that mass civil disobedience in northern cities be conducted weekly along with sit-ins for jobs at plant gates, and thousands of jobless youth camping out in Washington like the Bonus Marchers during the Great Depression. Disrupting business as usual in such ways would have an impact of “earthquake proportions,” he predicted.
All of this was urgent, but it was not enough. Mass direct action must be combined with the continuing quest to build an effective coalition to win electoral power. They must replace Johnson with a candidate committed to both peace and economic justice (King had made it clear he himself was not running) and elect a new congressional majority to stem its rightward spin. Were these strategies at loggerheads? Although he no doubt worried about it, he did not publicly question whether mass urban disruption, while sublimating riots, would sharpen the white backlash and hinder efforts to win a progressive majority. He may have hoped that disciplined and principled disruption would shake loose the conscience-stricken elements of the growing backlash bloc from the hard-core racists and mindless patriots.
To see coalition politics as the “exclusive method,” which Rustin had long been urging, “is as futile as it is disastrous. Negroes are not in a mood to wait for change by the slower, tedious, often frustrating road of political action.” This dilemma recalled the early 1960s’ contention between desegregation and voting rights campaigns, but now with higher stakes. King said that while urban blacks were learning to value electoral insurgency for long-term progress, they needed “the social adrenaline of quick changes” offered by direct action. It would be difficult to mix electoral action with nonviolent disruption, and each might fray the other, but he saw no sense in giving up one for the other.
He concluded his dramatic address to the convention by imploring Americans to heed Jefferson’s warning: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”56 America was living on borrowed time. Judgment Day was coming closer.
Martin King was able to let down his veil preaching at black Baptist churches. He was able to reveal slivers of his hidden self, as he rarely did to racially mixed congregations or in public speeches. So he did on the last Sunday of August 1967 at Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church, in the heart of the Chicago slums that he had made his home the year before. Near the end of a long sermon decrying the abandonment of spiritual ends for material pleasure, he advised that people needed to value not only their interdependence with each other, all over the globe, but their dependence on God. For the first time in a decade, he publicly relived his kitchen conversion of January 1956.
“You can have some strange experiences at midnight,” he said. This time, he made clear to rapt listeners that the inner voice he heard commanding him to hang on for righteousness was the voice of Jesus. He was preaching to black Baptists, of course. But it also reflected something deeper: his feeling dependent not only on God, but more than ever on his personal relationship with Jesus, to help him get through these midnight days. Jesus had become his personal God.
“And so I’m not worried about tomorrow. I get weary every now and then. The future looks difficult and dim, but I’m not worried about it ultimately because I have faith in God.
“I don’t mind telling you this morning that sometimes I feel discouraged. (All right) I felt discouraged in Chicago. As I move through Mississippi and Georgia and Alabama, I feel discouraged. (Yes, sir) Living every day under the threat of death, I feel discouraged sometimes. Living every day under extensive criticisms, even from Negroes, I feel discouraged sometimes. (Applause) Yes, sometimes I feel discouraged and feel my work’s in vain. But then the Holy Spirit (Yes) revives my soul again.
“There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.”57
. . .
WHEN YOUNG NAACP LAWYER Marian Wright was a senior at Spelman College in 1960, she heard King give the Founders’ Day address. More than the elegant power of his oratory, she was impressed with his openness about his doubts and uncertainties. “He talked about taking that one step even if you can’t see the whole way, and how you just have to keep moving.” As she was growing up in rural South Carolina, her parents instilled in her a mission to serve society. At Spelman she was jailed in an Atlanta lunch-counter sit-in, graduated as valedictorian, then went on to Yale Law School. In 1963 she worked on voter registration in Mississippi. After NAACP leader Medgar Evers was gunned down she moved in with the movement. The first black woman to pass the Mississippi bar, she devoted herself to legal help for poor blacks.
It felt like ages since Freedom Summer had shed some light on the misery of the Mississippi poor. Since then Wright had been searching for ways to keep Mississippi in the public eye, to show that the black poor were only getting poorer. Even the progress in voting rights was a mixed blessing. In many cases people who dared register, like Fannie Lou Hamer, were thrown out of work, kicked out of their homes, driven from poverty to penury. In March 1967 Wright testified before the Senate subcommittee on poverty about starvation in the Magnolia State, tenant-farm families going hungry while Senator Eastland and his ilk were raking in millions for not growing crops. The affluent senators were skeptical of her claims. She took them on a tour of the Delta.
She walked into a hot, filthy shack with New York senator Robert Kennedy, who had won a Senate seat in 1964 after resigning as attorney general. She could hardly believe her eyes when the well-dressed senator, who had barred cameras at the door, got down on his knees on the grimy floor with a child who looked dead. Nearly in tears, the father of ten said soothing words and touched the ragged child. The emaciated mom was scrubbing dishes in a tin tub.
When in July President Johnson reacted to the riots with one-sided hostility toward the rioters, RFK became convinced that the President would do nothing more to fight poverty. In late summer the senator was lounging by his pool at his Virginia estate with Wright and his aide Peter Edelman (whom Wright later married).
“The only way there’s going to be change,” he said to his guests, “is if it’s more uncomfortable for the Congress not to act than it is for them to act. You’ve got to get a whole lot of poor people who just come to Washington and stay here until Congress gets really embarrassed and they have to act.”58 When Wright said good-bye she mentioned that she would stop to see King in Atlanta on her way home to Mississippi.
“Tell him to bring the poor people to Washington.” The man who six years before had tried to persuade activists to halt their freedom ride and then, behind their backs, permitted Mississippi officials to jail them in Jackson was now calling, in effect, for a freedom ride in reverse.
Wright was shaken by how depressed King was. “He was real down that day when I walked in,” she recalled, distressed about what to do. His dark mood lifted abruptly when she passed on Kennedy’s offhand suggestion. He “instinctively felt that that was right and treated me as if I was an emissary of grace, something that brought him some light. Out of that, the Poor People’s Campaign was born.”59
That evening Coretta King was surprised to see her husband in a good mood. He was excited about the new idea.
KING’S CALL at the August SCLC gathering for nonviolent “dislocation” in cities to overcome poverty had drawn headlines all over the country. How committed was he to this path of creative extremism? The address had been drafted mainly by Levison. Was he doing more than mouthing his leftwing adviser’s script? Was there a gap, as there had often been in the past, between his fighting words and his more temperate actions? Was he crying wolf?
Moreover, he would need prodigious energy to lead this gutsy campaign but was more depleted than ever. “I’m tired now,” he said to an Atlanta mass meeting. “I’ve been in this thing thirteen years now and I’m really tired.” Folksinger Joan Baez recalled his despondency at a September staff retreat. As people were relaxing after a long day of talk, King drinking whiskey, “I heard him saying that he wanted to just be a preacher, and he was sick of it all. That the Lord called him to be a preacher, and not to do all this stuff, and he wanted to leave it.”60
At this mid-September retreat in rural Virginia, SCLC staff debated strategies and tactics for the new urban campaign. While Bevel pushed for a primary focus on the war, including supporting draft resistance, and Hosea Williams pleaded for them not to abandon the South, their chief pulled rank and insisted that a poor people’s presence in Washington be the driving priority.
THE COLLISION WOULD LIKELY have happened sooner or later. The summer’s conflagration in the cities carried its fury from the burned-out streets to a more civilized venue in which to “get whitey,” Chicago’s swank Palmer House. The drive for Black Power was now at flood tide, overpowering hesitation on the left with its arsenal of guilt. Many whites seemed to enjoy the role of victim rather than executioner, blind to the path of moral equality. The ghost of Atlantic City resurrected in Chicago. SNCC and allies were getting Pyrrhic revenge for their clobbering by the Johnson forces in August 1964. But on Labor Day weekend 1967, what the insurgents wrecked was not the crowning of Johnson but an effort to dethrone him.
The National Conference for New Politics was founded in fall 1965 to run peace candidates for Congress. It had little success in that arena, but pinned its hopes on challenging LBJ’s reelection. Even though he disavowed interest, King felt flattered that, after April 15, many left liberals who had not given up on electoral politics were enthralled by the prospect of a King peace candidacy, with Spock as running mate. The pediatrician was as gung-ho about a third-party campaign as the preacher was reticent. Despite reservations King had accepted an invitation to give the keynote address at the NCNP convention in Chicago, called to craft an electoral strategy for 1968. It would have been hard to turn it down when the husband of SCLC’s biggest donor was a main organizer.
Focusing on the three great evils of racism, exploitation, and the Vietnam War, his speech hit all of the notes he had been blowing for months. He stood before an assembly of over three thousand activists from two hundred organizations, a historic coming together of the American left.
“Seldom, if ever,” he began, “has such a diverse and truly ecumenical gathering convened under the aegis of politics in our nation.” They had come from dusty plantations and depressing ghettos, from universities and flourishing suburbs, “from Appalachian poverty and from conscience stricken wealth.” They had come to Chicago because they had all seen “the coming of Judgment.”61
He had been warned that young militants might heckle him. They did. What disturbed him more was that some ignored him, talked among themselves, walked out. They would not listen to a message that he believed spoke to their rage, filled in the gaps of revolutionary appeals that were otherwise sound and fury signifying nothing. Dispirited, he left town right after, followed by Andy Young, an NCNP board member, and Julian Bond, its cochair.
King’s rude reception by the black and white New Left was only the prelude to a weekend of guilt supreme. The gathering surfaced divisions never to be healed—a day of judgment for the movement, if not for the nation.
The black caucus led by SNCC and the Black Panthers, comprising about one-tenth of the assembly, emotionally strong-armed the majority into giving them half the votes and committee seats; these were “tests of sincerity.” They then bulldozed passage of a thirteen-point manifesto that included “white civilizing committees” to humanize the savage whites, and a condemnation of the “imperialist Zionist war” fought by Israel in June. “We are just a little tail,” one white delegate reportedly gushed, “on the end of a very powerful black panther. And I want to be on that tail—if they’ll let me.”
The near majority who opposed the radical takeover were embittered. NCNP founder Arthur Waskow railed that “one thousand liberals are trying to become good radicals and they think they can do it by castrating themselves.” When the black caucus took control, a woman set fire to her delegate card and walked out. “This is the old politics,” she said, “not the new politics.”62
The women’s caucus was incensed. These radical women were already fed up with treatment as second-class activists by “male chauvinists” in SDS and other New Left groups. (The term sexist had not been invented quite yet.) When in a condescending manner those in charge blocked Shulamith Firestone from reading the caucus’s resolution on male privilege—on the ground that women’s oppression was trivial next to racism—the women boiled over. It wasn’t like Rosa Parks in Montgomery, but this was the spark they needed to launch their own movement. Firestone and her sisters stormed out and formed the first women’s liberation groups.
NCNP and its dream of a new populist party for peace and justice came crashing down. Now the antiwar movement, growing fast, was polarized between the “Dump Johnson” forces who chose to work within the Democratic Party and the radical legions who felt contempt for “establishment politics.” They were determined to build democracy in the streets. On more of a tightrope walk than ever, King was still trying to straddle insurgency inside and outside the electoral system. He was finding it more and more difficult to talk out of both sides of his mouth. He might have to make a choice.
Presidential politics might be a chimera for the left, but black voters in big northern cities were poised to elect African-American mayors for the first time. This would be a breakthrough for black empowerment. King showed his commitment both to the electoral route and to black self-determination in Cleveland, eighth-largest U.S. city, where SCLC was conducting voter registration and rent strikes. Ohio state legislator Carl Stokes, who had grown up poor in a Cleveland project, had nearly defeated the Democratic mayor in 1965 and was trying again. He felt ambivalent about SCLC’s presence. They proved indispensable in mobilizing the black vote, but he worried they would alienate liberal whites he depended on. King and SCLC felt they deserved credit for Stokes’s primary victory over the incumbent, one of the first times that a registration campaign actually delivered the goods. But Stokes never acknowledged SCLC’s assistance. He asked King not to help out in the general election, which he narrowly won, making history.
King discovered in Cleveland, where he had invested considerable resources, that if militant black nationalists considered him an Uncle Tom, moderate purveyors of Black Power saw him as incendiary, a threat to gradual racial progress. Rather than expanding, the turf of radical moderation he had been cultivating seemed to be shrinking, especially now that he himself had adopted the language of revolution. His balancing act was facing a free fall.
When King had looked out over the sea of antiwar protesters on April 15 at the U.N., a greater sea than that of 1963, he must have wondered whether a similar march on Washington might turn the tide of war. In the following weeks, while pursuing other peace strategies like Vietnam Summer and the long-shot effort to replace Johnson, he moved forward with a notion to re-create the magic of “I Have a Dream.” Could he unify the far-flung forces of peace as, in his glory days, he had done for the civil rights crusade? He called a meeting of peace leaders in early July across the street from Riverside Church, where he pushed his idea for a mass march in Washington that would couple opposition to the war and to dismantling the poverty program, linking the triple evils. A few days later the Newark riots exploded across the Hudson River. Everything changed.
As July turned to August the idea of a peaceful march on Washington, which might have caught the movement’s imagination three months before, now seemed to many like a relic of the past. No matter how much activists disdained the ghetto violence, and the incendiary rhetoric of SNCC and the Black Panthers, all were caught up in the rush to escalate tactics to stop the war. In late May the Spring Mobilization Committee gathered several hundred activists in Washington to plan a different kind of spectacle in the capital. They would march on the Pentagon in October to “confront the warmakers.” Even though a rally at the Lincoln Memorial was part of the plan, King chose to steer clear. He couldn’t help but feel resentful that peace leaders weren’t listening to him, when he had gone so far out on a limb for peace.
Liberal critics continued to pillory him. Black columnist Carl Rowan, who had alerted King to the false boycott settlement in January 1956, had criticized his antiwar stand back in April. In a September Reader’s Digest article that reached millions, the ex-director of the U.S. Information Agency condemned King’s “tragic decision” to oppose the war, blaming his hubris and his Communist ties.63 King countered in an ABC News interview that Rowan was accusing dissenters of disloyalty, that he was engaging in McCarthy’s tactics in alleging Communist influence on him.64 As he weathered public blows and invasive espionage, he saw that the price of the mad war was not only blood in the streets at home, but the specter of a new McCarthyism eroding the Bill of Rights and laying waste fundamental freedoms.
A NEW ERA of McCarthyite repression seemed to be falling hardest on those young men refusing to cooperate with conscription. Antidraft activists had had a field day likening the Selective Service to totalitarian rule, not only induction but the channeling process that denied free choice of a job or career. Now in an ironic twist it was those publicly saying no to this arguably un-American institution who were being red-baited as Communist pawns. Congress had moved with alacrity to criminalize destruction or nonpossession of draft cards after a handful of pacifists had burned theirs. Caught without your draft card, go to prison for up to five years. This sounded like the Soviet Union, or South Africa. Murderers and rapists often got off with less.
So it was not surprising, in the face of such high risks, that the movement to renounce deferments, return draft cards, and openly refuse induction had taken hold by fall 1967 as the moral cutting edge of the antiwar cause. Through the summer of love and hate, David Harris and his cohorts roamed the West Coast from San Diego to Seattle, searching out prospective noncooperators, telling their story to small groups or one-to-one, explaining why they had chosen the role of criminal. Sometimes they played music and smoked marijuana together. “Part of the process was creating a sense of intimacy between us,” Harris recalled, “which we felt was the basis of our organization.”65 The organizers planted a seedbed of local Resistance groups, mainly around campuses, that sprouted in all parts of the country, coalescing into a loose federation linked by common action and political style. Rejecting formal leadership, stressing consensus decision making, Resistance chapters did not have officers, because resisters faced the shared risk of prison, and thus, like early SNCC, everyone was a leader.
As Harris had promised at April’s big San Francisco rally, on October 16 about fifteen hundred men turned in their draft cards at churches and federal buildings on the first National Day of Noncooperation, beating expectations. Thousands more sent back draft cards in later turn-ins. Spock, Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, and other members of Resist, a support group, delivered a briefcase packed with forsaken cards to the Justice Department. Spock, Coffin, and two others were later convicted in a celebrated trial of conspiring to aid and abet draft refusal.
In the San Francisco Bay Area the Resistance had joined in coalition with SDS and pacifist groups to mount Stop the Draft Week, aimed at shutting or slowing down the Oakland induction center. The tense coalition broke apart over tactics: traditional symbolic civil disobedience versus something more assertive that might actually close the facility serving the heart of the West Coast. The latter camp, desiring to march in step with Black Power, sought to demonstrate the “seriousness” of white radicals. The factions compromised by dividing the week. The Resistance and War Resisters League conducted a peaceful sit-in the same day cards were collected at the San Francisco federal building. Next day troops led by Berkeley SDS aggressively blocked the induction center and nearby streets in a taste of guerrilla warfare. Police routed them.
In a return engagement on Friday they outwitted the cops and kept them at bay, for a while surrounded, using cars, benches, and potted trees as barricades. This spontaneous action prevented inductee-laden buses from getting in for three hours. In the heat of battle protesters had invented a controversial new weapon, “mobile tactics,” that lay in a gray area between militant nonviolence and armed struggle.
That fall SDS and the New Left were growing faster than ever. SDS chapters in every state except Alaska numbered more than three hundred. Although they supported draft resistance and joined Stop the Draft Week, their main target was university complicity, particularly war-related recruiting. Campus confrontations proliferated. Some were aimed at Dow Chemical, whose flesh-frying jellied gasoline, napalm, served as the most heinous symbol of the Vietnam carnage. Its child victims splayed in living color across Ramparts magazine had propelled King on his irreversible antiwar path.
The autumn’s most explosive campus action occurred at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. A determined nonviolent obstruction of Dow recruiting by several hundred students brought a ferocious assault by riot-clad police who bloodied students in the manner of Selma and Birmingham. A shocked crowd did what they could to aid the injured and stymie the cops. A daring cadre let air out of a paddy wagon’s tires and immobilized it with their bodies. Police responded with more beatings, tear gas, and Mace, a paralyzing nerve gas. The furious crowd counterattacked with rocks and bricks until the battle died down. Never before had an American campus witnessed such flagrant police brutality, not even in the South. It sparked a short-lived strike by students and sympathetic faculty.
The battles of Oakland and Madison built up to the frontal assault that weekend on the global headquarters of the American military colossus. Organized by the National Mobilization Committee, successor to the Spring Mobilization and the widest left coalition yet—despite SCLC’s absence—the spectacle drew a potpourri of participants by offering a peaceful rally for newcomers, a kaleidoscopic “be-in” for hippies, and militant civil disobedience for those choosing to put their bodies on the line. They intended the confrontation at the Pentagon to be a “creative synthesis of Gandhi and guerrilla,” as chief organizer Dave Dellinger depicted it, nonviolent but forceful. SDS had reluctantly endorsed the April mobilization; like SNCC’s criticism of King, they felt that big media-centered marches stifled long-term grassroots organizing. SDS chapters decided to take part in this one when it appeared a real confrontation was brewing. The feds delayed granting permits and deployed thousands of combat-ready troops, fresh from Vietnam, Santo Domingo, and Detroit, to defend the Pentagon from its own citizens.
The steering committee stayed up most of the night before, arguing tactics. Should they treat the troops as the enemy, or as fellow victims and potential allies? Unlike in Oakland, the views of the radical pacifists prevailed. They would conduct a teach-in to the troops, who were the same age as most protesters, but darker skinned. Had he known about it, King might have been pleasantly surprised. Here was a constructive middle course between pacifist moral witness and tactical adventurism that might spiral into chaos.
The next morning tens of thousands rallied at the Lincoln Memorial, listening to speeches and to singing by Phil Ochs and Peter, Paul, and Mary. To stunned silence a speaker announced the execution of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara, who personified the spirit of revolt. Half the crowd crossed the Potomac River and congregated in a vast Pentagon parking lot. They witnessed an odd spectacle. A congeries of “witches, warlocks, holymen, seers, prophets, mystics, saints, sorcerers, shamans, troubadours, minstrels, bards, roadmen, and madmen” led by the anarchist Diggers and the Fugs rock band invoked all the magic they could muster to levitate the Pentagon and exorcise its evil spirits.66 Chants of “Out, demon, out!” filled the crisp autumn air. Eyewitnesses reported the mighty fortress rising ten feet off the ground.
An SDS cadre and a “Revolutionary Contingent” broke through a cordon of MPs and paratroopers and seized high ground on a plaza at the Pentagon’s north entrance. Some made it inside but were beaten and busted by troops lying in wait. A group of notables—including Spock, poet Robert Lowell, writer Dwight MacDonald, and linguist Noam Chomsky—maneuvered to another side of the complex to do quiet civil disobedience. MPs swooped down on them but arrested only the less famous. By late afternoon several thousand had mounted the steps to the plaza. Their front lines pressed up against solid rows of rigid young soldiers clutching bayoneted M-14s.
Following the eleventh-hour scenario, protesters communicated directly to the troops, through bullhorns and face-to-face, to try to win their hearts and minds. Over and over they urged the soldiers to “join us!” They talked gently—“You are our brothers”—and sang to them, stuck flowers in their rifle barrels. Three or four put down their rifles and seemed about to switch sides when MPs swiftly stole them away. Other soldiers reportedly abandoned the front line and were locked up in the Pentagon stockade. According to GIs’ testimony a lot of them opposed the war and were touched by the teach-in.67
Defense secretary Robert McNamara and a top general oversaw the massing of forces from the Pentagon’s roof. When he had met with the President to prepare for the protest, he recalled, “I told him we faced a difficult problem, because the Pentagon has no natural defenses.” As he looked down upon the siege, “I was scared,” McNamara confessed to a reporter. “An uncontrolled mob is a frightening thing. At the same time, I could not help but think that had the protesters been more disciplined—Gandhi-like—they could have achieved their objective of shutting us down. All they had to do was lie on the pavement around the building. We would have found it impossible to remove enough of them fast enough to keep the Pentagon open.”68
As night fell and cold set in, protesters built campfires out of posters and debris. Marijuana joints floated around. Someone yelled, “Burn a draft card! Keep warm!” Hundreds of tiny flames flickered in the darkness. In an intense moment of solidarity and awe, people sang “Silent Night.” But the military high command would not let all be calm. MPs and U.S. marshals sporadically beat and arrested people all evening. Late at night, TV cameras gone to bed, troops formed a flying wedge and attacked their unarmed foes, thrashing them with clubs and rifle butts. Young women were hurt the most. Blood stained the steps.
Peace returned by Sunday dawn. Many of the weary protesters departed. But a hard core of a few hundred stayed put until midnight, when they were ordered to disperse. Singing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” “America the Beautiful,” and, over and over, “We Shall Overcome,” they calmly offered themselves for jail. Packed into army trucks, they were driven underground into the bowels of the Pentagon, kept in utter darkness. They had made their destination at last, though in custody of Uncle Sam. At dawn, like a few hundred arrested earlier, the prisoners found themselves in a federal workhouse in Occoquan, Virginia. It was the same prison where suffragists, arrested for vigiling at the White House gate, had held hunger strikes during World War I, force-fed through tubes.
Fifty years later protesters (women and men separated) sat on bunks in the large barracks and made plans for furthering the revolution. Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan and a few others fasted. March leaders Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman concocted a new guerrilla group called the Yippies to lead the hippie masses. Hoffman wrapped himself in a white sheet and danced around like a madman.
The nonviolent siege of the Pentagon and Stop the Draft Week turned the corner for the antiwar movement. It now became broader, bolder, and more divided. Movement liberals and radicals parted company, committed to divergent strategies. The former aimed at winning over the majority to oppose the war, to be consummated, they hoped, in the 1968 elections. Radicals, lacking faith in electoral politics, aimed at raising the social cost of the war to a level that would make it unmanageable. Or if Johnson stayed his course, to make the nation ungovernable until the war ended. A big debate ensued about whether this critical mass of disruption could be achieved nonviolently.
SDS leader Greg Calvert had been one of those pushing hardest on the Pentagon protest’s steering committee for the tactic of compassionate militancy. “I left the Pentagon absolutely convinced radical nonviolence had worked, that it was possible to confront the state nonviolently and effectively without falling into adventuristic tactics.”69 Other Pentagon veterans, including Calvert’s SDS comrades, were just as convinced that the protesters were not aggressive enough, that the lesson of the Pentagon was that the military establishment was more vulnerable than they had thought. They should have fought harder to break through the lines.
Two images of revolution vied for the movement’s future, Calvert suggested in retrospect. “One was a vision of long-range organizing born of the New Left’s traditions of decentralist democracy and the spiritual and moral values embodied in nonviolence, but coupled now with a new sense of the power of active nonviolence focused on communication to new constituencies rather than simply on moral protest through civil disobedience. The other image projected direct confrontations and street disruptions, and increasingly abandoned the nonviolent tradition of the Movement in favor of a new brand of macho militancy.”70 As we will see, King was groping toward a way of reconciling these clashing images.
Never distinct, these two images cast dividing lines within the movement. The adventurists, whose tactics played well with their black nationalist allies, captured the imagination of the youth revolt and “seized the time.” The alternative of militant compassion, especially of appealing to soldiers, and potential soldiers, not to fight—that strategy persevered against mounting odds but eventually was overrun.
The Pentagon siege was a turning point too for the Johnson administration. Despite LBJ’s smug pronouncements, the administration was thrown awry by its magnitude and militancy. McNamara, who kept to himself his grave doubts about the war, was on his way out as defense czar. He didn’t know whether he resigned or was fired. The White House berated the military chiefs for lousy intelligence. Johnson ordered the FBI, CIA, and other agencies drastically to step up surveillance and infiltration of antiwar groups. Soon the FBI had over a thousand agents spying on the New Left, plus several thousand informants. The CIA unleashed its illegal “Operation Chaos” to disrupt radical activism. But as quickening events would tell, it was too late for the Johnson administration to stem the tide.
KING WAS MUTE about Stop the Draft Week and the Pentagon. By October, with Bevel prodding him to support draft resistance, he had all but explicitly endorsed refusal to cooperate with conscription. For months he had been calling for conscientious objection. Did he mean official CO status with alternate service (even a noncombatant role in the military), which few could attain, or did he mean illegal noncooperation? He probably meant legal if possible, illegal if no other recourse. No doubt in private he supported the national draft-card turn-in and the disciplined sit-in in Oakland, where his friend Joan Baez was arrested. The activist folksinger, along with Harry Belafonte, had been performing benefit concerts for SCLC during the fall.
Apparently he had felt the proposed Pentagon protest to be unwise, misguided, even foolhardy. But wasn’t it the kind of militant nonviolent disruption he had called for in August? Did he have a double standard when it came to the peace movement?
Besides feeling snubbed, he had good reason not to hook up with the Pentagon operation. The decentralized civil disobedience must have looked like a minefield. Unlike SCLC direct actions, it would be neither organized nor disciplined—McNamara was correct—nor would there be nonviolent training. The protesters did not have a broad base of national support, nor had they prepared the ground with educational work, which Gandhi deemed essential. King’s call for militant disruption in the cities, by contrast, culminated a dozen years of steady movement building, successive stages of protest.
Yet despite its chaotic moments and lack of discipline, the Pentagon protest proved to be an invigorating step forward for the peace movement. With surprising success it had offered a palette of civil disobedience, small and large—draft-card burning, dialogue with soldiers, sit-ins, sit-downs, stand-ups, and the final refusal to leave. If King had swallowed his doubts, he might have been able to shape it into a disciplined nonviolent confrontation of a size and impact not seen since Gandhi’s salt satyagraha in 1930. In any event, it was clear that by fall 1967 he did not oppose mass civil disobedience against the war. He simply held high standards for any direct action he might support, especially if he risked jail.
He publicly stated that he wished he was of draft age so he could resist the draft like Muhammad Ali.71 But age did not have to hold him back. If he had unequivocally supported draft resistance, actively “aided and abetted” young men to renounce deferments and to refuse induction, he might have helped make resistance to conscription a more effective strategy. A critical mass of draft resisters in 1967 and 1968 would have made it harder to prosecute the ground war in South Vietnam, both by withdrawing conscripts and by hurting combat morale. King might have been accused of sedition if not treason and faced a long prison term. It would have been the trial of the century.
Draft resistance did keep growing during the next two years, but it proved more successful in ending the draft than in stopping the war.
One reason that King didn’t join Spock, Coffin, Norman Mailer, and other notables sitting in at the Pentagon was purely practical. He had been ordered to go to jail in Birmingham. The Supreme Court in June had narrowly affirmed King’s conviction, along with the convictions of Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, Wyatt Walker, and a few others, for contempt of court when they marched in violation of the injunction on Good Friday 1963. King felt frustrated that he was to be penalized a second time for a peaceful assembly that had led to a noble end, the historic Civil Rights Act. Just when he was striving to make nonviolence the weapon of the strong, it was being shown as not worth the price.
Dressed in his denim going-to-jail garb, he looked depressed to well-wishers who gave him and three companions a jubilant send-off at Atlanta airport just before Halloween. He had plenty to read for five days behind bars. Besides the Bible, he brought William Styron’s just published Confessions of Nat Turner and John Kenneth Galbraith’s New Industrial State. His choice of reading hinted at his mind’s wanderlust. In the historical novel Styron idealized Turner’s bloody 1831 slave revolt as a prophetic mission and probed whether violence against racial oppression was justified. Economist Galbraith’s new book examined how large corporations dominated the government.
Hardly had the steel doors closed than he got sick with a bad cold. He had little voice when he and his jailmates were cheered at a Birmingham mass meeting upon their release. But he found enough strength to assert that their 1963 Birmingham movement would be the model for his militant campaign for economic justice. Their troubled city had showed the world how powerful nonviolent disruption could be. Still adept at turning a bad deal to his advantage, he was getting mileage from his jail sojourn after all.
“Now we started out here in Birmingham,” he said. “We struggled. And you know we got this city to the place it couldn’t function. Birmingham could not function until it dealt with our problem. You remember that?
“We’ve got to take this same Birmingham experience and apply it to the economic situation that we face.” Through his hoarse voice he vented his anger:
“We’ve got to make it known that until our problem is solved, America may have many, many days, but they will be full of trouble. There will be no rest, there will be no tranquility in this country, until the nation comes to terms with our problem.”72
. . .
AFTER THANKSGIVING, at another staff retreat on St. Helena Island, King offered a full analysis of “the state of the movement.” Again he played down the immorality of rioting in the “domestic colony”—stressing its damage to property, not people—and played up the sins of white society.
“The Negro who runs wild in a riot has been given the example of his own government running wild in the world.” Reaffirming his faith in nonviolence, despite its battering by the year’s events, he explained that it “must be adapted to urban conditions and urban moods.” It must “mature to a new level, to correspond to heightened black impatience and stiffened white resistance.” The disruption it inflicted must not be clandestine or surreptitious, but open. “It is not necessary to infest it with guerrilla romanticism”—a swipe at the Black Panthers and SNCC as well as the white New Left. Just five days earlier, Black Panther minister of defense Huey Newton, patrolling the police with a pistol and a law book, was pulled over by two Oakland cops. In the ensuing gunfight he was shot in the stomach, killed one cop, and wounded the other. The shots were heard round the world and made Newton, charged with murder, a guerrilla superstar on the scale of freshly dead Che Guevara.
King was determined to seek a better way. Mass civil disobedience “as a new stage of struggle,” he claimed, “can transmute the deep anger of the ghetto into a creative force.”
Like any revolutionary strategist worth his salt, he spelled out the agents of revolutionary change—disaffected American youth. They comprised three overlapping groups. First, the majority of young people (white and black) who were alienated to some degree, but not willing to take risks that might jeopardize their futures. Second, a large minority who had become hippies. Third, a smaller minority, the radicals, who hungered for action, “direct, self-transforming, and structure-transforming action.” The hippies were not seeking social change but flight from society. When occasionally they protested, it was not “to better the political world, but to give expression to their own world.” But escapism was no solution. The nonconformity and creative maladjustment of all three groups, he claimed, were spawned by committed black youth, who had transformed themselves and their values to build a culture of resistance.
He believed that SCLC’s new strategy of “massive active nonviolent resistance to the evils of the modern system” could bring about an “action synthesis” that might unify the disaffected youth in a shared journey toward meaningful change, getting tangible results while healing divisions of race, class, and politics. Radicals would offer the burning urgency of action, the hippie sector the need for inner peace, and the silent majority of youth would bring to the table realism, respect for traditional values, and openness to honorable compromise.
Then he took a leaf from the book that had fanned the fire of young militants as his own new book had not—Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. He invoked the French-trained psychiatrist’s call to advance humanity to a higher level by refusing to emulate values of the old order; the revolutionary must “set afoot a new man.” Unlike Fanon, he insisted that the people reborn must reject the old order’s addiction to violence.
He always liked to surprise his staff. Just as abruptly as he would go off to pray, he suddenly performed a wedding ceremony, to marry himself. Was he being funny or dead serious?
“I have taken a vow,” he said. “I, Martin Luther King, take thee, nonviolence, to be my wedded wife, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.”73 It was not a jest.
“I am going on in that faith and with that determination.” He said that if they could escalate nonviolent action, “we will be able to go to Washington, we will be able to move through the cities of our country. Many will wonder where we are coming from. Our only answer will be that we are coming up out of great trials and tribulations. We will be seeking a city whose Builder and Maker is God, and if we will do this we will be able to turn this nation upside down and right side up.”74
. . .
ALTHOUGH WHITE RADICALS could never match the drama of Huey Newton’s shoot-out with Oakland police, they sought to apply “mobile tactics” wherever they could. Running around midtown Manhattan after dark, throwing eggs and blood at limousines, scattered by police on horseback, a few thousand protesters failed to prevent Secretary of State Dean Rusk from speaking at the New York Hilton, where he was protected by a thousand cops manning barricades. During the first week of December protesters replayed Oakland’s Stop the Draft Week at the New York induction center, with hundreds of arrests. Like the Oakland antidraft protests, the New York actions were mostly not nonviolent—though ubiquitous Dr. Spock led symbolic civil disobedience at the induction center. But the sporadic violence by protesters was mainly verbal, in self-defense, or aimed at property.
Despite his new rhetoric of disruption and dislocation, King never condoned destruction of property. For this reason, and because it was done by men of cloth using religious imagery, he did not approve of a daring new tactic of militant nonviolence. A few days after the Pentagon siege Philip Berrigan, a Josephite priest, and three other Catholics poured their blood on draft files at a Baltimore draft board—a further experiment in combining Gandhian and guerrilla tactics, taking nonviolent action to its limit. The most notorious of a dozen draft-board raids was carried out the following spring outside of Baltimore. The “Catonsville Nine”—Berrigan, his brother Daniel (who had fasted at Occoquan prison), and seven other radical Catholics—made a bonfire of draft files with homemade napalm, declaring that “we believe some property has no right to exist.”75 Participants in these actions avoided harming anybody, stayed around to be arrested, and accepted the consequences. After the Catonsville trial, however, the Berrigans went underground until the FBI caught up with them.
Like King’s own escalation of tactics, the “ultra resistance” draft raids were a creative effort to halt the relentless spiral toward armed struggle by modeling a militant nonviolent alternative. But by this midnight hour many white and black activists were losing patience with even the boldest expression of nonviolence.
Violent posturing was one form of militancy. Another was separatism, which had manifested itself during the long history of black struggle whenever interracial avenues appeared blocked. By late 1967 separatism had become more than ever the basis of black liberation.
White women who felt oppressed in the peace and justice movements identified with the subordinate position of African Americans. When a few nonconforming women began speaking out for their own freedom in the mid-1960s, they hoped to be able to change SNCC and SDS from within. It didn’t work. After black activists demanded a black-only movement, dissident women adopted that course for themselves.
Shulamith Firestone, still smarting from her Labor Day humiliation, founded New York Radical Women in the fall. They helped to organize an antiwar march in Washington by the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, led by the eighty-seven-year-old feminist, the first woman in Congress and the only lawmaker to vote against World War II. They handed out leaflets along the march announcing “Sisterhood is powerful.” The event included a torchlight procession at Arlington National Cemetery symbolizing “the burial of traditional womanhood.” Participants went home to form more feminist collectives.
Charlotte Bunch started a group in Washington, D.C. Raised in New Mexico, graduate of Duke, a youth leader in the Southern Methodist Church, she had been a civil rights activist who had marched from Selma to Montgomery and then a community organizer in a D.C. ghetto. She had identified both with the New Left and with Christianity’s radical wing, inspired by the black church, that “sought to put the gospel into action for social justice.” She remembered that in her first women’s group, “we spent months convincing ourselves that it was politically okay to meet separately as women and to focus on women’s concerns. We felt somewhat more secure because we saw a parallel to the arguments of blacks who had been establishing their right and need to have their own space.”76
Radical feminist groups sprouted rapidly as word spread through female networks. “I had never known anything as easy as organizing women’s groups,” Heather Booth recalled, “as easy and as exciting and as dramatic.”77 New Left ranks were depleted as legions of radical women declared their independence and fashioned a movement of their own.
Because they perceived it as the key to their liberation, they pursued self-discovery through consciousness-raising groups. Partly modeled on SNCC’s testimonies about racism, the CR group was a recruitment tool, a process for unlearning sexism (a word they coined), and a microcosm of an egalitarian community that prefigured a feminist society. Through intimate dialogue they learned that their personal problems were “political” and required collective solutions. Radical feminists dug down to the root, as they saw it: the subjugation of women in relationships with men and in the family division of labor (especially childbearing). They demanded not equality of sex roles, which they likened to Jim Crow’s separate but equal, but their elimination. This new creed struck chords in a multitude of young, mainly white, middle-class women who convinced themselves that, like black people, they had the right to define themselves and to shape their own destinies.
LIKE MOST AMERICANS King was little aware of radical feminist rumblings. CR groups were proliferating underground, and hardly at all in the South. The movement did not announce itself to the world until September 1968, when activists protested the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City for allegedly celebrating women as sex objects. King knew about the National Organization for Women, founded by Betty Friedan and colleagues in 1966, but he was not on record as having endorsed NOW’s campaign against sex discrimination. Like Frederick Douglass in the mid–nineteenth century and many black and white reform leaders in the 1960s—the NCNP convention an apotheosis—he placed racial discrimination well above gender bias on his scale of evils. If he was not noticeably concerned about women’s plight in education and the work world, how much less would he have been sensitive to the major grievance of radical feminists—female subjugation in home and family. Given his background and his own patriarchal assumptions, he simply would not have understood where they were coming from.
In his own life he did not question his wife’s primary obligation to raise their four children. She struggled with his neglect of parenting responsibilities, easily justified by his public mission but still painful. Just as the preacher was the center of the black church, the father was the center of the family, even if absent. Just as he firmly believed that leadership in the church never ascended from the pew to the pulpit, so he did not see any major role for movement women, with rare exceptions such as Jo Ann Robinson, beyond being “helpmates” for male leaders.
Ella Baker bristled at her treatment by King and other ministers when she was director of SCLC. They did not listen to her (King’s listening gift notwithstanding) even though she had better ideas and far more experience. Dorothy Cotton had a less troubled relationship with him, in part because they were emotionally close. Although she didn’t protest when he asked her, the director of citizenship education, to get coffee at staff meetings, she like Baker was well aware of his chauvinist attitudes and behavior.
King may have been more unabashed in his sexism, but he was hardly worse than many younger movement men, both black and white, who might have been slyer in mistreating their sisters, but still expected them to be the movement secretaries and “shit workers” as well as to service their sexual needs. In Robin Morgan’s words, radical feminists were saying “good-bye to all that.”
IN A CHRISTMAS EVE SERMON at Ebenezer, King confessed that over the past four years he had witnessed his dream “turn into a nightmare.” But now he was striving, with whatever time he had left, to transfigure the nightmare into a bolder dream, a dream not of reform but of revolution, that this time would not be deferred.
Half a million American soldiers were fighting for their lives in the defoliated forests and jungles of Vietnam. Troops had invaded America’s own cities to put down native insurgencies. Draft induction
centers, military bases, the Pentagon fortress were under siege by protesters in time of war. Thousands were openly flouting the draft. Stoned soldiers were refusing to fight, deserting the battlefield, blowing up their commanders. At home, black and white, young and old, poor and rich inhabited different nations, unable to communicate across the social chasms. The white backlash, a new name for aggressive white privilege, had fired up the revolt by blacks and youth; they in turn fueled the backlash. It was a civil war, not of geography but of mind. A civil war for America’s soul.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus laid down principles by which, on the Day of Judgment, he would decide who will be saved and who will be damned. Those he will save will have fed and clothed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, cared for the sick, and visited the imprisoned. Perhaps because he hated jails, or because he had been jailed himself nineteen times, Martin King had never visited fellow protesters behind bars.
Joan Baez had first heard King speak, in Monterey, California, during the Montgomery bus boycott, when she was a fifteen-year-old high school girl. She cried when he talked about the bus boycott. Seven years later she sang “We Shall Overcome” to the March on Washington. In fall 1966 she and her mentor Ira Sandperl helped King desegregate schools in Grenada, Mississippi, walking black kids through rocks to a white school. After she was jailed a second time for sitting in at the Oakland induction center, sentenced to forty-five days, King decided to visit her. Baez, her mother, and sixty other war protesters had been at Santa Rita jail, east of San Francisco Bay, since before Christmas.
The “regular” inmates, black and brown women, were bouncing off the walls when rumors flew that the great man was coming to see the dark-skinned mestiza who lulled them to sleep with angelic lullabies. In the visiting cell on January 14, 1968, King and Andy Young gave Baez and her mother bear hugs. The daughter wiped her tears. The two men looked weary.
“We sat at the small table under a bare lightbulb,” Joan Baez Sr. recalled, “and they went round and round with stories of old times, jokes, and ringing laughter such as the holding cell and its guards had never heard before. A warm and comfortable glow settled around me as if God were in his heaven, even if we were behind bars.” Joan and her mom noticed a few familiar “wishful black faces peeking through the mesh screen.” Joan asked King if he would say hello to her friends.
“Why shor’, babies,” he said in his southern drawl, “you jus’ come right on in,” as though it were his parlor. He looked at the guard, who opened the door. The teenagers darted in. Smiling warmly, King hugged each girl, saying “God bless you, babies.” They danced back out of the cell, beaming to their bones and whooping. The girls lost their “privileges” as punishment; they couldn’t have cared less. “I shook his han’ and touched him and talked t’him,” one girl exulted later to Baez. “Nuthin’ kin ever take that away from me!”78
Before leaving the cramped visiting cell, King bowed his head over the small table and said a prayer full of hope.
King looked anything but hopeful when next they visited Ira Sandperl, Joan’s partner in crime, on the men’s side. The depression King had cloaked visiting his “very dear friend” Baez flared up full force. Sandperl, Jewish, was a peace activist and Gandhian scholar in his mid-forties who always wore Brooks Brothers suits to protests. He felt embarrassed, “reeking to high heaven” in his smelly jail clothes, sitting with his famous friends in their polished outfits. But King’s spiffy exterior belied inner bedlam. Sandperl had never before seen his friend less than fully composed. Something was wrong.
“You guys, what’s the matter?” he asked with his trademark chuckle. “I’m the one who should be feeling lousy. What are you upset about?” King peered around the visiting cell as if afraid he would be locked in. In fact it was his last time behind bars.
King said he “really felt awful,” Sandperl remembered. He was mad at himself and guilt stricken. He said that “recently there were black hate groups that were both phoning him and writing him, threatening his life.”
“I shouldn’t feel any different,” he confessed, than he did about white groups who had been plotting to kill him for eleven years. “I do feel differently,” he said plaintively to his friend. “I am really annoyed at myself. I can’t believe that these black groups are people who really want my death.” After all of his years of battling white racism, it had come to this: black people mattered to him more than white.79 But this man who walked every extra mile to preserve black unity, who had fought so hard against hate, can be forgiven for being mortified by the thought that some blacks hated his guts. And for being afraid that, like Malcolm, like Gandhi, he might be slain by one of his own. A black woman had come close in 1958, slipping in a knife a hair from his heart.
Struggling to maintain his equilibrium in these dark days, he could have been spared this unnecessary heartache. These threats did not come from black liberation groups. They were all fabricated by the FBI. Hoover’s men were hell-bent on torturing his soul.
As King left the cell he mused, “Ira, if you’re not in jail in the poor people’s march, visit me in jail, because I will certainly be there.” Sandperl replied that certainly he would.80 On his way out of the sprawling county jail complex, hundreds of black and brown inmates ran to their windows and shouted their complaints to him—poor heating, lousy food, many other things.
“I just stood there listening to their complaints,” he recounted to his staff three days later. “Finally, as I was getting ready to walk off, almost with tears in my eyes, one young man said, ‘Doctor, you all be sure to fix it up now, so I can get me a job when I get out of here.’ ”81
King spoke to a support vigil for the protesters outside the Santa Rita gate. He had visited his friends, he said, to show his appreciation for their work for peace and justice, and because “I see these two struggles as one struggle. There can be no justice without peace, and there can be no peace without justice.” Justice was indivisible. This was his clearest statement yet that he wanted to build One Big Movement to transform the nation.
“I’m going to continue with all of my might, with all of my energy, and with all of my action, to oppose that abominable, evil, unjust war in Vietnam.” He expressed alarm about the growing repression of antiwar protest, which was bedeviling him personally. He saw a definite move by the government “to go all out now to silence dissenters,” now zooming in on draft resistance.
“We cannot allow this to happen. We’ve got to make it clear that to indict Dr. Spock and Bill Coffin and the other courageous souls will mean indicting all of us, if they think that this draft resistance movement is going to be stopped.”82 King was not only, for the first time, publicly backing draft noncooperation as honorable and necessary in the tradition of Thoreau and Gandhi. He was identifying himself with it. Radical pacifists he respected who, like himself, were not subject to conscription were challenging the draft system in creative ways—sitting in at induction centers, aiding and abetting resisters, burning draft files. He had put the government on notice that he might have to share their jeopardy.
WAS THIS RHETORIC of the moment, or was he challenging the government to prosecute him? Standing outside Santa Rita jail in the California winter, he sounded as if he were ready to go to prison for his opposition to the war. But he had made other commitments. He expected that he might be spending time in prison for shutting down the nation’s capital in the spring.
He had given marching orders to his staff at the sea island retreat in late November. The Poor People’s Campaign would be a “last, desperate demand for the nation to respond to nonviolence. We’ve got to go for broke this time.” The most extreme tactical proposals came not from Bevel or the usual firebrands but from one whom King counted on to hold up the cautious, conservative end of staff debate. His newly anointed executive vice president, Andy Young, suggested lying down on freeways, blocking government buildings, filling up emergency rooms by people needing care, a school boycott to turn D.C. children out into the streets.
King said the direct action must be “as dramatic, as dislocative, as disruptive, as attention-getting as the riots without destroying life or property.” The plan would be for two or three hundred well-trained activists from each of a dozen cities and rural areas to converge on Washington in April to demand action. Larger contingents, some walking or riding mule trains for hundreds of miles, would reinforce them, camping out in D.C. parks and government offices. This would lead to a second March on Washington, not “to have a beautiful day” like the first, but to immobilize the city until the government changed its course at home and abroad. The protest would not aim directly at the war in Vietnam, but by disrupting the capital and raising the domestic cost of the war it would unite social justice with peace. King hoped also, perhaps naively, that new federal spending to end poverty would make it harder to continue funding the war.
Right after the staff retreat, overriding opposition from key advisers and staff, he announced the Poor People’s Campaign to the world at an Atlanta press conference on December 4, 1967.
SCLC “will lead waves of the nation’s poor and disinherited to Washington, D.C., next spring to demand redress of their grievances by the United States government.
“If this means forcible repression of our movement,” he stated, “we will confront it, for we have done this before. If this means scorn or ridicule, we embrace it, for that is what America’s poor now receive. If it means jail, we accept it willingly, for the millions of poor already are imprisoned by exploitation and discrimination.” It would be a trek to the capital by “suffering and outraged citizens who will go to stay until some definite and positive action is taken to provide jobs and income for the poor.”
Conveying his own anguish as much as the nation’s, he said that those serving in the human rights movement were “keenly aware of the increasing bitterness and despair and frustration that threaten the worst chaos, hatred, and violence any nation has ever encountered. We are already at war with and among ourselves.” All Americans could feel a “social insanity which could lead to national ruin.”
Look at “the spectacle of cities burning while the national government speaks of repression instead of rehabilitation. Or think of children starving in Mississippi while prosperous farmers are rewarded for not producing food. Or Negro mothers leaving children in tenements to work in neighborhoods where people of color cannot live. Or the awesome bombardment, already greater than the munitions we exploded in World War II, against a small Asian land, while political brokers de-escalate and very nearly disarm a timid action against poverty.”83
Showing off his newfound militancy, Young threw in that they had waited long enough. It might be necessary to tie up the country, or at least the capital.
“The way Washington is,” he explained to the abashed reporters, “a few hundred people on each of those bridges would make it impossible to get in or out.” But that would be a last resort that he hoped would not come to pass. “It would probably be much better to have a thousand people in need of health and medical care sitting in around Bethesda Naval Hospital, so that nobody could get in or out until they get treated.”84
Playing the media with their usual virtuosity, King and Young had mustered the kind of credible threat that in diplomacy must be taken dead seriously. The White House, reeling still from the Pentagon siege and heightened antiwar protests, braced itself for a new front of civil disorder. Not doubting that King meant business, the FBI fired up a new operation to disable the Poor People’s Campaign before it could spread its poison upon the land.
Whatever his occasional rhetoric to the contrary, by the end of 1967 King had swung away from his earlier resolve to go all out to stop the war. He had chosen justice at home over peace overseas. Both to his face and behind his back, most of his staff were in mutiny against the poverty push. Field staff assigned to get things going in northern cities were dragging their heals, alienating local supporters.
Having heard the voice of Jesus commanding him to crusade against the war, Bevel was fiercely opposed to the Poor People’s Campaign. For one thing, he asserted at a December 27 staff meeting, “I do not know whether Johnson would give enough opposition for us to build up steam and momentum.” LBJ was a master of co-optation. What Daley had done in Chicago would seem like kids’ play compared to what the President could pull off with policy promises. After all, he had actually led a war on poverty, whatever its weaknesses. No one could claim that he didn’t care about the poor, even if he had turned his back on them to chase demons in Vietnam.
Bevel believed it would be tragic to turn away from the war. He was convinced that no social progress was possible while the war was raging, eating up the nation’s resources. A month earlier King had proclaimed young people to be the prime agents of change. Bevel felt that youth would never pour their passion into a fight for the poor. They could not see beyond the war, which overrode all other concerns. He believed that draft resistance, mounted on a massive scale, was the answer. “We need a movement to get the war machine to attack us rather than us attacking the war machine.”
King was chagrined by his intransigence. “The thing you are talking about is much harder to mobilize around and takes much longer,” he countered. “You have a lot of people agreeing with you but they are not willing to spend five years in jail over it. In addition, you have the national press against you.” He was still scarred from his raking over the coals by the media.
“I see levels of struggle” in the Poor People’s Campaign, with the war being the second level. “I see still another level behind that—the international level.” He made clear that the meaning of the campaign went beyond people’s livelihoods. Nonviolent struggle had to prove itself, redeem itself, in order to be able to fight on.85
. . .
KING HAD BEEN BUILDING up to his “go for broke” battle against poverty since SCLC had launched its Chicago campaign just after the Watts explosion. He had long known, intellectually, that economic deprivation was rooted in race as much as class. The Chicago stalemate had taught him that racism was more intractable than he had realized, implacable because of its malignant kinship with the class and power structures of the big cities, and of Washington.86 Since fall 1966 he had been searching for a strategy to confront the symbiotic entwinement of class oppression and racial prejudice.
Partly because they did not tackle this symbiosis, partly because of Vietnam, none of the earlier movement economic strategies had borne fruit. Whether it was Whitney Young’s domestic Marshall Plan, King’s Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, or Randolph’s Freedom Budget, Congress did not take them seriously; even with LBJ’s war on poverty, its support was halfhearted. Nor did movement leaders mobilize grassroots armies behind economic reform as they had for civil rights. One grassroots initiative more than any other pushed King toward a poor people’s movement that could fuse empowerment with economic justice, by means of a multiracial alliance of the poor and disadvantaged.
In fall 1965 social scientists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven circulated a working paper among civil rights and antipoverty organizers later published in Nation magazine.87 Responding to the black movement’s search for new directions, they proposed organizing a mass movement of welfare recipients, who were mainly women. Given that for every recipient another was eligible, several million more could be recruited to the welfare rolls. And given that welfare agencies typically refused to grant clients full benefits, Cloward and Piven pointed to a huge untapped potential for expanded payments. Their goal was to disrupt the welfare system and foster such a grave bureaucratic, fiscal, and electoral crisis that Washington would be compelled to guarantee a livable income for all citizens.
With little leadership the urban poor already had been sweeping into welfare centers in much larger numbers, which resulted in a quadrupling of clients during the 1960s. The freedom movement had taught poor people that they had rights as citizens, even economic rights. Concurrently the idea of economic entitlements had begun to take hold in academic and policy circles. Liberal economist Robert Theobald had argued for the poor’s “absolute constitutional right to an income.”88 Thirteen hundred economists petitioned Congress for a national system of income guarantees. Randolph’s 1966 Freedom Budget also embraced a guaranteed income.
Many activists dismissed the Cloward-Piven strategy, either because they did not think the welfare poor could be organized, or because they felt that economic solutions required creation of jobs, not perpetuation of dependency. One seasoned organizer, however, seized upon their ideas as the answer to his frustration. George Wiley, great-grandson of slaves, had grown up in Rhode Island, conquered one racial barrier after another, including becoming the first black to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry from Cornell. In the early 1960s he had blossomed into a respected research chemist at Syracuse. But as with so many others, civil rights activism inexorably took over his life. He worked first as a local CORE leader, then with James Farmer as CORE’s associate director. He came to realize that neither CORE nor any other existing rights group was prepared to build the grassroots movement of poor people he dreamed about.
As a first step, in June 1966 Wiley’s Poverty/Rights Action Center coordinated protests for “welfare rights” in twenty-five cities. Marching 150 miles from Cleveland to Ohio’s capital to present grievances to the governor, several hundred welfare women sang: