Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  As the Kings toured the sites of Gandhi’s “War of Independence,” they came one weekend to picturesque Cape Comorin, India’s southernmost point, where the Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea, and Bay of Bengal all converged. He and Coretta sat on a large rock, “enthralled by the vastness of the ocean and its terrifying immensities.” Waves unfolded in rhythmic succession and crashed like drums against the base of the rock. Off in the west, the sun was sinking into the ocean in a blaze of fire. When only the rim showed, a sliver of orange on the moving sea, Coretta touched him. “Look, Martin, isn’t that beautiful?” He turned and saw the moon rising from the ocean in one direction as the sun was setting in another. When darkness fell, the moon shone like a silver beacon of hope. King thought how one often had some painful experience when the light of day seemed to vanish. And one drifted along in gloom and despair, bereft of any hope. Then one looked in the east—and there! another light was shining even in the darkness. Another light was always shining, if one had the faith to see it. King liked the imagery so much that he later included it in a sermon.

  Soon after, the Kings headed back for New Delhi, having found the spirit of Gandhi very much alive in this sprawling land. On March 9 they left India with King in a pensive mood. He could not forget the contorted faces of all those hungry people he had seen in the towns and villages. He thought how America spent millions of dollars every day to store her surplus food, and he told himself: “I know where we can store that food free of charge—in the wrinkled stomachs of starving people in Asia and Africa.” And he said so repeatedly on his return to America.

  On their way home, the Kings stopped off in Jerusalem, where King inquired about the Arab-Israeli conflicts, “one of the most difficult problems in the world.” Then he and Coretta rented a car and drove toward Jericho, following a treacherous road that wound up through remote and jagged country known in Jesus’ day as “the bloody pass.” “I can see why Jesus used this for the setting for his parable,” King told Coretta. And he thought about what the Priest and the Levite said in the parable when they found the robbed man lying on the ground. “If I stop to help this man,” they fretted, “what will happen to me? What if robbers are still around?” But the Good Samaritan, when he came along, asked a very different question. “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” King loved that parable and tried to follow the example of the Good Samaritan. If more people did so, there would not be so many starving people in the world, or so much hatred, or so much war.

  From Jerusalem, the Kings took off for Cairo and Athens, where King viewed the “towering acropolis” and ruminated on the days of Plato and Aristotle. Then it was home to Montgomery, on circuitous flights that left them exhausted. Still, King said his experiences in India were among the most rewarding in his life. It was “a marvelous thing” to see Indian and English people living in mutual friendship, based on “complete equality,” within the Indian Commonwealth. He was convinced that nonviolence could produce a similar friendship between blacks and whites in the United States. Too, he was immensely impressed with what could be accomplished when a national government was determined to end discrimination. He stressed how much India had done to aid the untouchables, to help them “leap the gap from backwardness to competence,” by granting them scholarships, financial aid, and employment opportunities. Why could America not do this for her own “victim of discrimination”—the Negro? From then on, King made special federal aid to blacks one of his cardinal demands.

  In all, he came home with a deeper understanding of nonviolence and a deeper commitment as well. For him, nonviolence was no longer just a philosophy and a technique for social change; it was now a whole way of life. As Coretta said, he even tried to be more like Gandhi—more humble and spiritual than he had been before. Though he continued to live comfortably enough, he tried to be less concerned with material things now, insisting that “people who are doing something don’t have time to be worried about all that.” He trained himself to subsist on four hours of sleep a night, so as to devote more time to the struggle. And he vowed to set aside one day a week for meditation and fasting, in the spirit of the Mahatma. “My failure to reflect will do harm not only to me as a person, but to the total movement,” he said.

  But he could not keep his vow. Apart from limited successes in Shreveport and a few other places, the Crusade for Citizenship was foundering and SCLC itself operating in the red. King had scarcely unpacked his bags before he had to hit the fund-raising trail, to bring money into SCLC’s empty coffers. As his work mounted, it became impossible for him to spend a day in meditation. He always found himself using that time to catch up on accumulated chores or to answer emergency phone calls. What an enemy the phone was to this American Gandhi. “I have felt terribly frustrated over my inability to retreat, concentrate, and reflect,” he complained to a friend at Boston University. “My whole life seems to be centered around giving something out and only rarely taking something in.”

  THAT FALL, KING AND SCLC’s BOARD OF DIRECTORS agreed to utilize every available resource to increase the number of Negro voters. In mapping out SCLC strategy for I960, they resolved to file voter-registration complaints with the Civil Rights Commission, which was functioning increasingly as the government’s conscience in civil rights and as an ally to King. He and SCLC strongly supported its recommendation that federal registrars be deployed in southern areas where blacks were systematically kept off the voting rolls and out of politics. If the South’s 5 million eligible Negro voters could gain the ballot (at present only 1.3 million enjoyed this fundamental American right), King envisioned a solid bloc of 10 million Negro voters in the United States, who could wield “formidable political power” in the forthcoming presidential election.

  At the same time, King wanted SCLC to mount a “full-scale assault” on all forms of segregation—an ambitious program for an organization whose staff consisted solely of Ella Baker. King and the SCLC board made plans to enlarge the staff, and also to establish an SCLC training program that would instruct youths and adult leaders in nonviolence and then send them into their communities to launch massaction programs against segregated schools and eating and transportation facilities. King noted that the school situation was especially distressing. Five years after the Brown decision, Alabama did not have a single desegregated school. In fact, white officials had a mandate to close any school threatened with integration. King thought it time for SCLC to apply pressure on white officialdom—and the federal government itself—to obey the law of the land.

  So that he could devote full time to SCLC, King now reached a decision he had contemplated for some time: he would move to Atlanta, so as to be close to SCLC headquarters and make maximum use of his time. To supplement his income, he would serve as co-pastor of his father’s church. He also hoped to find time in Atlanta to meditate and “think through the total struggle ahead.”

  On November 29, King offered his resignation as Dexter’s pastor. “For almost four years now,” he told his congregation, “I have been trying to do as one man, what five or six people ought to be doing.” He talked about “the strain of being known” and confessed that he had not served Dexter well, since the demands of the movement took him away from Montgomery for extended periods. “I have come to the conclusion that I can’t stop now. History has thrust upon me a responsibility from which I cannot turn away. I have no choice but to free you now.”

  His parishioners stood and sang “Blest Be the Tie That Binds.” King was crying, and so were many of them. They had gone through a great deal together, but he had to go now. History was calling him home to Atlanta, obliging him to abandon his role as a preacher with a concern for civil rights and become a militant movement leader with a private and abiding religious faith.

  His resignation took effect on the last Sunday in January, 1960, at the dawn of a new decade. Among his final words to black Montgomery, he warned that freedom was never free. It was “always purchased with the high price of sac
rifice and suffering.” So let them protest “until every black boy and girl can walk the streets with dignity and honor.”

  PART FOUR

  SEASONS OF SORROW

  So IT WAS THAT KING returned to Atlanta, moving his family into a rented two-story home on Johnson Avenue, near Ebenezer and SCLC headquarters on Auburn Avenue. He commented wryly that he was only co-pastor of the church—his Daddy remained the pastor. King still professed indifference to material things and still tried to be like Gandhi. He drove a dusty three-year-old Chevrolet, and his personal income was scarcely commensurate with his labors and prestige. He accepted only $1 a year as SCLC president, received an annual salary of $4,000 from Ebenezer and another $2,000 for “pastoral care,” and kept only around $5,000 from his sizable royalties and honorariums (up to $230,000 in a good year, nearly all of which he donated to SCLC). Still, King was ambivalent about bourgeois values. He liked to stay in posh hotels and was always immaculately dressed in gray and black suits, white shirt, and tie. His work, of course, required that he be neat in appearance. Nobody, certainly no whites, would have attended his addresses or contributed to movement treasuries had he shown up in a Gandhian loincloth. Yet he had a fascination with men of affluence—a legacy from his father perhaps—and enjoyed the company of wealthy SCLC benefactors, especially in New York. He even served on the board of directors of the International Opportunity Life Insurance Company, advising people to invest in such a growing firm and even buying shares himself. What was more, he had more than fifty awards and honorary degrees arranged on the walls of his Atlanta home. Among them were honorary degrees from Morehouse, Howard University, Boston University, and the Chicago Theological Seminary, and the NAACP’s coveted Spingarn medal, given to King in 1957 for the highest achievement in his field.

  Because of his prominence, rumors flew about black Atlanta that King was rich. “The first thing some people ask me,” King said in bewilderment, “is, ‘All right, Reverend, now where’s the Cadillac?’” Many Negroes found it inconceivable that King had no flashy car, no personal fortune stashed away, no opulent mansion in a plush Negro neighborhood. But that was not the only problem he encountered in Atlanta. As it happened, many of the city’s old guard Negro leaders viewed him as an aggrandizing upstart—and a sanctimonious one at that—and vehemently opposed his move to Atlanta. “Smug and affluent,” they did not want King encroaching on their territory and stirring up the Negro masses. They had fashioned a “coalition of mutual self-interest” with white leaders like Police Chief Herbert Jenkins and Mayor William B. Hartsfield, the latter a spry seventy-year-old who expatiated on “my town” while pacing about his office. The established Negro leadership—which included Daddy King—had worked out a tacit understanding with white officials that desegregation should be gradual and nonviolent, in order to preserve the city’s image. By now, the golf courses and city buses were desegregated, and a Negro even served on the Atlanta school board. The schools themselves were under a federal court order to start desegregating in September, 1961, when ten black students were to be assigned to white schools. Hartsfield and Jenkins and the Chamber of Commerce, too, all pledged to carry out the federal court order, which was a far cry from the mule-headed opposition of white officialdom back in Montgomery. “We’re a city too busy to hate,” Hartsfield declared. “Atlanta does not cling to the past. People who swear on the old Southern traditions don’t know what the hell they are. I think of boll weevils and hookworms. Robert E. Lee wouldn’t even spit on the rabble rousers we have today. Think of living through this changing South—what a dynamic story! And Atlanta is the leader.”

  These were enlightened words for a southern white mayor. But the sad truth was that Atlanta remained a largely segregated city. In fact, Hartsfield’s own city hall maintained separate restrooms and drinking fountains for Negroes and a whites-only cafeteria. Across Atlanta, moreover, restaurants, theaters, lunch counters, and most of the parks were all closed to blacks. As Coretta said, a Negro who wanted a soda at a downtown drugstore still had to order it from a side door.

  King was upset about all this and once even scolded his father for not doing more in these years to challenge Atlanta’s segregated facilities. “I am different from my father,” he said on one occasion. “I feel the need of being free now!” But King himself never undertook an SCLC campaign in the city, because of an understanding he reached with “the somewhat envious old guard,” as an SCLC staffer put it. He could be a national leader, a regional leader, but not an Atlanta leader. He could use the city as his base and sanctuary, but he must not get involved in what was going on there. King agreed, said a close aide, because he knew that an SCLC action was doomed without the support of the local leadership.

  King had barely settled in Atlanta when newspapers reported startling developments in Greensboro, North Carolina. On February 2, 1960, four Negro students from North Carolina A & T College marched into Woolworth’s, sat down at its lunch counter, and refused to leave unless they were served. Electrified by their courage, hundreds of students, including some from white colleges in the area, assailed Woolworth’s during the next week, and the celebrated student sit-ins were under way. CORE, of course, had pioneered the sit-in back in 1942, and NAACP youth groups had staged sit-ins in Kansas and Oklahoma in 1958. But the events in Greensboro, widely reported in newspapers and television, galvanized Negro college students across the South and ignited one sit-in movement after another. In Nashville, James Lawson, Jr., a tall, soft-voiced clergyman and a Ph.D. candidate at Vanderbilt, had started workshops on nonviolence, with plans to launch a nonviolent offensive against segregation. Several bright and articulate young Negroes gathered around Lawson—people like John Lewis, James Bevel, and C. T. Vivian, all of whom had been inspired by Montgomery and greatly admired Martin Luther King. On February 13, Lawson’s group led the largest and most effective sit-in thus far, as five hundred students crowded white lunch counters in Nashville, singing “We Shall Overcome,” an old labor-union song destined to become the hymn of the Negro movement. John Lewis told his followers to “Remember the teachings of Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. God bless you all.”

  In Atlanta, King sensed that historic events were unfolding in North Carolina and Tennessee. At long last, Negro students were becoming involved in the struggle—students who had come of age since the Brown decision and had seen it flouted across Dixie. Now they were on the move, and he was proud of them. In point of fact, they were attempting to do what SCLC had on its own agenda for 1960: to desegregate eating facilities in southern cities. As the sit-ins spread, students from numerous campuses wrote King for help and advice, which he freely gave. He spoke to student groups in Durham, North Carolina, and corresponded with many others, imploring them to follow the “Montgomery way” and not strike back at whites who shoved and screamed at them. He also assured the sit-inners that this was their movement—he had no intention of usurping it—and that it was “one of the most significant developments in the civil-rights struggle.”

  But on another front developments were ominous. During the third week of February, a Montgomery grand jury indicted King on a charge of falsifying his state tax returns for 1956–1958, of deliberately lying about money he had received and spent as president of the MIA and SCLC. King was crushed by the news. “Many people will think I am guilty,” he moaned to Coretta and his close friends. “You know my enemies have previously done everything against me but attack my character and integrity. Though I am not perfect, if I have any virtues, the one of which I am most proud is my honesty where money is concerned.”

  The more he agonized over the indictment, the more he considered it a vicious attempt to discredit him in the eyes of Negroes everywhere. No, it was worse than that. Montgomery officials were out to destroy the movement itself by besmirching him in public. How to fight such treachery? The only way to prove his innocence was to win in court. But no white court in Montgomery was going to exonerate him. He was certain to be found guilty and t
hen “for the rest of my life,” he groaned, “people will believe that I took money that didn’t belong to me.” He would never do that, would never betray his people. “But who will believe me?” He fell into a deep depression.

  He canceled a speaking engagement in Chicago because he couldn’t bear to face anybody. He shut himself in his study and paced and prayed. Finally he realized that he had no right to hide. Accused or not, he had to stand before those people in Chicago. He called the airport, made new reservations, and went. Had he not done so, as James Baldwin said, he would have lost even before he came to trial.

  Because he needed a lot of money for legal fees, his New York friends—Harry Belafonte, Rustin, and Stanley Levison—formed an emergency fund-raising committee. But King didn’t want them to help him alone. The students needed money, too, and so did SCLC for its voter-registration work. “In the long run of history,” King argued, “it does not matter whether Martin Luther King spends ten years in jail, but it does matter whether the student movement continues and it does matter whether the Negro is able to get the ballot in the South.” He wanted to make that “palpably clear.” At his insistence, his friends promised to raise $200,000 for his defense and for the southern freedom movement.

  “My personal trials have…taught me the value of unmerciful suffering,” he wrote in the Christian Century. “If only to save myself from bitterness, I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transcend myself and heal the people involved in the tragic situation that now obtains.”

  In that spirit, he turned back to the sit-ins. In early March, students at Alabama State College in Montgomery held a demonstration at the county courthouse. In retaliation, police invaded the campus with shotguns, rifles, and tear gas, and threatened to arrest the entire student body. Though facing trial in Montgomery, King went to Alabama State and gave the students a pep talk at a mass rally—”he endeared himself to that generation of students by being with us,” recalled one young man. At the same time, King publicly condemned the “gestapo-like tactics” of the Montgomery police and telegraphed Eisenhower “to take immediate action in your name to restore law and order” in the Alabama capital. But the President ignored him.