Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  The next day, I showed up promptly at noon. I sat in his waiting room, glancing through the only magazine there again and again. At one o’clock, Abernathy came out of his office, peered over his glasses at me, said he had a financial problem he had to solve before he could leave, and returned to his office. He repeated this ritual every hour or so for the rest of the afternoon. At six, he came out and seemed surprised that I was still there. Now, the financial problem miraculously solved, he was ready to eat supper and suggested a nearby seafood restaurant. I thought: the clever rascal had been testing me, making me wait to see if I was serious about interviewing him.

  On the way to the restaurant, Abernathy complained that most of the things written about King and the movement had slighted his role in it; some accounts never mentioned him except to point out how badly he had failed as King’s chosen successor. He was genuinely hurt. He had been King’s closest friend and adviser, had been in marches with him, in danger with him, in jail with him. He had been asked to do the impossible in taking King’s place. Nobody could take King’s place; there was nobody else like him.

  As we entered the restaurant, a blond woman jumped from her seat and exclaimed, “You’re Dr. Abernathy!” She said she was visiting from Germany, and she brought forward her two small children to meet him. At our table, Abernathy seemed unfazed by the episode and continued to regret the lack of public recognition of his role in history. I made a mental note—“injured feelings,” “battered ego”—as he showed me a watch King had given him.

  To my dismay, Abernathy would not give me an interview at this time. But he would grant me one, he promised, during SCLC’s annual convention in Birmingham two weeks later.

  After we returned to West Hunter, I stumbled upon a young white man employed by the church who had participated in the civil-rights struggles in Florida. He gave me an interview on the spot and agreed to help me corner Abernathy in Birmingham. “This will take some doing,” he warned. He was prophetic.

  Two weeks later I was at the SCLC convention, following Abernathy everywhere he went. I was amazed at how popular he was—he was then SCLC’s outgoing president. People from all directions were calling his name and seeking him out. A flock of young people encircled him constantly, eager to touch and talk with a man they admired more than any other. At one point, I managed to chat with him briefly. Yes, yes, he said, he had promised me an interview and he was a man of his word. But I despaired of ever getting him alone in a quiet place where we could talk.

  Now the crowd surged off to another church. As it broke up, with me struggling to keep Abernathy in view, the young white man from West Hunter Church materialized at my elbow. He had a car. Could I steer Ralph to the corner? Somehow I did so just as the young man drove up; we pushed Abernathy into the back seat and sped away to my motel. He was chuckling, unoffended, but I couldn’t believe I had stooped to kidnapping to get my story.

  We went to my room, but no sooner had we sat down than the phone rang. I was astounded when a voice asked for Abernathy. How could anyone have known where to find him? I said, “He’s not here,” and shoved the phone under the mattress with the receiver off the hook. Before we began, Abernathy had me order a big lunch for him—he ate heaviest at midday—plus a bottle of wine. Then he slipped his shoes off and for two uninterrupted hours remembered his life with King, from the early days in Montgomery and the bus boycott there, to the great campaigns in Albany, Birmingham, Selma, Chicago, and the movement against the Vietnam War. I pressed him about specifics, about this meeting and that, pointing out when he said something that contradicted archival or printed sources or the transcribed interviews I had read in libraries. Abernathy was just getting to 1968, the year King went to Memphis, when he slowed down, yawned, lapsed into mumbles (the wine and large meal were taking their toll), and fell asleep. In a moment he was snoring.

  This was terrible. Abernathy’s testimony was crucial to a reconstruction of those final days, for he had been with King constantly and had been the first to reach him after he had been shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. I tried to wake Abernathy, but he was fast asleep. Finally, remembering his injured ego, I said as loudly as I dared, “Well, Dr. Abernathy, it’s too bad I never got to ask you about yourself, your own background—” Whereupon he woke right up—you can hear this on the tape; the snoring stops abruptly, like an exclamation. Then he talked for an additional hour, describing his own background (which I was to use in a vignette about him) and King’s last troubled days.

  After that, I secured interviews with many other significant witnesses—whether because Abernathy had talked or because I was simply bolder, I don’t know. But all together the information they provided helped round out my picture of the man who had been the center of their lives.

  A word about the reliability of oral evidence. To be sure, memory is a fallible instrument, whether in an interview, a letter, or a written reminiscence. In an interview, however, the biographer-historian has a unique opportunity to ask questions. This can yield significant material, so long as the interviewer is honest and avoids leading questions that trap the person into saying what the interviewer wants to hear. When used with care, living testimony becomes one more useful tool with which to reconstruct the past.

  V

  Because it must make the people of history live again, biography must be more than the compilation of research notes—more than the presentation of what has been gleaned from interviews, written records, and audio-visual materials. The prose of the biographer must radiate a sense of familiarity, quite as though the biographer himself has lived the life and walked the ground. And that can only be acquired by visiting the landmarks where one’s subject lived and died.

  In my quest for King, I walked in his footsteps in Atlanta, Montgomery, Washington, and the cities of his civil-rights campaigns. He lived for me the most when I visited Selma, Alabama, to reconstruct the voting-rights drive he directed there in 1965—a campaign that resulted in the Voting Rights Act that enfranchised southern blacks. I stood on the very spot at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge where Sheriff Jim Clark and his bullyboys had clubbed and whipped a column of voting rights marchers on Selma’s “Bloody Sunday.” I shall never forget entering the sanctuary of Brown Chapel, where the blacks had held their mass meetings and launched their protest marches to the courthouse. Suddenly, the sounds of those heady days—voices, laughter—came rushing back from across an abyss of time. People materialized in the pews all around me; they were clapping and singing, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around. Turn me around. Turn me around,” and there was King, sitting in the pastor’s chair in the glare of television cameras, his hands clasped in front of his chin and a pensive expression on his face, as he surveyed the swaying, clapping folk below. When he rose to speak, he gripped the podium with both hands, planted his short legs firmly apart, and his incomparable voice swept the sanctuary like a gust of wind…. I felt King’s presence so keenly that I stood rooted to the spot, hardly daring to breathe. I was sure I could see him, see the sadness in his eyes. It made my heart pound.

  You may think this was an hallucination, caused by over-identification with my subject. That is not so. I’m telling you King was there. In the sanctuary of Brown Chapel. On a hot summer afternoon in 1977.

  By the late summer of 1980, more than three and a half years after I had begun, I was ready for the last and most arduous stretch of my journey: I was ready to write. I felt I knew King now and knew his world. True, I had not been able to examine Coretta King’s collection of papers, which, I had learned, were to be part of her Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. But because of various difficulties, the archives might not open for years. That left me with the decision to wait for an event that might never happen, or to proceed with the information I had. I elected to proceed.

  Somehow from thousands of note cards, filed in five long boxes, I had to summon a life. I knew from experience not to write from a pile of note c
ards on my desk; composition done that way was almost always rough, repetitious, and dense. I use an intermediate step between note cards and actual composition: I construct a detailed sentence outline—the one for King ran more than twelve hundred single-spaced, typewritten pages. But it was a semiliterary document that had my information, my interpretation of character, my sense of interpersonal relationships, my judgment of King’s historical significance, and my choice of background detail, all organized in a clear and coherent fashion that was easily accessible. From that document, I devised narrative strategies, shaped the overall form of my story.

  Each morning of composition, I would play civil-rights music and tapes of King’s speeches in order to transport myself back into his world. Then I would memorize a segment of my outline and sit down at my writing desk with nothing on it but blank paper. There, oblivious to my surroundings, I would try to conjure his life, word for painful word. When I left my study after a day’s writing in his world, with the lyrics of “We Shall Overcome” singing in my head, I was stunned to find myself in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1980.

  As I wrote, I had to make major decisions about sensitive areas of King’s life. Let me discuss one in particular. I knew from unimpeachable sources that King had been guilty of sexual indiscretions. I had, I think, been fair but forthright in dealing with King’s other flaws and failings—the biographer is honor-bound to depict a person whole—and I decided that his infidelities had to be dealt with the same way. I could scarcely ignore them, since J. Edgar Hoover, the powerful director of the FBI, had exposed them to religious and political leaders across the country, in a relentless and reprehensible campaign to destroy King’s career. While I do not condone infidelity, I tried to understand it in my subject, to be compassionate about his troubles—his needs and loneliness and the constant temptations—that led him astray. Above all, I wanted to demonstrate that King’s sexual transgressions were part of the terrible price he paid for his fame. Frankly, I was relieved to discover how guilty he felt about his behavior. He wasn’t like John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who were also unfaithful. As far as I can determine, neither of them felt any guilt at all about their pursuit of female conquests; Kennedy in fact bragged about his. King, by comparison, felt real anguish for doing something that imperiled his movement and hurt himself and people he loved. He struggled to keep his “lower self,” as he put it, from taking over. But in moments of loneliness, beset with temptation, he would succumb again to his own human frailties. As his biographer, I did not think this damaged his probity as a public leader or detracted from his significance; it simply showed that he was a flawed human being, as we all are.

  As my pages accumulated, a real human being seemed to take shape right there on my writing desk. I found myself talking to him, complaining when he did something I disliked and then backing off in order to understand, showing shear delight when he triumphed over outer adversity or inner demons. I spoke to him in my dreams, even fell into his speech rhythms when I talked about him in interviews and on the lecture circuit. When he died in my story, I was stricken with an overwhelming sense of loss, as though a member of my family had been killed. After I sent him home to Atlanta to be buried, I left my typewriter and staggered into my living room, unable to believe or to bear what had happened. And I grieved.

  By September 1981, I had a title, Let the Trumpet Sound, and a completed book. Or so I thought. Then I received a phone call from a friend who served on the board of the King Center in Atlanta. The archives, which Mrs. King had not permitted me to see, were to be opened to the public the next month. It turned out that a professional archivist hired by Mrs. King had worked with speed and diligence to organize and catalogue this huge collection. What was more, she had persuaded Mrs. King to open the papers without restrictions.

  I did not know whether to jump for joy or jump out a window. What I finally did was jump on a plane for Atlanta, where the archivist permitted me to examine the collection before the official opening for the public. Because I knew an enormous amount of factual information already, I worked rapidly through the collection. I discovered many gems, had more rainbow moments of revelation, and took a great many notes. My findings helped to clarify and elaborate upon themes and events in my story, and to document matters that I had intuited or speculated about. As I speak now, one category of documents stands out in particular: King’s mail from the public, comprising thousands of letters, postcards, and telegrams. The sheer bulk of this public correspondence, from letters of excoriation and bitter hatred to letters of unqualified love, testified to the prodigious impact that King had on his generation. Here, clearly, was an individual who had made a difference.

  As irony would have it, I managed to meet with Mrs. King the night after the archives opened to the public. She was congenial now—I had told television reporters how valuable the archives were for scholars. She was understandably guarded when I mentioned my book and told her how it portrayed her husband. Except for a short conversation with Daddy King, I had never been able to interview a single member of the King family. It was clear I would never get to do so. Yet I was relieved in a way: it would have been a terrible ordeal for Coretta and her children to recall the day-to-day living, the high moments and low, of a murdered husband and father. Frankly, I was glad to spare them the agony, despite the family intimacy this cost my book.

  Mrs. King and I parted on good terms. I had been able to consult her archives after all, without having to sign a crippling contract that would have given others final approval of my work. Our discussion revealed something else that relieved me. Stanley Levison, who was dead now, had apparently misrepresented my intentions to Mrs. King, insisting that I wanted to do the “approved” or “house” biography of her husband but that I wished to work without restrictions. I assured her that I had never wanted to write such a book, that I was not that kind of biographer.

  Then it was home to Amherst and the task of revising my portrait, of reshaping character and context according to my new discoveries. The first biography to utilize all the King archives, Let the Trumpet Sound finally appeared in August 1982, with a photograph of King on the jacket that had never been published before; I had selected it from a collection loaned to Harper & Row from the vaults of Time magazine. The face in that picture, especially the eyes, seemed to reveal the complex human being I had tried to portray in my book, a man who bore within his character “antitheses that were strongly marked,” who was both commanding and vulnerable, full of love and anger.

  My book was on its own now; I had to tear myself away from what had been one of the strongest and most intimate attachments I had ever had, and go on to another biography, another challenge and risk, another involvement. The book won some prizes, appeared in several foreign countries, and attracted a fair amount of critical attention on both sides of the Atlantic. In deference to my emotional and mental health, I make it a practice never to read reviews of my work. But one day, in a moment of masochistic curiosity, I allowed myself to glance over some reviews of the book sent from my publisher. You can understand how incredulous I was to come across one from a scholarly U.S. journal, in which a certain historian impugned Let the Trumpet Sound for clearly being an uncritical “authorized” biography, one that had been written with Mrs. King’s permission and from her point of view. I’m sure that Coretta King would have found this assessment as absurdly ironic as I did. Still, it led to happier things, since it convinced me that one day I would have to tell the true story of how my biography came to be written.

  For me, life-writing has been a high and priceless adventure: it has allowed me to live through five other human lives besides my own, from John Brown’s to William Faulkner’s. The experience of resurrecting my subjects has convinced me that the people of the past have never died; they are still alive back there, in the other dimension of time called history. What is required to bring them forward? Like the character Ray Kinsella in the recent motion picture, we start by creating a field of dream
s—isn’t that what the idea of a biography really is? Then we offer the people of history compassion and understanding, the qualities we all want from our fellow human beings. And then if all goes well, they step forward, out of the mist.

  In times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and eternity.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 1862

  One day historians will record this movement as one of the most significant epics of our heritage.

  MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., 1962

  PART ONE

  ODYSSEY

  Tell me, muse, of the man of many resources who wandered far and wide after he sacked the holy citadel of Troy, and he saw the cities and learned the thoughts of many men, and on the sea he suffered in his heart many woes.

  HOMER, The Odyssey

  HE WOULD ALWAYS REMEMBER the day he joined the church. It was a spring Sunday in 1934, and an evangelist down from Virginia was conducting a spirited revival in the packed sanctuary of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. In the King family pew, five-year-old M. L.—for that was how he went in his youth—sat with his grandmother and his older sister Christine. Up behind the pulpit, with its exquisite gold cross, Reverend King—the boy’s father—reposed in imperial splendor in the pastor’s chair. Behind him, Mother toiled at the organ near the singing choir. All about M. L., all about the church, people in their Sunday finest clapped and shouted and sang. Presently, as M. L. squirmed and glanced, the evangelist gesticulated at the pulpit, expatiating on the glories of salvation and membership in the House of God. When he invited people to join the church, M. L.’s sister took off for the pulpit—the first person that morning to offer a pledge. At once M. L. ran after her, determined that Christine was not going to “get ahead of me.” And so he joined God’s House, not because of any “dynamic conviction” (as he later claimed), but because of “a childhood desire to keep up with my sister.” Even at his baptism, he was “unaware of what was taking place.” Hence conversion for him was never an abrupt religious experience, never “a crisis moment.” It was simply a gradual assimilation of religious ideals from his church and family environment.