Two weeks later he was in New York City for a “White House Conference on Civil Rights,” which Johnson had rigged to demonstrate Negro support for his policies. Pro-administration Negroes praised his accomplishments in civil rights and stated that the Negro cared less about Vietnam than about “the rat at night and the job in the morning.” King was not asked to talk or play any role whatever in the highly staged proceedings. The White House had even opposed inviting him until those preparing the conference warned that it would not take place without Martin Luther King.
So this was the price he paid for speaking out on Vietnam. The President had simply written him off and was no longer speaking to him. King’s aides were so incensed that they urged him to withdraw from the conference after the first day. But King refused to let Johnson’s snubbing drive him away: he stayed on to lobby for A. Philip Randolph’s Freedom Budget for All Americans, which advocated a ten-year federal expenditure of $180 billion to abolish poverty.
ON JUNE 6, KING WAS IN A STAFF MEETING in Atlanta when word came that James Meredith had been shot. The day before, Meredith had left Memphis on a one-man march down to Jackson, to demonstrate that Negroes were not afraid of whites in Mississippi and to encourage blacks there to register. Just inside the Mississippi line on Highway 51, an unemployed white man rose from the bushes and blasted Meredith with a shotgun. Alarmed, King phoned Memphis and found that Meredith was alive in hospital there, his back peppered with buckshot. Though King hoped to launch demonstrations in Chicago later that month, he sensed an opportunity here to heal the rifts in the civil-rights movement caused by Vietnam; he could bring the various organizations together in a co-sponsored march that would take up where Meredith had fallen. Together, they could expose the “ugly racism” that infected Mississippi, still the most lawless and backward state in the Deep South.
The next day, King flew to Memphis and huddled in Meredith’s hospital room with Floyd McKissick, new national director of CORE, and Stokely Carmichael, new chairman of SNCC. Both men reflected an increasingly militant and independent mood spreading among Negro civil-rights workers. McKissick, “a down-home lawyer” from North Carolina, argued that Negroes must acquire political and economic power on their own now. But it was Carmichael even more than McKissick who personified the new Negro militancy. A tall, lanky twenty-four-year-old with sparkling eyes and an infectious smile, he had come from Trinidad, spent his formative years in Harlem, the East Bronx, and Howard University, and joined the movement in 1961, when he went on the Freedom Rides and became a SNCC field organizer known for his cocky brilliance and adaptability. A black journalist reported that one week Carmichael was in the southern backcountry, wearing bib overalls and coaxing Negroes to vote “in a southern-honey drawl.” The next week found him in Harlem, dressed in Italian boots and a tight suit, talking to “cats” about the cause in the cool hip of the ghetto. A fortnight later he was addressing a student audience at a university, quoting Camus, Sartre, and Thoreau with a finger pointed at the floor. He was so highstrung, so intense and sensitive, that he had an ulcer by twenty-two. He brooded about the violence in Dixie and went to pieces when he saw a group of Negroes clubbed and beaten in a SNCC demonstration in Montgomery during King’s Selma campaign. “I started screaming and I didn’t stop until they got me to the airport,” he said later. “That day I knew I could never be hit again without hitting back.” After Selma, he formed the all-black Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama—its symbol a snarling black panther—and electrified a new generation of Negro youth with his appeals to black pride and black consciousness.
Despite SNCC’s organizational feud with King and SCLC, Carmichael admired King and told him so. As they conferred in Meredith’s hospital room, Carmichael and McKissick voiced their approval of a co-sponsored march through Mississippi under SCLC, SNCC, and CORE flags. But what about Meredith? King knew what an unpredictable loner he was and feared that he might object to a group’s continuing his work. But Meredith gave the project his blessing, and the three leaders left the room assuring him that they would continue the march “in his spirit.” They would seek as never before to instill “a new sense of dignity and manhood” in the mass of Mississippi Negroes, who were too poor to eat in desegregated restaurants and too frightened of white reprisals to vote.
With a group of aides and field workers, the three drove out to the desolate spot on Highway 51 where Meredith had been shot and took off for Jackson on “The James Meredith March Against Fear.” As they trekked along in scorching summer heat, escorted by the Mississippi state police, King overheard some young Negroes from SNCC and CORE talking in the ranks. “I’m not for that nonviolence stuff any more,” one said. “If one of these damn white Mississippi crackers touches me, I’m gonna knock the hell out of him.” Then the issue of white participation came up. “This should be an all-black march. We don’t need any more white phonies and liberals invading our movement. This is our march.” Once King halted the column to sing “We Shall Overcome.” But when they reached the stanza “black and white together,” a few marchers stopped singing. Later King asked them why. “This is a new day,” they replied, “we don’t sing those words any more. In fact, the whole song should be discarded. Not ‘We Shall Overcome,’ but ‘We Shall Overrun.’ ”
“The words fell on my ears like strange music from a foreign land,” King wrote later. “My hearing was not attuned to the sound of such bitterness.” But he told himself he should not be surprised. After all, these young people were affected by an atmosphere of unfulfilled white promises and continued white violence. He should expect them to question nonviolence. He reminded himself that disappointment breeds despair, despair breeds bitterness, and “the one thing certain about bitterness is its blindness. Bitterness has not the capacity to make the distinction between some and all.”
The marchers returned to Memphis for the night, checked into a Negro motel, and there plunged into a heated debate over the nature of their journey. Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young were present. And so were several Negroes armed with snub-nosed .38s and semi-automatic rifles—members of the Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense, a paramilitary black organization invited up by SNCC. King pleaded with his brothers, including his Deacon brothers, to remain true to nonviolence. But the Deacons didn’t “believe in that naked shit no way,” and SNCC and CORE seconded them because they were tired of seeing Negroes hit and shot without armed protection. But King pressed on. He was not arguing that Negroes shouldn’t protect themselves and their homes when attacked. Yet self-defense was not the point here. The point was whether they should carry guns in an organized demonstration. To do so would only confuse and obscure the moral issues, and it would not expose Mississippi injustice. If Negroes came marching through the state brandishing .38s and rifles, they were bound to precipitate a calamitous confrontation. Whites from the governor down would use it as an excuse to start shooting Negroes at random.
But Carmichael and McKissick disagreed. McKissick asserted that nonviolence had outlived its usefulness in this racist country and that Negroes ought to break the legs off the Statue of Liberty “and throw her into the Mississippi.” Carmichael argued shrilly that blacks should seize power in areas where they outnumbered whites—“I’m not going to beg the white man for anything I deserve. I’m going to take it.” As far as white participation was concerned, he and McKissick were adamant that this was a black march.
As Carmichael tangled with Wilkins and Young about this, King thought back over the glory years when they had worked together across the South and joyously welcomed white allies. What had caused Carmichael to change? King surmised that it had been all the articulate, well-educated, idealistic white students who had poured into Mississippi in the Freedom Summer of 1964 and simply overwhelmed SNCC’s poor black workers. Perhaps Carmichael thought this had increased their feelings of inadequacy. As Carmichael argued on, King reminded him and McKissick that racial understanding came from contact, from the ability of Negroes and
whites to work together. King insisted that the march be interracial. They were out to enlist consciences, not just racial groups. Remember that many dedicated whites had bled and died on civil-rights battlefronts. To reject whites now would be “a shameful repudiation” of all they had sacrificed for.
King pleaded for unity, too, but that seemed impossible as Carmichael and McKissick wouldn’t let up on Wilkins and Young. Finally they had had enough. They refused to support the march and left for New York. King threatened to withdraw, too, unless Carmichael and McKissick agreed to a nonviolent, interracial march. To prevent King from defecting, they accepted his terms. “If you got any notions that Negroes can solve our problems by ourselves,” Abernathy said when the march resumed, “you got another thought coming. We welcome white people.”
As a gesture of solidarity, King signed a joint manifesto issued to the press: “This march will be a massive public indictment and protest of the failure of American society, the Government of the United States, and the state of Mississippi to ‘fulfill these rights,’ ” in reference to the slogan of the recent White House conference in New York. The manifesto summoned Washington to endorse Randolph’s ‘Freedom Budget’ for all Americans and require states and counties to employ Negroes as lawmen and jurors in direct ratio to their population.
As the column headed for Greenwood, controversy continued to plague it. Why were they marching anyway? asked mercurial Charles Evers, brother of the slain civil-rights leader and director of the Mississippi NAACP. “I don’t see how walking up and down a lot of highways helps: I’m for walking house to house and fence to fence to register Negro voters.” Despite the voting-rights act, Mississippi still lagged behind the rest of the South, with only 30 percent of its eligible Negroes on the voting rolls. King and the other leaders talked it over and decided that Evers was right. Henceforth their main objective would be to register Negro voters. In Grenada, 1,300 Negroes followed King to the courthouse, where specially appointed black registrars worked through light and darkness to put five hundred of them on the county voting rolls. In one memorable scene in Grenada, SCLC’s Robert Green planted a U.S. flag between the arms of Jefferson Davis’s statue. “The South you led will never stand again,” Green told the statue. “Mississippi must become part of the Union.”
As the marchers headed south for Greenwood, thousands of black people from all over the countryside flocked to the highway for a glimpse of King. They would stand along the roadside as Negroes had done in Alabama, waiting in the boiling sun, looking for him from under the brims of their bonnets and soiled straw hats. When the column appeared, someone would shout, “There he is! Martin Luther King!” And they would rush toward him in such numbers that his aides would have to join hands and cordon him off, to prevent him from being crushed. On such occasions King always seemed surprised and bewildered. He would smile a little and nod his head in gratitude and touch as many groping hands as he could.
When the marchers encamped for the night, King would speak to local Negroes in some ramshackle church, “getting down” with the country folk and preaching “from the heart” as in Selma days. A white reporter was astounded at the impact he had on those rural Negroes. In one church he spoke so eloquently that a five-year-old girl started sobbing and saying over and over, “I want to go with him.”
As the procession moved deeper into Mississippi, white bystanders grew ugly. In “a grotesque parody of small-town America,” as one journalist put it, they congregated at gas stations and grocery stores, shouting obscenities, waving Confederate flags, and throwing things as the marchers passed. At the same time, Carmichael and his people became more belligerent, singing a ditty that made King grimace: “Jingle bells, shotgun shells, Freedom all the way, Oh what fun it is to blast, A trooper man away.”
It was a harrowing experience for King. To make matters worse, he had to shuttle back and forth to Chicago, where things were threatening to get out of hand, too. On June 12, a riot had flared in the Puerto Rican section, with police and civilians exchanging gunfire. King feared that it was going to be a long hot summer there despite all his efforts.
When he rejoined the Mississippi march in Greenwood, his staff was in a state of high tension. Carmichael had been arrested for trying to erect some tents on a Negro schoolground, only to find 3,000 people awaiting him at a SNCC rally when he got out of jail. “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested,” he yelled from a flatbed truck, “and I ain’t going to jail no more!” The crowd broke into cheers. “The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin”. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” The crowd roared in unison, “BLACK POWER!” Then SNCC’s Willie Ricks, called “Reverend” because of his fiery evangelical style, jumped up beside Carmichael and shouted in a parody of SCLC’s chant:
“What do you want?”
“BLACK POWER!”
“What do you want?”
“BLACK POWER!”
“What do you want? Say it again!”
“BLACK POWER!! BLACK POWER!!! BLACK POWER!!!!”
King’s aides were horrified. Though Negroes like Paul Robeson and Adam Clayton Powell had used the term before, “Black Power” created a sensation on the Mississippi march, as the media seized on it and warned of an impending race war. Worse still, Carmichael had instructed his staff that Black Power was to be SNCC’s war cry for the rest of the march. King’s staff believed that he was trying to capture headlines and usurp the movement.
As the march started up again, King mulled over SNCC’s new slogan and thought it “unfortunate,” because it gave the impression of black supremacy, which he considered just as evil as white supremacy. To his dismay, a bitter rivalry broke out between those who trumpeted “Black Power” and those who cried “Freedom Now,” SCLC’s slogan. At roadside rallies, SNCC and SCLC speakers vied with one another in stirring up crowds with their respective chants. At one rally, SCLC even got a local band to drown out Carmichael when he launched into his Black Power theatrics. By the time the column reached Yazoo City, some Black Power advocates were crying for white blood and inciting young Negroes to shout, “Hey! Hey! Whattaya know! White people must go—must go!”
King had heard enough of this. “Some people,” he exclaimed at Yazoo City, “are telling us to be like our oppressor, who has a history of using Molotov cocktails, who has a history of dropping the atomic bomb, who has a history of lynching Negroes. Now people are telling me to stoop down to that level. I’m sick and tired of violence! I’m tired of the war in Vietnam! I’m not going to use violence, no matter who says so!”
He said the same thing to Carmichael, McKissick, and their aides in a five-hour parley at a small Catholic parish house. “I pleaded with the group to abandon the Black Power slogan,” King recalled. “A leader has to be concerned with semantics. Each word has a denotative meaning…and a connotative meaning… Black Power carried the wrong connotations.” The press, he pointed out, had already stressed the implication of violence in the term, and the rash and bellicose statements of some SNCC marchers had only added to this impression.
Carmichael said: Violence versus nonviolence is irrelevant. The real question is the crying need for black people to organize themselves and consolidate economic and political resources to gain power. “Power is the only thing respected in this world, and we must get it at any cost.” Then, looking King in the eye: “Martin, you know as well as I do that practically every other ethnic group in America has done just this. The Jews, the Irish and the Italians did it, why can’t we?”
King: “That is just the point. No one has ever heard the Jews publicly chant a slogan of Jewish power, but they have power. Through group identity, determination and creative endeavor, they have gained it. The same thing is true of the Irish and Italians. Neither group has used a slogan of Irish or Italian power, but they have worked hard to achieve it. This is exactly what we must do. We must use every con
structive means to amass economic and political power” and “to build racial pride and refute the notion that black is evil and ugly. But this must come through a program, not merely through a slogan.”
Carmichael and McKissick: “How can you arouse people to unite around a program without a slogan as a rallying cry? Didn’t the labor movement have slogans? Haven’t we had slogans all along in the freedom movement? What we need is a new slogan with ‘black’ in it.”
King: Yes, we need slogans. But not ones that will confuse our allies, isolate us, and give whites who might be ashamed of their bigotry an excuse to justify it. “Why not use the slogan ‘black consciousness’ or ‘black equality’? These phrases would be less vulnerable and would more accurately describe what we are about. The words ‘black’ and ‘power’ together give the impression that we are talking about black domination rather than black equality.”
But Carmichael and McKissick didn’t think King’s suggestions carried the emotional force of “Black Power.” They were determined to make it the slogan for both their organizations and project it across the land. The two sides were at an impasse. To save the march, King recommended that both “Black Power” and “Freedom Now” be dropped for the remainder of the trek to Jackson. Out of respect for him, Carmichael and McKissick agreed. But Carmichael added, “Martin, I deliberately decided to raise the issue on the march to give it a national forum, and force you to take a stand for Black Power.”
“I have been used before,” King said. “One more time won’t hurt.”
A few days later, the column came to Neshoba County where Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman had been murdered two years before. In Philadelphia, King conducted a memorial service for them on Main Street. A crowd of whites encircled the marchers and responded to King’s every phrase with a taunt. “Sometimes,” said a journalist, “they listened and screamed so carefully that Dr. King appeared to be leading them in a responsive reading.” Then they charged forward, clubbing the marchers with hoes and ax handles while the police looked the other way. Only when the Negroes started fighting back did the police intervene and drive the whites away. That night, violence broke out again as white marauders and armed marchers shot at one another. Trying desperately to maintain nonviolence, King announced a return march to this hateful town—but warned that only those committed to nonviolence could participate. Carmichael and McKissick backed him up “100 per cent.” King also wired the President to send federal marshals lest civil war break out in Mississippi. But the White House did not respond.
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