Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  King was overwhelmed with grief and bitterness. Not since the days of the Christians in the catacombs had God’s church, in a Christian country, suffered such naked violence as Negro churches were in America. He noticed that the bomb had blown away Christ’s face from a stained-glass window, and he was certain that this symbolized “how sin and evil had blotted out the life of Christ.” He shook his head, unable to believe or to bear what had happened here. “If men were this bestial,” he thought, “was it all worth it? Was there any hope? Was there any way out?”

  There seemed no end to the hate that melancholy Sunday, as Birmingham police killed a Negro youth in the streets and white toughs murdered another who came riding by on a bicycle. Authorities did investigate the church bombing and even arrested a suspect, a local Klansman named Robert Edward Chambliss, but eventually let him go.* With another unsolved bombing added to the long list, angry Negroes dubbed the city “Bombingham.”

  What was more, Birmingham whites seemed not to care. King called it “the poverty of conscience of the white majority.” Only a few dared break the white silence about the atrocity—among them a young attorney, Charles Morgan, Jr., who had gone to the University of Alabama and had his eye on a political career in the state, maybe even the governorship. But he threw all that away on the Monday after the bombing, when he stood before the all-white Young Men’s Business Club and told them who was really responsible: “Every little individual who talks about the ‘niggers’ and spreads the seed of his hate to his neighbor and his son. The jokester, the crude oaf whose racial jokes rock the party with laughter… Bevery governor who ever shouted for lawlessness and became a law violator… Each citizen who has not consciously attempted to bring about peaceful compliance with the decisions of the Supreme Court; every citizen who has ever said, ‘They ought to kill that nigger.’ Every person in this community who has in any way contributed to the popularity of hatred is at least as guilty, or more so, as the demented fool who threw that bomb.”

  King gave the eulogy at a joint funeral service for three of the girls, still shaken that any man could degenerate to such a tragic level of inhumanity and evil as to murder children in church. Before the funeral, Negro novelist John Killens announced that the bombing marked the end of nonviolence and that “Negroes must be prepared to protect themselves with guns.” But Christopher McNair, grieving for his daughter, replied, “I’m not for that. What good would Denise have done with a machine gun in her hand?” In his eulogy, King called the girls “heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity,” whose deaths tell us to work “passionately and unceasingly to make the American dream a reality.” Then he spoke to himself as much as to the tear-filled church: “They did not die in vain. God still has a way of wringing good out of evil. History has proved again and again that unearned suffering is redemptive. The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as the redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city.” But he observed that not a single city official attended the funeral. Save for a few brave ministers, no white people came at all.

  IN LATE SEPTEMBER, KING PUBLISHED in the New York Times Magazine a fiery manifesto to white America called “In a Word—Now.” Negroes, he asserted, wanted everything in Kennedy’s civil-rights bill, immediate and effective federal protection against police brutality, the right to walk unafraid and unopposed to the ballot box, and an end to unemployment, “a form of brutality.” In early October he and his aides were back in Birmingham, back at that battlefront, threatening to resume demonstrations if Negro policemen were not hired and conditions that spawned the bombing not rectified. This disproved the accusation of SNCC and other civil-rights rivals that King always left a city after a direct-action campaign and never returned to follow up his initial success. But others in the movement opposed renewed demonstrations, and King yielded to them because “the fullest unity was indispensable,” he wrote later, against “the formidable adversaries we faced.”

  On October 23, King was in New York for the thirtieth anniversary of District 65 of the Distributive Workers of America, held in Madison Square Garden. King praised this small union for giving broader and more consistent support to the movement than any other in America. When all trade unions followed its example, “the brotherhood of which men have dreamed will begin to live in the real world around us.” But, alas, that dream was nowhere near in 1963, as “Negroes, north and south, still live in segregation, eat in segregation, pray in segregation and die in segregation.”

  When he was back in Atlanta, which was not often, King tried to work on his book about Birmingham, which was proceeding at glacial speed even with the help of his New York agents and another editorial and rewrite assistant named Nat Lamar. With endless interruptions and New York pestering him to hurry, King was as harried as he had ever been while writing Stride Toward Freedom.

  Early in the afternoon of November 22, King was upstairs in his Atlanta home, making preparations for a Los Angeles fund-raising appearance and vaguely listening to a television program in the background. Suddenly, an announcer interrupted with a special bulletin: President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, just after landing there during a political trip to Texas. At first the news was fragmentary. On CBS TV, a distressed Walter Cronkite relayed a UPI report that three shots had been fired on the presidential motorcade in downtown Dallas. “The first reports say that the President was ‘seriously wounded,’“ Cronkite added. By 1:45 the three networks were all on the air with the news, and reports and special announcements crowded the television screen. Coretta and Bernard Lee came up from downstairs, and the three of them huddled in silent vigil before the television set. Shortly after 2:30 came the dreaded bulletin: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, thirty-fifth President of the United States, was dead of a sniper’s bullet in Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital. King listened to the news with a quiet intensity. Then he said, “I don’t think I’m going to live to reach forty.”

  “Oh, don’t say that, Martin,” Coretta pleaded.

  But King persisted. “This is what is going to happen to me also. I keep telling you, this is a sick nation. And I don’t think I can survive either.” There was a painful silence, Coretta and Lee unable to answer.

  The children gathered around, and six-year-old Marty asked, “Daddy, President Kennedy was your best friend, wasn’t he, Daddy?”

  Yes, in a political sense he was, and now he was gone, cut down in the prime of his life, and King grieved for him and for his country. The phone rang constantly that day, with the wire services and other media wanting a statement from King about what the assassination meant to civil rights, to America, to him personally. What could one say at such times? “I am shocked and griefstricken,” King’s statement read. “He was a great and dedicated President. His death is a great loss to America and the world…. ”

  The country was traumatized. For three eternal days and nights the television networks stayed on the air, uninterrupted by commercials, reporting the aftermath in a blur of images, with Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, and other newsmen trying to comment on something beyond understanding. “The events of those days don’t fit, you can’t place them anywhere,” Brinkley said. “It was too big, too sudden, too overwhelming, and it meant too much.” Those who sat before their television sets would never forget the picture of a distraught Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office on Air Force One with Jacqueline Kennedy, in shock, still dressed in bloodstained clothes, standing beside him…would never forget the sight of her flying back to Washington with her husband’s coffin…would never forget the spectacle of Jack Ruby, Dallas strip-joint operator, shooting alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald just two days after Kennedy’s murder—and doing so in a crowded tunnel under the Dallas police station, in front of a national television audience…would never forget the heartbreaking grandeur of Kennedy’s funeral in Washington—the drums that shattered the sunlit day, the riderless horse, the farewell salute John, Jr., gave his father’s passing coffin, the
eternal flame wavering at the grave in Arlington National Cemetery.

  As the nation entered a period of soul searching, King jotted down his own reflections on Kennedy, some of which appeared in his Birmingham book, others in speeches and articles, including one for Look entitled “It’s a Difficult Thing to Teach a President.” Nineteen sixty-three, King observed, was a year of assassinations: a white postal worker from Baltimore slain on a “freedom walk” in Alabama, Medgar Evers gunned down in Mississippi, six Negro children murdered in Birmingham, and “who could doubt that these too were political assassinations?” And so the contagion spread until it got “the most eminent American,” and “we mourned a man who had become the pride of the nation, but we grieved as well for ourselves because we knew we were sick.”

  There was so much he remembered about Kennedy. How to assess him for posterity? Like Lincoln, he had a tremendous capacity for growth. And in two areas that concerned King the most—civil rights and world peace—Kennedy was growing up to the very day he was killed. In the international theater, King wrote, the young President had abandoned his old view of the Cold War as a “conflict of ultimate destinies” and sought to make the world a safer and more peaceful place to live. He had, for example, forged a successful nuclear test-ban treaty in 1963 that prohibited atomic explosions in the atmosphere. Kennedy would be remembered, King thought, not because he was a conqueror who built an empire or brought home the spoils of war, but because he presided over the world’s mightiest nation with intelligence and restraint. “His memory will persist because he understood something a clergyman of the Civil War era declared, ‘Greatness lies not in being strong, but in the right use of strength.’”

  In domestic affairs, he would be remembered for his remarkable growth in civil rights. Timid and ineffectual in his first two years, Kennedy emerged in 1963 as “a strong figure” with a deepening commitment to end racial discrimination. “Always willing to listen” and respond to creative pressure, he had the courage and vision to see the problem in all its dimensions. “History will record that he vacillated like Lincoln, but he lifted the cause far above the political level” to the moral level. He recognized, too, that the Negro’s struggle was part of a global movement against oppression, and that he lived in an era in which human rights were the central world issue. “No other American President had written with such compassion and resolution to make clear that our nation’s destiny was unfulfilled so long as the scar of racial prejudice disfigured it.” Had Kennedy lived, King said he would have broken his policy about political endorsements and supported him for re-election in 1964.

  A Look writer, assessing King’s comments, contended that it was his own unrelenting pressure that had made Kennedy grow in civil rights. The black Baptist preacher and the white Catholic President, the writer said, had engaged in a three-year-long struggle of wills. They agreed on principle but not on tactics or urgency. “The black man won. Near the end, he shaped events so that the white man had to use every resource, his audacity and skill, to avoid national disaster, and to earn his most likely claim on history.”

  SO NOW LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON of Texas was President. What kind of friend would he be to the movement? King had talked with him a number of times while he was Vice-President and had been impressed with his “emotional and intellectual involvement” in the quest for racial justice. Still, the new President was a tempestuous and mercurial man who merited careful scrutiny if King was to trust him as an ally. King, of course, had heard stories about Johnson’s monumental ego and hunger for power, and the stories would proliferate in the days ahead. In the Senate, he had proven himself a legislative genius and a consummate manipulator of men, using honey-coated flattery, chest-punching intimidation, two-hour monologues, or shrewd bargaining skill to get measures passed. But his self-esteem was inordinate. Once he gave the Pope a huge plastic bust of himself. At his ranch in south-central Texas, he flew his own flag with his initials on it. He spiced his language with boisterous profanity and scatological references, and took obscene delight in drawing certain advisers into the bathroom with him and dictating orders while he sat in noisy flatulence on the commode. He relished smutty stories about political rivals, once slapping his thighs in delight when he learned that a Republican senator frequented a Chicago bordello and had “some kinky sexual preferences.” He drove his staff without mercy and demanded absolute loyalty. “I heard Johnson say one time,” recalled Congressman Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn, “that he wanted men around him who were loyal enough to kiss his ass in Macy’s window and say it smelled like a rose.” And he could be astonishingly mendacious, even to the point of claiming that he had a relative at the Alamo (he did not) and depicting his childhood as far more deprived than it was. Schooled in the tangles of Texas politics and the shifting alliances of the U.S. Senate, he came to believe that politics contained no accidents, only conspiracies, and he saw conspiracies against him everywhere. “I don’t trust anybody but Lady Bird,” he once said, in reference to his wife, “and sometimes not even her.” He always insisted that Kennedy had been murdered by a Communist plot, in retaliation for a supposed Kennedy attempt to have Castro assassinated.

  And yet there was another side to this pungent and suspicious man, a strain of idealism and sensitivity to Negroes and other minorities that made King hopeful. In his early congressional years, Johnson had voted against six different civil-rights measures. Yet he did not regard himself as a southerner. As he pointed out, there were no “darkies” or plantations in the harsh Texas hill country where he grew up. He had never been a son of the Lost Cause, had never sat on the knees of a Civil War grandpappy and heard romantic tales about the old Confederacy. No, that was not his tradition. In Stonewall and Johnson City in the Pedernales country, he had been raised among ranchers and listened to stories about his great trail-driving grandpa and Indian fights and cowboy life on the Chisholm Trail. The closest big city for him was San Antonio, with its Spanish missions and legacy. As a schoolteacher in dusty Cotulla, where Mexican-Americans comprised 75 percent of the population, he felt deep compassion for his Mexican-American pupils, who were poor and hungry; he could see “the pain of injustice” in their eyes, and he yearned to help them.

  Yet when he entered politics and went to Washington, his compassion did not extend to Negroes, not right away. He was a prideful Texan, and his state had a historical connection with Dixie in the Civil War, and he would flare up defensively when some Yankee would describe the South “as a blot on our national conscience.” As a consequence, he found himself voting with southerners to defeat civil-rights legislation, arguing that this wasn’t the answer to the problem. But by 1957, when he was serving as Senate majority leader, civil rights had become a major national issue that could no longer be shelved without endangering his party and his own leadership. Johnson was no white supremacist anyway. He understood the discrepancy between segregation and the American dream. He reminded himself that he was a Roosevelt Democrat with a deep well of sympathy for poor people—and that must include Negro people. He concluded that “the Senate simply had to act, the Democratic Party simply had to act, and I simply had to act; the issue could wait no longer.” On the Senate floor, this tall, jug-eared man, speaking in his south-Texas drawl, threw his enormous parliamentary talents behind the 1957 civil-rights bill and got it enacted. Later, as Vice-President, he chaired Kennedy’s Committee on Equal Opportunity, trying to stop discrimination by corporations with federal contracts.

  And now, as President, Johnson swore to use “every ounce of strength I [possess] to gain justice for the black American.” On November 27, in his first presidential address to Congress, he declared: “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.” Then he summoned black leaders one after another to the White House, to reassure them that “John Kennedy’s dream of equality had not died with him.”

  King met with
Johnson on December 3, after the President had importuned congressional leaders to “give it the old college try” in getting the civil-rights bill through. “He means business,” King said after his session with the President. “I think we can expect even more from him than we have had up to now. I have implicit confidence in the man, and unless he betrays his past actions, we will proceed on the basis that we have in the White House a man who is deeply committed to help us.” But King confided in his staff that one thing about Johnson troubled him. When you went to see Kennedy, King said, he listened to you for an hour and asked questions. “When you went to see Lyndon Johnson, he talked for an hour.”

  IN MID-DECEMBER, KING WAS HOME in Atlanta, surveying the pace of desegregation in this so-called citadel of southern racial enlightenment. Negotiations were currently under way between white and Negro leaders to desegregate other areas of Atlanta life, but King found them so outrageously slow that he lashed out at the city for the first time in a long while, venting the hurt and frustration he felt from a whole autumn of sorrow. “While boasting of its progress and virtue,” he told 2,500 Negroes shivering in an icy wind in a downtown park, “Atlanta has allowed itself to fall behind almost every other Southern city in progress toward desegregation.” King was not out “to embarrass our city, but to call Atlanta back to something noble and plead with her to rise from dark yesterdays of racial injustice to bright tomorrows of justice for all. We must honestly say to Atlanta that time is running out. If some concrete changes for good are not made soon, Negro leaders of Atlanta will find it impossible to convince the masses of Negroes of the good faith of the negotiations presently taking place.”