Later, in the quiet of his office, King spoke of the future. “We are dealing with a formidable opposition which is organized and using every method in the books to block our advance.” He formed his hands in a pyramid before his face. “There is bound to be tension. I think we’re creating the legal, moral and nonviolent tension. Socrates called himself the gadfly. Maybe that’s what we are, the creative gadflies of society, bringing on the necessary tension.” This was “the critical struggle of our time,” he said, a struggle that would produce “the new Atlanta, the new Birmingham, the new Montgomery, the new South.”
The students were back again: Lonnie King, Bernard Lee, and attractive coeds from Spelman College, all imploring him to go downtown and sit in with them. “You are the spiritual leader of the Movement,” Lonnie King reminded him on the eve of the first demonstration, “and you were born in Atlanta, Georgia, and I think it might add tremendous impetus if you would go.” By now he was beginning to waver. He felt morally obligated to join the protest, and anyway the Miami meeting with Kennedy had fallen through, mainly because King still opposed an official endorsement, and he no longer had a valid excuse for telling the students no. All right, he said, he would go to jail with them, in the spirit of Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau. But he made it clear to the public that he was not the leader of the protest, that it was student planned and student sustained.
On Wednesday morning, October 19, some seventy-five students launched what one journalist called “the Second Battle of Atlanta,” setting up picket lines and conducting sit-ins at the major downtown stores. King joined a sit-in at Rich’s snack bar, was arrested for trespassing and whisked off to jail in a paddy wagon. He refused to pay his $500 bond and promised to “stay in jail 10 years if necessary.” As he’d told the Life reporter: “In order to serve as a redemptive agency for the nation, to arouse the conscience of the opponent, you go to jail and you stay. You don’t pay the fine and you don’t pay the bail. You are not to subvert or disrespect the law. You have broken a law which is out of line with the moral law and you are willing to suffer the consequences by serving the time.”
He found himself in a cell with strapping Lonnie King, Bernard Lee, and several other male students. “Our prize was that Martin Luther King—our leader—was there with us,” Lee recalled. He took a bunk next to theirs, and they spent the slow jail hours talking about segregation, nonviolence, Gandhi, Christianity, love, and the Montgomery bus boycott. “It was almost like a retreat for us,” Lee said later. “We had our song fests. We had our meditation periods. We played games. I used to beat the dickens out of Dr. King playing checkers. He thought he could play and I’d just wear him out. He was very relaxed, in a way like a brother to us.”
On Saturday Mayor Hartsfield announced that, on the personal recommendation of Senator Kennedy, he had reached an agreement with student leaders that called for the release of King and all other incarcerated Negroes.* In exchange for that, the students agreed to a temporary truce, during which the mayor was to negotiate with downtown merchants about desegregating their lunch counters. The protest ended for now, and the jailed students all went free.
King, however, remained imprisoned. When officials in contiguous DeKalb County learned that he was in Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail, they asked that King be turned over to them, to stand trial for violating probation on a traffic fine he’d received months before. The incident had happened one night the previous spring, when the Kings had driven through DeKalb County with Lillian Smith, the eminent white novelist. A cop saw them and pulled King over because he had a white woman in the car with him. To his dismay, King had forgotten to secure a Georgia driver’s license and his Alabama license had expired. The cop therefore cited him for driving with an invalid permit. In his trial in DeKalb County, Judge Oscar Mitchell had fined King $25 and placed him on a year’s probation. King promptly paid the fine and gave no more thought to the probation, assuming that it related only to his driving privileges.
But now DeKalb County officials argued differently. According to them, his probation required that he stay out of trouble with the law for one year, and his arrest in Atlanta violated that probation. On Monday morning, DeKalb County sheriff deputies picked King up at the jail in Atlanta and sped him across the county line to face Judge Mitchell a second time. On October 25 the judge found him guilty and sentenced him to serve four months at hard labor in Georgia’s public-works camp. He even denied King bail and informed his lawyers that they had better appeal in a hurry because he was going on a fishing trip.
King was stunned at the severity of his punishment, and so were his lawyers and supporters at the trial—among them, Roy Wilkins, who brought personal assurances from the NAACP. Coretta, for her part, openly wept in the courtroom, the first time she had cried in public since the movement began.
She and Daddy visited King briefly in jail, and she broke into tears again. DeKalb County was a haven for the Klan; Negroes had gone to jail here and never been seen again. What if she never saw Martin again? “Corrie, dear, you have to be strong,” King said. “I’ve never seen you like this before. You have to be strong for me.”
“You don’t see me crying,” Daddy King said; “I am ready to fight. When you see Daddy crying, Coretta, then you can start crying. I’m not taking this lying down.”
But King said wearily, “I think we must prepare ourselves for the fact that I am going to have to serve this time.” He asked Coretta to bring him some magazines, newspapers, and writing paper. She promised to do so in the morning, then left with Daddy, glancing back at her husband.
That night several men came to the cell where King lay sleeping with other prisoners. A flashlight shone in his eyes. “King! “King! Wake up!” The men hovered over him in the gloom, and he felt a pang of fear. For Negroes, midnight visits in jail could mean only one thing. They made him get dressed, clamped handcuffs on his wrists and chains on his legs, and dragged him out to a sheriff’s car, which roared away into the night. The handcuffs were so tight that his wrists hurt. Where were they taking him? he asked the deputies, but they ignored him. They drove for hours along empty highways, the deputies silhouetted in the glare of the headlights. Every time they slowed the car, King tensed, his eyes wide in the dark.
At last they pulled up at the gates of a prison. A sign read “Reidsville Penitentiary.” Reidsville! That meant they had driven him three hundred miles from Atlanta—for what purpose? What would they do to him now? In some dim and dismal room, officials outfitted him in a white prison uniform with green stripes down the pantlegs—all this the result of a minor traffic infraction. Guards marched him down an echoing corridor and pushed him into a cell reserved for hardened criminals. He was in real Klan country now, in a prison whose wardens were brutal and abusive, and he was alone. Well, it was going to be a long stay; he had better try to make the best of it. Somehow he secured some books to read—Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Upton Sinclair’s The Cup of Fury, John’s Seldon Whale’s Victor and Victim—and settled in with them.
But he couldn’t keep his mind on the books. Cockroaches were crawling all over his narrow cell. And the food tasted awful—acidic blackeyed peas, beans, and greens. He pushed it away. Hungry, numb from the cold, worn down from tension and lack of sleep, he caught a terrible cold and lay shivering and hacking on his bunk.
But suddenly his fortunes changed. On October 28 the prison released him on a $2,000 bond, and SCLC sent a chartered plane to fetch him home. The plane landed at the suburban airport in De-Kalb County, and King got off and fell into the arms of his worried wife. Atlanta journalist Pat Watters, who had never seen King until now, noted that he had “a look of vulnerability about him—not softness, not naivete, but somehow hurtable.”
The Kings climbed into a large black sedan and rode away toward Atlanta. King had learned from reporters that the Kennedys had been instrumental in getting him out of Reidsville, and Coretta now filled him in on details. Senator Kennedy had phoned her and promised to d
o all he could to help her husband. And Robert Kennedy (who had initially opposed the senator’s call, which was Wofford’s idea) then phoned Judge Mitchell, who, in all the adverse publicity surrounding King’s imprisonment, reversed his decision and ordered King released on bond.
Presently, the car came to the Fulton County line, where one hundred Negro students, veterans of the Atlanta sit-ins, waited in the dusk to welcome King home. The car stopped; the trailing cars did too; and King got out and waved to the students, silhouetted against a full moon. They broke into the lyrics of “We Shall Overcome,” their voices, rising on a soft wind, young and unafraid. “Oh, deep in my heart I do believe, that we shall overcome some day….”
The motorcade started up again and bore King to Ebenezer Church, where eight hundred people greeted him with songs and prayers. “I am deeply indebted to Senator Kennedy, who served as a great force in making my release possible,” King had told reporters. “It took a lot of courage for Senator Kennedy to do this, especially in Georgia. For him to be that courageous shows that he is really acting upon principle and not expediency.” He informed his people that “I never intend to reject a man running for President of the United States just because he is a Catholic”—a reference to his father, who opposed Kennedy strictly on religious grounds. Though King did not endorse Kennedy, the Atlanta Journal said “he did just about everything short of it.” In fact, other papers reported that he had endorsed the senator, and millions of Negroes believed that he had. The story gained currency when Ralph Abernathy urged Negroes “to take off your Nixon buttons,” and Daddy King himself announced that he was switching his vote to Kennedy, Catholic or no. With the election only a few days away, Kennedy forces distributed two million copies of a pamphlet called “No Comment Nixon” versus a Candidate with a Heart, Senator Kennedy: The Case of Martin Luther King, which recounted the Kennedy phone calls in King’s behalf and stressed Nixon’s silence.
According to many analysts, the entire episode won critical Negro votes for Kennedy and gave him the election in November. Official returns assigned him 34,226,925 popular votes to Nixon’s 34,108,662—a margin of only 112,881. That Kennedy captured almost three-fourths of the Negro ballots proved decisive in a contest in which Nixon had largely ignored the black electorate and gone after the white South instead. For King, the election demonstrated what he had said all along—that one of the most significant steps a Negro could take was the short walk to the voting booth.
He rejoiced that Kennedy had won. Now, he believed, the country had a chief executive who would use his powerful office to enforce civil rights. But he insisted on correcting press reports that he had endorsed the President-elect. “The price that one has to pay in public life is that of being misquoted, misrepresented and misunderstood,” King said. “I have tried to condition myself to this inevitable situation.”
AFTER THE ELECTION, KING WAS SCHEDULED for a thirty-minute debate with James J. Kilpatrick, editor of the Richmond News-Leader, on an NBC-TV show called “The Nation’s Future.” King said he suffered “a great deal of stress” before the debate, because his time in jail and heavy schedule made it impossible for him to prepare adequately. And he was up against a formidable opponent in Kilpatrick, one of America’s preeminent segregationists. They were going to debate a complex issue—”Are Sit-in Strikes Justifiable?”—and King knew a large national audience would be watching. What was more, his performance could affect events in Atlanta, where negotiations had broken down and the boycotts and sit-ins resumed. If Kilpatrick defeated him, it might fuel white intransigence in Atlanta and everywhere else in the South.
The debate took place on Saturday evening, November 26, in NBC’s New York studios. That day in Atlanta, Klansmen and Negro students had demonstrated on opposite sides of the same street, and Mayor Hartsfield was reported as saying that “Atlanta, Georgia, was the only city in the country where Negroes and the Klan could picket together to the tune of the Salvation Army.” The NBC moderator introduced King first, and he stated his position calmly. The goals of the sit-ins, he said, were scarcely debatable in a society founded on the principle of equality. Through nonviolence, student protesters were out to remove barriers between colors of men, which prevented America from realizing the ideal of brotherhood. Second, instead of showing disrespect for law (as many people charged), the students had so much respect for law that they wanted to see all laws conform to the moral law of the universe. They also hoped to square local laws with the federal constitution and “the just law of the land.” Third, they drew from “the deep wells of democracy that were dug by the Founding Fathers of this nation,” a nation that was created in protest (the Boston Tea Party, the Revolution itself). “And so, in sitting down, these students are in reality standing up for the highest and the best in the American tradition.”
The cameras switched to Kilpatrick, who dismissed the sit-ins as insignificant. When seen in the overall context of race relations, he argued, “the question of who eats integrated hot dogs seems to me greatly exaggerated.” Then he got down to the crux of his argument: the preservation of the white race. King, he maintained, wanted to stamp out segregation everywhere, and at the end of his argument lay “what has been termed the coffee-colored compromise, a society in which every distinction of race has been blotted out by this principle of togetherness.” Like most southern whites, Kilpatrick took pride in his race, and he was puzzled—maybe King could comment on this—why Negroes “by and large seem to take so little pride in theirs.” Southern whites, he went on, were out to save the predominant racial characteristics developed by white western civilization over the past two thousand years. Thus they fought against race mixing, especially in social areas where “intimate personal association” would foster an ethnic breakdown. As for the sit-ins, King was wrong in calling them nonviolent. On the contrary, they created “a great deal of tense pushing and shoving, in an atmosphere that is electric with restrained violence and hostility.” But the essential question was one of property rights—the right of private store owners to serve whomever they please. If they did not want to serve Negroes, they had that right.
King listened to all this in considerable distress. These were complicated points—pretty much summing up white opposition to the sit-ins—and King had little time in which to refute them. He took off on the charge of violence, pointing out that the students hadn’t pushed or shoved anybody; the white opposition had done that. The students had shown amazing discipline and dignity. As to property rights, the issue here went beyond exclusive private property. The sit-ins involved privately owned property that depended on the public for its support and livelihood.
But Kilpatrick interrrupted him. He wanted to return to King’s recitation on law. “It is an interesting experience to be here tonight,” Kilpatrick drawled, “and see Mr. King assert a right to obey those laws he chooses to obey and disobey those that he chooses not to obey and insist the whole time that he has what he terms the highest respect for the law, because he is abiding by the moral law of the universe. I would prefer here on earth that we tried to abide by the law of the land, by the statutes, by the court decisions, by the other acts that establish law here on earth.”
But most of these local laws contradicted federal law, King said. Surely Mr. Kilpatrick would agree with that.
“I don’t agree with that at all,” Kilpatrick retorted.
All moral men, King went on, must agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all” and must be opposed. Local segregation laws were unjust, and that was why the students challenged them. For comparision, take the southern white resistance to the 1954 school decision.
“We thought we were resisting an unjust law, you see,” Kilpatrick chuckled.
But you will have to agree, King insisted, that “there is a great distinction between the immoral, hateful, violent resistance of many white segregationists and the nonviolent, peaceful, loving civil resistance of the Negro students.” The difference here was betwee
n uncivil and civil disobedience. Moreover—and this was the crucial point—an individual who in his conscience decides to disobey an unjust law must be willing to suffer the consequences and go to jail. “At that moment he is expressing the highest respect for the law,” King contended.
Kilpatrick threw up his hands. “This is the most remarkable exposition of obedience to law that I ever remember taking part in. Everyone has the right to decide for himself on the basis of his conscience what laws he regards as just and what he regards as unjust.” But he wanted to ask King about “the boycott business,” which involved the right of Negroes not to buy. “Do you see any right comparable on the part of the store owners not to sell?”
King replied, “I would say that on the one hand those individuals who are in the common market with their stores should not deny individuals access to the common market. I think, on the other hand, we must see that the boycott method as used by the students is not a negative thing.”
But time was up, and King left the studio feeling that he had not done very well. The issue of civil disobedience, he complained, was new to a lot of people and was almost impossible to explain in the brief time allotted to the debate by NBC.
In truth, lack of time was his greatest frustration. Already his schedule for 1961 was heavier than last year’s, with an almost endless series of speeches, lectures, and other public appearances, and he feared that he was losing his freshness and creativity, feared that he was harming the southern struggle itself “by being away from the scene of action so often.” But there were so many friends to oblige, so much money to raise, so much to be said about the movement, that he felt obligated to accept as many invitations as possible. Still, he longed for a few unhurried hours alone, so that he might write a systematic exposition of his philosophy. Months ago he had started a book of sermons which would elucidate his theological views. But his commitments were so great that he could not work on the book again until next summer.
Let the Trumpet Sound Page 22
