Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  Not that he was going to give up on white America and stoop to some black nationalist or Black Power argument that all whites were devils. He had to remind himself that when the brick struck him in Marquette Park a white man was marching at his side. He had to remind himself that “We’ve got some black devils too.” He had met some in the slums of Chicago—“street corner preachers” who exhorted Negroes to burn America down, and other blacks so caught up in frustration and irrational rage that they mouthed racist epithets against Jews, blaming them for all their woes. For King, black anti-Semitism in the ghettoes was “a freakish phenomenon” and deeply troubling. He understood that many slumlords and ghetto shop owners were Jews, and that ghetto Negroes, surrendering to racial stereotypes, generalized about a group of people on the basis of a few. They seemed impervious to the fact that Jews had been heavily involved in the civil-rights movement from the outset. In Chicago, King had taken a strong stand against black anti-Semitism “because it’s wrong, it’s unjust, and it’s evil.” It still left him depressed. The whole Chicago experience left him depressed. He didn’t know where he was going from here.

  IT WAS AN UNHAPPY AUTUMN. In Vietnam, American planes were turning the land to rack and ruin, blasting it with bombs, searing it with napalm, wasting it with chemical defoliation. More than 350,000 American troops were fighting there now, and Johnson saw the Alamo in every U.S. outpost, Davy Crockett in every U.S. soldier. In late October, in Cam Ranh Bay, the President urged American troops to “come home with that coonskin on the wall.”

  At home, Stokely Carmichael was crisscrossing the country, calling Johnson a “liar,” a “hunky,” and a “buffoon” and denouncing Vietnam as a white racist war, black soldiers there as the white man’s mercenaries. At the same time, he damned integration as “a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy” and summoned “Afro-Americans”—the term “Negro” was out now—to sever all ties with white Americans, something that SNCC had already done. “If we are to proceed toward true liberation,” argued a SNCC document written largely by Carmichael, “we must form our own institutions, credit unions, co-ops, political parties, write our own histories,” and “construct an American reality defined by Afro-Americans.”

  Soon Carmichael was telling black audiences that “if we don’t get justice we’re going to tear the country apart” and urging them to “fight for liberation by any means necessary.” As he said later, he was grateful to King for teaching blacks how to confront and for taking a moral stand against racism. But King was not political enough; he was not helping to fashion a revolutionary ideology—the purpose of Black Power—for the awakening black masses. “We refuse to be the therapy for white society any longer,” Carmichael told a Berkeley crowd in October. “I look at Dr. King on television every single day, and I say to myself: ‘Now there is a man who’s desperately needed in this country. There is a man full of love. There is a man full of mercy. There is a man full of compassion.’ But every time I see Lyndon on television, I say, ‘Martin, baby, you got a long way to go.’ ”

  Carmichael’s rhetoric resounded in Atlanta, too, right in King’s own home. He was living in a new place now, one he’d bought the year before on Sunset Avenue. Here, as in his flat in Chicago, young Black Power advocates argued with him over cups of coffee late into the night. Their hero was Frantz Fanon, a black psychiatrist from Martinique and author of The Wretched of the Earth. Quoting Fanon passionately, King’s young friends asserted that violence for oppressed people was psychologically healthy and tactically sound, that only violence could bring about black liberation. Don’t sing us any songs about nonviolence and progress, they said, for nonviolence and progress belong to middle-class Negroes and whites, “and we are not interested in you.”

  King tried to reason with them. “The courageous efforts of our own insurrectionist brothers, such as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, should be eloquent reminders to us that violent rebellion is doomed from the start,” he said. Negroes in this country today are outnumbered ten to one. What were the chances and potential casualties of a minority rebellion against a rich and heavily armed majority with a fanatical right wing “that would delight in exterminating thousands of black men, women and children”? Anyway, history amply demonstrated that violent revolution could only succeed if the government had already lost the allegiance of the military and most of the people. “Anyone in his right mind knows that this will not happen in the United States.” Moreover, violence only multiplied hate, intensifying the brutality of the oppressor and the bitterness of the oppressed. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness,” King said: “only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

  In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon maintained that blacks must shun Europe and create new institutions, new nations, and finally a new man. King was glad that his young brothers were quoting these words. But Fanon’s argument contained a fatal contradiction: he wanted to create a new man on the basis of old concepts of violence. Humanity, King insisted, was waiting for more than a blind imitation of the past. The new man must be a man of love, a man of power imbued with a sense of justice and humanity. “A dark, desperate, confused and sin-sick world waits for this new man and this new kind of power.”

  But King won few converts among his Black Power brothers. In truth, as William Manchester observed, the torch seemed to be passing to a new generation of black leaders, and it was a real torch. Wherever King went, people asked him: “Since violence is the new cry, isn’t there a danger that you will lose touch with the people in the ghetto and be out of step with the times if you don’t change your views on nonviolence?” King told them, “I refuse to determine what is right by taking a Gallup poll of trends of the time.” A true leader “is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.” “If every Negro in the United States turns to violence, I will choose to be that one lone voice preaching that this is the wrong way.”

  To combat Black Power, Randolph, Rustin, Wilkins, and Whitney Young signed a statement in October, 1966, which repudiated violence and demagoguery and welcomed—urged—“the full cooperation of whites,” and King wrote in Ebony that the talk of violence in the Negro community was that of “fearful men.” He assured his staff that SCLC wasn’t going to reject whites, because “we have come too far down the path now to turn back. There have been too many hymns of hope, too many anthems of expectation, too many deaths, too many dark days of standing over graves of those who fought for integration for us to turn back now. We must still sing ‘Black and White Together, We Shall Overcome.’ ” He reminded them, too, that it was a fact of history that no revolution ever progressed in a straight line, that there were always lulls, dips and curves and meandering points, that somehow they would get through this traumatic time and on “to the city of fulfillment.”

  Still, he couldn’t help but worry about the fractures in the movement. To make matters worse, the white backlash had claimed another victim, as Congress rejected open-housing legislation sponsored by the administration, and the media started playing taps for civil rights. “After more than a decade of the Civil Rights Movement,” asserted Ramparts magazine, “the black American in Harlem, Haynesville, Baltimore and Bogalusa is worse off today than he was ten years ago…. The Movement’s leaders know it and it is the cause of their despair…. The Movement is in despair because it has been forced to recognize the Negro revolution as a myth.”

  King had to do something to refute such outrageous inaccuracies, stem the drift toward violence in the black community, win back the movement’s traditional allies, clarify his own ideas about directions and programs, get the Negro revolution back on line. In Atlanta, he announced that he was going on a two-month sabbatical to write a book about the movement called Where Do We Go from Here? In early January, 1967, he repaired to Jamaica and secluded himself in a phoneless cliff side villa that afforded a sweeping view of the Caribbean and the Green Mountains with their puffs of clouds. Here, surrounded by tropical vegetati
on, clad in pajamas, slippers, and a bathrobe, King toiled twelve to fourteen hours a day in a marathon effort to meet a February 15 deadline imposed by Harper & Row.

  Apart from a descriptive passage on the march through Mississippi, King had no time for dramatic narration in his new work, no time for the stories of Selma and Chicago. In a style that alternated between historical analysis and exhortation, he rehearsed the enormous gains of a decade of struggle—Negro voter registration up by 300 percent in Virginia and 600 percent in Alabama, the Negro’s own hard-won sense of pride and dignity—which proved the efficacy of nonviolent protest. He pointed out that fewer people had fallen in ten years of nonviolent campaigning in Dixie than had died in three nights of rioting in Watts.

  Up to now, though, reforms had come at bargain rates. It hadn’t cost white America anything to let Negroes vote and share libraries, schools, parks, restaurants, and hotels. But the struggle was in a new phase now, in which Negroes sought an end to economic exploitation and racism itself. And this phase was going to cost white America a great deal—up to $1 trillion, according to the Office of Economic Opportunity—to wipe out slums and poverty. And “stiffening white resistance,” King wrote, “is a recognition of that fact.”

  In 1966, the term “white backlash” inhabited newspapers across America. But King noted that this was nothing new. It was merely the surfacing of ancient prejudices, ambivalences, and rationalizations that had characterized white racial attitudes since the colonial era. In modern times, those attitudes thrived in American history books, which almost totally ignored Negro achievements and contributions and thus intensified the Negro’s sense of “nobodyness.” Those attitudes even infected the English language, as one found out if one consulted Roget’s Thesaurus. There one found 120 synonyms for “blackness” and 60 were offensive words like “blot,” “soot,” “grime,” “foul,” and “devil.” By contrast, there were 134 synonyms for white arid all connoted purity, cleanliness, innocence, and chastity. Maybe Ossie Davis was right, King wrote: maybe the English language should be reconstructed so that black children would no longer be taught 60 ways to hate themselves and white children 120 ways to feel superior.

  Today, King went on, Negroes were bombarded with a persistent argument: “Other immigrant groups such as the Irish, the Jews and the Italians started out with similar handicaps, and yet they made it. Why haven’t the Negroes done the same?” Whites who asked that seemed unable to understand that the black experience in America had been vastly different from theirs, vastly more cruel and complex. No other ethnic group had been forcibly brought here as slaves. No other had come with the stigma of color and been systematically victimized by laws and attitudes that not only treated them as inferior but too often made them feel inferior. The emotional damage inflicted by “the color shock” was incalculably worse than anything white groups had had to bear. To illustrate, King related how a colleague gave his three-year-old daughter a test for color sensitivity in young children. The test required her to use the appropriate crayon on a tree, an apple, and a child. The little girl applied a green crayon to a tree, a red one to the apple. But when she came to the child, she gripped a purple crayon in her fist and slashed the figure with violent thrusts.

  Out of the whirlpool of Negro anger and despair came the cry of “Black Power” now sounding in the Negro community. Because it was the first public challenge to the philosophy of nonviolence, King took great pains to explain why the new slogan existed at all and to assess its positive and negative sides. Unlike his conservative colleagues, he did not dismiss the slogan out of hand. No, there were positive things about it. Black Power rightly emphasized strength through unity, rightly summoned the Negro to assert his manhood, take pride in his blackness and his African past, rid himself of his old fear and awe of the white man. But Black Power was too nihilistic to become the basic strategy of the civil-rights movement. True, revolutions often derived from despair. But it required hope to sustain a revolution, and Black Power advocates were bereft of hope because they were convinced that Negroes could not win in America. And so they championed black separatism, even an independent black state. King thought this absurd. “There is no salvation of the Negro through isolation”—the whole notion was chimerical. In a multiracial society, no group could make it alone. The Irish, Jews, Italians, and other ethnic minorities did not acquire power through separatism. They stuck together, yes, but they also formed alliances with trade unions and political machines. And so must the Negro have allies. “In the final analysis the weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the black man needs the white man and the white man needs the black man.” Worse, too many Black Power exponents called for violence and thus trapped themselves in a woeful contradiction. They talked incessantly about not imitating white society, and yet in urging violence they copied “the most brutal and the most uncivilized value of American life.”

  “Where do we go from here?” King asked. After 338 years of oppression, the Negro was expected to be as resourceful, responsible, and productive as whites who had known no such history. Yes, King conceded, it seemed an impossible task. Yet there were times when you had to attempt the impossible, go on anyway, “keep on keeping on.” The Negroes of America must proudly and cheerfully assert who they were. “We are descendants of slaves,” King wrote. Say it without shame. “We are heirs of a great and exploited continent known as Africa. We are the heirs of a past of rope, fire and murder. I for one am not ashamed of this past. My shame is for those who became so inhuman that they could inflict this torture upon us.” And yet we are Americans too, King said. We are Afro-Americans, “a true hybrid, a combination of two cultures.” Scorned and abused though we are, our destiny is still America’s destiny; it is not in some nebulous black nation within a nation. Remember Cicero’s injunction, “Freedom is participation in power.” That is what we want, King said.

  Where do we go from here? We must say to ourselves and the world, “I am somebody. I am a person. I am a man with dignity and honor.” We must tell our children that “black people are very beautiful” and that they must stand tall and walk with their heads held high. We must convince ourselves and our white brothers that “life’s piano can only produce the melodies of brotherhood when it is recognized that the black keys are as basic, necessary and beautiful as the white keys.” Then maybe whites will one day understand that integration is not an obstacle, King wrote, “but an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity.”

  We must remember that we have “a rich and noble history, however painful and exploited that history has been,” King said. We must reverse “the cultural homicide” committed against us in American histories and remind ourselves and our country of our contributions to American life. All too many whites and Negroes are oblivious to the fact that it was a Negro physician named Daniel Hale Williams who performed the first heart operation in America; that it was another Negro physician, Charles Drew, who largely developed a method of separating blood plasma and storing it in large quantities, a process that saved countless thousands of lives in World War II; that it was a Negro named Norbert Rillieux who invented an evaporating pan that revolutionized sugar refining; that it was another Negro, Granville T. Woods, an electric motors expert, whose patents accelerated the growth and development of railroads at the start of this century. We must remember how our forebears struggled to save their families from the shattering blows of slavery: how mothers on the African coast fought fiercely against slavers to protect their children…how parents on plantation after plantation stole and fought and sacrificed and died for their families…how one family trudged after Sherman’s army in a desperate march to freedom, the father holding one child and the mother another, and eight other toiling children tied to her by a rope…how mothers after the Civil War wandered across roadless states in search of children sold off before the conflict…and how in the last decade parents and their children have marched hand in hand against guns, clubs, cattle prods, and mobs. We mus
t remember that “the Negro was crushed, battered and brutalized, but he never gave up. He proves again that life is stronger than death. The Negro family is scarred; it is submerged; but it struggles to survive.”

  Where do we go from here? “We must make full and constructive use of the freedom we already possess,” King wrote. We must not wait for full equality before we set out to make our collective and individual contributions to our national life. We must recall the inspiring examples of Negroes “who with determination have broken through the shackles of circumstance.” Booker T. Washington rose from a slave cabin in Virginia’s hills to become “one of America’s great leaders.” From “the oppressive hills” of Gordon County, Georgia, Roland Hayes emerged as a famous singer who entertained kings and queens. From an impoverished background in Philadelphia, Marian Anderson became a celebrated contralto, so honored that Toscanini claimed that a voice like hers happened only once in a century. From “the racial bastion of Laurel, Mississippi,” Leontyne Price rose to prominence in the Metropolitan Opera as a soprano and actress. We must remember the example of James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, who reached up and touched “a star in the poetic sky.” We must remember the examples of Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson, Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, and Sidney Poitier, of W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin; of Joe Louis, Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Jesse Owens, Althea Gibson, and Arthur Ashe—all of whom have shown us that, despite our lack of complete freedom, we can make contributions here and now.