Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  BUT IN APRIL, 1967, MOST OF KING’S COUNTRY supported the Vietnam War, and his address provoked a fusillade of abuse from all sides. The Jewish War Veterans of America blasted it as “an extremist tirade” that belabored an “ugly parallel” with the Germans, revealed “an ignorance of the facts,” pandered to Ho Chi Minh, and insulted “the intelligence of all Americans.” The FBI claimed that Stanley Levison had shaped if not written the Riverside speech, and bureau documents denigrated King as “a traitor to his country and to his race.” Taking his cue from the FBI, a Johnson aide remarked that King’s argument was “right down the Commie line,” and Congressman Joe D. Waggonner, in communication with the White House and the bureau, charged on Capitol Hill that King’s “earlier training at such gatherings as the Communist Highlander Folk School has called him on to another Communist end, mobilizing support for Peking and Hanoi in their war against South Vietnam.”

  In media circles, Newsweek accused King of plunging in “over his head” and mixing evangelical passion with “simplistic political judgment,” which indicated that he had abandoned his dream of an integrated America in favor of a country “in which a race conscious minority dictated foreign policy.” Life wailed that he advocated “abject surrender in Vietnam” and sounded like Radio Hanoi, and the Washington Post maintained that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people.” The New York Times, in an editorial called “Dr. King’s Error,” decreed that Vietnam and the cause of Negro equality were “distinct and separate” problems and belittled King for his “facile” fusing of the two, which did “a disservice to both” and led “not to solutions but to deeper confusion.” The editorial condemned his German analogy as reckless slander, reproved King for “whitewashing Hanoi,” and suggested that the place for his leadership was the battleground of the ghettoes, not Vietnam.

  King’s black colleagues opened up on him, too. Carl Rowan, encouraged by Johnson’s White House, complained publicly that King had “delivered a one-sided broadside about a matter on which he obviously has an abundance of indignation and a shortage of information,” and that he had made himself “persona non grata to Lyndon Johnson.” “I am convinced he is making a very serious tactical error which will do much harm to the civil rights movement,” asserted Ralph Bunche of the United Nations. King “should realize that his anti-U.S. Vietnam crusade is bound to alienate many friends and supporters.” Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, Jackie Robinson, and Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts all disagreed with King in public. And on April 12 the NAACP’s sixty-member board unanimously opposed any effort to fuse the civil-rights and antiwar movements.

  At first, King was crushed by the public clamor against him. Of all the salvos, the New York Times editorial wounded him the deepest. The Times was the most prestigious paper in America and King had great respect for it, had given it an interview about Vietnam two days before his Riverside address, and was totally unprepared for its hostile reaction. What could he do to defend himself? He didn’t think a letter-to-the-editor would do any good. He was so distraught and hurt, his advisers said, that he sat down and cried.

  Behind all the uproar, King and his advisers glimpsed the specter of Lyndon Johnson. It appeared to them that this crafty and vindictive man was orchestrating the critical bombardment against King and ready to go all out to punish him for turning against the President. Six days after Riverside, in fact, the President received an expanded edition of the FBI’s dissertation on King and permitted Hoover to circulate it in and out of Washington.

  When he realized the extent of the fight he was in, King regained his composure and lashed back at his critics in a series of statements, press conferences, and speeches. Maybe his views on the war were not safe or politic or expedient, maybe they did offend and alienate former allies, but “I will not stand idly by when I see an unjust war taking place and fail to take a stand against it.” No, he was not whitewashing Hanoi. The truth was that “we initiated the buildup of this war on land, on sea and in the air and we must take the initiative to end the war.” No, he hadn’t spoken too strongly about U.S. violence. The U.S. “at this moment” was practicing more violence than any-other nation. No, he had not compared “the war in Vietnam to Hitler and what he did to the Jews.” He “merely said” that the use of new weapons and testing in Vietnam were “ ‘reminiscent’ of World War II actions.” (In fact, he had compared American weapons’ testing to what the Germans did in the concentration camps.) Though he had repeatedly said that “we must combine the fervor of the civil rights movement with the peace movement,” he now steadfastly denied that he desired to merge the two. This was “a myth” perpetuated by the NAACP. While he would personally continue in both movements, SCLC would concentrate on civil rights. Nevertheless, King believed that “no one can pretend that the existence of the war is not profoundly affecting the destiny of civil rights,” and “I challenge the NAACP and other critics of my position to take a forthright stand on the rightness or wrongness of the war, rather than going off creating a nonexistent issue.”

  As for those who claimed that he should stick to civil rights: “I’ve fought too long and too hard now against segregated accommodations to end up segregating my moral concerns.” If other civil-rights leaders wanted to go along with the administration, that was their business. “But I know that justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

  Though his opponents continued to attack him, King was not without supporters. Carmichael defended his theories about the interrelatedness of the war and civil rights; McKissick, who like Carmichael was outspoken against the conflict, said that “Dr. King has come around and I’m glad to have him with us” and Bayard Rustin, Benjamin Mays, Reinhold Niebuhr, Murray Kempton of the New York Post, and John David Maguire of Christianity and Crisis all insisted that he was entitled to express his convictions. Mays added that history would decide whether his stand on Vietnam was right or wrong. Murray Kempton, who happened to agree with King about the war, was especially incensed at the New York Times. “Are Nobel Peace laureates to be instructed by the New York Times as to when it is proper or improper for them to state their views on peace?” Rustin feared that the attacks against King indicated that “America really does not believe that Negroes, as citizens, have yet come of age. Like children, we should be seen but not heard.” Reinhold Niebuhr, in a foreword to a pamphlet edition of King’s Nation Institute and Riverside speeches, pointed out that too many people confused King’s position on nonviolent resistance with absolute pacifism. Niebuhr had once confused the two positions himself, as King had observed in Stride Toward Freedom, in a chapter on his pilgrimage to nonviolence at Crozer and Boston University. But now Niebuhr had learned from King. “I think, as a rather dedicated antipacifist, that Dr. King’s conception of the nonviolent resistance to evil is a real contribution to our civil, moral and political life.” And he hoped that King’s speeches would enjoy a wide reading.

  On April 15, King returned to New York for a giant antiwar rally at the United Nations building, an affair sponsored by Bevel’s Spring Mobilization Committee. Bevel had asked King to participate because his eminence would give the demonstration tremendous prestige, and King had agreed to do so against the advice of Rustin and others on his Research Committee. The UN rally would draw people from across the entire antiwar spectrum, from respectable pacifists like Dr. Spock to radical Vietcong flag wavers. “Too many of these people are kooks,” Rustin warned King. “They’ll wave Vietcong flags in your face and you’ll be horribly embarrassed. Besides, you’ll be breaking from your real coalition, which is the clergy.” But King had made up his mind to ally with Bevel’s people, and there was no shaking him.

  More than 100,000 people marched with King, Bevel, Spock, Belafonte, folk singer Pete Seeger, Carmichael, and McKissick that day, in the largest demonstration against Vietnam the city had seen. Out in San Francisco, Coretta addressed 50,000 protesters in Kezar Stadium, and Lyndon J
ohnson, from his Texas ranch, let it be known that the FBI was watching all this antiwar activity. As the New York marchers made their way down Manhattan to the UN building, etched against a somber sky, younger demonstrators chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?” King felt ill-at-ease with such people—seventy of them had burned their draft cards and somebody had set an American flag on fire. In his remarks at the UN building, King sounded “as if he were reading someone else’s speech,” noted journalist David Halberstam. He just read it, without extemporizing. When he finished, a black embraced him, and he left as soon as he could. He even refused to sign a manifesto of the Spring Mobilization campaign, because he thought its reference to American “genocide” too extreme.

  Even so, his was now the most popular voice in the antiwar movement, and students at Berkeley clamored for him to attend their own Spring Mobilization rally. King called for 10,000 student volunteers to participate in a “Vietnam Summer,” educating and organizing communities against the war. Then he headed for California with a retinue of aides and David Halberstam, who was doing a piece on him for Harper’s Magazine. They stopped off in Cleveland so that King could meet with a group of harried Negro ministers. The year before, four people had died in riots there, and the word was out that disorders were going to be worse this summer, and the preachers wanted King to come in and help avert the storm. King was edgy about Cleveland, because the Negro community was badly divided and he feared another Chicago. Still, the city had definite possibilities for a successful civil-rights campaign: it was smaller than Chicago, and there was no Daley machine with roots deep in the black community. At a three-hour session with the ministers, King agreed to bring SCLC to Cleveland and start a summer voting-rights drive. All hoped that this would ward off another summer of violence.

  Afterward, King dined at a Negro café with several preachers, some of them old friends. “The middle-class Negroes are our problem,” one said. “They’ve all gone to Shaker Heights and don’t give a damn about being Negro any more.” Alas, King said, it was the same everywhere in the North. They ate in a jovial atmosphere, though, and fell to joking. One dark minister pointed at another and remarked how much darker he was. King was almost reproachful. “It’s a new age, a new time,” he warned them. “Black is beautiful.”

  On the plane again, heading west for Berkeley, King admitted that he was becoming a more radical critic of America, of its “domestic colonialism” in the North and its violence in Vietnam. Halberstam said he sounded like a nonviolent Malcolm X, but King disagreed. No, he could never endorse black separatism. “We are all on this particular land together at the same time, and we have to work it out together.” Later, though, he commented on how tragic it was that Malcolm had been assassinated. “He was really coming around, moving away from racism,” King said. “He had such a sweet spirit.”

  Halberstam reflected that King was closer to Malcolm now than anybody would ever have anticipated five years before—and much farther from such traditional allies as Wilkins and Whitney Young. In private, King and his staff were sharply critical of both men: they tried to secure things for Negroes through the white establishment, an approach that forced them to tolerate attitudes they privately disdained. Their argument was that the white man owned 90 percent of the country and that the only course was to work through him. This was fine up to a point, King said. But the problem was that the white establishment had become corrupt, and Negroes who tried to model themselves after it, to work with and through it, inevitably picked up the same corruptions. This was what had happened to Wilkins and Young on Vietnam.

  But there were fundamental differences here, deeper than Vietnam. “For years,” King told Halberstam, “I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the South, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.” Though King did not say so, SNCC and CORE had reached a similar conclusion after the violence and frustration of the Mississippi Freedom Summer. But as they subsequently turned to black separatism and independence, King searched for solutions that would hold the races together. Reconstructing American society, he said, might require the nationalization of vital industries, as well as a guaranteed income for impoverished Americans and an end to the slums. It would certainly necessitate a spiritual change in white Americans, to rid them of the racism that infected virtually all levels of white society and that contaminated many Negroes, too.

  Halberstam thought no Negro a tougher critic of America. Yet King assumed a radical stance without writing the country off, screaming at whites, or waving a Vietcong flag.

  King’s plane landed at San Francisco on a sunlit day, and a young black dean and several students fetched him across the bay to the University of California campus, currently the nerve center of antiwar protest and “the conscience of academia,” as King put it. At the rally, there were signs promoting a “King-Spock” presidential ticket, and the students and an impressive gallery of the world press responded enthusiastically as he gave a stemwinding talk against the war. “We have flown the air like birds, and swum the sea like fishes,” King said, “but we have not learned the simple act of walking the earth like brothers.” Afterward he answered questions and said that, no, he would not run for President, though the students’ support touched him deeply.

  As he left the rally, a white graduate student suddenly blocked his path. “Dr. King, I understand, your reservations about running for President, but you’re a world figure, you’re the most important man we’ve got, you’re the only one who can head a third-party ticket. And so when you make your decision, remember that there are many of us who are going to have to go to jail for many years, give up our citizenship, perhaps. This is a very serious thing.”

  King was stunned. The student pressed on: “This is the most serious thing in our lives. Politically you’re the only meaningful person. Spock isn’t enough. So please weigh our jail sentences in the balance when you make your decision.”

  It was the first time Halberstam had seen anyone get to King. He stood there, waiting for the student to say more, then realized that there was nothing more to say. “Well,” King said, “you make a very moving and persuasive statement.”

  On the way back to San Francisco, King was still shaken by the encounter, and he talked about the alienation of the young. In a meeting with “Afro-American” students, one had told him that America was fighting in Vietnam solely to perfect weapons for the extermination of the Negro. Another had advocated violence, another black separatism. “What’s your program?” King asked. “What are you offering?” “We don’t need to talk mean, we need to act mean.” In the car, King said it was good that young people were identifying with the ghettoes more than students had ten years ago, but there was danger now of paranoia.

  As King headed back across the country, his tour seemed very much like a presidential campaign, with its frenetic schedule and plethora of news conferences, speeches, and meetings. King had traveled 3,000 miles in a few days, always somber and confident, always dressed in his dark, interchangeable suits and ties. “The people, the faces, the audiences, the speeches were already blending into each other,” Halberstam wrote. “Only the terrible constancy of the pressures remained. One sensed him struggling to speak to and for the alienated while still speaking to the mass of America, of trying to remain true to his own, while not becoming a known, identified, predictable, push-button radical, forgotten because he was no longer in the mainstream.”

  AS KING BARNSTORMED THE COUNTRY that May and June, calling for “teachins” and “preachins” against the war, Johnson kept escalating the bombing and sending more and more troops into Vietnam. By 1967, the Untied States was spending $20 billion a year on the conflict, and some 485,000 American soldiers were fighting there. With no end to the war in sight, King elected to go all out to defeat Johnson in the Presidential election of 1968, to make Vietnam so u
npopular that no contender could support it. He announced that SCLC would depart from past practices and endorse candidates on all levels who opposed the war. Was he going to run for President? reporters asked. “I understand the stirrings across the country for a candidate who will take a firm, principled stand on the question of the war in Vietnam,” King replied. “But I must also add that I have no interest in being that candidate.”

  But the White House did not believe him. Though a recent Harris poll claimed that 75 percent of the American people as a whole, and 48 percent of American Negroes, disagreed with King’s position on the war, a Johnson aide warned him that King was a potentially strong third-party candidate who could draw off “a substantial number of Negro voters” and a million or so whites. Even if he did not run, he was capable of throwing half of all Negro voters behind any candidate he endorsed in 1968—which was clearly not going to be Johnson. Already alarmed by an incipient “dump Johnson” movement within the Democratic party, the President fulminated against King’s antiwar stance—“Goddamnit,” he raged at an assistant, “if only you could hear what that hypocritical preacher does sexually”—and let the FBI step up its vendetta against him. The bureau lumped SCLC in with other “Black Nationalist-Hate Groups” and initiated COINTELPRO activities against them, which entailed the kind of tough counterintelligence action used against Russia. The FBI kept Johnson apprised of the intelligence it amassed on King and other antiwar dissidents, and the President became convinced that the Soviets were building up congressional opposition to Vietnam and that Red China was financing the peace demonstrations. This in turn only made him more aloof, more obsessed with winning the war through massive bombing of North Vietnam. “How can I hit them in the nuts?” he badgered one cabinet member. “Tell me how I can hit them in the nuts.” With Johnson growing more belligerent and irrational about the war, Robert Kennedy groaned, “How can we possibly survive five more years of Lyndon Johnson? Five more years of a crazy man?”