Death of a King

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  For Martin Luther King Jr.… America’s greatest democratic public intellectual

  April is the cruelest month.

  —T. S. ELIOT, THE WASTE LAND

  INTRODUCTION

  I hold this project precious for reasons that are both intensely personal and politically urgent.

  As a young boy growing up in a trailer park in rural Indiana, my initial encounter with the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. altered the very course of my life. During the most difficult period of my childhood, a time when I had fallen into deep despair, his spirit entered my soul and excited my imagination. I recognized the rhythms of his rhetorical passion as more than hypnotic: I knew they were righteous. As a result of their disturbing truths, I became a lifelong student of his work as a minister, advocate, and writer. His call to radical democracy through redemptive love resonated with me on a profound level.

  I was barely a teenager when I began entering statewide oratorical interpretation competitions by declaiming King’s most famous speeches. The thrill of channeling his voice—not to mention my frequent victories—had me believing that my connection to the man was preternatural. It was certainly life affirming. Through the voice of the prophetic minister I eventually found my own voice.

  My study of King’s pivotal role in the history of this country has never stopped. Over the years, I have spoken with his most important critics, chroniclers, and defenders. I was privileged to enjoy a rewarding friendship with Coretta Scott King, whom I interviewed many times. Her last national television interview was an appearance on my public television program filmed in Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in 2005, on what would have been her husband’s seventy-sixth birthday. At her behest, I served on the advisory board at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta.

  Yet for all the years that I have read, discussed, and analyzed King’s work, this is the first time I have sought to capture my feelings about him in a book. That’s because now, after decades of study, I have come to firmly believe that, in a critical way, he is misunderstood. I further believe that misunderstanding is robbing us of the essence of his character and crusade.

  Ironically, his martyrdom has undermined his message. As a public figure who fearlessly challenged the status quo, he has been sanitized and oversimplified. The values for which he lived and died—justice for all, service to others, and a love that liberates, no matter the cost—are largely forgotten. He is no longer a threat, but merely an idealistic dreamer to be remembered for a handful of fanciful speeches. That may be the Martin Luther King that the world wishes to remember, but it is not the Martin Luther King that I have come to better understand and love even more.

  The King that moves me most is the man who, during the final season of his earthly journey, faced a torrent of vicious assaults from virtually every segment of society, most painfully from his own people.

  The symmetry is remarkable:

  On April 4, 1967, he comes to the Riverside Church in New York City and delivers a dramatic and controversial speech in impassioned opposition to the Vietnam War.

  Exactly twelve months later to the day, on April 4, 1968, he is assassinated in Memphis, where he has traveled on behalf of garbage workers.

  The question I attempt to answer in this book is simple:

  In his last year, what kind of man has Martin Luther King Jr. become?

  In my view, he is a man whose true character has been misinterpreted, ignored, or forgotten. I want to remember—and bring to life—the essential truths about King in his final months before they are unremembered and irrecoverable. This is the King that I cherish: the King who, enduring a living hell, rises to moral greatness; the King who, in the face of unrelenting adversity, expresses the full measure of his character and courage. This is the King who, despite everything, spoke his truth, the man I consider the greatest public figure this country has ever produced.

  In constructing this chronicle, I’ve conducted a series of fresh interviews with three distinct groups: scholars, including his major biographers Taylor Branch, David Garrow, and Clayborne Carson; close friends like Harry Belafonte and Gardner C. Taylor; and associates including Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, Dorothy Cotton, and Clarence Jones, among others. The insights gleaned from these firsthand observations have convinced me that the final leg of King’s journey was far rougher than I had imagined. The pressures he faced were crushing. Yet he never compromised his core commitment to nonviolence. Not for a minute did he diminish his efforts to address the burning issues of racism, poverty, and the inherent immorality of this nation’s unchecked militarism.

  Nearly fifty years after King’s death, these issues are more pressing than ever. And if, as we relive these last excruciating months in his life, we are made to understand that his mission remains unfulfilled—that the causes for which he gave his life continue to demand the immediate attention of our hearts and minds—then the purpose of this text will be fulfilled.

  One final note about the tone of this text:

  You will see that I attempt to convey King’s inner thoughts during rare moments of self-reflection. Because he was a man in constant motion, these quiet, precious moments were few. My interpretation of these moments—my reading of what was on his mind—derives from my conversations with associates who were actually with him during those intimate times and privileged to hear him voice his heart.

  You will also see that I refer to King as “Doc.” This was how his most trusted colleagues addressed him. In adopting this nomenclature, I trust that I am not being presumptuous. I use this term of endearment as a way to bring me—and you—closer to the soul of the man.

  Tavis Smiley

  Los Angeles, California

  PART I

  FOUR SEASONS

  Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter

  Chapter One

  “VOCATION OF AGONY”

  On Tuesday, April 4, 1967, Doc sits in his suite at the Americana Hotel in midtown Manhattan, realizing that everything about his public life is about to change. The moment of truth—Doc’s truth—has arrived. An hour from now, when he stands in the pulpit of the august Riverside Church, he will face a congregation of four thousand people prepared to hang on his every word.

  His mind is made up. He knows what he has to do. But his conviction, no matter how deep, cannot drown out the dissenting voices that clamor inside his head. These voices are more than mere phantoms. They reflect the views of the majority of his supporters. These voices, though now silent assaults, were once spoken aloud with feverish certainty.

  Stay in your lane.

  You’re a preacher, not a politician.

  Don’t overstep your bounds.

  Don’t overplay your hand.

  You helped push through two of the most important pieces of legislation in our history—for civil and voting rights. Only a fool would now oppose the president who so aggressively championed our cause.

  Attacking the Vietnam War is tantamount to attacking Lyndon Johnson. Why turn our most powerful ally into an enemy?

  Why undermine the very movement to which you’ve devoted your life?

  Why venture into an area—international politics—abou
t which you have little or no expertise?

  Why run the risk?

  You’re a Nobel laureate, a man respected the world over for his views on matters concerning minority rights and minority dignity. Why undermine your own dignity and standing—your exalted position as a leader of your people—by moving into the morass of arguments over a war that’s irrelevant to your purpose?

  Why destroy the hard-fought progress you have already made?

  Your ego has run amok.

  Your sense of restraint has abandoned you.

  Where’s your common sense?

  Where’s your concern for your supporters?

  Why are you injuring them?

  Why are you injuring yourself?

  The voices are persistent. Their ominous tone reflects the grave doubts of one of his most trusted aides and chief fund-raiser, Stanley Levison, who openly opposes the speech Doc is about to deliver.

  Doc thinks back to the first draft of the speech written by Clarence Jones, a brilliant young black lawyer whom he recruited to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1960. Jones had been reluctant to leave his Pasadena, California, home and promising corporate legal career. Even the fact that Doc had come to Jones’s home on a Saturday night to personally persuade him didn’t move the attorney. But come Sunday morning, sitting in the first pew of the Mt. Sinai Missionary Baptist Church and listening to King, as guest preacher, masterfully skewer the black middle class for refusing to fight for its own people, Jones surrendered to the preacher’s call to action. The lawyer left his old life behind and became a tireless supporter. It was Jones, in fact, who visited Doc during the spring of 1963 when he was incarcerated in Alabama, where he had written in the margins of newspapers and small scraps of paper “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” his celebrated defense of nonviolence.

  “We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal,’ ” wrote King, “… [and] it was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.”

  Clarence Jones was dear to Doc’s heart, but Jones’s first draft of this Vietnam speech was too restrained, too balanced, too reflective of the lawyer’s sense of moderation. King had come out against the war on previous occasions, but there had yet to be a definitive statement. So when the national conference of the Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam asked him to deliver its keynote address at Riverside, he quickly accepted.

  As a man who has skillfully sought media attention to bring his message home, Doc understands the power of today’s platform.

  Riding in the back of the car as it winds its way through the city’s swarming streets, he remembers a few months back, when, flipping through a magazine at an airport restaurant, he stopped at a photograph showing the horrific effects of napalm attacks on Vietnamese children.

  His aide, seeing that he was no longer eating the food, said, “Doc, doesn’t it taste any good?”

  “Nothing will ever taste any good for me until I do everything I can to end that war.”

  In recent weeks Doc has twice canceled meetings with the world’s most powerful man, Lyndon Johnson, whose civil rights support he had long courted and secured. Like all mortals, Doc is impressed by a White House invitation. But deeper wisdom tells him to avoid an encounter with a politician whose powers of persuasion are legendary. No doubt LBJ wants to get Doc to tone down his statements on the war when, in fact, Doc is about to dramatically turn up the volume.

  It was only sixteen months ago—in January of 1966—that Doc had sent the president a telegram endorsing LBJ’s peace efforts and his “reassuring” commitment to keep Vietnam from impeding progress in civil rights. But since the conflict has escalated alarmingly, Doc has come to view Johnson’s win-at-all-costs policy as a catastrophe. Right now the last thing he needs is a one-on-one arm-twisting session with LBJ.

  Martin Luther King is probably the only Negro in America prepared to turn down a private meeting with the president. It’s not that his ego isn’t excited by the prospect. Doc is a fiery preacher, and fiery preachers have strong egos. He likes recognition. He likes adulation. Yet his moral mission trumps his hunger for personal glory. He avoids Johnson because he does not want to be played by Johnson. His moral mission cannot be compromised.

  The prepared text that he carries in his briefcase is largely the work of Vincent Harding—Korean War veteran, Mennonite peace activist, chairman of the history department at Spelman College, and Doc’s Atlanta neighbor. It is a speech that, while setting out a compelling pro-peace position on high moral ground, carefully delineates the modern history of war-torn Vietnam.

  As Doc arrives at 120th Street and Riverside Drive and looks out at the great Gothic edifice, his mind goes to the ironies of the moment. He reflects on the proximity of this opulent church, built largely through the contributions of John D. Rockefeller Jr. to the nearby neighborhood of Harlem, where impoverished people struggle for mere subsistence. He thinks of Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, Riverside’s founding minister and eloquent voice of liberal Christianity, who fearlessly denounced racism during the dark days of the thirties and forties. He also thinks that were he ever to leave his beloved home church of Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta, where he and his father are co-pastors, it would only be to lead a great progressive congregation like Riverside.

  Stepping from the car and walking to the main sanctuary, he considers the furor he is about to create. He remains resolute.

  After a standing ovation, the applause quiets and Doc gets down to business, declaring, “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice.”

  He quotes the directive of the conference’s executive committee: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.”

  “Some of us,” he says, “who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak.”

  He speaks of his own past ambivalence.

  “Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path.… When I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling.…

  “In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly… why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church—the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate—leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.”

  Now Doc is off and running. He quickly links the war—indeed, the very forces of militarism—to racism and poverty. Blacks are fighting and dying at almost twice their proportion of the population. He points to the “cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together at the same schools.” He speaks about the rioters who, in answer to his plea for nonviolence, question America’s own unchecked violence in Vietnam.

  “Their questions hit home,” he says, “and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.”

  The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.

  The phrase will send shock waves through the media.

  Doc’s full-frontal attack on the war is unequivocal. His five-point plan is clear: Stop bombing, issue a unilateral cease-fire, abandon all bases in Southeast Asia, negotiate with North Vietnam’s National Liberation
Front, and set a date for complete troop removal.

  The war is immoral. The immorality of the war is married to the immorality of poverty and racism. America must turn from the mad pursuit of this war to the pursuit of its moral integrity. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” he claims, “is approaching spiritual death.”

  Like the Old Testament prophets he has studied and loved so well, Doc is delivering a prophesy in the sternest possible terms. “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.… We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.”

  Moving away from his prepared speech, Doc begins to improvise. True to his bedrock Baptist roots, he points to Amos 5:24, calling forth a sense of faith and hope inherent to his tradition. He invokes a time when “justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

  The church explodes with thunderous applause. Again, an impassioned and sustained standing ovation.

  His speech concluded, Doc leaves the sanctuary.

  And then the real fireworks begin.

  Chapter Two

  “BETRAYING THE CAUSE”

  On the long flight from New York City to Los Angeles, Doc looks out over the cloud covering of dark gray. Not a glimmer of sunshine. Nursing his stiff drink—vodka and orange juice—he tries to fight back the tears, but the emotions are too strong. The tears flow.

  Doc thought he was prepared for the press reaction to his speech, but he wasn’t. He isn’t. The tears wet his cheeks. The tears expose the pain in his heart. His heavy heart is wounded by what is far more than a negative response. There is a viciousness to the attacks that assaults not only his position but his character as well.

  The attacks from the mainstream press are unrelenting: