Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  Although King himself said that “I can do a much better job in the spiritual than in the administrative area,” he was a superior administrator in many ways, not the least of which was his mastery of the art and technique of fund raising. As one staff member said, money dictated the movement’s priorities, and King had no equal when it came to drumming up funds for its treasuries. What was more, he brought to SCLC a group of talented and dynamic assistants who had been leaders themselves. “He surrounded himself with what I feel is one of the most competent staffs in the whole area of civil rights,” said one associate, “and he respected hell out of all of us.”

  Always alert to new talent, King had several newcomers on his staff in 1964. Among them was C. T. Vivian, a tall, angular, highstrung young man with small features and a neatly trimmed mustache. When he spoke, there was drama and a touch of mysticism in his language. He had an ironic sense of humor that bordered on the sardonic, and a spirited, tut-tutting laugh that punctuated his conversation with thespian artistry. When he discoursed on some human folly, he would close one eye as though sighting a distant target. In high school in Illinois, he came under the spell of a creative English teacher who “gave us that understanding of how great writing fits with the whole integrity of man.” He went on to Western Illinois University, got married, divorced, married again, found himself at American Theological Seminary in Nashville, and wound up as an editor on the Sunday School Publishing Board there. Across his desk came the speeches of the young minister who was heading the Montgomery bus protest. In 1957 Vivian heard King give a talk on nonviolence in a packed Nashville church, and he was spellbound. He had studied Gandhian techniques, but until now had never understood the philosophy behind them. Determined to preserve King’s utterances, Vivian prepared an article that featured his speeches and writings. “It frightened me,” he wrote King in 1958, “to think that you might die and your speeches be lost. I did what I could with my funds and talent. I hope to continue to put your words and thoughts into the hearts and minds of any person I contact.” Quoting King himself, Vivian became involved in the Nashville sit-ins and the next year went on the Freedom Ride to Mississippi, where he was brutally beaten on a prison farm. After that he pastored a church in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and participated in demonstrations there. Impressed with this philosophical, energetic, laughing man, King invited him to join SCLC as director of affiliates.

  Another new aide, Hosea Williams, was a tempestuous, self-styled “workaholic” with a rasping voice and a brawling style. He was born in poverty in rural southwest Georgia, “reared up with no father,” he recalled; “I’m a bastard child—my mother was never married to my father—reared up on a white man’s plantation.” He had suffered his share of racial violence in his youth. Once whites accused him of messing around with a “po” white girl and tried to lynch him. During World War II, he was wounded in action in Europe and returned to Georgia on crutches. On his way through Americus, he limped into a bus station to get a drink of water at a white fountain, only to be drubbed mercilessly by berserk whites. “I was violent by nature,” he said of those bitter early years. Yet he had enough pride and sense of direction to educate himself and become upward bound: he secured a position as a chemist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Savannah, bought a new house and a new car, married and started a family. Later, after his sons were refused service at Savannah lunch counters, he joined the NAACP and plunged into the civil-rights movement. But his pugnacity offended the local NAACP brass, and he quit the organization in disgust. Inspired by the work and message of Dr. King, he accepted nonviolence and went to work with SCLC’s affiliate in Savannah, where he launched a direct-action campaign and caught King’s eye with his aggressive style, which was to hit the streets and “keep on pressin’, pressin’.” In early 1964, King appointed him to his Atlanta staff as director of voter registration. Something of a maverick among the other executive staffers, who were seminary-trained ministers, Williams was a superb grassroots organizer, with a special touch among the masses of poor folk because he had suffered privation, too. “Martin had a lot of confidence in my ability to mobilize and move people,” Williams claimed. “He saw me and said, ‘That’s my crazy man. That’s my wild man. That’s my Castro.’” “Doc understood Hosea’s ability to create tension,” Vivian said with a sly chuckle. “When Hosea can’t have his way, he creates a lot of tension.”

  By 1964, King had assembled a cadre of bright and brash young lieutenants who were fiercely loyal to him and supremely confident in themselves. “Who could tell us anything?” Vivian said. “We were the movement.” Not every Negro leader was secure enough to have strong subordinates, he pointed out, but “Doc” had six or seven “horses in their own right” who battled one another at SCLC’s often stormy staff sessions. “Phew,” said a visitor to SCLC, “that kinda meeting would tear up any organization I ever belonged to. It’s interesting that you guys are still together.” It was King, of course, who “kept all those wild horses together.” Impartial, never taking sides in staff skull sessions, he would ask questions and let his assistants debate and argue—Walker tangling with Bevel, Williams with Young—all the while he would sit there thinking and scratching at his painful whiskers. He would continue raising questions until they had worked through a problem collectively and reached a conclusion. “When he no longer had anything to ask.” Vivian said, “we had it together.”

  “We were very young, very strong, very articulate,” Williams declared, “and it was amazing how he could orchestrate us.” “Martin is such a soft, easygoing fellow,” Walker said, and “so absolutely moral in his leadership that there never has been any vying for his spot. It’s just out of the question. Everybody gives him allegiance.” “He had greater commitment than any of us,” Vivian remembered. “He could walk us out into the deep water.” But not only that. “Doc outthought everybody, too. No one programmed him. Doc was the head of all of us. That’s why he was our leader.” In awe of him, they competed with one another for his ear and his favor. “It was like children in the family,” said one staffer, “in the sense that everybody wanted the father’s attention.”

  To be sure, King had administrative drawbacks. As one young aide recalled, he tended to function “by the spirit” in ways that were amazing, exasperating, and infuriating by turns. Anybody who dealt with King found that he and his staff ran by what they jocularly called “CPT”—Colored People’s Time—and kept appointments with cheerful disregard for punctuality. In addition, King was indifferent to staff discipline. “If one of them got absolutely obstreperous,” Rustin said of King’s assistants, “Dr. King would come in and tell him to calm down. But in terms of assigning jobs, people just pretty much ran off and did what they wanted.” Abernathy complained that King made him “do what I called his dirty work” and tend to disciplinary problems, because King was reluctant to hurt anybody. He was unwilling to fire people, too, even if they were dishonest. Once the staff released an office worker for stealing SCLC funds, but the person persuaded King to take him back. “What do you do to a devil?” King asked his aides. “Do you take a devil and throw him out in the world? Or do you try to bring him closer to you, convert him, redeem him? We’re supposed to be the church. So do you throw a man out of the church? Or do you try to keep him in the church and right his wrongs?”

  His assistants did not dispute him. “He was a preacher,” Young explained. “And whenever we argued, he’d get to preaching. You never won an argument because he would take off on flights of oratory, and you’d forget your point trying to listen to him.”

  His preaching, though, was the touchstone of his leadership. He always made decisions on moral grounds, as Walker said, and he excited audiences of all colors and conditions with his unique mixture of southern Negro evangelism and theological erudition. If he could make Negroes in a country church say amen to a quotation from St. Thomas Aquinas, he could make university professors and students applaud a quotation from an unlettered slave. �
�Doc really communicated on other levels than just the intellectual,” said Vivian, the student of his words and a minister himself who understood the hallmark of great preaching. “He communicated on the emotional level, too, so that you really didn’t have to understand his words to understand what he meant. That’s why the No D.’s and the Ph.D.’s could be moved by the same speech. Besides, Doc conveyed the sense that he cared. He wasn’t some disinterested conveyor of crafted sentences. He believed that the right word, emotionally and intellectually charged, could reach the whole person and change the relationships of men.”

  That wasn’t the only quality that set King apart. His sense of history enabled him to perceive the broad historical canvas on which the civil-rights movement was taking place. It convinced him that the progress of America was forward, not backward; that he was better off in 1964 than his forebears; that thousands of people in the past had struggled to enlarge his own freedom. King’s historical perspective made him an optimist; it contributed to the calm under fire that became his trademark. And it strengthened his belief that the mission of the American Negro (as Gandhi and others had contended) was to introduce a new moral standard into the United States and the world.

  Like Gandhi, King was both an activist and a theoretician, a protagonist at the center of a great historical struggle and a philosopher concerned with ultimate questions about God and man. Like Gandhi, he identified downward with the poor, the forgotten, and the disinherited. He walked among the black masses, philosophizing as he went, and he furnished them something no other American Negro leader had been able to give them: “a tool,” as a black scholar phrased it, “for removing the invisible shades of segregation.”

  Ved Mehta, a distinguished student of India, discerned something else about King, something David Halbertstam also glimpsed. In 1961, in an article in the New York Times Magazine, Mehta contended that both King and Gandhi had a flair for arranging demonstrations as though they were theatrical performances. It was art, not economics or politics or theology, that was the essence of the movements they led. By century’s end, Mehta predicted, both apostles of nonviolence would be remembered because “they were imaginative artists who knew how to use world politics as their stage.”

  IN MID-JANUARY, 1964, King led his staff away to Black Mountain, in the foothills of North Carolina, for a retreat at the site of a defunct experimental community in art, education, and lifestyle. King loved staff retreats. They afforded him the opportunity to stroll in the forest and meditate in solitude, as he longed so much to do in the maelstrom that was his life. At retreats, he and his aides would pray and sing, eat, and play pingpong and basketball together. “Cat could really play basketball,” staffer Willie Bolden said of King. He would dart and glide down court and push off shots high in the air, only to beg his exhausted young lieutenants once the game was over, “Aw fellas, come on, let’s play another ten points.” When they all gathered for the evening discussions, which might continue in King’s room until well past midnight, he would go around introducing everyone, narrating their biographies with a phenomenal memory for detail.

  At the Black Mountain retreat, King introduced a procession of topics for discussion—among them, the hostility of SNCC, of Hoover and the FBI—and gave sermonlike recitations on them. “In some ways,” said Harry Wachtel, who was at Black Mountain, “he was still the Bapist minister talking to his congregation.” They also reviewed SCLC’s leadership training program at Dorchester, Georgia, which was turning out “the noncommissioned officers of the civil rights movement,” as King phrased it. People from small towns and rural areas came there to learn how to conduct voter-registration drives, combat illiteracy, and secure government benefits, and then returned to their communities to implement what they had learned. By 1963, some six hundred Negroes had graduated from the SCLC program and were spreading the movement far and wide in Dixie.

  Because SCLC was now the second most popular civil-rights organization among American Negroes, (the first was the NAACP), as reported in Newsweek’s poll of July, 1963, King explored at Black Mountain the possibility of converting SCLC from a southern coalition of affiliates into a national membership organization that would attack segregation throughout the country. Many of King’s followers argued that this would enable him to reach a level of prestige and power unsurpassed by any Negro in American history. “I will have to face the decision soon on whether I should be limiting myself to the South,” King had told a writer for the Saturday Evening Post. “In the North there are brothers and sisters who are suffering discrimination that is even more agonizing, in a sense, than in the South.…. In the South, at least the Negro can see progress, whereas in the North all he sees is retrogression.” But the idea of a national membership organization never got beyond the talking stage. According to Wachtel and others, King realized that such an organization would threaten the NAACP and Roy Wilkins—not to mention the leaders of CORE and the National Urban League—and likely wreck the fragile alliance then existing among the various civil-rights groups. To keep peace, King decided that SCLC should remain a regional organization of affiliates, but one with national interests.

  One outgrowth of the Black Mountain retreat was the creation of a Research Committee, a kind of brain trust that would advise King on a structured basis. The committee consisted of Young, Fauntroy, and Abernathy from the SCLC staff; historian L. D. Reddick, now teaching at Coppin State College in Baltimore; Rustin, Wachtel, Levison, Clarence Jones, Negro labor leader Cleveland Robinson, and others from New York and Chicago. The group held late-night conference phone calls and tried to meet three or four times a year, generally in Wachtel’s New York law offices, to “kick around ideas and give reactions,” Young said. King found the meetings stimulating and refreshing; they gave him a chance to get away from the southern front and debate ideas with a coterie of articulate northerners, in the manner of the old Philosophy Club back at Boston University. The Research Committee functioned strictly as an advisory group, though, and King never took a vote. After their meetings, Wachtel recalled, King “did whatever he damn well wanted.”

  As King and his advisers surveyed the various civil-rights battlefronts in early 1964, they found little to cheer about. Kennedy’s civil-rights bill had passed in the House, but faced a crippling southern filibuster in the Senate. Though President Johnson was using all the power and persuasion of his office to get the measure approved, King was certain that additional civil-rights campaigns would be necessary to pressure the Senate to act.

  In “The Hammer of Civil Rights,” which he wrote for The Nation, King pointed out how successful southerners had been in using the filibuster to block civil-rights legislation over the years, and he enjoined the Senate to put an end to it as a fitting tribute to the Negro girls assassinated in Birmingham. At the same time, he demanded federal police protection for Negroes in Dixie, where local officials had fielded an awesome force. In Mississippi, for example, the mayor of Jackson openly bragged about the armor he had amassed for a projected summer campaign on the part of SNCC to register Negro voters. In addition to an armed contingent of five hundred men and a reserve of state troopers, deputies, civil employees, and neighborhood citizens’ patrols, the mayor commanded a “Thompson Tank,” two searchlight tanks, an armored battlewagon that carried twelve men equipped with shotguns and machine guns, three troop lorries, and three huge trailer trucks. Thus a veritable mechanized division awaited nonviolent demonstrators with “undisguised hostility and the familiar trigger happy eagerness for confrontation.”

  Across the South, King wrote, nonviolent Negroes found themselves at war. Yet “the most powerful federal government in the world” had left them “almost solely to their own resources to face a massively equipped army.” This “cries out for resolution.” Though the country had a national power beyond description, “it cannot enforce elementary law even in a remote southern village.”

  According to a Negro dentist named Robert B. Hayling, elementary law had ceased to
exist for the Negroes of St. Augustine, a small tourist town on Florida’s northern Atlantic coast. Sometime in late February or early March, Hayling visited King in Atlanta and told him what was going on in St. Augustine, where the dentist lived and practiced. A haven for the Klan and other extremist groups, St. Augustine was the oldest permanent European community in North America and one of its most viciously racist. Here Sheriff L. O. Davis, “a buffoonish, burly, thuggish man,” employed an auxiliary force of one hundred deputies, many of them prominent Klansmen, to “keep the niggers in line.” Here barrel-chested Hoisted “Hoss” Manucy, dressed in cowboy paraphernalia, led a bunch of Klan-style bullyboys who called themselves the Ancient City Gun Club. They patrolled the county in radio cars with Confederate flags on their antennas, harassing Negroes at will. Manucy boasted that he had no vices, that he didn’t smoke, drink, or chase women. All he did was “beat and kill niggers.”

  In 1963, inspired by King’s Birmingham campaign, Hayling, an Air Force veteran, set out to end the atmosphere of terror in St. Augustine. He wrote President Kennedy and Vice-President Johnson about the racial violence that plagued the city and even got up a local movement to desegregate public accommodations and gain uninhibited Negro voter registration. But the police beat and jailed the demonstrators with ruthless precision, and stood idly by while the Klan bombed and strafed Negro homes and fired shotguns into Negro nightclubs. In September, Klansmen abducted Hayling and three other blacks, hauled them out to an open field where a crowd was waiting, and beat them unconscious with brass knuckles and ax handles. As the crowd roared and a woman screamed, “Kill ’em! Castrate ’em!” Klansmen prepared to douse the four Negroes with kerosene. “Did you ever smell a nigger burn?” one asked. “It’s a mighty sweet smell.” Only the timely arrival of the sheriff prevented them from being incinerated.