Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  King followed Malcolm’s arguments that year, and they alarmed and saddened him. In “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and other utterances, King had warned that the Negro masses, if their grievances were not redressed, might seek solace and security in a black separatist ideology like Malcolm’s, which would lead to a racial nightmare. As for the Muslims’ philosophy, King grimaced at their “strange dream of a black nation within the larger nation” and thought some of their expressions bordered on a new race hate, black supremacy, and appeals to violence. Still, he regarded the Muslims as a challenge, for they made him and SCLC work with renewed vigor to eradicate racial discrimination and all other forms of exploitation that fed hate groups like them.

  As it happened, though, Kenneth Clark shared some of Malcolm’s unhappiness with nonviolence. A psychologist and a Negro, Clark argued that resentment and bitterness, not love, were “natural” human reactions to humiliation and degradation. Moreover, white liberals were apt to use King’s doctrine to nurture the stereotype of the Negro as meek and servile. Yes, King’s goal of full equality was fine, his tactics effective. But his philosophy of loving the oppressor, Clark said, was “unrealistic” and “psychologically burdensome” for the Negro.

  King, of course, did not pretend to have all the answers. But he submitted that Birmingham proved dramatically that Negroes could triumph over police brutality without violent retaliation (which would only have gotten them killed) and that the philosophy of nonviolence could help dispirited blacks overcome the crippling disease of hate and make them strong and dignified and proud.

  As for Malcolm X, King met him once in Washington and thought him very articulate, with a great concern for the problems Negroes faced as a race. But as he told Playboy later, he wished that Malcolm would talk less about violence, “because violence is not going to solve our problem. And in his litany of articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive, creative alternative, I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice. Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as he has done, can reap nothing but grief.”

  IN LATE JUNE, KING EMBARKED on a triumphal speaking tour from California to New York. In Los Angeles, 25,000 people cheered his description of Birmingham and his quotation from an old Negro slave, “We ain’t what we ought to be and we ain’t what we want to be and we ain’t what we’re going to be. But thank God we ain’t what we was.” In Chicago, he brought 10,000 clapping people to their feet. In Detroit, he and labor friend Walter Reuther led 125,000 on a Freedom Walk down Woodward Avenue, and he thrilled a packed auditorium when he spoke of a dream of his, a dream rooted in the American dream, a dream of a day when all of God’s children could sit together at the table of brotherhood. In New York’s Harlem, he spoke to applauding crowds, too, with members of the press chasing after him. But amid all the cheers and popping cameras, some blacks—the “spiritual disciples” of Malcolm X—called him “a polished Uncle Tom” and pelted his car with rotten eggs.

  King was shaken and hurt. He thought about all his suffering and sacrifices, and yet realized that some of his own people did not understand or appreciate his work and tried to destroy his image at every turn. But on reflection, he was able to get his mind off himself. “You know,” he remarked later, “they’ve heard those things about my being soft, my talking about love, and they transfer their bitterness toward the white man toward me.” He was confident that “all this talk about my being a polished Uncle Tom” would eventually die out and that nonviolence would triumph. That was the faith that kept him going, that helped him stand up against “sometimes unsurmountable odds.”

  He had reason to be optimistic, because nonviolence was sweeping most of black America with tidal force. That summer, the “miracle” of Birmingham ignited a veritable revolution across Dixie, as Negroes waged nonviolent, direct-action campaigns in some nine hundred cities, with an estimated one million Americans participating in solidarity demonstrations from New York to Los Angeles. To make white authorities consider their grievances, southern Negroes blocked construction sites, chained themselves to school doorways, sat in at state legislatures, hotels, banks, and restaurants, and tangled up traffic in tunnels and on bridges and highways. King himself led a demonstration in Danville, Virginia, the last capital of the Confederacy, despite a local injunction against civil disobedience. “I have so many injunctions,” King said, “that I don’t even look at them anymore. I was enjoined January 15, 1929, when I was born in the United States a Negro.”

  King rejoiced in the historical significance of what was taking place. “The summer of 1963,” he explained, “was historic partly because it witnessed the first offensive in history launched by the Negroes along a broad front. The heroic but spasmodic slave revolts of the antebellum South had fused, more than a century later, into a simultaneous, massive assault against segregation.” And the results were spectacular, as the Negroes’ summer campaigns forced thousands of hotels, restaurants, schools, parks, and swimming pools to desegregate in 261 cities. “The invisible Man has now become plainly visible,” reported Time, “in bars, restaurants, boards of education, city commissions, civic committees, theaters and mixed social activities.” In “the summer of our discontent,” King wrote, “the Negro became, in his own estimation, the equal of any man.” Since Kennedy had shied away from a second emancipation decree, “the Negroes of America wrote an emancipation proclamation to themselves” and “shook off three hundred years of psychological slavery.” “No period in American history, save the Civil War and the Reconstruction, records such breadth and depth to the Negro’s drive to alter his life. No period records so many thaws in the frozen patterns of segregation.” “It makes you feel this way,” said a black organizational leader of the new Negro mood: “At last, by God, at last.”

  But despite the Negroes’ hard-won gains, the fortress of segregation remained largely intact in Dixie, with most public facilities still closed to blacks, 1,888 schools still segregated, and obstacles to Negro voting still omnipresent. And Time was to use the word “backlash” to describe growing white resentment to the new Negro militancy, a resentment summed up in the idea that “the Negro is pushing too far, too fast.”

  That same argument reverberated through Congress that summer, as the parliamentary fight over Kennedy’s civil-rights bill grew increasingly acrimonious. With the outcome of the measure greatly in doubt, Randolph, Rustin, and other civil-rights leaders worked out final details for the long-projected march on Washington, designed to unite in “one luminous action” all the forces at work on the long front of Negro protest that summer. March leaders predicted that 100,000 people from all over the country would participate. Final plans called for the affair to take place on August 28, with King and many other dignitaries each to give an eight-minute speech. But in deference to the President, march leaders agreed to hold the mass demonstration itself at the Lincoln Memorial rather than the Capitol. That would be more fitting anyway in this historic and symbolic year.

  Predictably, controversy swirled up over the projected march, with prophets of doom warning that a horde of Negro “rowdies and uglies” would descend on the capital and plunge it into violence. On the floor of the Senate, Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond of South Carolina accused Bayard Rustin, the march’s deputy director, of being a Communist and a draft dodger—a charge that Rustin vehemently denied in a press release. Civil-rights leaders—King among them—staunchly defended Rustin’s integrity and promised that Negroes were coming to Washington, not to “stage violence or put on any stunts,” but to show the government how strongly they felt about the need for federal help.

  WHILE PLANNING FOR THE GREAT MARCH went apace, King tried to hide out that August to work on a quick book about Birmingham and the summer revolution, to be called Why We Can’t Wait (in answer to whites who said the Negro should). New American Library contracted to publish the volume promptly in paperback and assign
ed King an August 31 deadline. These wretched deadlines! For three weeks he sequestered himself in a friend’s house in Riverdale, New York, and worked mostly on the book. Alfred Duckett, a Negro journalist and public-relations man from New York, gave unstinting editorial and rewrite help as King labored on his manuscript. But he ran out of time and had to leave it, despairing of ever meeting his book deadlines.

  On August 27, the day before the great march, King flew to Washington with Coretta and a retinue of aides and advisers, and set to work on his speech in a suite at the Willard Hotel. Because he had been allotted only eight minutes at the rostrum, King’s lieutenants were upset. “There’s no way in the world, Martin, that you can say what needs to be said in eight minutes,” moaned Walter Fauntroy of SCLC’s Washington office. “They can’t limit you—the spokesman of the movement—to that.”

  “But they’ll all be mad at me if I speak longer,” King said. “I don’t want Roy Wilkins saying I overstepped my bounds and everybody else was true to the time commitment but I had to show off.” They went round and round about that, until finally King’s aides threw up their hands. “Look, Martin, let the Lord lead you,” Fauntroy said. “You go on and do what the Spirit say do.”

  King labored on his speech throughout the night, with Young, Walker, Abernathy, and Fauntroy hovering near, offering advice on theme and word choice. Despite the time limit, King wanted to say something meaningful, something Americans would not soon forget. He was to speak last, so his remarks would be the highlight and the benediction, not only for the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial, but for millions of people who would be watching on television or listening by radio. Two months ago, in Detroit, he had talked about his dream of a free and just America. But he doubted that he could elucidate that theme in only a few minutes. He elected instead to talk about how America had given the Negro a bad check and what that meant in light of the Emancipation Proclamation. “He intended to echo some of the Lincolnian language,” Coretta said.

  By morning, the speech was finished and proofed, and Walker hurried off to have it reproduced. When Coretta awoke, King was standing at the window of the suite watching the crowds outside. According to television reports, only about 25,000 people had turned out for the march, and King worried that it would fall short of expectations. But by midmorning it was clear that media reports were wrong. The word from march leaders was that some 90,000 people had already assembled on the lawns around the Presidential Mall and that thousands more were still streaming in. Among them were poor Negro sharecroppers from the southern black belt, brought up by SNCC workers to show them that they were not alone, that people in America did care about them. And whites were out there, too, thousands of clerics and teachers and students and professional and labor people like Walter Reuther, come to stand with their Negro brothers and sisters in a show of togetherness. There were movie stars like Charlton Heston, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Marlon Brando. There were gospel singers like the incomparable Mahalia Jackson and folk singers like Joan Baez, who had gone to Birmingham during the children’s crusade and sung the youngsters her repertoire of ballads and protest songs, her voice as clear and brilliant as starlight.

  Over in the White House, the Kennedys were monitoring the march closely, fearful that violence—vandalism, fights, something—might erupt and embarrass the administration. The President had officially approved of the march, and so had a number of distinguished senators—among them, Hubert Humphrey, Jacob Javits, and George Aiken. The only sour note, from the view of civil-rights forces, was that the AFL-CIO had refused to endorse the affair. King considered this “a blunder” that “served to strengthen the prevalent feeling that organized labor, not only on the national level but frequently on the local level as well, is lacking today in statesmanship, vigor and modernity.” Though a number of international unions independently voiced their support, King was not mollified. “Negroes battling for their own recognition today have a right to expect more from their old allies,” he said with an eye on the AFL-CIO.

  When the Kings and SCLC aides left the hotel and reached the mall behind the White House, they were stunned by the size of the crowd. At least 250,000 people—the largest single demonstration in movement history—thronged the grassy, tree-shaded Ellipse behind the White House and the sloping park near the Washington Monument, and march marshals were moving them in steady lines past the rectangular reflecting pool that led to the Lincoln Memorial beyond. This was magnificent, King said, and certain to have a great impact on the country. For the first time, millions of Americans were getting a good look at Negroes engaged in a serious enterprise, and the old stereotype of the Negro was bound to suffer an irreversible blow. And “if the press had expected something akin to a minstrel show, or a brawl, or a comic display of odd clothes and bad manners, they were disappointed,” King wrote later. Actually, he was impressed with the number of television crews and reporters covering the march. Usually Negro activities commanded press attention only when violence was likely to occur. This was the first organized Negro function, he believed, that received the “respect and coverage commensurate with its importance.”

  King now separated from Coretta and joined the other leaders on the mall. Since the march was already under way, they simply fell in line and surged along with the great mass of people, who sang old Negro spirituals and broke into the immortal refrain of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which Julia Ward Howe had written to the tune of “John Brown’s Body” one sleepless night during the Civil War. Above the moving columns was a sea of placards and signs: “WE SEEK THE FREEDOM IN 1963 PROMISED IN 1863!” “NO U.S. DOUGH TO HELP JIM CROW!” “A CENTURY-OLD DEBT TO PAY.”

  Slowly the huge crowd encircled the Lincoln Memorial, and King and the other leaders took their assigned places before the monument, where the statue of Lincoln looked down “as if in meditation” at the multitude gathered before him. Because the lawn around the reflecting pool could not hold them all, hundreds of marchers spilled onto grassy places under elms and oaks. They lay down with their shoes off and unpacked picnic lunches while loudspeakers carried the platform program out to them. A reporter surveying the vast assemblage wrote that “tens of thousands of these petitioning Negroes had never been to Washington before, and probably would never come again. Now here they were. And this was their Washington, their very own Capital, and this was their lawn and that great marble memorial was their memorial to the man who had emancipated them.”

  At 1:30 Camilla Williams began the ceremonies with a rousing rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” There followed a seemingly endless parade of performers and speakers, their messages to America “clear, painfully clear, shamefully clear,” a reporter said. By the time Roy Wilkins spoke, it was nearly three o’clock and people were getting restless and drifting away. Then Mahalia Jackson launched into “I’ve Been ’Buked and I’ve Been Scorned” and the restlessness stopped, because the man everybody had been waiting to hear was scheduled to speak next. When Randolph, “white-haired and statesmanlike,” strode to the rostrum and introduced “the moral leader of the nation,” the giant assembly broke into thunderous applause and chanted King’s name.

  He stood at the microphone in sweltering sunlight, the unofficial “President of the Negroes” and the trumpet of conscience for all his countrymen, thrilled to incandescence by the human spectacle spread out before him. Nobody, said a friend, got so “high on a crowd” as he. “Five score years ago,” he said after an opening remark, “a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice.” He spoke louder now, repeating symbolic phrases with a rhetorical emphasis that brought cries from his audience. “But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One h
undred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.