Redemption Read online

  By speaking out sharply against the Vietnam War, as he had been doing for more than a year, he had plunged into a cauldron of controversy. His critics claimed that no true patriot could slam the nation’s military engagement while hundreds of thousands of American troops were in harm’s way. His plans for the Poor People’s Campaign were arousing more hostility against him. He was threatening to plague lawmakers in Washington with militant civil disobedience until they committed the federal government to an immense program to end poverty. To many Americans he was a radical, a threat to civil order. Many believed he was leading the country into an abyss of strife and chaos. By inserting himself into the Memphis strike, resulting in a march turned riotous, he had aggravated the fears. Now he was returning to Memphis to lead another march and restore his credibility as a nonviolent leader. It would expose him to greater controversy, greater risk. Fearful, but courageous in his resolve, he was flying to Memphis, come what may.

  The Tennessee city, as Mark Twain wrote in 1882, was “nobly situated on a commanding bluff” overlooking the majestic Mississippi River.2 For the 60 percent of whites among its total population of six hundred thousand, Memphis had a long, noble tradition, and not just in geography. For them Memphis was a proud Southern city of well-attended churches and well-tended lawns, a paragon of order and civility. At the junction of northwestern Mississippi, Southwestern Arkansas, and southeastern Tennessee, the city stood as the gateway to the Deep South, and it reflected much of that region’s gracious character.

  For blacks it was a very different story. Gradual desegregation had been under way since the early 1960s, but the city was still largely divided into two cultures, a dominant class of whites and a subservient class of blacks. The garbage strike, which had begun on February 12, had cast the depth of the racial divide into bold relief. Local historian Joan Beifuss would write that the conflict over the strike had quickly stripped away “the thin veneer of dialogue and handshakes and politeness and kindly interest” and exposed such a “depth of ill will” and “intensity of hostility” as to declare that “the bitterness had always lain somewhere close to the surface.”3

  The black community had rallied behind the strike. Henry Loeb, the newly elected white mayor, had the strong backing of the white establishment against the strike, and he had taken a hard line against it. As garbage piled up and the strikers staged demonstrations against Loeb’s hiring of replacement workers, tensions mounted by the day.

  King had spoken for the first time in support of the strike at a rally on March 18. He had come back to Memphis ten days later to lead a march. He had been expecting the march to proceed lawfully through downtown streets. Barely had the march begun when it turned violent. Police responded with clubs, tear gas, and guns. Four looters were shot, one fatally. Five police officers were hospitalized, and about sixty other people received medical care for their injuries.4

  Splashed on newspapers and TV screens around the country, the story of the Memphis riot was big news. King was outspoken in deploring the violence, which he attributed to a small number of young rowdies who had tagged along behind the great throng of peaceful marchers. At a news conference the next day, he told a reporter for the Commercial Appeal that he had been blindsided. He said that he had had no warning about the potential for violence and had “no part in the planning of the march. Our intelligence was totally nil.” King went on to fault the police for having dealt brutally with many marchers.5

  But his credibility as a nonviolent leader who could keep the movement free of violence was under fierce attack. There were potshots from segregationists like Robert Byrd of West Virginia. While not surprising, the invective from the right had more bite than usual. Byrd, then one of the most zealous segregationists in the US Senate, assailed King as a “self-seeking rabble rouser,” as quoted in an FBI memo. If King were allowed to “rabble-rouse” in Washington as he threatened, Byrd declared, the city “may well be treated to the same kind of violence, destruction, looting and bloodshed” that had erupted in Memphis.

  The Commercial Appeal echoed Byrd with a scalding editorial on March 30: “Dr. King’s pose as a leader of a non-violent movement has been shattered. He now has the entire nation doubting his word when he insists that his April project—a shanty-town sit-in in the nation’s capital—can be peaceful.” A more sympathetic newspaper, the New York Times, cautioned King in its editorial on the same day against engaging in “emotional demonstrations in this time of civic unrest.”

  Worse, King had to contend with spasms of doubt from within the civil rights movement. In 1963 Adam Clayton Powell, the first African American elected to Congress from New York, had hailed him as “probably the greatest human being in the United States today.”6 Now he mocked him as Martin “Loser” King.7 Responding to a reporter’s question about the violent eruption in Memphis, Roy Wilkins, the influential head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, commented about the upcoming antipoverty campaign: “The great danger of Dr. King’s demonstration is that he might not be able to keep control of it.” Privately Wilkins was saying that King ought to cut his losses and scrap the Poor People’s Campaign altogether.8

  King himself had his doubts. Like Wilkins, he pondered whether he ought to call the whole Washington thing off. Wouldn’t the rioting in Memphis and attacks against King blunt poor people’s interest in joining the Washington demonstrations? “They will hold back if they think they will be in a campaign that will be taken over by violent elements,” King confided to a close adviser.9 In his despair King thought perhaps he should fast in a show of penance. Ultimately, he did not fast, but he seriously considered it.

  If King’s energy on the road had seemed inexhaustible for many years, it was no longer so. Like any flesh-and-blood mortal, he could not maintain his punishing schedule of speaking engagements and almost incessant travel without a physical cost.

  He was pushing himself to the brink of collapse. His doctors had hospitalized him or ordered him to days of bed rest for exhaustion on at least four occasions over the previous four years (in October 1964, February 1965, August 1966, and April 1967).10 By February 1968, the rush to organize the antipoverty campaign was wearing him down to such an alarming extent that he reluctantly heeded his doctor’s advice to rest. Along with Ralph Abernathy, he took a one-week break to recuperate in Acapulco.11

  It was not only sheer exhaustion that accounted for King’s sinking spirits. His influence as a political and moral force had peaked in the mid-sixties. He was then riding the crest of a series of triumphs: the electrifying “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington of 1963; the Nobel Peace Prize bestowed on him the next year; and the landmark desegregation and voting-rights legislation enacted by Congress in 1964 and 1965.

  His best years seemed behind him. His venture into the more complex racial and political minefield of Chicago had stalled. Rioting was plaguing the nation’s inner cities, as though defying his nonviolent leadership. Young Black Power militants had captured the dynamism of the movement. By 1968 it seemed that he was “old news,” as his friend and financial backer Harry Belafonte would note in a memoir.12 The book King published six months earlier, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, sold poorly, and many reviewers panned it.13 For the first time in a decade the name of Martin Luther King Jr. did not appear on the Gallup Poll annual list of the ten most admired Americans.14

  The turn of events in Memphis was propelling King back into front-page news, abruptly and disastrously. The torrent of adverse publicity was sapping his usual optimism, testing his resilience. “He was very, terribly depressed, a depression that I had never experienced before, and had never seen,” Abernathy would recall.15 Somehow over two soul-searching days back in Atlanta, King overcame the gloom, determined to move ahead. He would not yield to despair. He was returning to Memphis, resolved to lead a corrective march untainted by violence. Or so he desperately hoped.

  Once aboard the Eastern jet to Memphis, Kin
g and his four aides sat close together. King and Dorothy Cotton were in adjoining seats. Hardly had they settled down before the pilot announced, “I have to ask everyone to leave the plane because Dr. King and some of his staff are on the plane and there has been a bomb threat,” as Cotton recounted years later.16

  A wave of fear rippled through the plane, launching the passengers to their feet. “When the pilot made that announcement, we stood up,” Cotton continued, “and I was moving really rather energetically, and I stepped on Martin’s foot. I said, ‘Don’t you think we should move it? There has been a bomb scare,’ and he sort of glared at me.”17

  As the other passengers surged down the aisle, King barely moved. Rather than rush off the plane, King “pulled back and let people get off,” Young recalled. That was not how Bernard Lee, who served King as a sort of aide-de-camp and unarmed bodyguard, reacted. Lee hastened toward the exit. He was “the first one off the plane,” said Young. The sight of his bodyguard leaving him behind in that moment of danger had King smiling. It was a moment that he would later play for laughs.18

  King’s nonchalance did not surprise Young. Threats against King’s life were an almost constant menace. King had a stock reply to reports of death threats against him. He would say that he received them every day, and he could not worry about them, because no one could stop attempts on his life.

  Once King and the other passengers disembarked from the plane, police officers brought dogs aboard to sniff for bombs. A thorough check found nothing suspicious. After an hour’s delay the passengers returned to their seats. King turned to Abernathy. “Well,” he said wryly, “it looks like they won’t kill me this flight.”19

  Chapter 2

  Detour

  And I submit this afternoon that we can end poverty in the United States. Our nation has the resources to do it.

  —MLK, speech at Stanford University, April 14, 1967

  KING MIGHT HAVE returned to Memphis earlier in his quest to save his reputation. But a critical speaking obligation stood in the way. On March 31, three days before leaving for Memphis, he was in Washington, DC, delivering the Sunday sermon at the Washington National Cathedral. His remarks centered on the Vietnam War and the Poor People’s Campaign, though the crisis in Memphis must have been weighing heavily on him.

  The storied cathedral offered him a platform for reaching the political elite of the nation’s capital. It was an occasion to build support for his stands against the war and for far-reaching federal antipoverty legislation. Sunday sermons, of course, were routine for King. So was the mixing of religion and politics whenever he preached themes of social justice.

  But this time he was mixing two causes, both hurtling him deeply into two bitter national debates and blurring his image as the nation’s foremost champion of racial desegregation. His high visibility as a zealous foe of the US policy in Vietnam exposed him to attacks on grounds that he had no business expounding on military matters. The plan to besiege the nation’s capital in the name of ending poverty was causing even many of his supporters to reassess their opinions of him.

  The Poor People’s Campaign would be like no other he had undertaken. A legion of volunteers would stage weeks, possibly months, of “militant” demonstrations in Washington until lawmakers enacted far-reaching programs for the poor. He was threatening epic disruption of the federal government. The massive civil disobedience King envisioned was bound to lead to scuffles with police at the least, and possibly violent confrontation, along with the almost certain arrest of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people.

  The siege of Washington by hordes of poor people would intensify the heat in a political climate already at the boiling point because of the Vietnam War. Multitudes of demonstrators against the war were taking to the streets of Washington and other cities around the country chanting, “Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?” Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota was drawing widespread support in his bid to unseat President Johnson by running for the Democratic presidential nomination on an antiwar platform. In the New Hampshire primary McCarthy won more than two-fifths of the vote against an incumbent president in his own party. Johnson was under intense pressure to withdraw US troops from Vietnam or resign. Johnson buckled, announcing on March 31 he would not seek reelection as president in 1968.

  Earlier on that day, an overflow crowd had gathered in the neo-Gothic splendor of the National Cathedral to hear King speak. He must have sensed that many of his listeners in that Episcopal sanctum lived apart from America’s poor and knew little of them. He beseeched them to consider the plight of America’s forty million “poverty stricken” people, who, he said, were “invisible” in a country that is “so rich” that many “don’t see the poor.”1 Within a few miles of Congress and the White House, his booming voice ringing with indignation, he demanded urgent federal action against poverty.

  Turning to Vietnam, he decried it as one of the most “unjust wars” ever.2 Eloquent, emotional, and powerful, the sermon evoked King’s passion for the antipoverty and antiwar causes that he had made his own by the spring of 1964.

  On the road when he was in Washington and elsewhere he carried a well-stuffed briefcase, which served him as a kind of traveling file cabinet containing materials to inform him on war, poverty, and other issues. It was a rectangular briefcase, emblazoned with the initials MLK in gold above the latch. It included a few personal effects: a tin of aspirin, a bottle of Alka Seltzer, and a can of shaving powder. It was crammed with papers and two books written by him.

  Among the papers were at least two items that indicated the breadth of his curiosity. One was a speech by ecologist Hugo Boyko evaluating the potential for Israeli-Arab cooperation in food production. Another was a newspaper article about Florida governor Claude Kirk Jr.’s private police force. The oldest papers dated back to 1966. The Vietnam War figures in several newspaper articles from that year.3

  A six-page statement that King released to the public in October 1966 set forth his view of Black Power, the slogan adopted by young militants such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown to dramatize their call for aggressive methods to advance civil rights. The statement reflected the fine line that King was walking on the subject. It disavowed the slogan Black Power for its “connotations of violence and separatism.” But it sympathized with the “unendurable frustrations” of people of his race who were “taunted by empty promises, humiliated and deprived by the filth and decay” of America’s slums.4

  Buried in his traveling case was a two-year-old article from the Wall Street Journal about a federal study warning of potential “Watts-type violence” in twenty-one cities. (The 1965 riot in the Watts section of Los Angeles had left 34 dead, 947 injured, and $45 million in property damage.5 More civil unrest had flared up in dozens of cities over the next two years. Some of the worst rioting was in the slums of Newark and Detroit. Whole neighborhoods were devastated by widespread looting and violence that left scores dead and many hundreds injured during the summer of 1967.)

  Also tucked into the briefcase was a book of King’s sermons, Strength to Love, and his fifth and last book, Where Do We Go from Here. The last book ponders the state of the movement (“Negroes have established a foothold, no more”) and appeals for a great federal commitment to end poverty.6 King devoted a fifty-eight-page chapter of the book, the longest, to the subject of Black Power. In the second-longest chapter, he examined the related development of “white backlash,” the reaction of white people so alarmed by the urban violence that they were demanding harsh law-and-order measures. King was unsympathetic. He wrote that the backlash sprang either from whites’ racism or a lack of empathy for the “ache and anguish” of daily life in the ghetto.7

  Tellingly, King had in his traveling file pages 179 and 180 of Where Do We Go from Here, printed out on separate sheets of paper. On those pages he discusses two parallel “revolutions.” One is in technology, the other in the civil rights and anticolonial movements sweeping the globe. Both revoluti
ons King sees as progressing with inevitability. In reflecting about that point later on, he must have mused about how to make the issue of poverty relevant to all people. In the margin of page 180, he had scribbled in blue ink, “The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich. The betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother. Whatever affects one affects all.”

  That he was carrying a copy of Where Do We Go from Here with him, along with his markup of pages from the book, seems to underscore how intensely he had turned to poverty as a transcendent issue. His pivot from the decade-long pursuit of racial progress to the larger issues of poverty and war marked his most dramatic turning point as a national leader.

  Some papers in the briefcase harked back to important public pronouncements of the mid-sixties. On April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York he had delivered a speech on Vietnam that had attracted wide public attention. He meant the speech to be a definitive statement of his views on the subject. He denounced Lyndon Johnson’s policy as morally unjust and strategically flawed. He said the war was draining the US treasury of money that could have funded antipoverty programs and that it was impressing black soldiers into Vietnam service in disproportionate numbers. He deplored the death and destruction it was inflicting on Vietnam and its people. No one concerned about “the integrity and life of America today,” he thundered, “can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam.”8

  As for the rioting in Watts and other cities, King looked at the urban strife as a product of poverty and the associated ills of unemployment, blighted housing, and shoddy public education. To respond to Black Power, King was rolling out the Poor People’s Campaign as a massive, militant, though nonviolent, alternative.