Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  But they did not reach that decision easily. In point of fact, a major debate raged within the administration over that point, and Robert Kennedy was the only cabinet member who urged his brother to send a civil-rights bill to the Hill. Thanks to “on the job sensitivity training,” as one writer phrased it, Robert Kennedy had become the leading in-house advocate of civil-rights legislation. His training had begun with the Freedom Riders and continued with Ole Miss and the dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham. Then in June he and the President had to federalize the Alabama National Guard to get two Negroes enrolled at the University of Alabama, where Governor Wallace, in what King described as “a fatuous display of political pomposity,” stood in the schoolhouse door before backing down under federal pressure. All this had finally gotten to Robert Kennedy. “The more he saw,” said Burke Marshall, “the madder [he] became. You know he always talked about the hypocrisy. That was what got him.” When asked to measure the rise of Kennedy’s civil-rights consciousness, Marshall shot his right arm straight up.

  And so it was Robert Kennedy who persuaded the President to throw the administration behind Martin Luther King and fight for the very thing he had advocated from the streets of Birmingham: a federal law that would open public accommodations across Dixie to Negroes. And though every other cabinet member opposed the move, Robert Kennedy prevailed.

  On the night of June 11, the President gave a nationally televised address about civil rights, a response to Birmingham and the crisis at the University of Alabama and the moral issues at stake in this critical hour. Watching Kennedy on television, King was elated, because the President’s argument was identical to what King had been saying in his own speeches and writings for two years now. This nation, Kennedy asserted, was founded “on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened,” a paraphrase of King’s own contention that a threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Every American, the President went on, had the right to attend any public institution, enjoy equal service in any public facility, and register and vote without having to take to the streets or call for federal troops. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” Kennedy told the nation. “It is as old as the Scriptures and as dear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities; whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.” The President identified passionately with the victimized Negro. “Who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?” We say we are the land of the free. We are, except for Negroes. The time has come for America to remove the blight of racial discrimination and fulfill her brilliant promise. Next week, Kennedy said, “I shall ask the Congress…to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.”

  So there it was at last: the President’s long-delayed appeal to the conscience of the nation. And if it was not the sweeping second Emancipation Proclamation King had wanted, he still acclaimed it “the most earnest, human and profound appeal for understanding and justice that any President has uttered since the first days of the Republic.” In his struggle of wills with the President, it seemed that King was bringing him around now…that the James Merediths and the Negroes of Birmingham were bringing him around.

  That night came the news that Medgar Evers, an NAACP field secretary, had been shot to death by a white man in front of his house in Jackson, Mississippi. So this was the response of southern segregationists to Kennedy’s appeal. A brave and gentle man was gone, another victim of the forces of hate in Dixie. “This reveals,” King said, “that we still have a long, long way to go in this nation before we achieve the ideals of decency and brotherhood.”

  Himself “deeply disturbed” by all the racial violence in Dixie, Kennedy submitted his new civil-rights bill to Congress on June 19. As King happily noted, the measure not only outlawed segregation in interstate public accommodations, but empowered the Attorney General to initiate suits for school integration and shut off funds to all federal programs in which discrimination occurred. With the Kennedys and Vice-President Lyndon Johnson battling hard to get the bill through Congress, King knew it was the start of a difficult journey for legislation “first written in the streets” of Birmingham.

  In hopes of pressuring Congress to act, various civil-rights leaders laid plans for a mass march on Washington. They wanted it to be larger than that of 1957, larger even than the trek of 100,000 A. Philip Randolph had threatened to lead back in 1941. In recent years, Randolph and other civil-rights people had talked about staging a Washington demonstration to dramatize the need for Negro jobs. But in the heady aftermath of Birmingham, with major civil-rights legislation pending on the Hill, they elected to march for jobs and freedom legislation. The demonstration would end with a mass rally at the steps of the Capitol. King, for his part, was only peripherally involved in the planning of the march, which was largely the work of Randolph and Bayard Rustin. But he agreed to give a speech at the affair, which Randolph hoped would draw tens of thousands of people from all corners of the Republic.

  On June 22 King went to the White House with Randolph, Farmer, Wilkins, and Whitney Young of the Urban League, to talk with Kennedy about the civil-rights bill and the projected march. Robert Kennedy, Johnson, and Walter Reuther were also present. The President described the situation on the Hill, where southerners were up in arms against his bill, and said he understood only too well why the Negro’s patience was at an end. But “we want success in Congress,” he said, “not just a big show at the Capitol. Some of these people are looking for an excuse to be against us. I don’t want to give any of them a chance to say, ‘Yes, I’m for the bill, but I’m damned if I will vote for it at the point of a gun.’” He conceded that demonstrations got results—the civil-rights bill was testimony to that—but insisted that they were in a legislative phase now and that Congress should be given “a fair chance to work its will.”

  Randolph and Farmer spoke up in defense of demonstrations, and so did King. “It is not a matter of either/or, but of both/and,” King said to Kennedy. The march on Washington “could serve as a means through which people with legitimate discontents could channel their grievances under disciplined, nonviolent leadership. It could also serve as a means of dramatizing the issue and mobilizing support in parts of the country which don’t know the problems at first hand. I think it will serve a purpose. It may seem ill-timed. Frankly, I have never engaged in any direct action movement which did not seem ill-timed. Some people thought Birmingham ill-timed.” The President broke in, “Including the Attorney General.”

  As they talked, the issue of police brutality came up. “I don’t think you should all be totally harsh on Bull Connor,” Kennedy said. There were gasps all around. “After all,” the President explained with a smile, “he has done a good deal for civil-rights legislation this year.”

  Then Kennedy grew solemn. “This is a very serious fight. The Vice-President and I know what it will mean if we fail. I have just seen a new poll—national approval of the administration has fallen from 60 to 47 per cent. We’re in this up to the neck. The worst trouble of all would be to lose the fight in Congress…. A good many programs I care about may go down the drain as a result of this—we may all go down the drain as a result of this—so we are putting a lot on the line. What is important is that we preserve confidence in the good faith of each other.”

  Kennedy said goodbye to the other Negroes, but asked King to wait. Then they left the Oval Office and walked into the Rose Garden, with its chirping birds and summer smells. Here the President related that he was getting a lot of flak from Senator Eastland of Mississippi to the effect that Communists had masterminded the entire Birmingham campaign and the upcoming march as well. Hoover’s
FBI was also concerned about Communist influences on King, the President said, and then added, “I assume you know you’re under very close surveillance.” In fact, Hoover thought King was consorting with known Communists and even had two on his staff. Kennedy specifically named Stanley Levison of New York, King’s longtime adviser, and warned him not to discuss significant matters with Levison by telephone. The FBI had his phone tapped because Hoover believed him “a conscious agent of the Soviet conspiracy.” Kennedy mentioned Jack O’Dell, too, a Negro associated with SCLC’s New York office. “They’re both Communists,” the President said. “You’ve got to get rid of them.” Otherwise civil-rights opponents like Eastland would try to discredit King with the Communist charge. “If they shoot you down, they’ll shoot us down too—so we’re asking you to be careful.”

  King thought he was careful enough. His organization had a “firm policy” against hiring Communists or Communist sympathizers. He was aware of the charges against O’Dell, who in his past had been a party organizer in New Orleans. In fact, when the FBI leaked to five newspapers a story that O’Dell was still affiliated with the American Communist party, King had asked for his resignation pending an SCLC investigation.* But King was shocked that Kennedy should accuse Levison of being a Communist. “I know Stanley and I can’t believe it,” King said. “You will have to prove it.” Kennedy promised that Burke Marshall would show Andrew Young the evidence, then excused himself. He had to get ready for a tour of Europe. In the meantime they should keep in touch.

  Later King recounted the Kennedy meeting to Young and other aides. As far as the civil-rights bill was concerned, King said, “I liked the way he talked about what we were getting. It wasn’t something that he was getting for you Negroes. You knew you had an ally.” But the talk in the Rose Garden was disconcerting. King pointed out that the President had been afraid to say anything in his own office, and he sort of laughed. “I guess Hoover is buggin’ him, too.”

  Still, Kennedy was right that the cry of Communism could wreck the civil-rights bill and imperil the movement. Thus King decided to release O’Dell, who was not so close to him or so important to SCLC as Stanley Levison. Although SCLC had failed “to discover any present connections with the Communist Party on your part,” King wrote O’Dell, “the situation in our country is such…that any allusion to the left brings forth an emotional response which would seem to indicate the SCLC and the Southern Freedom Movement are Communist-inspired. In these critical times we cannot afford to risk any such impressions. We therefore have decided in our Administrative Committee, that we should request to make your resignation permanent.”

  That took care of the O’Dell problem. But Levison was another matter. King had heard allegations before about his so-called affiliation with the American Communist party. Burke Marshall, John Seigenthaler, and Robert Kennedy himself had all warned King that the FBI regarded Levison as “a secret party muckamuck,” even “a high official” of the CP, even a top Soviet spy. Although the bureau never offered proof of its accusations, Robert Kennedy truly believed them and was troubled when King refused to take them seriously. “Well, he’s just got some other side to him,” Kennedy later complained of King. “So he sort of laughs about a lot of these things, makes fun of [them].” But when Harris Wofford spoke with him, “King seemed dumbfounded and depressed,” Wofford recalled, “and said he had far more reason to trust Levison than to trust Hoover.”

  He had known Levison since Montgomery days, when he’d become a loyal friend and shrewd counselor. He had helped King prepare his income taxes, write speeches, sign book contracts, produce Stride Toward Freedom, and raise funds for the movement and King’s various court trials. And King often stayed with Levison and his wife when he was in New York. An attorney of independent means, he refused any remuneration and guarded King’s interests with a singular distrust of people, particularly editors and businessmen. “My skills,” he once wrote King, “were acquired not only in a cloistered academic environment, but also in the commercial jungle where more violence in varied forms occurs daily than is found on many a battlefront. Although our culture approves, and even honors, these practices, to me they were always abhorrent.” King knew that the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, acting on Hoover’s imputations, had summoned Levison for interrogation in April, 1962. But he had taken the Fifth Amendment because he was reluctant, he claimed, “to rehash sensational and misleading charges which could only end up in unfairly smearing Dr. King’s reputation.” This was hardly a valid reason for pleading the Fifth Amendment, and Levison’s performance did nothing to clear up Senator Eastland’s question: “Isn’t it true that you are a spy for the Communist apparatus in this country?” Levison confessed to King that he had known Communists in New York and had worked with some in Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential bid and in anti-McCarthy campaigns later on. Maybe this made him something of a fellow traveler in those days, but he claimed he had never been a card-carrying member of the Communist party. And anyway his Communist associations were all in the past. He was certainly no Communist now, not even a sympathizer. And King believed him.

  While Levison had no ties with the American Communist party throughout his long affiliation with King, he wasn’t telling the whole truth about his past. Through the reports of a key informant in the CP hierarchy, the FBI had amassed convincing evidence that Levison had been a secret benefactor of the CP between 1952 and 1955. After Levison severed his party connections in the latter year, the bureau lost interest in him until January, 1962, when it discovered that he was closely associated with King. Then Hoover and his men assumed that Levison hadn’t broken with the Communists after all, that he was really a cunning CP operator who had infiltrated King’s inner circle and was influencing his and SCLC’s activities. They became even more convinced of this when Levison, who had brought O’Dell to SCLC’s New York office, recommended him as King’s executive assistant. Intensive electronic surveillance of Levison, begun in March, 1962, turned up no evidence to support the bureau’s supposition that he was a high CP official and a spy—indeed, the FBI learned that Levison had become “disenchanted” with the party, but refused to accept or to reveal that information. Hoover and his deputies were the kind of men who believed what they wanted to believe, especially about Communism and particularly about left-leaning whites in league with Negro activists out to change the old America. Thus the FBI kept a steady flow of memos to Robert Kennedy about the Levison-O’Dell-King connection.*

  Anxious to know what proof the Kennedys thought they had about Levison, King dispatched Young to meet with Marshall in a federal courthouse in New Orleans. But Young did not return with much. “Burke never said anything about any evidence he had,” Young recalled; “he always quoted what the Bureau said it had. I didn’t feel this was conclusive. They were all scared to death of the Bureau; they really were.”

  King was sensitive to the Kennedys’ plight, for anything that discredited him would be an administration disaster. At the same time, he was reluctant to break off with Levison. He went to see him about Hoover’s charges and the worries of the President, then with considerable misgivings officially severed their ties. “I induced him to break,” Levison reported later. “I said it would not be in the interests of the movement to hold on to me if the Kennedys had doubts. I said I was sure it would not last long.” Still, King’s decision troubled him deeply. Levison was a reliable, understanding friend, and King missed him.

  But Levison was right—the break didn’t last long. Soon King found himself contacting Levison indirectly to check facts for some speech or article he was writing. They used attorney Clarence Jones, now managing the Candhi Society, as their go-between. As their communications became more frequent, even direct, Levison would ask King, “Aren’t we drifting back together? Aren’t we giving the opposition something to muck around with?” But King eventually restored him as an adviser. “I have decided I am going to work in the open,” King said. “There’s nothing to hide. An
d if anybody wants to make something of it, let them try.”

  KING HAD ANOTHER POWERFUL ADVERSARY that spring and summer besides the FBI and southern segregationists. If they branded him as a Communist and a rabble rouser, fiery Malcolm X of the Black Muslims, the voice of Negro rage and retaliation, was castigating King in magazine interviews and on radio and television as an Uncle Tom who had sold out to the white devil. What did Malcolm think of Birmingham? “An exercise in futility,” he snapped. And the children’s crusade? “Real men don’t put their children on the firing line.” And King’s nonviolent philosophy? “There is no philosophy more befitting the white man’s tactics for keeping his foot on the black man’s neck.” And King’s vast popularity? “If you tell someone he resembles Hannibal or Gandhi long enough, he starts believing it—even begins to act like it. But there is a big difference in the passiveness of King and the passiveness of Gandhi. Gandhi was a big dark elephant sitting on a little white mouse. King is a little black mouse sitting on top of a big white elephant.”

  In a post-Birmingham television interview with Kenneth B. Clark, a prominent New York psychologist, Malcolm X stepped up his attack. Eyes flashing behind his horn-rimmed glasses, Malcolm asserted that the masses of black people did not support King. The white man did. “The white man pays Reverend Martin Luther King, subsidizes Reverend Martin Luther King, so that Reverend Martin Luther King can continue to teach the Negroes to be defenseless. That’s what you mean by nonviolent, be defenseless. Be defenseless in the face of one of the most cruel beasts that has ever taken a people into captivity. That’s the American white man.” Yet King taught Negroes to love the white man, who turned dogs and fire hoses on them in Birmingham and had victimized black people for four hundred years. No, Birmingham was not a success. “What kind of success did they get in Birmingham? A chance to sit at a lunch counter and drink some coffee with a cracker—that’s success?” King was “just a twentieth century Uncle Tom” out to lull blacks to sleep by urging them to eat in the same restaurant with the white man.* As for King’s supplications for federal help, Malcolm likened that to “asking the fox to protect you from the wolf,” and he flayed President Kennedy as “a modern Pharaoh sitting in Washington, D.C.” What was the solution to the race problem? It wasn’t the turn-the-other-cheek philosophy of “ignorant Negro preachers.” It was the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Black Muslims, who held that black people had the same right to defend themselves as the white man, that Western society was sick and disintegrating, that God was about to eliminate the white man because he had never been a brother to anybody, and that blacks must separate themselves entirely from his “sinking ship” and concentrate on improving themselves.