Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  During the third week of August, King appeared before the Democratic convention in Atlantic City and implored party bosses to understand the crisis and include his Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged in their platform. True, thanks to the President, Congress had recently enacted a $1 billion antipoverty program, but King thought this merely a ploy to buy time, rather than a serious attack against the causes of urban blight. That would cost at least $50 billion in federal antipoverty measures, King maintained, which was still less than the country spent annually on defense. The Democratic party, however, politely rejected his plan.

  Meanwhile King worked hard to get the delegates of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party seated at the convention. But President Johnson, manipulating its proceedings from Washington, offered a compromise to keep party unity, and the credentials committee overwhelmingly endorsed it. The party accepted the regular Mississippi Democrats, but offered MFDP two at-large seats and outlawed segregated delegations at future conventions. King and Bayard Rustin, who was at the convention, realized that this was the best they were going to get. But the MFDP delegates were up in arms. At a stormy meeting in an Atlantic City church, King asked them to face political reality. Yes, he said, there was a lot wrong with the country, they had paid “a heavy price,” and they had “a long road to travel.” But they could not travel it alone. This was the only party that had helped the struggle, and although it had segregationists in it, it was the best they had and they “must work to make it better.” He went on: “I’m not going to counsel you to accept or to reject. That is your decision. But I want you to know that I have talked to Hubert Humphrey. He promised me there would be a new day in Mississippi if you accept this proposal.” He regarded it as “an entering wedge” that would lead to a MFDP triumph in 1968 and an end to lily-white delegations.

  As King spoke, SNCC Executive Director James Forman, a burly, ironic man, a year King’s senior, was aghast at his “naïveté.” But after Forman spoke against the Johnson compromise, Rustin asserted that it was Forman and SNCC who were naïve about American politics. In the end, the MFDP rejected the proposal. “We didn’t come all the way for no two votes!” exclaimed Fannie Lou Hamer, irrepressible heroine of the Mississippi campaigns.

  After the convention, which nominated Johnson and Humphrey as the Democratic standard bearers, King took to the hustings against Republican candidate Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Though he never officially endorsed Johnson, King’s speeches amounted to the same thing. “I’m not going to tell you who to vote for,” he said to American Negroes, “but I will tell you who I’m not going to vote for.” Across the country, King damned Goldwater as the voice of the white backlash, a reactionary who sneered at the Negro and “fawned on the segregationists.” In the Senate, King noted, Goldwater had voted against the civil-rights bill, implied that Negro poverty derived from the Negro’s own laziness, derided social security and welfare as un-American, and advocated “a trigger-happy” policy toward Communist countries that could plunge the world into annihilation. Johnson, by contrast, ran as a peace and social-reform candidate under the banner of the only party that Negroes could trust. If Goldwater whipped the President, it would mean the destruction of America “as we know it.” Before the campaign ended, said Andrew Young, King and SCLC had gone to every major American city to mobilize the Negro community against Goldwater. On election day in November, the vast majority of black voters went for Johnson, who buried Goldwater in a record-breaking landslide, winning more than 61 percent of the popular vote.

  Still, as British journalist James Cameron observed, it was an anxious and difficult time for King himself, as he caught increasing flak from both sides: from “those who assail him for moving too fast and those who denounce him for moving too slowly.” “It cannot possibly be easy,” Cameron said. “Dr. King is a brave man; he has somehow created from the ingredients of intolerance and injustice a mutation of rational determination and courage, and he will overcome one day.”

  IN MID-OCTOBER, KING HAD CHECKED into Atlanta’s St. Joseph Infirmary for a rest. Coretta said he was “simply exhausted” and needed a few days away from his crushing burdens. That night he took a sleeping pill and enjoyed his first sound sleep in weeks.

  The next morning Coretta phoned him bursting with excitement. The Associated Press had just reported that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Of course, they had known he was being considered. Newspaper stories had even claimed that he was high on the list. But King had told Harry Wachtel that he didn’t think he would win. “If I do,” King said, “I’ll carry your bags.” Wachtel called him from New York. “Are you ready to carry my bags?”

  King was ecstatic. Nothing could mean more to him than to be recognized as a world leader for peace. At thirty-five, he was the youngest recipient in Nobel history. Only two other Negroes had ever won the Peace Prize—Ralph Bunche and Chief Albert Luthuli of South Africa, whom King greatly admired.

  When he put the award in perspective, King said later, “it made me feel very humble indeed.” At a press conference in his hospital room, he read a prepared statement: “I do not consider this merely an honor to me personally, but a tribute to the discipline, wise restraint and majestic courage of the millions of gallant Negroes and white persons of good will who have followed a nonviolent course in seeking to establish a reign of justice and rule of love across this nation of ours.” Later he said he would donate most of the $54,600 prize money to SCLC, the rest to SNCC, CORE, the NAACP, the National Council of Negro Women, and the American Foundation for Peace.

  Not everybody in the country was impressed. Aside from Atlanta’s Mayor Allen, no southern political figure complimented King, even though the award made him the South’s most celebrated citizen. The Nobel Prize committee was inundated with letters from the United States protesting his selection. Novelist John O’Hara said he didn’t deserve it. “They’re scraping the bottom of the barrel,” snorted Bull Connor. A Los Angeles segregationist argued that it “only shows the Communist influence.” And J. Edgar Hoover was fuming. “He was the last person in the world who should ever have received it.”

  Still, King had plenty of defenders. Archbishop Paul Hallinan of Atlanta congratulated him personally at the hospital, pronounced a blessing, then startled King by kneeling and asking for his blessing. The Christian Century observed: “Some would-be Negro leaders are quite willing to pull the house down on everyone, destroying the Negro in the process. King has not only won more battles for the Negro than any other individual of our times; he has done so in a spirit and wisdom which provide the ground for new and even more extensive Negro victories.” Ralph McGill, sage columnist for the Atlanta Constitution and voice of the southern white moderate, thought the prize indicated that Europeans had a clearer view of King than Americans. Like Asians and Africans, they saw in him “manifestations of the American promise” and an eloquent champion of what that held for the world. “The South one day will be grateful when it realizes what the alternative would have been had Dr. King, with his capacity to stir and inspire, come preaching violence, hate and aggression,” McGill wrote. “This Nobel reminds us that the sooner Southern people get down to some simple things like getting along together with dignity and equality before the law, the sooner they will realize their potential.”

  November found King back on his feet and hard at work again, planning a major voting-rights campaign to commence early next year in Selma, Alabama. He was to receive his Nobel award in Norway early in December and asked Bayard Rustin to handle his public relations and itinerary. He took time off to grant Playboy a long interview, part of which occurred during one of his rare evenings with his family, his four children affectionately chiding him for “not being home enough.” After dinner, King talked about the movement, the Nobel Prize, and the future. “I dream of the day when the demands presently cast upon me will be greatly diminished.” He did not foresee much let-up in the next five years, in the North or the South. But after that perhaps he could re
alize one of his oldest dreams—that of teaching theology in some university. Still, he said, “I welcome the opportunity to be a part of this great drama, for it is a drama that will determine America’s destiny. If the problem is not solved, America will be on the road to its self-destruction. But if it is solved, America will just as surely be on the high road to the fulfillment of the founding fathers’ dream, when they wrote: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident….’ ”

  Still rundown from overwork, King escaped to Bimini off the Florida coast for a brief rest. Up in Washington, meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover had become so exercised over King’s Nobel award that he seemed to have lost his senses. On November 18, in an interview with a group of newswomen, the director castigated King for his repeated criticism of the FBI and called him “the most notorious liar in the country.” This was sensational copy, and the press and major news magazines quoted the director under screaming headlines. On Bimini, King was shocked at the news. He had his Atlanta office telegraph Hoover: “I was appalled and surprised at your reported statement maligning my integrity. What motivated such an irresponsible accusation is a mystery to me.” King issued a press statement that Hoover “has apparently faltered under the awesome burdens, complexities and responsibilities of his office,” and he complained in phone conversations (with Hoover’s men listening in) that the director “is old and getting senile” and must be “hit from all sides.” In response, Hoover “carried on wildly” in a speech out in Chicago, raving about “zealots of pressure groups” who resorted to “carping, lying and exaggerating” and were spearheaded by “Communists and moral degenerates.”

  It was clear to King’s camp that something evil was afoot. Then came a phone call from CORE’s James Farmer, who wanted to see King as soon as possible. On his way through New York City, King met with Farmer in an airport lounge and learned to his horror that the FBI was spreading “this story” that he had engaged in group sex and that Hoover was “determined to get him” on three counts: personal misconduct, financial irregularity, and Communist associations. King vigorously denied all the charges, especially that about group sex.

  “I’ll forget it,” Farmer said about the sex story.

  “Don’t forget it,” King rejoined. “No, let’s do what we can to stop it. If something like this comes out, even if it isn’t true, it will damage all of us in the whole movement.”

  It was depressing—and scary. How widely had Hoover circulated the story? Did the director really have something on him? Then somebody else high in the movement—Wachtel claimed it was Roy Wilkins—relayed word to King that Hoover was going after him “on the unholy trilogy of sex, Communism, and finances.” King had his lieutenants probe news sources to find out what Hoover was saying, and the rumors alone were enough to make them pause.

  As it happened, Hoover’s “liar” charge was the climax of an intense FBI crusade to depose and denigrate King under the excuse of protecting national security. In addition to using vast electronic surveillance and counterespionage activities, which treated King as though he were a Russian agent, Hoover and his men expanded their scurrilous monograph on King compiled the year before. The revised edition not only belabored the old Communist charge, but accused King of directing SCLC funds into private bank accounts in Switzerland. Worse, it contained lurid information culled from the bugs FBI agents had planted in King’s hotel rooms that year. Carl Rowan, head of the U.S. Information Agency, had access to the bureau’s “dirt” on King and claimed that “90 percent of it is barnyard gossip.” He did not comment on the other ten percent. The truth was that the bureau’s ever-widening electronic dragnet had snared King in some compromising situations.

  Under Hoover’s orders, Assistant Director Deke DeLoach and his men in the crime records division showed the dissertation to various bureaucrats, senators, and congressmen and even played them tapes from the hotel microphones. “I was shocked,” said Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach when he found out about the FBI’s dossier on King, and he took the matter directly to the President. But Johnson made no effort to rein Hoover in. He could ill afford to alienate the powerful director, said he would rather have him “inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in,” and liked him in any case. In fact, Johnson not only read Hoover’s monograph, which an aide compared to “an erotic book,” but listened to the tapes, apparently delighting in the squeak of the bedsprings.

  Meanwhile Agent DeLoach was busily peddling his salacious materials from one newspaper to another. Chicago News columnist Mike Royko dismissed them as “gossip” and asserted that King’s personal affairs had nothing to do with national security or his probity as a civil-rights leader. Though he got a similar reception at the Washington Post and the New York Times, DeLoach was nothing if not persistent. He had the King dossier offered to Eugene Patterson of the Atlanta Constitution, but Patterson rejected it, contending that his was no “peephole journal.” The FBI also approached segregationist editors in the South, but not one of them would touch the sex stories. “Hell,” one told Patterson, “I wouldn’t print that stuff. That’s beyond the pale.”

  Though never given the FBI monograph, syndicated columnist Jack Anderson did see some of the FBI evidence on King and published a quotation that involved an incident with a woman. Anderson claimed that he interviewed her before going into print with the story. Actually, he believed the FBI surveillance of King revealed less about him than about Hoover. In fact, Anderson reported that the director had collected data on the sexual conduct of many other prominent Americans—among them, Jane Fonda, Paul Newman, Muhammad Ali, Zero Mostel, and Joe Namath. “Indeed, from the quantity and detail of information,” Anderson wrote, “we suspect there was as much voyeurism as sleuthing involved in the investigations.”

  Still, it was King’s sexual conduct that obsessed Hoover, tormented him. Ramsey Clark of the Justice Department said that “you couldn’t talk very long with Mr. Hoover without him bitterly criticising Dr. King as being an immoral person, a bad person.” In late November, Hoover and Sullivan concocted a scheme to remove this “moral degenerate” once and for all, a scheme that they hoped would frighten him so badly that he would remove himself from public life, even commit suicide. Ignoring the fact that the bureau’s hateful vendetta against King was flagrantly illegal and unconstitutional, the director authorized Sullivan to prepare a special tape—a composite of occurrences recorded at the Willard Hotel in Washington and other places—and send it to King in care of SCLC’s Atlanta headquarters.

  KING KNEW NOTHING about Hoover’s latest tape. But what he knew about the others was profoundly disquieting. He conferred with a group of trusted advisers in a hotel room in New York City, and he and some of them feared it was “the end of the game.” Was there any truth to the FBI’s charges? Wachtel asked. “I know all about the Communist part. I’m assuming there is something around on sex. But I know nothing about the financial. You know, Martin, the most damaging thing would be finances. If they can show you lining your pockets, that would be the most potent attack on you in the black community.”

  “We’re all right on money,” King said. “There’s no problem on that.” But he confessed that “there could be embarrassment” so far as his private life was concerned. What did Harry and the others think he should do?

  Kenneth Clark and Clarence Jones urged defiance. “Let Hoover reveal his damned tapes”—they would hurt him more than King. But Wachtel feared the tapes would damage King among his white supporters and argued in favor of a peace offer. It seemed clear to Wachtel that Hoover was trying to prevent King from accepting the Nobel Prize. But he thought the director had gone too far and would retreat if given a chance. “Show him you respect his office,” Wachtel counseled. “Make an historical record that you called on him, talked all this out, came to a better understanding of one another. It saves him and it saves us.”

  On reflection, King agreed with Wachtel. “I’m going to extend the hand of peace,” he said.

&nbs
p; “Damn it,” Clark exploded, “you may be Christ-like, but you’re not Christ.” King and the others laughed.

  What became known as “the summit meeting” took place in Hoover’s office on the afternoon of December 1. Deke DeLoach of Georgia sat with a scowling Hoover; Young, Abernathy, and Fauntroy with King. First, King said, he wanted to clear up his criticism of the FBI. His main concern was that special agents, assigned to investigate Negro complaints of police brutality, had been seen consorting with local police, especially in Albany. King had meant no personal slur against Hoover; he was only articulating southern Negro grievances. Second, he was no Communist and could never be, because Communism was “a crippling totalitarian disease” and because he was a Christian.

  But Hoover butted in and monopolized the rest of the discussion. He lectured King on how Communists thrived on trouble and chaos, how they cared nothing for Negroes, how King “of all people” should know that. He boasted about the FBI’s record in the South, telling how it had put “the fear of God” into the Klan, especially in Mississippi, and referring to “watermoccasins, rattlesnakes and redneck sheriffs” in the Magnolia State. Then he gave King some advice. He and other Negro leaders ought to urge their people to vote. That was the best thing they could do for themselves. They should also get educated so that they could compete “in the open market.” He even mentioned some professions in which Negroes could easily gain the necessary skills. In essence he told King to wait, contending that “in due time” attitudes and practices in the South would change.