Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  Randolph and Wilkins were the two most powerful Negro leaders in America, and King found it hard to believe that he was meeting with them as an equal. Fifty-five now, Wilkins was NAACP executive secretary, a slim, brown-skinned man with a small mustache and a wry smile. A native of St. Louis, he had studied journalism at the University of Minnesota and gone on to edit the Kansas City Call during the 1920s. In 1931, he joined the NAACP and worked in the New York office, where he succeeded Du Bois as editor of The Crisis, the NAACP’s official publication, and in 1955 became the leader of the national organization. Urbane though he was, Wilkins lacked charisma—he was a writer, not an orator—and King’s enormous popularity. In truth, this able and educated man was jealous of King and fretful that his projected new organization would compete with the NAACP.

  By contrast, Randolph genuinely admired young King and treated him with avuncular warmth. Head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the strongest Negro union in the country, Randolph was sixty-eight now, a tall broad-shouldered man who spoke in a magnetic baritone. In his youth, he had wanted to be an actor and liked to recite Shakespeare in rolling cadences. Later, at the City College of New York, he read Marx, decided that economics was the basis of racial injustice, and mounted the soapbox to orate on “everything from the French Revolution and the history of slavery, to the rise of the working class.” When the United States entered World War I, the Wilson administration branded him “the most dangerous Negro in America” because he had the temerity to question why Negroes should fight for a nation that oppressed them. After the war, Randolph became the irrepressible chief of the porters union and dedicated himself to the proposition that trade unionism was the best solution to the social problems of blacks and whites alike. “We never separated the liberation of the white workingman from the liberation of the black workingman,” he said.

  King all but idolized “Mr. Randolph” and considered him America’s greatest living Negro. He rejoiced, too, that both Randolph and Wilkins agreed that “the spiritual undergirding of our common struggle” must be stressed in this darkening hour. At a subsequent meeting, they and seventy-four other Negro leaders issued a call for “a Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom,” to take place on May 17—the third anniversary of the Brown decision—at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Meeting there, King knew, would emphasize the historical and symbolic ties of the civil-rights movement and the Civil War era. He himself liked to point out that the movement was an extension of the Civil War, that Negroes of his day were struggling to realize the promise of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

  When the celebrated event came, King was disappointed in the turnout. He had hoped for 75,000 Negroes to gather at the Lincoln Memorial, but the actual crowd was estimated at from 15,000 to 37,000. After a procession of other Negroes had sung and spoken, King treated the throng to the kind of rousing oratory for which he had become famous, his voice booming over the loudspeakers as the statue of Lincoln looked on. In fact, King launched into a defense of Negro suffrage that seemed to take up where Lincoln had left off in his last public address, given in Washington on April 11, 1865. In that speech, Lincoln had endorsed limited Negro suffrage in the conquered South and granted outright that the black man deserved the electoral franchise. Now, standing in Lincoln’s “symbolic shadow,” King proclaimed that “so long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote I do not possess myself…. So our most urgent request to the President of the United States and every member of Congress is to give us the right to vote.” Then he took off on an oratorical flight that set the crowd to clapping and echoing him:

  “Give us the ballot [give us the ballot]…and we will transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs into the abiding good deeds of orderly citizens.

  “Give us the ballot [give us the ballot]…and we will fill our legislative halls with men of goodwill, and send to the sacred halls of Congress men who will not sign a southern manifesto because of their devotion to the manifesto of justice.

  “Give us the ballot [give us the ballot]…and we will place judges on the benches of the south who will ‘do justly and love mercy,’ and we will place at the head of the southern states governors who have felt not only the tang of the human but the glow of the Divine….

  “We come humbly to say to the men in the forefront of our government that the Civil Rights issue is not an ephemeral, evanescent domestic issue that can be kicked about by reactionary guardians of the status quo; it is rather an eternal moral issue which may well determine the destiny of our nation in the ideological struggle with Communism. The hour is late. The clock of destiny is ticking out. We must act now, before it is too late.”

  The Amsterdam News of New York, a Negro journal, praised King effusively for his address and asserted that he “emerged from the Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington as the number one leader of sixteen million Negroes in the United States.”

  “AFTER LIVING IN THE SOUTH ALL MY LIFE,” King wrote a Michigan congressman, “I have come to see through grim experience that the southern reactionaries will never fall in line voluntarily; it will only come through proper, moral, and legitimate pressure”—especially from Congress and the President.

  But the President seemed indifferent to southern recalcitrance and aloof from the congressional debates now raging over the civil-rights bill. So far, he had even refused to make a public defense of the Brown decision. The President’s inaction offended King, who believed that much of the South’s current racial trouble could have been avoided had Eisenhower exercised strong executive leadership.

  On June 13, King and Abernathy visited for two and a half hours with Vice-President Richard Nixon, in hopes that he might be persuaded to influence his boss. In graphic terms, King described the southern white opposition to school desegregation, Negro enfranchisement, and integrated transportation. Abernathy added that southern Negroes were determined to gain their full citizenship, that segregationists were equally dedicated to stopping them, and that most southern whites were strung out between the two positions. But if they preferred segregation, most southerners would obey the law if Eisenhower chose to enforce it.

  Though Nixon stoutly defended the President, King thought he seemed concerned about civil rights. “His travels have revealed to him how the race problem is hurting America in international relations,” King later told Nixon biographer Earl Mazo, “and it is altogether possible that he has no racial prejudice.” Still, King had his suspicions about the Vice-President. “He is one of the most magnetic personalities that I have ever confronted,” with “a genius for convincing one that he is sincere. When you are close to Nixon he almost disarms you with his apparent sincerity. You never get the impression that he is the same man who…made a tear jerking speech on television in the 1952 campaign to save himself from an obvious misdeed…. If Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.”

  As it turned out, the Nixon interview was a waste of time, since the President himself remained inert in the matter of civil rights. On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas herded the civil-rights bill through a stormy Senate. But to do so he bartered away the most significant provision in it—one that would have given the U.S. Attorney General injunctive power to enforce school desegregation and various other civil rights. Among other things, the final version of the bill authorized the Attorney General to seek injunctions in the matter of voting rights, and it created an independent advisory agency called the Civil Rights Commission. Though it was the first civil-rights legislation enacted since Reconstruction, King and other Negroes were unhappy with the 1957 Civil Rights Act because it ignored the school problem and other crucial issues. To make matters worse, Eisenhower’s Justice Department proceeded to enforce the measure “with all deliberate lethargy,” as one writer phrased it.

  With the white South obstructing school desegregation and wiping out Negro voting rights in one state after another, King called 115 Negro leaders to Montgom
ery to plan a counter-offensive. Meeting on August 7 and 8, the delegates formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King and Rustin had been working on since January, and unanimously chose King as president. In fact, the new organization centered almost entirely on King’s prestige and popularity—“King was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” said one insider. Unlike the NAACP, which was a membership organization, SCLC consisted entirely of local affiliates, each of which would send five voting delegates to SCLC’s conventions—held biannually at first, then annually. As King envisioned it, the organization would operate through the southern Negro church and function as a service agency to coordinate local civil-rights activity.

  SCLC’s main goal was to bring the Negro masses into the freedom struggle by expanding “the Montgomery way” across the South. In this respect, it differed significantly from the other major civil-rights organizations. The National Urban League, founded in 1911, concentrated on improving Negro life in northern cities, doing little for the black masses in Dixie. CORE, established in 1942, had applied Gandhian direct-action techniques to the American scene, mostly in northern cities. But apart from outposts in St. Louis and Washington, D.C., CORE had failed to penetrate the South and remained largely a northern operation. By 1957, in fact, CORE was at its nadir as an effective civil-rights organization, lacking even a field staff to coordinate its scattered and piecemeal efforts. The NAACP, of course, continued to concentrate on legal action and court battles. But many influential Negroes thought it had become complacent and elitist now, largely insensitive to the suffering of the Negro masses, especially in the South. In any case, since the national executive had failed to implement many of the NAACP’s court victories, a strictly legal strategy seemed ineffectual. Now King and his ministerial associates hoped to offer an alternative: a nonviolent, grassroots movement in Dixie under SCLC’s banners.

  SCLC’s initial project was a southern-wide voter registration drive called the Crusade for Citizenship, to commence on Lincoln’s birthday, 1958, and to demonstrate once again that “a new Negro, determined to be free, has emerged in America.” Because “the right to vote does not raise the issue of social mixing to confuse the main argument,” King hoped the campaign would attract the support of southern white moderates. SCLC, for its part, would conduct voting clinics across Dixie, gather evidence on white obstructionism, and utilize the media to educate Americans on the plight of the southern Negro.

  To assist King, SCLC’s founders provided for a central office in Atlanta and planned to raise an operating fund of $250,000, mainly through donations. Prim and principled Ella Baker became temporary executive director, charged with running the Atlanta office and overseeing the voting-rights drive. She came at the recommendation of both Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison, a King friend and financial adviser in New York. Several years older than King, Baker dreamed of creating a true mass movement through SCLC, one that would stress collective enterprise over individual initiative. She resented all the attention being put on King and complained that SCLC was much too leader-oriented rather than the mass organizational force she had in mind. King clashed with her over this, asserting that he was going to lead because “the people” wanted him to.

  To keep harmony within civil-rights ranks, King hastened up to New York and had a long talk with Wilkins and other NAACP leaders, assuring them that SCLC’s approach supported and supplemented theirs. While the NAACP focused on legal strategy, SCLC would concern itself with “spiritual strategy”—with raising the moral conscience of America. As King repeatedly said, there was no single road to the promised land. It was imperative that Negroes advance on a united front along several parallel paths—one led by SCLC, another by the NAACP, still others by CORE and the Urban League.

  That September, newspapers screamed with headlines about a school crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas. A federal court had ordered Central High School there to admit nine Negro students. But Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard around the school with orders to keep the blacks out. A fifteen-year-old Negro named Elizabeth Eckford, wearing bobby socks and ballet slippers, approached the school with her notebook, only to confront taunting white spectators and a line of gun-toting soldiers. She retraced her steps and stood alone at a bus stop, surrounded by jeering whites.

  Another attempt to enroll the students provoked such disorders that mob rule threatened Central High. Faced with the most serious challenge to federal authority since the Civil War, Eisenhower was obliged to nationalize the Arkansas National Guard and dispatch a thousand regular army paratroopers to Little Rock. With white parents shouting and waving Confederate flags, U.S. soldiers escorted Elizabeth Eckford and eight other Negro students into the school and through the corridors to their classes. Thanks to southern white intransigence, Eisenhower became the first President since Reconstruction to send federal troops to enforce Negro rights in Dixie, a move that enraged the white South and polarized the region.

  For King, Little Rock was “a tragic revelation of what prejudice can do to blind the visions of men and darken their understanding.” Moreover, it demonstrated “that while the forces of good will in our nation remained silent, the forces of opposition mobilized and organized.” Still, he thought Little Rock might be “a blessing in disguise.” For the first time, the school issue had been taken before the conscience of the nation. Now maybe men of good will would realize that the problem had to be dealt with forthrightly.

  KING WAS so BUSY WITH MEETINGS and speeches, not to mention his church work, that he had scarcely any time for his family. He did hurry home during the third week in October, when Coretta gave birth to a son. King named him Martin Luther King III. “Little Marty” cried with such fervor that King said he detected the voice of a future preacher.

  Then it was back to his whirlwind schedule. In between SCLC conferences and public appearances, King even began a book on the Montgomery story, to be published by Harper & Brothers’ religious department. He also planned a trip to India, to meet Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and other disciples of Gandhi. But because of his multitude of commitments, King had to postpone the trip until the next year. In mid-November his frenetic pace caught up with him: he fell sick and took to bed for more than a week.

  But in early December he felt well enough to attend the MIA’s annual Institute on Nonviolence, held in Montgomery’s now famous Holt Street Baptist Church, and to deliver a candid address on “some things we must do.” He recalled an incident that happened to him in the Atlanta airport a few days before. The terminal had two restrooms for males, one labeled “Colored Men” and the other just “Men.” “I thought I was a man,” King related, “and I still think I am so I decided to go into the Men’s room, not the Colored Men’s room.” Though none of the whites complained, a Negro custodian became very upset. “The colored room is over there!” he cried. “You belong over there, that’s for the colored.” King replied, “I’m gonna stay here, right here,” and he did. “That fellow was so conditioned by the system that he didn’t think of himself as a man,” King told his audience. Well, Negroes must continue to resist that system and try to change it. At the same time, though, they must strive to improve themselves.

  “Let’s do as Gandhi did in South Africa,” King said. “Let’s consider what the whites say against us and consider whether they have any good arguments. They say we want our constitutional rights so we can marry their daughters. But that is nonsense so we don’t have to pay any attention to that.” “Amen!” his audience responded. “They say that we smell,” he went on. “Well the fact is some of us do smell. I know most Negroes do not have money to fly to Paris and buy enticing perfumes, but no one is so poor that he can’t buy a five cent bar of soap.” There was applause at that.

  “And we kill each other and cut each other too much,” King said. Let them “face some facts.” In New York City, Negroes constituted 10 percent of the population, yet committed 35 percent of its crime. In Missouri, they
comprised 26 percent of the population, yet collected 76 percent of the aid to dependent children. What was more, Negroes generally had eight times as many illegitimate children as whites. Yes, all this was caused by racial oppression and was no excuse for racial oppression. But Negroes themselves must improve these conditions. They must avail themselves of the doors already opening to them and “be ready for integration.”

  “You don’t need to speak good English in order to be good,” he said. “Our people didn’t know English very well but they knew God.” “Amen!” somebody shouted. “But there is no excuse for our school teachers to say ‘you is’—they’re supposed to be teaching but they’re crippling our children.”

  He was warming to his subject now. “And our doctors should not spend their time on big cars and clothes but in reading books and going to medical institutes. Too many Negro doctors have not opened a book since leaving medical school.” And Negro ministers “can’t just whoop and holler, we must be able to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And for this we need to study and think more, and not worry about getting amens.” “Amen,” the crowd yelled. “I’m going to holler tonight,” King cried, “because I want to get this over. I’m going to be a Negro tonight.” And he hollered about how too many Negroes lived beyond their means. “Oh, I know why Negroes like to buy Cadillacs and ride in bigger cars than whites. We’ve been pushed around and if we can’t have a big home we can at least have a big car. But it’s time to end this foolishness. There are too many Negroes with $2,000 incomes riding around in $5,000 cars.” And the problem with liquor was worse. “The money Negroes spend on liquor in Alabama in one year is enough to endow three or four colleges.” All of these, King concluded, “are some things we have it in our power to change.”