Death of a King Page 13

  Aretha is singing, “You make me feel so alive.”

  Doc is feeling that, despite it all, these are the small miraculous moments that push him to keep on keeping on.

  Chapter Seventeen

  FRANTIC MELANCHOLY

  If Doc is able to deal with the darkness—a darkness whose history includes thoughts of suicide and a preoccupation with death—it is because of his unstoppable drive to attend to the least among us. There is, though, this precarious balance between his ups and his downs. He is torn between bleakness and light, despair and hope. Taylor Branch would later describe Doc’s emotional condition in these, his final days, as one of “frantic melancholy.”

  On February 18, he is back home in the pulpit of Ebenezer delivering a sermon that he calls “Who Is My Neighbor?” In it he tells Jesus’s story of the Good Samaritan: A man has been beaten and left for dead on the side of a road. A priest and another cleric see him, ignore him, and move on. It is the outsider, the nonecclesiastical Good Samaritan, who saves the man’s life.

  In an act of public confession, Doc surprises his congregation. Rather than identifying with the Good Samaritan, he sees himself as the heartless priest. Doc speaks of the time that he bypassed a hitchhiker on a desolate highway outside Atlanta.

  “I really haven’t gotten over it to this day,” he says. “I didn’t stop to help the man because I was afraid.”

  Fear returns when, on the Monday after his Sunday sermon, he is in Miami to give the opening speech at a leadership conference of one hundred and fifty Negro pastors and learns of threats to his life.

  Ignoring the threats, he addresses the convocation, his words reflecting his own personal struggle:

  “When hope diminishes, the hate element is often turned toward those who originally built up the hope. The bitterness is often greater toward that person who built up the hope, who could say ‘I have a dream,’ but couldn’t produce the dream because of the failure and the sickness of the nation to respond to the dream.”

  There can be no doubt that he is referring to himself.

  There can also be no doubt that the death threats are real. The FBI has received a bomb threat. A man identifying himself as a sniper with every intention of murdering the minster has called the Sheraton hotel, where Doc is staying, and demanded to know his room number. The Miami police insist that Doc remain secluded for the rest of the five-day conference. Armed security officers are stationed in front of his room.

  Billy Kyles, a well-known minister from Memphis, is in the room with Doc, whose nerves are frayed. Obsessed with dark memories, Doc once again recounts those other times when his life was on the line—the frightening marches in Mississippi, experiencing the murderous hatred of the rock throwers in Cicero, Illinois.

  Murderous hatred is rampant in Memphis. Reverend Kyles learns that, while he and Doc are holed up in this hotel room, demonstrators have been maced. Kyles’s daughter is among the injured marchers protesting on behalf of the sanitation workers.

  Memphis is on the verge of mayhem.

  The calls between Memphis and Miami heat up. Doc and Kyles’s mutual friend Reverend James Lawson reports from the front line. He is alarmed that the press is giving the strikers scant notice. Lawson sees this as a national issue and is convinced that national leaders—like Doc—must come to Memphis to direct media focus on the mounting crisis.

  Doc is moved but also reluctant. His Poor People’s Campaign is still unformed and in desperate need of all his attention. Beyond that, the police and the FBI are warning him to curtail his movement in public.

  For four days Doc is mostly restricted to his room. From a distance of mere yards that feel like miles, he learns that the conference is chaotic. The militants will not yield to the more moderate ministers and accuse them of selling out. It’s another exercise in hostility—and this among clergymen who supposedly espouse teachings of tolerance and love.

  It is the ethos of love that Doc espouses when, unable to remain in his room any longer, he emerges to address the conference during its last day.

  “We didn’t come to Miami to play,” he tells his fellow preachers. “We came to Miami to see how we could develop a relevant and a creative ministry for the valley.” He speaks of a valley filled with “men and women who know the ache and anguish of poverty.… Welfare mothers who’ll not be able to feed their little children.… People who are in moments of despair because of their circumstances.”

  Doc rises above his own circumstances as a marked man. In a plea for unity among the ministers, he asserts, “We will influence the policies of every city if we in this room will just stick together, and work together, and love each other.”

  Although it is with love, he goes on to deliver a sharp moral assessment of many of his fellow preachers.

  “Let us admit that even the black church has often been a tail-light rather than a headlight.” He admonishes the clergymen for not confronting the great sociopolitical issues of our time. Even as congregants live “in the midst of… poverty,” he cannot abide ministers who preach “pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.” He rebukes his colleagues for their obsession with rampant materialism. “Too often we’ve been more concerned about the size of the wheelbase on our automobiles, and the amount of money we get on our anniversaries.” His call is to “give a kind of new vitality to the religion of Jesus Christ.” He believes that “the great tragedy is that Christianity failed to see that it had the revolutionary edge.”

  His speech over, Doc is rushed from the conference to the airport to fly to New York, where some five hours later—on the evening of February 23—he appears on the stage of Carnegie Hall to honor one of his revolutionary heroes, W. E. B. Du Bois, the intellectual giant who cofounded the NAACP.

  Although Doc strikes many in the audience, including his friend Stanley Levison, as tired and out of sorts, he nonetheless uses the occasion to reassert his belief in radical solutions to social ills.

  “We cannot talk of Dr. Du Bois,” he says, “without recognizing that he was a radical all of his life.”

  Doc contrasts Du Bois’s militancy with the militancy currently in vogue:

  “He [Du Bois] confronted the establishment as a model of militant manhood and integrity. He defied them and though they heaped venom and scorn on him his powerful voice was never stilled.

  “And yet, with all his pride and spirit he did not make a mystique out of blackness. He was proud of his people, not because their color endowed them with some vague greatness but because their concrete achievements in struggle had advanced humanity and he saw and loved progressive humanity in all its hues, black, white, yellow, red and brown.

  “Above all he did not content himself with hurling invectives for emotional release and then to retire into smug passive satisfaction. History had taught him it is not enough for people to be angry—the supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.…

  “This life style of Dr. Du Bois is the most important quality this generation of Negroes needs to emulate. The educated Negro who is not really part of us and the angry militant who fails to organize us have nothing in common with Dr. Du Bois. He exemplified Black power in achievement and he organized Black power in action. It was no abstract slogan to him.”

  With the speech behind him, Doc still fears that the militant Black Power sloganeers have captured the imagination of the youth. Photographed wearing dark glasses and with a rifle in hand, Stokely Carmichael has been declared “Prime Minister of the Black Nation” in an attempt to unite the Black Panther Party and SNCC. “Black nationalism,” he declares, “must be our ideology.” In truth, there is mounting dissent on the left. “The SNCC people were the bad niggers in town, and then the Panthers jumped up and started saying, ‘We are badding you out,’ ” says SNCC leader Willie Ricks. The fact that Doc’s opponents are disorganized brings him no comfort. He is deeply disturbed by any disunity among black folks, even his adversaries.

 
; Reverberating are lines of a poem by William Butler Yeats, written nearly a half century earlier in response to Europe’s moral collapse in the wake of World War I.

  Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity.

  Doc has conviction, but the intensity of these past weeks—these past months, this past year—has Doc on the verge of physical and mental collapse. Rather than risk a complete breakdown, he agrees to a short vacation in Jamaica with Coretta. Aide Andy Young comes along.

  The vacation is marred by distractions. “The tourists wouldn’t leave us alone and the phone was our enemy,” Doc later tells Stanley Levison.

  Even more disturbing are the news accounts of Bayard Rustin’s pointed criticisms of Doc’s Poor People’s Campaign. Rather than restrict the airing of his dissent to members of SCLC, Rustin goes to the press and says, “I seriously question the efficacy of Dr. King’s plans for the April project.” He believes that the protest would not favorably influence Congress. The way forward, according to Rustin, is by electing Democratic candidates who favor progressive legislation, not mass demonstrations. He urges Doc to cancel his plans, and even if Doc might lose face, “he’ll lose a lot more face if he conducts the demonstrations and fails.”

  The growing estrangement between Doc and Rustin, once the closest of colleagues and political-spiritual soul mates, is a source of profound pain for Doc.

  Doc’s pain is evident when, back from a restless vacation and addressing his congregation at Ebenezer, his Sunday sermon focuses on unfulfilled dreams. Doc’s mood remains downcast.

  He describes how King David never lived to see his dream of a temple in Jerusalem. Gandhi never lived to see his dream of a free India. Paul never lived to see his dream of reaching Spain. Most folks don’t live to see their dreams of a better world or a fulfillment of their own better character.

  “You don’t need to go out this morning saying that Martin Luther King is a saint. Oh no,” he exclaims, “I want you to know this morning that I’m a sinner like all of God’s children.”

  He seeks the comfort that God offered David. While David’s dream was not fulfilled, the Lord did tell David that, in Doc’s interpretation, “it is well that it is within thine heart. It’s well that you are trying. You may not see it. The dream may not be fulfilled, but… thank God this morning that we do have hearts to put something meaningful in.”

  President Johnson’s dream of a quick end to the war in Vietnam continues to exist only in fantasy. Despite massive bombings, the administration’s war strategy is proving untenable. With more than a half-million troops already engaged, the military command is requesting two hundred thousand more. The president is caught up in a spiral of frustration.

  The spiral intensifies when, on March 1, the president’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, issues its public report. The findings on the causes of the 1967 urban riots are unequivocal: “White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.” The report’s most widely quoted statement could not be clearer: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

  Mired in the confusion of his war policy—it is costing three times the amount of money that the president’s own commission is urging the government to invest in our cities—LBJ does not comment on the Kerner report.

  Doc does.

  “The Commission’s finding that America is a racist society and that white racism is the root cause of today’s urban disorders is an important confession of a harsh truth,” he tells the press before relating the conclusions to poverty. According to Doc, all this shows how “the lives, the incomes, the well-being of poor people everywhere in America are plundered by our economic system.” He stresses “the absolute necessity of our spring campaign in Washington.” Doc goes on to describe how three separate caravans—from Mississippi, Milwaukee, and Massachusetts—will descend on the Capitol. He envisions folks arriving by the hundreds of thousands—by car and truck, by foot and even mule cart. He sees this poor people’s march transforming the very consciousness of the nation.

  Reporters want to know when it will happen.

  In late April, early May.

  That’s only eight weeks away.

  Can Doc pull this off?

  He assures the questioners that he can.

  At the same time, he does not reveal how his plans are still under attack from within the very organization that he leads. In private, he is in a heated debate with Marian Logan, the wife of his friend and physician, Arthur Logan. Marian, in solidarity with Bayard Rustin, has written her fellow SCLC board members an impassioned argument against Doc’s campaign:

  “The demonstrations may well harden congressional resistance and create an atmosphere conducive not only to the victory of reactionary candidates in the coming elections, but also to the defeat of those candidates who are, or would be friendly to the social and economic objectives of our struggle.”

  She also writes directly to Doc, saying that he may not “be able to preserve the non-violent image and integrity of our organization.… You say, Martin, that you ‘will use disruptive tactics only as a last resort’… but you understand, of course, that in view of the likely police response to these disruptive tactics, you are in effect saying that you are prepared to court violence as a last resort.” She goes on to question the adequacy of the planning itself that, in her view, remains in a precarious state of disarray.

  Doc’s hope is that another short escape—this time to Acapulco—might repair his own state of disarray. But the melancholy does not lift. In the middle of the night, Ralph Abernathy, who has traveled with Doc, spots him on the balcony of his hotel room, where he is leaning over the rail. Abernathy is alarmed. He remembers Doc’s story about a suicide attempt in his youth. He rushes to Doc’s side.

  “Martin,” he says, “what are you doing out here this time of night? What’s troubling you?”

  After several moments of silence, Doc says, “You see that rock out there?”

  “Yes, I see it.”

  “How long do you think it’s been there?”

  “I really don’t know. Centuries and centuries.”

  “Do you know what I’m thinking about?”

  Abernathy is reluctant to answer.

  Mournfully, Doc begins to sing the ancient hymn “Rock of Ages,” a meditation on eternal rest.

  On the way home, Doc runs into Reverend Billy Graham at the airport. In the fifties, Graham had invited Doc to preach at a revival and subsequently contributed money to his cause. There is great mutual respect between the two Baptist preachers. This time, though, Graham is not reassuring. He is convinced that Doc is moving too aggressively with his social action programs—and cautions him to slow down.

  Instead, Doc picks up the pace. He enthusiastically tells an audience at New York’s Hunter College about the upcoming Poor People’s Campaign. The media is talking about “the long hot summer ahead,” he says. “And what always bothers me about this is that the long hot summer has been preceded by a long cold winter. And the tragedy is that the nation has failed to use its winters creatively, compassionately.… And our nation’s summers of riots are still caused by our nation’s winters of delay.”

  Without delay, he sends a telegram to United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez saying that he is behind his twenty-five-day fast in support of striking farmworkers:

  “I am deeply moved by your courage in fasting as your personal sacrifice for justice through nonviolence.… The plight of your people and ours is so grave that we all desperately need the inspiring example and effective leadership you have given.”

  Meanwhile,
Memphis won’t go away.

  Memphis’s black leadership is pressuring Doc to come to the city as the situation worsens with every passing day. The garbage strikers are gaining no ground. The powers that be continue to refuse their demands. Reverend James Lawson wants Doc to address the grievances and lend his great prestige to their noble cause.

  Doc is torn.

  The Poor People’s Campaign requires all his attention, but Memphis is calling. Memphis stays on his mind.

  In the midnight hour, unable to sleep in still another hotel room in still another city, Doc finds himself singing those same words he sang in Acapulco. It is the ancient hymn whose meaning penetrates his heart.

  Nothing in my hand I bring

  Simply to Thy cross I cling

  Naked, come to Thee for dress

  Helpless, look to Thee for grace

  Foul, I to the fountain fly

  Wash me, Saviour, or I die

  While I draw this fleeting breath

  When mine eyes shall close in death

  When I soar to worlds unknown

  See Thee on Thy judgment throne

  Rock of Ages, cleft for me

  Let me hide myself in Thee

  Chapter Eighteen

  RESTLESS HEART

  As a devoted student of theology, Doc is versed in the seminal texts of Christianity. Among those is The Confessions of Saint Augustine, the radically introspective fourth century autobiography that glorifies God even as it questions God’s unknowable ways:

  “Man is one of your creatures, Lord, and his instinct is to praise you. He bears about him the mark of death, the sign of his own sin, to remind him that you thwart the proud. But still, since he is a part of your creation, he wishes to praise you. The thought of you stirs him so deeply that he cannot be content unless he praises you, because you have made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.”

  Then: “My soul is like a house, small for you to enter, but I pray you to enlarge it. It is in ruins, I ask you to remake it.”