Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  Unperturbed, King pointed out that SCLC was planning voter-registration work in Selma, Alabama, to begin “in the near future.” Hoover broke in and cited five cases in which the FBI had been involved there. Would agents be in Selma when SCLC got there? King asked. Hoover promised that they would be and that they would record and report any violations of civil rights.

  The session ended with both men agreeing that they should “stay more in touch.” In Hoover’s reception room afterward, King told reporters that the session had been “friendly” and that he and Hoover had found “new levels of understanding.” He added: “I sincerely hope we can forget the confusions of the past and get on with the job.”

  Though the public feud now abated, King and Hoover continued to detest one another. King complained of the summit meeting that “the old man talks too much,” and Hoover said he held King “in complete contempt.” For their part, King’s aides were unhappy because none of the problems had been resolved. Nothing had been said about the FBI bugs and tapes, SCLC’s finances, or King’s personal conduct. Worse, they learned that the bureau continued to spread its stories about that. In fact, while King was meeting with Hoover, an FBI official showed a Chicago journalist waiting in the reception room a photograph of King and a woman leaving a motel.

  ON DECEMBER 4, KING SET OUT for Norway and the Nobel Prize ceremonies. His traveling entourage—the largest in Nobel history—numbered twenty-six people, including his parents, Coretta and A. D. King, the Abernathys, the Wachtels (the only whites in the group), and Bayard Rustin, who had arranged King’s schedule. Rustin was disgusted with the large and happy bunch. “It was a circus,” he recalled. “Just a circus.”

  On the plane, King sat alone with a confidant and unburdened his feelings about the FBI tapes. He indicated that there had been some things in the past, but that was over now. He realized how difficult and touchy the problem was; now that the Nobel award had placed him on a world stage as a moral leader, he had to live more carefully. Even if it deprived him of something he needed, he was going to be “spartan” in his conduct.

  On December 6 King and his companions stopped in London for three days of speeches and appearances before going on to Oslo. The English treated the Nobel laureate as though he were visiting royalty. When he left his Hilton Hotel suite, a Princess limousine driven by a personal chauffeur conveyed him from one conference to another. At the Palace of Westminster he met with the Lord Chancellor of Britain and members of Parliament and called for economic sanctions against South Africa. Rustin had arranged for him to speak at historic St. Paul’s Cathedral, but the Kings were late in getting started, and in the ride there he and Rustin exchanged heated words over his going by “Colored People’s Time” in England. King momentarily lost his temper and suggested that Rustin call Canon John Collins and tell him to get another preacher.

  But at the pulpit of St. Paul’s, the only non-Anglican to stand there in the church’s 291-year history, King was the picture of self-control as he addressed a congregation of 4,000. He preached on “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,” the sermon he had given in his trial visit to Dexter Church a decade ago. After a reception at the canon’s home, the Kings took off on a sightseeing tour, visiting Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London and then driving down Whitehall past rows of government buildings. There stood the Admiralty and the Foreign Office—edifices of Britain’s former imperial glory. Anger stirred in King again. Those buildings reminded him that the grandeur of London “was built by exploitation of Africans and Indians and other oppressed peoples.”

  On December 8 King’s party flew to Oslo over a stormy sea, touching down at Gardernoen Airport early in the afternoon. A group of enthusiastic Nobel officials greeted King in heavy fog and rain. His schedule called for him to receive his award in Oslo on Thursday, then fly to Stockholm for a reception in honor of all the Nobel Prize winners. In the hotel lounge that night, the Kings threw a huge birthday party for a friend. As the champagne was about to be popped, Daddy King stepped forward. “Wait a minute before you start all your toasts to each other. We better not forget to toast the man who brought us here, and here’s a toast to God.” Then in a quavering voice, he told what his son’s prize meant to him. “I always wanted to make a contribution, and all you got to do if you want to contribute, you got to ask the Lord, and let Him know, and the Lord heard me and in some special kind of way I don’t even know He came down through Georgia and He laid His hand on me and my wife and He gave us Martin Luther King and our prayers were answered and when my head is cold and my bones are bleached the King family will go down not only in American history but in world history as well because Martin King is a Nobel Prize-winner.”

  King was moved. So were all the others. “The champagne just stayed there,” recalled a King friend, “and they made the toast to God and the champagne just stayed there afterwards. No one drank any, not even Bayard Rustin.”

  The next day, King held a press conference and charmed the Norwegian press corps by introducing Ralph Abernathy as his “perennial jailmate.” Abernathy himself reveled in all the attention, could not get enough of it. He had such need for recognition as King’s “alter ego” and first vice-president that he would elbow people out of the way so that he could be photographed beside King.

  As the conference progressed, the Norwegians pressed King for his opinions on international issues. For them, he was no longer just an American civil-rights leader; he was a Nobel laureate whose views on global matters were of great interest to Europeans. For several years, the United States had given financial and military assistance to a United Nations police force in the Congo, a former Belgian colony racked by civil war. Would he comment on American action there in connection with Belgian paratroopers? Would he demand that his government withdraw? “No, I haven’t gone that far,” King said. “But the Congo civil war will not be resolved until all foreign elements are withdrawn.”

  There were rounds of meetings and visitations. Then on December 10 came the grand event: the presentation of King’s award in the auditorium of Oslo University, with King Olav V and other Norwegian royalty in attendance. “We had quite a time getting him ready,” Coretta said of her husband. He put on striped trousers and a gray tailcoat and then fussed as Coretta and others worked on the ascot, a broad-ended necktie, swearing that he would never wear one of these things again. When the ceremony began in the auditorium, King sat stiffly in front of the stage, glancing at Coretta, nervously clasping and unclasping his hands, while a procession of speakers lauded his achievements and the Norwegian Broadcasting Orchestra played Gershwin and Mozart. When the chairman of the Norwegian Parliament introduced him as “an undaunted champion of peace…the first person in the Western world to have shown us that a struggle can be waged without violence,” King wiped his eyes and swallowed repeatedly. Then trum pets blared. Somebody nudged him, and in a burst of applause he climbed the stage to get his prize. Gazing across the overflow crowd into the glare of television lights, King said he considered this award “profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time—the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.” And he accepted the award with “an abiding faith” in his country and the future of mankind. “I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life which surrounds him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daylight of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality. I believe that even amid today’s mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow.”

  He spoke of “the tortuous road which has led from Montgomery, Alabama, to Oslo” and said that the Nobel Prize was really for the millions of Negroes on whose behalf he stood here today. Their names would never make Who’s Who. “Yet when the years have rolled past and when the blazing light of truth is focused on this marvelous age i
n which we live—men and women will know and children will be taught that we have a finer land, a better people, a more noble civilization—because these humble children of God were willing to suffer for righteousness’ sake.”

  Outside the auditorium, hundreds of torch-carrying students stood around a giant Christmas tree in the university square. When King and Coretta came out and a black limousine bore them away, the students chanted “Freedom now!” “We Shall Overcome!” The songs and slogans of the movement had become part of a universal vocabulary—proof that King and his black followers had injected a new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization as he had prophesied they would do in his first boycott speech in 1955.

  WHEN KING AND HIS ENTOURAGE returned to New York after the reception in Stockholm, fireboats saluted him in the East River, the city awarded him a medallion of honor, and 10,000 people cheered him lustily on “Martin Luther King Night” in the Harlem Armory. “For the past several days I have been on the mountaintop,” he told a packed Negro church, in reference to the Biblical story about how Jesus took his disciples to the mount of the Transfiguration to see God’s glory, then led them back into the valley to do God’s work. “I really wish I could just stay on the mountain,” King said, “but I must go back to the valley.” Cries and clapping drowned him out; he waited for the crowd to quiet. “I must go back, because my brothers and sisters down in Mississippi and Alabama can’t register and vote. I’ve got to go back to the valley…. There are those who need hope. There are those who need to find a way out…. Oh, I say to you tonight, my friends, I’m not speaking as one who’s never seen the burdens of life. I’ve had to stand so often amid the chilly winds of adversity, staggered by the jostling winds of persecution. I’ve had to stand so often amid the surging murmur of life’s restless sea. But I go back with a faith…. And I still have a dream.”

  On his way back to Atlanta, he stopped off in Washington for a visit with President Johnson. King urged him to push a voting-rights bill without delay, but Johnson was not encouraging. Although his administration was actually planning some sort of action against Negro disfranchisement (either legislation or a constitutional amendment), the President told King that he could not get a voting bill out of Congress in 1965, not when it had just passed the Civil Rights Act. All right, King told himself, then we will write a voting bill ourselves, down in the streets of Selma, Alabama.

  PART SEVEN

  AIN’T GONNA LET NOBODY TURN ME AROUND

  BY CHRISTMAS TIME, 1964, KING AND HIS STAFF had completed final plans for Project Alabama, the direct-action campaign in Selma designed to win southern Negroes the unobstructed right to vote. Since 1957, Negro enfranchisement had been one of King’s central concerns, and over the years his organization had mounted a number of voter-registration drives in Dixie. But these had foundered in a welter of legal obstacles, violent white resistance, and Negro fear and apathy. SCLC’s only recourse had been to file suits with the Justice Department, but eight years of case-by-case litigation in the federal courts had convinced King of the ineffectiveness of that approach. While the South’s large cities and border states had witnessed a marked increase in Negro voters in the early 1960s, there had been no significant gain in the deep southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, where a combination of state laws and ruthless local practices kept the mass of Negroes off the rolls.* In Alabama, 80.7 percent of the eligible Negro voters were still not registered. In Dallas County, of which Selma was the county seat, a mere 333 out of 15,000 voting-age blacks could exercise their basic American right and cast ballots in an election. Yet it had been here, said a Justice Department official, that litigation had been tried the hardest. “Our experience has been that it takes years to undo in the courts what segregationists do in a day in the legislative halls of the South,” King remarked. The only way to ensure Negro voting rights, he contended, was through a strong and strictly enforced national law, one that sent federal registrars to Dixie.

  But only a direct-action campaign was likely to get such a law out of Congress. “Demonstrations, experience has shown, are part of the process of stimulating legislation and law enforcement,” King said. “The federal government reacts to events more quickly when a situation cries out for its intervention.” And he and his staff intended to create that situation in Selma, by applying all the skill and experience they had acquired in the battles of Albany, Birmingham, and St. Augustine. As demonstrations in Birmingham had created a national mood in favor of desegregated public accommodations, demonstrations in Selma, King hoped, would so arouse the national conscience that Washington would be forced to wipe out obstacles to Negro voting. He could count on help, too, from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a coalition of SCLC and some 120 other organizations now lobbying for civil-rights legislation on Capitol Hill. If a voting-rights act could be produced in 1965, two million Negroes could theoretically be added to southern voting rolls. It fired King’s imagination to think what political muscle that eventuality would give his people. They could form powerful alliances with labor, progressive Democrats, and even the white poor, alliances that might vote segregationists out of office, annihilate discriminatory practices, and take America a long step closer to realizing her dream of equality for all.

  There was good reason why King circled Selma for his newest and most ambitious campaign. The town seemed to have all the ingredients necessary for a direct-action victory. Consisting of some 29,000 people, more than half of them black, Selma was an old black-belt community situated on the banks of the murky Alabama River some fifty miles west of Montgomery. It was the birthplace of Bull Connor and Alabama’s first White Citizens’ Council, and it maintained a rigid racial caste system that was typical of the South’s small towns and rural areas. The system relegated blacks to an impoverished and unpaved “nigger” section and ten years after the Brown decision still restricted their children to “colored” schools. Except for schoolteachers and a few professional and business people, black Selmans eked out a hard-scrabble existence, mostly as menials and maids for white employers. Whites here expected “niggers” to “know their place,” argued that they were happy with segregation, and viewed the Brown decision, the Civil Rights Act, and the movement itself as part of a sinister outside conspiracy to destroy the southern way of life.

  The movement had come to Selma back in 1963, when SNCC sent in several young workers as part of its own grassroots voting-rights effort. A local judge, noting that the students were racially mixed, wore blue overalls, and came mostly from outside Alabama, branded them as “Communist agitators” in the employ of Moscow, Peking, and Havana. At once the students began stirring up trouble. They canvassed Negro homes, talked about the constitutional right of every Negro citizen to vote, and pointed out villainies on the part of the Dallas County Board of Registrars which whites did not want to hear about. The reason so few Negroes were registered was that the Board met only two days a month and cheerfully rejected black applicants for any reason whatever, such as failing to cross a “t” on the registration form. The students also stirred up trouble by leading small, tentative protest marches to the courthouse in downtown Selma. At the same time, a dental hygienist named Marie Foster, a proud, forthright Negro who served as secretary of a black organization called the Dallas County Voters’ League, conducted nighttime citizenship classes for her black neighbors. These in turn led to weekly mass meetings at the Negro churches on Sylvan Street, where blacks discussed the humiliation of being called “nigger” and the importance of gaining the ballot. Meanwhile SCLC’s James and Dianne Bevel arrived in town and started trying to register Negroes under King’s auspices.

  As the movement gained momentum, the white community sharply disagreed over what should be done. Hefty Wilson Baker, new director of the city police, a professional lawman who had taught at the University of Alabama, was determined to avoid the kind of racial explosions that had shaken other southern cities. With the support of Mayor Joe T. Smitherman a
nd Selma’s old and affluent families, Baker intended to overcome the protestors with nonviolent law enforcement, deal quietly with federal officials, and get around national civil-rights laws with minimal compliance. But the diehard segregationists—particularly the rural folk of Dallas County—vowed to protect the old ways come what may. They argued that “agitators” should be shot and slapped emblems on their bumpers that showed a tattered Confederate soldier crying, “Hell No, I Aint’ Forgettin!”

  Their spokesman was Sheriff Jim Clark, a burly, blusterous fellow who hailed from rural Coffee County, where populism and Negrophobia both ran deep. Clark’s crude language, military swagger, and tough-guy approach to civil rights repelled Baker and Selma’s old families, who never approved of him. But Clark was undaunted. He was out “to preserve our way of life,” he told his wife, and “not let the niggers take over the whole state of Alabama.” And, “by God,” nobody was going to get in his way.

  In July, 1964, with King and his staff monitoring events in Selma, a state judge banned all marches and Negro meetings there, and Sheriff Clark enforced the injunction with a vengeance. He and his deputized possemen—many of them Klan members—beat the SNCC marchers into inactivity and suppressed all Negro gatherings on Sylvan Street. By November, the movement was paralyzed. In desperation, local Negro leaders asked the Bevels if Dr. King could be induced to come in and take charge. He was their only hope. Without him, the movement was dead.