Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  Afterward, in an informal meeting with civil-rights leaders in the Cabinet Room, Johnson argued that the need for direct-action protest was over. He actually believed that the Civil Rights Act eliminated “the last vestiges of injustice in our beloved America” and that further demonstrations were therefore unnecessary and “possibly even self-defeating.”

  Though the 1964 Civil Rights Act was the strongest ever produced in America, King was under no illusions that it was a panacea that ended all racial injustice there. True, it opened public accommodations to Negroes, who on cross-country drives would no longer have to sleep in their automobiles because no motel would accept them. In addition, the measure prohibited racial discrimination in large business and labor unions and established a federal commission to ensure equal employment opportunity. Yet as it finally emerged the act had glaring deficiencies. For one thing, there was no powerful, unambiguous section on Negro voting rights. “You will never have a true democracy until you can eliminate all restrictions,” King said. What the country needed was a Universal method of voter registration, literally “one man, one vote,” and in fact SCLC had on the drawing boards a southern campaign designed to bring that about. For another thing, the Civil Rights Act ignored the whole problem of fair housing and Negro poverty. Nor did it do anything to stop the civil war raging in the South from St. Augustine to Jackson, Mississippi. When would Washington realize that federal protection was imperative if Negroes were ever to be safe in war-torn Dixie?

  After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, King heard the same question over and over: “What more will the Negro want? What will it take to make these demonstrations end?” This was the prevailing sentiment in white America, and it vexed him. “Why,” he snapped, “do white people seem to find it so difficult to understand that the Negro is sick and tired of having reluctantly parceled out to him those rights and privileges which all others receive upon birth or entry in America? I never cease to wonder at the amazing presumption of much of white society, assuming that they have the right to bargain with the Negro for his freedom. This continued arrogant ladling out of pieces of the rights of citizenship has begun to generate afury in the Negro.”

  In Why We Can’t Wait, which came out during the St. Augustine campaign, King answered the white cry “What more does the Negro want?” “The Negro wants absolute freedom and equality, not in Africa or in some imaginary state, but right here in this land today.” The Negro was no longer interested in compromises over his fate. American history, King pointed out, was full of compromises over slavery—the compromise that deleted the slave-trade reference in the Declaration of Independence, the Missouri Compromise that allowed slavery to spread into the southern half of the Louisiana Purchase Territory, the Hayes-Tilden Compromise that ended Reconstruction by withdrawing federal troops from Dixie and leaving Negroes there to the mercy of their former masters, and the “Supreme Court Compromise” in Plessy v. Ferguson which upheld the doctrine of separate-but-equal. “These measures compromised not only the liberty of the Negro but the integrity of America,” which was why the Negro today regarded the word compromise as “profane and pernicious.” Freedom and equality were his birthrights, too, and he wanted them fully and he wanted them now.

  Then King got down to specific suggestions. He recalled what a nightclub comic said about the Greensboro sit-ins: if the young demonstrators had been served at the lunch counters, some could not have paid for the meal. Alas, there was painful truth in his observation. Even if statutory discrimination ended tomorrow, King wrote, the impoverished condition of black people—the institutionalized and historical consequences of color—would remain. As he had pointed out elsewhere, citing historian Henrietta Buckmaster, Negroes at the time of emancipation owned nothing but the skin on their backs. The federal government failed to grant them economic security, instead leaving them bound over to their former masters in Dixie as a largely landless class. During all his years in servitude, the Negro had been “robbed of the wages of his toil,” and he had continued to be exploited ever since, thanks to practices that confined him to unskilled or semiskilled jobs. King believed it time to correct this profound historical problem. “Negroes must not only have the right to go into any establishment open to the public,” he contended, “but they must also be absorbed into our economic system in such a manner that they can afford to exercise that right.”

  What he proposed was a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, named after the GI Bill of Rights, which would provide massive federal aid to the poor. Of course, no amount of money could ever compensate for “the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries.” But a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, “our veterans of the long siege of denial,” would certainly help the Negro catch up to whites in a race in which he had started three hundred years behind. King had in mind a sort of Marshall Plan for America’s poor—not only the black poor, but the “large stratum of forgotten white poor.” He admitted that the program would cost billions of dollars, but argued that its benefits would be worth the price.

  Like Stride Toward Freedom, King’s book was a blend of argument, philosophy, and narrative history. He recounted the story of Birmingham in vivid detail, from “Bull Connor’s Birmingham” on the eve of demonstrations down to “the new day” the campaign brought about. He included “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” described the Negro revolution that swept the country that summer and culminated in the great march on Washington, and placed the events of 1963 in historical perspective, relating the Negro’s own long search for freedom since the Emancipation Proclamation. Again his hero was the mass of Negroes who resolved to stand up and make their freedom real through the technique of nonviolent protest. King’s was the symbolic story of the boy who stood in Harlem and the girl who rose in Birmingham. “Across the miles they joined hands, and took a firm, forward step. It was a step that rocked the richest, most powerful nation to its foundations.” In relating the historical background and significance of Birmingham, King proved that he was not only the movement’s preeminent leader, but one of its ablest contemporary historians.

  The book enjoyed a respectable sales in the United States, with 24,000 hardback and 150,000 paperback copies in print by November, 1964, and it appeared in translation in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, Spain, Japan, and in the Oriya language in India. American reviews were generally enthusiastic, although Robert Penn Warren, writing in the New York Review of Books, disparaged King’s “debt” theory as “fraught with mischief.” The volume enjoyed a warm reception in England, where the Spectator thought it a “brilliantly re-created” story and urged Britons to read it; and the Guardian, praising King’s demands as correct, asserted that “American politics would gain immeasurably from the kind of idealism, self-sacrifice and sense of public service which has characterised responsible Negro leadership,” of which King was an outstanding example.

  THERE WAS TROUBLE AGAIN in St. Augustine. At first city officials promised to abide by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But when white businesses refused to do so and thugs attacked Negroes who entered restaurants and other public places, the city resegregated. Back came King, warning that this kind of action would become a pattern in Dixie unless it was blocked here and now. Again movement lawyers filed a grievance with Judge Simpson, who then ordered St. Augustine businessmen and city officials to comply with the law or face contempt charges. This gave them the excuse of external coercion to take down the “WHITES ONLY” signs—“what else can we do?”—and desegregation came at last to strife-torn St. Augustine. Judge Simpson also issued a restraining order against the likes of Sheriff Davis and Hoss Manucy, which ended their reign of terror and moved Abernathy to quip that the movement changed Manucy “from a Hoss to a mule.”

  IN MID-JULY VIOLENCE ERUPTED with volcanic fury in the long-smoldering ghettoes of Newark and Harlem. Time and again, King had warned that ghetto Negroes would resort to violence if their grievances were not redresse
d. And now, in grisly scenes carried on television and in the press, Negroes were rioting in the streets of the urban North, looting and setting stores ablaze.

  At once the President summoned King and other Negro leaders to the White House. Johnson intended to be the Democratic candidate in this year’s election and feared that riots and other civil disturbances would help the Republicans—who were certain to offer up conservative Barry Goldwater on a strong law-and-order platform—and would also impede the implementation of the Civil Rights Act. He persuaded King, Wilkins, and Whitney Young of the Urban League to stand with him against the forces of disorder and reaction. Out of the meeting emerged a statement in which the various civil-rights leaders asserted that “the present situation” required a “temporary alteration in strategy” and that “the greatest need now is for political action.” Accordingly, “we call on our members voluntarily to observe a broad curtailment if not total moratorium on all mass marches, picketing and demonstrations until after Election day, November 3.” For now, they and the man in the White House were united by a common purpose.

  King meanwhile had gone to New York City, where Mayor Robert Wagner conferred with him about cooling Harlem down. The trip was a disaster. While King toured the riot sites, embittered Harlemites booed him and spouted anti-Semitic vitriol that made him grimace. At the same time, local Negro leaders fumed that no “outsider” imported by the mayor had the right to invade their territory and tell them what to do.

  King was greatly troubled. He warned Harlem Negroes that violence would only exacerbate their problems and beseeched them to follow his course of nonviolent resistance. With an eye on the New York police commissioner, who was “utterly unresponsive” to the needs of Negroes, King also warned against “shallow rhetoric condemning lawlessness.” What was needed, he said, was “an honest soul-searching analysis and evaluation of the environmental causes which have spawned the riots.” As for black anti-Semitism, “I solemnly pledge to do my utmost to uphold the fair name of Jews. Not only because we need their friendship, and surely we do, but mainly because bigotry in any form is an affront to us all.”

  On July 20 King and his staff launched a People-to-People tour of Mississippi, to help SNCC and CORE in a Freedom Summer campaign to educate and register disenfranchised Negroes. Largely at SNCC’s invitation, scores of white college students from the North were toiling side-by-side with SNCC and CORE field workers, holding freedom schools and voter workshops in the Mississippi backcountry. King and his people admired the students’ zeal and idealism but feared they were in for a rude awakening if they thought atavistic Mississippi could be transformed in a summer. “We tried to warn SNCC,” Young said. “We were all Southerners and we knew the depth of the depravity of Southern racism. We knew better than to try to take on Mississippi. We saw Birmingham as having realistic possibilities, as the reality.” In cities like Birmingham, SCLC’s nonviolent forces could capture international media attention and expose southern racism to a world audience. But that was all but impossible in a rural state like Mississippi, where the Klan and other rowdies could attack students on lonely byroads away from media cameramen.

  The casualties of SNCC’s Mississippi campaign were climbing steadily, as white Mississippians beat and murdered people at will and burned one Negro church after another. There were reports that King himself would be assassinated by a Mississippi guerrilla contingent under a retired army major, and King’s staff, always fretful about his safety, begged him to cancel the tour. “I have a job to do,” King retorted. “If I were constantly worried about death, I couldn’t function.” Besides, he felt his cause was “so right, so moral, that if I should lose my life, in some way it would aid the cause.”

  In five days, King visited several towns and rural communities in Mississippi, and “I have carried with me ever since,” he told a Playboy interviewer later that year, “a visual image of the penniless and the unlettered, and of the expressions on their faces—of deep and courageous determination to cast off the imprint of the past and become free people.” In one town, the only restaurant was white-owned and refused to serve King and his staff. So they drove out to a Negro country store and feasted on pig skins and pickled pigs’ feet. Said Abernathy: “Our staff in that little crowded black man’s country store had a fellowship, a kononia, together. We had a purpose and we had a universal sense of love that they did not have downtown.”

  When King’s party reached Philadelphia in dangerous Neshoba County, a massive federal search was under way for three young CORE workers—James Chaney, a Mississippi Negro, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, Jews from New York—who had last been seen in Philadelphia looking for Negroes brave enough to try to register. FBI agents and 210 Navy men dragged rivers and creeks, with helicopters and a photo-reconnaissance jet flying overhead. Mississippi whites claimed that it was all a publicity stunt and that the three were in Cuba, swilling beer and joking about the hunt for them. Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, a wad of tobacco in his mouth, fulminated against all the outside meddling in his county and even complained to Hoover when FBI agents guarded King during his stay in town.

  In Philadelphia, as in Meridian, Vicksburg, and other places, King galvanized local Negroes when he outlined his Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged and said he planned to introduce it at the Democratic convention. Here was one famous brother who really did care about them. Still, everywhere King went there was “a strong undertow of disaffection,” as one writer phrased it. Members of Jackson’s black middle class, loyal to the NAACP, clapped politely after he addressed them, then drove home in expensive automobiles. SNCC workers grumbled about how “de Lawd”—SNCC’s nickname for King—came in, gave a few speeches, and then took off with an escort of police and FBI men, leaving them behind to do the field work. It was typical of “de Lawd,” SNCC liked to say, that he thought charisma alone could sustain a movement.

  King could not understand SNCC’s hostility toward him. “Why do they call me de Lawd?” he would ask his aides and friends. Was it just envy because he commanded the spotlight? “I do draw more attention,” he said. “But I can’t help that.” Then petulantly: “Look, I helped organize SNCC. No one ever talks about what we did to put SNCC in business.” His staff and friends agreed. “They think they started the movement,” Walker said. “The SNCC people have a thing about it. They don’t even mention Montgomery. All they talk about are the student sit-ins. They think they started the revolution. They give no credit to the NAACP.” Walker added, “I think Dr. King showed a great deal of restraint and patience [in dealing with them], more than I ever could have shown.”

  In fact, King had a lot of respect for SNCC. Maybe the students were arrogant and their assault of Mississippi unrealistic, but their concern for the rural Negro deserved nothing but praise. And he was impressed with the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party, an interracial organization that grew out of SNCC’s voter-registration campaign and that intended to unseat the all-white regular Democratic delegation at the Democratic convention in August.

  August brought grim news from Neshoba County. At a construction site five miles southwest of Philadelphia, federal authorities found the bullet-riddled bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner buried under an earthen dam. Months later the FBI arrested twenty-one local whites—most of them Klansmen—including Sheriff Rainey himself and Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price. A murder conviction was impossible in this bastion of white supremacy; the governor and state attorney general announced that they would not prefer charges. Eventually the Justice Department took the case to a federal grand jury in Meridian, Mississippi, which indicted eighteen of the suspects on charges of conspiring to deprive the victims of their civil rights. But U.S. District Judge W. Harold Cox, a Kennedy appointee and an avowed segregationist who compared Negro voter applicants to chimpanzees, dismissed or reduced the charges to misdemeanors. The U.S. Supreme Court did overrule Cox and ordered the accused to stand trial on the conspiracy charges; but most civil
-rights people thought the case doomed since no white jury in Mississippi had ever convicted white defendants in a civil-rights case. Free on bond, Rainey and the others became heroes in white Mississippi, and Confederate flags sprang up around the federal building in a symbolic taunting of national authority.*

  As it turned out, the violence SNCC encountered in Mississippi’s “magnolia jungles” broke its staff mentally and physically. “People were bitter, frustrated, torn-apart, battle-fatigued, and everything else,” said SNCC chairman John Lewis. The casualties in SNCC’s Freedom Summer were staggering: six people had been killed, eighty beaten, two wounded by gunfire, more than a thousand arrested, and thirty-seven Negro churches and thirty-one Negro homes burned or dynamited in a civil war over racial tensions and national destiny that was still going on.

  King too was distressed about the violence in Mississippi, and he wondered what it required to convince Washington of the desperate need for preventive police protection in Dixie. True, President Johnson had made Hoover himself go to Jackson, “the spiritual capital of white supremacy,” and open an FBI office there. But King had little faith in the FBI’s southern agents, and he continued to say so.

  IT WAS A LONG HOT SUMMER, not only in Mississippi but in the ghettoes of Chicago, Philadelphia, and Jersey City, which also exploded in riots. In comparison to Roy Wilkins, who drew up in “stuffy indignation” over the disturbances, King pleaded with white America to understand what caused them. “America will be faced with the ever-present threat of violence, rioting and senseless crime as long as Negroes by the hundreds of thousands are packed into malodorous, rat-plagued ghettoes; as long as Negroes remain smothered by poverty in the midst of an affluent society; as long as Negroes are made to feel like exiles in their own land; as long as Negroes continue to be dehumanized; as long as Negroes see their freedom endlessly delayed and diminished by the head winds of tokenism and small handouts from the white power structure. No nation can suffer any greater tragedy than to cause millions of its citizens to feel that they have no stake in their own society.” But when he said this to politicians like Mayor Wagner, most had little idea what he was talking about. “I have found that these men seriously—and dangerously—underestimate the explosive mood of the Negro and the gravity of the crisis,” King said.