Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  Still, King took some consolation in the way white officialdom responded. The governor made a predawn inspection of the bombed-out churches and offered a $2,000 reward for the arrests of suspects. Moreover, whites for the first time went on record in defense of law and order: the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, several white preachers, and the city’s most influential business group all publicly condemned the bombings, the preachers calling them unchristian and uncivilized.

  On January 11 King returned to the Atlanta meeting, more determined than ever to forge a powerful new regional organization that would inspire and unify his beleaguered people. Out of the Atlanta conference, attended by sixty Negro leaders from ten southern states, came a blazing manifesto that urged Negroes “to refuse further cooperation with the evil elements” and “no matter how great the obstacles and suffering…reject segregation.” It summoned men of good will across the Republic to make America truly “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” and implored President Eisenhower to visit the South and make a public statement that he would uphold the Supreme Court school and bus decisions (the White House replied that this was impossible). Then they made plans to meet again in New Orleans and set up a permanent southern organization centered around the church.

  After the conference, King and Rustin got to talking about Gandhi and a statement he had made about American Negroes back in 1935. When asked to visit America and help blacks in their struggle for equality, Gandhi responded, “How I wish I could, but I must make good the message here before I bring it to you.” Then he said, “It may be that through the American Negro the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.” For King, this was the mission of his long-suffering people, and he meant to carry it out.

  STILL, HE RETURNED TO MONTGOMERY in a deepening depression. It had started when he saw the wrecked churches and parsonages the previous Saturday in Montgomery. Now, home again, he heard his people talk in subdued and frightened voices: would the city use the bombings as a pretext to shut down the buses entirely and destroy all the gains of the protest? And whose churches and homes would be dynamited next? Whites had threatened several members of King’s own congregation, and he worried that several of them might be bombed out, even killed.

  King took all this personally, feeling a terrible guilt that the bombs and threats and anxieties of his people were his fault. On Monday night, he addressed a mass meeting, and for the first time broke down in public. Clutching the pulpit, his face contorted in pain, he invited the audience to join him in prayer—and then felt seized by an uncontrollable emotion. “Lord,” he cried, “I hope no one will have to die as a result of our struggle for freedom in Montgomery. Certainly I don’t want to die. But if anyone has to die, let it be me.”

  “No, no,” his people chorused.

  King could not continue his prayer. Two ministers came to the pulpit and tried to get him to sit down. For several minutes he stood with their arms around him, unable to move. Finally some friends helped him to a seat.

  “Unexpectedly,” King wrote later, “this episode brought me great relief.” After the meeting, many people assured him that “we were all together until the end.” But the incident was cathartic in another way too: by praying that he be killed if somebody must be, he freed himself from his guilt that I am to blame, I have caused all this suffering. He was ready to lead again. He felt strong again. He felt God beside him, and he did not fear to die. It was as though he had told the forces of evil in the universe: kill me if you will, but the forces of light shall never cease to struggle for righteousness.

  Before dawn on Sunday, January 27, the forces of evil struck again, as terrorizing whites bombed a Negro home and a Negro service station and cab stand. Somebody found an unexploded bomb, consisting of twelve sticks of dynamite, still smoldering on King’s own porch. In the chill morning, King addressed a gathering crowd from his porch, “Tell Montgomery that they can keep shooting and I’m going to stand up to them; tell Montgomery they can keep bombing and I’m going to stand up to them. If I had to die tomorrow morning I would die happy because I’ve been to the Mountaintop and I’ve seen the Promised Land, and it’s going to be here in Montgomery.”

  Fearful that Montgomery might plunge into anarchy, the authorities indicted five whites for all the bombings that had rocked the city, and two even signed confessions and came to trial. On hand as a subpoenaed witness, King looked on as an all-white jury disregarded the confessions and found the two men innocent. Grinning, they walked out of the courtroom.

  King feared that such a miscarriage of justice would lead to more bombings. Instead, the disturbances abruptly stopped, perhaps because most Montgomery whites accepted desegregated buses and deplored all the violence. Meanwhile, the city commissioners worked out a compromise with King regarding his appeal for violating the state antilabor law: he agreed to pay his $500 fine and the city to drop the cases against the other 88 indicted Negro leaders (and against the other white bombing suspects too). King remarked to several Negro newsmen, “We decided the best thing to do was to pay the fine and move on to another phase of the struggle.”

  In the following weeks, as he spoke across the nation, people would often ask him, “How are things in Montgomery today?” And he would say, “Better; things are much better in Montgomery today.” Not only were blacks and whites riding together wherever they liked, but a lot of whites there seemed to have gained respect for their black neighbors. “We’ve got to hand it to those Negroes,” whites would say. “They had principles and they stuck to them and they stuck together. They organized and planned well.” “We didn’t think they had it in them.” And whites had a grudging admiration for King, too. “Don’t let anyone fool you,” a taxi driver told a Texas writer. “That young colored preacher has got more brains in his little finger than the City Commissioners and all the politicians in this town put together.”

  Still, the boycott had hardly made Montgomery a paragon of racial justice. Apart from the buses, the city remained strictly segregated, with most whites clinging tenaciously to the traditional caste system and threatening intimidation and endless litigation to preserve segregated schools and prevent the coming of King’s new order. What was more, the local press never tired of telling whites that civil war was still going on in Dixie—a civil war against “Yankees and race-mixing.”

  But if the boycott had not transformed the hearts of most whites, it had had a tremendous impact on Negroes themselves. As King said, the Negro in 1955 was “unarmed, unorganized, untrained, disunited and, most important, psychologically and morally unprepared for the deliberate spilling of blood.” Then came the Montgomery way, which showed the mass of black folks a method that enabled them to shed their passivity without violence, for violence would only have gotten them killed. Thanks to the method of nonviolent resistance, thanks to King’s own “tremendous facility,” as Rustin put it, “for giving people the feeling that they could be bigger and stronger and more courageous than they thought they could be,” an entire black community for the first time had mounted a sustained direct-action protest in Dixie, in the very heart of the Deep South. “We got our heads up now,” said a Negro janitor in Montgomery, “and we won’t ever bow down again—no, sir—except before God!” What was more, Montgomery demonstrated that the church—the supporting mechanism for the entire protest—“can be a great transforming power if it will be true to its mission,” as King pointed out. In truth, said a Negro historian, King and his ministerial associates “are raising to new heights the historic role of the Negro minister as the leader in civil rights.”

  King himself was now immensely popular, hailed far and wide as one of the most learned and yet passionate social activists to emerge in his embattled nation up to that time. Yet “I am really disturbed how fast all this has happened to me,” he confided in Coretta. “People will expect me to perform miracles for the rest of my life. I don’t want to be the kind of man who hits his peak at twenty-seven, with the
rest of his life an anticlimax. Neither do I want to disappoint people by not being able to pull rabbits out of a hat.”

  PART THREE

  FREEDOM IS NEVER FREE

  KING WONDERED IF HIS LIFE would ever slow down again. He received so many speaking invitations that it was almost impossible to answer them all. And job offers flooded in, too, tempting him with salaries up to $75,000 a year. When DeWolf wrote him about some faculty position, King replied that he was happy in the pastorate and had about decided that this was where he should serve. But “I can never quite get the idea out of my mind that I should do some teaching.” Beyond solidifying the southern Negro leadership organization, he didn’t know what he wanted to do for certain.

  On February 18, 1957, Time magazine published a feature story about King called “Attack on the Conscience” and written by Lee Griggs of Time’s Atlanta office. The magazine ran King’s picture on the cover and conveyed the name and message of this “scholarly Negro Baptist minister” to an enormous audience. “Personally humble, articulate, and of high educational attainment,” Griggs wrote, “Martin Luther King Jr. is, in fact, what many a Negro—and, were it not for his color, many a white—would like to be.” Noting that King wore conservative, funeral-gray suits, Griggs trailed him through a typically hectic day. At his MIA office, King toiled in a cramped back room with yellowed walls, laying plans for a Negro credit union and a voter-registration drive in Montgomery. All the while the telephone rang. After an exhausting day, King struck out for a mass meeting, where he spoke after a round of hymns: “If we as a people had as much religion in our hearts as we have in our legs and feet, we could change this world.” Later that night, “the mass meeting a warm memory,” King talked quietly about the principles on which his efforts were based: “Our use of passive resistance in Montgomery is not based on resistance to get rights for ourselves, but to achieve friendship with the men who are denying us our rights, and change them through friendship and a bond of Christian understanding before God.” For a lot of people, Griggs wrote, this probably seemed impossible. “But so, only 14 months before, was the notion that whites and Negroes might be riding peaceably together on integrated buses in Montgomery, Ala.”

  Was King reaching the white South? Griggs quoted a white minister and a former chaplain at the University of Mississippi: “I know of very few white Southern ministers who aren’t troubled and don’t have admiration for King. They’ve become tortured souls.” King, too, thought Negroes were troubling the white southern conscience. In fact, even diehard white supremacists were disturbed; even they knew that segregation was an egregious sin against God. “If it weren’t,” as King later told Playboy magazine, “the white South would not be haunted as it is by a deep sense of guilt for what it has done to the Negro—guilt for patronizing him, degrading him, brutalizing him, depersonalizing him, thingifying him; guilt for lying to itself. This is the source of the schizophrenia that the South will suffer until it goes through its crisis of conscience.”

  In the heady aftermath of Montgomery, King tried to be realistic about the future. When the NAACP circled 1963 as the target year for the end of segregation in America, King declared this much too optimistic and designated 2000 as the more reasonable date.

  IT WAS MARCH 3, and King and Coretta were on an airplane bound for Ghana in West Africa. Ghana had recently won her independence from Great Britain, and Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah had invited King and other American dignitaries to attend independence-day ceremonies in Accra, Ghana’s capital. On the trip over, King pondered the history of the world’s “dark-skinned people”—there were 1.5 billion of them—and how Europe had plundered and oppressed so many of them, But they were on the move now, everywhere “in revolt against social and political domination.” This was the spirit of the age, King thought, and he equated the struggles of the American Negro with the independence movements of other dark-skinned folk in the world. In their own quest for full citizenship, black Americans were part of a global movement to throw off racial oppression.

  The Kings reached Accra at night and stayed at a low stucco bungalow that belonged to an English professor and his wife. Here servants brought King breakfast and tended his every need, bowing and speaking in obsequious tones like American slaves of old. Their servile attitude disturbed and depressed him.

  On March 5, he assembled with representatives of sixty-nine other nations in the square around the old British colonial building, to witness the official birth of independent Ghana. At last bells tolled midnight, and the flag of Ghana replaced the Union Jack as fifty thousand people cheered wildly. On a wooden platform stood Nkrumah, a tall man in the bright robe of his Akan tribe, proclaiming Ghana free at last of colonial rule. At that the crowd started chanting, “Freedom, freedom, freedom!” And King was “struck by the idea of a new Jerusalem descending from God,” “a new Heaven and a new earth” about to be born in this epochal time.

  The next morning, King came down with a virus which made him violently ill. For a time he was certain he would die. As he lay in the bungalow, burning with fever, a celebrated Anglican clergyman named Michael Scott came for a visit. Dressed in flowing white robes, Scott knelt at King’s bedside and prayed for his recovery. But sick as he was, King managed a dialogue with Scott: they both believed that Ghana was a model African state, irrefutable proof that Africans could manage their affairs and run their governments regardless of what European imperialists claimed. They also discussed apartheid in South Africa and compared it to the grim conditions in the American South. “At bottom,” King said, “both segregation in America and colonialism in Africa were based on the same thing—white supremacy and contempt for life.”

  A few days later, King felt well enough to dine with Prime Minister Nkrumah, who had once been a student in the United States. King was one of his favorite Americans, he said, and the people who followed King in Montgomery had given him great hope.

  At last it was time for the Kings to go, time to leave this memorable African land, and return to Montgomery by way of Nigeria, Rome, Paris, Geneva, and London. In Nigeria, King was shocked at the universal suffering he saw. He had never witnessed such squalor, not even in the rural American South. He “talked angrily” about the British exploitation of Africa and said he was glad that the sun no longer rose and set on the British empire. In Rome, at St. Peter’s Cathedral, he was so overcome by all the history it symbolized that he fell to the floor and prayed.

  Back in Montgomery, King said his visit to Africa—the “land of my father’s fathers”—was one of the most vivid experiences of his life. It was “a nonviolent rebirth.” And from that time on he remained passionately interested in African affairs. He did all he could to help educate African students in the United States, served with Eleanor Roosevelt and John Gunther on the American Committee on Africa, and amassed an impressive archive of clippings and magazine pieces about developments there. At the same time, he maintained a heavy correspondence with African leaders—among them, Chief Albert Luthuli of South Africa, who withstood abuse and persecution, King said, “with a dignity and calmness of spirit seldom paralleled in human history.” As he studied that “vast and complex continent,” he surely realized that not all of Africa’s woes could be ascribed to European imperialism. Nigeria, for example, had internal stresses and strains that derived from its three very different regions, and other small emerging states suffered from endemic ills as well. But King didn’t discuss this, at least not in his writings. He focused almost exclusively on the similarities between the American Negro movement and black Africa’s own strivings against white oppression. “Although we are separated by many miles we are closer together in a mutual struggle for freedom and human brotherhood,” he wrote dissenters in Southern Rhodesia. “We realize that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Therefore, we are as concerned about the problems of Africa as e are about the problems of the United States.” He understood what they were going through and how difficult it was to challeng
e the racial status quo. “But in the final analysis it is such a creative minority that save history.”

  But concerned though he was about Africa, he emphatically opposed any modern back-to-Africa movement in the United States. When a Negro begged him to lead their people to Liberia or Ghana, King firmly replied: “To have a mass return to Africa would merely be running from the problem and not facing it courageously…. We are American citizens, and we deserve our rights in this nation. I feel that God has marvelous plans for this world and this nation and we must have the faith to believe that one day these plans will materialize.”

  ON MARCH 25, KING WAS IN NEW YORK, discussing plans for a Washington prayer pilgrimage with A. Philip Randolph and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP. It was a critical time for American Negroes, with segregationists in Dixie undertaking an all-out campaign to obliterate Negro voting gains over the last decade and to obstruct school desegregation in a variety of devious ways. In Congress, progressive forces were promoting a new civil-rights bill, drafted by Eisenhower’s Justice Department (the catalyst was Attorney General Herbert Brownell, not the President), which among other things would protect Negro rights in voting, education, and housing. But southern segregationists and northern reactionaries vowed to annihilate the bill should it ever come to a vote. In the view of King and his colleagues, Negroes themselves must pressure Congress to enact the bill, as well as dramatize the overall plight of America’s “citizens of color.” And all three thought a prayer pilgrimage to Washington, drawing thousands of Negroes from across the land, could best accomplish that purpose.