Let the Trumpet Sound
A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Stephen B. Oates
To the memory of
Addie Mae Collins
Denise McNair
Carol Robertson
and
Cynthia Wesley
For it was to restore the beloved community, so that the children of the world might inherit a legacy of peace, that he came down out of the academy, down from his pulpit, and marched his way to glory.
For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
I CORINTHIANS 15:52
Contents
Epigraph
Prologue to the HarperPerennial Edition
Part One Odyssey
Part Two On the Stage of History
Part Three Freedom Is Never Free
Part Four Seasons of Sorrow
Part Five The Dreamer Cometh
Part Six Life’s Restless Sea
Part Seven Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around
Part Eight The Road to Jericho
Part Nine The Hour of Reckoning
Part Ten Free at Last
Acknowledgments
References
Searchable Terms
Other Books by Stephen B. Oates
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE TO THE HARPERPERENNIAL EDITION*
The Story Behind the Biography
I
I first thought about writing a life of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the spring of 1977. My biography of Lincoln had appeared that February, and I had been searching in vain for another subject. When I mentioned King as a possibility, some of my colleagues and friends expressed concern. I was known as a biographer of the Civil War era. Why would I want to risk my reputation by writing about a controversial subject who had died just nine years before?
I had considered other figures as possible subjects. But none of them was as demanding as Lincoln. Lc I was to grow as a writer, I had to take a risk, do something even more challenging than my previous biography. And King was certainly that.
There seemed valid reasons for me to undertake a life of King. I was an experienced biographer who had studied and taught the art of life-writing; perhaps I could bring some expertise to bear in resurrecting King. While I had never met him, I had been active in the civil-rights movement in Austin, Texas, and had long admired him as the spiritual leader of the movement and the trumpet voice of America’s anguish and aspirations in the matter of racial justice. I hoped that my respect for him would lead to empathy, the biographer’s requisite quality.
A life of King also seemed consistent with the themes of my previous work. In addition to my life of Lincoln, I had written biographies of the slave rebel Nat Turner and the revolutionary abolitionist John Brown. All three had been profoundly affected by the moral paradox of slavery and racial oppression in a land based on enlightened ideals of liberty, and all had devised their own solutions to that problem. King, though struggling in a subsequent century, was both historically and symbolically linked to these figures of the Civil War era. Driven, visionary, and spiritual like them, King perceived that the civil-rights movement was an extension of the Civil War, that he and his followers were striving to realize the promise of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. In fact, King gave his most famous speech, “I Have a Dream,” at the Lincoln Memorial. In the end, King too was assassinated, a victim of the same conflict over racial tensions and national destiny that had claimed Lincoln’s life in another April long before—and that had claimed the lives of John Brown and Nat Turner, too. It seemed to me that a life of King would add significantly to the biographical tapestry I was creating.
Finally, in reading King’s own books, I experienced that phenomenon biographers often feel when searching for a subject—I felt a tapping on the shoulder, a beckoning from the mist. It was a strange, almost spiritual, sensation of being called.
Still, I was apprehensive. It remained to be seen whether I could pull together a book that would satisfy me. As far as I could tell, Boston University had the only collection of King papers then open to the public. Another collection, owned by King’s widow, Coretta, was reportedly uncatalogued and gathering dust in the basement of her Atlanta headquarters. There were archives in the presidential libraries of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson that bore on the King story, and several collateral manuscript collections that might be useful. But could a successful biography be fashioned from such disparate and elusive sources? For me to try would require a leap of faith. With considerable trepidation, I made the leap.
II
Fortunately for me, Harper & Row, my publisher, came through with a contract and an advance against royalties that made my leap more tolerable. Then I sent Coretta King my prospectus and my credentials for undertaking a life of her husband and asked if I might meet with her. An intermediary informed me that Mrs. King could not see me, but that Stanley Levison, her New York lawyer and a friend and adviser of her husband’s, would talk to me in her behalf.
The meeting took place that June in Levison’s New York apartment. It was a disaster. Levison made it clear that he and Mrs. King would cooperate with me on one condition: that we enter into a contract giving both of them the right of “script approval”—a euphemism for censorship—without which my book could not be published.
In all my years as a biographer and historian, I had never encountered such a proposal, and it got my professional hackles up. As the price I had to pay for utilizing Mrs. King’s archives, I would have to submit my work to two people who had no training in history or biography. I told Levison that what he and Coretta could tell me about King would be invaluable and that I would welcome their critical responses to whatever I should write. But I could not submit to censorship. That would compromise my integrity, my quest for the truth. Should I produce one of those sanitized “authorized” lives, it would ruin my reputation as a serious biographer.
Levison was adamant. Without script approval, neither he nor Mrs. King would cooperate, which meant that I could not see her documents or interview a single member of the King family. To compound my misery, I learned that the King collection in Atlanta was much larger than that at Boston University and included King’s private and official correspondence, not to mention the papers of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), from about 1962 to 1968. How could I do an acceptable biography without seeing these materials?
From that point on, Levison and Coretta King were hostile to me and my project. Once, during a conference in Atlanta, a mutual friend tried to introduce me to Mrs. King in the hope that we might reach an understanding if we talked without intermediaries. But she would have nothing to do with me—“Mr. Oates and I have a real problem,” she snapped, and walked abruptly away.
I was learning a painful lesson that surviving family members can be a biographer’s worst enemies, especially when they control access to crucial manuscripts. Still, I could understand Mrs. King’s position. She was afraid that, unless she controlled matters, an irresponsible biographer would produce a vulgar book that sensationalized her husband’s shortcomings, defamed his character, and besmirched the family name. Yet I was hurt. I had a reputation for writing compassionate books. Levison had read my biography of Lincoln, and Mrs. King had been sent a copy; that book showed I was no character assassin. If I uncovered human frailties in King—and how could I not?—I would try to understand them, not use them to invite readers to an execution.
In Levison’s case, I did not know then what would surface later: he had once been a secret benefactor of the American Communist Party.* Evidently King himself had never known about tha
t, even though Levison had been his close friend and adviser. In short, Levison had something to conceal in his own background, and he clearly did not want that discovered and made public lest it somehow tarnish King’s reputation. I am convinced that this is why he wanted to control my work, and, failing that, to knock me off the project entirely.
III
So I was off to a perilous start. Yet I did make fascinating discoveries in the resources available to me. I gained a three-dimensional sense of my subject from Eli Landau’s incomparable King, A Filmed Record and other audio-visual materials I came across. Among these was a remarkable collection in the National Archives, which included tapes of King’s speeches, newsreels of his campaigns, and film copies of his television appearances. One film, The Negro and the American Promise, was a real find; produced in 1963 for National Educational Television, it featured separate interviews with King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. The interviews had been published in a book version which, I now discovered, had been edited to tone down Malcolm’s and King’s language. The film revealed how much more passionately, angrily, the two black leaders had disagreed at that time in their approaches to white America and racial change. Malcolm’s denunciations of King were stunning; so was King’s criticism of Malcolm. I copied quotations directly from the film copy, hoping that the authentic version would make a dramatic and significant scene in my story.
The film records relating to King revealed telling details I might not have found in traditional written and printed documents: the tilt of King’s head in conversation, the little gestures he made with his fingers to stress a point in oratory, the way he said “Birmin-ham” for Birmingham and “a-gain” for again, the ineradicable sadness of his eyes. Those eyes betrayed a vulnerability that gave me a fleeting glimpse into his inner self. Later I would find evidence of that vulnerability in unpublished sermons, letters, and other documents.
More archival material was available to me than I had expected. King’s former literary agent, a kindly woman who supported my project, opened her files to me without restriction. Here I discovered the hell King went through trying to write his many books while being constantly on the go as a civil-rights activist. Like other harried public figures, he had to rely on rewrite editors to polish his pages into publishable manuscripts. I also profited from a private collection donated to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, which shed much new light on King’s 1966 campaign to end Chicago’s slums.
But of all the archives I examined in the early going, I made my most exciting finds in the King papers housed at Boston University, which pertained to the King story down to about 1964. I rowed out over that sea of paper—some 83,000 documents all told—and threw my searchlight into the depths below. In addition to seeing how incredibly active King was as a public figure, my searches discovered a more personal King, a private King. That was crucial, for I was looking for the inner man, too, for what Leon Edel called “the figure under the carpet,” that is, the psychological signs and evidence that reveal the subject’s inner life.* Paul Mariani describes the discovery of that inner life as “the moment of the breakthrough”—“that moment of light streaming into the head, the moment of the rainbow.”†
I experienced several rainbow moments in the Boston University library. Perusing King’s papers, examinations, notebooks, and other matter accumulated during his graduate studies in Boston University’s School of Theology, I realized how supremely intelligent King was. According to his Ph.D. adviser, King was “a scholar’s scholar” with great intellectual potential. Indeed, immensely happy in the world of ideas, King at one time had hoped to teach theology at a major university or seminary. So that my readers might understand how brilliant he was as a scholar, I resolved to describe in detail King’s intellectual odyssey through the great thinkers of the ages, during which he worked out a complex personal philosophy.
One document among King’s Boston University papers really opened him up to me; I shall never forget coming across “Autobiography of Religious Development,” which King had written for a course in the religious development of personality. In the paper, the young theology student described how he had first joined the church at age five during an Atlanta revival. Right here I had found the opening of my biography, for the church was King’s spiritual home; here he could find the healing, reciprocal love he needed before returning to the battlefronts of the struggle. The church was to provide my story with a special symmetry, for it would end as it had begun—with King in Ebenezer Baptist Church. The end, however, would be his funeral, taking place in the same sanctuary where he had joined the church thirty-four years before, in the springtime hope of his childhood.
King’s autobiography also disputed the popular belief that he was born nonviolent and never hated anybody. I instinctively distrusted that notion: how could anyone witness the violence and evil of the South’s segregated world and not feel any anger? Now I had my answer. In his autobiography, King recounted his first boyhood brush with the reality of racism and discrimination in Atlanta, after which his parents told him about some of the insults they too had received. “I was greatly shocked,” King wrote, “and from that moment on I was determined to hate every white person.” His anger grew with every insult and outrage he experienced in the southern apartheid of his day. That King could hate hateful people and an oppressive system made him spring to life for me. Who would not feel the same in his situation?
Yet, as King later said himself, uncontrolled hatred can be self-destructive; in the hands of an ingenious rabble-rouser like Hitler, it can lead to violent upheaval in the world. As an angry black man growing up in the segregated South, King could have come along preaching hatred and bloody retaliation. Had he done so, given his gift for inspiring masses of people, this nation might have plunged into another civil war. But King had not come along that way. Why not?
I decided that another line in his autobiography held the key to that question. When King’s parents admonished him to love white people because it was his Christian duty, King did not repeat his vow to hate all whites. Instead he asked, “How can I love a race of people who hate me?” How indeed? It was his strength of character, a combination of his Christian faith, his humanity, and a self-esteem inculcated in him by his parents and a loving grandmother, that allowed King to remain open to the possibilities of positive change. He found that in the teachings of Gandhi, which showed King how to harness his anger and to channel it into a positive and creative force for social change.
Later in my research, I learned how much a mature King had to struggle to stand by his nonviolent faith. He could feel the most terrible anger when whites murdered a black or bombed a black church; he could contemplate giving up, turning America over to the haters of both races, only to dedicate himself anew to his convictions and his dream, which was to redeem the country he loved, to create in this nation of immigrants a “symphony of brotherhood and sisterhood.”
IV
Many of the libraries I visited had extensive oral history holdings, which contained transcribed interviews with living witnesses who had known and worked with King. Their testimony added a human dimension to the puzzle I was trying to piece together. Each of their voices, ringing out from the darkness, gave me a view of King from a unique angle. As a biographer, I intended ultimately to create from a great many individual views of King a single, coherent portrait.
Once I had finished most of my archival research and had ingested the pertinent published sources, I felt I had sufficient command of the facts to begin interviewing witnesses myself. Their testimony would prove invaluable because I could ask them to fill in gaps, to elaborate on scenes and meetings in which they had participated. Then I would compare them to the library interviews and look for testimonies that corroborated one another. If, for example, two or three witnesses gave similar accounts of a meeting, then I would tend to regard them as reliable. From reading the transcribed interviews in libraries, I was convinced that I should ask questions about s
pecific events and situations and proceed sequentially, from the initial meeting with King until the last memory. I also resolved to use a tape recorder, so as to ensure factual accuracy.
When I tried to set up interviews, first by letter and then by phone, I ran into a vortex of difficulties. Nobody would talk. I could understand why certain people close to Levison and Coretta King would turn me down. But what about the other veterans of the movement? Why had most of them not responded to my entreaties?
Finally, noticing that many civil-rights luminaries would be on hand for an Atlanta gathering, I flew there in hopes of securing an interview with somebody, anybody. The trouble was, my parents had raised me to be a gentleman. I took “no” to mean “no.” Now I had to impersonate an investigative reporter: I had to be aggressive, devoid of shame, and rude if necessary, and I had never to take no for an answer. Nothing in graduate school had ever prepared me for this. I was terrible at it. I hated to intrude on other people’s privacy, to ask them to remember things that could be painful. Who gave me the right to do that?
Finally, a breakthrough came in the form of a retired New York lawyer named Harry Wachtel. This kind, avuncular man agreed to an extensive interview and became my friend. He had been close to King and a member of a brain trust that advised him on civil-rights matters; Wachtel thus had a special perspective on the man and the movement, which he shared with me. He also gave me wise advice on how to secure other interviews. “Get Ralph Abernathy to talk,” he said. “You see how the movement has split into factions since King’s death. If Ralph talks to you, so will the others—out of fear of what Ralph said.”
What happened next proves how far a biographer will go if he is sufficiently desperate. Abernathy was still pastor of West Hunter Baptist Church in Atlanta. I flew back there and set up headquarters near the top of a towering hotel (I think I wanted heavenly help for what I was about to do). Since Abernathy wouldn’t respond to my phone calls, I had to throw aside what my mother had taught me about being nice. Adopting the confrontational tactics of the civil rights movement, I took a taxi to West Hunter just before Abernathy was to preach on Wednesday night, and I positioned myself in front of his door; call it a standin, if you like. He approached, slyly looking me over, and attempted the delicate maneuver of reaching all the way around me, unlocking his door, and dashing in to safety; but I blocked the keyhole with my nonviolent body while babbling my name and what I wanted. Somehow he got the door open, and through the crack I glimpsed my books on his desk, the books which, having no shame, I had sent him to prove I was a serious biographer. At last, complaining about the sermon he had to deliver in a few moments, Abernathy capitulated and agreed to talk with me the next day over lunch.
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