To the Mountaintop

1963–1966

Prologue:
New Birth of Freedom

Survivors called it a perfect hell on earth, the devil’s slaughter pen. The ground that had grown swaying fields of corn and wheat was soaked with blood. Thousands of men’s bodies lay putrefying in puddles of blood and mud. Some of the dead men embedded in this hell clutched their bibles. The three-day Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, the bloodiest battle ever in the Western Hemisphere, left nearly as many dead or debilitated as all the American soldiers felled in the decade-long Vietnam War. Although the Union forces had lost almost half of the casualties, “it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw,” a victorious Union soldier exulted.¹ The battered Confederate remnants hobbled back home across the Potomac. From then on the rebels waged a defensive war whose days were numbered.

But the stench and pollution from the crashingly quiet battlefield, overrun by buzzards and black flies, alarmed the traumatized farming town of Gettysburg in southeastern Pennsylvania. “In many instances arms and legs and sometimes heads protrude,” Gettysburg banker David Wills reported to the governor, “and my attention has been directed to several places where the hogs were actually rooting out the bodies and devouring them.”² Wills cranked gears in motion to create a massive burial ground that became the Soldiers’ National Cemetery. Like all cemeteries of the time, it had to be formally dedicated. When poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier refused Wills’s invitation, he turned to the greatest orator of the age, Edward Everett, diplomat, ex-senator, and Harvard president. Belatedly Wills invited the president of the United States to make “a few appropriate remarks.”

As in early July, thousands of Americans invaded the farm town just before Thanksgiving, but these people were older and well clothed, women and men, all on the same side. Everett spoke of the battle for two hours, enthralling the crowd. Abraham Lincoln followed him, for three minutes. He was disappointed by the tepid response.

Yet his melodic 272-word speech transmuted the grisly deaths on the battlefield—burying of the decayed bodies still not complete, Cemetery Ridge still pockmarked with rusted rifles, strips of blue and gray, skeletons of horses—into the vital value of the war. Out of these parched fields of death Americans would create new life, Lincoln proclaimed, a “new birth of freedom,” national rebirth. His words rewrote the nation’s founding document of 1776 as a commitment to equality more than to life or even liberty, and set the stage for postwar reform of the Constitution to follow suit. He accomplished a feat in a few phrases that history had belied and that the war had so far cruelly mocked: conjuring the meaning of America as a single people dedicated to a single proposition, their union defined by equality. Lincoln’s incantation, which drew no distinction between North and South, forged the ideal of a new America that would complete the American Revolution, a second founding to fulfill what was promised in the first.³

But at what cost? Although the Union commander-in-chief may have confessed later that he became a Christian only after seeing the “graves of our dead heroes” at Gettysburg—“I then and there consecrated myself to Christ”—he was glorifying, even sacralizing, hideous, painful death, the mass destruction of the young men under his ultimate command who on this battlefield died senselessly.⁴ Neither side had a compelling reason to fight at Gettysburg, no strategic necessity. And the suicidal “Pickett’s charge” up Cemetery Hill was one of the craziest blunders in military history, for which Robert E. Lee asked his Confederate president to fire him.

Transubstantiating the flesh and blood of fifty thousand young Americans killed or wounded into an abstract promise of equality and union, himself as high priest of this Eucharist, Lincoln justified the mad horror of the war, no matter what the outcome. In four years over six hundred thousand Americans would die over Lincoln’s lofty principles, seeding the national myth that it was a war of sacred justice. The war freed the slaves, and it launched a powerful industrial nation with railroads steaming from sea to shining sea. But equality of any sort would remain a mirage. Lincoln was speaking over the heads of his audience, beyond hearing of the buried heroes, to an America that did not exist. The heroes had died for Lincoln’s dream.

Lincoln was neither the first nor the last to hallow the war as a holocaustic, purifying fire, its primal power cleansing the nation of its sins to bring rebirth. Walt Whitman, who saw Lincoln often in Washington—“we exchange bows, and very cordial ones”—where he treated the war’s wounded heroes in improvised hospitals, exalted the war’s purgative violence that he witnessed firsthand.⁵

In an 1865 poem he wrote: “And ever the sound of the cannon far or near, (rousing even in dreams a devilish exultation and all the old mad joy in the depths of my soul,).”⁶ After all the horror he had seen, touched, and smelled, he wrote:

Look down, fair moon, and bathe this scene;

Pour softly down night’s nimbus floods, on faces ghastly, swollen, purple;

On the dead, on their backs, with their arms toss’d wide,

Pour down your unstinted nimbus, sacred moon.⁷

When the Civil War erupted, and especially after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation turned the conflict into a war against slavery, black and white abolitionists envisioned the bloodletting as a reenactment (on a vaster scale) of God’s deliverance of the Israelites, or as the apocalyptic Judgment Day crashing down from the heavens. In a wartime sermon AME bishop Daniel Payne portrayed Confederate soldiers as Pharaoh’s forces and Union armies as the chariots of the returning wrathful Messiah. Many northerners and southern slaves believed that the unearthly sacrifice of life, the unmerited suffering of millions of dead and wounded, would redeem the nation and its people and bring about reconciliation between North and South, slave and slaveholder.

This vision of redemption through blood was conveyed by the war’s anthem, “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” by Julia Ward Howe, the tune fittingly from “John Brown’s Body.” Dripping with Hebrew Scriptures and Revelation, it served as the favorite marching song of Union soldiers. Whether the “grapes of wrath” were those of God or of the slaves, or the two as one, the Messiah in the mold of marching feet, white and black, was “trampling out the vintage” from centuries of human suffering into blood flowing as wine that would resurrect the nation. Lincoln was said to have wept upon first hearing it.

When on March 4, 1865, the reelected president began his Second Inaugural Address under the Capitol’s new gold dome, John Wilkes Booth watching within pistol range, the dark wintry clouds suddenly parted to let in a blast of sunshine. But the clouds closed up before he finished his short speech. People then as now chose to remember the consoling last lines of this great address, “With malice toward none; with charity for all . . .”

In his First Inaugural Address he had pleaded for such Christlike reconciliation, “devoted altogether to saving the Union without war.” Despite seven states having seceded and the Confederacy in full revolt, Lincoln did not presume to know which side God was on.

“We must not be enemies,” he proclaimed. “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

But his address four years later was “a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel,” sanctifying a just and holy crusade to free the slaves.

“If we shall suppose,” Lincoln said, “that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?” By no means.

“Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’ ” His black listeners called out, “bress de Lord.”

When Lincoln asked him what he thought of the speech, ex-slave Frederick Douglass told him later that day at a White House reception—“no one of color” was allowed; he had been kicked out, then appealed to the President to let him in—“Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.”⁸

God was punishing both sides for the sin of slavery, and would continue to punish the nation far into the future, well past Reconstruction—but Lincoln by now had no doubt that God was foursquare on the Union side. A month later the war was over, the rebels vanquished. More Americans had lost their lives than in all the nation’s other wars put together, including two world wars of the next century.

When slaves were liberated from bondage by northern troops, many were certain that God had answered their prayers.

“Golly! de kingdom hab kim dis time for sure,” a black man cried out in Richmond, Virginia, the second Confederate capital, when white and black soldiers captured the city, “dat ar what am promised in de generations to dem dat goes up tru great tribulations.”⁹ Richmond’s black residents welcomed “Father Abraham” with ecstasy when he toured the city ten days before his death, surging around him, touching him, calling him their “Messiah.”

When he was slain on Good Friday, blacks and northern whites believed it was no coincidence. If the war had not yet done it—Lincoln had not been sure—the captain of state had died to wash away his people’s sins.

But the new birth of freedom did not arise out of the ashes of this war.

FOUR SCORE YEARS LATER, America reunited was caught up in a world war that was a crusade for freedom, this time on a global scale. Three months before the Normandy invasion turned the tide against the Nazis, a fifteen-year-old black boy in Atlanta won a high school debate contest sponsored by black Elks. His speech was titled “The Negro and the Constitution.”

“Black America still wears chains,” the high school junior asserted. “Even winners of our highest honors face the class color bar.” He mentioned Marian Anderson being barred from singing at Constitution Hall five years before.

“But this tale had a different ending,” he said. “The nation rose in protest and gave a stunning rebuke to the Daughters of the American Revolution and a tremendous ovation to the artist, who sang in Washington on Easter Sunday and fittingly, before the Lincoln Memorial.” Still, he pointed out, the great contralto could not spend the night in a “good hotel.” Even after being honored as the “most distinguished resident” of Philadelphia, “she cannot be served in many of the public restaurants of her home city.

“So, with their right hand they raise to high places the great who have dark skins, and with their left, they slap us down to keep us in ‘our places.’ Yes, America, you have stripped me of my garments, you have robbed me of my precious endowment.

“Today 13 million black sons and daughters of our forefathers continue the fight for the translation of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments from writing on the printed page to actuality. We may conquer southern armies by the sword, but it is another thing to conquer southern hate.”

After delivering his oration to the state Elks’ contest in Dublin, Martin King returned on a bus to Atlanta. Riding through the rural river valley in which King’s slave great-grandfather had long before picked cotton and preached the Gospel, the bus driver ordered King and his teacher to give up their seats for white passengers boarding along the route.

“We didn’t move quickly enough to suit him,” King recalled, “so he began cursing us, calling us ‘black sons of bitches.’ I intended to stay right in that seat, but Mrs. Bradley finally urged me up, saying we had to obey the law. And so we stood up in the aisle for the ninety miles to Atlanta. That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.”¹⁰ He happened to be the same age and in the same grade as Claudette Colvin would be a decade later when she put up a fight.

Despite his teenage rage, King would not for long be steered away from the upbeat words that had closed his speech.

“The spirit of Lincoln still lives,” he had said, “that spirit born of the teachings of the Nazarene, who promised mercy to the merciful, who lifted the lowly, strengthened the weak, ate with publicans, and made the captives free.

“America experiences a new birth of freedom in her sons and daughters,” he concluded. “She incarnates the spirit of her martyred chief. Their loyalty is repledged; their devotion renewed to the work He left unfinished. My heart throbs anew in the hope that inspired by the example of Lincoln, imbued with the spirit of Christ, they will cast down the last barrier to perfect freedom.”¹¹

Good Friday, April 12, 1963

Things looked bleak for Martin Luther King Jr. and the stumbling Birmingham movement. Everything was going wrong. It was bad enough that the start of the Birmingham campaign had to be postponed twice—first until after the March city election, then until the April 2 runoff in which ex–lieutenant governor Albert Boutwell trounced Public Safety Commissioner Theophilius Eugene “Bull” Connor for mayor. But Connor, refusing to step down, was proving a cannier adversary than the movement had counted on.

Born in Selma, sixty-five-year-old Connor had started out as a railroad telegrapher and baseball radio announcer in the 1920s, earning his nickname for “shooting the bull,” not his shape. After serving as a state legislator, in 1937 he was elected public safety commissioner, one of three (as in Montgomery) who ran the city. His baptism as a savior of Jim Crow came in November 1938, when the liberal Southern Conference for Human Welfare held its founding meeting in downtown Birmingham. Its focus was New Deal–style economic reform. But when Connor announced that “White and Negro are not to segregate together” and his men dragged a rope down the middle of Municipal Auditorium, he compelled the group to make an issue of segregated seating—all the more so when First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt pulled her folding chair out into the aisle as a protest but was not arrested. During the next quarter century Connor tacitly encouraged Ku Klux Klan bombings to block integrated housing and buses, letting the KKK do the dirty work. Now the Klan was backing off for a season to let Connor conquer a Negro invasion by official methods.

The early April sit-ins at downtown department stores got off to a lackluster start, partly because stores closed their lunch counters. The store boycott that had started several months before limped along. Notwithstanding SCLC executive director Wyatt Walker’s meticulous planning of every last detail, including the number of seats in each lunchroom, within less than a week after the kickoff on April 3 SCLC leaders altered their strategy from sit-ins to protest marches (and even considered canning direct action in favor of voter registration). The city’s black preachers and other African-American leaders were overwhelmingly resistant to SCLC’s civic confrontation. They claimed lack of consultation, but in fact they hoped that Boutwell’s new regime would make protests unnecessary. In his marathon meetings with black moderates King managed to turn some of them around.

The sit-ins and marches garnered a respectable three hundred arrests during the first week, but Connor got a midnight injunction from a cooperative state court judge banning further protests. He had overheard King on a police bug announce to a Wednesday mass meeting that he would be arrested on Friday.

“Everyone in the movement must live a sacrificial life,” he had said at St. James AME Church. “I can’t think of a better day than Good Friday for a move for freedom.”¹² Next day at a press conference Rev. Ralph Abernathy raised the stakes: “Almost two thousand years ago Christ died on the cross for us. Tomorrow we will take it up for our people and die if necessary.”¹³ The specter of King’s jailing finally put the Birmingham protests on the front page of the New York Times, a badly needed lift. But was he bluffing?

Things got worse on Maundy Thursday. SCLC’s bail funds were hitting bottom when the bail bondsman reported that the city had put him out of business. Suddenly the cost of bailing prisoners jumped tenfold. Moreover, because contempt citations could be prosecuted in superior court, the potential bail would be much higher than simply for parading without a permit. King’s advisers felt he had a higher responsibility to leave town and raise cold cash as only he could.

When he met with local leaders and SCLC staff on Good Friday morning to decide what to do, “a sense of doom” pervaded Room 30, King’s small suite at the Gaston Motel. Owner Arthur G. Gaston, Birmingham’s only black millionaire, and King’s father were among those present. “I looked about me,” King Jr. recalled, “and saw that, for the first time, our most dedicated and devoted leaders were overwhelmed by a feeling of hopelessness. No one knew what to say, for no one knew what to do.” There was an atmosphere of utter gloom, Andrew Young recalled.

A staff member broke the somber silence. “Martin, this means you can’t go to jail. We need money. We need a lot of money. We need it now. You are the only one who has the contacts to get it.”

Did it occur to anyone in the stuffy room that King’s “one-man team” approach to leadership, especially his one-man moneymaking show, had put them all in this untenable dilemma? He was still the six-year-old organization’s only dependable fund-raiser. “If you go to jail,” the staffer continued, “we are lost. The battle of Birmingham is lost.” But if he did not go to jail, after making a public pledge, the nation’s eyes upon him, the movement might die a less honorable death, and his leadership, already fragile, might be undone. Judges could then shut down any constitutional protest with the stroke of a pen.

Neither King nor SCLC could afford to lose in Birmingham. The future if not the survival of both were on the line. It was do or die in Birmingham, then the most segregated big city in America.

“I sat in the midst of the deepest quiet I have ever felt,” King later wrote, “alone in that crowded room.”¹⁴ For the first time in his leadership career, the thirty-four-year-old preacher faced the prospect of going against the majority consensus of his team. Only Walker and Fred Shuttlesworth urged jail. All the other local leaders were adamantly opposed. Chain-smoking, King paid close attention to their objections. Compassionate listening was one of his ways of defusing stressful conflict.

Ever since in his Montgomery kitchen he was baptized in the power of prayer and had plumbed the depths of his faith, King sometimes sought to re-create that experience when crisis struck, but usually in private or with intimates. This time he made a show of his faith. Without a word he retreated to his bedroom and closed the door.

When he came out half an hour later to face the befuddled group, he was wearing a pressed blue-gray work shirt over his white dress shirt, and crisp blue jeans with cuffs rolled up. The denim outfit was meant both to show solidarity with poor blacks and to back the downtown store boycott by challenging the need to buy new Easter clothes.

“I don’t know what will happen,” King said grimly to his colleagues. “I don’t know where the money will come from. But I have to make a faith act.” He turned to his closest friend.

“I know you want to be in your pulpit on Easter Sunday, Ralph. But I am asking you to go with me.”¹⁵ As he had in Atlanta during the bus boycott, Daddy King pleaded with his son to avoid an arrest that might kill him. Like seven years before, Martin would not be swayed, neither by his father nor by other elders in the room.

“I have to go,” he replied. “I am going to march if I have to march by myself. If we obey this injunction, we are out of business.” Exasperated, his father rued, “Well, you didn’t get this nonviolence from me. You must have got it from your mama.”¹⁶

No one doubted he meant business. The group joined hands and sang “We Shall Overcome.” Since the 1960 student sit-ins the slave spiritual rephrased by black South Carolina textile strikers, then polished by Pete Seeger and Guy Carawan, had become the movement’s battle hymn. A few blocks away at Sixth Avenue Zion Hill Church fifty protesters were also singing freedom hymns as they patiently awaited their leader.

An hour later King, Abernathy, and Shuttlesworth led the trained protesters out of the church toward downtown white Birmingham. A growing crowd gathered around, joining in their chanting and singing, as they marched by black Kelly Ingram Park, boundary of the two Birminghams. Connor and his cops were waiting with paddy wagons. As if of one mind the column of twos suddenly turned, sidestepping the police blockade. Police caught up with them, motorcycle cops roaring to the front and ordering a halt. King and Abernathy fell to their knees in prayer. Burly cops grabbed each preacher by his shirt back and shoved them roughly into a paddy wagon. Police had trouble distinguishing protesters from onlookers, arresting a larger number than had marched out of the church. Shuttlesworth had not intended to go in this time, but he was swept up in the confusion. The crowd of several hundred cheered their heroes as they filled up the wagons.

At Birmingham city jail King and Abernathy were removed from the larger group that was stuffed into a drunk tank; each was locked in solitary confinement. King’s cramped cell was completely dark. He had a cold metal cot without mattress, sheet, or blanket, and a filthy seatless toilet. Terror trumped his shock and disgust.

“Those were the longest, most frustrating and bewildering hours” of his life, he wrote later. “You will never know the meaning of utter darkness until you have lain in such a dungeon, knowing that sunlight is streaming overhead and still seeing only darkness below.”¹⁷ He feared that this might be his tomb, no bigger than Jesus’ stone tomb in Jerusalem that he had once prayed within. Would this be his Golgotha? Would he never again hold his baby, Bernice, born a week before? The Montgomery movement had been born just after his first child, Yoki, had entered the world.

During his first two days of trembling darkness, when he was not praying or dozing fitfully, he could look back over seven years of daily facing death. The only time he had felt death embrace him was when in Harlem a deranged black woman stabbed him in the chest, September 1958—but God had let him survive the wound a hair from his heart. His fear of death had become a companion, a soul mate, which energized him while it also wore him down. Fear was intertwined with aching guilt for subjecting his wife and children, and parents, to the apparent inevitability of his death. Many times since December 1955 he had daydreamed about leaving the movement in others’ hands. More than once he had resolved to do so. He had wanted out. But he always reminded himself of his covenant with the holy spirit, his midnight vow of January 1956 to fight on no matter what. Leaving the movement would mean betraying his faith, betraying his Lord, and leaving himself spiritually more alone than he was now physically in the “hole.”

But what bruised fruit his leadership had netted since the bus boycott triumph. SCLC’s voting rights campaign of the late 1950s, which had such potential, had fizzled, perhaps because he had not paid enough attention. During those early years he believed that his main job was to commit the uncommitted through oratory, to spread the political gospel like a black Billy Graham for justice, and always to raise money. It wasn’t until the startling lunch-counter sit-ins of winter 1960 that he learned he must act with his body as well as his voice, and that black voting was not sufficient. And next year the freedom rides led by CORE and young SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) members showed him that he was not alone in staring down death. SNCC activists who wrote wills before heading on a bus from Montgomery to Mississippi were upset when he refused to join them, after urging them onward. To derisive laugher “De Lawd” told them that he must choose the time and place of his Golgotha.¹⁸ De Lawd was the nickname SNCC people had given him, only partly in jest.

Then came humiliating defeat in Albany, the southwest Georgia city that Bernice Johnson Reagan, born and raised there, called the “mother lode” of the movement, in which singing was as powerful as marching and sitting in.¹⁹ SNCC’s resentment toward King for his moral caution was deepened by his men’s grabbing the helm of the Albany movement, then jumping ship when it ran into shoals. SCLC had earned a reputation for bringing a big media show that spotlighted King, then leaving town with the cameras, abandoning local people to fend for themselves against sheriffs and the Klan. Notwithstanding his sacred pledge, King might have already resigned from the movement for an ivoried college or seminary had the young militants not kept relighting his fire.

What King hated most about jail, and being alone, was the suffocating self-reproach he conjured up.

If the stench and darkness of Birmingham’s hole represented the nadir of King’s young life, the zenith had been a world away at the White House. In October 1961, a long-sought appointment was granted with the new president, who had been beleaguered by the failed Cuban invasion and a contest of wills with Khrushchev over Berlin. King found himself having an animated lunch with John and Jacqueline Kennedy upstairs in the family quarters, the first African American so honored. Afterward the Kennedys showed him around the rooms that the First Lady had famously redecorated. In the Lincoln bedroom, he and JFK saw their faces black and white reflected in a replica of the Emancipation Proclamation above Lincoln’s fireplace.

“Mr. President,” the preacher said softly, “I’d like to see you stand in this room and sign a Second Emancipation Proclamation outlawing segregation, one hundred years after Lincoln’s. You could base it on the Fourteenth Amendment.”²⁰ JFK warmed to the idea and asked King to prepare a draft.

King had always been wary of the wealthy, charismatic Irish Catholic whom much of the nation now admired like royalty. Before the 1960 election he had been cultivating a political friendship with Vice President Richard Nixon; the two had met in West Africa at the inauguration of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah in March 1957. Candidate Kennedy’s phone call to Coretta King days before the election had brought about her husband’s release from state prison after an Atlanta lunch-counter sit-in—“they had me chained all the way down there.” The call had clinched Kennedy’s razor-thin victory with a windfall of black support; and it persuaded King that there might be more to Kennedy than his Irish Brahmin halo.²¹

Like many Americans, King was lifted by the new spirit of idealism and commitment that Kennedy’s New Frontier was purveying to the nation. Was it just words and soaring metaphor, his own coin of the realm? He sought to harness this rejuvenated patriotism away from Kennedy’s prime target, the Cold War, toward the unfinished revolution at home. Although JFK’s magnetic inaugural address echoed Lincolnian tones, he did not draw upon Lincoln’s call for equality as the essence of American union. He was leery of rekindling Civil War memories that might divide the nation when it sorely needed unity to face global communism—and that might alienate the white South that dominated Congress and could be crucial to his reelection. Play up Lincoln’s image, play down what he stood for.

King on the contrary saw a one-time chance to wed New Frontier idealism to the “mystic chords of memory” of the Civil War, whose centennial was being commemorated, more vigorously South than North. Like A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and other black leaders, King wanted the President to honor the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation that had freed slaves by delivering a second Emancipation Proclamation to abolish slavery’s afterlife of segregation; and in the same manner, an executive order that bypassed Congress. JFK could get cover from the commemoration to make such action more politically palatable. So far the commemoration had been exploited by white southerners who were using it to refight the Civil War and to defend the southern way of life. King and his colleagues wanted to exploit Civil War memories to bolster the civil rights crusade.

During his first hundred days Kennedy appeared to encourage this approach by making it clear to King and other black leaders that he saw no hope for congressional legislation against Jim Crow. In an Oval Office meeting he told them he would pursue a strategy of “executive action” to advance civil rights. But it did not take long to discover that executive action was a fig leaf for inaction. It did not translate into meaningful executive orders—made plain when JFK’s promised order to ban housing discrimination was delayed for two years and watered down. Kennedy cautioned the leaders not to push him.

King did not heed this warning. Since Congress was deadlocked, he made it his mission to nudge the President to outlaw segregation by decree. Although he placed in Kennedy’s hands a Lincolnesque proclamation for New Year’s 1963, JFK ignored it. He had already avoided one opportunity to address the nation in late September 1962, the centennial of Lincoln’s signing, while embroiled with Mississippi governor Ross Barnett over the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi. He did not want to fan the flames of the true-life Gettysburg reenactment at Ole Miss. He sent in several thousand troops to quell the ferocious mobs. Many were injured and two people died, the only fatalities connected with military intervention in the South during this era.

By the time New Year’s Day 1963 rolled around, the White House had decided to replace a commemoration of Emancipation with a gala presidential dinner on Lincoln’s birthday to which black leaders and celebrities would be invited in droves. That February evening President Kennedy panicked upon discovering actor Sammy Davis Jr.—like his own brother-in-law Peter Lawford a member of Hollywood’s fabled “Rat Pack”—wandering with his white wife into the Lincoln bedroom. He commanded his staff to use any ruse necessary to prevent the couple from being photographed. Like Lincoln before him, Kennedy believed that civil rights had limits; interracial marriage was still taboo. King, Randolph, and other leaders had boycotted the sham occasion.

BACK IN SPRING 1961, just a few weeks after the President had instructed black leaders not to push him—Khrushchev and Fidel Castro were pounding him hard enough—a squadron of youthful activists jolted him harder than King’s entreaties ever could have. John and Robert Kennedy, fond of muscular activism by others, could not help but admire the daring of the freedom riders in Alabama, despite their being a royal pain.

Shortly after the Supreme Court declared segregated bus terminals unconstitutional, CORE resolved to enforce compliance with the ruling. In May 1961 a baker’s dozen of activists, black and white, left Washington on two buses, headed for New Orleans. Outside of Anniston, Alabama, one bus was forced off the road and firebombed by the Klan. The choking riders barely escaped the inferno. In town eight men burst into the second bus and assaulted the passengers, nearly killing a retired white professor. Then a Klan mob ambushed the freedom riders on their arrival at the Birmingham bus station. Fred Shuttlesworth called an ambulance for white pacifist Jim Peck, who underwent hours of surgery for multiple head gashes.

CORE decided to declare victory and go home, but Diane Nash and other SNCC members were determined to complete the journey at all cost. Robert Kennedy, the greenhorn attorney general fresh from the Cuban Bay of Pigs morass, interceded with Alabama officials. The SNCC group rode safely from Birmingham a hundred miles south to Montgomery guarded by police cars and helicopters. But when the bus pulled into the Montgomery terminal the police disappeared. The riders were greeted by another vicious mob that beat them with pipes and baseball bats, almost killing two young men. President Kennedy’s personal emissary, John Siegenthaler, was knocked out cold. The President publicly expressed his concern and called for peace.

A mass meeting was held the next night at Ralph Abernathy’s church. King flew in to speak in support of the riders. He had already been on the phone with the attorney general. Before the meeting King conferred in the church basement with CORE’s James Farmer and SNCC’s Diane Nash about what to do. The phone rang. Robert Kennedy was calling again to ask King to stop the freedom ride to allow a cooling-off period. Keeping the attorney general on the line, he turned to his colleagues.

“Don’t you think that maybe the freedom ride has already made its point and now should be called off, as the attorney general suggests?” Nash shook her head.

“The Nashville Student Movement wants to go on,” she said sternly. Farmer instructed King, who was ambivalent, to “tell the attorney general that we have been cooling off for 350 years. If we cool off any more we will be in a deep freeze.”

“I understand,” King replied softly, and turned down Kennedy’s request.²²

Upstairs outside the mass meeting, several hundred rioters were besieging the church, firing rocks through stained-glass windows. Those inside, showered with glass, emboldened themselves for hours with tenacious singing. The mob was about to break down the doors when a battalion of U.S. marshals, sent by the attorney general, scattered them with tear gas.

Robert Kennedy recalled a late-night phone call from King, who feared for his life. “I said that our people were down there, and that as long as he was in church, he might say a prayer for us. He didn’t think that was very humorous. He rather berated me for what was happening to him at the time. I said to him that I didn’t think that he’d be alive if it wasn’t for us, and that we were going to keep him alive, and that the marshals would keep the church from burning down.”²³ The outnumbered marshals were reinforced later that night by national guard troops reluctantly activated by Governor John Patterson, a JFK political ally who reportedly had been evading the President’s phone calls.

Three days later two busloads of freedom riders, national guard, and reporters left for Jackson, Mississippi, escorted by legions of police in cars and aircraft. Farmer remembered its being like a military maneuver. Jackson onlookers witnessed the spectacle of protesters being led into the interstate terminal by rifle-toting guardsmen, police opening doors for them, then being handcuffed and taken away. Robert Kennedy had made a secret deal with Mississippi politicians, permitting the bust if done with no violence. The riders served two months at tough Parchman penitentiary in the Delta, where prayer and defiant singing of freedom songs got them through. Over the summer of 1961 hundreds more flocked to Jackson and joined their peers in prison. Prodded by the attorney general, the Interstate Commerce Commission enforced the Supreme Court ruling banning segregation in terminals. The freedom rides gave SNCC its reputation for fearless militancy, steeling cadres for further combat.

While still not at his Golgotha, Martin King found himself in hand-to-hand combat in an unlikely setting, the SCLC convention in Birmingham, September 1962. The sixth convention, in the wake of SCLC’s Albany defeat, convened in the steel city in part because Shuttlesworth had been lobbying to get SCLC to aggressively support the local movement—pleading to make Birmingham the next campaign. The irascible, tough-as-nails preacher had led boycotts and other protests for seven years since founding his Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) when the state NAACP was outlawed by Attorney General Patterson’s court order in June 1956. A boycott of downtown stores begun by Miles College students in early 1962 was having surprising success. When SCLC descended upon the fractured city for its annual gathering, merchants agreed to pull the “colored” signs—cosmetic changes revoked when SCLC left town. King’s own arrival was auspicious. At the airport he used the city’s only desegregated men’s room and found himself standing next to the city’s staunchly segregationist mayor, Art Hanes. They did not pass words.

During King’s keynote address on the final morning of the convention, a beefy white man sitting next to millionaire Gaston walked onto the stage and belted King several times in the face. Delegates and reporters were amazed to see the SCLC president, once a wrestler, take the blows without shielding his face. As Abernathy and Joe Lowery jumped up and readied their fists to strike back, King stared down his attacker and soothed him, protecting him from his colleagues’ wrath. As if he were an honored guest King introduced the man, who lived in an American Nazi Party hostel. The young Nazi wept in King’s arms.

When the police took the man away King said he would not press charges, but the police did so. The Nazi explained at his trial that he became enraged when King announced a benefit by Sammy Davis Jr., the comedian whose dark seed was polluting the womb of virtuous white womanhood.

After celebrating the Emancipation Day centennial at black-led rallies around the country, King gathered his inner circle for a two-day retreat in early January 1963 at Dorchester in southeastern Georgia. At the Congregational church missionary school, Wyatt Walker presented an elaborate plan for a four-stage campaign in Birmingham, “Project Confrontation”: lunch-counter sit-ins, boycott of big stores, mass marches to support the boycott and jam the jails, and finally a call to outsiders to help immobilize the city.

The Albany movement had been too fresh a wound to dissect at the September conference, but here they probed it. Acting on its hard lessons might lead to redemption in the centennial year of the first emancipation. Unlike in the Albany struggle they would focus on a single target, rather than segregation in scattershot fashion, and a clear-cut goal: desegregating department stores. They would pursue a defined strategy, to split the business elite from city hall. Preempting competition by SNCC or other groups, the movement would remain unified under tight control by SCLC and its ACMHR affiliate. Above all, they planned to profit from the reckless abandon of a police czar who, unlike Albany’s media savvy chief Laurie Pritchett, was presumably ready to use brutal tactics and expose the ugliness of white supremacy for the world to witness. They must provoke open violence by the opposition.

All of these lessons except the necessity of official violence were matters that King had done right in Montgomery. They were trying to re-create the glory of the bus boycott, adding civil disobedience and an escalating media drama that would pressure the federal government to intervene, preferably with a bill to abolish segregation. If cajoling in the Lincoln bedroom and King’s bully pulpit could not force the President to act, mass jailings might do the trick.

But SCLC leaders had a deep concern about Birmingham that distinguished it from Albany and Montgomery—the conservative apathy of middle-class black leaders, especially preachers. Shuttlesworth’s ACMHR spoke for a narrow evangelical spectrum of the black community of 150,000. Many local blacks considered him a wild man, seeker of martyrdom, too radical for the community’s good no matter how courageous.

“Don’t worry, Martin,” he said. “I can handle the preachers.” Could King trust his swaggering confidence?

“You better be right,” he replied skeptically.²⁴

Swallowing their doubts about the reliability of black allies, SCLC reached consensus for an all-out mobilization to crack segregation in Birmingham. They sought a morale-lifting victory—first in six years—that would set the pace for the South and force John Kennedy to grasp the mantle of Lincoln. Before SCLC could “redeem the soul of America,” its stated mission, it had to redeem itself.

At the close King made sure that his dozen colleagues understood the personal risk they were taking together.

“I have to tell you that in my judgment,” he said gravely, “some of the people sitting here today will not come back alive from this campaign. I want you to think about it.” Andrew Young felt that once again their chief was being dragged into peril, this time by Shuttlesworth, against his will or even his best judgment. King knew better than anyone, Young recalled, “that every time he made a commitment to something like this he was committing his life. He thought in everything he did it meant his death.”

“You better let me know what kind of eulogy you want,” King said to his fellows.²⁵ Then, as was his habit, he parlayed the gravity into levity by delivering tongue-in-cheek eulogies for a few of his brothers in cloth, airing each one’s dirty linen. He and his associates knew that it was his own funeral he was perseverating about. He had plenty of skeletons of his own.

His preoccupation with death and his own mortality was so familiar to those who knew him well that they sometimes tried to make light of it, as he sometimes would with his own gallows humor. When his college friend Mary McKinney Edmonds, a Spelman grad, lunched with him around this time in Cleveland, where he was preaching at her father’s church, she sat with her back to the restaurant door and joked that this way an assassin must shoot her first.

“No, Mary,” he said dryly, “when they get me, and they will, they will only get me.” No gallows humor on this occasion. Edmonds blanched.²⁶

King’s dark night of the soul in his Birmingham dungeon was broken by a visit on Saturday by one of his lawyers, who brought a copy of that morning’s Birmingham daily. While he was being held incommunicado, the local and national press lit into him. Time’s article was titled “Poorly Timed Protest.” Newsweek and other media indicted King and Connor as equal extremists. Evangelist Billy Graham, whom King had once hoped to join forces with, publicly urged “my good personal friend” to “put the brakes on.”²⁷ Birmingham’s white and black moderates echoed this stand.

Although King was heartened by his lawyer’s news on money being raised, his spirit sank upon reading a statement in the newspaper by eight prominent Alabama clergymen, leaders of the Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish faiths in the state, who denounced the protests as “unwise and untimely.” By Deep South standards these were racially liberal churchmen. They had publicly opposed Governor George Wallace’s inaugural pledge of “segregation forever.” But they hadn’t lifted a finger to help resolve the Montgomery bus boycott.

“Just as we formerly pointed out that ‘hatred and violence have no sanction in our religious and political traditions,’ ” their words rang out on the front page, “we also point out that such actions as incite to hatred and violence, however technically peaceful actions may be, have not contributed to the resolution of our local problems. We do not believe that these days of new hope are days when extreme measures are justified in Birmingham.” They urged the Negro community to withdraw support from the protests.²⁸

For years King had felt an affinity with Saint Paul. He likened his own “kitchen conversion” in January 1956 to Paul’s blinding vision on the road to Damascus in the first century C.E. The Greek Jew, like King, heard Jesus speaking to him. The heavenly light was so bright that Paul could not see in an earthly way for three days. King identified with the ex-persecutor’s relentless persecution—“tried for heresy at Jerusalem, jailed at Philippi, beaten at Thessalonica, mobbed at Ephesus, depressed at Athens,” and imprisoned and executed in Rome.

Not long after King’s own vision he preached a sermon at Dexter in the persona of Paul, a letter to American Christians. Martin as Paul urged his audience to “be not conformed to this world,” but to transform themselves into the divine image, a colony of heaven, to begin by refusing to conform to banal evil.²⁹ At least since his Albany jailing King had thought about writing a letter from jail as Paul had done. Now he transmuted the despair he felt reading the clergymen’s letter into a furious burst of intellectual energy, to craft a Pauline epistle that sharpened themes he had previewed in his 1956 sermon.³⁰

Like Paul of Tarsus, the Birmingham inmate penned an urgent letter for a particular place and time that took on universal meaning for all times and places. Scribbling on the margins of the newspaper in which the clergymen’s letter appeared, then on scraps of paper slipped into his cell by a black jail trusty, he began with a warm greeting, “My dear fellow clergymen,” and praised them as sincere men of “genuine good will.”

He responded to criticism of him as an outsider by explaining that he and SCLC had been invited by their local affiliate; but that they were there “more basically” because “injustice is here.” Just like the Hebrew prophets, and just as the Apostle Paul “left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so I am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.” He was likewise an apostle sent by God to correct false teachings of misguided Christians.³¹

Unlike the Hebrew prophets who chastised a chosen people, Paul was the unequaled prophet of human unity. He brooked no divisions in the body of Christ, no divisive spirit. So in his own epistle King stressed from the outset the interrelatedness of all people, partly as justification for his intervention, but more as source of segregation’s sinfulness and that of his white clergy brethren.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he asserted. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outsider agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.” How far he had traveled since Montgomery, when he was troubled about the role of Bayard Rustin and other outsiders.

The heart of his message to his fellow clergy was that racial segregation had broken the interwoven body of humanity. This was the crisis—not the disorder in Birmingham streets that was aimed at mending the broken community. But the curveball he pitched to these clergy was to confess his disappointment that white (and black) moderates like themselves were not only not helping to repair the break, to reunify God’s splintered creation. Notwithstanding their apparent sincerity and goodwill, they were more responsible for the crisis than white supremacists and the Klan. He was not the first to suggest that the worst sin was good people staying silent. But in the case of these religious leaders, and many other moderates, they were remaining silent except to criticize the protests and defend law and order. Even more damaging was that the moderates were not even aware of their complicity but in flagrant denial.

“Shallow understanding from people of good will,” King wrote, was more the problem than “absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will,” “lukewarm acceptance” worse than “outright rejection.”

King was twisting the preachers’ comfortable ethical world upside down, or right side up—and indirectly this included Birmingham’s slacking black preachers. He argued that like antebellum ministers who tolerated slavery or gave lip service to abolition, the moderates, particularly moderate church people, were the primary linchpin bolstering the unconscionable status quo. He had borne a grudge since the Montgomery bus boycott, when he had naively hoped that white clergy in Alabama—the same ilk he was now addressing—could be persuaded to rally behind the boycott. This was the assignment he had given to Methodist minister Glenn Smiley. He believed then, as he did today about Birmingham, that such influence could have made a crucial difference in wearing down the resistance of the Montgomery city commissioners, so sensitive to white voters—in which case the boycott could have achieved its goals independently, without a Supreme Court decision. This rosy hope was one of the worst misjudgments of King’s career. It had taught him to be wary of white ministers and moderates.

King’s broadside against moderates echoed the words of white writer Lillian Smith, whom he singled out for praise, in her address to the MIA’s Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change in December 1956, the bus boycott’s first anniversary. Her speech, “The Right Way Is Not a Moderate Way,” was delivered by a friend because she was at home in Georgia battling the cancer that eventually killed her.

Bemoaning moderation as “the slogan of our times,” the controversial novelist had lauded the Montgomery movement for showing the world that moderation was a dangerous myth no longer affordable. Rather, there were simply extremes: the extreme of hate and the extreme of love, the extreme of the lie and the extreme of searching for truth.

“So, you have been extremists,” she had said to the Montgomery black community, “good, creative, loving extremists, and I want to tell you I admire and respect you for it.” Of many great things they had done, one of the most valuable was to dramatize “for all America to see that in times of ordeal, in times of crisis, only the extremist can meet the challenge. The question in crisis is not: Are you going to be an extremist? The question is: What kind of extremist are you going to be?” She drew an analogy with her own struggle with cancer. Moderation would not make the cancer go away. The time had come, she insisted, “when it is dangerous not to risk. We must take risks in order to save our integrity, our moral nature, our lives and our country.”³² It was perilous not to be an extremist when extremism was called for. One was guilty of harmful extremism by not engaging in the constructive version.

In his Birmingham letter six years later King embraced the arrow of extremism (after being wounded by it) and restated Lillian Smith’s provocative question: not whether, but what kind of extremist shall they be? Jesus had been an extremist, for love, he suggested, as were the Hebrew prophets, for justice, and Paul, for the Christian gospel of unity; so was Lincoln for national union, and Jefferson for natural rights. And for sure God had been an extremist in flooding the world, nearly killing Isaac, slaughtering worshipers of the golden calf, and sending his only begotten son to an agonizing death.

King declared that he was being an extremist by standing “in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community,” complacent apathy and bitter violence, the latter exemplified by the Nation of Islam and other black nationalist “hate” groups. “I have tried to stand between these two forces,” like his extremist namesake, Martin Luther: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” Evoking Paul, he claimed that his middle-of-the-road extremism was to pursue “the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest.”

Like Lillian Smith but more subtly he was charting a tectonic shift in the moral landscape. In Montgomery and since, he had championed walking a middle road between extremes—for example, between capitalism and communism. In a new departure he now asserted that the good and true middle road replaced false moderation with a creative extreme that would navigate amid hazardous extremes on either side—in this case, of passivity and of vengeful retaliation. And just as there were different kinds of extremism, so there were different forms of militancy. Neither extremism nor militancy had to mean violence to body or spirit. So much for Aristotle’s doctrine of the golden mean in which moderation was enshrined and extremes expunged. One ought not blame King’s poor churchmen for their bewilderment: he was accusing them of worse evil than the Klan.

The creative extremist, the constructive militant, the compassionate radical—King was projecting a new center for the American political universe. Could this radical center take hold?

Part of King’s radical moderation was, again like Paul’s approach, to clothe his unflinching moral pounce in a tone of friendship and pastoral caring for fellow men of God. Despite his harsh criticisms of wayward Christians, Paul often expressed a longing to be with the recipients of his admonitions. In closing, King asked the clergymen to forgive him if he overstated the truth or showed “unreasonable impatience,” while asking God to forgive him if he was not hard enough on them. He wished to meet each of the eight signers as a Judeo-Christian brother. He was not only acting out his commitment to rebuild broken community, but showing that the heart of community was face-to-face dialogue, fellowship, and forgiveness, breaking bread at the table of brotherhood.

Was King speaking only to the clergymen, to white ministers, and to moderates of all colors? In a semiconscious way he may have been addressing his own moderate, cautious, and passive side. He could identify with the middle-class white clergy; perhaps this was why he challenged them so artfully. He had always leaned toward caution and often appeared passive. He had not immediately backed the bus boycott in December 1955. He had resisted the robust voting rights campaign that acting director Ella Baker mapped out for SCLC. He had refused to join the freedom rides even after egging on the riders. He had wiggled and wavered in Albany, further infuriating his SNCC allies. He had reluctantly approved the Birmingham campaign only when Shuttlesworth’s pleading could not be rebuffed. In his upbringing and temperament he was as much a moderate as the bishops and rabbi he was upbraiding. Putting aside his own comfortable moderate demeanor, he had to decide for himself, What kind of extremist shall I be?

He acted the part of extremist in smuggling drafts of his missive in and out of jail as Walker, one of few who could decipher his scrawls, frantically copyedited, his secretary typed them, and he returned typescripts by attorney courier for the prisoner to revise. He began the lengthy letter on Easter Sunday, while outside an SCLC crew sought to desegregate Birmingham’s lily-white churches. The letter was released to the press on Thursday. It drew little comment and had small effect on the Birmingham movement. Rejected by the New York Times Magazine, it was published later that spring in three left-leaning journals and then in the Atlantic. Its rise to canon and classic did not come until it made waves as the core of King’s second book, Why We Can’t Wait, in the afterheat of 1963.

. . .

A PERSONAL EPISTLE ABOUT RACE relations that made a louder splash during spring 1963, and ripples into the next century, appeared as James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. The best-selling book contained a short letter, “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” and a long essay, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind.” Like King the thirty-nine-year-old author was the son of a Baptist preacher and had become a preacher himself. Writing in the deceptively calm racial waters of mid-1962, Baldwin expressed an apocalyptic urgency that surpassed that of the SCLC leader in the Birmingham cauldron. If King wrote his soon-to-be-famous letter physically imprisoned, Baldwin wrote metaphorically as a prisoner in America, as a slave in all but name, psychologically shackled. He asserted that, whether born in Harlem like himself or in middle-class digs like King, the Negro was born into a mental ghetto from which he must break free.

To endure their psychic imprisonment African Americans had to toughen themselves, build up self-worth, and through religion find compassion to care for their own people and even for the oppressors, whose sin of racism, he optimistically believed, came more from ignorance and delusion than willfulness. White people must drastically change their ways, however, to forestall the racial Armageddon. In return for black forbearance, they must overturn their own identity in order to be able to relate to blacks as children of God. To see blacks differently, they must see themselves anew—as spiritually sick souls locked in their own psycho-spiritual prison, enslaved inside their debilitating myth of superiority (and terror of inferiority) that was ultimately as dehumanizing for themselves as for the oppressed.³³

The white man, Baldwin wrote, is “in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being.” Why would blacks, or whites, want to be integrated into a burning house? White people could not be free themselves without helping to free the Other.

Despite Baldwin’s tone of imminent doom, this work, as much as King’s letter, was a veiled gift to the white world—if only it would be heard as such. But Baldwin’s message was misunderstood by many white (and black) Americans. He was far from advocating the extreme of revolutionary violence if whites did not come to their senses. He like King was ardently trying to avoid black vengeance. With his passionate prose he too was calling for creative extremists to seize the center ground, spread it in all directions, and forestall the catastrophic extremism of either passivity or nihilism.

“Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands,” he concluded. “If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare.” If they did not dare, black and white together, Noah’s prophecy would be fulfilled: in the words of a slave spiritual, “No more water, the fire next time!”³⁴

While feverishly revising his prison letter, King was reading another black manifesto published sixty years before, The Souls of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois. The work foreshadowed Baldwin’s apocalyptic black self-exploration and shared with both Baldwin and King’s letter a tone of subdued outrage and reasoned passion. When King, Abernathy, and the other protesters were brought in for arraignment on Monday morning, the two leaders complained about their hard, bare beds and cold nights without covers. King, who had been fasting, was tired, weak, and grumpy. Later back in his cell King met with his attorney, Clarence Jones, who “lifted a thousand pounds from my heart” with word that King’s close friend Harry Belafonte had raised fifty thousand dollars for protesters’ bail money, which redeemed his decision to go to jail.³⁵

Chained to three kids and a newborn, Coretta King in Atlanta was distressed that she had not heard from her husband, who always called from jail right away. Bull Connor had forbidden him a call to his wife or to anyone else. On Sunday—the first Easter she had not gone to church—she tried calling President Kennedy in Palm Beach, Florida. He owed her: his helpful phone call to her in October 1960 had probably won him the election. She couldn’t reach the President, but the attorney general returned her call with reassurance. Robert Kennedy had been called by Belafonte, urging him to improve King’s condition. “Tell Reverend King we’re doing all we can,” he had told the singer, joking that “I’m not sure we can get into prison reform at this moment.”³⁶

When the President called Coretta back on Monday afternoon her two-year-old son, Dexter, picked up the phone. The leader of the free world had to break through a riff of baby talk to reach the movement’s first lady. In his warm brogue JFK asked about her children and new baby and said that he had sent FBI agents to investigate her husband’s plight; if he did so, no agents talked to the prisoner. He said that her husband would be phoning shortly. She got the call a few minutes later. Martin King was surprised when she excitedly told him of Kennedy’s call. He urged her to get maximum media mileage from the White House intervention. Whatever Kennedy or his younger brother had done, King’s and Abernathy’s conditions had suddenly gotten better: mattresses, pillows, blankets, and now a phone call, with guards eavesdropping.

When King and Abernathy were released after eight days, they discovered that their jailing had not hot-wired the movement as they had hoped. It seemed to be running out of juice. After only three weeks people were weary. A young Mississippi native who had driven over from his home state on Good Friday almost single-handedly breathed new life into the withering crusade. King had urged him to come when he was about to get arrested.

“You can put me in jail,” Rev. James Bevel roused Good Friday’s mass meeting, “but you can’t stop us. When the Holy Ghost gets to a man, nothing can stop him.” He cajoled the teenagers to join in. “Some of these students say they have got to go to school, but they will get more education in five days in the city jail than they will get in five months in a segregated school.”³⁷ A recent convert from SNCC to SCLC, now heading up the latter’s limited Mississippi operations, Bevel arrived in Birmingham just as the Greenwood voter registration offensive had stalled. The Greenwood campaign in the Delta had been getting the kind of attention from the Kennedy brothers and the media that King had wished on Birmingham, after SNCC activist Jimmy Travis got shot, the SNCC office was burned out, and Bob Moses and several others were jailed for constitutionally protected activities. But the Justice Department pulled out at the pivotal moment, leaving SNCC in the lurch. Some SNCC people blamed King for diverting attention to Birmingham, where Project Confrontation was feeling its way.

Bevel, twenty-six, with shaved head topped by skullcap—his beloved father claimed Jewish blood (and changed his surname to a Hebrew word associated with God)—was already well tested in movement risk taking. Kidnapped from the Delta by his mother after she divorced his father, he spent his teenage years in Cleveland, then served a short stint in the navy until a black ship’s cook with a Ph.D. gave him Tolstoy’s Kingdom of God Is Within You; he could no longer serve in the military. Returning to Cleveland, he made good money as a steelworker, sang rhythm-and-blues at night, and was about to sign a recording contract when his godmother insisted he go to church with her. On that Sunday morning, hearing God’s voice in the reading of Isaiah, he felt a divine call. Shortly he arrived at the black Baptist seminary in Nashville.

Although he was friends with John Lewis and other movement firebrands in Nashville, he spurned the workshops on nonviolent resistance taught by Rev. James Lawson, because the redemption he thirsted for was personal, not political. But Lawson reminded him of his father, who walked what Jesus taught, and he could not keep away. When the Nashville lunch-counter sit-ins erupted in early 1960 he was an eager recruit. Next spring when Nashville movement leader Diane Nash called for SNCC people to take over the freedom ride in Birmingham, Bevel joined up and found himself back in Mississippi, spending several weeks in Parchman pen. His glorious tenor kept his brothers’ spirits up while infuriating the jailers. Although he and Nash, light-skinned, straitlaced Catholic beauty queen turned superwoman activist, were human opposites, she accepted his plea of marriage, despite his notoriety in the movement as a proud womanizer.

While King was in jail in Birmingham, Bevel was exhorting the faithful with his frenzied preaching at nightly mass meetings. He tangled with the authoritarian Walker, who had a penchant for antagonizing the young militants. Walker demanded that King fire him. “I can take orders from you,” Bevel implored King, “but Wyatt is just an unprincipled motherfucker.”³⁸ Both entranced and intimidated by him, King refused to let him go, especially since Bevel was his vital link with SNCC and younger activists. Although he had little of King’s highfalutin religious training—he was the kind of hootin’ and hollerin’ country preacher that King had scorned—some considered the man they nicknamed the “Prophet” at least De Lawd’s equal as a preacher. After getting out of jail King had to push to keep from getting upstaged.

“I would rather stay in jail the rest of my days,” King enthralled a mass meeting, “than make a butchery of my conscience.” This man who hated jail yelled out, “I will die there if necessary.”³⁹ The preaching and the unearthly singing by the ACMHR gospel choir, making Birmingham’s night music as thrilling as Albany’s, conjured the illusion of a thriving mass movement.

But the gaggle of reporters and TV cameras were leaving town. Birmingham had fast become old news. If something was not done to dazzle them, the movement would fade as it had in Greenwood and Albany. Bevel was eager to deploy an unconventional weapon, but his superiors held him back. He wanted to unleash the power of teenagers and preteens whose explosive energy was bottled up in segregated schools. To this point most of those arrested had been adults, trained in the movement’s nonviolent workshops led by Dorothy Cotton and others. King’s marathon meetings in March had barely won the verbal backing of a majority of the city’s black leaders. King knew that using children might undo that fragile support, as well as bring criticism from important white allies, especially in Washington. Racked with doubts, spending hours closeted in his motel suite, he was unable to make up his mind.

Assuming King’s approval, Bevel and the kids’ army did not wait for a final go-ahead from the Gaston Motel command center. D-Day had been set for Thursday, May 2. Bevel, Cotton, Andrew Young, and other SCLC organizers had spent the week proselytizing high school students by importuning athletic stars, prom queens, and student leaders to mobilize their own followers. On D-Day morning over a thousand youngsters, many in elementary school, high-fived over the school gates that their principals had locked to keep them inside and rushed into Sixteenth Street Baptist Church for quick schooling in nonviolent revolution.

After lunch, they streamed out of the church in orderly fashion, two by two, to march downtown to city hall. As they sang “We want our freedom!” Connor’s police halted the rhythmic dancelike flow and escorted them into paddy wagons until filled up and then into commandeered school buses. Several hundred boys packed the city jail; several hundred girls were penned up at the state fairgrounds. There was something about the steely, purposeful dignity of those confident marching schoolchildren, an epiphany captured in film footage, that made them invincible. They had turned the corner. From this afternoon on, victory was palpable.

Betraying his reputation, for a trying month Connor had been copying the restraint of Albany’s police chief, Pritchett, whom he had hired as a consultant. It had worked thus far. Minimal police violence had dammed the movement’s flow. But D-Day got him stuck. The movement finally was filling the jails. The city was incapable of holding more prisoners; the courts were paralyzed. He could no longer afford to arrest protesters. He would have to stop them. Snarling dogs had made an appearance as a scare tactic. Something more punishing was imperative.

King and other SCLC doubters were relieved by the day’s success. At that night’s exultant mass meeting he christened the following day “Double D-Day.” On Friday morning an even larger army of schoolkids vaulted from their school yards and packed the Baptist church for classes that ennobled them. With jittery excitement they playacted confrontations with police and angry bystanders that would soon be real life. Hormones popping, they readied for battle. When the kids in formation poured out of every orifice of the church heading toward the white downtown, Connor was ready: he had positioned a phalanx of firemen with high-powered fire hoses whose blasts of one hundred pounds per square inch could rip bark off trees. Fired from tripod-mounted nozzles that resembled Gatling guns, the ferocious water cannons hurled the kids against trees, walls, and pavement. Kids on the periphery were attacked by German shepherds lunging at their limbs. Girls wearing cotton skirts were most vulnerable.

The sight and sound of this water massacre—tiny girls screaming, shirts torn off boys, soaked children piled on each other—left an indelible memory on millions of television viewers, including this writer. I watched it on Dave Garroway’s Today show on NBC before going to my western Massachusetts high school, where soon I formed a civil rights committee. This was as much a historic day for television as for the nation. During the freedom rides and Albany movement SCLC had awakened to the power of television. They had carefully planned to make Birmingham a media spectacle to dominate the networks’ daily quarter hour of national news. Up to this day Connor’s unexpected kid-gloves approach had sabotaged their hopes. Now Connor was revealing his true colors. Television that had first shown its pizzazz with Elvis Presley in 1956 and its ability to anoint presidents with the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates now showed its power to make history in the streets. May 3, 1963, was the birth of the television age. Not even President Kennedy would outdo Martin King’s mastery of the medium, reaching its peak in Selma two years later.

Bruised and battered kids who could still walk, and legions of fresh troops—their sisters, brothers, pals—returned to the streets on Saturday. Over two hundred were arrested. Teenagers around the edges who had not been trained nor had pledged to obey the “ten commandments” nonviolent code fought back with rocks and bottles. Grabbing a police megaphone, Bevel on his own called off the protest and declared a weekend truce, to Walker’s chagrin, for fear of rioting. Only nonviolent purists like Bevel and King minded the melee. Walker was thrilled that untrained youth were joining the protests. He noticed that press counts of protesters did not distinguish between the schooled and unschooled; thus numbers were inflated. He and other staff wondered if mass action would be more effective if strictly controlled—or allowed to be fluid in the margins.

Then came miracle Sunday. King and Abernathy were away, preaching at their home churches in Atlanta, where the former was praised as “Moses on earth.” In the afternoon a thousand well-dressed adults gathered for a prayer service at New Pilgrim Baptist Church. A woman got up and testified that she and other mothers ought not to be afraid to let their kids go to jail. “Jail be the only thang leff t’do,” she called out, “an ain’t a disgrace lahk Ah always bin taught, no suh. (Praise the Lord!) It’s a honuh t’go t’jail in the footsteps of ow-uh great leaduh, Dr. Mawtin Luthuh King!”⁴⁰ White troubadours Guy and Candie Carawan from Highlander Folk School were arrested at the church door for violating Jim Crow religion, while darker-skinned Joan Baez was seduced by soul music inside before being spirited away to perform at all-black Miles College. Preacher Bevel revved up the fellowship’s anger at the Carawans’ arrest.

“We’re tired of this mess!” He broke the truce he had imposed. “Let’s not march,” he yelled, “let’s walk.”⁴¹ They were determined to hold a prayer vigil at Southside jail, come what may.

Outside New Pilgrim the gathering doubled in size to two or three thousand, the largest march yet; mainly grown-ups in dark suits and bright dresses. In a few blocks, singing fervently “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me,” they ran into a blockade of police and fire engines two blocks from the jail. For a minute Bevel thought the mounted fire hoses were machine guns. Since Walker could not stop the march, he had picked its leader, Rev. Charles Billups, an evangelist preacher and Shuttlesworth’s longtime coworker. Up against the fire-engine barricade, water guns with bulging hoses poised to shoot, Billups knelt to pray, as did the serpentine procession behind him. He let loose his lungs.

“We’re not turning back,” he shouted. “All we want is our freedom. How do you feel doing these things?” Then in a mellifluous chant, tears flowing down his cheeks, he cried, “Turn on your water! Turn loose your dogs! We will stand here till we die.” The huge chorus behind him echoed his words, all staring at the firemen and cops. Connor swiftly ordered his firefighters to open fire. They were still, as if in a spell.

“Dammit!” he bellowed. “Turn on the hoses!” A fireman was heard to say, “We’re here to put out fires, not people.”⁴² A few firemen cried. They ignored Connor’s frantic screams, their long hoses like sagging phalluses. They stepped aside as the marchers stood up and slowly walked by.

When Billups—a shipwreck survivor of World War II, shrapnel in his head from Korea—had joined Shuttlesworth’s movement years before, he had confessed that he was “living on borrowed time,” with “nothing to go for but life.” In 1960 the Klan abducted him, tied him to a tree, beat him senseless with chains, and branded his belly with “KKK” while commanding, “Nigger, stop that praying.” Billups felt more sorry for them than for himself. When one of his assailants later showed up at his home offering to turn himself in, the young preacher prayed with him instead.⁴³

“You would have to say that the hand of God moved in that demonstration,” New Pilgrim’s pastor observed of miracle Sunday.⁴⁴ He believed that the protesters’ spiritual delirium must have infected the firemen. King, who had missed this emotional and spiritual apex of the campaign, recalled nonetheless: “I saw there, I felt there, for the first time, the pride and the power of nonviolence.”⁴⁵

D-Day, Double D-Day, and the weekend marches had gotten Washington’s attention. With the President keeping watch on the fast-breaking events, his brother sent assistant attorneys general Burke Marshall and Joe Dolan to push the stalled negotiations with business leaders. Communication was complicated by the businessmen’s refusal to talk directly with black leaders, especially with outsider King, and by the downtown merchants’ need to get approval for even cosmetic changes from the “Big Mules,” the bankers and industrialists who really ran the city.

Moreover, SCLC had underestimated the intransigence of the business leaders. They might have had different priorities than Bull Connor, but they were less willing to jettison Jim Crow than was the Montgomery bus company in 1956. The store owners might have buckled sooner had it not been for the industrialists’ dependence on segregation to keep the work force divided, and for fear of retribution by Connor and the Klan. Even black heavyweights like Gaston were slow to move—until Gaston looked out his office window and saw below a tiny girl get horsewhipped by water. With the help of the merchants’ lawyer, David Vann, Marshall and Dolan shuttled between the Gaston Motel and the merchants and then made overtures to the Big Mules’ Senior Citizens Committee.

Monday was the fourth day of massive young people’s marches downtown as the protesters, many wearing raincoats, got acclimated to the water assaults; some found the spray refreshing in the ninety-degree heat. By that evening over twenty-five hundred people were incarcerated, most of them juveniles. The fairground 4-H dorms, which had always excluded black kids, now overflowed with boisterous black girl power.

Tuesday, May 7, was V-Day. Shuttlesworth, Bevel, and Cotton decided that this was the day for a midday show of force in the forbidden downtown. An hour earlier than police expected, squads of kids spun out of church doors and maneuvered cleverly into awed lunch-hour crowds, sitting down in restaurants and wandering through department stores. As only serendipity might permit, the merchants, making scant progress toward a settlement, broke for lunch at the height of the downtown hullabaloo. The Negroes had taken over their downtown. When a store owner found a black teenager sprawled out on the floor of his men’s department chanting “Freedom!” he decided it was time to settle. When the shaken merchants regathered after their badly digested luncheon, they agreed on terms to put before the Big Mules, who had also been sobered by the downtown revolt.

The lunchtime foray was so successful that the leaders decided on a sequel in midafternoon. This time, however, the burgeoning crowds around the fringes let loose at the cops with rocks and bricks. It was one thing to have a little violence at the edges that could draw more TV cameras. It was a different matter when the newspaper of record, the New York Times, named it a riot. Though small and short by later standards, it was the first urban riot of a decade that would see hundreds more.

By late afternoon protest leaders managed to calm things down and pull their troops from the tempest. Remarkably, no one was killed. The five-week campaign had suffered lacerations and broken bones but no deaths. The day’s heaviest casualty was Shuttlesworth. He was assaulted by a water gun outside Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, smashing him down a stairwell, breaking his ribs, nearly knocking him out. When Connor heard that he had been taken away in an ambulance he told reporters he wished he had been taken in a hearse.

Meanwhile SNCC leader Jim Forman, excited by the children’s crusade but dismayed that little kids were deliberately put in harm’s way, dropped in on King at the Gaston Motel. He was mortified to find this man of the people eating room-service steak in silk pajamas while children were doing battle in his name. Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X had found rare concord in likewise condemning the abuse of children. Kennedy said that “an injured, maimed or dead child is a price that none of us can afford to pay.” The Nation of Islam minister was cutting: “Real men don’t put their children on the firing line.”⁴⁶

The daily escalating street protests climaxing in the nonviolent takeover of downtown and the violent spasm of unaffiliated youth brought tentative agreement by the merchants and the Mules to desegregate the large stores’ lunch counters, rest rooms, and clerk jobs with all deliberate speed, and to form a biracial committee to plan subsequent integration of schools, parks, and police. Key provisions remained to be worked out; it was not a done deal. With all of his rhetorical promises King was reluctant to settle for less than freedom now, but Burke Marshall’s steady pressure made him cave in. Marshall had arranged a presidential press conference to announce the anticipated breakthrough—but they still faced a big hurdle.

In a low ebb for King’s professed concern with pastoral care or simple compassion, neither he nor Abernathy had taken a moment to phone hospitalized Shuttlesworth, in great physical pain, much less pay a visit. This stung him. Well before the fire-hose blast that felled him Shuttlesworth, like SNCC activists in Albany, had felt rolled over by the SCLC juggernaut—even though he had beseeched them to come and admired King. Now, rather than come to his bedside with the sketchy agreement, which supposedly required his OK, they asked the heavily sedated patient to drive to a meeting across town at “Dynamite Hill,” perhaps hoping he wouldn’t show. At first King kept his back to him. No one would tell him what was up.

“Fred, we have decided to call off the demonstrations.”

Shuttlesworth, woozy from painkillers, couldn’t believe his ringing ears. “Say that again, Martin? Did I hear you right?” King repeated his words.

“Well, Martin, who decided?”

“We just decided that we can’t have negotiations with all this going on.”

“Well, Martin, it’s hard for me to see how anybody could decide that without me. Hell no, we’re not calling anything off.”

“Well, uh—”

“Martin, you know what they said in Albany. You get things stirred up and then you pull out and leave the community with sickness and death and lost jobs. But I’ve been here. People have been hurt, and I’ve been here to help heal. That’s why I’m respected in Birmingham. People trust me, and I have the responsibility after SCLC is gone, and I’m telling you it will not be called off. You and I promised that we would not stop demonstrating until we had the victory.”

His rage rose. “You’ve been Mr. Big, Martin,” he burst out, “but you’ll be Mr. Shit if you pull out now! You’ll be a nobody. If you want to call it off, you call it off, but I’m marching.”

Marshall jumped in. “What about the press conference by the President? I made promises.”

“Burke,” he replied to the assistant attorney general for civil rights, “who gave you the authority to make promises to anybody?”

As Shuttlesworth hobbled to the door King said, “We got to have unity, Burke. We’ve just got to have unity. People have suffered. People will suffer.”⁴⁷ His face was anguish. Shuttlesworth stormed out, his wife, Ruby, propping him up.

By next day he had calmed some but was still fuming that his friend Martin had double-crossed him. He could not abide ending the protests that he had staked his life on until a fair agreement was signed, sealed, and delivered. After all, the bus boycott was not called off even when the highest court of the land ratified its victory; they waited several weeks for the order to take effect. From Shuttlesworth’s standpoint the proposed settlement was more P.R. than real: he had tasted the worth of white promises the past fall. Moreover, the young masses were eager to keep marching and cheered his reluctance, holding him to a higher standard than the usual compromise of half a loaf.

Shuttlesworth was heading out of the Gaston Motel to lead a march downtown when Andrew Young physically blocked him, ready to tackle him despite his injuries. “I was prepared to do whatever I had to do to keep him from going out that door and embarrassing Martin Luther King in front of the whole world.” Dolan managed to get his boss, RFK, on the phone: “Reverend Shuttlesworth, the attorney general would like to speak with you.” Kennedy reassured him that the settlement was sound.

The phone call, Young recalled, “saved me from punching him out.”⁴⁸ Behind closed doors SCLC leaders’ behavior did not always adhere to the nonviolent discipline imposed on their young followers in the streets. Shuttlesworth blamed suave Young, SCLC’s lead negotiator, more than anyone for pulling wool over their eyes.

At separate but equal press conferences on Friday the two sides announced the agreement for phased desegregating of department stores and a biracial committee to oversee further desegregation. Despite its delayed timetable, the larger black community embraced the agreement with relief. Connor, whose incumbent city commission had refused to hand over power to the new mayor, giving the city rival regimes, publicly repudiated the pact. While white moderates backed it as the best they could get, supremacists were livid.

At a raucous Klan rally that night Grand Dragon Robert Shelton bitterly declared, “Martin Luther King’s epitaph can be written here in Birmingham.”⁴⁹ Later that night a powerful bomb with Klan signature obliterated Room 30 of the Gaston Hotel. King had checked out earlier that day, turning the room over to an aide, Joe Lowery, out celebrating. No one was hurt. Minutes before, a bomb had wrecked the home of King’s younger brother, Rev. A. D. King, a protest leader. In response to the bombings blacks not part of the movement rose up in a true riot, torching several buildings downtown. The insurrection was worsened by the highway patrol battalion sent in by Governor Wallace, which made Connor’s tactics seem timid: a preview of Selma’s “Bloody Sunday” two years hence. Many blacks were injured, but incredibly, none were killed. The President deployed eighteen thousand troops, the first time in the postwar era that the military intervened to suppress disorder rather than enforce a court decree.

When Connor failed to hold the line against mongrelization, Bombingham had returned to business as usual. But change had come that could not be turned back. The city’s despised black children had brought deliverance.

In retrospect, Young called King’s bold decision to get arrested on Good Friday—popular only with Shuttlesworth and his own Christian soldiers—“the beginning of his true leadership.”⁵⁰ He had done a remarkable job winning tepid support from moderate black leaders, even ones like the Birmingham World’s Emory Jackson, who had been so opposed as to editorialize that the protests were “wasteful and worthless.”⁵¹ Although he handled Shuttlesworth poorly, he had kept feuding among subleaders, especially Walker and Bevel, from spilling into the public eye. He had performed masterfully as the symbolic focus of the campaign, until being overshadowed by the army of no-nonsense kids.

But time and again he had equivocated, delayed, refused to decide. If left to his discretion the children’s crusade might never have materialized—and the Birmingham campaign, such a close thing, would almost surely have failed. In that case it was doubtful that King could have regained the prestige and moral authority he had lost after Albany. As Shuttlesworth had warned, Mr. Big would be Mr. Shit, or Mr. Nothing.

King had a lot to celebrate besides having left town hours before his motel room was blown up. His leadership of the Negro Revolution hung by a thread of his garment of destiny. Had his moment to shine come and gone? Would he forever be living in the long shadow cast by the Montgomery mass miracle?

During all the low days after Albany he had not often doubted that the Spirit still stood with him, that their covenant had not been broken, that he was called by God to lead his people to a second fuller emancipation. Although—despite his rational mind-set—he never looked hard for proof, he nonetheless appreciated signs and portents. These had been bountiful in Montgomery; they had helped to sustain his and the movement’s ebullient energy.

Whatever his disappointments with Birmingham, with his own failures of leadership there, his temporizing, indecision, and paralysis of nerve, the epic spectacle—and the media’s superlative spin on it—reaffirmed his faith in his personal mission, his worth to his God, his trust in having been anointed. It eased his mind to be facing certain death when he felt exalted, his feet firmly planted on a divine path. It was this spiritual release that energized him to write the prison epistle that would justify the civil rights struggle for posterity, as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address had etched the meaning of the first Civil War. But his sudden catapulting to “man of the year” (as Time would anoint him on its cover), with all of the hoopla of fame surrounding his elevated status, made him more conscious than ever of two Martin Kings at war, the exalted and the earthbound, sinful self.

If King did not expect his redemption in Birmingham and did not quite trust it, he and his colleagues had expected even less to discover in the steel city the holy grail, the elixir they had been seeking. In Montgomery King and the MIA had nearly perfected the boycott as a form of nonviolent mass action. But despite hundreds of exemplary group actions since, especially lunch-counter sit-ins and freedom rides, the American movement had not come close to approximating the large-scale direct action led by Gandhi in India.

Now, thanks to Bevel’s zeal to unleash kid power, the desperation that allowed such an outlandish tactic, and most of all the brave beauty of the boys and girls, SCLC leaders had discovered the irresistible power of mass nonviolent action. It was not only its magnitude that stunned them. It was the complex catalytic role of violence. They had planned carefully for a violent response by Connor’s cops, vexed when it took a month to bring it out. But they were taken aback by the dynamic supporting role played by uneducated, lower-class black youth with little to lose who joined the demonstrations spontaneously. The astounding impact of the disciplined children’s marches, and of the telegenic fire spray and canine corps, was not devalued by their realization that the school dropouts and jobless youth who threw rocks and bottles, provoking even crueler police reprisal, proved indispensable to their victory.

Bevel, Cotton, and other street leaders mustered all their skill to stop the unplanned violence, believing it hurt their cause as well as their principles. SCLC repudiated it. Yet it was the disciplined mass marches combined with the parasitic fringe violence—the latter spilling into full-scale rioting—that brought the Big Mules to their knees. In the United States, the hidden power of Gandhian-style mass action would be the ever-present threat that police violence would beget people’s violence into an escalating spiral of chaos. The ugliness of white supremacy forced into the light was not only the brutality of its perpetrators, but the pain of its hardest-pressed victims primed for release.

Robert Kennedy saw in the Birmingham violence the specter of the urban underclass in revolt. He worried that it might spread to big cities in the North. He invited James Baldwin for a breakfast discussion at his Hickory Hill estate in Virginia, then asked the writer to assemble a small group of knowledgeable people to meet with him in New York. Among those who showed up at Kennedy’s opulent Central Park West apartment in late May were singers Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, and social psychologist Kenneth Clark, whose experiments with white and black dolls had undergirded the 1954 Brown decision. To give the attorney general a taste of Jim Crow justice, Baldwin invited Louisiana CORE activist and freedom rider Jerome Smith, who had been jailed and beaten numerous times; he was getting medical treatment in New York for his battle wounds.

Smith set the tone for the evening by saying that meeting with Kennedy in his lap of luxury made him feel like throwing up. The attorney general had been upbraided by freedom riders the year before when SNCC’s Charles Sherrod accused him of bribing the movement with voter registration funds (to move away from direct action), but Smith made Sherrod’s barrage look tame. With volcanic black anger that Kennedy had never before witnessed—but that would unnerve many well-meaning whites in years to come—Smith recounted his experience in the Deep South. Kennedy turned to the more respectable Negroes, but Horne replied, “You’ve got a great many very, very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General. But the only man who should be listened to is that man over there.”

Smith confessed that he was questioning nonviolence. “When I pull the trigger,” he said, “kiss it good-bye.” Baldwin asked if he would fight for his country. “Never! Never! Never!” Kennedy, World War II vet and Cold War quarterback, was shocked.

“Bobby got redder and redder,” Clark recalled, “and accused Jerome of treason. That made everybody move in to protect Jerome and to confirm his feelings. It became really an attack!”

“This boy,” Horne said later, “just put it like it was. He communicated the plain, basic suffering of being a Negro. The primeval memory of everyone in that room went to work after that. He took us back to the common dirt of our existence and rubbed our noses in it.” Tempers caught fire all around.

Hansberry, creator of the racial drama A Raisin in the Sun, admonished Kennedy: “Look, if you can’t understand what this young man is saying, then we are without any hope at all because you and your brother are representatives of the best that white America can offer. If you are insensitive to this, then there’s no alternative except our going into the streets, and chaos.” Sounding like Baldwin in his new book, she said that whites were castrating blacks, and warned vaguely of Negroes in the street getting guns and killing white people.

The combat raged for three hours. Clark called it “one of the most violent, emotional verbal assaults that I had ever witnessed, the most intense, traumatic meeting in which I’ve ever taken part.” Kennedy, hoping for constructive brainstorming, not destructive emotions, recalled that “they seemed possessed. They reacted as a unit. It was impossible to make contact with any of them. You can’t talk to them the way you can talk to Martin Luther King or Roy Wilkins. It was all emotion, hysteria—they stood up and orated—they cursed—some of them wept and left the room.”

His friend and biographer Arthur Schlesinger Jr. concluded that “he began, I believe, to grasp as from the inside the nature of black anguish. He resented the experience, but it pierced him all the same. His tormentors made no sense; but in a way they made all sense.”⁵² Kennedy brooded about the battle but let its meaning sink in. He began to understand why they could not wait.

Marshall and Dolan returned from the Birmingham battlefield with a new mission. The experience had convinced them that there would be many Birminghams in the months ahead, and that it would be impossible for the Justice Department to step in all over the South. Birmingham itself was a close call. On speaking tours King, Shuttlesworth, and others ratcheted up pressure on JFK to sign a second Emancipation Proclamation outlawing segregation. But the President had made it plain that executive action, such as the Birmingham intervention, would fall short of an executive order. Nor would the civil rights community have been satisfied with a milk-toast order like Kennedy’s against housing discrimination. They felt that whatever Washington did had to be comprehensive, enforceable, irreversible. In the wake of Robert Kennedy’s browbeating in Manhattan it did not take long for the attorney general and his deputies to decide that sweeping civil rights legislation was a must. RFK sensed too that the President’s free-world leadership might depend on it.

On Memorial Day 1963 Vice President Lyndon Johnson, kept out of the loop on civil rights as on much else, delivered an uncharacteristically eloquent speech at Gettysburg.

“One hundred years ago, the slave was freed. One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage. The Negro today asks justice. We do not answer him—we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil—when we reply to the Negro by asking, ‘Patience.’ Our nation found its soul in honor on these fields of Gettysburg one hundred years ago. We must not lose that soul in dishonor now on the fields of hate.”⁵³ LBJ was so charged up by his oration that he urged Kennedy to give a Gettysburg address of his own.

MADE FAMOUS AROUND THE GLOBE by TV, newspapers, and mass-market magazines, the electrifying Birmingham drama ignited a firestorm of largely nonviolent protest as spring turned to summer. Perhaps because there were so many protests so spread out, or because of the media’s burnout after Birmingham, what King called the “Negro revolution of 1963” was poorly covered and thus underplayed. By the government’s conservative data, during ten weeks through July, over 750 demonstrations occurred in 186 cities with 15,000 arrests. These were not only in southern hot spots like Jackson, Danville, Durham, and Orangeburg. Many protests, organized by CORE and allied groups, took place in northern and western cities. If the 1960 sit-ins launched the black student movement, CORE’s civil disobedience in San Francisco, where hotels, restaurants, and car lots were forced to hire blacks, and in other cities and campus towns launched the white student movement, which focused on civil rights and liberties before turning to Vietnam in 1965.

Although Justice Department leaders had been born again to civil rights, White House political advisers—ever mindful of the 1960 squeaker—saw a Kennedy civil rights bill sinking his reelection. Then another media show in Alabama that absorbed the Justice Department finally pushed the President to rise above his traditional temporizing. Stung by the Birmingham sellout, cognizant that television was the culprit, Governor Wallace decided to stage a media spectacle of his own to block desegregation of the University of Alabama, still lily-white seven years after Autherine Lucy had been admitted, then kicked out after white rioting. As he had pledged, Wallace stood “in the schoolhouse door” on June 11 to symbolically bar Vivian Malone and James Hood from enrolling. But after JFK federalized the national guard he stepped aside to avoid arrest by U.S. marshals.

Just two days prior, another drama hidden from public view transpired in the hill country near the Mississippi Delta. Several rights workers, led by SCLC’s Annell Ponder and ranging in age from forty-five-year-old Fannie Lou Hamer, from nearby Ruleville, to sixteen-year-old June Johnson from Greenwood, were returning by bus from an SCLC voter registration workshop in South Carolina. When the bus stopped in Winona on Sunday morning and they tried to have breakfast at the Jim Crow café, they were taken to jail. The bus driver, who had already harassed them, had called ahead. For hours they were tortured and sexually abused. The jailers stripped Johnson naked and beat her bloody. Hamer heard Ponder screaming, while praying God to have mercy on her captors. For refusing to call them “sir” they pulverized her face and she nearly lost an eye. They came for Hamer.

“You bitch, you,” they yelled at her. “We gon’ make you wish you was dead.” The memory burned into her soul.

“The state highway patrolman came and carried me out of the cell into another cell where there were two Negro prisoners. The patrolman gave the first Negro a long blackjack that was heavy. It was loaded with something and they had me to lay down on the bunk with my face down, and I was beat. I was beat by the first Negro until he gave out. Then the patrolman ordered the other man to take the blackjack and he began to beat. That’s when I started screaming.” The patrolman lifted her dress and fondled her while she was being whipped. She could feel the cops’ sadistic sexual gratification. After the beatings the jailer’s wife and daughter, good Bible Belt Christians, surreptitiously brought them water. Hamer gave them Bible verses to contemplate.

The merciless beating blinded her in one eye, ruptured her kidneys, and crippled the polio survivor for life. Her battered face was unrecognizable for weeks. She overheard the jailers plotting to throw their bodies into the Big Black River. Quick action by SNCC and SCLC colleagues saved them—though SNCC’s Lawrence Guyot was thrown in Winona jail himself, where the guards nearly burned off his penis. Several months later the torturers were brought to trial, but the white jury acquitted them.

Fired up by righteous anger, Hamer was out registering voters in the cotton fields as soon as she could walk, heedless of her limp. A year later she told her gruesome tale to a live national television audience.

IN LATE MAY the White House refused King’s request for a meeting with the President to talk about ending segregation. Kennedy stated to aides in a secretly recorded conversation that “King is so hot these days that it’s like having Marx coming to the White House.” He worried that if he proposed legislation, “it will look like he got me to do it.”⁵⁴ On June 1 the attorney general convened an Oval Office meeting to decide whether to push the bill and what it would contain. He said he was dealing with thirty major protests that week. Backed by the vice president, who had never before been privy to civil rights policy, RFK persuaded his brother and doubting aides that the bill could not wait—regardless of his reelection or southern oligarchs on Capitol hill.

Ten days later, at the moment of Wallace’s stand-down in Tuscaloosa, John Kennedy ordered his speechwriters to prepare an address to the American people that evening. Two days before, not knowing about the legislative breakthrough, King had criticized the President for his timidity. For once he might have wished he’d held his tongue.

JFK’s hastily prepared speech—he fumbled with notes while facing the camera—was the most passionate presidential statement on race, from a man uncomfortable with both passion and race, since the Civil War president against whom he did not want to be measured.

We are confronted with a moral issue, he said, that “is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race except with respect to Negroes?

“Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise. The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them.” Who among us, he asked, would be “content with the counsels of patience and delay? One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free.” Across the land, he said, “the fires of frustration and discord are busy in every city. Redress is sought in the street.”⁵⁵

With frank acknowledgment that he was responding to mass demands, he announced he was sending a measure to Congress that the White House had considered impossible just two months before: to banish segregation and discrimination in public accommodations. It would be the first meaningful civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.

Like most of the civil rights community King was happy with Kennedy’s speech. Kennedy’s chief adviser, Ted Sorensen, let it be known that his boss “was not averse to those who called his speech and bill ‘the second Emancipation Proclamation.’ ”⁵⁶ King, who had been steering him in this direction ever since the unlikely pair had seen their reflections in Lincoln’s proclamation two years before, would have concurred.

But black leaders’ euphoria did not last the night. Minutes after the family of Medgar Evers in Jackson had cheered Kennedy’s speech, the Mississippi NAACP leader, returning home after a long day shepherding the Jackson protests, was shot down in his driveway by a high-powered rifle. The President drew flak from southern whites when he ordered that the veteran of Europe’s Normandy invasion be buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. It took four decades and three trials before Evers’s assassin, Byron de la Beckwith, was finally convicted for murder. Beckwith had bragged to his Klan klavern that killing “the nigger” caused him no more grief than his wife felt in giving birth.

What the Kennedy administration was conspiring to forestall, King, his SCLC colleagues, and grassroots organizers were busily fomenting—a true nationwide mass movement not seen since the labor revolt of the 1930s. But the establishment civil rights leaders such as Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young and their white liberal allies worried that the civil rights revolution might get out of hand, as Birmingham and its sister protests warned. They felt it must be managed from above.

Shortly after Birmingham, multimillionaire philanthropist Stephen Currier funded the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership (CUCRL), a federation of the “Big Six” civil rights organizations (NAACP, Urban League, SCLC, CORE, SNCC, National Council of Negro Women). James Farmer of CORE discovered that “civil rights generalship was one-fourth leadership, one-fourth showmanship, one-fourth one-upsmanship, and one-fourth partnership.” Though SNCC’s Jim Forman disparaged it as mainly a fund-raising gimmick (with SNCC at the short end), CUCRL provided a forum to try to resolve intergroup gripes and to develop broader strategy. Division had surfaced about means and even ends. The elite council was often polarized between the bureaucratic inertia of Wilkins and Young, and Forman’s and Farmer’s impatient militancy. Caught in the middle, King’s thoughtful, low-key presence served as a reconciling force between opposites.

To unify both the feuding leaders and the erupting masses, the next step seemed clear—to rev up the march on Washington that A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin had been planning since March, at which time neither SCLC nor other civil rights groups showed interest. In late 1962 Randolph had proposed commemorating the centennial of emancipation with a mass protest in the capital drawing attention to black unemployment and poverty, issues virtually ignored by the mainstream movement. His threatened march on Washington by black workers in 1941 had forced President Roosevelt’s executive order banning discrimination in war industry. When King got on board in May and dragged Wilkins and Young along, the price of their backing was to downplay economic issues and focus on passage of the civil rights bill that Birmingham had put on JFK’s front burner. King wanted the protest “to unite in one luminous action all of the forces along the far-flung front,” climaxing the “thundering events of the summer.”

Randolph chose Bayard Rustin to direct the colossal organizing operation, overriding opposition from Wilkins and others concerned about Rustin’s homosexuality and leftwing past. Trading on his vast Rolodex of contacts, Rustin rapidly pulled together a supercoalition of interracial civil rights, labor, and religious leaders, though he was unable to swing endorsement by George Meany’s AFL-CIO. When civil rights leaders met with President Kennedy at the White House in late June, Randolph stood up to JFK’s efforts to squelch the march because he feared disorder. A month later the President endorsed it.

On August 28, 1963, about three hundred thousand people arrived in Washington on twenty-two chartered trains, two thousand charter buses, thousands of car pools, and surged down the Mall. Moving from the Washington Monument toward the forty-year-old Lincoln Memorial, it was a symbolic march across history from the promises of the American Revolution to the unfinished business of the Civil War. The mass assembly was estimated to be about three-quarters black, one-quarter white and Latino. Many poor Negroes bused up from the Deep South. Large contingents represented religious faiths and labor unions. Haunting freedom songs by Odetta and Joan Baez and spirituals by Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson—back to the Memorial after a quarter century—blended with brief speeches by the civil rights generals. Although pressured by moderate leaders at the last minute to soften his words, SNCC’s John Lewis pierced the optimistic mood with a candid speech that expressed reservations about Kennedy’s legislation because it neglected police brutality and voting rights.

At the end of the long sun-baked afternoon King stood beneath the brooding stone face of Lincoln, a row of white-capped guards behind him. He waited for the cheers and chants to die down.

“I am happy to join with you today,” he began, “in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

“But one hundred years later, the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land.”

In this great sermon televised live, King did for the whole nation, indeed the globe, what the best of black preachers had long sought to do for their downcast flocks: to conjure the kingdom of God in their midst. But first he had to lead them out of slavery. He transported his listeners back to the now of 1863 and made them feel the hope of Lincoln’s act of emancipation. Then he carried them a century into the future and made them feel the chains of slavery still suffocating its inheritors. He made slavery palpable in the eternal now. He painted in vivid strokes why “we can never be satisfied” with meager gains that perpetuated psychological enslavement. He showed how the “fierce urgency of now” required an end to gradualism.

Then just as surely as he pitched the present into the past and the past into the present, he flung the past-imbued present into the future—and pulled the future back into the present. He was shape-shifting time.

The sheer power of his entranced audience, and a nudge by Mahalia Jackson, inspired him to let go of his prepared text and grasp a phrase he had used before, recently in a big Detroit rally. The act of drawing his dream out of ether made it more tangible than words typed on paper. He was prophesying of the future, “one day,” but the images spun by his spoken words made the invisible world visible, the Word flesh. If only for an instant, he was delivering Americans from the “warm threshold” on which they stood up into the “palace of justice,” the eternal kingdom where all would break bread together at the table of brotherhood.

Although King made plain that only with faith would they be able to raise themselves into the kingdom of God, his words proclaimed that the kingdom was being lived on that very day by the people he was talking to. Below him along the reflecting pool, dipping their feet in water, and under the elms, seeking shade, were southerner and Yankee, black and white, Jew and gentile, Catholic and Protestant, women and men, old and young—sitting together, singing together, praying together, standing up for freedom together.

All that was left was for the prophet shaman to call the kingdom into being: “Let freedom ring.” The future of racial justice had arrived, if fleetingly, on this hot August afternoon. “Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”⁵⁷

None were more uplifted by the dream and the day’s drama than the thousands of poor black people that SNCC had brought from the Deep South. “It helped them believe that they were not alone,” a SNCC activist remarked, “that there really were people in the nation who cared what happened to them.”⁵⁸ Yet some southern organizers had a hard time sharing De Lawd’s dream. Sitting on the trampled grass, the young black activist Anne Moody of CORE told herself that back in Mississippi “we never had time to sleep, much less dream.”⁵⁹ Abernathy wandered back to the Mall later that day and felt the holy spirit whistling through the leftover debris.

A WEEK LATER BIRMINGHAM fell into turmoil again. In fits and starts the new mayor, Albert Boutwell, and the biracial citizens committee had moved to implement the May agreement. Although the city council abrogated segregation laws, the merchants dragged their heels. Sitting together at lunch counters was bad enough, but the real threat of mongrelization was the commingling of black and white kids at school, where they could make friends. Spurred by the Klan, who bombed a black lawyer’s home, whites rioted when a federal court ordered the admission of five black children to three white schools. Governor Wallace sent the Alabama National Guard to block desegregation. President Kennedy federalized the guard in order to pull them out. The kids enrolled in school.

On Saturday morning, September 14, “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss told his wife and niece that he had found the address of “the nigger girl that was going to integrate the school.” His niece warned him to be careful. He boasted that he had enough “stuff put away to flatten half of Birmingham.”

“What good do you think any of that would do?” his niece asked. He looked her straight in the eye.

“You just wait till after Sunday morning. They will beg us to let them segregate.”⁶⁰

Late that night Chambliss and three Klan colleagues stashed a powerful dynamite bomb in bushes outside Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Birmingham’s counterpart to middle-class Dexter in Montgomery. The church had been drawn reluctantly into the spring crusade by its new young pastor, John Cross. This bomb was unlike twenty others the Klan had set off in town, all unsolved crimes, since blowing up Shuttlesworth’s home in December 1956. It had a delayed fuse and could be detonated remotely. At 10:22 A.M., with a roar heard all over the city, the bomb blasted a seven-foot-wide hole through the church basement’s thick wall and decimated the women’s lounge. The face of Jesus was blown out of a stained-glass window. Five girls had just finished their Sunday school class on “the love that forgives.” They were in the lounge helping each other get dressed, all in white, to usher the youth day service. Addie Mae Collins, fourteen, was tying the sash of her friend Denise McNair, eleven. Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, both fourteen, were fixing their hair.

After the explosion the smoke and rubble were so heavy that it took hard digging to reach the four blackened bodies buried on top of each other, one girl decapitated.

Their identities were revealed by shoes and rings. Addie Mae’s younger sister Sarah barely survived the carnage.

With rioting breaking out, Rev. Cross stood on the church’s front steps: “We should be forgiving as Christ was forgiving.” He gave the megaphone to Rev. Billups: “Go home and pray for the men who did this evil deed,” Billups told the angry crowd. “We must have love in our hearts for these men.”⁶¹

One of the bombers, Bobby Cherry, surveyed the grisly scene and told a neighbor there would be more bombings. Apparently the Klan had not directly targeted the children, though black children were their worst enemy. By the hundreds they had streamed out of this devastated church in May to desegregate white Birmingham. Now in smaller numbers they were invading white schools.

The rest of Sunday, blacks seeking revenge fought street battles with police and Al Lingo’s savage highway patrol. Cops killed a black man who was trying to get away. In another part of town a white teenager shot dead a thirteen-year-old black boy riding a bicycle. Black men patrolled their neighborhoods with shotguns. One of them, Rev. John Rice, was a high school guidance counselor who had urged students in the spring not to join the protests. But he had taken his eight-year-old daughter, Condoleezza, the future national security adviser, to witness them, and to accompany him as he aided his penned students at the fairgrounds. Four months later one of her schoolmates was killed in the church.

Martin King arrived Sunday night to a city about to implode.

“We feel that Birmingham is now in a state of civil disorder, an emergency situation,” he told the press Monday morning. He called for the U.S. Army to take over the city. He wired the President that if he did not take drastic action, “we shall see the worst racial holocaust this nation has ever seen.”⁶² The White House demurred, disappointing King. As in many times past, black forbearance outpaced rage. Street violence diminished before it wrought civil war.

In his eulogy at the slain girls’ funeral, King tried to do for their deaths what Lincoln had done a hundred years before in Gettysburg: transform gory suffering and dying into redemptive rebirth, a new birth of freedom. He had persuaded the parents of three girls to hold a combined funeral for the good of the movement.

The girls died nobly, he said. “They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. So they have something to say to us in their death. They say to each of us, black and white alike”—here he was surely speaking to himself—“that we must substitute courage for caution.

“The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as the redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city. The spilt blood of these innocent girls may cause the whole citizenry of Birmingham to transform the negative extremes of a dark past into the positive extremes of a bright future.”⁶³ His words soothed the girls’ grief-stricken families and friends but, unlike on August 28, fell short of engendering new life in their midst, of delivering heaven to their hell.

SNCC’s John Lewis shepherded car pools of Birmingham youngsters from the funeral to join a growing SNCC voting rights protest in Selma, an hour away, where three hundred were jailed that month.

His words over the girls’ dead bodies did little to lift up King’s own depressed spirit. The Birmingham triumph seemed more than ever like a media mirage. The glory of the August march seemed of a distant time and place, its meaning defiled by the slaughter of the four innocents.

As if to deny their paralysis the SCLC convention in Richmond spewed forth a babel of proposals for how to save the movement, and to save nonviolence, which some thought had been buried with the girls. Ideas ranged from protest campaigns in half a dozen cities, to a national economic boycott, to a massive return to Birmingham to hammer home the delayed desegregation. A renewed Birmingham thrust might include a march to Montgomery, part of a daring proposal by Diane Nash Bevel and her husband to shut down the Alabama capital with mass direct action and physically remove George Wallace from office. King had dismissed the Bevels’ revolutionary script with a chuckle, but others thought it worth pursuing. After several days of heated talk leaders failed to agree on the next step, except for a boycott of Birmingham business and “selective buying” campaigns in other cities.

Rather than upbeat as before, King’s presidential address as the convention closed was contrite, repentant, even despairing. “We knew, when we went into Birmingham,” he said, “that this was the test, the acid test of whether the Negro Revolution would succeed. Today we are faced with the midnight of oppression which we had believed to be the dawn of redemption”—aggravated by the President’s unwillingness to take action in the current Birmingham crisis. He admitted that his faith in the Kennedys had been naïve. “We are faced with an extreme situation, and therefore our remedies must be extreme.” Yet he clung to his faith in nonviolence, telling the story of Lazarus and Dives, of Jesus loving his enemies, and of Lincoln explaining why he did not call the Confederates the enemy: “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”

Opening his heart to his coworkers, King avowed that his leadership was “standing still, doing nothing, going nowhere.”⁶⁴ Never before had he made such a confession. It had been less than a month since he had delivered his effervescent dream on that warm afternoon. He had slid from the loftiest peak to the lowliest valley.

JUST AS KING was never able to savor the peaks in his life, at least not for long, so his rock-solid ego, self-esteem, and faith did not let his downtimes drown him. He brooded over his sins and those of the multitudes, he took refuge in partying and sexual excess (which the FBI began to record), but despite his depressed demeanor, during these years he never hit bottom and thus was always able to will himself back to impressive functionality.

Besides his faith, sense of calling, and emotional security, he found an additional tool to deal with adversity and crisis: his consciousness of inhabiting a divided world. Like many African Americans, but more self-consciously, he came to believe that the world, and each human soul, were divided into sacred and secular realms that flowed in and out of each other. For King, this fundamental duality of life infused every aspect of being.

When he had arrived at Boston University he discovered a name for this split but interwoven universe—dialectics—and a thinker who was its master: Hegel. But, reflecting Cartesian dualism, Hegel and his disciples, especially Karl Marx, grandly oversimplified the divided world and did not grasp how it was one, two, and many simultaneously, how in order to be united it had to be divided. While Hegel’s own thinking was more complex than that of his interpreters, the basic Hegelian formula of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis was the gist of his legacy. Although King had applied this formula frequently in his preaching, writing, and leading, he understood there was more to it than met the eye.

So King synthesized everywhere—justice and love, militancy and moderation, persuasion and coercion, legal and extralegal, communism and democracy, individual and community; on Sunday mornings, heaven and hell, sin and salvation, good and evil, life and death. Whether or not he had read about it for the first time in Birmingham jail, he experienced acutely the divided self of black people that Du Bois rendered so tenderly in The Souls of Black Folk.

“It is a peculiar sensation,” Du Bois wrote at the turn of the century, “this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others. . . . One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

“The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the other selves to be lost.”

Many times in many idioms King had preached Du Bois’s plea “to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.”⁶⁵ After a long life of often bitter struggle, Du Bois had finally concluded that this was an impossibility in America. He renounced his citizenship and left his country for good. The great scholar activist died at ninety-five in Ghana, on the eve of the March on Washington.

King never gave up faith in America and its promise, although he came perilously close later on. He endured every day his anguished twoness but made it a tool of emancipation.

Whether African Americans’ attunement to double consciousness resulted from resistance to white oppression or was rooted in African worldviews or both, King’s basic philosophy of life was to deny dichotomies and to affirm the unity of opposites in every facet of experience. For him almost every dichotomy was a false dichotomy. As a Hegelian he believed that unity could be experienced only through conjoining opposites. But his perspective treated opposites not as nullifying but fulfilling each other, as ambiguously coexisting. It was most often a matter not of either/or, but of both/and, the simultaneous embracing of unresolvable opposites.⁶⁶ Synthesis was the lived experience of continuous creative tension in the relationship between opposites, a relationship whose conflict brought clarity and change.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN STOOD out as an oddity in American history in part because he shared the homespun dialectical thinking that was common to African Americans. This had much to do with his greatness. His genius was to master the ambiguity of holding two opposing “truths” in creative tension and charting a middle path to reconcile and transcend the two poles.

From October 1854 well into his presidency he asserted that slavery was an “unqualified,” “monstrous” moral wrong, yet it could not simply be abolished. His middle path was rhetorically to condemn the evil—and to mean it—while practically tolerating it (even the draconian Fugitive Slave Law of 1850), opposing only its expansion. When war broke out, he presided over the most horrible warfare the world had yet seen, the most destructive war ever in the Americas. But unlike virtually all other Union voices including preachers’, he did not solely blame the South and held all Americans responsible for slavery and its fruit of carnage. He declared, notably in his Second Inaugural Address, that God probably sided with the North, but that no one could be sure. Although God could be on only one side, the Lord was punishing both sides for their sins. Unlike Hebrew prophets to whom he was later compared, Lincoln did not aspire to speak for God, to pronounce God’s will, but sought to clarify divine meaning.

He condemned slavery but did not condemn the white South, hating the sin but not the sinner. Yet while not hating or even blaming the Confederates, he was responsible for their mass destruction. At the same time as killing them by the hundreds of thousands he pardoned prisoners of war by the handful. He invoked moral absolutes, particularly in justifying his near dictatorial war powers, but he usually expressed his absolutes nonjudgmentally; and supremely in the Second Inaugural, with ambivalence and uncertainty. He somehow got away with being righteous (“the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether”) without being self-righteous. While he called for “malice toward none, charity for all” and sincerely desired reconciliation, his soldiers were still slaughtering the bloom of southern youth.

As King’s prison letter had done in proposing a moral equivalent of war, Lincoln shifted the moral landscape to pursue the middle path of nonjudgmental but total war, transforming what had been an extreme solution—pushed by hardly an abolitionist—into the moral center of American life. How many Americans today, outside the Deep South, would judge Lincoln’s methods (even his authoritarian rule) extreme or radical? In full command of the battlefield of ambiguity, of incertitude, he redefined the drastic extreme of war as the moderate, the evenhanded, the reasonable, the balancing of macro justice with micro compassion.

No better epitaph for Lincoln was composed than by Frederick Douglass:

“Viewed from the genuine abolition ground,” he declared, “Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, indifferent. But, measuring him by the sentiment of his country, the sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined. Taking him all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.”⁶⁷

How successful was Lincoln’s stance of radical moderation? In the short run the nation was devastated by unprecedented casualties of war—not only lives and limbs lost, but homes and farms wrecked, psychological death on a colossal scale. Yet the Union was preserved, and slavery abolished. But slavery in another form—some felt more virulent—continued for another century. Despite Lincoln’s prophetic words and deeds, his supremely bloody war against southern white supremacy had not attained justice for black people, and certainly not racial equality. Rather, it led to a century of white revenge and a tightened noose around black lives. Even if racial justice had been achieved—the way it looked for a few short years in early Reconstruction—King was convinced that justice without reconciliation was nearly worthless, sowing seeds of future hatred and hostility.

His storied humility not withstanding, King saw his own messianic mission, and that of his movement, as being to succeed where Lincoln failed, to fulfill the first and second American revolutions with a third one a century hence.

KING HAD FIRST PRACTICED radical moderation during the bus boycott. It was startlingly successful. Beginning with his address on December 5, 1955, he had heralded a means of struggle that combined the militant and the moderate, persuasion and coercion, passion and compassion. But, rhetoric to the contrary, moderation had had the upper hand. Initial demands were moderate, as was the tactic: refraining from riding a bus. Participants did not engage in civil disobedience, but rather civil obedience when they reported for arrest en masse. Even when the state court shut down the car pool in November 1956—an ideal opportunity to disobey the ruling and obey a higher law, that of the Supreme Court and the Constitution—they walked for the last five weeks. Through it all King was more concerned in practice with tempering militancy than firing it up. His greatest feat of leadership was keeping the protest nonviolent.

He witnessed true militancy for the first time in the freedom rides and then in the Albany movement. He wasn’t sure he liked what he saw, especially lack of structure, control, order. He was awed—but how does one lead something so volatile and unpredictable? What should his role be? Out in front or pulling strings? As we have seen, Birmingham was intended to be a manageable alternative—as orderly as the bus boycott. Meticulous planning with unified control was expected to ensure a positive result. The initial lunch-counter sit-ins by Miles students would have won attention three years before, but in April 1963 they were old hat. There was no fire in the belly. Project Confrontation almost died stillborn.

King’s true leadership might indeed have emerged when he gambled on going to jail on Good Friday. His prison epistle conveyed his Easter epiphany, thanks to the moderate clergy who attacked him, that he and his coworkers were extremists. They had no choice but to fulfill their God-given mission. His creative extremism of mass nonviolent action would be the middle path between the intolerable extremes of silence, from white and black, and nihilism. Who could have been more extreme than the shortsighted black preachers and businessmen on one side, or Bull Connor’s forces of public safety on the other—in equal measure guardians of the unconscionable status quo?

The power of King’s epistle came from the rawness of his conversion, in the bleak blackness of his dungeon, to nonviolent extremism. Yet it was one thing to articulate the word, his unique talent, another to make it flesh. Released from jail, he seemed to lose the flame of his captivity. One might suppose that the children’s crusade would have been just the type of creative extremism he had called for from his dark cell. But in the comfort of his motel room he wavered and wobbled until the spirited youngsters were led by their feet, and perhaps a nudge from God.

In spite of himself and his old god caution, creative extremism won the day. Within months, in sharp relief to the riots that broke out in Birmingham and dozens of other cities, the once controversial children’s marches appeared to many as a necessary and even restrained maneuver. Of course nothing makes radical look moderate like success and the passage of time—true of Lincoln in the Civil War and of the American Revolution. Without endorsing its tactics, the President himself lent his moral support to the Birmingham movement.

King’s wielding of radical moderation underwent a metamorphosis between Montgomery and Birmingham. Still for him it was more radical in words, more moderate in deeds. Like Lincoln, he was moderate by temperament, a reluctant radical by the pull of his times and his conscience. Like Lincoln, he believed that real change would come only when public attitudes changed. He knew well, as he said many times, that a law would not get a white racist to like him, but it might keep the man from lynching him. Although laws were vital, moral suasion and education were ultimately more so, especially in the long run that King always kept an eye on (another dichotomy he tried to transcend). The radical edge of confrontation would trouble the conscience of the uncommitted or indifferent majority. But reassurance and lack of blaming and vengefulness, conveyed by rhetoric and behavior, would give the majority the safety it needed to accept a change in the rules, especially in the white South.

The March on Washington put forth this double message: The movement in its widening dimensions had the power to disrupt the nation’s business as usual, and to give it a black eye in the rest of the world. But the national, mass-based movement was guided by wisdom, restraint, and goodwill. The march succeeded, Rustin commented, “because it was the product of sound political philosophy and intelligent, responsible strategy.”⁶⁸ The march and what led up to it made it easier for the American people to accept the principles, if not the practice, espoused by the civil rights movement.

Then came the church bombing, and all bets were off from the movement’s point of view. Within SCLC Diane Nash and Jim Bevel, backed by others, pushed King to launch a last-resort, all-out campaign to shut down Alabama government as long as blacks were locked out. Stung by defeat in the Delta, Bob Moses and SNCC were concocting a less confrontational but more dangerous plan to overthrow the Mississippi Democratic Party democratically.

Now that movement voices all around him were goading him to walk the talk of creative extremism, to practice what he had been preaching, King once again was immobilized. Although moving forward with Operation Breadbasket, its selective buying campaign (or boycott) to compel black hiring, SCLC found itself once more in the doldrums. The leaders discovered that nothing failed like success. Were the late fifties repeating themselves, when a glorious triumph stemmed by white terrorism brought the movement to a standstill? But autumn 1963 was a very different time. A people’s army had been unleashed upon the land.

SOMETHING ELSE HAD CHANGED since the 1950s that hinted at a different political strategy to actualize the Negro revolution. Throughout American history, citizens had turned to direct action when governmental channels seemed closed. With the Civil War, government itself turned to direct action of the most horrific sort when its own checks and balances failed to halt the irrepressible conflict. Now by mid-1963 a dynamic liberal presidency seemed to have found its soul, black and other progressive voters were finding their voice, and meaningful legislation to remedy racial and economic injustice appeared within reach.

Rustin and Randolph believed that the March on Washington meant more than that the civil rights movement had come of age, had become the spunky center of American politics. The diverse, interracial, multiclass composition of the marchers signaled to them that blacks and whites, middle-class and working-class, could be brought together around a common program of economic reform. The march’s little-noticed “ten demands” that Rustin announced to the assemblage included “a massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers—Negro and white—in meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages” and a ban on discrimination in employment and housing.⁶⁹

These two men, democratic socialists for decades, considered racism inextricable from class oppression and had long called for black alliances with organized labor and other liberal forces. Could this be the moment for the first successful progressive interracial electoral coalition in American history? During the Populist movement of the 1890s and the New Deal “popular front” of the 1930s, blacks had played third fiddle. Now they might be equal partners. Since June 1963 progressives looked to a president who might carry the torch to make his reelection a mandate for social justice.

King was no stranger to democratic socialism. He was known to have had a “socialist orientation” as early as 1960. But he had higher priorities and more urgent claims on his attention, it didn’t speak his prophetic language, and it was too sectarian for a leader who clung to unity. Rustin and Stanley Levison, his closest advisers, were pressing him to focus more on economic issues and the impoverishment of both blacks and whites that socialist Michael Harrington had recently exposed in his book The Other America, which awakened JFK to the problem.

Shortly after the Birmingham crusade, King was pushed in this direction by an unlikely player, Whitney Young of the mainstream National Urban League. Even before he assumed leadership of the Urban League in fall 1961, he had been framing a proposal for “compensatory” or “preferential treatment” for disadvantaged African Americans. After he won over his board of trustees, the league called in June 1963 for “an immediate, dramatic, and tangible domestic Marshall Plan,” a “special effort”—which Young distinguished from special privileges—of massive compensatory action, over ten years, by government, business, and foundations, to improve employment, education, housing, and health for urban blacks.⁷⁰

Speaking on NBC television three weeks later, King for the first time advocated a “concrete, practical preferential program” for African Americans. In St. Louis, right after he had eulogized the four Birmingham martyrs, he asserted: “It is now only normal and moral to atone for past injustices to Negroes with a crash program of special treatment.”⁷¹

Was King’s glimmer of hope that JFK’s second term might be as progressive as FDR’s first a victim of the Kennedy flash and polish that was so often belied by Kennedy realpolitik—an ethical contradiction King himself was guilty of? Was he being seduced by the specter of a new Kennedy emerging after Birmingham who was leaving behind the cautious Kennedy of the first two years? He later spoke of “two Kennedys,” the second reborn during the Negro revolution of 1963.⁷²

He had been more upset than he let on about the President’s passivity in the wake of the Birmingham church bombing and the rioting that followed. His idealistic side hoped that Kennedy would seize Lincoln’s mantle and finish the unfinished emancipation. His practical side, the side that identified with Kennedy’s hesitancy, feared that he and the movement had pushed him to his limit. JFK’s unwillingness to take further risks frustrated him.

It was worse than he realized. He had long suspected that the FBI was spying on him and blamed it on J. Edgar Hoover’s racism. But the wiretapping of his home and office did not start till September 1963; the Kennedy brothers wanted it as much as the FBI boss. Shortly after the March on Washington, RFK approved Hoover’s request for electronic surveillance. FBI informants had disclosed that two of King’s most trusted aides, Jack O’Dell, a black SCLC organizer, and Stanley Levison (already being wiretapped), had been Communist Party activists. While it was not clear that Levison had ever been an actual CP member (he denied it), he had been a party fund-raiser and had managed CP business ventures. But he had fully cut his ties from the CP when he decided in early 1957 that King, not communism, was the answer to his social conscience. O’Dell had been a party operative more recently but had also cut his ties.⁷³

Although the Kennedys did not believe that King himself was or ever had been a communist or sympathizer, the FBI had gathered more than enough secret evidence to make a strong case for one or the other. Hundreds of progressive activists, writers, artists, filmmakers, and scholars had been ruined by far weaker dossiers compiled by the FBI for McCarthyite congressional hearings. During a June 1963 meeting Kennedy had walked King out to the White House rose garden and leaned on him to fire O’Dell and break off all contact with Levison. King did dismiss O’Dell, but the Kennedys were chagrined to discover through subsequent spying that he had continued to confer with Levison, directly or indirectly. As a matter of principle as well as friendship, he refused to end his six-year relationship with his close confidant.

“I have to weigh other factors,” he told another white friend, “before I can shun anybody like that. You see, I have a pastoral responsibility.”⁷⁴ His commitment to nonviolent soul force required that he not break off a connection with anyone, certainly not with a devoted friend. This man who always feared being ostracized himself would not stoop so low as to ostracize somebody else. If he could keep lines of communication open with segregationists who hated him, he could do so with Levison, who loved him. On top of this he felt himself in a pastoral relationship with Levison (though the latter was Jewish), as he did with all of his close disciples.

But King, as he would freely admit to his friends, was no saint. The initial wiretap logs revealed that his overnight stays in various cities were not all business. Hoover was more agitated and obsessed by this charismatic black man’s sexual adventurism than by his leftwing associations, though the two were blurred in the FBI czar’s paranoid mind.

By late fall 1963, unbeknownst to the civil rights leader, the Kennedys were not feeling sanguine about a future partnership with him. The tenuous mutual trust built up by the March on Washington and King’s deft containment of black rage was being washed away.

Whatever John Kennedy was thinking about King, and whatever JFK’s promise for 1964 and beyond, mattered no longer after a high-powered bullet destroyed his brain on November 22. King was watching television at home in Atlanta when he heard the horrid news. He called to Coretta downstairs.

“Corrie, I just heard that President Kennedy has been shot—maybe killed.” After learning that he was dead, they sat together in silent shock. Despite his disappointments, King had not only liked and admired Kennedy—who had called Coretta twice in crises—he felt linked to him as a flawed leader. He felt a peculiar bond of understanding and empathy with JFK’s trials and tribulations. He felt that starting with the Ole Miss battle and the Cuban missile crisis of a year before, Kennedy “went through what Lincoln went through.”⁷⁵ Now he realized that all three of them shared the same fate.

“This is what is going to happen to me,” he said to Coretta. “I keep telling you, this is a sick society.”⁷⁶

He grieved not only about Kennedy’s death but about its message that hate and violence were on the loose in America. Hurt that the bereaved family did not invite him to the funeral mass at National Cathedral, he flew to Washington nonetheless and stood alone unknown in the crowd, praying, as the black-shrouded, horse-drawn wagon clip-clopped past him.

On Thanksgiving eve the new president spoke to a joint session of Congress seeking to reassure the nation, especially African Americans, that he would stay the course.

“So let us here highly resolve,” LBJ evoked Lincoln at Gettysburg, “that John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not live—or die—in vain.”

On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, nine days after Kennedy’s killing, the Nation of Islam’s newly promoted “national minister” spoke at a Nation rally in New York City, where he headed the big Harlem mosque. The title of Malcolm’s address, “God’s Judgment of White America,” foreshadowed its unanticipated bombshell. It was about “divine justice” and “how the hypocritical American white man was reaping what he had sowed.”

Although he criticized the “late President” a number of times, including his alleged manipulation of the March on Washington—Malcolm had called it “the Farce on Washington”—he did not mention the assassination. The Nation’s supreme leader, Elijah Muhammad, revered as semidivine by Malcolm and all the faithful, had specifically ordered him and all ministers not to comment on the national trauma. But in the question period someone asked him about it. Probably expecting the question, Malcolm deliberately disobeyed the man who had saved him from a hellish life on earth.

“Being an old farm boy myself,” he replied with his infamous grin, “chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they’ve always made me glad.” The audience howled with delighted surprise. He was referring to America’s legacy of slavery and white supremacy, and across the seas, to what he considered an imperial foreign policy that targeted popular Third World leaders like Fidel Castro and the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba. More generally he meant “America’s climate of hate,” which also worried King—but which Malcolm had been complicit in perpetuating.

“The seeds that America had sown—in enslavement, in many things that followed since then—all these seeds were coming up today; it was harvest time.”⁷⁷ The media, leading off with the New York Times, excoriated him for the seemingly offhand comment. The Nation of Islam, which under Muhammad’s leadership had striven to remain rigorously nonpolitical, was suddenly thrust into the dead center of American politics. The supreme leader shocked Malcolm, whom he had always treated like a favored son, by commanding his silence for three months and suspending his ministry.

Both Malcolm and his father surrogate may have been waiting for such an incident to bring their growing tensions to a head. During the past year Malcolm had been so tortured by rumors of Muhammad’s sexual immorality—impregnating his secretaries, then silencing them—that he had confronted him about it. Muhammad explained to him that he was merely fulfilling biblical prophecies—that as King David and other prophets were philanderers so he must be. Malcolm, on the contrary, had strictly obeyed the Nation’s ascetic moral code of sexual abstinence outside of marriage. Wanting to turn the rage of the urban underclass that he was so attuned to in a fruitful direction, he had also been frustrated by the Nation’s ban on political activity. By the time of Muhammad’s edict of silence, which he later made indefinite, Malcolm was aware that his rivals in the chain of command were conspiring to oust him, or worse. Most Muslims still considered him the heir apparent.

Ever since his jailhouse conversion in 1948—the same year that nineteen-year-old Martin King was ordained a Baptist minister—and ever more strongly in his twelve years as a street preacher, Malcolm held faith in his divinely appointed mission to rescue and redeem the lives of black people who were laying waste their souls as he had during his reckless youth. The covenant was clear: black people poisoned by white sin must wage an internal holy war to purify themselves; in return Allah, the avenging God of justice, would destroy the devilish master race and its decadent civilization. If they freed themselves on the inside, Allah would free them from external chains. So Malcolm preached moral purity while at the same time that “white America is doomed!” No one shall escape except those who accepted Allah as God, Islam as the only true religion, and Elijah Muhammad as God’s Messenger “to the 22 million ex-slaves here in America.

“If America will repent,” Malcolm cried out like Jeremiah, “God will overlook some of its wicked deeds, but if America refuses, then like the biblical houses of Egypt and Babylon, God will erase the American government and the entire white race from this planet.” White America, he warned, “wake up and take heed, before it is too late!” America’s “racial powder keg” was ready to set off the “Great Doomsday,” a “day of slaughter for this sinful white world.”⁷⁸ No more water, the fire next time.

Although Malcolm was spouting familiar Black Muslim diatribe, his and the Nation’s rhetoric rejuvenated a black tradition of prophetic invective as old as the slaves’ baptism to Christianity. Black abolitionists had condemned slavery in similar terms, calling upon whites to repent in the face of a just, wrathful God.

“Beware Americans!” wrote Othello, a free Maryland black, in 1788. “Consider the difference between the mild effulgence of approving Providence,” enjoyed in the American Revolution, “and the angry countenance of incensed divinity.” Forty years later, Boston abolitionist David Walker printed a fiery pamphlet banned both South and North:

“Americans, unless you speedily alter your course, you and your Country are gone!!!!!! Your DESTRUCTION is at hand, and will be speedily consummated unless you REPENT.” Many abolitionists, invigorated by the fervent evangelism of the Second Great Awakening, argued that collective atonement was the surest path to both emancipation and the kingdom of God on earth. But atonement did not come calmly. The irrepressible conflict over slavery led to the ghastly Armageddon of the Civil War. What new Armageddon lay in store for white America in the 1960s?

After three months of painful silence, Malcolm decided to break away from his spiritual and personal home of a quarter century. In early March 1964 he announced that he was leaving the Nation because of “internal differences,” not “of my own free will.” But now that he had “more independence of action,” he intended “to use a more flexible approach toward working with others.” He was “prepared to cooperate in local civil-rights actions in the South and elsewhere and shall do so because every campaign for specific objectives can only heighten the political consciousness of the Negroes and intensify their identification against white society.” He created the Muslim Mosque, Inc., as a vehicle for unifying black people both Muslim and non-Muslim.

Although still calling himself a black nationalist, he downplayed racial separation. “We cannot think of uniting with others, until after we have first united among ourselves.” He held fast to the right of armed self-defense and of retaliation.⁷⁹ He envisioned his new movement as not competing with but complementing both the Nation of Islam and the civil rights movement. He saw his prophetic role as doing for Black Muslims and the urban poor what King had done for southern black Christians. But the nature of his constituency might require him to play by different rules.

Malcolm sought to reinterpret the civil rights movement and to strengthen it with new allies from the urban ghettos, and from overseas. His strategy for doing so was to “expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level—to the level of human rights,” and to put American racism on trial before the United Nations. Malcolm argued that as long as black activists confined the movement to “the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam,” they were lost. They must globalize the struggle—fighting in the world arena in which people of color were the majority—and get support from newly freed African nations as well as Asians and Latin Americans. Still he went out of his way to threaten organized violence if the government, or white extremists, responded to the multiclass black movement with violent suppression. It would be “ballots or bullets.”⁸⁰

To escape bullets from Muslim rivals—death threats were climbing by the week—and to forge personal alliances with African and Arab leaders, Malcolm left his country for the first time on a five-week journey to Egypt, Lebanon, Nigeria, Ghana, Morocco, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia, meeting with students, journalists, politicians, diplomats, and heads of state. He made the pilgrimage to Mecca, a cardinal duty of all Muslims, which allowed him to adopt the Sunni Muslim name El Hajj Malik El Shabazz. He had thought that his main mission was to link up with fellow dark-skinned leaders, but the hajj brought about what he called his “spiritual rebirth.” It was no less a political rebirth.

“Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood,” he wrote from Jedda, “as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this ancient holy land, the home of Abraham, Muhammad and all the other prophets of the Holy Scriptures.” It made him “utterly speechless and spellbound.” He saw tens of thousands of pilgrims from all over the globe, “of all colors, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans,” all embodying a spirit of unity “that my experiences in America had led me to believe could never exist between the white and the non-white.” He added, “I was not conscious of color for the first time in my life.

“America needs to understand Islam,” he insisted, “because this is the one religion that erases the race problem. Before America allows herself to be destroyed by the ‘cancer of racism’ she should become better acquainted with the religious philosophy of Islam, a religion that has already molded people of all colors into one vast family.” In sum, “Islam removes racism.”

Upon returning to robustious welcomes in New York and Chicago he declared that “I no longer subscribe to sweeping indictments of one race. My pilgrimage to Mecca served to convince me that perhaps American whites can be cured of the rampant racism which is consuming them and about to destroy this country. I am not a racist and do not subscribe to any of the tenets of racism.”⁸¹ Before he left on his journey he had downplayed the spiritual spur of the broadened freedom movement he pressed for. Now he saw orthodox Islam as a force of liberation in its own right that could not only mobilize poor blacks but help bridge the divide between black and white America. In July 1964, after founding the Organization of Afro-American Unity, modeled on a federation of African nations, he took off on a longer journey seeking a global alliance to fight American racism.

MALCOLM TALKED ABOUT it hardly more than King and mainstream black leaders, but his true enemy was hard-core deadening poverty. He blamed it on white racism more than capitalism, which he saw through the prism of race, not class. Malcolm barely recognized the white victims of poverty, who constituted the majority of American poor.

Unlike his superrich predecessor, the new president of the United States had tasted poverty, growing up amid poor whites and Mexicans in south Texas. In his twenties he had joined the New Deal with activist zeal to fight the Depression, heading the New Deal’s youth-assistance program in Texas. After assuming the presidency he resolved not only to continue Kennedy’s social programs but to go further—to carry out his hero FDR’s unfulfilled legacy. So in his first State of the Union address, in early January 1964, he declared a “war against poverty.” The Kennedy White House had set the stage for it but was not ready to promote it in the reelection year, and not before the civil rights bill. LBJ had expedient priorities as well as noble ones: he could steal thunder from the civil rights crusade, win support from voters of color, and appease southern whites who stood to benefit. Enough of a populist legacy had survived in the white South to support ambitious economic remedies, especially if they headed off touchier rights laws.

President Johnson threw a curveball when he called the civil rights generals to meet with him in mid-January. King, Wilkins, Whitney Young, and James Farmer expected LBJ to bend their ears if not their arms to accept a weakening of the civil rights bill then being considered by the House Rules Committee, a civil rights graveyard. Rather, he reassured them that he would secure the bill without any changes. Not stopping there, he urged them to mobilize support for his war on poverty.

Through midwinter 1964 King and SCLC colleagues debated how serious Johnson was about ending poverty, and whether it should affect their own wobbly strategy. They understood that LBJ’s initiative, unlike the civil rights measure, was not a direct response to movement pressure. But the movement had had a decisive indirect influence by producing a favorable moral and political environment and by raising poor people’s expectations. While the civil rights community fully endorsed the antipoverty program, it did not want to deflect momentum from the full-court press behind the civil rights bill, whose passage was touch and go, especially with a dreaded Senate filibuster. Although a majority of African Americans hovered around poverty, most black leaders held that obtaining constitutional rights must be the foundation for economic advances—the same position pushed by American leaders on the world stage about nations of color. Johnson and congressional liberals launched the war on poverty largely on their own.

The antipoverty effort would likely have been more effective had rights leaders been more involved. The long-term aim of preventing poverty was more ambitious than the New Deal’s goal of stabilizing it, but Johnson’s means were paltry in comparison. The strategy behind the “war” was the old American ideal of expanding opportunity while rehabilitating the poor. The various programs, delivering services and not cash to the inner-city and rural poor, aimed at helping them to help themselves rise out of poverty. It was criticized by activists and social workers for not giving poor people what they most needed: jobs or income.

The poverty war’s chief weapon was the decentralized Community Action Program (CAP), which marshaled legal, educational, social work, and health resources to give poor people more control of their lives. A controversial feature mandated “maximum feasible participation of residents.” But just as the phrase “all deliberate speed” had marred the Brown desegregation decision, so the qualifier “feasible” encouraged noncompliance. Nowhere was “involvement of the poor” converted into real power. In his later study of the poverty war, social psychologist Kenneth Clark branded it a “charade,” not resulting “in any observable changes in the predicament of the poor.”⁸²

Regardless of its strategy, weaponry, or prospect of victory, the Johnson administration’s will to combat poverty delighted the two men who had wanted their great Washington march to focus on poverty and unemployment. Rustin and Randolph had long insisted that black people could not move forward without pulling up the economic roots of racism. They were astonished to see the Texan not known for racial enlightenment leading the way toward economic justice. For Rustin, this turn of events was nearly as revelatory as Malcolm’s discovery of white Muslims in Mecca. Had Johnson dealt them in?

. . .

PRESIDENT JOHNSON’S UNEXPECTED BOLDNESS in putting poverty on the nation’s agenda—though his program would barely dent it—complicated King’s difficulties in crafting his second and most important book, Why We Can’t Wait. Was racism or poverty the driving issue of the day? How were they connected? A group effort, largely ghostwritten, the slender volume appeared in early June 1964, published by Harper & Row (as was his Montgomery memoir). Its composition was challenged not only by churning political tides, but by the delicacy of collaborating with a coauthor, Levison, whom President Kennedy had ordered King to excommunicate. But the book, with “Letter from Birmingham Jail” as its centerpiece, proved a masterstroke of passionate reasonableness, practical idealism, and radical moderation.

Although as with Stride Toward Freedom he put himself front and center in his narrative, he testified that the masses in revolt were the prime actors: “it was the people who moved their leaders, not the leaders who moved the people.” In summer 1963, “the Negroes of America wrote an emancipation proclamation to themselves. They shook off three hundred years of psychological slavery and said: ‘We can make ourselves free.’ ” The Revolution of 1963 all but finished off “slaveries other than the physical” that had endured since 1863, especially the guts of slavery, the psychic and spiritual servitude that had hardly diminished since the Civil War. “Is not freedom the negation of servitude? Does not one have to end totally for the other to begin?”

Reprising his jail letter, he rejected the opposite extremes of incrementalism and unplanned or “directionless spontaneity.” In words that contradicted his own deeds/misdeeds, he declared that in “the bursting mood that has overtaken the Negro,” compromise was “profane and pernicious,” that the current black leadership was “innately opposed to compromise.” Clearly he referred to unprincipled compromise, like the corrupt Compromise of 1877 that summarily ended Reconstruction, but he sounded absolute.

As if to meet any doubt about his newfound extremism, he submitted that “when you are right you cannot be too radical.” Then he countered his own extremist tone by asserting that the Negro wanted only to secure his rightful place within the economic system, not overturn it; that direct action must be complemented by electoral gains; and that black people needed nothing more radical than the benefits given to veterans after World War II. But the book made an airtight case for freedom now.

His most far-reaching proposal for reform was the “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged.” King had conceived of it as the “Negro Bill of Rights,” but he and his coauthors decided that such a narrow scope was neither expedient nor right. “The moral justification for special measures for Negroes,” he wrote, “is rooted in the robberies inherent in the institution of slavery,” not least the billions in unpaid wages. He rationalized extending these entitlements to disadvantaged whites on the grounds of what he called “derivative bondage”—the impact of slavery on the control and exploitation of the white labor force. “As long as labor was cheapened by the involuntary servitude of the black man, the freedom of white labor, especially in the South, was little more than a myth.” White labor was cheapened further when formal slavery was replaced by systematic racial discrimination, which made black workers a reserve army to keep wages low and to break strikes. This was the most damaging linkage of race and class, the most malignant economic root of racism. Still, the concept of derivative bondage was something of a stretch. Compensatory justice appropriate for a chosen people liberated from slavery did not have the same moral charge when applied to a larger group not sharing this heritage.

No doubt other peoples of color would have been included in King’s proposal, but in the mid-1960s, when the combined population of Latinos, American Indians, and Asians did not equal that of African Americans, smaller racial minorities appeared as invisible to King as to the public at large. America was white and black.

The economic and social rights he envisioned, similar to the GI Bill of Rights, would give “veterans of the long siege of denial” full educational support with living expenses, loan subsidies for home and business, preferential employment (especially in civil service jobs), medical care, and other compensation. Intended for a ten-year period, the entitlements would aim at the “basic psychological and motivational transformation” of recipients, affecting “social evils” like family breakups, school dropout, crime, unmarried births, and “swollen relief rolls.” Although “change in human psychology is normally a slow process,” King was convinced that the catalyst of black revolt would hasten transformation from within.

To undergird the economic bill of rights King called for a massive federal effort to foster full employment in the teeth of automation, and the “full resources of the society” to attack tenacious poverty. Admirable as they were, King’s vague reform proposals did not match the power of his moral indictment of racism and prophetic call for change. Irresistible in the realm of civil rights, King’s rhetorical magic had not found its footing in the intractable realm of human rights—or in the slippery sphere of public-policy reform.

TO ACTIVISTS ON THE STREET, many of whom could not even vote, King’s contemplation of macroeconomic reform must have seemed as remote from their hand-to-mouth lives as was Plato’s ethereal realm of ideas from the shadowy cave. King would have liked nothing better than hiding out on a tropical island with Plato’s Republic, his second favorite book, but the murky real life of movement politics dogged his waking hours. SCLC’s strategic confusion of late fall had not been straightened out six months later. Drift drove. The “revolutionary” plan Nash and Bevel had concocted in the afternoon of the church bombing—a saner alternative to their grieving impulse to track down and kill the bombers—had picked up support from SCLC staff. They toned it down from a militant nonviolent shutdown of the state capital (including lie-ins on highways, runways, and railroad tracks), which upset President Kennedy when he got wind of it, to a “nonviolent army” marching on Montgomery and mobilizing for voting rights throughout Alabama.

By late winter 1964 the Alabama campaign, including a renewed push in Birmingham, where the mayor and merchants had reneged on the year-old settlement, was poised for takeoff. Throughout the spring King heralded the “Alabama freedom army” as SCLC’s next big push, hitting the road by June or July. But an unexpected turn on Florida’s Atlantic coast, and the mounting drama of SNCC’s Mississippi Freedom Summer, forced SCLC to postpone its Alabama rendezvous with destiny. King and SCLC needed a timely victory to stay afloat, and to keep from getting drowned out by the revolution in Mississippi.

Settled by the Spanish in 1564, St. Augustine, Florida, was the oldest nonnative city in North America; its flourishing slave trade predated the arrival of slaves in Virginia by half a century. Preparing to celebrate its quadricentennial, the tourist city with Deep South racial mores got swept up in the Negro Revolution of 1963. Apart from usual demands, the black community was protesting use of federal funds for a racially exclusive historical commemoration.

Both whites and blacks lived in fear of a thousand-strong armed Klan militia, calling itself Ancient City Hunting Club, whose chieftain, “Hoss” Manucy, a pig farmer and bootlegger, told a journalist that “my only bad habit is fightin’ nigguhs.”⁸³ Manucy shared law-enforcement duties with the sheriff, his former football coach, who had deputized him and his gang. Skirmishes between black activists, newly affiliated with SCLC, and Manucy’s posse escalated to pitched battles after the Klan torched a cottage where King had stayed and local leader Robert Hayling, a dentist, armed his followers. “We were not totally nonviolent,” Hayling later admitted.⁸⁴ Although King was unhappy about this ethical lapse, he did not reject having armed bodyguards in St. Augustine, protection he had eventually vetoed in the bus boycott. Six months after the President’s murder, his own assassination seemed more likely than ever.

“This is the most lawless city I’ve ever been in,” he told a reporter. “I’ve never seen this kind of wide-open violence.” At mass meetings he announced his readiness to die: “If physical death is the price I must pay to free my white brother and all my brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.”⁸⁵

King and entourage flew in and out of St. Augustine during May and June 1964 while he was trying to manage SCLC’s disarray and money woes, promote his new book, and fight for Senate passage of the civil rights bill, in danger of death by filibuster. The House had passed it by a wide margin in February. On June 10, after mighty political arm-twisting by LBJ, the Senate shut off (71–29) the two-month southern filibuster, longest ever, the last big hurdle toward passage.

Next morning King, Abernathy, and eight others were arrested seeking to desegregate the Monson Motor Lodge restaurant. Taken to the Jacksonville jail, King told a black woman employee who greeted him: “Hello, sister. I’ve been in fifteen jails, but this is the first time that I have been treated like a hog.” As in Birmingham he was put in solitary, “a very lonely, dark and desolate cell by myself, cut off from everybody.”⁸⁶

A few days later black and white protesters plunged into the first movement “swim-in” in the Monson motel pool, King watching across the street. The owner poured a noxious chemical into the water to scare them out. Protesters sought as well to integrate the Atlantic Ocean, which had swallowed black bodies as human cargo for centuries. They were attacked on the hot beach by crazed mobs of white toughs, male and female. Despite the governor’s ban on night marches, night after night protesters marched in the old city at dusk toward the historic slave market, the prime tourist attraction. Street battles with Manucy’s Klan posse, who sometimes outnumbered them, grew increasingly violent until all hell broke loose after dark on Thursday, June 24.

The Klan had gathered a large rally at the Old Slave Market, where, under a full moon, supremacists J. B. Stoner and Connie Lynch whipped the crowd into a frenzy of hatred. The civil rights forces, mainly teenagers in boy-girl pairs, had marched as usual from their church headquarters toward the slave market that was now taken over by the slaveholders’ scions.

“There they are!” Lynch shrieked. “Here come the niggers now!” Armed with bats, tire tools, logging chains, and cue sticks, heaving trash cans and other makeshift missiles, the enraged white crowd overran state troopers sent by the governor and attacked the protesters in a real-life reenactment of Civil War combat. The bloodied protesters, a score lying on the ground, many having to be hospitalized, found an escape route with whites in hot pursuit. A woman yelled: “Don’t let ’em git away, boys, go git ’em!”⁸⁷ The New York Times reported that “a number of Negro women had their clothes torn off while they were being clawed and beaten by screaming terrorists.”⁸⁸

Standing alone on a dark porch, King watched his followers “stumbling past him in the dim shine of the streetlights like the tattered remnant of a brigade filtering back from a battlefield disaster, girls in shredded clothes, sobs now lifting up from them, a few scattered screams like a long-pent breath at last released—he watching them with that stricken expression of amazement, horror, but also captivation.”⁸⁹ He did what he could to shepherd his wounded flock back to the church. Abernathy performed oratorical wonders to calm the troops in the sanctuary, transmuting that night’s “sweltering fevers for vengeance” back into the “higher, finally mysterious will to love despite everything.”⁹⁰