Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  As the war intensified, the tensions in the ghettoes threatened to blow America’s cities apart. As planned, King’s staff started a summer voter-registration drive in Cleveland, and King himself commuted in and out of the city during breaks in his antiwar activities. Week after week, he and his staff walked the streets of Cleveland’s ghetto, where 50 percent of the Negro men were either unemployed or earning incomes below poverty level. Nevertheless, SCLC and its local allies got an impressive number of Negroes out to vote, which helped make Carl Stokes the first black mayor of a major American city. Thanks to King’s presence and SCLC’s campaign, Cleveland had no race riot that year.

  But a hundred other cities did in the longest, hottest summer ever. In June, street fighting broke out in Boston’s Roxbury district, parts of downtown Cincinnati went up in flames during five awful days and nights of shooting and Molotov cocktails, and Newark convulsed in six days of the worst rioting since Watts. In July came the biggest explosion of all, as Detroit blazed in a four-day holocaust that consumed 43 lives and $50 million in property. On July 24, Johnson sent tanks and paratroopers into Detroit, explaining his decision over nationwide television without a single reference to the human misery that had helped ignite the Detroit inferno.

  King “labored with heavy heart” through the news of Detroit, moaning that the administration had “created the bizarre spectacle of armed forces of the United States fighting in ghetto streets while they are fighting in the jungles of Asias.” On July 25 he fired off a telegram to Johnson: “The chaos and destruction which now spreads through our cities is a blind revolt against the revolting conditions which you so courageously set out to remedy as you entered office in 1964. The conditions have not changed.” What happened in Detroit was “the externalization of the Negro’s inner torment and rage,” which congressional ignorance and inactivity only exacerbated. In recent months, Congress had killed a rent-supplement bill, drastically cut the Model Cities proposal, and thrown out “a simple bill” to protect cities from rats! “The suicidal and irrational acts which plague our streets daily are being sowed and watered by the irrational, irrelevant and equally suicidal debate and delay in Congress. This is an example of moral degradation. This hypocrisy and confusion seeping through the fabric of society can ultimately destroy from within the very positive values of our nation which no enemy could destroy from without.”

  What could be done? “Let us do one simple direct thing—Let us end unemployment totally and immediately.” Let America create something like Roosevelt’s old Works Progress Administration, a national agency that would provide a job to every person who needed employment—white or black, old or young. Unless Congress acts at once, “this tragic destruction of life and property” will spread. “Mr. President, this is an emergency state.” The life of our nation is literally at stake at home. “I urge you to use the power of your office to establish justice in our land by enacting and implementing legislation of reason and vision in the Congress.”

  But Johnson ignored him. Instead of condemning the causes of the riots and working swiftly and constructively to remove them, the President rebuked the rioters and lectured Negroes to obey the law. “How,” King asked, “can the administration with quivering anger denounce the violence of ghetto Negroes when it has given an example of violence in Asia that shocks the world?…Only those who are fighting for peace have the moral authority to lecture on nonviolence.” When a government has as much wealth as America, and offers no more than it does to curb the riots, “it is worse than blind,” King said, “It is provocative.”

  But many whites thought it was King who was provocative, King who had caused the riots with his marches and demonstrations. Commentator Lionel Lokos asserted that the “criminal disobedience” in Newark and Detroit was the inevitable consequence of King’s “civil disobedience.” By flouting laws he considered unjust, King invited ghetto blacks to do the same. “He has been outstripped by his times,” Andrew Kopkind wrote in the New York Review of Books, “overtaken by the events which he may have obliquely helped to produce but would not predict.”*

  Even the U.S. Supreme Court had succumbed to the current mood. On June 5, with several northern cities ablaze with riots, the court handed down a decision on Walker v. Birmingham, which had come up on appeal from the Alabama Supreme Court. During the Birmingham campaign, King and seven colleagues had been convicted for violating an Alabama state court injunction against demonstrations and sentenced to five days in jail. Now, at a time when whites equated demonstrations with riots, the Supreme Court justices voted in a split decision to uphold the conviction and ordered King and his associates to commence their jail terms in the fall. “No man can be judge in his own case, however exalted his station, however righteous his motives, and irrespective of his race, color, politics, or religion,” Potter Stewart wrote in the majority decision. “One may sympathize with the petitioners’ impatient commitment to their cause. But respect for judicial process is a small price to pay for the civilizing hand of law.”

  The ruling left King terribly sad. “The Supreme Court,” he said, “has placed a ’weapon for repression—an injunction against legitimate protest—in the very hands of those who have fostered today’s malignant disorder of poverty, racism, and war.” He told Wyatt Walker, “We used to have the Supreme Court as an ally; now even they have turned against us.” “This is it, the turning point of the 1960s,” moaned a veteran of Birmingham. “We knew that if the justices ruled against King, then no other black leader could expect much when he ran afoul of racist justice.”

  Never in the history of the movement had whites and Negroes seemed so polarized. On one side, backlashing whites argued that the flames of Detroit had “cremated” nonviolence and that white people had better arm themselves against Negro rioters. On the other side, Carmichael called on Negroes to “kill the Honkies,” and H. Rap Brown, who had replaced Carmichael as SNCC chairman, exhorted Negroes to “get your guns” and “burn this town down.” After Brown said that in Cambridge, Maryland, and Dayton, Ohio, blacks set sections of both cities afire. SNCC’s Chicago chapter announced that “we must fill ourselves with hate for all white things. We have to hate and disrupt and destroy and blackmail and lie and steal and become blood-brothers like the Mau-Mau.” SNCC dropped “nonviolent” from its name and lobbied against civil-rights legislation, and Carmichael himself joined the paramilitary Black Panthers, founded in Oakland in 1966. In an article in Harper’s Magazine, historian C. Vann Woodward pronounced the civil-rights movement moribund and pointed to “disturbing parallels” with the end of Reconstruction.

  All around King, the country was coming apart in a cacophony of hate and reaction. “I seriously question the will and moral power of the nation to save itself,” he fretted. There was such rage in the ghetto and such bigotry among whites that he feared a race war was about to break out. If that happened, there was likely to be a right-wing takeover of the country. In King’s view, time was running out for America, for nonviolence, for the new moral order he had struggled so long and so hard to build here for his fellow man. He felt he had to do something to pull America back from the brink. He told his staff that they had to mount a new campaign that would halt the drift to violence in the black world and combat stiffened white resistance, a nonviolent action that would “transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force.”

  But he doubted that another Chicago movement was the answer. In fact, the failures of Chicago had convinced him that the southern tactics of street marches and demonstrations were unsound in the northern ghetto. As he pointed out, a march down a street in Selma, Alabama, was a revolutionary step, but a march through the northern ghetto was scarcely even distracting because the turbulence of city life absorbed the march “as mere transitory drama.” In the South, the street march had caused a social earthquake. In the North, it was only “a faint, brief exclamation of protest.” Something else had to be found “within the arsenal of nonviolence,” a n
ew approach that would salvage nonviolence as a tactic, as well as dramatize the need for jobs and economic advancement for the poor.

  Out of King’s deliberations sprang a plan, one so bold and so daring that it surprised some of his aides when he revealed it to them in mid-August. Elaborating on a suggestion by Marian Wright Edelman, who had worked with poor blacks in Mississippi and Washington, D.C., King told his staff and advisers that nonviolence must mature to a new level to meet the crisis they faced in this country. And that new level was mass civil disobedience in the national capital itself. Marian had once participated in a small poor people’s “tent-in” in Lafayette Park across from,the White House. On her advice, King wanted to try something like this on a vaster scale—a campaign that would bring thousands of unemployed Negroes to Washington, to camp out in front of government buildings for an extended period, like the Bonus Marchers of 1932. Yes, the time had come to confront the federal government itself, for it was that government which had become the reactionary force in American life, that government which was killing poor people in Asia and condemning them to death in America’s riot-torn ghettoes, that government which was persecuting King because he dared to challenge its evil policies. King hadn’t worked out details yet, but their goal, he told his followers, was “to cripple the operations of an oppressive society” until it listened at last to the cries of its poor.

  TO RAISE MONEY FOR THE PROJECTED CAMPAIGN, King set out on a nationwide tour that fall of 1967, with the FBI dogging him as always, disseminating to “friendly” news sources a Negro newpaper editorial that castigated him as a “misguided Moses” and “a traitor to his country.” In late October he broke off his tour and flew into Birmingham with Walker, Abernathy, and his other convicted colleagues, to begin their five-day jail terms. It was King’s nineteenth time behind bars, and he had never felt so disconsolate about what was happening “in this dark hour” in America. With a steady rain falling outside, he tried to study John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New Industrial State, to clarify his ideas about the upcoming campaign. But he was so rundown that he contracted a virus and had to see a prison doctor. On the fourth day of his sentence, an Alabama circuit judge ordered him released because “we don’t want to work a hardship on anyone. He’s served enough time.”

  A few days later, he felt well enough to give a strong antiwar speech before a Chicago labor conference for peace. But it was a terrible time for King, the lowest ebb in his civil-rights career. It seemed that everybody was attacking him—young black militants for his stubborn adherence to nonviolence, moderate and conservative blacks, labor leaders, liberal white politicians, the White House, and the FBI for his stand on Vietnam. It had been two years since he’d produced a nonviolent victory, and contributions to SCLC had fallen off sharply. Adam Clayton Powell, who had once called him the greatest Negro in America, now derided him as Martin Loser King. And the incessant attacks were getting to him, creating such anxiety and depression that his friends worried about his emotional health.

  Desperate for a victory that would silence his-critics and save his shattered movement and his country, King called a series of staff meetings and a retreat that November and forged an even bolder plan of operations. What he had in mind now, he told his aides and advisers, was a genuine class movement that would mobilize poor people across racial lines and get them marching on Washington. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we’re going to take this movement and we’re going to reach out to the poor people in all directions in this country. We’re going into the Southwest after the Indians, into the West after the Chicanos, into Appalachia after the poor whites, and into the ghettoes after Negroes and Puerto Ricans. And we’re going to bring them together and enlarge this campaign into something bigger than just a civil-rights movement for Negroes.” He intended, he said, to launch a broad attack against class-based economic and social discrimination, of which Negroes were the worst victims, but not the only victims. The poor of all races and ethnic backgrounds suffered from a system that deliberately exploited them, deliberately kept them impoverished, and he planned to expose and dramatize that ugly truth by bringing a veritable poor people’s army to Washington. He spoke of causing “major massive dislocations” at government buildings and installations, of tying up hospitals with waves of sick youngsters—all to call attention to the plight of America’s thirty-five million poor, who were being murdered psychologically for want of jobs.

  He had given this a lot of grave and painful thought. Since his college days, he had brooded over the cruel exploitation of the poor in capitalist countries, especially the black poor in America. As early as 1964, he had raised the possibility of a poor people’s alliance and had actually advocated that in Where Do We Go from Here? Now King was ready to put his words into action—ready to launch a movement that would confront the class and racial basis of economic discrimination.

  Several staffers were alarmed by King’s plan, certain that SCLC lacked the resources to bring off so monumental a campaign. They recalled, too, how the government had brought out the army to disperse the Bonus Marchers and feared that this would be their fate as well. But it was James Bevel who objected the hardest. Back with SCLC now, still wearing jeans and a yarmulke, he pointed out that the peace movement had grown steadily that year, thanks in no small part to King’s influence. Some 20,000 young people had participated in the Vietnam Summer, thousands of others had held anti-draft protests that fall, and in late October (while King was facing imprisonment) some 50,000 demonstrators had marched on the Pentagon, against a sizable police and military force called up to protect it. Bevel was adamant that SCLC’s major thrust must be against the war. The issue of peace was far more critical to the survival of mankind than a movement aimed at domestic economic issues. As he argued, he revealed the extent of his own alienation from whites. “You cannot solve the problem of the dilemma of this world until you emphatically tell the truth about who the American white people are,” something he thought an all-out peace crusade would do. “They are the most savage, bestial, corrupt, murderous people on earth; and they engage in war games, killing, tricking all the time. They can’t help that. It’s not because they are mean. It’s because they are mentally ill.”

  King was not about to subscribe to such an extreme view of whites, and it hurt him that one of his own lieutenants should do so. He was critical of whites too—thought most of them “unconscious racists”—but Bevel seemed to overlook the fact that whites predominated in the very movement he championed. And in any case King disagreed that the war overrode everything else. He personally supported an all-out peace offensive, but felt that the time had come to gain a national hearing on fundamental economic questions, and anyway the war was part of the whole problem of economic exploitation. “He kept talking about racism, militarism, and the kind of capitalism that exploited people,” assistants recalled, and about how his projected campaign would bring all that out. He vowed that federal authorities “aren’t going to run me out of Washington” and that he would “stay in jail six months” if necessary. As King talked on, referring to the Washington project as his “last, greatest dream,” Bernard Lee felt a terrible urgency in King”s voice and realized with a start that “we are going for broke this time.”

  On December 4, King revealed his new campaign to a crowded press conference at Ebenezer Church in Atlanta. “America is at a crossroads of history,” he said, “and it is critically important for us, as a nation and a society, to choose a new path and move upon it with resolution and courage. It is impossible to underestimate the crisis we face in America. The stability of a civilization, the potential of free government, and the simple honor of men are at stake.” Beginning in early April of next year, SCLC would undertake a “strong, dramatic, and attention-getting campaign” of mass civil disobedience in Washington, D.C., to force the federal government to guarantee jobs or incomes for all Americans, and to start tearing down the slums once and for all. SCLC was planning, he said, to recruit 3,000 poor people
from five rural areas and ten major cities, train them for three months in the techniques of nonviolence, and then bring them to Washington to disrupt transportation and government operations until America responded to the needs of her poor.

  “The Negro leader’s mood seemed deeply pessimistic,” noted the New York Times reporter. “He said the confrontation in Washington was a ‘last desperate demand’ by Negroes, an attempt to avoid ‘the worst chaos, hatred and violence any nation has ever encountered.’ ” Yes, the ugly mood of ghetto Negroes made the campaign a “risky” one, King said, but “not to act represents moral irresponsibility.” He thought—he hoped—that “angry and bitter” people would respond to nonviolence “if it’s militant enough, if it’s really doing something.” He reminded the press that the government “does not move to correct the problems involving race until it is confronted directly and dramatically.” He added, “These tactics have done it before, and this is all we have to go on.” One thing he felt for certain: continued inaction on the part of the national government would bring down “the curtain of doom” on America.