Death of a King Read online

“Dr. King’s Error” is the title of the New York Times editorial. “The political strategy of uniting the peace movement and the civil rights movement could very well be disastrous for both causes,” claims the paper before calling Doc’s approach “wasteful and self-defeating.… Linking these hard, complex problems will lead not to solutions but to deeper confusion.”

  The Washington Post is even more damning: Doc “has done a grave injury to those who are his natural allies… and… an even graver injury to himself. Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence. He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people.”

  “King has gone off on a tangent,” declares Life magazine. “Instead of providing a share of the leadership that the faltering civil rights movement so desperately needs… he introduces matters that have nothing to do with the legitimate battle for equal rights here in America… [and] comes close to betraying the cause for which he has worked so long.”

  Even more painful for Doc, though, are the attacks from the country’s most prominent black citizens. The people he thinks will be most sympathetic to his argument become, in many cases, his fiercest antagonists.

  Carl Rowan, perhaps the most prestigious African American journalist—a former United States ambassador and former director of the United States Information Agency—writes in his nationally syndicated column, later to be expanded upon in Reader’s Digest, one of the country’s most widely read magazines, “Negroes had, in fact, begun to grow uneasy about King. He no longer seemed to be the selfless leader of the 1950s. There was grumbling that his trips to jail looked like publicity stunts. Bayard Rustin, a chief planner of the great civil rights March on Washington in 1963, and himself a pacifist, pleaded in vain with King not to wade into the Vietnam controversy.

  “Why did King reject the advice of his old civil rights colleagues? Some say it was a matter of ego—that he was convinced that since he is the most influential Negro in the United States, President Johnson would have to listen to him and alter U.S. policy in Vietnam. Others received a more sinister speculation that had been whispered around Capitol Hill and in the nation’s newsrooms for more than two years—talk of communists influencing the actions and words of the young minister. This talk disturbed other civil rights leaders more than anything else.… King has alienated many of the Negro’s friends and armed the Negro’s foes, in both parties, by creating the impression that the Negro is disloyal. By urging Negroes not to respond to the draft or to fight in Vietnam, he has taken a tack that many Americans of all races consider irresponsible.”

  Rowan points to a damning Harris poll indicating that one in every two blacks in America considers King dead wrong on the war question. Another 27 percent reserve comment.

  If Rowan’s assault isn’t enough, Doc has to deal with the dagger being wielded by Dr. Ralph Bunche, his fellow Nobel laureate and the first African American to receive the prize. Bunche is not only the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, but also a board member for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—the oldest and largest civil rights organization in American history. A solid citizen of the black bourgeoisie himself, Doc is devastated when, some days later, a front-page New York Times story reports that Bunche supported an NAACP board position to “oppose the effort to merge the civil rights and peace movements” and had, in fact, “moved to toughen the language of the… resolution by denouncing the merger attempt as a ‘serious tactical mistake.’… He added that Walter P. Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers union, another NAACP board member, had supported his proposal.”

  Attacks from black intellectuals and policy makers is one thing; attacks from the grassroots black press is quite another. It isn’t enough for the Pittsburgh Courier to go after him on Vietnam; the paper questions the merits of his recent civil rights work:

  “It has only been a few months since Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference abandoned the South to attack problems in the urban north. Chicago was selected for its initial assault and there is still debate over the relative merits of that program last summer. Some have credited Dr. King and his SCLC followers with the defeat of longtime supporter of liberal causes Paul Douglas in his bid for the U.S. Senate. Others say the efforts did little to aid the plight of Chicago’s South and West Side Negroes whose problems are more complex than those of a rural community in a Dixie located state.” In a final blow, the paper concludes that Doc “does not speak for all Negro America and besides he is tragically misleading them.”

  Doc puts down the papers.

  A second vodka and orange juice.

  Another long look out on the vast gray expanse of sky.

  A deep sigh.

  He closes his eyes, tries to sleep, but sleep won’t come. He reaches into his briefcase and pulls out a copy of the speech that has caused all this fury. As he reads it over, he reflects on what has happened. He knows that it wasn’t his best delivery. Like the Mississippi blues singer and the New Orleans jazz musician, Doc is a freewheeling improviser. His greatest oratory moments have been spontaneous and, in the very moment of delivery, informed by the spirit, not a prepared text. Riverside was a prepared text. Because the speech was part history lesson and part peace plan, Doc had been careful to make a step-by-step case. That meant mostly sticking to the words written on the page. The result was a formality that subdued his typically soulful, free style.

  The Riverside speech was also one of the rare times that Doc’s aides distributed the complete text to the press. Not even his celebrated “I Have a Dream” address, delivered four summers ago from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, had been mimeographed and made available to reporters covering the massive rally. John F. Kennedy had refused to attend that march. Afraid that Doc would provoke a riot, the president watched the proceedings on television from the White House. He refused to stand shoulder to shoulder with King. Only when the rally proved peaceful did Kennedy invite Doc and his cohorts to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for a photo op.

  Doc smiles at the memory of a friend telling him that “I Have a Dream,” like “A Change Is Gonna Come” for Sam Cooke, would surely be remembered as his greatest hit. There were indeed high moments in that address:

  “There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright days of justice emerge. And that is something that I must say to my people who stand on the worn threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.…

  “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice… will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

  “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream… I have a dream that one day in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

  “I have a dream today.… When we allow freedom to ring—when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last.’ ”

&nbs
p; That was August 28, 1963. Three short months later, on November 22, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. In the view of many, America’s age of innocence—renewed in the aftermath of World War II, elongated during the relatively sleepy two-term presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, and recharged by the Camelot aura of the early sixties—ended with that shocking tragedy. Kennedy died the death of a martyr. And LBJ, his successor, used that martyrdom to push through long-overdue legal protections for minorities.

  Protect us by protecting LBJ, Doc’s Negro critics are now telling him.

  Don’t bite the hand that feeds us.

  Be smart.

  Be practical.

  Stay in your lane.

  But now Doc has pulled onto a completely different highway. “I Have a Dream”—a moving and brilliantly succinct sermon—was delivered at the right time in the right place, before a throng of a quarter million in the nation’s capital. For all its biting critique of racist America, Doc’s message was hardly viewed as controversial. Like a lyrical piece of popular music, it resonated with the great masses. It was, in fact, an enormous hit.

  Now, according to the nation’s most powerful opinion makers, Riverside is a colossal failure, a fatal mistake in the career of a man who has overstepped his bounds and lost his way.

  Why this sudden reversal?

  Doc finishes off his second vodka and reflects on the enormity of that question. To his mind, his “Beyond Vietnam” speech was a carefully constructed argument—logical, cogent, and irrefutable. He’d been told that the distribution of his remarks to the press that evening would help his case. Yet it had exactly the opposite effect.

  As an astute observer of the American scene, Doc knew full well that the culture wars were escalating—young versus old, doves versus hawks. He knew that not everyone would be pleased when, with unapologetic defiance, he took on the Johnson administration. But he had no notion that the reaction to his remarks would be the most uniformly and viciously negative of a public career going back to the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955.

  The vitriol behind those attacks has his head throbbing. The idea that he is “tragically misleading” his people is nothing he wants to consider. He wants to order a third drink but asks the stewardess to bring him a cup of coffee instead. He feels like having a cigarette. His policy is not to smoke in public, but the plane is half-empty and, with his aide sitting in the aisle seat next to him, Doc is afforded a privacy that allows him to light up a Salem. For much of his adult life he’s vowed to quit smoking. Not long ago he even made the pledge to his wife, Coretta. But when she found a pack in his coat pocket, he did what men often do—he blamed it on someone else. He told Coretta the cigarettes belonged to Tom Houck, his driver. From then on, after being dropped off at night, Doc handed his Salems to Tom, only to get them back the next morning.

  He draws on his smoke. Could he be “tragically misleading” his people? As a highly educated intellectual who believes in challenging one’s own ideas, Doc has always been his sternest critic. And like all people of faith, he has to deal with his doubts.

  He thinks back to how his doubts were excited by his encounters with Stanley Levison. A Jewish lawyer who has dedicated his life to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Levison works without pay. Doc never doubts Levison’s devotion and especially values the fact that Levison, unlike some other aides, has no personal agenda or ambitions of his own. Levison’s opinions cannot be ignored.

  When it came to Riverside, Levison was forthright.

  “I am afraid you will become identified as a leader of a fringe movement when you are much more,” Levison said when he read the text that he also characterized as “unbalanced and poorly thought out.” He further offered, “I do not think [the speech] was a good expression of you.”

  Doc, who relished a good debate, fought back, arguing that the speech might be “politically unwise but morally wise.… I really feel that someone of influence has to say that the United States is wrong, and everybody is afraid to say it.… I have just become so disgusted with the way people of America are being brainwashed… by the administration.”

  In the aftermath of the speech, though, Levison’s cautionary words hit Doc hardest. Responding to King’s hope that his speech would sway public opinion—and the administration—toward a withdrawal from Vietnam, the lawyer had said, “It will be harder than Birmingham.”

  Looking out the window of the plane, Doc sees that the clouds have parted. The sun is shining. The sky is a luminous blue. The captain announces that they are passing over the city of Chicago. The city Doc chose when, two years ago, he traveled north to champion the plight of the urban poor.

  “In the South, we always had segregationists to help make issues clear,” he said at the time. “This ghetto Negro has been invisible so long and has become visible through violence.”

  Rather than live in a hotel suite or a comfortable high-rise, Doc moved into the heart of the ghetto: a $90-a-week third-floor walk-up flat in the neighborhood of North Lawndale—nicknamed Slumdale—where he led the Chicago Freedom Movement, a multipronged assault on the brutal discrimination facing the underprivileged in housing, health, education, and employment. It was also in Chicago that Doc addressed the issue of urban violence and met face-to-face with the leaders of the city’s most notorious gangs.

  From the very start, Doc’s efforts were bitterly opposed by the formidable Chicago Democratic machine, led by Mayor Richard Daley, a Johnson ally—the same Daley who used his mighty influence in a calculated attempt to discredit Doc’s campaign and obliterate his reputation. It was Daley who only last July warned LBJ that Doc is “not your friend. He’s against you on Vietnam. He’s a goddamn faker.”

  Doc’s sworn enemies have, for some time now, been among the most powerful people in government, including J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI. As Doc wings his way west, he is fully aware that his opponents have been emboldened by his speech at Riverside; still, he has no idea that Hoover has not only planted spies among the upper echelon of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but has also set wiretaps to monitor the phone calls of Doc and his aides. One of the spies is James Harrison, the treasurer of SCLC, who, for nearly two years, has been taking under-the-table money from the FBI to report on the activities of Doc and his organization. Another is Ernest Withers, a black freelance photographer and an insider in the civil rights movement who has spent an enormous amount of time covering Doc all across the country.

  Back in 1964, it was the FBI that anonymously mailed Doc a vicious letter from an assailant urging him to kill himself. Unfortunately, it was Coretta who opened the package. “King,” it stated, “there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what this is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

  The letter accused him of grave moral improprieties along with a tape made by bugging Doc’s hotel rooms. On the tape Doc is telling off-color jokes. There are also suggestions and sounds of sexual activity. But somehow his marriage has weathered the storm.

  Another cup of coffee, another Salem, another long look out the window; the sky is again covered by clouds. The plane hits an air pocket. The captain warns of rough weather ahead. Doc straps on his seat belt. He is used to rough weather of every variety. He has been flying in and out of storms for the greater part of his life.

  Some of those storms nearly took him out.

  Back in 1958, he was at a book signing in Harlem when a woman plunged a knife in his chest.

  Four years later, a white power fanatic in Birmingham jumped to the stage as Doc was speaking. The assailant hit Doc in the face, struck him on the side of the head and punched him in the gut. The preacher put up no resistance. He simply got up and, after the attacker was taken away, somehow completed his remarks.

&n
bsp; During a march in Chicago to protest housing segregation, Doc faced a placard that read “King would look good with a knife in his back.” During that same march a stone struck him on the head and felled him to his knees. To protect Doc from an onslaught of flying bottles, rocks, and firecrackers, his aides surrounded him, but the minister kept marching. Afterward he said, “I have to do this—to expose myself—to bring this hate into the open.” Then he added, “I have seen many demonstrations in the South, but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today.”

  That was last year in Chicago.

  This year after Riverside, the hate and hostility, like the war in Vietnam that Doc so passionately opposes, will escalate to even higher and more dangerous levels.

  His mood is sullen. The sheer number of attacks has taken its toll and wounded his spirit. But wounded or not, he summons the strength to start plotting out his plan for the rest of the year—more protests against America’s rising militarism and, if God wills him to live long enough, the mobilization of a sweeping Poor People’s Campaign that will transform the national conscience and spotlight the pressing needs of those who, in the words of the gospel of Matthew, are “the least of these my brothers and sisters.”

  The plane flies into the center of the storm. The turbulence is severe but not severe enough to keep Doc from reaching for his notebook and getting to work.

  Chapter Three

  “THE LANGUAGE OF THE UNHEARD”

  Doc is a minister on the move. For the past decade he has lived life at a frenetic pace, crisscrossing the country in jets and puddle jumpers, on buses and in cars, accompanied by aides and advisers with whom he confers on the run. His days are jam-packed with phone calls, press conferences, speeches, and strategy sessions. He is a crusader in a tremendous hurry, a paradoxical symbol of a super activist-pacifist. His work ethos is beyond excessive. He is incapable of slowing down.

  And yet in April of 1967, Doc faces a firewall of criticism that, at least for now, has him reeling. When his plane lands in Los Angeles, he hurries to an overcrowded press conference at the Biltmore Hotel. He is testy. Stanley Levison has written for him a defense of Riverside, an argument that the speech did not—as the news accounts have reported—call for a literal merger of the civil rights and peace movements. As a natural-born advocate, Doc does not relish being on the defensive. Furthermore, he does not want to give the appearance of backing down from his antiwar position. When it comes to sparring matches with the press, he is an old pro, a nimble opponent and skilled debater. But today in California, sensing his weariness and vulnerability, the reporters are unrelenting. Question after question comes down to the same charge: