Death of a King Read online

  The day after—Friday, March 29, 3 p.m.

  Doc is still at the Holiday Inn, still struggling to maintain emotional equilibrium.

  Levison calls, again trying to becalm his friend. He continues to stress all that has been accomplished and all the good that lies ahead.

  His words have little effect. A political realist, Doc analyzes his situation with unsentimental clarity: yesterday’s debacle will embolden the black leaders who oppose him—from Adam Clayton Powell to Stokely Carmichael to Bayard Rustin. And the whites who oppose him—from the president of the United States on down—will use this moment to attack him.

  “Martin Luther King is dead,” Doc tells Levison. “He’s finished. His nonviolence is nothing, no one is listening to it. Let’s face it, we do have a great public relations setback where my image and my leadership are concerned.”

  He goes on to explain that earlier in the day the Invaders—the youths who instigated the riot—turned up at his hotel.

  “They came to me,” says Doc. “I didn’t even call for them. They came up here. They love me. They were fighting the leadership of Memphis. They were fighting Jim Lawson and the men who… would not hear them and wouldn’t give them any attention.… I had no knowledge of all this. I know the fellows, and they really do love me. They were too sick to see what they were doing yesterday was hurting me much more than it could hurt the local preachers. But… what do we do?”

  Doc considers a fast, in the tradition of Gandhi, whose pacifist demonstrations also triggered violence. A fast would symbolize atonement.

  Levison still thinks that Doc is overreacting, that he is wrong to assume the blame for a march at which 99 percent of the marchers behaved nonviolently.

  It doesn’t matter whether he assumes the blame or not, Doc insists, because the press will undoubtedly place the blame on him.

  “Watch your newspapers,” Doc tells Levison. “Watch what the New York Times says. It will be the most negative thing about Martin Luther King you have ever seen.”

  Doc is right.

  The New York Times calls the incident “a powerful embarrassment to Dr. King” and urges him to cancel his Poor People’s Campaign: “None of the precautions he and his aides are taking to keep the capital demonstration peaceful can provide any dependable insurance against another eruption of the kind that rocked Memphis.… Dr. King must by now realize that his descent on Washington is likely to prove even more counterproductive.”

  “King’s position as leader of a nonviolent movement has been shattered,” says the local Memphis paper, the Commercial Appeal. “He wrecked his reputation when he took off at high speed when violence occurred, instead of trying to use his persuasive prestige to stop it.”

  Reading such reports is infuriating, not only because of the mean-spirited animus but because of the flagrant mischaracterization of the facts.

  Yet in the face of extreme adversity, Doc manages to rally.

  In a press conference before leaving Memphis, he does not defend himself. Instead he takes the high road and defends SCLC. He says that contrary to published reports, “my organization had no part in planning the march. Our intelligence was totally nil.”

  He fights through his own sense of defeat and defiantly announces that he will soon return to the city to lead another major march—this one under the careful planning of his own people. Under no circumstances will he abandon Memphis’s garbage workers. The urgency of their issues will not be ignored.

  When asked whether yesterday’s civil disturbance will cause him to cancel his Poor People’s Campaign, he stands firm: “We are fully determined to go to Washington. We feel it is an absolute necessity.”

  Memphis isn’t only on Doc’s mind. On no fewer than three separate occasions, LBJ points to Memphis. He calls the riot a reminder that “violence and repression can only divide our people” and, borrowing a phrase from Lincoln, decries “redress by mob law.” The stinging criticism of the press is one thing. But a rebuke from the president of the United States is quite another.

  The blind man has hands of steel.

  He requires all the strength at his command to undo the dense knots in Doc’s aching back and neck. The masseur at Atlanta’s downtown YMCA has worked on Doc many times before, but he has never felt anything like the muscular tightness that he must manipulate today.

  Just off the plane from Memphis, Doc is on the rubdown table. He prizes the skill of the sightless man to attack his tension. The fact that the massage therapist works in complete silence is an extra bonus. Aimless chatter is the last thing in the world that Doc wants to hear.

  Doc wants to lose consciousness of all thought and analysis; wants to cease reviewing the past week and the past month and the past year; wants to stop anticipating what will happen today and tomorrow and the day after tomorrow; wants to stop pursuing and planning and putting on a brave face before those who doubt him or those who would destroy him; wants to stop fearing the destruction of his grand vision; wants to stop fearing his own death; wants to stop the endless rotation of complex ideas and ugly images that have been haunting him night and day; wants to find relief in this mindless act of lying supine on a massage table and allowing the relief that comes when muscles are untangled and thoughts disappear.

  An avalanche of thoughts returns the next day—Saturday, March 30—at an SCLC emergency meeting at Ebenezer. The emergency, of course, is Memphis.

  In the wake of the riot, Doc’s hope is that his closest colleagues will support his commitment to redouble his efforts to back the strikers. He needs SCLC to reaffirm his mission.

  It doesn’t happen. Instead he faces more biting criticism and bickering dissent.

  Why did Doc agree to participate in the march without being certain that the Memphis leaders had the militants under control?

  And why in the world does he want to go back?

  Forget Memphis. Memphis was a bust. Memphis continues to be not only a distraction but a draining misadventure. It’s time to move on from Memphis.

  Doc will not move on. He argues that the principles—and pragmatism—of pacifism must be reestablished. “Memphis is the Washington campaign in miniature,” he claims. Memphis must be made right so supporters can see the positive prospects of occupying the capital.

  But SCLC insiders do more than attack Doc’s association with Memphis; they attack the efficacy of his Poor People’s Campaign, period.

  Andy Young states unequivocally that if the campaign does take place, it must be delayed for at least a year.

  Stanley Levison rejects Doc’s argument that the campaign will be analogous to the bonus marchers of the Great Depression. Like other King advisers, he doubts the campaign’s political wisdom.

  James Bevel is vehemently against the entire operation. “We don’t need to be hanging around Washington,” he insists. “We need to stop this war.”

  Jesse Jackson thinks that the Memphis situation is too small to merit Doc’s attention and the Poor People’s Campaign too unorganized. Jackson wants attention focused on his Operation Breadbasket.

  Doc snaps. He’s heard enough.

  He accuses Young of capitulating to his doubts.

  He accuses Bevel of capitulating to the paralysis of analysis.

  He accuses Jackson of capitulating to his own ambition.

  He storms out of the meeting.

  His aides run after him.

  “Doc, Doc, don’t worry! Everything’s going to be all right,” Jackson shouts.

  “Jesse,” Doc answers, “everything’s not going to be all right! If things keep going the way they’re going now, it’s not SCLC but the whole country that’s in trouble.… If you’re so interested in doing your own thing that you can’t do what this organization’s structured to do, if you want to carve out your own niche in society, go ahead. But for God’s sake, don’t bother me!”

  Ralph Abernathy has never seen Doc this agitated. Walking him to his car, Abernathy expresses his deep concern for his friend’s w
ell-being.

  “I’ll snap out of it,” Doc mutters. “I’ll pull through it.”

  Doc gets in the car and, rejecting all company—even the companionship of his friend Ralph—he does something he rarely does, especially in light of an ever-increasing number of threats to his life.

  He drives off into the night.

  Alone.

  With no word about where he is going.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  FREEDOM EXPLOSION

  The next day, the preacher can be found back in the pulpit.

  It is the last Sunday in March, and Doc is using his sermon at Washington National Cathedral to lift his own spirits.

  Determined to fight the despondency dragging him down, he looks to one of the brightest passages in the Book of Revelation: “Behold, I make all things new; former things are passed away.”

  He points out how, just as Rip van Winkle slept through the American Revolution, there are those among the parishioners sleeping through the day’s revolution. There are those among them missing all that is new. The new and most compelling revolution is the one for human rights, “the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world.”

  That revolution will not wait. It will not slow down for those who claim that progressives like Doc are moving too quickly. It will not be quieted by those who claim that “the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps.”

  These antirevolutionaries “never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil.… It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”

  Doc links racism to the issue that allows him no peace: poverty.

  “Like a monstrous octopus, poverty spreads its nagging, prehensile tentacles into hamlets and villages all over our world. Two-thirds of the people of the world go to bed hungry tonight. They are ill-housed; they are ill-nourished; they are shabbily clad. I’ve seen it in Latin America; I’ve seen it in Africa; I’ve seen this poverty in Asia.”

  Doc brings the message home to America, speaking about his trip to Marks, Mississippi. “I saw hundreds of little black boys and black girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear. I saw their mothers and fathers trying to carry on a little Head Start program, but they had no money.”

  He speaks of his recent visits to the tenements of Newark and Harlem and the frustrations that he faces as a man determined to force the country he loves to heed the cries of the dispossessed.

  And, of course, he speaks of his Poor People’s Campaign.

  “In a few weeks some of us are coming to Washington to see if the will is still alive… in this nation.… Yes, we are going to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses.… We are going to bring those who have come to feel that life is a long and desolate corridor with no exit signs. We are going to bring children and adults and old people, people who have never seen a doctor or a dentist.…

  “We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not coming to tear up Washington.… We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago,” he urges, repeating the admonition that he first articulated during his “I Have a Dream” speech five years earlier.

  “We are coming,” he continues, “to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between the promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.”

  Doc makes visible his most vehement critics by telling the story of a newsman who confronted him:

  “Dr. King,” he asked, “don’t you think you’re going to have to stop, now, opposing the war and move more in line with the administration’s policy?… It has hurt the budget of your organization, and people who once respected you have lost respect for you.”

  “I’m not a consensus leader,” Doc replied. “I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.”

  “Ultimately,” Doc tells his congregants, “a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.

  “Cowardice asks the question—is it safe? Expedience asks the question—is it politic? Vanity asks the question—is it popular? Conscience asks the question—is it right?”

  Doc closes by declaring that he will not “yield to a politic of despair. I’m going to maintain hope as we come to Washington in this campaign. The cards are stacked against us. This time we will really confront a Goliath. God grant that we will be that David of truth set out against the Goliath of injustice, the Goliath of neglect.…

  “Our goal is freedom, and I believe we are going to get there because however much she strays away from it, the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be as a people, our destiny is tied up in the destiny of America.”

  But what of Doc’s destiny?

  Even before the Memphis riot, the FBI has been working overtime to undermine him. On one front, it issued fraudulent news leaks in the North about how SCLC, flush with cash, was not in need of funds. Meanwhile, FBI agents wrote letters to supporters in the South saying that there was “no provision to house or feed marchers” in the upcoming Washington campaign, whose purpose was only “King’s personal aggrandizement.”

  “Prepare the letters on commercially purchased stationery,” J. Edgar Hoover instructed his underlings, “and take all necessary precautions to insure they cannot be traced back to the Bureau.”

  After Memphis, the bureau’s anti-King campaign grew even nastier. A memo was sent to the media claiming that “the result of King’s famous espousal of nonviolence was vandalism, looting, and riot.” Doc was seen as “like Judas leading lambs to slaughter.” Hoover told his friends in the press that “King led the marchers to violence, and when the violence broke out, King disappeared.” Rather than go to the Lorraine, “owned and patronized exclusively by Negroes,” Doc preferred “the plush Holiday Inn Motel, white owned, operated, and almost exclusively white patronized.”

  Doc knows nothing about these assaults on his character and campaign. He does know, however, that the upcoming presidential elections will have an enormous impact on the poor.

  With that in mind, on the Sunday afternoon following his Washington National Cathedral sermon, Doc and Andy Young meet with Michigan congressman John Conyers and Gary, Indiana, mayor Richard Hatcher to discuss which of the candidates—Eugene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy—might better serve the needs of the underprivileged. Either way, Doc is vehemently opposed to the renomination of President Johnson.

  Even in the midst of the political discussion, though, Doc is still clearly caught up in a state of dejection.

  “I don’t know when I have ever seen him as discouraged and depressed,” Young will later say.

  Sunday evening Doc watches the president address the nation. The shock of Johnson’s announcement changes Doc’s dark mood, if only for the moment:

  “I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party as your President.”

  The statement is startling. No one expected Johnson to leave the race. It is, in some respects, a victory for those who, like Doc, have tirelessly opposed his war policy. It is recognition of the reality that such a policy has rendered LBJ politically impotent.

  Doc is gratified that, adhering to the hawks, Johnson cannot sustain his presidency. At the same time, Doc’s heart cannot help but feel for a man who courageously supported the cause of racial equality.

  In 1963, shortly after the assassination of John Kennedy, it was Johnson who turned to Doc to offer support for his cause.

  In 1965, after the riots broke out in Watts, it was Johnson who called Doc to gain a deeper understanding of the disturbance.

  And, of course, it was Johnson who invited Doc to the White House on many occasions, not only to personally confer with the president but to witness the signing of the historic legislation that the two allies—the shrewd politician from Texas and the
Baptist preacher from Georgia—labored long and hard to bring to life: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

  Doc remembers that it was Johnson who, addressing the cause of black Americans, said, “Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray for wise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevant differences.”

  And yet other essential and earth-shattering differences cannot be set aside:

  Johnson pursues a war that Doc considers one of the great disasters of American history. Through his FBI director, Johnson is aggressively working to decimate Doc’s effort to activate his Poor People’s Campaign. Even as Johnson’s political currency is on the verge of bankruptcy, the president’s minions are manipulating the media to demonize Doc and destroy his plans.

  On this last day of March, the day of Lyndon Johnson’s surprise statement about his political future, Doc has no choice but to focus on the future of his own political plans.

  The future is obviously not about LBJ.

  Nor is the future about a futile attempt to win an unwinnable war.

  In Doc’s mind, the future continues to be about one place, and one place only.

  Memphis.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  THE MOUNTAINTOP IN MEMPHIS

  Fate is a mysterious thing.

  On the morning of Wednesday, April 3, Mable John, a soul singer who lives in Chicago, makes a fateful decision to give up her room at the Lorraine Motel—number 306—to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

  A recording star for Memphis’s Stax Records, Mable has been in the studio cutting a new album, even as her current single—“Able Mable”—is being played on WDIA. The sessions have been extended a few days longer than anticipated, thus delaying her departure.