We feed our children bread and beans

While rich folks ride in limousines.

After all, we’re human beings,

Marching down Columbus Road.⁸⁹

Responding to such cries of need, Wiley created the National Welfare Rights Organization to fight for the lowest stratum of American citizenry—impoverished urban women of color. NWRO was led jointly by Wiley and a national board of dynamic, no-nonsense black welfare mothers including chair Johnnie Tillmon from Los Angeles. Calling for concrete reforms grounded in principles of adequate income, dignity, justice, and democracy, NWRO set forth its goal: “Jobs or income now! Decent jobs with adequate wages for those who can work; adequate income for those who can not work.”⁹⁰

Local groups multiplied in 1967 and 1968 and carried out the “street strategy” of creative direct action. Most effective were “basic need” campaigns to secure special grants for winter clothing, furniture, and school lunches. NWRO organizing spread throughout the country, even among poor whites in Appalachia and the South. It proved most successful in New York and Massachusetts. In New York City demonstrators camped out in welfare offices, generally without violence, but wreaking havoc on mountains of paperwork and throwing welfare services into chaos. More often than not they won their demands.

Whether practical or not, the right to a livable income had generated enough steam by 1967 that it did not seem wildly radical, especially in the turbulence of the times. It would have been surprising had King and his staff not chosen it as the basic aim of the Poor People’s Campaign. It was a logical expression of radical moderation.

In speeches and in Where Do We Go from Here he followed NWRO in stressing the adequacy of income as well as its legal guarantee. Two conditions were indispensable, he wrote, “if we are to ensure that the guaranteed income operates as a consistently progressive measure. First, it must be pegged to the median income of society.” Second, it “must be dynamic; it must automatically increase as the total social income grows.”⁹¹ In the wake of the July revolts he had called for the government to provide jobs for the jobless. That would still be the priority, but one way or another Washington would have to make sure that every American family had a decent income. They would abolish poverty in the world’s wealthiest nation.

Well aware that staff members such as Bevel and Jackson were opposed to the Poor People’s Campaign, that hardly any were excited about it, and that field workers in designated cities were ill informed, King held a mid-January staff workshop at Ebenezer for the several dozen PPC organizers. He concluded a lengthy speech to participants by reemphasizing the imperative of nonviolent conduct.

“We are the custodians of the philosophy of nonviolence,” he asserted. “And it has worked.” He was confident that it would succeed in Washington as well as it had in the South. It just had to be more creatively engineered. At a press conference he announced that they were pulling out all the stops, that the first wave of protesters would involve blacks, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, American Indians, and poor whites; they would include welfare moms and kids; and they would build shantytowns to dramatize their plight. But unlike the Depression Bonus Marchers, World War I veterans fighting for their rightful benefits, they would not be run out of Washington. Tying up traffic would be a last resort.

Reporters seemed more curious about King’s Vietnam doings, and whether he might be indicted for supporting draft refusal like Spock and Coffin. He replied that it was a definite possibility; he’d heard rumors of a bigger crackdown. Nevertheless, he would continue to make his Ebenezer altar a sanctuary for young men who chose to turn in their draft cards or refuse induction. This was two days after he had visited his friends at Santa Rita jail.

That night, while King was away, the staff held a stormy session in which they let loose their frustrations with the Poor People’s Campaign as they could not have done with him present. Led by Bevel and Jackson, the rebels ripped the proposed campaign for casting aside other pressing projects while being poorly thought through. “The winds of anger were blowing mighty hard,” King gathered.

Sensing the seriousness of the staff rebellion, aware that his leadership was on the line as perhaps never before, he was determined to change the minds of his doubting disciples. He spoke to them next day in a masterful display of compassion mixed with firm resolve. He affirmed the “confusions” that they all shared in this “sick, neurotic nation,” the schizophrenia of divided loyalties, of ambivalent passions: love vs. hate, integration vs. separatism, nonviolence vs. violence.

Much of the acrimony had been about the nature of the PPC’s demands. He agreed that “jobs or income” would have to be spelled out in specifics. But for the purpose of mobilizing the masses of the poor, many of them unschooled, it was preferable to have a simple goal conveyed in a down-to-earth, straightforward slogan.

“My brothers and sisters,” he said, “the people that we are going to be recruiting are not going to be fired up on the basis of a long list of demands. They wouldn’t know what you’re talking about, because of long years of denial and deprivation.

“Let’s find something that is so possible, so achievable, so pure, so simple that even the backlash can’t do much to deny it. Yet something so non-token and so basic to life that even the black nationalists can’t disagree with it. Now that’s jobs or income.” He was talking about a reform that could not be co-opted by the establishment, by the canny politician in the White House. A reform that could be embraced by a broad liberal-left consensus across race and class lines. A reform that reflected basic American values of fairness and decency yet would bring about a radical result—getting rid of poverty. The politics of radical moderation had one more chance to prove its mettle. It was a middle path between unacceptable extremes of rioting and “timid supplication,” which would shift the center to the left.

King could see his own doubts and despair reflected in the eyes of his colleagues. To bring them back he needed something more than rational persuasion. He needed to minister to them. He told them that going to Washington would be good for their souls. It would be a spiritual renewal or restoration, a resurrection of the Spirit. He reminded them how Jesus had faced the doubts and fears of his disciples, trying to get them to Jerusalem.

“It was that pull of expectation,” he explained, “that caused Peter, on the day of Pentecost to go out fired up with that something he got from Jesus, and he preached until three thousand souls were converted. Aren’t we talking about three thousand?” Jesus had exhorted Peter to turn from sand into rock, and he eventually did. “I’m expecting you to be like a rock,” King said to his own staff.

No matter what their tribulations, they should never succumb to “give-up-itis.” Hope was the final refusal to give up. “Genuine hope involves the recognition—I think this is very important in what we are about to do—that what is hoped for is already here. It is already present in the sense that it is a power which drives us to fulfill what we hope for.

“That is what Jesus meant when he looked at his disciples and said one day, ‘You don’t have to wait for some distant day for the kingdom of God to come.’ Brethren”—King now speaking to those before him—“you’ve got to realize that the kingdom of God is in you, it’s right now, as an inner power within you that drives you to fulfill the hope of a universal kingdom.” Hope was personally and socially therapeutic, a force of survival, of immortality. Going to Washington, they were crossing to Jerusalem.

“I don’t know if I’ll see all of you before April.” With faith “I send you forth,” he instructed his staff in closing the retreat, “as Jesus said to his disciples: Be ye as strong and as tough as a serpent, and tender as a dove. And we will be able to do something that will give new meaning to our own lives and, I hope, new meaning to the life of the nation.”⁹²

11

 

By the end of January 1968 the Pentagon was at war with itself. Inside its mighty, indefensible walls a cluster of civilian officials, following McNamara’s timorous lead, had grown demoralized by the Vietnam stalemate. The rising public protests deepened their doubts. The clincher was the spectacular Tet offensive set off on the Vietnamese lunar new year, January 31. In a sudden blitz NLF guerrillas backed by North Vietnam invaded every major city and town in South Vietnam and even took over part of the U.S. embassy in Saigon.

“What the hell is going on?” newscaster Walter Cronkite yelped off camera in his CBS studio. “I thought we were winning this war.”⁹³ He spoke for millions. A high-level source revealed that the brilliantly coordinated, all-out offensive caught the military and the White House by surprise, and “its strength, length, and intensity prolonged this shock.”⁹⁴ Body counts on both sides soared. The bloody massacre of civilians by the NLF and Hanoi in the ancient city of Hue dwarfed all previous atrocities by either side. But all along U.S. forces had massacred South Vietnamese villagers, most sensationally (but not exceptionally) the slaughter of 350 men, women, and children in the hamlet of My Lai, March 1968. When GIs could not tell the difference between Vietcong fish and the sea of villagers, survival demanded that they drain the sea.

Command of the air and high-tech weaponry enabled the shaken U.S. forces to repel the Tet offensive by mid-February in a debilitating military defeat for the NLF. “We lost our best people,” an NLF leader ruefully admitted later.⁹⁵ Their once impregnable military, political, and social infrastructure never recovered. It was the beginning of the end for the Vietcong. From this point on they played a weakened role. Hanoi took control of both military command and provision of forces.

Nonetheless, in the age of color television, the Tet offensive proved in the short run a breathtaking political and psychological victory for the NLF, the kind that mattered in a guerrilla war. Tet shattered the die-hard illusion that the United States could win in Vietnam, at least on the ground, without nuclear weapons. It graphically showed that the war could never be other than a stalemate.

Unbeknownst to any at the time, except perhaps to Hanoi’s strategists, the trauma of Tet represented the end of a largely guerrilla war and the onset of more conventional warfare. Just when the U.S. military was finally comprehending that it was fighting a guerrilla war, the adversary was changing its strategy—to fight the war by massing forces to hold territory. Washington was concluding that the United States could not prevail just when the North Vietnamese were beginning to turn the conflict into something more like wars that America had never lost.

But this unseen shift with its Sophoclean irony had little bearing on the immediate chaos.

THE COLD WAR WITHIN SCLC continued apace. Inefficiency and insubordination fed on each other. King grew so frustrated with his staff leaders’ hubris that he delivered a sermon on it at Ebenezer, where some of his staff would hear him, and all of them would get the message. Oratory was ever his favored means to deal with conflict. But the sermon spoke more to himself than anyone else.

He started out with a story from the Gospel of Mark about two of Jesus’ disciples, James and John, who asked him for privileged positions in the kingdom that he will rule. Text and context made it likely that he referred to his own James (Bevel) and Jesse Jackson (Jack being a variation of John)—but casting his eye on all staff members afflicted with hubris. Jesus told James and John that they must share his travail and sacrifice, but that it was not up to him who will sit on his right and left hands. But King was just as surely scolding himself for his own puffed-up pride and vanity.

Jesus explained that the favored disciples would be those who were the greatest servants. The greatest of all would be the servant of all.⁹⁶

Before we judge ambitious disciples for their egotism, King said, let us realize that we all have the drum-major instinct, the drive for recognition, distinction, specialness, to lead the parade, to be first. But if unmanaged, undisciplined, the drum-major instinct was pernicious; it distorted and degraded one’s personality, one’s soul. Runaway egotism spawned a host of sins, including corruption, criminality, exploitation, dishonesty, and exclusion. On a larger scale it led to prejudice and racism, and to powerful nations’ lust to rule the world. Their own country was the “supreme culprit.” The nation’s narcissism bore poisonous fruit in America’s criminal conduct in Vietnam, and in the supreme arrogance of both superpowers threatening the planet with annihilation, holding the whole world ransom for their own rivalry.

But just as James and John, or James and Jesse, should not be condemned for their hubris, neither should the drum-major instinct be condemned out of hand. It was only the perversion of this instinct for self-aggrandizement that was dangerous, even deadly.

“The great issue of life,” King told his home congregation, “is to harness the drum major instinct” for constructive purposes. He pointed out that Jesus did not scold James and John for being selfish. Jesus affirmed them for being ambitious. King paraphrased Jesus to make sure he was getting through.

“Oh, I see you want to be first,” King said. “You want to be great. You want to be important. You want to be significant. Well you ought to be. If you’re going to be my disciple, you must be. Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be first in love. I want you to be first in moral excellence.”

Jesus transformed the situation “by giving a new definition of greatness,” a new norm of nobility. Jesus said to James and John, “You must earn it. True greatness comes not by favoritism, but by fitness.” By defining greatness in terms of servanthood, Jesus and Martin were declaring that “everybody can be great. Because everybody can serve.” All one needed was “a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.” Long before and after Jesus, prophets and philosophers have been trying to reconcile the fullest individuality with the most just community. Greatness of servanthood may have been as good an answer as any ever found. The best woman or man was the one who did the most for the community.

In his sermons, in his all-night chats, in his meditations, King was more than ever preoccupied, obsessed, with his own death. This was not the first sermon in which he preached his own eulogy—he had done so the past April—but it was his most complete, and his last. Here he would bring judgment back on himself. He would transubstantiate his own hubris into humility, his own sins into virtue.

“If any of you are around when I have to meet my day,” he said in the sanctuary where it would inevitably come to pass, “I don’t want a long funeral,” nor a long eulogy. He didn’t want the preacher to say that he’d won the Nobel Prize, or several hundred other awards.

No, “I’d like somebody to mention that day,” that he had “tried to give his life serving others,” that he had “tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day, that I tried to be right on the war question,” that he tried to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned. “I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.

“Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.” All of his weaknesses, his failures might be forgiven. All of his sins washed away.

“I just want to leave a committed life behind.

“Yes, Jesus, I want to be on your right side or your left side, not for any selfish reason. I want to be on your right or your left side, not in terms of some political kingdom or ambition, but I just want to be there in love and in justice and in truth and in commitment to others, so that we can make of this old world a new world.”⁹⁷

12

 

The Poor People’s Campaign was cranking up its sticky gears. Even without fire in their bellies, SCLC organizers were hard at work in a dozen cities and the Deep South. Support came from various groups involved with empowering poor people, including labor unions. Cesar Chavez, founder of California’s United Farm Workers, about to begin a fast that nearly killed him, sent a telegram of solidarity. One constituency that the PPC could not do without was welfare mothers; it had to bring in the burgeoning welfare rights movement.

But the leaders of NWRO, whose ten thousand members King coveted, were suspicious. He had not notably supported their efforts for welfare reform. Why should they divert resources to this quixotic Johnny-come-lately campaign? George Wiley insisted that King come to Chicago for a face-off with the NWRO leadership. He walked through an adoring crowd at the Chicago YMCA to the upstairs conference room, where NWRO board members greeted him cordially. They sat him on the dais with Wiley and the board, cut off from his aides placed in far corners. Community organizer Tim Sampson described Wiley’s seating plan as “a grand piece of psychological warfare.”⁹⁸

The leaders were rankled that King’s people had tried to seduce NWRO locals into joining the PPC. Wiley and the women leaders had built NWRO from scratch “with their blood, sweat, and tears,” Sampson noted. “Not to be recognized was an attack on their very being.” A collision with the drum-major instinct. “And to have it taken away was unthinkable.”⁹⁹

Board chair Johnnie Tillmon presided, an infant grandchild in her lap. After each board member had introduced herself, King gave a spiel about the PPC and asked for their support.

Board member Etta Horn began the inquisition. “How do you stand on P.L. 90-248?” Befuddled, King looked over to Andy Young for a cue.

Mrs. Tillmon broke in. “She means the anti-welfare bill,” just passed by Congress and signed by the President, that would freeze benefits and require work. “Where were you last October,” she asked, “when we were down in Washington trying to get support for Senator Kennedy’s amendments?” The women fired one question after another that he fumbled.

“You know, Dr. King,” Tillmon scolded him like a stern schoolmarm, “if you don’t know about these questions, you should say you don’t know, and then we could go on with the meeting.”

“You’re right, Mrs. Tillmon,” he confessed. “We don’t know anything about welfare. We are here to learn.”¹⁰⁰ He should have listened before he spoke. He did not have the patience he once had. They proceeded to teach him about the plight of welfare recipients and the feds’ crackdown. He was unaccustomed to being browbeaten. “They jumped on Martin,” Young recalled, “like no one ever had before. I don’t think he had ever been that insulted in a meeting. They were testing him.”¹⁰¹ His empathy allowed him to rise above his dismay. He promised that SCLC and the PPC would fully support their demands for fairer and more democratic welfare.

THE WELFARE RIGHTS SHOWDOWN touched off a week of confrontations with black militants. King hated nothing more. He scheduled an SCLC board meeting in Washington to coincide with a two-day antiwar mobilization organized by Clergy and Laity Concerned, which he served as cochair. Sixteen thousand clergy came to D.C. from all over the country. King headed up a march to Arlington National Cemetery, where he led a long prayer at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. His friend Rabbi Abraham Heschel closed the prayer by calling out in Hebrew: “Elohi, Elohi, lama sabachthani?”—my God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?—the last words of Jesus on the cross.¹⁰²

That silent protest contrasted with harassment of SCLC board members at Vermont Avenue Baptist Church by local black militants. In his speech, “In Search for a Sense of Direction,” King reported progress in the Poor People’s Campaign. He recounted his visits with “the least of these,” who lived with “wall to wall rats and roaches.” He pointed out portentous parallels between their nation’s losing its soul and the Roman Empire’s decline and fall.

“God’s judgment is standing today on America.” They will be coming to Washington to say, repent America, and to “demand that the nation grant us what is truly ours.”

He concluded with words of encouragement, more to himself than anyone else.

“I can’t lose hope,” he said. “I can’t lose hope because when you lose hope, you die. When you lose hope”—he was speaking also to the militants outside the church—“you become so nihilistic that you engage in disruption for disruption’s sake rather than for justice’ sake.” He was especially wary fearing that somewhere, maybe right outside the door, militants were gunning for him.

“When you lose hope, you may still stand up and think you’re a man physically, but you are dead psychologically and spiritually. We’ve lost a great deal, and we’ve had our disappointments, but we must develop something on the inside that causes us to go on anyway. If we give up, we are dead.

“If I can leave you with any message tonight,” he closed, “I would say don’t lose hope. Wait for the next morning. It may be dark now. It may look like we can’t get out of this thing now. It may appear that nonviolence has failed, and the nation will not respond to it.

“Don’t blow your brains out now. Don’t give up hope. Wait until the next morning, for our check will surely come. And we will be a new people.”¹⁰³

His faithful board of directors, many of whom had known him since the bus boycott, had never seen him so down, so weary. His words may have girded up his loins a notch, but they didn’t lift his colleagues’ morale, or their once unshakable confidence in him.

Black militants’ invective toward him and SCLC board members aggravated King’s fear that they might cause trouble for the Poor People’s Campaign. One evening he met with Carmichael, Rap Brown, and other SNCC-associated militants. They agreed not to oppose or criticize the campaign, to help calm the black community, and to march with him pledged to tactical nonviolence.¹⁰⁴ The mood of reconciliation was broken by a black woman accusing King of selling out the movement in Selma and being about to do it again. For the first time in public, King erupted in anger. His whole body quivered as he vociferously denied her accusation.

Next day King and staff colleagues met again with Carmichael, Brown, and company to firm up their peace pact. During the dialogue King reproved executive director William Rutherford for accommodating the militants’ stance against nonviolence. He blew up at him after the meeting.

“You’re wrong. You’re absolutely wrong,” he nearly shouted. “Violence begets violence, that’s what it’s all about.”

“I would have been humiliated if I hadn’t been so shocked,” Rutherford recalled. “Dr. King never ever humiliated anyone in public in front of anyone else. But he was shaking. He went on for about ten minutes, and then I very quickly realized he wasn’t talking to me anymore, he was talking to himself or he was speaking for history.” Now that he and others such as his radical Catholic friends were taking nonviolent action to its outer limits, he felt it more critical than ever to draw a line between their ramped-up tactics and actual violence, in word or deed.

In hindsight Rutherford thought that his boss’s fit reflected his utter exhaustion and his frustration with the Washington campaign’s slow progress and his own staff’s growing skepticism of nonviolence, which he felt as personal betrayal. “I think he was beginning to have self-doubts as well. Would this really work?”¹⁰⁵

Next day he sought support for the PPC from the D.C. Chamber of Commerce, mainly black businessmen, as the best antidote to rioting. He worried out loud that one more explosive summer might bring fierce repression, even a rightwing regime.

“They’ll throw us into concentration camps,” he warned. “The Wallaces and the Birchites will take over. The sick people and the fascists will be strengthened. They’ll cordon off the ghetto and issue passes for us to get in and out.” To prevent this, “we’re going to be militant. We’re going to plague Congress.”¹⁰⁶

Practically as he spoke, his fearful premonition was being borne out in Orangeburg, South Carolina, a hotbed of rights activism since the Montgomery bus boycott year. Students at the two black colleges had been protesting segregation of Orangeburg’s hospital and bowling alley that clearly violated the four-year-old Civil Rights Act. Over several days in early February police and protesters skirmished; students, some of whom broke windows, were arrested and beaten. Then on the night of February 8, state police and national guardsmen surrounded students around a bonfire at the state college. State troopers, apparently unprovoked, opened fire on the unarmed students with high-powered shotguns, killing three and wounding thirty, many shot in the back as they fled. SNCC leader Cleveland Sellers, whose marriage ceremony King had conducted over at Ebenezer the week before, was charged with inciting the riot. He had little to do with it and was never tried, but was sent to prison for draft resistance. Although the FBI was complicit in the police misconduct, allegedly falsifying evidence, nine state troopers were indicted on federal charges for the “Orangeburg massacre,” but were predictably acquitted.

TOWARD THE END of February King hoped he might get a reprieve from the battlefield by escaping to Jamaica for a short vacation. His rest was broken by a painful jolt. In a one-liner Rustin, his close adviser for twelve years, publicly chastised the upcoming campaign. “I seriously question the efficacy of Dr. King’s plans for the April march,” he told a reporter.¹⁰⁷ As a longtime member of MLK’s research committee, his key advisers, Rustin had written a memo a month earlier with constructive suggestions and criticisms. He supported the PPC’s objectives (though he thought they should be clearer and more winnable), but he opposed the most publicized tactics.

Only a few years past, before becoming a true believer in electoral politics, he had promoted a strategy he called “social dislocation,” militant, Birmingham-type direct action, as the route to social change.¹⁰⁸ But he felt that the urban revolts had transformed the nation’s climate. Now he wrote that “any effort to disrupt transportation, government buildings, etc., can only lead, in this atmosphere, to further backlash and repression.” Such tactics will “fail to attract persons dedicated to nonviolence” but “attract elements that cannot be controlled.” He hoped that the spring protest would be limited to “constitutional, nonviolent protest,” presumably allowing symbolic civil disobedience but not actual blockades. He did not want to risk alienating liberal-leaning voters in the 1968 elections.

But in concluding he expressed second thoughts about whether SCLC could maintain control even of tamer nonviolent tactics. “SCLC essentially lost control of the Mississippi march [June 1966] when the splintering and confusion was quite simple as compared to the current mood.”¹⁰⁹

In his cover letter to King accompanying the memo he explained that he was not able to finish it “because I haven’t thought through two important problems: (1) What do we mean by the escalation of nonviolence (particularly since the press is interpreting this to mean the inclusion of minimal violence). (2) What kind of commitment must individuals make,” what discipline must they accept?¹¹⁰

Apparently his memo never received a response from King or senior staff. He felt rebuffed—worse, ignored. Rather than follow up with another memo, he went public with his concerns. King was hurt. Staff leaders felt that Rustin had betrayed trust. King adviser Harry Wachtel, a research committee member, was so angered that he broke off relations with his friend for seventeen years. In a letter of reconciliation Wachtel later wrote:

“I did know from Martin, first-hand, and from Coretta and others, second-hand,” that he was “stung by your public views” about the PPC. “For you were on the inside when that was being planned and developed. It was this act on your part which made Martin feel so badly. He felt let down because he held you up so high.”¹¹¹ King and Rustin never got a chance to reconcile.

RUSTIN HAD PUT HIS FINGER on momentous questions that King had been groping to answer. What did they mean by the escalation of nonviolent tactics? What commitment and discipline must practitioners adhere to? Activist writer Barbara Deming put forth the most cogent answer in that month’s Liberation magazine—an article that King probably read and Rustin surely did. Liberation coeditor Deming, fifty, had been jailed for civil disobedience several times, notably in Albany, Georgia, during the Quebec to Guantanamo march for nuclear peace in 1962, the subject of her classic account, Prison Notes. No one was more responsible for the successful nonviolent communication between protesters and troops at the Pentagon the past October.

Her February 1968 essay, “On Revolution and Equilibrium,” was the decade’s most persuasive intellectual challenge to the violent call of the wild, deepening the understanding of nonviolent activists for years to come. Employing Frantz Fanon’s own words to argue for nonviolence, she asserted that every time he called for violence, “radical and uncompromising action” that was nonviolent would work even better, at lesser cost. Like King and many radical pacifists, she suggested that nonviolent action must be more forceful, more aggressive; disruption was needed along with massive noncooperation. But, she pleaded, at the same time it escalated in militancy it had to escalate in humanity, in its compassion for adversaries mired in unjust institutions.

“ ‘Do you want to remain pure? Is that it?’ a black man asked me, during an argument on nonviolence,” she began her essay. “It is not possible to act at all and to remain pure.” What she wanted was, in Fanon’s words, “to escape becoming dizzy”—to keep the movement from losing its equilibrium, its collective sanity—and thus be able to set afoot a new person, a new people. “What are the best means for changing our lives,” she asked, “for really changing them?”

Establishing and preserving one’s relationship with the adversary was crucial—in the first place, by not killing or harming him. Let us recall the young man in Selma hell-bent on praying with the hostile deputy sheriff who blocked his passage to the courthouse.

“We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern,” Deming wrote in Liberation. “It is precisely solicitude for his person in combination with stubborn interference in his actions that can give us a very special degree of control. We put upon him two pressures—the pressure of our defiance of him and the pressure of our respect for his life—and it happens that in combination these two pressures are uniquely effective.”¹¹² But they must be combined: neither worked without the other. The escalation of righteous action must be matched by the escalation of empathy.

This was where King was at, where his epic journey had brought him. The mad maelstrom of the times never gave the master of words a chance to explain his modus operandi as well as Deming did.

ONE REASON that black militants were upping the heat on King and SCLC was their own internal pressure to escalate tactics—the result not only of heightened repression but of infighting among Black Panthers, SNCC, Maulana Ron Karenga’s US organization in Los Angeles, and other black liberation groups. After Huey Newton’s capture in October 1967, journalist and ex-convict Eldridge Cleaver, author of the best-selling memoir Soul on Ice, eclipsed Bobby Seale as the BPP’s major-domo.

In early 1968 the Panthers mounted an all-out campaign to “Free Huey,” culminating in mammoth Oakland and Los Angeles rallies in mid-February. Cleaver recruited Carmichael to speak at the rallies, where Cleaver announced a “merger” of SNCC with the Panthers. Carmichael, no longer a SNCC leader, was chosen to be the BPP’s prime minister. Although the Panthers depended upon Carmichael’s fame and oratorical power to advance their goals, they were troubled by his public criticism of the party’s ties with white leftists and adherence to Marxist socialism. He espoused a pan-Africanist philosophy that downplayed class struggle and insisted upon full black separatism. He might have thought that he was faithfully carrying Malcolm’s torch; actually Malcolm departed from such racial exclusivism.

Over the next year animosity grew between the Panthers and SNCC, forcing Carmichael out as titular leader. FBI covert action exacerbated BPP’s antagonism with Karenga’s US, culminating in a gunfight on the UCLA campus in January 1969 that killed two Panthers. Conflicts among black liberationists were even more tempestuous than between them and SCLC. No black liberation group apparently ever threatened King with violence, yet with the FBI’s conniving they were slandering and murdering each other.

KING WAS NOT ALONE in his time of trial. The commander-in-chief, his onetime friend, was besieged as never before. One of LBJ’s closest confidants, young special assistant Bill Moyers, confided to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in early March that the White House was “impenetrable,” sealed off from reality. The President dismissed all criticism as driven by political or personal enmity. Despite his admiration for his mentor, Moyers now believed that “four more years of Johnson would be ruinous for the country.”¹¹³

The political damage of the Tet offensive was irreparable. This was just the kind of setback that Johnson’s policy of incremental escalation had been designed to prevent. He was aware that McNamara was not the only Pentagon hawk who had transmogrified into dove. And protests were proliferating all over. He could not muffle the chants of demonstrators at the White House gates. One in particular got to him, according to his wife: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” In January black singer Eartha Kitt had marred a White House women’s gathering hosted by Lady Bird Johnson with her comments blaming the war for problems of American youth. King was one of few public figures who lauded her “very proper gesture. I admire her for saying what needed to be said.”¹¹⁴

In February a prominent liberal scholar was invited to have dinner with the Johnsons in the upstairs family quarters. LBJ had not given up hope that historians would redeem him. The scholar had visited the White House many times before, but this time it felt truly under siege, a palpable onslaught. After being greeted by the First Couple, he tried to lighten the deathly grim atmosphere.

“Well, Mr. President, I have to confess to you that all four of my children marched on the Pentagon last October, and one got arrested.” Johnson did not even pretend to smile. The dinner conversation was “guarded and subdued, everyone avoiding the subject that lay over the White House like a shroud.” Suddenly the President’s elder daughter “flounced into the room in a housecoat, sat in her father’s lap, then beside him on the floor.” She started talking about Vietnam, where her marine captain husband was about to be sent, as was her younger sister Lucy’s spouse. “Most of her friends and those of her husband were military men, she said, but she understood the feelings of young people who hated the war. She then presented those feelings, as simply and eloquently as I could remember having heard.” Lynda Bird tried to explain to her father that the young protesters felt passionately about peace the way he had felt, as a young man, fighting poverty in the New Deal. Her father listened, but for once had no reply.

The scholar broke the stony silence with a story about how his son, the one who was jailed at the Pentagon, had nursed a passionate love for Texas as a young boy growing up in New England and dreamed about being a Texas rancher and politician. The President was transfixed—anything to get his mind off the war that had hog-tied him.¹¹⁵

. . .

HOW COULD IT HAVE HAPPENED that this political genius who had been elected by a historic landslide, commanded solid majorities in Congress, controlled the mightiest military the world had ever known, with hundreds of bases spanning the globe, felt paralyzed by the domestic forces opposing him? His fear and paranoia compelled him to escalate espionage against the peace and freedom movements and in particular against King. He could not tolerate any more shocks or surprises. By early 1968 he was less interested in discrediting King—the thrust of White House machinations against his Vietnam stand—than in keeping close watch on him, his organization, and his allies.

The FBI, however, was still obsessed with destroying him politically and psychologically. “We were operating an intensive vendetta against Dr. King in an effort to destroy him,” former Atlanta FBI agent Arthur Murtagh testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations.¹¹⁶

In August 1967, stunned by the massive multicity rioting that they had not foreseen, the FBI created a major new program: Counterintelligence—Black Hate Groups. Counterintelligence was a euphemism for counterinsurgency. The agency had set up a “Cointelpro” operation in 1964 targeting the Klan and white hate groups, and earlier against the Communist Party, Socialist Workers, and Puerto Rican nationalists, but this was a far grander enterprise. Its mission was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.”¹¹⁷ Shortly thereafter the “racial intelligence section” was established to oversee this new program. While King and SCLC were included in it—despite not fitting the profile—not much changed right away because they were already heavily targeted. It was likely, though, that the new Cointelpro was responsible for the more distasteful dirty tricks against King, such as the bogus death threats from black militants that roiled him so.

Then came the Pentagon siege in October, prompting an expanded Cointelpro against the New Left, followed by King’s announcement of the Poor People’s Campaign, which raised red flags all over Washington. The FBI reinforced their secret war against King with a full-bore campaign against the PPC of infiltration, red-baiting, disinformation, and disruption.

In early January 1968 Hoover instructed twenty-two field offices to coordinate intelligence gathering on the PPC with local and state police. It was the FBI’s first opportunity to activate its Ghetto Informant Program, which utilized over three thousand ghetto residents as “listening posts.” They were paid to report on and thwart SCLC recruitment efforts for the PPC. The new attorney general, Ramsey Clark, refused to approve renewed FBI wiretapping of SCLC headquarters in Atlanta, where agents wanted to tap all ten phone lines (they still had taps on Levison, Rustin, and other New York advisers).

It hardly mattered, though. Since fall 1964 the FBI had lodged a trusted informant at the heart of SCLC’s executive staff: Jim Harrison, the controller, who managed SCLC’s finances and payroll. He reported regularly to his FBI handler on all aspects of SCLC operations, paid ten thousand dollars per year. Harrison’s duplicity was not revealed until much later. Undoubtedly other spies were secreted in SCLC at lower levels and in the field.

Recruiting of PPC participants in northern and southern cities was already slowed down by field organizers’ lack of clarity and commitment. The FBI’s espionage and disinformation took a further toll, especially in the South. In Birmingham the network of informants spread the lie that PPC participants would have their welfare benefits cut off. By March SCLC recruiters had signed up only forty Birmingham blacks. While the South was lagging, they did better in northern cities. In Philadelphia SCLC staff tripled their quota of two hundred. PPC coordinator Bernard Lafayette brought in seasoned organizers from the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and endorsement by a slew of religious and community associations in D.C. and an impressive roster of national groups.

Despite public words to the contrary, King was worried about the Poor People’s Campaign, intensified by his underlying gloom. He feared that because of faltering progress, they would have to delay or even cancel the spring campaign.

“There’s no masses in this mass movement,” he complained. “We are not doing our homework,” he chided staff leaders in a mid-February meeting recorded by FBI informant Harrison. “We have not gotten off the ground as far as engaging in the enormous job ahead. I am disturbed about the fact that our staff has not gotten to the people we are talking about, the hard-core poor people.

“If we cannot do it, I would rather pull out now. The embarrassment and criticism would be much less now than if we went to Washington with about three hundred people.”¹¹⁸ His colleagues tried to convince him that things were not so bleak. They debated what to do, whether to stop or go forward. They reached consensus on Lafayette’s proposal that if they did not garner enough volunteers by April 1 they would postpone the campaign but not call it off. King barnstormed through Mississippi and Alabama to jazz things up at rallies and mass meetings.

The Poor People’s Campaign got a timely lift at the end of February when the National Commission on Civil Disorders, chaired by Illinois governor Otto Kerner, issued its five-inch-thick, fourteen-hundred-page report. Johnson set up the commission immediately after the Detroit riot to investigate the causes and prevention of urban violence. After three months of hearings with 130 witnesses, including King, the commission concluded: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal. Reaction to last summer’s disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division. To pursue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values.

“What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

Their proposed solution was nearly as blunt: a commitment to national action, “compassionate, massive and sustained. From every American it will require new attitudes, new understanding, and above all, new will. Hard choices must be made, and if necessary, new taxes enacted.” The middle class would have to sacrifice in order to save the ghettos. Large-scale programs to meet the problem “will require unprecedented levels of funding and performance. There can be no higher priority for national action and no higher claim on the nation’s conscience.”¹¹⁹

The damning report delivered extra clout because the eleven commission members were moderate to conservative, with not a single community leader from the inner city. Black leaders across the board praised the document, especially the admission that white racism was the fundamental problem. King and Whitney Young pointed out that they had urged similar remedies for several years—the former’s Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged and the latter’s domestic Marshall Plan. SNCC chief Rap Brown, in a New Orleans jail under high bail on a weapons charge, proclaimed that commission members “should be put in jail under one hundred thousand dollars’ bail each, because they’re saying essentially what I’ve been saying.”

King stated that the report was “a physician’s warning of the approaching death of American society, with a prescription to life.” It showed how “the lives, the incomes, the well-being of poor people everywhere in America are plundered by our economic system,” and proved “the absolute necessity of our spring campaign in Washington.” He announced that the PPC would kick off in late April.

“We believe the highest patriotism demands the ending of the war and the opening of a bloodless war to final victory over racism and poverty,” he said. “Flame throwers in Vietnam fan the flames in our cities. I don’t think the two matters can be separated.” While he and other leaders would lobby Washington officials, three thousand people of color in a mule train of wagons would start out for the capital from the Mississippi Delta, retracing paths famously trod by protesters.¹²⁰

President Johnson ignored his own advisory commission’s recommendations. He was unhappy that the Kerner commission failed to praise his war on poverty and refuted his conviction that the riots were caused by a black radical conspiracy, probably communist inspired. Funds that might have gone toward removing the causes went to arm local police forces with high-tech arsenals of tanks, personnel carriers, machine guns, nerve gas, and other weapons of mass suppression.

13

 

Despite the good news of the Kerner gospel, King continued to spiral downward. Abernathy accompanied him on a brief getaway to Acapulco, where, fraught with fear about the Washington campaign, he could not relax or sleep. While his staff was reluctantly following his marching orders, SCLC board members and other allies blasted him with confidential criticism. His toughest in-house critic was board officer Marian Logan from New York, who feared that the PPC would stiffen congressional resistance and help elect reactionary candidates, moving Congress and the presidency further to the right. Like others she worried about confused aims, poor planning, and the propensity for violence. Public attacks did not let up. In Michigan he suffered the worst heckling of his life by rightwing protesters, yelling “Commie!” and “Traitor!”

Traveling in Los Angeles, “he felt that his time was up,” an aide recalled. He said he knew that they were going to get him. His inner circle felt that his depression was deeper and more serious than before, that his obsession with his dying amounted to a death wish, to escape his torments and tormentors.

“You think I’m paranoid, don’t you?” he had asked Rustin, when they were still talking.

“Sometimes I do, Martin,” his old friend replied. Young, Rutherford, and Dorothy Cotton believed that his free-falling depression was more spiritual than emotional. Clinging for dear life to his nonviolent faith, he was beginning to doubt that it could save his nation. Cotton thought the turning point was his vilification the year before for denouncing the war. “That whole last year I felt his weariness, just weariness of the struggle, that he had done all that he could do.”

He appeared “a profoundly weary and wounded spirit,” Justice Department official Roger Wilkins recalled. A “profound sadness” had engulfed him.¹²¹ He also seemed, despite his caring extended family and many friends, a desperately lonely man.

MORE THAN EVER his best therapy was sermonizing, especially preaching to himself, about himself, confessing to God. Yet he was always, at the same time, preaching to the world, about the world, delivering the words of God. On March 3, 1968, shaky of soul, losing his equilibrium, he preached a sermon about shattered dreams.

“Approaching the darkness, living in the shadow, perhaps anticipating the elusive, eternal light,” his friend Vincent Harding wrote years later, “our brother needed to share these words of self-reflection, confession, and hope. Where better than at Ebenezer, with the congregation that had known him before he knew himself, the extended family of faith whose love could provide a space for their internationally renowned son to come home and say things that only a compassionate family could receive? Where everyone could see the implacable opposition and the shadow of death that seemed to envelop him.”¹²²

King had seen his dream of beloved community turn into a nightmare of chaos, of nihilism. He was struggling now to transform the dream turned nightmare into a new dream, a bolder dream, powerful enough to recast the nightmare into a new morning. But was the temple he was trying to build, of justice and love, unbuildable? He took refuge in God’s soothing words to King David: “Thou didst well that it was within thine heart.”¹²³

But what if one’s heart was sick with sin? Would that pollute the dream? He pointed out in his sermon, as he had so many times before, that forces of good and evil were locked in a cosmic death dance, though good would ultimately prevail. Every human being internalized this struggle.

“And in every one of us this morning, there’s a war going on. (Yes, sir) It’s a civil war. (Yes, sir) There is a civil war going on in your life. Every time you set out to be good, there’s something pulling on you, telling you to be evil. (Preach it) Every time you set out to love, something keeps pulling on you, trying to get you to hate. (Yes. Yes, sir) There is a schizophrenia. There are times that all of us know somehow that there is a Mr. Hyde and a Dr. Jekyll in us.

“I want you to know this morning that I’m a sinner like all of God’s children. But I want to be a good man. (Yes. Preach it)”

In an earlier sermon he had probed the nature of one’s lower self, one’s devilish domain, first with sexual temptation.

“Sex is sacred,” he had said. “It’s beautiful, it’s holy.” But “if one becomes a slave to sex, you can never satisfy it! And then the long road of promiscuity comes along. And then you discover what hell is. Hell is God giving a man what he thought he wanted. When you get it, you discover you don’t want it any longer, and you move on and you get something else. Whenever you become a slave to a drive, you can never satisfy it.

“It’s a strange mixture in all of us, isn’t it? You’ll do what’s right most of the time, but every now and then you’ll do some wrong. You’ll be faithful to that and those that you should be faithful to most of the time. But every now and then you’ll be unfaithful to those you should be faithful to.

“Do you know that there is a bit of a coward in the bravest of us, and a bit of a hero in the meanest of us? There is much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us.”

In this sermon he retold the parable of the prodigal son, hinting that he himself had been wastefully extravagant, especially in stockpiling acclaim and fame, accumulating glory. Even the extravagance of a perhaps unrealizable dream that raised false hopes for millions and dashed them.

But in his March 1968 homily he reassured his flock and himself that God judged all of them by “the total bent of our lives.” God required that your heart was right. “Salvation isn’t reaching the destination of absolute morality, but it’s being in the process and on the right road.” One found salvation in the heartfelt struggle to keep one’s higher self right side up.

For King the road to redemption was to return from the “far country,” the dark places of physical and spiritual extravagance, to repent for his sins and come home—coming home to Ebenezer, his birthplace, his fount of baptism.

For America, the road to redemption was to come home from the “tragic far country” of racism, war, and poverty amid plenty.

“There’s a famine in this country, a moral and spiritual famine, because somewhere America strayed away from home. I can hear the voice of God saying, ‘America, it isn’t too late if you will only come to yourself.’ ” Like his own country, King had to slough off the waste, empty himself of extravagance, of his overflow of ego, and find the courage to walk humbly with his God. King and his country had to follow the same road to salvation.¹²⁴

14

 

On March 1, 1968, corporate lawyer Clark Clifford took over as secretary of defense. As we have seen, McNamara’s mounting misgivings about Vietnam had estranged him from LBJ and his shrinking inner circle. No one had been a more loyal friend. The President had been utterly dependent upon him. In McNamara’s words, they “loved and respected each other.”¹²⁵ His disaffection from the war they had managed together was a grievous blow to the commander-in-chief.

The breaking point was a memo McNamara wrote to the President one week after October’s Pentagon protest. “Continuation of our present course of action in Southeast Asia,” he concluded, “would be dangerous, costly in lives, and unsatisfactory to the American people.” He doubted that they could “maintain our efforts in South Vietnam for the time necessary to accomplish our objectives.”¹²⁶ Johnson eased his departure by sending him off to run the World Bank. But McNamara’s no less disgruntled lieutenants remained at their watches. These dissenters, led by assistant secretary Paul Warnke and his deputy Morton Halperin, saw Clifford’s arrival as a crucial chance to rethink Vietnam policy.

Clifford was the quintessential cold warrior, a key Washington power broker who had advised Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson on foreign policy. Although little known to the public, he had been a kingpin of the national security elite, author of the Truman doctrine of communist containment in 1947. At that time, he reminisced later, he and other policy makers “had this feeling that we could control the future of the world.”¹²⁷ LBJ respected him no less than he had McNamara.

In the aftermath of the Tet offensive General William Westmoreland, American commander in Vietnam, requested the President for two hundred thousand additional troops. Over half a million U.S. forces were already swamping South Vietnam. Westmoreland admitted later that he intended to use the infusion of troops for an invasion of North Vietnam he had been secretly planning; and he wanted to expand the ground war into Cambodia and Laos. The war’s biggest troop request was the punch line of a report by General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after his latest Vietnam visit. It was the military’s first pessimistic assessment of the war’s progress.

President Johnson set up a task force under Clifford to advise him on the post-Tet crisis. The Pentagon doves felt that the portentous troop call, on the heels of the offensive, marked a watershed between all-out escalation and scaling down the war. They fought hard for a defensive strategy and negotiations. Making a clean start, Clifford might have the clout to begin the colossal job of turning the war around.

The Clifford task force agreed that further escalation of the ground war would mean activating at least 250,000 reserves and substantially upping draft calls. Air force secretary Townsend Hoopes and others pressed the view that mobilizing the nation for what was still officially a limited war, for dubious aims, would have disastrous effects on the country’s economy, politics, and social fabric.

Assistant defense secretary Phil Goulding argued that if the troop requisition were granted, requiring bloated draft calls and mobilizing reserves, “the shock wave would run through the entire American body politic. The antiwar demonstrations and resistance to the draft would rise to new crescendos, reinforced by civil rights groups who would feel the President had once again revealed his inner conviction that the war in Vietnam was more important than the war on poverty.”¹²⁸

Hoopes fired a memo to Clifford titled “The Infeasibility of Military Victory,” stating that the war was “eroding the moral fiber of the nation, demoralizing its politics, and paralyzing its foreign policy.” More troops “would intensify the domestic disaffection, which would be reflected in increasing defiance of the draft and widespread unrest in the cities.”¹²⁹

Another element came into play—the specter of nuclear warfare. Five thousand U.S. marines were encircled by North Vietnamese forces at the mountain stronghold of Khe Sanh. In a White House luncheon Joint Chiefs chairman Wheeler was unable to reassure the commander-in-chief that the siege of Khe Sanh could be lifted without using tactical nuclear weapons. Wheeler reportedly told senators that he would recommend their use at Khe Sanh if needed. Senator J. William Fulbright and other war critics denounced this option.¹³⁰

General Westmoreland had set up a secret group to examine using battlefield nukes, in particular at Khe Sanh, where “civilian casualties would be minimal.” In his 1976 memoir he wrote that if Washington officials were determined to send a message to Hanoi, “surely small tactical nuclear weapons would be a way to tell Hanoi something. Use of a few small tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam—or even the threat of them—might have quickly brought the war there to an end.” Fearing a leak, his superiors told Westmoreland to can nuclear planning. “I felt at the time and even more so now that to fail to consider this alternative was a mistake.”¹³¹ During late winter 1968 anxiety about this frightful alternative inflamed war opposition both on the street and in official corridors. Would the Vietnam intervention deter the holocaust of World War III, or trigger it?

The Clifford task force ended up pushing another round of incremental escalation—more of the same. The blockbuster troop request did not win out, but Warnke’s proposal for de-escalation was vetoed under heated pressure from the Joint Chiefs. Although the task force supported giving the military much of what it wanted, the painstaking efforts of Warnke and other dissenters paid off. By the strange logic of bureaucratic physics, defeat augured victory, or the illusion of victory. The rough-and-tumble debate convinced the new defense czar that the policy must change. He knew how to reach his embattled friend in the Oval Office.

Clifford convened a meeting of the “Wise Men”—pillars of the national security establishment such as Dean Acheson, McGeorge Bundy, and Cyrus Vance—who had counseled LBJ on Vietnam and had backed him to the hilt. Now they informed him that his war was bankrupt. The cost, political, fiscal, and moral, was too high. Vance, a future secretary of state, disclosed later that a key factor in their turnabout was the Wise Men’s alarm that the “divisiveness in the country was growing with such acuteness that it was threatening to tear the United States apart.”¹³²

. . .

THE WINTER SAW a slackening in the antiwar movement’s effort to raise the social cost of the war. Some of its volatile energy was absorbed by electoral challenges and other moderate peace activism, such as the clergy’s Washington protest. Younger activists were furiously preparing for expected upheaval in the spring; the Student Mobilization Committee was organizing “ten days of resistance” for April on campuses nationwide. Some activists, like King, were struggling to choose between fighting against the war, and fighting against racial injustice at home.

In its national office and multitude of local chapters, Students for a Democratic Society was torn once again. Since summer and fall 1967 many members had begun to see SDS as a revolutionary vanguard. SDSers were rushing to adopt Marxist-Leninist mind-sets, partly to counter an invasion of disciplined cadres from the Maoist Progressive Labor Party intent on taking over. A majority of chapters had decided to work with constituencies other than white students, especially “third world” groups of color. After rancorous debate in Lexington, Kentucky, in late March, the SDS National Council voted for schizophrenia: letting chapters decide whether to focus on the war or racism, while committing the organization to support “the black struggle for liberation.”

ON MARCH 12, two weeks before LBJ’s fateful meeting with the Wise Men, Senator Eugene McCarthy came close to beating him in the New Hampshire presidential primary, garnering 42 percent of the vote and most delegates. The pious-sounding, poetry-writing Minnesota senator and his battalions of well-groomed student volunteers had campaigned for an end to “Johnson’s War.” The Tet offensive not only shook up the White House and Pentagon and vitalized the antiwar movement, but it transfigured the presidential race just taking off. Since the past summer, the “Dump Johnson” movement had been searching for a viable candidate to challenge LBJ in the spring primaries on a forthright antiwar platform. When dream candidate Kennedy demurred, Al Lowenstein and associates turned to McCarthy, who took the plunge in late fall 1967. But McCarthy’s campaign was slow to catch fire; in January it seemed almost moribund. Tet turned it around. In the weeks leading up to the New Hampshire vote it became a young people’s crusade. Scruffy antiwar protesters were even willing to cut their long locks and get “clean for Gene.”

McCarthy’s remarkable showing in the Granite State did not surprise Kennedy, who had been agonizing for weeks over whether to run. He knew how weak Johnson was on the war. Despite opposition from all of his close advisers, including younger brother and Senate colleague, Ted, he decided to go for it just before the March 12 primary and told McCarthy. His colleague’s success strengthened RFK’s belief that his own entry would not be seen as a vendetta against LBJ. His campaign would not divide the Democratic Party because it was already split.

Kennedy tried a last-ditch effort to sway LBJ from the inside. He met with Clifford to get him to urge Johnson to set up a presidential commission on Vietnam, like that on the summer riots, that would include RFK. Johnson refused, knowing that this would provide a potent platform for his arch-rival to attack him on Vietnam. He did not want to grease the rail for RFK to challenge his renomination and recapture the glory of Camelot. Four days after the first primary (after putting a call in to King), Kennedy threw his hat into the ring.

He seemed to feel real anguish about the war, strangely divorced from political calculations. It was partly driven by guilt. As JFK’s closest adviser, he had been a cheerleader for the intervention and headed up the Special Group Counter-Insurgency that oversaw it. RFK had matured during the painful odyssey since his brother’s death four years before. During a tumultuous time the “ruthless” tough-skinned attorney general had evolved into a conscientious, if still cautious, advocate of peace and racial justice, showing heartfelt compassion for the people of Indochina and for America’s poor.

The multiracial, multiclass coalition that Kennedy sought to build could politically empower the bottom-up alliance of the disadvantaged that King envisioned. Through Marian Wright and other activists, the King and Kennedy staffs had already linked arms on the PPC. King felt hopeful about RFK’s candidacy, which would not only bolster his crusade for the poor, putting it on the national agenda, but relieve pressure on him to push harder against the war, freeing him to concentrate on poverty. For better or worse RFK would become the messiah of the peace movement, the role King had reluctantly relinquished. The senator had the added asset of appealing to the white working class, King’s nemesis in Chicago and the South. For the first time the preacher was ready to break his long-standing rule of not endorsing a presidential candidate. He had supported neither John Kennedy nor (formally) LBJ.

“We’ve got to get behind Bobby now that he’s in,” he told Washington SCLC leader Walter Fauntroy.¹³³

What about the Republicans? Normally in a presidential election the opposition party made the biggest ruckus. This time they took a backseat to the Democrats’ civil war. The GOP was handicapped by an oversupply of stars. Front-runner Richard Nixon was hotly pursued by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, Hollywood emanation Ronald Reagan, Michigan governor George Romney, made famous by the Detroit riot, and Illinois senator Charles Percy.

George Wallace had been running for almost a year, under the banner of his one-man American Independent Party. He had challenged LBJ once before, in the Democratic primaries of 1964, and his anti–civil rights harangues had played well in the North. Barred from succeeding himself as Alabama governor in 1966, he got his wife, Lurleen, elected in his place. The trouble was that she had been secretly diagnosed with uterine cancer in late 1965. A physician had told him four years before that his wife had a cancerous condition; he opted not to tell her. She grew sicker during her ceremonial governorship run by him. Although he did not let her illness stymie his presidential ambition, her rapid deterioration in late winter 1968 forced him to pause until after her death in early May. He then revved up his campaign for “law and order” and Vietnam victory. In November, when Nixon beat Humphrey, Wallace took votes from both to capture the Deep South and 13 percent of the popular ballot, nearly making his goal of throwing the race into the House of Representatives. Despite his “party” being only paper, he was the most formidable third-party challenger since Teddy Roosevelt helped elect Woodrow Wilson in 1912.

ONE REASON that King’s staff dragged their feet in organizing the Washington campaign, and that he chafed at them, was the irrepressible spirit of black nationalism that had taken hold within SCLC, especially among field organizers. When King lost his temper with Rutherford and others for questioning nonviolence, his chagrin was linked to the staff’s flirtation with separatist black liberation, itself a violation of nonviolence as unifying and all-inclusive, as breaking down walls. While not separatist, SCLC had always been a black organization (with a handful of token white organizers), unlike SNCC and CORE, which had earlier been biracial, or the NAACP, which continued to be. King himself showed occasional black nationalist tendencies; he might be described as a minimal nationalist. Key staff leaders rationalized their involvement in multiracial coalition building—which included whites—only by stressing the vanguard role that black activists would play, first among equals.

In recruiting black participants, Hosea Williams, the campaign’s field director, downplayed the multiracial aspect and stressed that the PPC was (as it surely was) a new front in the struggle for black freedom, to be led by black people.¹³⁴ Williams and other staff members were more interested in building a multiclass coalition of blacks than a multiracial coalition of the poor. He wrote to Atlanta activists that “some of us are defined as radicals, some as moderates and others as ‘Uncle Toms.’ But we are all inextricably bound—we are Black; each of us are flesh of one another’s flesh and blood of one another’s blood.”¹³⁵ Unifying blacks across class lines might mean toning down the PPC’s rhetoric and demands in order to attract the black middle class. This nationalist bias took a toll on the PPC’s outreach and nonblack recruitment.

Because SCLC was organizing the campaign, and African Americans were the primary constituency, numbers alone would necessitate that black activists be dominant. Blacks were the majority of the organized poor, such as in the welfare rights movement. Switching their consciousness from a black-centered movement to a true poor people’s movement was not easy for some SCLC staffers. One candidly confessed at a staff meeting: “I do not think I am at the point where a Mexican can sit in and call strategy on a steering committee.”¹³⁶

Pulling in poor whites might be especially tricky. An AFSC organizer in eastern Kentucky wrote Andy Young that the Appalachian poor “even less than the Mexican-Americans or the Indians see the reality of their common cause with the black poor.” She argued that SCLC “will need to involve in some of the decision-making processes representatives of other poor groups if their cooperation is to be a reality.”¹³⁷

The United States in 1968 was still a nation of white and black. Other racial minorities (Latinos, Asians, and American Indians), which combined did not yet equal half of the black population of 22 million, were relatively invisible, along with poor whites, who were in fact the majority of poor people. So when King called an Atlanta meeting in which fifty-three nonblack organizations made a “declaration of unanimous support” for the PPC, it was a breakthrough of major proportions, the high point of the entire campaign. Seventy-eight leaders from seventeen states represented Chicano organizations from the Southwest, United Farm Workers (UFW), American Indian groups, Puerto Ricans, Appalachians, welfare rights, labor unions, tenant unions, inner-city community coalitions, and faith-based activists. Only Asian Americans seemed to be missing from the rainbow.¹³⁸

The meeting was a dream come true for Myles Horton from Highlander in Tennessee. “I believe we caught a glimpse of the future,” he wrote to Young, “the making of a bottom-up coalition.” He counseled SCLC to break away from its centralized mode and encourage autonomous actions in Washington by Mexican Americans and others, sharing the limelight.¹³⁹

King heralded “the beginning of a new cooperation, understanding, and a determination by poor people of all colors” to achieve economic security. “Delegates repeatedly pointed out that the established powers of rich America have deliberately exploited poor people by isolating them in ethnic, nationality, religious, and racial groups.” A white delegate stated that it wasn’t the poor people “who are responsible for hatred in our country, but the powerful economic and political managers who want to keep us down. We will no longer permit them to divide us.”¹⁴⁰

King hoped that participants’ racial identity would buttress their identity as a class, the class of the poor—not to undermine the emerging identity politics but to raise it to a higher level, give it more reach and clout. This new coalition or “true alliance,” both class and race based, would be a creative synthesis combining the strengths of the old civil rights coalition with those of the new politics of liberation.

Right after this meeting King embarked on what was planned as a nineteen-day, nineteen-city tour to hold grassroots hearings to learn about grievances, meet with community leaders, and push recruitment. The Deep South, heartland of poverty, would get special attention. Flying over Mississippi’s hills and molehills by small plane, King fired up rallies in eight cities and towns, ending up in Jackson at 4 A.M. after a twenty-one-hour day pressing the flesh. He campaigned as hard as any presidential candidate.

He exhorted whole families of Delta blacks to descend on Washington to “plague Congress and the President until they do something.” In the Delta town of Marks in Quitman County, poorest in the nation, he stood at a pulpit listening to locals’ cries for help. In this county many survived on wild rabbits and berries. Children didn’t know the feel of shoes. He listened to mothers plead for “shoes and a decent education” for their kids. “Johnson said when he come in he was going to wipe out poverty, ignorance and disease,” one black woman shouted. “Now where’s our money?”

“It’s criminal for people to have to live in these conditions,” he replied. “I am very deeply touched. God does not want you to live like you are living.”¹⁴¹ He and his entourage visited a day-care center.

“There was one apple,” Abernathy remembered, “and they took this apple and cut it into four pieces for four hungry waiting students. And when Dr. King saw that is all they had for lunch,” he cried. “The tears came streaming down his cheek. He had to leave the room.”¹⁴²

Before they left Marks, a rough-hewn white fellow handed King a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill to help with the campaign.

Several hundred black Mississippians and Alabamians filled out registration forms to join up for the long trek to Washington. Most were women; many had been involved in civil rights work, active in the Freedom Democratic Party, arrested in past protests. They spelled out their motives in plain English.

Virgia Mary Genes scribbled on her form: “i have 6 children no one to suport them But me and I don’t have a job and they wont give me one. and i need a job Bad.”

Mrs. Louella Wright: “for mony, better housing and more jobs and better streets and I want land.”

Vonell Jamison, twenty-one: “So I can get what belong to me and my right to.”

Mrs. Rose Kendrick of Marks, fifty-five, put it all together: “For jobs money decent house to live in and some land. poor people do not even get respect as human being. I dont have no job. I don’t have any money. I am hungry. I need clouths. My house is falling in. Congressmen you have the job and you have the money. I want some of it so i can live to.”¹⁴³

. . .

THE CAMPAIGN’S ANTIPOVERTY GOALS were still not as clear as SCLC staff and board wanted, or as poor people expected. In early February the staff announced a set of legislative objectives with multibillion-dollar price tags to achieve full employment and a guaranteed income, but nothing that caught the public’s imagination. King was not as concerned about specific reforms as he was about forging a national consensus behind what he conceived to be a universal right of citizenship, authorized by the Declaration of Independence with its inalienable right to pursue happiness, for a livable income for all citizens, provided directly by the government if someone could not work.¹⁴⁴

Thus the PPC called for an “economic and social bill of rights” featuring a “meaningful job at a living wage” and “secure and adequate income for all who cannot find jobs or for whom employment is inappropriate.”¹⁴⁵ He did not consider this human right a one-way street, a bureaucratic dole that would deepen dependence. He believed that entitlement to income support, for those who were not employed, entailed the responsibility of community service or some contribution to social betterment. Although he was a far cry from a feminist, and didn’t think much about gender discrimination, his sensitivity to the unpaid labor of housewives (like his own wife’s) caused him to consider that the right to an income might encompass child rearing and housework.¹⁴⁶

In his many speeches to build this true alliance of the poor, King harped on the fact that the government had granted such economic rights to white people for at least as long as slavery had been abolished. While the freed slaves were denied “forty acres and a mule,” whites settling the West were given four times that acreage plus credit, technical services, land-grant colleges, and of course railroads. Since the New Deal white farmers were paid billions not to grow crops while their black and brown neighbors, some dependent on those fallow fields, went hungry. Taxpayers (including the working poor) paid for the freeways that took middle-class whites from suburban homes to city jobs and pleasures. The tax system, notably the home-mortgage interest deduction, heavily favored property owners. It was socialism for the rich and middle class, King emphasized, cutthroat capitalism for the rest. Special preferences for the already advantaged. Poor people were coming to Washington to claim “what is ours,” their fair share of the national harvest.

For twelve years King had been able to straddle the barbed wire between direct action and electoral politics. Now the tumult of 1968 and criticism by friends, private and public, were forcing him to make a painful choice. It might have been different had it not been a presidential election year, which always tended to disrupt grassroots activism. But King could not wait until after the election. This dilemma partly reflected the ethic of immediacy so pervasive at the time, and the friction between immediate results (freedom now, end the war now) and the realism to pursue a step-by-step, longer-term strategy. King’s immediatism was driven not only by the still escalating war and urban explosions, but by the apocalyptic mood all around and by his steadily sinking depression and strong premonition that death was nearing. He knew he didn’t have much time. He had to get results.

But something more was at stake that was the antithesis of immediacy. He was determined as well to strike a blow for the long haul. From his perspective it was presidential politics as much as rock throwing that was driven by short-run thinking. He felt acutely the urgency to dump Johnson. In fact he had come to see that this might be the quickest way to end the war. The McCarthy and Kennedy campaigns were bearing this out. But real change, fundamental change, would take more time. He wanted to send a message to posterity, a prophecy for the ages.

Nonviolent mass action, he believed, was the most fruitful means not only to end immediate evils but to bring about social regeneration, and not only in his own country. Replacing the president might bring peace for a season; it might even, for a time, still the troubled waters of racial strife. But electing a new president, even the prince of Camelot, was not more than a short-term expedient. It was militant mass action (with electoral politics playing an intermediate role) that would reshape history, that would make the revolution for human rights and economic justice, that would enable men and women to set foot as new people in a new land. Racked with doubts about so many things, he held fast to his faith that the fateful choice was between nonviolent revolution and barbarism, between nonviolence and nonexistence.

But none of this dialectical thinking made much sense to board secretary Marian Logan. King called her almost daily to get her to withdraw her criticisms of the PPC, which she had communicated to the SCLC board. His board members did not usually rock the boat. Andy Young wrote her that “we are too far gone to turn around. This is very much a faith venture.”¹⁴⁷ Spending the night with Logan and her husband in their New York apartment, King argued with Marian until dawn, downing one tumbler after another until he was quite drunk and her husband told him to desist. They had drunk and argued before, but this time it was different, she recalled. King careened from anger to grave anxiety to icy calm as he sought to convince her that the Washington campaign was right, his certitude betrayed by his taut, nervous body language. His sense of humor was a shambles. She thought he was “losing hold.”¹⁴⁸

He canceled his morning events in New York because he was so exhausted and hung over. “I’ve been getting two hours’ sleep a night for the last ten days,” he told reporters when he lunched with a welfare mom in her shabby Harlem tenement.¹⁴⁹

We should not forget that there were moments in the Birmingham movement and in Selma when things looked nearly as bleak. In fact, by the first day of spring, when King was most downhearted, the Poor People’s Campaign was finally charging up. Most of the chosen cities had recruited their two hundred volunteers, and some had done much better. Backing and money continued to pour in from organizations all over. While the leaders at the top were having jitters and second thoughts, the field staff were pulling rabbits out of their hats.

By one measure it had already won—shaking up the higher circles. Washington officialdom was terrified that the PPC might ignite a spasm of rioting in the capital. Attorney General Ramsey Clark reported later that high officials were panic-stricken and paranoid. Congress members lashed King and the PPC and urged that the protests, though protected by the Constitution, be banned as a danger to national security. The FBI stepped up its maneuvers to sabotage the PPC. Hoover directed his field offices to go all out against “the most violent and radical groups,” SCLC foremost. The agency’s mission: to “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement.” Preventive measures were left undefined. Hoover advised that King was the leading candidate for this position, along with Stokely Carmichael.¹⁵⁰

Looking back, Andy Young was convinced that the White House and the FBI were determined to stop the Poor People’s Campaign by any means necessary. “We had become the enemy.”¹⁵¹

15

 

Now it was the disciples’ turn to get mad at their messiah.

Amid the first swing of his “people to people” tour of the nation to drum up support for the PPC, King got a phone call from Rev. James Lawson, pastor of Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, SCLC board member, and head of SCLC’s Memphis affiliate. A decade before, he had been kicked out of Vanderbilt divinity school for teaching nonviolent methods to a new generation of young activists—Diane Nash, John Lewis, Jim Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, and other trailblazers—who built the Nashville movement and then SNCC. No one in the movement except Rustin had as much expertise in nonviolent techniques. Lawson asked King, who had also gotten pointers from him, if he would speak to a mass rally of striking sanitation workers in Memphis while traveling through the nearby Delta country.

Thirteen hundred black workers, members of an AFSCME public employees’ local, had been striking for five weeks, since Lincoln’s birthday, to win union recognition by the city. The strike was brought on by long-running discrimination and measly pay (with no benefits), but precipitated by two rainy-day incidents. Two workers were pulverized by their compactor when they took refuge from a storm in the back of their garbage truck; unlike white workers, they were not permitted to sit out rain in the cab. During another storm black sewer workers were sent home without pay; white workers were paid.

Despite their just grievances, the newly elected mayor, Henry Loeb, adamantly refused to recognize their union local and allow a dues checkoff to make it viable. A peaceful protest organized by Lawson and other community leaders was attacked by police, who sprayed Mace on workers and ministers alike. In response Lawson and colleagues created a support group, Community on the Move for Equality (COME), that organized rallies, marches, and a boycott of downtown businesses. The workers’ slogan: “I am a man.” They invited in nationally known black leaders such as Rustin and Roy Wilkins to build solidarity. King was the prize.

Lawson lured his friend in part by stressing how the Memphis strike reprised the southern movement at its best—huge rallies, wide community support, strict adherence to nonviolence. Nothing like it since the Montgomery bus boycott. The strike epitomized the interplay of racial and class oppression that was the whole point of the Poor People’s Campaign. More important, it was a place where nonviolent struggle was still respected and still working—or so King thought. He agreed to speak at a rally the next day, March 18.

Andy Young and other SCLC leaders hit the roof. Here he had single-mindedly corralled all of them to throw in with the PPC, against their collective better judgment, insisting that they drop everything, put their cherished projects on hold. Now he was abandoning the PPC recruitment effort at a crucial juncture, just when momentum was finally hitting its stride.

“There was just a tremendous organizing job,” Young recalled, “and I didn’t know how you could take on anything else.”

“Well, Jim Lawson has been around for so long,” the chief replied, “and here are garbage workers on strike. He just wants me to come in and make a speech, and I’ll be right back.”¹⁵² If the past was any guide, the staff well knew, going off to make a speech, as in Albany or St. Augustine, led to embroilment, often with an unhappy ending. Despite their angry pleading, they could not change his mind. For him it was win-win: the striking workers would get national attention, and he would dramatize the cruelty of race-based poverty. He saw it as not a diversion from the Poor People’s Campaign but the blastoff.

King spoke to fifteen thousand excited people who packed prodigious Mason Temple church, the largest indoor crowd he had ever roused in the South. He felt right away the mood and makings of a great people’s movement.

“One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage is just as significant as the physician. For if he doesn’t do his job, disease is rampant. And you are reminding not only Memphis but the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages.” He and the assembly merged in call and response. Their cheers grew wilder as he swayed to his climax.

“You know what?” He talked as though fifteen thousand souls had gathered in his living room. “You may have to escalate the struggle a bit. If they keep refusing, I tell you what you ought to demand, and you’re together here enough to do it. In a few days you ought to get together and just have a general work stoppage in the city of Memphis.” He set off an explosion of human will, thunderous clapping and whooping sparked by the lightning vision of victory.

“You let that day come and not a Negro in this city will go to any job downtown, not a Negro in domestic service will go to anybody’s kitchen, black students will not go to anybody’s school.”¹⁵³ He was inciting nonviolent insurrection.

Despite the jubilant mood, maybe because he felt so at home with these folk, he couldn’t help but lift the veil on his inner self: “Sometimes I feel discouraged,” he admitted, “having to live under the threat of death every day, having to take so much abuse and criticism, sometimes from my own people. Sometimes I feel discouraged.” But he said he could always count on the holy spirit to resuscitate his soul.¹⁵⁴

King’s aides were frantically conferring with Lawson and other Memphis leaders behind the pulpit. After King sat down to roaring applause, Abernathy suggested that perhaps they might all march down to city hall that night. Then King came back and announced that he and SCLC would return in a few days to lead a march to turn the mayor around. The strikers had been steadily losing hope with one frustration after another. He had restored their hope.

AFSCME organizer Bill Lucy was astonished by King’s ability, in the heat of oratorical passion, not only to connect intimately with the mammoth audience but to get what the conflict was about. “He had not been there before,” Lucy recalled, “and he had had the most minimal of briefings. But he clearly understood that the struggle was really about a new kind of people, who worked forty hours a week and still lived in poverty.”¹⁵⁵ He made their battle legitimate, just, and God-sent.

The first try for the march and work stoppage was called off because of a bizarre snowstorm that dumped record snow on a city that rarely saw any. “The Lord has done it again,” COME leader Rev. Ralph Jackson quipped. “It’s a white world!”¹⁵⁶

Rescheduled for Thursday morning, March 28, the big march was delayed getting started because King’s flight was late. Lawson insisted on waiting until he arrived. Earlier, violence had broken out at a black high school when teachers and police tried to keep students from leaving for the protest. The march, King and Abernathy up front, had been moving only a few minutes along Beale Street, where W. C. Handy had built the blues, when marchers heard the sound of shattering glass coming from the rear. Shouting “Black Power!” several dozen youths, some stoned on wine or drugs, darted out of the main body to smash store windows with poster sticks and grab armfuls of shoes, stereos, portable TVs, and musical instruments. Then they would hide back among the marchers.

Just before police moved in with shotguns and gas, Lawson ordered the march to turn around and for King to be spirited away. Abernathy, Bernard Lee, and others swept him up, commandeered a car from an agreeable black woman, and whisked him out of harm’s way. A motorcycle cop led them to the Holiday Inn on the Mississippi River—too dangerous to stay downtown.

Although the march had turned back, cops arrested a few hundred, mostly peaceful protesters or bystanders. About two hundred stores had windows broken, but most had not been entered. At worst it was a mini-riot, lasting hardly more than an hour. Mayor Loeb nonetheless declared a state of emergency and called in four thousand national guard, who patrolled the streets in armored personnel carriers. Besides many injured, a cop killed a sixteen-year-old boy with a shotgun blast against his chest. His mother claimed he had his hands up. King and Abernathy glumly watched the denouement on TV in their plush hotel suite.

If ever King needed the holy spirit to rescue him, this was the time. Abernathy had accompanied his friend through countless low ebbs, but he had never seen him so distressed, almost catatonic. King knew how the media would eat him alive, the eulogies for nonviolent protest, the warnings that the PPC would unleash greater violence, the denunciations of his inability to control a protest, the chorus of catcalls for the PPC to be canceled. When Lawson and other COME leaders arrived at the motel, King was in bed, fully clothed, covers pulled over him, metaphor of his fear and vulnerability, covering up his naked exposure.

Lawson and fellow leaders apologized for the debacle but blamed a militant black group called the Invaders, with whom they had had a stormy relationship. King had not been told about this group, nor of any significant black militancy in Memphis. He told the Memphis leaders that the Invaders could no longer be ostracized; they would have to be included and an understanding worked out.

He was devastated that, for the first time, a march he had led—for once it was actually his own idea—turned violent, even though less than 1 percent of participants had broken discipline. And that a boy, possibly innocent of wrongdoing, had been killed.

Many previous SCLC marches had provoked police or white mob violence, of course; they could not have succeeded without it. But this was not the first SCLC-led protest in which some participants engaged in riotous actions. The climactic Birmingham marches, during which King remained holed up at the Gaston Motel, were similar to what had just happened in Memphis. Black youths on the fringes who had not been “workshopped” caused the trouble. In Birmingham it worked to the movement’s advantage. This time it had the opposite effect. It was ironic that in the less violent era of spring 1963, the Birmingham mini-rioting (because it was something new?) did not discredit King in the way that comparable violence did five years later.

The media hit him even harder than he had feared. They added insult to injury by accusing him of fleeing the scene in a cowardly manner to a luxury motel; actually he had no choice. As part of its PPC sabotage operation the FBI sent out derogatory disinformation that was published by many newspapers, even as editorials.

Despite Abernathy’s and Lee’s efforts to console him, King could not sleep till morning came. He told Levison in New York that he might have to call off the Poor People’s Campaign.

“He was worried, worried,” Abernathy recalled. “He didn’t know what to do. It was then that he raised this question with me if those of us who advocated nonviolence should not step back and let the violent forces run their course.”¹⁵⁷ Perhaps they would have to admit that the day of violence had arrived. The nation wasn’t listening to them.

In late morning, as King dressed for a press conference, Abernathy heard a loud knock. Three young men were at the door, leaders of the Invaders. They had come to apologize, to set the record straight, and to get help. While waiting for King to come out, Abernathy angered the trio by blaming them for the violence. King walked in, wearing a shiny silk suit, surprised that he knew one of them. Charles Cabbage, a Morehouse student, had worked with Hosea Williams in the SCLC headquarters the past summer, and had been proposed for the field staff in Baltimore to recruit for the PPC. Calvin Taylor was the only black intern on the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the city’s more conservative daily.

“For a man he had very soft looking skin,” Taylor remembered of his first encounter with the heroic leader he had heard about most of his life. “His hands were very soft. He wasn’t bitter. This man actually lived and believed nonviolence. This is one of the reasons he looked so soft to me. You talk about depressed! He looked as if he was about to cry. Not so much ‘Why did you have a riot with me leading it?’ but ‘Why would you resort to violence anyway?’ As if to say, ‘You know that violence hasn’t worked for white people. Why would you do that?’

“I have never seen a man that looked like peace, and that man looked like peace. I swear he did. I was kind of shocked. Dr. King wasn’t raising his voice. There was no shouting. The only time Cab shouted was when Abernathy accused the Invaders of being responsible. Then Dr. King said, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter who was responsible. Lawson and them should have told us. We should have sat down and talked before we had this march. When I come back to the city, that’s what we’re gonna do—sit down and talk. You will not be left out.’ ”

Cabbage and colleagues explained that they had not been present at the march, because Lawson and COME had excluded them from the planning. They had tried to talk with King when he spoke at the March 18 rally, but they claimed Lawson wouldn’t let them. They admitted that some of their members might have taken part in the disturbance but that it would not have happened if their group had been included in the leadership. They were sure that none of their members had started it. Cabbage then asked if SCLC could help them out financially, since the Invaders were involved in organizing poor people and could bring some of them to Washington. Taking it as a good-faith request, not an implied threat, King said he would see what he could arrange.

“What can I do to have a peaceful march?” he asked them. “Because you know that I have got to lead one. There is no other way.” He wanted to meet with them before the next march and pledged that they would be part of the leadership.

The three young men, who had been ready for a rough face-off, were blown away by his disarming patience, compassion, and reasonableness. “Nobody can be as peaceful as that man,” Taylor concluded. “When he came into the room it seemed like all of a sudden there was a real rush of wind and everything just went out and peace and calm settled over everything. You could feel peace around that man. It was one of the few times in my life when I wasn’t actually fighting something.” It felt to him like a psychotherapy session.¹⁵⁸

King then conducted a press conference in an assertive manner that contrasted with his torpor of the night before. He explained to antagonistic reporters that SCLC had not been involved in planning the failed march.

“We came in here cold,” he said. “Our intelligence was nil. I wouldn’t have come if I had known the outbreak of violence was possible.” SCLC would organize a return engagement in a week. The sanitation workers’ strike, he said, proved the necessity of the Poor People’s Campaign. “We are fully determined to go to Washington.”¹⁵⁹

That was his brave public face. Behind it he was still forlorn. He instructed Abernathy to get him out of Memphis as fast as possible. He had a long phone conversation with Levison, recorded by the FBI, in which he poured out his true feelings. They were in serious trouble, he told his longtime confidant. “I think our Washington campaign is doomed.” It would be much harder to get people there because they would fear the outbreak of violence that the media, with FBI feeding, was doing double time to make happen. Levison disagreed that the situation was so dire.

“All I’m saying,” King countered, “is that Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin and that stripe, and there are many of them, Adam Clayton Powell, their point is, ‘Martin Luther King is dead. He’s finished. His nonviolence is nothing, no one is listening to it.’ Let’s face it, we do have a great public relations setback where my image and my leadership are concerned.” Levison stressed that only a tiny fraction had been violent. King agreed. “It was a failure of the leadership here.” For one thing, there had been minimal training, usually Lawson’s forte. He told Levison about the Invaders’ visit.

“They came up here, they love me. They were fighting the leadership of Memphis. They were fighting Jim Lawson and the men who ignored them, who neglected them, who would not hear them, wouldn’t give them any attention. I had no knowledge of all this. I know the fellows, and they really do love me. They were too sick to see that what they were doing yesterday was hurting me much more than it could hurt the local preachers.

“I was so upset about this thing and so shocked,” he continued, “that I was just going to announce that I was going on a fast, and through this fast to appeal to the leadership of Memphis as well as those who participated in the violence to come to me in a united front and let’s take up the cudgel and move on in this movement. I think that that kind of powerful spiritual move would be the kind of thing that would pull all the forces. It would be a way of unifying the movement and transforming a minus into a plus.”¹⁶⁰ He might even bring back home his own prodigal staff.

He was looking to Gandhi, of course, who had fasted to atone for his own movement’s violence and to discipline his people when they had erred. But he was no doubt inspired as much by the nearly fatal twenty-five-day fast by his ally United Farm Workers chief Cesar Chavez, in California’s Central Valley. It had ended two weeks before, lasting longer than Gandhi’s. Chavez, a longtime admirer of King, his own methods influenced by him, was sending a UFW delegation to the Poor People’s Campaign. At a low point in his grape strike and boycott, Chavez fasted to keep farm workers nonviolent; some union members had allegedly destroyed growers’ property. A week before he announced his presidential bid, Robert Kennedy had joined the frail Chavez in a massive UFW celebration in Delano when he broke his fast. The two leaders, both devout Catholics, shared a portion of bread broken and blessed by a priest. The fast proved a turning point in the union’s fortunes.

King felt that the powerful act of fasting, which was excruciating for Chavez but would have been an even tougher sacrifice for this man who loved to eat, would help redeem the power of nonviolent action and counter his drubbing by the media. But he let go of the idea once convinced that SCLC would pull out all the stops to make the next Memphis march a triumphant vindication of soul force and of himself. He had married nonviolence back in November, after a long engagement, and had promised to stay with her till death them did part. He believed that the outcome in Memphis and Washington would determine whether nonviolent action would be “the dominant instrument for social change,” or whether it would be cast aside by guerrilla warfare and armed struggle—or by the masses’ timid supplication.¹⁶¹ He could tell that the next few weeks would be the severest test of his abiding nonviolent faith.

AFTER FLYING HOME to Atlanta with Abernathy, King got his usual workout at the YMCA. Not wanting to be seen in public, he joined Coretta to spend the night at the Abernathys’. His head was pounding from a bad migraine headache. The two men, wiped out, fell asleep scrunched up on matching loveseats.

“Ralph,” King joked as he drifted off, “I wish you’d had enough money to buy a whole sofa instead of just a half sofa.”¹⁶²

King was late for the executive staff meeting he had called the next morning at Ebenezer. When he walked into the conference room, Jesse Jackson, Bevel, and others were, one more time, marshaling arguments against the Poor People’s Campaign. They criticized him for going into Memphis at such a precarious moment. Sitting in back in a wooden classroom seat, he listened agitatedly. Finally he strode to the front. He blasted them for not supporting him.

“He just jumped on everybody,” Young recalled. “He said we’d let him down. That we all had our own agendas. Never before had I seen him so aggressive in dealing with us.”¹⁶³ He demanded that everyone drop what they were doing and go back with him to Memphis. He mentioned the fast he might undertake, that they might have to call off the Poor People’s Campaign if the staff would not rally round.

“I can’t take all this on by myself,” he protested. “I need you to take your share of the load. Everyone here wants to drag me into your particular projects. Now that there is a movement that originated basically from Mississippi-born folk, not from SCLC leadership, you don’t want to get involved.

“Now that I want you to come back to Memphis to help me,” he charged, “everyone is too busy.”¹⁶⁴ He had already instructed them to concentrate on the PPC, of course, and most had followed orders reluctantly.

“Succumbing to their own egomania,” Young wrote later, some staff leaders “had begun to feel that they were more important to the movement than Martin. When they were really feeling their oats, Hosea, Bevel, and Jesse acted as if Martin was just a symbol under which they operated. Bevel was so arrogant as to think he was smarter than Martin.” He was eager to send a peace delegation to the Mekong Delta to stand between American and North Vietnamese forces. Williams wanted SCLC to focus on running black candidates in the South. Meanwhile, “Jesse was busy building his own empire in Chicago,” with Operation Breadbasket going full tilt.¹⁶⁵

Eyes aflame, fury no longer hidden, King declared that each of them had to decide whether they would be part of the SCLC team, or if they were just using him and SCLC to glorify themselves.

“I’m getting out of here.” He marched out of the room.

The dozen senior staff members, plus Levison, who had flown down from New York, were stunned. They had never seen him explode like that. They hoped that he had just gone off to pray, like so many times before. But he did not look like he was in a praying mood. Abernathy instinctively rushed after him, catching up with him on the stairs.

“Martin, what is wrong with you? Tell me.”

“I’m going to the country. I need to go to the farm.” He probably meant the biracial Koinonia Farm community in southern Georgia run by his friend Rev. Clarence Jordan.

“Tell me what is bugging you?”

“All I’ll say is, Ralph, I’ll snap out of it. Didn’t I snap out of it yesterday? I’ll pull through it.”¹⁶⁶

At that instant Jackson appeared at the top of the stairs. “Doc,” he called out. “Don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right.”

King swung around and glared at him with an icy stare, stabbing his finger at him.

“Jesse, everything’s not going to be all right! If things keep going the way they’re going now, it’s not SCLC but the whole country that’s in trouble. If you’re so interested in doing your own thing, that you can’t do what this organization is structured to do, go ahead. If you want to carve out your own niche in society, go ahead. But for God’s sake, don’t bother me!”¹⁶⁷

Jackson was visibly wounded by the tirade. He must have felt like Peter rebuked by Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. Or did he feel more like Judas?¹⁶⁸ One Judas was still sitting in the conference room meticulously taking notes to hand to the FBI.

Under Abernathy’s and Young’s direction, the staff managed to collect itself and get down to business. By his impulsive direct action King had closed the door on dissent. There was no longer any question of defying the boss’s will. They had to pull together behind their leader, no matter how bad they felt about it, no matter how wrong they thought the course. Back to Memphis and on to D.C.

A few hours later, after they had finalized plans, Joe Lowery from Mobile said to the group: “The Lord has been in this room this afternoon. I know He’s been here because we could not have deliberated the way we did without the holy spirit being here. And the holy spirit is going to be with us in Memphis and Washington.”¹⁶⁹ He gave an Indian war whoop. Young did a little dance. All stood up and shook hands with each other like passing the peace of Christ. Abernathy managed to reach King and urged him to come back. A few more hours passed until he showed up. After taking twelve-year-old Yoki to her ballet lesson, he had visited a friend, then had a long talk with his father back at Ebenezer. He was gratified to hear what the staff had decided, that they would back him all the way. The meeting had lasted for ten hours. The staff were giddy with relief.

KING’S BLISTERING REBUKE was an emotional scourging that Jackson never let go of. Only thirteen years older, King was more his father than anyone had ever been. Jackson was born out of wedlock to a teenage mother in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1941, two months before Pearl Harbor. He had barely known his biological father, an older married man with a family of his own who abandoned him. As a young adult he would rebel against his adopted father, in an almost Oedipal sense challenging his movement leadership. But King had lifted him from obscurity, had trusted him to run the Breadbasket program, had raised this nobody into a somebody. Now this man he revered had shamed him in front of his movement siblings.

“I had never seen him under such a spiritual cloud before,” Jackson remarked later with understatement.¹⁷⁰ The experience confirmed for him what a lot of King’s staff and confidants were feeling. De Lawd was deliberately retreading the steps of Jesus as he arrived in Jerusalem with his languid disciples and struggled through his last days, especially the night of passion in the garden of Gethsemane below Mt. Calvary.

Like Jesus, King confronted the presumed disloyalty of his disciples, Jackson above all but also Bevel, Williams, and others, and tried to shape them up into worthy successors. While he had already anointed Abernathy to succeed him as SCLC president, he expected that all of these leaders he had cultivated would spread his gospel of justice and love. This was why he was so angered when Rutherford, Williams, and other close associates seemed to be questioning the worth of nonviolent principles. If his own senior staff were not committed to building the temple of nonviolence, what hope could there be that others would pick up his mantle?

And so, at this Saturday staff meeting and other crucial moments during that flood-tide spring, he was beseeching God, if possible, to lift the cup of destiny from his lips. Should he continue moving forward on his perilous path, or should he leave the movement and retire to an ivory tower, or to a farm in south Georgia—returning to his distant roots in the red clay soil? Should he stay in command, or hand over the reins to his own disciples? Which ones could he trust? Could he get Peter to keep faith with him? Would Judas betray him? Had he already?

If up to him, he wanted to be released from his suffering. But if not? He wanted to do God’s will.¹⁷¹

King’s passion ran deeper than whether he should continue to fight, who would carry on his work and how well, and how he could keep his disciples from denying him, betraying his principles and vision. It ran deep into his inner self, into the state of his wounded soul, into the dark shadows of his heart. He wanted to save his soul. If he could redeem his own soul, maybe he could redeem the soul of America, of humanity.

King had always been a glutton for guilt, ever since he had jumped out the upstairs window of his boyhood home blaming himself for his grandmother’s death. By his fortieth year the guilt that he had accumulated was monumental. In one compartment of his conscience was guilt about the extravagance of praise and honor lavished upon him that he felt he did not deserve, that others, unsung, unknown, already dead, deserved far more than he. In another compartment was remorse about neglecting his wife and children. In another, one can imagine, was searing guilt about his alleged extramarital relationships. And in another whole edifice of contrition was the guilt that he felt for all the failures of the freedom movement, the peace movement, the human rights movement, movements that he both personified and internalized. He felt responsible for the endless war, the burned babies of Vietnam. He felt responsible for the emaciated kids of Marks, Mississippi, running around barefoot, living on trapped rabbits and apple slices.

He found it more and more difficult to disentangle his own failures of leadership from the collective failures of the movements he led. And then he would feel guilty as well for treating these movements as extensions of his cosmic self.

He may have smothered his personal guilt with his political—overlaying guilt about his family with guilt about the world—sometimes the other way around. But however these multiple layers of guilt coexisted uneasily in his overgrown conscience, his cosmic guilt inflicted torturous anguish at the same time that it offered hope of relief and release. It was perhaps the balancing tension of pain and promise that enabled him to keep going against overwhelming odds.

The more guilt he endured, the more anger he turned inward, the more self-destructive his behavior, the more debased he felt—the more he felt he was humbling himself in the eyes of God. The silver lining in all his sinning, personal and public, was that he was pulling himself down from his exalted status, reducing himself to the least of these, or at least to less than what he had been, or could have been. If, as he truly believed, the first would be last and the last would be first, he wanted to be last in order to be first, to make himself small enough to squeeze through the eye of a needle to the promised land. He believed that the path to his personal redemption passed through the deepest depths of personal sin, the deepest darkness of private evil.

King dealt with his prodigious guilt by extreme self-punishment. The more he suffered, the more he sacrificed, the more he felt he could transform this punishing perdition into a way out of no way, into an exorcism of the devil inside of him. On some primal level he knew that he could never be reborn until he hit rock bottom, that only in the deepest darkness would he be able to see the stars. And so he sank, his drowning the way of deliverance.

It was no wonder then that he fixated on his own death. Nothing redeemed like martyrdom. By sacrificing his life he believed that he might wash away more than his own sins.

As if he were following the road map of a fellow Christian martyr, sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross, who talked of “the dark night of the soul,” he seemed to believe that his soul could find union with the divine only if it were fully purged of all impurities and temptations. But in order to cleanse his sins he had to embrace them. For years he had tried to humble himself, to decrease himself, through acts of will. But it seemed that the more he humbled himself, the higher he was exalted. The more he strove to transcend his self, the more it was magnified, by others if not by himself. As he had preached so often, one could only merge with God if one were stripped naked. The lower one fell into darkness, the more completely could one be reborn and exalted. To rise up was to fall down; to fall was to rise.

The darkness was the abode of sin, but it was also the place where sin could be faced and exposed and overcome. It was only in the dark night of the soul that one could empty oneself of wickedness, one could annihilate one’s ego, in order to be filled by divine light, light that could be blinding as it was to Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor of Christians. “When the spirit of good yields to the spirit of evil,” wrote St. John of the Cross, “the soul is purified and prepared for the feast to come.”¹⁷² The darkness was a place of torment for the soul but also the forcing house of re-creation. It was in the deepest darkness of the soul that the divine fire forged life out of death. It was from the darkness of this womb that new life, new worlds, could be born.

Dedicated to the faith that personal and social rebirth were interwoven, King believed that his nation should follow the same course of naked exposure and moral cleansing. It was not that a person or a nation ought to strive to be evil in order to be purified and exalted. It was that each person and every nation, but especially his own, were already overwrought with evil, while also blessed with good. King’s self-destructive actions were not to make him worse than he was—only to force him to face and come to terms with the evil in his being, to illuminate it like he had racial segregation, so that it could be transformed. He was not urging America to fall from grace, to seal its doom. He was not preaching, like millennialist doomsayers, that the nation had to be destroyed in order to be saved. He was doing his utmost to meliorate the society both short and long term.

What he was saying was that in order to be reborn, to be redeemed, the nation had to humble itself, eschew its arrogance. It had to burrow into the depths of its own soul to face the evil at its core—the evil of which a quarter millennium of slavery was metaphor as well as reality, as Lincoln had suggested in his Second Inaugural address. By cleansing itself of its triple evils of racism, human exploitation, and war making, the United States of America could return to the divine mission of enlightenment that was promised in the sacred covenant of the Declaration of Independence.

16

 

On Sunday morning, March 31, King flew to Washington to preach the Passion Sunday sermon at the National Cathedral. It would be his final Sunday service. Easter was two weeks away. He urged people not to be passive during this revolutionary era of robust transformation. It was time for a “national awakening.”

“We are not coming to tear up Washington,” he reassured the mainly white congregation that overflowed the huge Episcopal cathedral. “We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty. We are going to bring children and adults and old people. People who have never seen a doctor or a dentist in their lives.

“We read one day—We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.” He extolled the Poor People’s Campaign as the harbinger of a new Jerusalem. They were Davids fighting the Goliath of injustice, determined to make America the truly great nation it was called to be.

“ ‘Behold, I make all things new,’ ” he quoted from the New Testament’s last book, Revelation, “ ‘former things are passed away.’

“God grant that we be participants in this newness. If we will but do it, we will bring about a new day of justice and brotherhood and peace. And that day the morning stars will sing together and the sons of God will shout for joy.”¹⁷³

After the service he told reporters that they would show in Washington that the real issue “is not violence or nonviolence, but poverty and neglect.” He said that because of the campaign he would not be able to fly to West Africa in mid-April to mediate the barbaric civil war in Nigeria. He noted that if they did not make hay in Washington, they might take poor people to the party conventions in Miami and Chicago. “They will have a real awakening in Chicago.” He disclosed that he was willing to negotiate with the government to call off the PPC—his mentor Randolph had been successful with FDR in 1941—but only if Johnson agreed to substantive demands, “with a positive timetable,” including implementation of his own commission’s recommendations on urban disorder. He was not optimistic that this would happen.

Then his words took an ominous turn. “We cannot stand two more summers like last summer,” he warned, “without leading inevitably to a rightwing takeover and a fascist state” that would “destroy the soul of the nation.”¹⁷⁴

Whatever happened, it would not be more of the same. That night from the Oval Office President Johnson delivered a long, nationally televised speech dealing mostly with Vietnam. He announced that he had cut back the bombing of North Vietnam in the hope that it would lead to peace talks with Hanoi. He did not mention that he had approved the small troop increase favored by the Clifford task force. Nor that he had rejected Westmoreland’s big request and removed him as U.S. commander. Moving to conclude, he astounded the nation. After a glance at his wife, he stared dead on into the Teleprompter and declared that he would not run for reelection nor accept his party’s nomination.

Although slightly skeptical, King was thrilled with the bombshell. Vice President Humphrey would no doubt jump in, but RFK would no longer face the long odds (historically unprecedented) of unseating the incumbent president.

“He’s doing just like a Baptist preacher,” King observed to SCLC organizer Walter Fauntroy in Washington, “you know, trying to get a vote of confidence. He’ll pull back in later. But this country’s through with him.”¹⁷⁵

Johnson seemed finally to realize that his fellow Americans—more than a disloyal fringe of elite intellectuals and students—were turning against the war.

“I felt that I was being chased on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me from all directions,” he confided to a biographer. “On one side, the American people were stampeding me to do something about Vietnam. On another side, the inflationary economy was booming out of control. Up ahead were dozens of danger signs pointing to another summer of riots in the cities. I was being forced over the edge by rioting blacks, demonstrating students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical reporters. And then the final straw. The thing I feared from the first day of my presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American people were dancing in the streets. The whole situation was unbearable for me. After thirty-seven years of public service, I deserved something more than being left alone in the middle of the plain, chased by stampedes on every side.”¹⁷⁶

. . .

BACK IN ATLANTA on Monday, King took part in an SCLC strategy meeting for the Poor People’s Campaign. They considered whether Johnson’s good news might alter their plans, but resolved to forge ahead. He had dispatched Young, Bevel, Williams, Jackson, and other leaders to hit the ground running in Memphis, organizing the march set for Monday of Holy Week. They met with a wide swath of community leaders, giving special attention to the Invaders as King had promised. He and Abernathy were supposed to arrive in Memphis on Tuesday, but he begged off to get more rest, to Abernathy’s chagrin. He was in no hurry to get back to Golgotha.

On Wednesday morning, April 3, King’s Eastern Airlines flight was held up for over an hour on the Atlanta runway. Just before takeoff the pilot announced that there had been a bomb threat because of Dr. King’s being on board. The plane had been guarded all night, but all the bags had to be examined. King chuckled.

“Well, it looks like they won’t kill me this flight.”¹⁷⁷ When he, Abernathy, Young, Lee, and Dorothy Cotton arrived late in Memphis, ahead of a big storm, they were greeted by several Memphis detectives who, in light of mushrooming threats, offered police security for King. The police top brass were worried: the police commissioner told another official that “we’ve gotten some threats that he is going to be killed if he comes back to Memphis.” The local organizers declined the offer, suspecting correctly that Memphis police, in cahoots with the FBI, were more interested in surveillance than protection. SCLC staff knew that their boss was the FBI’s enemy number one. They knew how intimately FBI agents colluded with southern police departments.

King had accepted police protection in other cities, but bad blood between the strike movement and police, aggravated by the March 28 police overkill, made such protection here politically unwise as well as of dubious value: the proverbial fox guarding the chicken coop. “He wasn’t the kind just to play and flirt with death,” a Memphis friend, minister Samuel (Billy) Kyles, noted. “By the same token, he wouldn’t try to live secretively. There were always threats. He lived with it.”¹⁷⁸

King’s regular Memphis chauffeur, Solomon Jones, a funeral-home driver, took them in a white Cadillac downtown to the Lorraine Motel, where King usually stayed. For years the black-owned motel had been a second home for blues and jazz musicians, church leaders, and other notable black visitors. The husband and wife proprietors treated King and his staff like family and cooked food he liked. After checking in, King and staff rushed to a meeting with black ministers at Lawson’s Methodist church. They got the bad news that a local federal judge had blocked their march. King was dismayed, but knew that this could play into their hands.

Back at the Lorraine, King politely greeted federal marshals who handed him the injunction order. A battery of lawyers was preparing to contest the injunction at a hearing the next day. He had informed them that the march would not be stopped.

Late afternoon, he and his staff held a frank discussion with Cabbage and other Invader leaders. He told them that if they would not help to make the next march nonviolent, he didn’t want anything to do with them. They said they would do everything they could, but that they could not guarantee no violence. They could only control their own members. This rankled SCLC leaders, who expected them to rein in their followers, the street people they served. The Invaders agreed to serve as parade marshals, which would have prevented the earlier violence since the marshals on that day were few and weak. The staff reiterated that SCLC would try to help them get funding; there was even casual talk of the Invaders’ youth project coming under SCLC’s umbrella. While SCLC staffers did not fully trust the peace pact, they were now less concerned that violence might break out the following Monday, April 8.

KING FELT TOO TIRED to speak at the rally that night at Mason Temple, national headquarters of the Church of God in Christ, largest black Pentecostal denomination. The gathering storm, with tornado warnings, portended a small turnout. He sent Abernathy in his place. But when the second-in-command arrived, he sensed that the people who had braved the howling rain had come for one reason. Rather than fire up a speech, he found a phone in the vestibule.

“Your people are here and you ought to come on and talk to them,” he told his weary friend. “They didn’t come tonight just to hear Abernathy. They came tonight in this storm to hear King.”¹⁷⁹

He dressed up quickly. When he walked onstage the assembly of about three thousand, one-fifth the number who had heard him there two weeks before, greeted him with applause so loud it drowned out the thunder outside. The stained-glass windows high in the rafters shuddered. Abernathy took half an hour to introduce him, elaborately telling his life story, from cradle to this day. As King started speaking in the hot, humid hall, large fans banged, scaring him. They were turned off. Civil defense sirens blared as heavy rain and tornados swept across Tennessee and Kentucky, smashing houses and barns, killing twelve people. Lightning lit up the hall. King’s words were punctuated by blasts of thunder.

He thanked Abernathy, “the best friend that I have in the world,” for his long-winded introduction that annoyed the other preachers. “But I wondered who he was talking about.”

In his first public address in Montgomery twelve years before, he had stressed the cosmic significance of the time they were living in, and how they were collectively agents of God’s will. Now he asserted that their time was as pregnant as any in human history.

If he could have asked God to live in any historical period, starting with the Israelites crossing the Red Sea toward the Promised Land, and Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek sages pondering eternal thoughts up on the Parthenon, “strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, ‘If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.’ ” He knew this sounded strange, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around.”

Just as he came to accept that his own redemption would happen only after he hit bottom, so he believed that their nation would be redeemed and regenerated when doom thundered across the sky. God was working in the world, and people were joining in, doing his will, actualizing his plan. A new covenant was taking shape. People had no choice now but to grapple with crisis problems that had come to a head. If the human rights revolution did not move forward, across the globe, the whole of humanity was in peril. It was time to act.

“Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness,” he belled. “Let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge, to make America what it ought to be.” He was grateful for the gift of being alive during this promising era, these days of miracle and grace.

He told them he was glad to be with them on this stormy night, despite the Memphis death threats, despite the fear of a bomb on his plane that morning. He knew that their “sick white brothers” were out to get him. Sweat was streaking down his brow and cheeks. His eyes danced, drawing in and reflecting back the unloosed passion of the resolute garbage workers, their families and friends.

“Well, I don’t know what will happen now,” he said. “We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.

“And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man.” Sweat and tears commingled on his glowing brown face.

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”¹⁸⁰

The applause was unearthly. He swiveled around and fell back into Abernathy’s arms. A minister asked if he wanted water. Standing in the rear, Lawson felt “a great feeling of oneness” in the hall. “I was basking in this feeling of kinship and warmth.”¹⁸¹ Ministers were wailing all through the sanctuary. Jackson, who had hoped he could speak that night, told his wife that King “was lifted up and had some mysterious aura around him.”¹⁸²

Once recovered, King was visibly elated. Normally he would have left right after such an oration. Tonight he stayed around to shake hands and mingle. He did not want to leave. It was like the best of the movement days. Perhaps the best of all.

While the COME strategy committee deliberated, King and Abernathy enjoyed a late dinner at the home of his old friend Benjamin Hooks, a Memphis judge and pastor. They returned to the Lorraine Motel in the middle of the night, where King was happy to find his younger brother. A. D. had driven over spontaneously from Louisville, where he pastored a Baptist church. He brought with him a Kentucky politician, the state’s first black woman senator, who was close to his brother. King relaxed with A. D. and spent time with his Kentucky friend.¹⁸³ He slept till nearly noon on Thursday, April 4.

17

 

While King was sleeping, meetings were taking place all over Memphis—some black, some white, some mixed—to deal with the upcoming march and to resolve the labor struggle. It was day fifty-three of the strike. Young rose early to accompany Lawson to the federal court hearing, where they testified about the nature of the planned march and SCLC’s history of nonviolent protest. Late in the afternoon the judge told the lawyers in his chamber that he would permit the march with restrictions that King had approved (such as more parade marshals) to make the protest more manageable.

Soon after waking King joined Abernathy for a catfish lunch at the Lorraine café. They ate off the same plate, since the waitress brought only one and King didn’t want to trouble her. Then he presided over a staff meeting that focused on the necessity of nonviolent discipline, reaffirming their commitment to it, and whether they could trust the Invaders to keep their word. A few staff members still worried about the prospect of violence, from whites if not from blacks.

“I’d rather be dead than afraid,” he chided them. “You’ve got to get over being afraid of death.”¹⁸⁴

Williams suggested that SCLC hire a couple of the Invaders as a way to teach them nonviolence. King rebuked him. “Dr. King had gotten onto me,” Williams told a reporter later that day, “because we have a few people on our staff who question nonviolence. He said, ‘Hosea, no one should be on our payroll that accepts violence as a means of social change.’ ” Williams had wondered out loud whether protective violence might be acceptable in certain situations, such as in self-defense against police attack. In an angry tone King insisted that violent action by protesters would not be permitted under any circumstances, and that he did not respect a man who would not be publicly nonviolent. He paced the floor, preaching about soul force one more time to his staff.

“The only hope for mankind upon this globe is the true fostering—not only speaking, but living—the kind of life Jesus Christ lived, nonviolently.”¹⁸⁵

They did not know, but would hardly have been surprised, that one or two of the Invader members were informants for the FBI, another for the Memphis police.

Just as they were adjourning in laughter and high spirits, Andy Young walked in the door. King had been irritated because he hadn’t heard from him about the court hearing that everything depended on. Young had not been able to get to a phone.

“L’il nigger, just where you been?” King barked at him, half in jest. Of course he knew where he had spent the long day. “You ought to stay in touch with me. You’re always running off doing something without me knowing about it.”

Like a big kid he leapt from the bed and clobbered his executive vice president with a pillow. Abernathy beat him with another. “After all the tension we had been through,” Young wrote later, “this kind of childlike play was exhilarating. I dodged and ducked my way over to the other bed, grabbed a pillow, and fought them off.”¹⁸⁶ The other staffers joined in a raucous free-for-all. FBI eavesdroppers would have thought these nonviolent soldiers were slaughtering each other. When their nervous energy was spent, Young delivered the good news from the federal court. King grinned as others cheered. After more jiving and backslapping they headed for their rooms to dress for an elaborate soul-food dinner at the Reverend Kyles’s home.

SINCE KING’S ARRIVAL at the Lorraine the day before, Memphis detectives, FBI agents, and army intelligence had been watching his party closely from a fire station across the street. Cops had papered over the window facing the motel and kept binoculars trained through holes they had snipped. Two army special forces sharpshooters were reportedly stationed on the roof. Tactical squad police patrolled the area in cars and on foot. The police and military presence increased the next day. They were there not only to spy on King but to be positioned for anticipated rioting during the coming march, or sooner.

Late afternoon on Thursday a well-dressed white man about forty registered for a room at a run-down rooming house a block away. He signed in as John Willard. His real name was James Earl Ray, a career criminal who had recently escaped from the Missouri penitentiary. In his bare room he took out of his bag a .30-06 caliber rifle with scope, bought four days before. He could see the Lorraine from his window, a hundred yards away. He found a clearer view from the bathroom down the hall.¹⁸⁷

. . .

ABOUT THIS TIME King was joking with proprietor Lorraine Bailey outside his room.

“I’m getting ready to go to Dr. Kyles,” he said. “If he don’t have good food out there, like that catfish we had, I’m going to come back and eat here.”

“All right, Doctor,” she laughed.¹⁸⁸ King and his brother talked with their mother on the phone, joking around and impersonating each other. He called Ebenezer to give his secretary the title of his sermon for Palm Sunday: “Why America May Go to Hell.”

Billy Kyles showed up to hurry them along, knowing his friend’s habitual tardiness and that they had a mass meeting to get to after dinner. King was dressing.

“All right now, Billy,” Abernathy ribbed him, “I don’t want you kidding me tonight. Are we going to have soul food?” King had already asked Abernathy to call Gwen Kyles to find out what was in store for them. She reeled off: roast beef, chitlins, neck bones, potatoes, ham, macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, greens, candied sweet potatoes, tossed salad, potato salad, coleslaw, corn bread, corn muffins, corn pone, rolls, cakes, pies, ice cream, lemonade, iced tea, coffee. Mrs. Kyles had recruited the best chefs from their church to help her out. “We had the mood set where they could just relax,” she recalled.

Abernathy did not let up on her husband. “Now if we go over there and get some filet mignon or T-bone,” he teased, “you’re going to flunk. We don’t want no filet mignon.”

“Yeah,” King joined in, “we don’t want it to be like that preacher’s house we went to in Atlanta, that great big house. We went over there for dinner and had some ham—a ham bone—and there wasn’t no meat on it. We had Kool Aid and it wasn’t even sweet. If that’s the kind of dinner we’re going to, we’ll stay here.”

“You just get ready,” Kyles deadpanned. “You’re late. I told my wife six o’clock. Hurry up, let’s go.”

“You know, your wife is real pretty,” Abernathy came back. “I’m gonna put some cologne and stuff on.”

“Yes, she’s so pretty,” King said. “Can she really cook soul food? Course, she’d have to be pretty to be married to a fashion plate like you.” The threesome talked preacher’s talk while King shaved, an arduous process. His skin was too tender for a razor, so he rubbed on a foul-smelling paste called Magic Shave that burned off his whiskers, which he scraped off with a knife. It was one reason he was always late. They talked about Daddy King.

“He’s got lots of spunk left in him,” his son said. “You know, Dad is really something. When he was courting Mama, not only did Dad get the daughter, but he got the church, too.” They laughed. He seemed in a good mood, relaxed. He had put on his shirt but couldn’t find his tie. He thought someone was playing a trick on him, but they found it in a drawer. His shirt was so tight he couldn’t button the collar.

“Oh, Doctor, you’re getting fat,” Kyles threw in.

“Yeah, I’m doing that.” He put on a bigger shirt and noosed his tie.

“Billy,” he asked his friend, “what do you think brought the Negroes together in Memphis?” Kyles replied that the black community empathized with the sanitation workers’ plight.

“This is like the old movement days, isn’t it?” King gloated. “This really is the old movement spirit.”

“I better put some more of this good-smelling stuff on me,” Abernathy said.

King stepped outside on the balcony in the approaching twilight. Staff members were milling around in the courtyard below with the driver, Solomon Jones, and his Cadillac limousine. Young and Bevel were clowning and shadowboxing with a much taller staff member, James Orange. King greeted his colleagues warmly.

“All right, load up,” he called down. “We’re getting ready to go.”¹⁸⁹ Jackson looked up at King admiringly: “Our leader!” he shouted. Someone asked him why he was not wearing a tie. He quipped that all one needed to wear to dinner was a hearty appetite. Jackson reintroduced King to Ben Branch, a singer and saxophonist with the Operation Breadbasket band. They would be performing at the rally that evening.

“Oh yeah, he’s my man,” King said, both hands gripping the balcony railing. He seemed pleased that he and his wayward disciple were getting along.

“Ben,” King said slowly, “I want you to sing ‘Precious Lord’ for me tonight like you never sung it before.”

“Dr. King,” Branch replied, “you know I do that all the time.”

“But tonight, especially for me. I want you to sing it real pretty.”¹⁹⁰

Jones told King it was getting cool and he should get his overcoat. The sun was about to set.

“I don’t know whether I need a coat.”¹⁹¹

At that moment, about six o’clock, his staff heard a loud clap that sounded like a car backfiring or a firecracker. Their leader was no longer standing. An eyewitness saw him flying backward, his arms out to his sides. He lay on his back, knees raised, feet pressed against the railing. Blood gushed out of his throat and neck. The high-powered bullet had exploded in his right cheek and jaw, tearing off his tie. It passed through his neck and severed his spinal cord. The first to reach him was Marrell McCollough, an undercover Memphis cop who had infiltrated the Invaders. He tried to stanch the bleeding with a towel. Kyles put a blanket over him. Abernathy cradled him in his arms. People were screaming and moaning in the courtyard. Young sprinted up the stairs.

“Oh God!” he cried. “Oh God, Ralph. It’s over.”

“Don’t you say that, Andy. It’s not over. He’ll be all right.” Kyles bolted into King’s room to call an ambulance, but the office switchboard did not answer. He howled in frustration. Lorraine Bailey suffered a stroke that evening; she died four days later.

Dozens of heavily armed, riot-clad police, on alert around the firehouse, burst into the courtyard. Staff members felt at first under attack. Young and others pointed across the street to the rooming house. Jones saw a shadowy figure with white skin moving through bushes above the retaining wall and running down the street. He jumped in his Cadillac to chase after him, but the driveway was blocked.

King’s eyes were wide open, gazing at Abernathy, who was stroking his left cheek.

“Martin, this is Ralph. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. This is Ralph. Everything will be all right.”¹⁹² At one point Abernathy scooped up King’s pool of blood into a jar. Jackson came up and bathed both his arms in the blood, soaking his shirtsleeves.

An ambulance took King, accompanied by Abernathy, to St. Joseph’s Hospital. He breathed his last breath an hour later, his closest friend caressing him in his arms. Abernathy called Coretta, who had already heard about the shooting. She would come in the morning.

“It hit me hard—not surprise, but shock,” she wrote in her memoir, “that the call I seemed subconsciously to have been waiting for all our lives had come.”¹⁹³

When the shocked and grieving staff leaders returned to the Lorraine from the hospital, they gathered for a meeting. Abernathy grimly declared that they had to keep going, that their fallen leader would not want them to pause. Bevel stood up.

“Our leader is dead,” he said. “In many respects I loved Dr. King more than Jesus.”¹⁹⁴ But now he was gone, and they had to choose a new leader. The band of brothers reaffirmed Abernathy as his chosen heir. They prayed and sang “We Shall Overcome.”

THAT DAY ROBERT KENNEDY had begun his campaign for the Indiana primary. John Lewis, former SNCC chair and bloodied freedom rider, had thrown in with the Kennedy campaign and set up a gig for him that night in a poor black neighborhood of Indianapolis. On his plane the candidate learned that King had been shot; upon landing, that he had died. He “seemed to shrink back,” a reporter recalled, “as though struck physically.” The mayor, police chief, and his own aides thought it would be suicidal to appear in the ghetto, but RFK insisted. The police refused to escort him. Because they had been waiting for him outside on this cold night, the black audience had not heard. Kennedy clambered onto a flatbed truck in a parking lot, “hunched in his black overcoat,” a TV man reported, “his face gaunt and distressed and full of anguish.”

“I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens,” the senator said sadly, “and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.” The crowd gulped and moaned in the wind.

“For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed.” Then, speaking as much about his own journey to healing as that of black Americans, he recited from memory “my favorite poet,” Aeschylus:

“In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”¹⁹⁵

Later in the evening he reached Coretta King in Atlanta and then sent a jet to take her to Memphis to bring home her husband’s body.

MAYOR LOEB WAS DRIVING down to Mississippi for a law school reunion when he heard that King had been shot and turned around. Back at city hall the mayor and some city council members, white and black, cried when they heard the final bulletin. He composed himself to request several thousand national guardsmen from the Tennessee governor and reimposed the dusk-to-dawn curfew he had ordered during the last week’s disorder. Memphis black leaders struggled past their horror to urge calm. SCLC staff scrambled to the Mason Temple rally, defying police warnings, to grieve with the strikers and to make-believe hope. Lawson, who had enticed King to Memphis, spoke over and over on the radio, beseeching people to stay faithful to their slain hero’s nonviolent creed. He “died on behalf of all of us.”¹⁹⁶

That evening theologian Howard Thurman, one of King’s spiritual mentors, delivered a eulogy for his friend on Pacifica radio in Los Angeles.

“Tonight there is a vast temptation to strike out in pain, horror, and anger,” he said. “Riding just under the surface are all the pent up furies, the accumulation of generations of cruelty and brutality. A way must be found to honor our feelings without dishonoring him whose sudden and meaningless end has called them forth. May we harness the energy of our bitterness and make it available to the unfinished work which Martin has left behind. It may be, it just may be that what he was unable to bring to pass in his life can be achieved by the act of his dying. For this there is eloquent precedence in human history. He was killed in one sense because mankind is not quite human yet. May he live because all of us in America are closer to becoming human than we ever were before.”¹⁹⁷

Largely because the black leadership rallied to keep the peace, Memphis did not explode in vengeful violence. There was some vandalism, looting, and burning, and a hostile atmosphere for the white majority, but many who might have blown stayed cool out of respect for Dr. King.

Not so in the rest of the nation. While Americans of all colors grieved quietly, black and brown youth (over half under sixteen) in more than a hundred cities released their rage in the most widespread urban violence America had ever seen. Twenty thousand soldiers and four times that many national guardsmen assisted local police to battle looters, snipers, and arsonists. At least forty people were killed, mostly black as usual; many thousands were arrested. Fires gutted thirty blocks of downtown Chicago, looting reached the Loop, and Mayor Daley gave police orders to shoot to kill. In Oakland a police assault killed Black Panther treasurer Bobby Hutton, a teenager, and wounded Eldridge Cleaver and chief of staff David Hilliard.

Washington, burning, looked to be hardest hit. Smoke billowed over the Capitol and the White House. Some of the worst rioting was but blocks away. Johnson ordered several thousand army paratroopers to defend the city, the first military deployment inside the district since the Bonus Marchers were ousted in 1932.

It appeared during the long weekend, at least to foreign eyes, that the urban devastation Europe and Japan had suffered during World War II was now ravaging American cities—not bombs from the skies but blasts from the ground up. A West German newspaper witnessed “the world’s mightiest country in tragic conflict with itself.” Le Monde of Paris saw “the disintegration of everything that makes up the life of a civilized collectivity.”¹⁹⁸

But the combined force of black remonstration, tanks in the streets, better-trained and -led law enforcers, and King’s battered spirit of nonviolence managed to douse America’s broadest insurrection on the brink of civil war.

OVER THE WEEKEND in Memphis, ministers led somber memorial services, sanitation workers kept up their daily marches, and a large interracial gathering took place on Sunday, a national day of mourning, seeking to reconcile the divided city. On Monday, April 8, the great march that King had died for, a march both to redeem nonviolence and to win the two-month strike, took over the town. Forty thousand people, many from labor unions around the country, marched quietly to city hall behind Coretta Scott King, her three oldest children, entertainment stars, and national labor and religious leaders including Walter Reuther and Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who had trekked with King from Selma to Montgomery. Like a replay of that famous march, five thousand national guardsmen patrolled the streets. Nonviolence ruled. Mrs. King spoke to the huge rally at city hall.

“I would challenge you today to see that his spirit never dies,” the long-prepared widow sang out, “and that we will go forward from this experience, which to me represents the Crucifixion, on toward the resurrection and the redemption of the spirit.

“How many times have I heard him say that with every Good Friday there comes Easter. When Good Friday comes, these are the moments in life when we feel that all is lost, and there is no hope. But then Easter comes as a time of resurrection, of rebirth.

“But then I ask the question: how many men must die before we can really have a free and true and peaceful society? How long will it take? If we can catch the spirit and the true meaning of this experience,” she concluded, “I believe that this nation can be transformed into a society of love, of justice, peace and brotherhood.”¹⁹⁹

With pressure snowballing on Mayor Loeb from city fathers, national unions, President Johnson (who sent an assistant labor secretary as mediator), and his own shaken conscience, the city agreed to recognize the AFSCME public works local a week later, acceding to a dues checkoff and pay raise. Although it had taken the martyr’s death to bring it off, the hard-pressed strikers had won. And in Washington the 1968 Civil Rights Act, outlawing most housing discrimination, finally passed Congress after being bottled up in the House.

CORETTA KING WAS SHROUDED in a dark veil as she viewed her husband’s body at Ebenezer, and as she sat with her four children and A. D. King in the front pew of the funeral on Tuesday. Daddy and Mama King sat with unspeakable sorrow next to the children. Before them the casket was coated with a cross of white carnations. Mrs. King cradled in her bosom her youngest child, Bernice, just turned five, as the little girl’s eyes begged an answer from her brave, bereaved mother.

The assembled congregation, which included a sprinkling of white faces—political figures and presidential candidates like Hubert Humphrey, Robert Kennedy, and Richard Nixon—heard the dead prophet deliver his own eulogy over the loudspeakers, from his “Drum Major” sermon at Ebenezer two months earlier. The gospel choir sang like it had never sung before.

After this service in King’s own church, tens of thousands of mourners from all over the country followed behind an old farm wagon drawn by two mules carrying the shiny mahogany coffin bereft of its flowered cross. The multitude trekked up Sweet Auburn to a final memorial service at Morehouse College before burial. Wearing their blue denim uniforms, Young, Bevel, Williams, Jackson, and other SCLC leaders held the mules’ reins and clasped the wooden sides as the old wagon creaked and clip-clopped forward bearing their beloved.

Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, let me stand,

I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.

Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light.

Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.

When the shadows appear and the night draws near,

And the day is past and gone,

At the river I stand, guide my feet, hold my hand.

Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.²⁰⁰