Death of a King Read online

  Dinner with Powell does little to relax Doc. The congressman spends the evening making disparaging remarks at Doc’s expense. According to Powell, not only is America going to hell in a handbasket, but the Negro people no longer have a leader they can admire. Doc is fooling himself if he thinks he still makes a difference; Doc should wake up to the facts and admit that this nonviolence business is obsolete. His movement has failed; no one takes SCLC seriously anymore. The militants have won over the heart of the people, and the militants are right. No movement can succeed without exerting physical power. Violence is necessary. Any fool knows that to be true.

  Realizing that any attempt to counter Powell’s arguments would fall on deaf ears, Doc just sits and listens. The congressman likes bullying his guest. He enjoys dishing out insults. At the head of the long dining room table, the black prince in exile speaks with unwavering authority on all matters, especially the precipitous decline in Doc’s national status.

  Doc deftly ignores the taunting. After all, he’s on vacation. He’s come to the Bahamas to relax, not argue. But Powell is persistent, gung ho about getting his guest to admit that his Gandhi-like approach to social change has run its course. Doc will admit no such thing. He simply smiles, gets up from the table, and walks to the veranda. The sky is ablaze with stars. The sea sparkles with moonlight. Night-blooming flowers scent the air. Back in the dining room, Powell is still pontificating. In the darkness, standing alone, Doc seeks peace.

  Chapter Twelve

  IRONIC ANNIVERSARY

  The respite is quick. Doc is back in America, back to the grind.

  There are a number of speaking engagements, but the most meaningful one is on December 10 in Montgomery. He is invited to deliver a Sunday sermon at the ninetieth anniversary of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, his original pastorate. The trip to Alabama is awash in nostalgia. This is, after all, where it all began.

  Driving through the city on his way to the sanctuary, Doc is startled to see hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan assembled in front of the state capitol. They are preparing a Sunday morning rally. Doc can only sigh.

  Everything has changed, yet nothing has changed.

  He thinks back a dozen years to his arrival in Alabama. The Montgomery Improvement Association was struggling to find a leader among the city’s black clergy for its impending citywide bus boycott. Many of the older preachers were reluctant to take on the task. Others lacked the skill. Because Doc, at twenty-six, was a fresh face unsullied by hardball city politics, he was viewed as a prime candidate to lead the charge. At first he declined, just as he had similarly withdrawn his name for presidency of the local NAACP. Coretta had recently given birth to Yolanda, their first child. Doc wanted to relish the role of fatherhood and dedicate himself to the spiritual needs of his congregation.

  Yet in spite of his initial instinct to tell the boycott organizers no, his conscience compelled him to say yes. That “yes” changed his life and led to a seemingly endless series of brutal challenges that both tested and bolstered his character. The boycott met with not only fierce opposition but imprisonment and threats to his life. When he realized the enormity of the task he had undertaken—and the dangers that it posed to his wife and baby daughter—he wanted to give up. He later rejoiced that he hadn’t, and after a year the Montgomery movement succeeded in integrating the citywide bus system.

  But that was then. This is now.

  Now he drives past the Klan and, only a few blocks later, arrives at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where he is warmly greeted. He takes his seat in the pulpit beside the elders and, waiting to deliver his sermon, smiles at the memory of the moment when it all turned around—when, back in the days of the boycott, his “no” turned to “yes” and resignation transformed into resolution.

  Those were crazy, frightening times. Events surrounding the boycott had turned chaotic. He fought for clarity and composure but found himself overwhelmed by uncertainty. He couldn’t think, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop worrying.

  On one such restless evening he was at home in bed with Coretta when the phone rang. Who was calling at midnight?

  “Nigger,” said the caller, “we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out and blow up your house.”

  Doc’s heart beat wildly. It was more than fear; it was terror. He couldn’t get to sleep. He went into the kitchen to get some coffee. What he really wanted to do was run into the arms of his father and mother, but they were back in Atlanta. He wanted to run back to the university in Boston, where the world seemed more tolerant. He wanted out. He wanted safety. Like Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, he wanted anything but to walk this dark and dangerous path before him.

  So he did what Jesus did: he prayed.

  “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right; I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now; I’m faltering; I’m losing my courage. And I can’t let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak.”

  Then the miracle.

  The Holy Spirit spoke to his soul and said, “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness, stand up for justice, stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.”

  Those words are the strength that has sustained him for these twelve tumultuous years. Yet even as Doc prepares to come to the podium to speak love, the Klansmen, led by Grand Dragon James Spears, eviscerate opponents of the Vietnam War and advocates of gun control while mocking the name of “Martin Lucifer King,” just a few blocks away.

  Nothing has changed, yet everything has changed.

  Twelve years ago when he arrived in Alabama, the civil rights movement was an unrealized dream. Segregation was ironclad. Now legal segregation is gone. Discriminatory voting restrictions are gone. But the cost has been huge. Lives have been lost—Medgar Evers, freedom riders, innocent children. The honors have been unexpected: Doc’s picture on the cover of Time magazine, being named the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, gaining unprecedented access to presidents and prime ministers, recognition as an international figure.

  The timing of the Klan rally is recognition of another truth: hatred has not gone into hiding. The vicious racist past is alive—right here and now.

  When it finally comes time to address the congregation, Doc stays focused on the doubts that plagued him when he first came to Montgomery. In the presence of sinners and saints, he works through his doubts. He speaks to the congregation, even as he speaks to himself.

  Our nation is sick with racism. Sick with militarism. Sick with a system that perpetuates poverty. Some fifty million people are poverty-stricken.

  How to find hope in the darkness?

  He points to First Corinthians and what he calls Paul’s “magnificent trilogy of durability”: faith, hope, and love.

  Today hope is his concern—what does it mean and how is it maintained?

  He draws a distinction between “magic hope” and “realistic hope.” “Magic hope is sheer optimism” that somehow things automatically improve. “Realistic hope is based on a willingness to face the risk of failure, and embrace an ‘in spite of’ quality.”

  He equates the loss of hope with death. “If you lose hope absolutely you die,” he contends. “A hopeless individual is a dead individual.… When you lose hope you lose creativity, you lose rationality.… I was saying to some of my nationalist friends the other day—we were arguing about violence versus non-violence—that the problem is you’ve lost hope.… He who loses hope makes the ugly beautiful and the beautiful ugly. He who loses hope makes the true false and the false true.… Hope is animated and undergirded by faith and love.”

  Doc speaks of how hope got black folks through the hell of American history. “More than seventy-five million black people were lost, murdered and died in the midst of that two hundred and some years of sla
ve trading.… Don’t ever romanticize slavery. It’s one of the darkest and most evil periods in the history of the world. But the Negro is still going and he’s going because he never had the disease of ‘giveupitis.’ He knew somehow that there was an agreement with an eternal power and he’d look out and say, ‘You ain’t no nigger. You ain’t no slave, but you’re God’s children.’ ”

  Doc turns inward and reflects on his despondency. “Around in Alabama and Mississippi and up in Cleveland and Chicago every now and then I feel discouraged. Living every day under the threat of death, I feel discouraged… feel my work is in vain, but then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again. ‘There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.’ And this is the faith. It’s the faith that will carry us through the dark days ahead.”

  Doc has given his final sermon at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and the days ahead are darker than Doc can even imagine. Forces rip apart the country, demons divide his own people, discord gnaws on his own organization—rancor is on the rise.

  Rancor resides in the minds of the Klansmen who, as Doc prays for hope, call for violence. That call is echoed by enraged and embittered groups the world over. As 1967 comes to an end, with America raining bombs on North Vietnam, violence is in the air.

  In the face of a culture that has less and less interest in his core values, Doc has invoked the God who, as he says, “can make a way out of no way. I know about Him. I know that He can lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope. I’ve seen the lightning flash. I’ve heard the thunder roar. I’ve felt sin breakers dashing, trying to conquer my soul, but I heard the voice of Jesus saying, ‘Fight on.’ ”

  Yet he cannot pretend that in this festive season all is calm, all is bright. He cannot call the impending New Year happy. As never before, the odds are stacked against him. But the odds don’t matter. All that matters is fighting on.

  “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,” he reads in the Book of Ecclesiastes.

  Scrutinizing the sociopolitical situation, he realizes that in this coming year the battle will worsen. His enemies will be emboldened. He will make grave personal and professional mistakes. He will break down more than once.

  He realizes that he will not survive the battle with human strength alone. And that in reaching for divine sustenance, he will experience fear.

  Yet he will keep praying, keep planning. He will keep reaching.

  PART II

  THE FINAL SEASON

  The Last Three Months

  Chapter Thirteen

  THIRTY-NINE

  The year begins ominously.

  The war is six years old, soon to be the longest in American history—nearly sixteen thousand Americans killed and a hundred thousand wounded so far. Hoping to finally destroy the enemy, in the first month of 1968 President Johnson unleashes an eleven-week bombing attack on North Vietnam.

  J. Edgar Hoover renews his own attack, doubling down on his plans to destroy Doc through the FBI’s network of paid informers.

  Doc’s allies Benjamin Spock and William Sloane Coffin are indicted by the Justice Department for helping young men oppose the draft. Infuriated, Doc calls a press conference in which he attacks the indictments, speaks favorably of Eugene McCarthy’s campaign to unseat Johnson, and criticizes Bobby Kennedy for being lackluster in his opposition to the war.

  Maintaining his furious pace, Doc flies to California to support Joan Baez, still imprisoned in Oakland for blocking the entrance to a military center. After the visit, he addresses the press.

  There are tough questions about his relationship to Adam Clayton Powell, who has publicly announced that Martin Luther King Jr. no longer subscribes to nonviolence. Coming on top of the insults he suffered in Bimini, this takes Doc by surprise. With all due respect to the congressman, he unequivocally refutes the statement. Yet in spite of this blatant misrepresentation, Doc sends a gracious letter to Powell, urging him to return to New York, where his leadership is needed. “You beat the white man at his game,” Doc writes, “and became a fighting symbol of power.”

  His aides are astounded that Doc is able to turn the other cheek and offer the congressman such support.

  “Radical love,” Harry Belafonte will later reflect, “is Doc’s great hallmark. Loving those who are twisting your words. Loving those moving against you. Loving those looking to take your spot and undermine your authority. In the end, Doc is not only offering unconditional love, but he’s supporting every organization and individual fighting for the liberation of people throughout the globe. He never allows political discourse to overwhelm his revolutionary moral vision.”

  Doc’s next challenge is to sell his vision to SCLC.

  He tells the press that tomorrow he’s off to Atlanta, where he will give his troops “marching orders to go into fifteen communities where we will be mobilizing people by the thousands for a massive demonstration in Washington on a quest for jobs and income.”

  His mission at this latest SCLC staff meeting is clear: this time he will finally and firmly establish the fact that his priority is a Poor People’s Campaign in the spring, and that his priority will prevail.

  But will it? In Atlanta, the staff remains in revolt. Dissent erupts from the get-go. Doc has to deal with the heated resistance of James Bevel and Jesse Jackson, who are, in the words of one of Doc’s aides, “competing with him for leadership.” The infighting is brutal. At the end of the day, his patience stretched to the limit, Doc is ready to leave. But Andy Young won’t allow it. At that moment the staff breaks into a spirited “Happy Birthday!” Typically, Doc’s staff would get him a new suit for his natal day. But this year he is lovingly toasted and presented with a couple of gag gifts: a jar of shoestring potatoes (because Doc has complained about the bad food and shoestring policy of the Birmingham prison) and a mug that reads, “We are cooperating with Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Drop coins and bills in the cup.”

  Doc smiles and expresses earnest gratitude.

  On this day—just another rough-and-tumble workday in the life of a minister who cannot stop working—he turns thirty-nine.

  At noon the next day, he’s back at it, standing before a bevy of reporters to announce the kickoff of his poverty campaign. He envisions armies of protestors encamped in the nation’s capital. His tactics are, in his words, “patterned after the bonus marches back in the thirties.… The only difference is that this time we aren’t going to be run out of Washington.”

  His plan is vague—only that the campaign will start in the spring. His inability to unify his own troops is obvious. In private, one aide questions his judgment by asking, “What’s going to happen when we bring these people to Washington and Stokely’s going to be there?” Doc confesses that he harbors doubts but says, “I don’t want to psychoanalyze anybody but myself.”

  After days of debate, all he can tell his staff is, “Just go to Washington.” The ambiguities of the plans should not get in their way. The plans for the Montgomery Bus Boycott were also sketchy, but look what happened.

  “We got to be fired up ourselves,” Doc keeps preaching to the unconverted supporters.

  The supporters remain resistant. The wrangling goes on ad infinitum. One workshop on finances and fund-raising is especially long and arduous. Usually a patient listener, Doc is on the verge of losing it. Rather than run the risk of appearing cranky, he excuses himself for a bathroom break. But instead of heading to the men’s room, he quietly exits a side door and walks to his car. Feeling like a truant student escaping school, he drives to the home of Dorothy Cotton, a close aide and director of the Citizenship Education Program of SCLC.

  Dorothy is surprised to see him at her front door. Why isn’t he at the workshop? What’s wrong?

  “Don’t tell anyone,” he whispers in a mischievous voice, “but I snuck out. I just couldn’t take another minute.”

  Dorothy understands. She has been to dozens of such meetings herself. She ushers him into the living roo
m, where he sits in a wooden rocking chair painted yellow. Yellow, she points out, is a calming color. Doc could use a little calm.

  He agrees. Calm is just what he lacks; calm is just what he needs. He gets to gently rocking and finds the motion calming.

  Clarence Jones is right: Doc will never go to a psychiatrist, but in the presence of a trusted friend like Dorothy Cotton, he is able to reflect inwardly and speak of heavy matters weighing on his heart.

  He talks about being despondent. He talks about being exhausted. He expresses doubt about the effectiveness of his leadership. He describes his organization’s senior staff as “a team of wild horses.” He’s bone tired of trying to get them to back his agenda. There comes a time when arguments are futile, a time when a man has to see that he’s no longer useful. It’s obvious that the political climate has turned against him. Why not move on?

  “To where?” asks Dorothy.

  To England, Doc explains. A church in Great Britain has offered him a pastorate. A prestigious church. A progressive church. A church where he could write and preach and commune with God without the endless strife that has become his increasingly troubled life in America.

  Dorothy wonders whether he is serious.

  Doc assures her that he is.

  She doesn’t respond. She realizes that he needs to vent, needs to express these mounting frustrations, needs to comfort himself with thoughts of an easier life.

  But a pastorate in England, like the presidency of a university, is a romantic fantasy. It’ll never happen. Sitting in the yellow chair, rocking late into the night, Doc realizes—as does Dorothy—that he will never abandon the struggle.

  Those few hours with Dorothy help revive his spirit.

  On the following night, January 16, he is back home with Coretta and the children. After a quiet dinner, he turns on the television to watch Johnson’s State of the Union address.