Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  But there was more to it than that. As he explained in a series of lectures for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that autumn and winter, the crisis in America was “inseparable from an international emergency which involves the poor, the dispossessed, and the exploited of the whole world.” The crisis was between the haves and have-nots, the exploiters and exploited, the economic and political imperialists and their luckless victims in the ghettoes, reservations, and Appalachian wastelands of America and in the Third World. In a “Christian Sermon on Peace,” aired over the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on Christmas Eve and delivered in person at Ebenezer Church, King called for a total reconstruction of society for the benefit of white and colored peoples the world over. Human life, he warned, could not survive unless human beings went beyond class, tribe, race, and nation and developed a world perspective. It all came down to something he had long believed—that “all life is interrelated,” that “we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” In this interdependent world, no nation, race, or individual could possibly survive alone. Today, Americans couldn’t leave for their jobs in the morning without relying on most of the world to get them started. In the shower, you bathed with a sponge from a Pacific Islander and soap from a Frenchman. In the kitchen, you drank coffee provided by a South American, or tea by a Chinese, or cocoa by a West African, and you buttered toast from an English-speaking farmer. “And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half of the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.”

  ALL OF KING’S PREVIOUS CAMPAIGNS had suffered adverse criticism, but none of that rivaled the nearly universal hostility his Washington project was generating. Predictably, most of the Negro leadership, the press, and the white liberal community complained about how unwise and untimely this was and fretted that King’s poor people’s army would incite a riot, plunging Washington into flames. Roy Wilkins accused King of “bowing to the trend” of the militants and giving peaceful demonstrations an “alarming twist.” A Negro named George Schuyler asserted in a column in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat that King and his “peripatetic parsons” were plotting a “new racial war” with shock tactics reminiscent of the Vietcong. And mail opposing the projected march flooded into the White House. “You had better lock up Martin Luther King,” wrote one enraged citizen, “or we will have a social revolution.”

  Johnson himself was furious that King was bringing a Negro army to protest against him, to disrupt and dislocate his government. What man had ever done more for the Negroes than he? Johnson thundered. Why didn’t the Negroes appreciate him? It was bad enough that King should mouth those lies about him and Vietnam, but an invasion of Washington was intolerable. When was King coming? Johnson badgered his aides. One replied that Deke DeLoach of the FBI would let them know once King set a date. In fact, DeLoach passed on to the White House secret SCLC documents, obtained through the FBI’s paid informant on King’s staff, that pertained to the organization of the campaign. Convinced that subversive hordes would soon be battering at the gates of Washington, Johnson appealed directly to King to call the operation off. When King refused, a presidential assistant lumped him with Carmichael and H. Rap Brown and accused him of plotting “criminal disobedience” against the government. And Johnson himself publicly warned that he would not permit lawlessness “in whatever form and in whatever guise.” The President, wrote George Schuyler in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, did not plan “to preside over the liquidation of the American nation or sit fiddling in the White House while Washington burns.” He could easily mobilize 25,000 troops to repel a militant invasion of the capital, and “Dr. King better believe that.”

  The FBI too was certain that King’s campaign would precipitate a “massive bloodbath in the nation’s capital,” and it set out to sabotage the campaign by stirring up public indignation against it. The bureau for the first time specifically targeted King in its COINTELPRO activities against “black nationalist hate groups” and used forty-four field officers to spread pernicious news stories about him. The stories charged King with violent and revolutionary intentions in Washington, with forming “an apparent alliance” with Elijah Muhammad and the Black Muslims, with aspiring to become “a ‘Messiah’ who could unify and electrify the militant Black nationalist movement.” At the same time, the bureau got out still another edition of the King monograph, with still more stories about sex, Communism, and embezzlement, and not only fed it to the entire intelligence community, Secretary of State, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and various army and naval commanders, but “briefed” outstanding religious leaders about its contents.

  King himself was aware of the FBI’s escalating campaign against him, and he and his advisers were convinced that Johnson was behind it, convinced that the President himself was now collaborating with Hoover to thwart the Washington campaign and turn the country so completely against King that he would be driven scorned and hated from public life. It depressed King that his relationship with Johnson had degenerated to such a hostile state. What new stories about his faults—his “sins,” as he called them—were Johnson and Hoover whispering into the ears of America? (The bureau was now claiming that King had “a Mistress”—the wife of a California dentist—whom he met in motel rooms.) In this difficult time, the FBI’s intensifying vendetta heightened King’s guilt over “the things” in his personal life. He later acknowledged that there was “a Mr. Hyde and a Dr. Jekyll in us” and that he was no saint, no, “I am a sinner like all of God’s children.” Yet he wanted so to be “a good man”—wanted so to hear a voice say to him one day, “I take you in and I bless you because you tried.” He was trying now, as hard as he had ever tried in his life. He would not give up. Despite Johnson and Hoover, despite wide-scale public disfavor, despite his own “sins,” he was going to Washington because he felt that God was calling him there.

  Still, he had deep forebodings. By 1968, the FBI had logged fifty assassination threats against him, and the Klan and other hate groups had him targeted for violence. With the announcement of the poor people’s campaign, right-leaning businessmen across the land viewed him as a fiendish black devil out to wreck capitalism and establish a Communist social order that would ring the bells of doom for “free enterprise,” white supremacy, and their own personal wealth. Such people hated King, cursed his cause, and wished him dead. In the St. Louis area, a couple of aging right-wingers, both active in Wallace’s American Independent party and supporters of Wallace for President, plotted to have King murdered. John Kauffmann, a motel operator with a criminal record, had a standing offer of $20,000 to $30,000 for anybody who would kill “the big nigger.” His friend John Sutherland, a St. Louis patent attorney given to wearing a Confederate colonel’s hat and decorating his study with Confederate flags, had put up $50,000 for King’s head.

  King knew nothing about any specific contracts against his life, but he realized that the Washington project made him more visible, increasing his chances of getting killed. He and many of his assistants had a feeling that he was being stalked now and that the end could come at any time: a knife thrust out of a crowd, a gunshot…. His staff worried constantly about his safety, but what could he do? he asked. He certainly couldn’t go to the FBI or the police. And he was not going to carry a gun or let anyone around him do so either. That would violate everything he preached, everything he stood for. Anyway, what good would a gun do? Anybody who wanted to could shoot him at any time. Look how easily Oswald had killed Kennedy.

  He tried to joke about the danger he felt, about the possibility that he or one of his young aides might be gunned down. He would say, “If it’s you, Andy, I sure will preach you a great eulogy,” and then he would preach it to the amusement of everyone around. At other times, he would philosophize as always. “You know, I cannot worry about my safety; I cannot live
in fear. I have to function. If there is any one fear I have conquered, it is the fear of death.” And he would quote, “If a man has not found something worth giving his life for, he is not fit to live.”

  But he remained apprehensive all the same. One staffer, remembering his talk about the likelihood of death, thought “the strain of wondering when it was coming was almost overpowering.” Only when King was someplace where he couldn’t be shot—such as in a room without windows—could he relax with his aides and be “the Martin Luther King of the early days.” In public, there was “almost a learned response to let his eyes wander and gaze,” the staffer said. “It was an unconscious response. He was looking, cautious, uncomfortable.”

  By 1968, King was working at a frenzied pace, telling his followers—telling Coretta herself—that “if anything happens to me, you must be prepared to continue.” Unable to sleep, he would stay up all night thrashing out ideas or testing speeches on his weary staff. Andrew Young was worried about him. “You oughta go have a good physical exam,” Young advised. “Start takin’ a little better care of yourself…slack off on the pace.” King was just thirty-nine; he had a lot of years left. But King would not slow down. It was as if he were cramming a lifetime into each day. Yet even his frantic pace could not assuage the despair he felt, a deepening depression that left him morose, distracted. His friends and aides did not know what to make of it or to do for him. One confidant recommended that he consult a psychiatrist. But King was personally hostile to psychoanalysis—had been since Boston University days—and rejected the advice. He drove himself harder than ever, plunging into the planning and organization of the poor people’s campaign like a man possessed.

  In January, he called an SCLC meeting in Miami, Florida, and secured official SCLC approval for what he now called the Washington Spring Project. But King was running into stiffening resistance among his own advisers, chief among them Bayard Rustin. “Given the mood in Congress,” Rustin warned King, “given the increasing backlash across the nation, given the fact that this is an election year, and given the high visibility of a protest movement in the national capital, I feel that in this atmosphere any effort to disrupt transportation, govt. buildings, etc., can only lead to further backlash and repression.” Too, the campaign would attract “elements that can’t be controlled,” as had the Meredith March in Mississippi. As for an alliance of the poor, “You are attempting the impossible. There is no way for Martin Luther King to bring white poor, Puerto Rican poor, black poor, Irish poor together in any meaningful way.” George Meany, boss of the AFL-CIO, had spent millions each year trying to organize such people into unions, and “he falls flat on his face year after year.” How could King accomplish what Meany had failed to do? Finally, if King undertook civil disobedience against government installations in Washington, “there is likely to be a swift and vigorous effort by the government to close the project down.” King “might lose face” in the movement if he canceled the operation, but he would lose a lot more face if he conducted the demonstrations and failed. Then what would become of King? of SCLC? of nonviolence itself?

  After a series of meetings with King and his advisers and staff, Rustin announced that King had rejected his advice. “But Dr. King is sincere in believing there is a terrible urgency and that if Congress does not act, the Nation will be faced with more riots. And he believes he can succeed in making them act. I respect him for his sincerity and still regard him as the leader of the civil rights movement.”

  In mid-January, King dispatched forty veteran SCLC field workers to selected rural areas in the South and to Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, New York, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, and other riot-plagued cities, to start recruiting destitute volunteers for King’s poor people’s army. King named young Bernard Lafayette, Jr., a former SNCC field secretary and a new SCLC officer, to direct the campaign. Then he launched a promotional tour out to the West Coast, telling crowds in churches and auditoriums along the way what he hoped to do in Washington. At a fund-raising affair in Hollywood, he spoke with James Baldwin, who thought him “five years wearier and five years sadder” than he’d been during the great Washington march of 1963. King was still petitioning Washington, Baldwin mused, “but the impetus was gone, because the people no longer believed in their petitions, no longer believed in their government.” Now, five years after King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, it seemed that “we had merely postponed, and not at all to our advantage, the hour of dreadful reckoning.”

  In truth, King himself was experiencing “deep apprehensions” about how the Washington project was going to turn out. It would attract new forces, less disciplined forces, far more excited and angry than any he had ever led. What if he could not control them? What if they turned Washington into another Detroit, as many of his critics were predicting? And what if he couldn’t form an alliance with the Indians, Chicanos, and white poor? Moreover, what new treacheries were Johnson and the FBI plotting against him? And there were money problems too. Rustin estimated that it would cost $400,000 to sustain a poor people’s “tent” city in Washington. With so many of his financial sources gone because of his opposition to Vietnam, where would he get that kind of money? And so many of his friends were against the campaign, warning him that he could never pull it off, telling him over and over that he was failing. Yes, failing.

  By early February, he was beginning to lose faith himself. “We’re in terrible shape with this poor people’s campaign,” Williams heard him complain. “It just isn’t working. People aren’t responding.” There seemed to be a spiritual death settling across America that threatened all his work, all his teachings. Abernathy, returning from an extended trip abroad, was shocked at how melancholy King had become. “He was just a different person,” Abernathy remembered. “He was sad and depressed. And I did everything I could to help him but I couldn’t do much.”

  On Sunday, February 4, King delivered a poignant personal message to the Negro people of Ebenezer, his one undivided community in this season of doom. “Every now and then I think about my own death, and I think about my own funeral. I don’t think about it in a morbid sense. Every now and then I ask myself, ‘What is it that I would want said?’ And I leave the word to you this morning. If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long.” His congregation responded with sympathetic “amens” as his voice rose, sweeping the sanctuary in an ecstasy of grief and consecration. “Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize. That isn’t important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards. That’s not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school. I’d like somebody to mention that day, that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others. I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked…. I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity. Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. That I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that’s all I want to say….”

  DEPRESSED THOUGH HE WAS, King somehow found the inner strength to go on. Two days after his sermon, he flew to Washington for rounds of talks with local black people. He met with Carmichael and SNCC chairman H. Rap Brown in a highly secret session in a Washington motel, explaining the poor people’s campaign to them as he had to other groups. Some wondered why King would bother to talk with SNCC at all. Racked by internal dissent and defections (John Lewis and others had quit because of its vi
olent, antiwhite policies), SNCC had fewer than ten field offices in full operation and had ceased to function as an effective civil-rights organization. Carmichael himself had recently toured several Communist countries, where he had championed black revolution, and was now in Washington with a small black staff, working for Negro unity. Because he and Brown had a following among ghetto youths there, King approached them as part of his own efforts to unify Washington Negroes behind his project; he didn’t want Carmichael and Brown to undermine it by preaching violence against “honkies.” In fact, he hoped to neutralize the two by letting them vent their anger on him and then persuading them to “give us a chance.”

  After the meeting, King would only say that “there were areas of agreement and disagreement.” But he later deplored SNCC’s antiwhite stance. “We have not given up on integration,” he said. “We still believe in black and white together.” That is why “we need this movement. We need it to bring about a new kind of togetherness between blacks and whites. We need it to bring allies together and to bring the coalition of conscience together.”

  Over the next two days, King and his staff rehearsed a constant theme in dealing with Washington blacks, from garbage collectors to ministers and businessmen: “We are here to deal with a serious problem in a sick society. We would like to have your support and understanding.” Newspapers reported some intense confrontations with black nationalists, though, as King made it emphatically clear that this was to be a nonviolent, integrated, dignified protest and that he wanted no rabid elements involved in it.