As they reviewed the Albany campaign, King and his aides were convinced that the FBI was on the side of Albany segregationists. Throughout the movement, blacks time and again had filed complaints about violations of their civil rights, but FBI agents had done nothing about them, nothing at all. In a statement widely quoted in the press, King said, “One of the greatest problems we face with the FBI in the South is that the agents are white southerners who have been influenced by the mores of their community. To maintain their status, they have to be friendly with the local police and people who are promoting segregation. Every time I saw FBI men in Albany, they were with the local police force.”
Although this was an accurate appraisal, FBI officials—particularly Director J. Edgar Hoover—became incensed when they read King’s remarks in a newspaper. One of the most powerful men in government, an aloof, priggish martinet with an imperial ego, Hoover had built the FBI into his private empire and ruled it with an iron hand. He intimidated Presidents and legislators alike and brooked no criticism from anybody in or out of Washington. As it happened, Hoover was already convinced that King and the civil-rights movement were influenced by Communism, which he regarded as the number-one enemy of the Republic. Since January, in fact, he had bombarded Robert Kennedy with memos that King had Communist associates. His bureau, moreover, had placed King’s name on “Section A of the Reserve Index,” which listed dangerous people to be rounded up in case of a national emergency, and had launched a full security investigation of King and SCLC. But there was more involved here than the issue of Communism. Hoover detested King personally, blasting him as “no good” on the margin of one memo. Intolerant of Negroes anyway, the director had no stomach for a popular, aggressive, outspoken one like King who rocked the established order.
Urged on by his close deputies, Hoover directed that Assistant Director Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, head of the Crime Records Division, phone King and “correct” his impression of the FBI. But when King failed to return the call, DeLoach took it as a snub and became enraged, damning King as “a vicious liar” who “constantly associates with and takes instructions from [a]…member of the Communist Party.” These were Hoover’s sentiments exactly. Attributing only the most sinister motives to King’s criticism and seeming rebuff of his bureau, Hoover was determined to ferret out his “subversive” dealings if it was the last thing he and his men did.
PART FIVE
THE DREAMER COMETH
“I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.”
MATTHEW 5:17
IN RETROSPECT, KING TRIED to convince himself that Albany had accomplished something, that at least “the Negro people there straightened up their bent backs.” A local Negro agreed. “What did we win?” he asked. “We won our self-respect. It changed all my attitudes. This movement made me demand a semblance of first-class citizenship.” Also, thanks to the voter-registration drive in Albany and similar efforts elsewhere in Georgia, which expanded the Negro electorate, Sanders defeated Griffin in the Democratic primary and went on to become governor. Since Sanders promised to enforce the law impartially, King supposed that he was preferable to a rabid segregationist like Griffin.
But King was wrong if he thought that much had changed in Georgia. Within a single week that September, 1962, the Klan dynamited four Negro churches in towns near Albany. When he saw those blasted sanctuaries, King gave in to bitterness. “Tears welled up in my heart and in my eyes,” he wrote. “No matter what it is we seek, the Negro stands little chance, if any, of securing the approval, consent, or tolerance of the segregationist South.”
He was steeped in anguish. So many of his own people seemed not to care about the struggle; so many whites were hostile or indifferent. The Kennedys showed no signs of making civil rights a major priority, which meant no new civil-rights legislation, no safeguards for Negro voting rights, no federal protection for blacks in Dixie, no second Emancipation Proclamation. Young later claimed that King was so disconsolate that he seriously thought about quitting the civil-rights movement. An offer came from Sol Hurok’s agency to make him its chief lecturer around the world, with a guarantee of $100,000. Because the agency pressured him for an answer, King had to grapple with his doubts, Young recalled, and finally told them no. It was a decision, observed one writer, that “committed King irrevocably to the Movement.”
With awakened resolution, he delivered a spirited address at SCLC’s September convention in Birmingham, where Fred Shuttlesworth was directing a Negro boycott of white merchants. As King spoke, a two-hundred-pound white youth, a self-styled Nazi, leaped on stage and punched him in the mouth. Reeling under the boy’s slashing fists, King made no effort to defend himself. At last the police and several SCLC delegates subdued his assailant, but King asked that he be allowed to sit back down. “This system that we live under creates people such as this youth,” King remarked after the meeting. “I’m not interested in pressing charges. I’m interested in changing the kind of system that produces this kind of man.”
Back home in Atlanta, King told Coretta about the incident, and she was horrified that he had wanted the boy to remain in the audience. “Suppose he had a knife or a gun?” she said. “Well, if he had, he would have used it before then,” King replied.
That same month, King sat in horror before his television set, watching news clips of the James Meredith crisis at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. Armed with a federal court order, U.S. marshals tried to register Meredith, a Negro and an Air Force veteran. But Governor Ross Barnett and a cadre of state troopers turned them away from the administration building, while armies of white students waved Confederate flags and chanted “Glory, Glory, segregation,” to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The Kennedy administration attempted to work out a deal with Barnett, but the governor railed against outside interference and vowed to preserve racial purity at Ole Miss. When federal marshals again sought to register Meredith there, whites opened fire and a terrible battle broke out in which two people were killed and 375 injured. Shocked that it should come to this, the Kennedys had no choice but to dispatch federal troops to quell the riot. At last Meredith registered at the university, but marshals had to escort him to his classes, where whites refused to sit anywhere near him.
“It has been difficult to believe what we have read in the newspapers and more difficult to believe what our television sets have hurled at our eyes,” King wrote in The Nation. This was “Mississippi’s most critical hour since secession,” and he castigated the state’s abysmal white leadership for allowing “Ole Miss to become a battleground for a cause that was lost a hundred years ago.” And though the President had sent troops to Oxford, with southern whites howling that it was Reconstruction all over again, King was deeply disappointed in him. His behind-the-scenes maneuvering with Barnett “made Negroes feel like pawns in a white politician’s game,” King said. All Kennedy seemed concerned about was a token victory—one Negro enrolled in Mississippi—rather than a serious effort to integrate the nation’s schools and improve the wretched lot of Negroes in this country. Where was Kennedy’s moral passion anyway? And his vaunted sense of history? How could he fail to perceive that Oxford, Mississippi, had placed democracy on trial and that America more than ever needed “vigorous and firm exercise of the powers of the Presidency?”
The truth was that the President remained preoccupied with foreign affairs, particularly with crucial developments in the Cold War: not only an escalating arms race and ongoing troubles in southeast Asia, but the Cuban missile confrontation that October, which brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the very brink of nuclear war. In the end, Khrushchev backed down and withdrew Russia’s missiles from Cuba; and Kennedy basked in what to him was a significant victory, one that compensated for the Bay of Pigs and that preserved American hegemony in this hemisphere. Compared to such Cold War events, from Kennedy’s perspective, racial turbulence in the South seemed a succession of nagging, largely avoidable episodes.”*
King, though, was more determined than ever to convince the President otherwise, to make him realize that the domestic race problem was a profound historical problem that menaced the very future of the Republic and that must be dealt with accordingly. During the late fall and early winter of 1962, in a procession of speeches and published articles, King mounted a personal crusade to make Kennedy act. January 1, 1963, he reminded the President, would be the centennial of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. What better way to commemorate that celebrated day, King asked, than for the President to promulgate a second Emancipation Proclamation, as King had been exhorting him to do? Doubtless Kennedy shrank from doing so because he believed that his margin of victory in 1960 had been too thin, that he had no mandate for so bold a thrust, and that he was afraid of offending the South and its northern allies. Lincoln’s dilemma had been similar. Even though he thought slavery a monstrous moral wrong, Lincoln had shied away from an emancipation decree lest he alienate the loyal border states and provoke northern conservatives, too. But he no longer hesitated “when historic necessity charted but one course,” King said. Castigated from all sides, assailed by all the winds of conflict and confusion, Lincoln searched his way through to his answer, embodied in his immortal words, “In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free, honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve.” And so he put forth the Emancipation Proclamation, which broke the shackles of several million oppressed Americans and revived the principle of equality in the Declaration of Independence, of which Lincoln’s decree was “the offspring.” The proclamation placed “the North on the side of justice and civilization,” as Frederick Douglass put it, and earned Lincoln a permanent place in history.
The centennial of Lincoln’s proclamation, King instructed Kennedy, reminds us that “the forceful, extensive use of executive power is deeply rooted in our tradition.” It reminds us that Lincoln’s was the strongest measure ever to come from an American president, one that altered the economy, liberated an enslaved race, and helped shape a momentous social revolution. The Lincoln precedent should have inspired subsequent presidents to complete the process of emancipation, King said. But in the ensuing century not one possessed “the daring or the will” to do so.
Now Kennedy had the opportunity to do so and earn himself a place in history. On January 1, 1963, on the one hundredth anniversary of Lincoln’s proclamation, Kennedy could “make its declaration of freedom real.” The President could issue his own proclamation, one declaring that segregation—a modern form of slavery—was morally and legally indefensible, that it was henceforth abolished, and that the federal government would use all its power to enforce the Negro’s constitutional rights. “The key to everything,” King asserted, “is Federal commitment, full, unequivocal, and unremitting.”
Years ago, King noted, Harvard’s Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., had polled his fellow American historians and asked them to name the greatest Presidents. Lincoln led the list, not because of personal magnetism but because of his sense of history—his ability to identify himself with a historical turning point in his era. Now the Republic had reached a historical turning point in the sixty-second year of the twentieth century, King declared, and “the day has come for a modern Emancipation Proclamation,” so that America at last could fulfill “the luminous promise of Democracy.”
AFTER SCLC’s CONVENTION IN SEPTEMBER, King had a series of pressing phone conversations with Fred Shuttlesworth, head of SCLC’s Birmingham affiliate, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR). For several years, Shuttlesworth and his people had struggled to desegregate Birmingham’s buses, schools, parks, and lunch counters, only to meet brutal white opposition. Not only did Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor clap them into jail, but marauding whites bombed so many of their homes that one Negro section became known as Dynamite Hill.
King had followed events in Birmingham and had great admiration for Shuttlesworth, an absolutely fearless man who had made going to jail “a badge of honor.” Alabama born and bred, he was a spare man with close-cropped hair and pastor of Bethel Baptist Church. Since 1956, when he had led an attack against the city’s Jim Crow buses, Shuttlesworth had suffered unbelievable violence and abuse. On Christmas night, 1956, his home was bombed and Shuttlesworth himself almost killed. Announcing that God had saved him and that “I wasn’t saved to run,” he conducted another demonstration against the buses, and whites retaliated by blowing up his church. When he and his wife tried to enroll their children in a white school, a mob beat him with chains and brass knuckles and stabbed his wife in the hip. Because of his civil-rights militancy, he had gone to jail eight times, fought a $3 million lawsuit brought against him by city officials, and seen his car and personal property sold off in public auction. Yet he went on challenging segregation, because he knew it “wasn’t just gon’ die away.”
In March, 1962, ACMHR and local Negro students launched a selective boycott of downtown stores; and Shuttlesworth urged SCLC to join them in a combined massaction campaign in the city. In May, King and SCLC’s Board of Directors seriously considered Shuttlesworth’s proposal, but then King got involved in Albany. When SCLC chose Birmingham as the site of its fall convention, rumors flew about an impending SCLC invasion, and several merchants—already hurt by ACMHR’s boycott—agreed to desegregate their lunch counters in a desperate effort to forestall demonstrations. In good faith, Shuttlesworth called off the boycott, but after the convention came and passed the merchants predictably reneged on their promise. And Shuttlesworth was mad. The only way this city was ever going to change, he told King, was for their two organizations to join forces and do battle with the “sin” and “darkness” here.
After Albany, King needed little persuasion. Here was a chance to make up for that debacle, to show all the country that SCLC could win a victory for the Negro and that nonviolence was not dead. Accordingly, he committed himself to a major direct-action campaign in Birmingham, and Shuttlesworth was euphoric. He was certain that with “SCLC’s staff and know-how and dedication from Albany” and his own seven years of battle experience, they could “make a confrontation which would bring the nation…to recognize the injustice.”
Still, King and his staff realized that it was going to be a tough campaign, a dangerous campaign. King himself called Birmingham “the most thoroughly segregated city in the country,” an American Johannesburg that was ruled by fear and plagued by hate. Here Negroes not only lived with the constant threat of violence (recently Klansmen had castrated a Negro and then left his mutilated body on a lonely road), but suffered from the full range of discrimination. Across the city, white moderates were intimidated and mute; nobody talked freely. Aroused whites had recently banned a book that featured black and white rabbits, and had launched a drive to prohibit “Negro music” from being played on white radio stations. Because of Birmingham’s stringent segregation policies, the Metropolitan Opera no longer visited the city. And the Southern Association baseball team had also departed. Apart from bus and railway facilities, King said, about the only things whites and blacks shared were the streets and the water and sewage systems.
Yes, Birmingham was a mean and violent place. Yet as Walker said, “We felt that if we could crack that city, then we could crack any city.” And “the results,” said another King adviser, “would radiate across the South.”
They had no intention, though, of dashing blindly into Birmingham as they had into Albany. At a three-day retreat, held at SCLC’s training center in Dorchester, Georgia, King and his aides and advisers worked out a detailed plan called Project C, for Confrontation Birmingham. As in Albany, their goal was to activate the entire black community and force the desegregation of all public facilities in the city. But to bring that about, they would attack the business community rather than the city government, would treat with merchants rather than local politicians. As King explained, “You don’t win against a political power structure where you don’t have the
votes. But you can win against an economic power structure when you have the economic power to make the difference between a merchant’s profit and loss.” Unlike Albany, where they had assailed all segregated accommodations and (in Walker’s words) had “bit off more than we could chew,” they would concentrate on a few downtown targets—Woolworth’s, H. L. Green’s, J. J. Newberry’s—and harass them with boycotts and sit-ins. Once these were under way, King’s forces would resort to mass marches and arrests to call attention to the plight of Birmingham’s Negroes. They would escalate the marches, tighten up the boycotts, even fill up the jails, until they brought about a moment of “creative tension,” when the evils of segregation would stand revealed and white merchants would be driven to the negotiating table.
On a more important level, the campaign was directed at the federal government itself. For even if they failed to break Birmingham, King and his men hoped to demonstrate “before the court of world opinion” the urgent need for change. They hoped to force the President and Congress to produce legislation that would desegregate public accommodations everywhere in Dixie.
All this reflected significant changes in King’s thinking about nonviolent resistance. For Montgomery and Albany had both taught him that nonviolent persuasion by itself might not win over the oppressor. No, federal action seemed imperative to effect lasting change in southern race relations. Yet King understood that the federal government seldom responded without pressure. And he planned to generate that in the streets of Birmingham, where his legions would expose the violence inherent in segregation and so stab the national conscience that Washington would be obliged to intervene with corrective measures. “Instead of submitting to surreptitious cruelty in thousands of dark jail cells and on countless shadowed street corners,” King said, the nonviolent resister “would force his oppressor to commit his brutality openly— in the light of day—with the rest of the world looking on.” In short, provocation was now a crucial aspect of King’s nonviolent strategy.
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