Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  Evidently James Bevel took their request to King and sold him on Selma as the ideal city in which to launch his long-contemplated Alabama voting-rights crusade. Not only did the local leadership want him to come, but Sheriff Clark seemed the perfect villain for the drama King intended to stage for the country. “Wherever you had a Jim Clark or an Al Lingo,” Bernard Lee asserted, “that was the place you needed to be.” For King and his lieutenants, Selma was “a theater for an act that had to be played,” a theater where Clark could be counted on to commit some brutal outrage that would rally the nation to SCLC’s banners. And so King instructed Bevel: “Go tell the people down there that I will be there on the first of January, and we are going to have a mass rally. We’re going to have a march. We’re going to launch a voter registration campaign.” But he made it clear that he wanted an official invitation from Selma’s local Negro leaders, to offset the static he was bound to get from SNCC that he was transgressing on their territory. As he left for Oslo in December, Bevel and Vivian headed for Selma to start organizing the Negro community.

  In late December, with King back in Atlanta, a Committee of Fifteen, representing all factions in black Selma, officially invited him to take command of the movement there. After Christmas, SCLC got out a six-page order of battle which stressed that “arrests should continue over the months to create interest in the freedom registration and freedom vote.” At the right time, King himself would go to jail and pen a message to America like his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

  On January 2, 1965, King and Abernathy were on their way to Selma by car, heading along Highway 80—popularly known as the Jefferson Davis Highway—that led from Montgomery. As they passed through undulating farm country, with its squalid Negro shanties and wintry fields, King talked about the violence they would likely encounter here in the black belt, that fertile crescent across central Alabama and Mississippi where cotton plantations had flourished and slavery had been the crudest before the Civil War. “Ralph,” King said, “I thought I would have been assassinated in Mississippi, but it did not happen. So it will probably come to me over here in Selma, so I want to fix it so that you will automatically become my successor without having to have a board meeting or anything.” But Abernathy protested that he didn’t want the SCLC presidency. Besides, anybody who shot King would get him, too, since they were almost always together. Actually, he didn’t think they were going to be assassinated. He agreed with Andy Young that the rough days were behind them now and that nothing like that was going to happen. But King feared there would be some killing before this campaign was over.

  It was late in the afternoon when they drove across the Edmund Pettis Bridge into Selma. There was “an unreal air about it,” wrote scholar and activist Howard Zinn when he visited Selma in 1964. “It is as if a movie producer had reconstructed a pre-Civil War Southern town—the decaying buildings, the muddy streets, the little cafes, and the huge red brick Hotel Albert, modelled after a medieval Venetian palace” and built by slave labor. Selma had been a slave market before the Civil War—one three-story house, still standing, had held four to five hundred Negroes at a time to be auctioned off—and a military depot during the Confederacy. Wagons loaded with cotton and drawn by mules still clattered through the streets, though cotton production had fallen off considerably by the 1960s.

  King and Abernathy swung down Sylvan Street past a parked police car. They were in the Negro section now, and the unpaved red sand road divided identical rows of dreary brick dwellings known as the George Washington Carver Development. In a moment they pulled up at Brown Chapel, a quaint red-brick building with twin steeples, where a mass meeting of local Negroes was already under way. They had been awaiting King much of the afternoon, transported with excitement that a man of his renown should come to lead them personally. When he entered the church and mounted the speaker’s platform, the crowd broke into such a tumultuous ovation that the entire church seemed to tremble.

  Dressed in a black suit, his eyes glistening, King reviewed the impediments to Negro voting in Dallas County and then fired his audience with a declaration of purpose: “Today marks the beginning of a determined, organized, mobilized campaign to get the right to vote everywhere in Alabama. If we are refused, we will appeal to Governor George Wallace. If he refuses to listen, we will appeal to the legislature. If they don’t listen, we will appeal to the conscience of the Congress….” He noticed one of Al Lingo’s state troopers and two impassive deputies sitting in the back, taking notes. He was all manly defiance now. “Our cry to the state of Alabama is a simple one: Give us the ballot!”

  “Give us the ballot!” the crowd roared back.

  “We’re not on our knees begging for the ballot. We are demanding the ballot!”

  At that his people were on their feet, shouting and clapping in the most fired-up meeting ever seen in Brown Chapel. Then they broke into “We Shall Overcome,” and King spotted the lawmen slipping out of the sanctuary to avoid having to hold hands and sing with Negroes. Before he left, King promised to return to Selma again and again until they reached the Promised Land.

  After the meeting, King held a two-hour strategy session in the home of Mrs. Amelia Boynton, a Negro businesswoman and civil-rights activist. As it happened, SNCC chairman John Lewis was also working in Selma and was prepared to march with King in a show of civil-rights solidarity. The son of an Alabama tenant farmer, a small, quiet young man with a fierce inner intensity, Lewis had personally idolized King since the Montgomery bus boycott, and he did not agree with most of his SNCC colleagues, who griped that King was “piggy-backing” on them in Selma. King was immensely pleased that Lewis was with him, for he wanted above all to avoid the family squabbles that so often, hindered the movement.

  King put Bevel in charge of Selma as project director and instructed fiery Hosea Williams to start drumming up grassroots support. King would return to lead the first march, scheduled for January 18, the next registration day. Then he climbed into a car with other aides and headed back for Montgomery, followed by cars filled with police, sheriff’s deputies, and FBI agents.

  TROUBLE AWAITED HIM at home. On January 5, while sorting and cataloging tapes of King’s speeches, Coretta came across an anonymous package mailed from Miami, Florida. Apparently it had arrived at SCLC headquarters before they left for Oslo and had been placed in a pile of similar boxes of tapes for shipment to the King residence, where Coretta collected them. When she opened the package, she found a note and a recording, listened to some of it, and called her husband.

  “King,” the note read, “look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. White people in this country have enough frauds of their own but I am sure they don’t have one at this time that is anywhere near your equal. You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. You could not believe in God…. Clearly you don’t believe in any personal moral principles.

  “King, like all frauds your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest leader. You, even at an early age have turned out to be not a leader but a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile. We will now have to depend on our older leaders like Wilkins a man of character and thank God we have others like him. But you are done. Your honorary degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you….

  “King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

  The tape was the composite recording that Hoover had authorized Sullivan to compile and send to King back in November, 1964. On Sullivan’s orders, an agent had mailed it from Miami on November 21, exactly thirty-four days before Christmas. The tape was to indicate that the FBI could back up the threa
ts in the note by exposing defamatory personal information about him. It contained highlights of various recordings, including that of the Willard Hotel party in January, 1964, and possibly of the episode there after the 1963 Washington march. King bravely played the tape before Coretta, Young, Abernathy, and Reverend Joseph Lowery, and they knew right away that only J. Edgar Hoover would do something like this. “What does he think I am?” King stormed. That Hoover should peddle his tapes to politicians and editors was evil enough, but to send this thing to King and brazenly hint that he should kill himself—that was unbelievably vicious.

  Whether or not the tape actually incriminated King may never be known. Years later Coretta told the New York Times, “We found much of it unintelligible. We concluded that there was nothing in the tape to discredit him.” Young subsequently conceded in published interviews that the tape contained a recording of “a bunch of guys sitting around together who are very good friends and who are kidding each other very intimately.” “Toward the end there was a recording of somebody moanin’ and groanin’ as though they were in the act of sexual intercourse, but it didn’t sound like anybody I knew, and certainly not Martin.”

  It is likely that Young and Coretta were trying to protect King in remarks intended for public consumption. Perhaps the voice could not be positively identified as King’s. But the fact remains that the activities illegally recorded on the tape had occurred in his hotel rooms; and he had succumbed to the temptations of the flesh during his long and arduous trips.

  Moreover, King himself was distressed and frightened. Obviously Hoover would claim that it was King on all his tapes, and those who heard them would probably take Hoover’s word for it. According to Wachtel and Young himself, King realized that this was the most serious kind of intimidation he had ever faced. “They are out to break me,” he groaned to a friend. “They are out to get me, harass me, break my spirit,” he told another. “What I do is only between me and my God.” Still, he or his lieutenants had to see Hoover or DeLoach at once; King couldn’t stand this lack of privacy. As it turned out, Hoover was not available, but Young secured an appointment with DeLoach for Monday, January 11. Over the weekend, in a New York City hotel room, King, Young, and Lee talked over what Young should say to DeLoach. King was distraught. He felt that the tape was “a warning from God” that he “had not been living up to his responsibilities in relation to the role in which history had cast him.”

  On Monday, Young and Abernathy went to Washington and in Young’s words confronted DeLoach about “the whole mess,” particularly the stories that “there was some kind of wild sexual activity going on around Dr. King personally.” DeLoach, of course, denied that the FBI was saying anything at all about King. Afterward, Young was convinced that they were dealing with “a kind of fascist mentality” at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  In sum, there was to be no truce with Hoover, no end to the FBI vendetta. King now had the choice of steeling himself for the worst or getting out of the movement. At this point, as Wachtel has pointed out, a lesser man than King might have quit in shame, leaving Hoover and his deputies to gloat in righteous triumph. But King’s determination to go on “in spite of” was a fierce countervailing force; anguished and guilt-stricken though he was, he resolved not to be bullied into cringing inaction. If he kept brooding about what Hoover had on him and what he was doing, he would indeed be paralyzed, his leadership finished. He must believe that God did not judge him by his mistakes but by “the total bent” of his life. With God’s help (and forgiveness), he must keep on keeping on.

  Still, he was more careful in his private matters now, and he and his staff did take precautions. They had their own spies in the Justice Department and elsewhere in government—Negroes loyal to King and the movement—who alerted him to the FBI surveillances. To foil Hoover’s men, King and his aides would rent a hotel room under the name of a trusted local friend and hold confidential meetings there. Or, once they checked into a hotel, they would immediately rent another room down the hall for conferences or private purposes, thus avoiding the FBI bugs.

  Even so, it was dispiriting to know that FBI agents were constantly on their trail. They were everywhere, Abernathy said: on airplanes, in pursuing cars, at rallies and meetings, in hotel lounges and restaurants. Young said they always knew when the FBI was at some hotel: it was hard to miss those plain green Plymouths with two-way radios parked in the lot. Once Young walked around a motel and passed a room with its curtain partly drawn; he peered inside and saw a man with earphones on, listening on a tape recorder.

  Assuming that the FBI was bugging almost every place they went, King and his people relied on humor to ease the strain. Since “all life is a recording studio for us,” they would joke about who would become a member of “the FBI Golden Record Club.” When someone made a fresh or flippant remark, King would chuckle, “Ol” Hoover’s gonna have you in the Golden Record Club if you’re not careful.” When Abernathy found a bug or a transmitter, he would call it a “doohickey” and start talking in to it, “Mr. President,” “Mr. Hoover,” “Whoever you are,” while King and his young aides whooped in delight. On the phone, they would ask one another, “How are you doing?” and then add merrily, “Well, J. Edgar, how are you doing?” As for those ubiquitous agents, King liked to leave a meeting by another door, sneak up on them, and suddenly introduce himself, “Hello, I’m Martin Luther King. I want to thank you for your ‘protection.’ ”

  And so it went in hotels and public meetings across America, as Hoover’s men stalked, bugged, and smeared King relentlessly. By now, the bureau had even hired an SCLC informant—a young Negro named Jim Harrison, who worked in SCLC’s accounting office. The bureau had given King a code name, “Zorro,” after the masked television character, and approached anybody who would listen about Zorro’s “filthy, fraudulent” behavior.* But as an Atlanta agent admitted, the bureau was naïve in assuming that its dossier on King would repel his followers and destroy him within the black community. “As far as Dr. King’s private life is concerned,” Rustin said, “most people in our community would say that’s his own business. We’re not even interested.” As a consequence, SCLC officials told the Atlanta agent that “they couldn’t care less” what the FBI said about Doc.

  ON MONDAY, JANUARY 18, KING WAS BACK in Selma for the opening of the campaign. While black teams successfully “tested” seven Selma restaurants, making certain they were abiding by the Civil Rights Act, King and John Lewis led four hundred Negroes off to the courthouse, Sheriff Clark’s green-marbled lair. Bespectacled Wilson Baker, however, stopped them en route and made them break up into small groups. Otherwise he would have to arrest them for parading without a permit, and Baker wanted no arrests and no incidents. He had studied King’s Albany operation, noting how Chief Pritchett had killed the movement with kindness. Like him, Baker intended to defuse King’s campaign by depriving it of the publicity it needed to succeed.

  At the courthouse, though, King and his marchers passed into Sheriff Clark’s jurisdiction. And the sheriff stood there now, wearing his military-style uniform and braided-trimmed hat, clenching his teeth and gripping his billy club, as King recited the grievances of local Negroes and in his most dignified manner—with an eye on nearby reporters—asked that the Negroes be registered to vote. Going along with Baker for now, Clark managed to restrain himself and simply ushered King and his people into a back alley and left them there. Among the leering whites around the courthouse, King spotted corpulent J. B. Stoner and American Nazi party chairman George Lincoln Rockwell.

  Turned away from the courthouse, King and his aides went to the Hotel Albert, a symbol of Selma white supremacy, and registered without incident, the first Negroes ever admitted into the hotel as guests. But as King crossed the lobby, a member of the National States Rights party walked up and punched him, while a white woman stood on a chair screaming, “Get him! Get him!” Baker subdued King’s assailant before he could land another blow and dragged him o
ff to jail. Unruffled, King told a humming church rally that thousands of Negroes would march and fill up the jails “to arouse the federal government” if Alabama refused to register them.

  Back in the Hotel Albert, King and his staff were up most of the night planning their next move. They were frankly disappointed that Clark had behaved himself that day. They would try another march tomorrow: if nothing happened, they would move the campaign to Camden in contiguous Wilcox County, where no Negroes at all were registered.

  Then King’s intelligence reported heartening news. In a conference with Baker and Smitherman that same night, Clark had started raving about all those “niggers” surging around his courthouse and had sworn to arrest “every goddamn one of them” if they came back.

  To test Clark’s threat, King dispatched fifty volunteers to the courthouse the next day. With a gaggle of reporters looking on, Clark not only arrested the lot of them, but seized businesswoman Amelia Boynton by the collar and shoved her viciously down the block to his car. At a mass meeting that night, Abernathy suggested that the Dallas County Voters’ League make Clark an honorary member, for his service in dramatizing the plight of Selma’s black people. At a strategy session afterward, King elected to keep the campaign centered in Selma. Something about Clark’s manic reaction that day convinced him that in Clark they had another Bull Connor. King’s impression was ratified when his intelligence reported that Baker and Smitherman thought Clark “out of control.”

  Over the next two days, King’s forces escalated the battle, as wave after wave of Negroes besieged Clark’s courthouse. To King’s delight, even the Negro teachers staged a protest march—a spectacle that astonished whites and blacks alike, since educators tended to be the most conservative Negro group in the matter of race relations. With the campaign attracting blacks of all ages and occupations, King’s young lieutenants told one another happily, “Brother, we got a movement goin’ on in Selma.”