At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Wallace, for his part, bristled at suggestions that Ronald Reagan surpassed him overnight in presidential stature. “He used to be a liberal,” Wallace warned reporters at a victory celebration. “Now he’s a conservative, and he might change back again.” Wallace claimed to have orchestrated the nation’s most impressive win against the Republican trend despite the handicap of a stand-in novice candidate, his wife, Lurleen, who won 63 percent of the Alabama vote but sat quietly through a press conference devoted mostly to his larger ambitions for 1968. The outgoing governor indignantly rejected any backlash label—“I never made a statement in my political career that reflects on a man’s race”—and presented himself as a crusader for constitutional states’ rights. Wallace said, “My only interest is the restoration of local government.”

  In California, Governor-elect Reagan deflected instant clamor that he was destined for the White House, calling it “very flattering that anyone would even suggest such a thing.” His contest drew a record 79 percent of registered Californians to the polls, and he won by 993,739 votes out of 6.5 million, carrying all but three of fifty-eight counties. Reagan acknowledged a groundswell. “It seems to be all over the country,” he said. “The people seem to have shown that maybe we have moved too fast.” He discounted white backlash as a benefit to him or other Republicans, emphasizing his personal abhorrence of bigotry and contrasting the new Negro Republican senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts with segregationist Democrats Lester Maddox and George Wallace. “For me,” said Reagan, “the vote reflects the great concern of the people with the size and cost of government.” His dubious but genial disclaimer of racial politics in California was more attractive than the bitter view of his vanquished opponent, who grumbled that Reagan won a 57 percent landslide with only 5 percent of the black vote and a quarter of Hispanics. “Whether we like it or not,” said the two-term incumbent Pat Brown, “the people want separation of the races.”

  Political analysts found backlash effects central to the success of Republican challenger Charles Percy over three-term Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, who maintained his “unequivocal stand in favor of open-occupancy legislation.” All the muscle of Democratic precinct captains barely carried the city of Chicago itself for Douglas, and Republican Sheriff Richard Ogilvie, who had been so visible against the fair housing marches into his suburbs, wrested from the Daley machine 18,000 patronage jobs under partisan control of the Cook County Board. This political feat established Ogilvie to become the next governor of Illinois, and Mayor Daley, according to biographers Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, perceived a grave threat to his own reelection in April of 1967. He criticized Martin Luther King early in November as a troublemaker bent on creating backlash votes for Republicans. One day after the election, Daley had his chief negotiator deny any binding responsibility under the Open Housing Summit Agreement of August 26. “There were only certain suggestions put down and goals to be sought,” Thomas Keane told the Chicago City Council. An uproar ensued. “Any attempt to destroy that hope is an act of cruelty,” said King, but the mayor moved decisively to shore up the white ethnic wards, relegating integration to a charitable zone at the margin of politics. His press secretary later confided that Daley’s “idea of affirmative action was nine Irishmen and a Swede.”

  PRESIDENT JOHNSON underwent surgery after the election to remove a throat polyp and repair the scar from his gall bladder operation, while submitting also to political pain he could defer no longer. Announcements dribbled out that the ceiling for the ongoing Vietnam buildup would rise from 400,000 to 470,000 troops, and Defense Secretary McNamara, who had lopped 50,000 soldiers from the request by the Joint Chiefs, presented the figure as a “leveling off” in future military effort. Still, journalists anticipated a bloody future from combat deployments in 1967 that projected roughly twice the average for 1966, when 30,000 Americans were wounded and 5,000 of the 6,644 cumulative U.S. fatalities occurred. To pay unbudgeted war expenses being filched from other Pentagon accounts, McNamara soon asked Congress for a supplemental appropriation of $12.4 billion, which more than doubled the admitted Vietnam estimate and pushed annual costs toward 20 percent of the overall national budget. Such sums threatened to deform the tiny South Vietnamese economy, whose prices had jumped 125 percent to absorb the flood of American war dollars. (“Runaway inflation can undo what our military operations can accomplish,” McNamara secretly observed.) To curb inflationary pressures from the Vietnam deficit at home, the President unhappily asked for an income tax surcharge.

  Johnson prepared to strike a tone of gallant realism in his 1967 State of the Union address. Vowing to “stand firm” in Vietnam, he quoted Thomas Jefferson’s “melancholy law of human societies to be compelled sometimes to choose a great evil in order to ward off a greater.” He reintroduced the failed omnibus civil rights bill of 1966, and promised to “intensify our efforts” in the War on Poverty. Anticipating a political crossfire, Johnson ordered archivists to retrieve every word the late President Kennedy said about helping the poor, and his economists compiled impressive statistics showing that 8.4 million new jobs since 1960 had reduced the poverty rate from 22 to 17 percent of the population. Still, Johnson’s own anti-poverty director denounced pressures to keep the third Office of Economic Opportunity budget stalled at roughly $1.5 billion, dwarfed by—and sacrificed to—the escalating price for Vietnam. “The poor will feel that democracy is only for the rich,” Sargent Shriver told reporters. Rustin’s freedom budget, launched to headlines on October 26, fell dormant with its plan to rescue the remaining 34 million poor Americans, of whom three in four were white, and Martin Luther King discreetly complained to the White House staff of domestic “retreat.” At the same time, countervailing forces sought to eliminate the anti-poverty campaign entirely. “Our work was just beginning,” Johnson recalled balefully in his memoir, “but there were some who felt that even this beginning was too much.” Elements of reaction in both political parties worried Johnson more than his liberal critics. They pressed for all-out war in Vietnam and attacked the anti-poverty agency as a utopian dream tinged with black power subversion.

  A political strategist admonished President Johnson that “the best minds are now in this game” against him, determined to exploit his association “with eliminating ghettos and generally pouring vast sums into the renovation of the poor and the Negro. The average American is tired of it.” A White House counselor advised less bluntly that government leaders were wearing down under conflict between Vietnam and the Great Society. “You have a tired cabinet,” wrote Harry McPherson. “They are good men, but they are beyond asking the hard questions now.” Johnson privately confronted Democratic governors who blamed the midterm losses on poor communication, especially his cornpone television persona and the vexing school desegregation guidelines. “I think it is unfair to take your leader and publicly say that it is his image that has caused all the problems,” he asserted in full pique, and the governors returned equally wounded complaints. “All of us want to help you,” insisted John Connally of Texas. “All of us want to look forward to 1968. We are all now on the defensive.” Seeping doubt plagued Johnson’s efforts to protect his mandate from 1964. “Now is indeed ‘The Valley of the Black Pig,’” Lady Bird Johnson told her diary, recalling an apocalyptic poem by William Butler Yeats. “A miasma of trouble hangs over everything.”

  FIVE DAYS after the election, King convened the far-flung SCLC staff of seventy-five for a stabilizing retreat on the coastal island of St. Helena, South Carolina, near the town of Frogmore, where the Penn Community Center inherited the rustic grounds of an old Quaker school for freed slaves. James Lawson and Ira Sandperl conducted joint seminars on the philosophy of nonviolence. Joan Baez performed solos between rousing group songfests that relieved strife brimming from the campaigns in Grenada and Chicago. Workshops vented fatigue, doubt, and abandonment. “The only time I have ever been hit is by a staff member,” said one overwrought worker. Rival factions loyal to Bevel and
Hosea Williams blamed each other for division, sabotage, unnecessary suffering, and the disillusionment of vulnerable followers. Williams fiercely resisted suggestions that he shift his operations into black Chicago for a winter registration drive to offset Mayor Daley’s push in the white wards, until a threat of open revolt silenced the commotion. “Dr. King, we love you,” Willie Bolden announced, “but I’m gonna be frank. Hosea Williams is our leader.”

  Williams made choking gestures toward Bolden, knowing the loyal outburst would only feed rumors that he was plotting a “coup” against King. Williams nurtured reciprocal suspicions against Bevel and his mercurial new protégé, Jesse Jackson. The Williams camp presented themselves as workhorses in the Selma tradition against dilettante theorists who seldom went to jail and had lured King to grief in Chicago. The Bevel camp disparaged Williams as a domineering crew boss for reformed seaport gangsters, incapable of grasping a national movement or the self-sustaining potential of Operation Breadbasket, spearheaded by Jackson. King himself, when present, tolerated the clash of headstrong lieutenants as a necessary by-product of frontier hardship and conviction. He ignored the scathing duels over his leadership, and seldom restrained the combatants. (“Remember, we are a nonviolent organization,” he placidly interjected.) Only in the end, when Williams growled at his hint that temporary consolidation in Chicago might be best, did King exhibit his will. “All right, forget it,” he told Williams. “Just forget it.”

  Williams stopped short to gauge the intensity of King’s remark, then folded. “Doc, you know I’ll go,” he said, and with the notable exception of Willie Bolden, most of his staff soon packed off sullenly into the Chicago winter. Privately, King rebuked Andrew Young for allowing Bevel and Jackson to combine so heavily against Williams, sapping resilience, and distress over the criticism snapped Young’s exhausted nerves. Leaving the retreat early for another assignment, he fell unconscious in the Savannah airport. One of the doctors who helped revive him sent Young straight on to Tel Aviv, reasoning that negotiations abroad would amount to prescribed rest.

  Battered emotions long had been a staple of the movement, testing King far past his trained experience at funerals. On Monday evening, November 14, he suspended the turmoil at Penn Center to explore thoughts out loud. “Whether I have anything to say or not,” he said, “I want you to try desperately to listen.” He honored the assembled SCLC workers and guests. “I found myself shedding a few tears this afternoon when I listened to Lester [Hankerson] talk about what he had gone through in Mississippi,” King confessed. “And many of our staff members go through experiences not quite as bad as Lester that we often know nothing about. And I want to thank you, because you have done this out of loyalty to a cause.” He acknowledged “a great deal of confusion in the air,” and professed no certainty or answers—“I am still searching myself”—to begin what he called “my informal statement” on the past, present, and future of the movement. In its surviving rough outline, biographer David Garrow later identified the skeletal structure of King’s next and final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

  Reviewing the movement decade, King concluded that change from its great mandates for equal citizenship was broad but neither swift nor deep. “While this period represented a frontal assault on the doctrine and practice of white supremacy,” he said, “it did not defeat the monster of racism…. And we must never forget that the roots of racism are very deep in America.” King defined the obstacle on a philosophical plane, distinguishing between the “empirical” statement that black people lagged behind and a stubborn “ontological” disposition to divide races for battle. He saw both. “And the fact is that the ultimate logic of racism is genocide,” he asserted. “If you say that I am not good enough to live next door to you…because of the color of my skin or my ethnic origins, then you are saying in substance that I do not deserve to exist. And this is what we see when we see that [form of] racism still hovering over our nation.”

  King used the premise of latent combat identity to analyze the twin obsessions of the political year. He presented black power and the white backlash as independent phenomena, rejecting common theories that one justified or propped up the other. He said backlash was nothing new. It was a vocabulary of denial like the idealized Ku Klux Klan stories that had numbed and distorted the aftermath of the Civil War. He described backlash as coded resistance to structural changes beyond free access to a bus or library. Like the original segregation laws, it served notice that white men were determined to retain tangible privilege from jobs to neighborhoods. By contrast, King defined black power as a cry of pain. “It is in fact a reaction to the failure of white power to deliver the promises and to do it in a hurry,” he said. “Once we recognize this we begin to understand what is happening in this revolution.”

  He explored the nature of revolution, speaking from his outline. “Now first, when you look at a revolution,” King ventured, “you must always realize that the line of progress is never a straight line.” There were inevitable counterrevolutions, splits, and convolutions “when you feel like you are going backwards,” he said. “Virtually all revolutions in the past have been based on hope and hate.” Conflict made for tumbling factions even when the revolutionaries were fellow aristocrats like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and King admitted taking extra risks from a submerged minority base. “To fire people and motivate them, get them moving,” he said, civil rights leaders had shouted “All, Here, Now!” for democratic rights long abridged. “We knew that we morally deserved our freedom, and we should have had it now,” he declared, “but deep down within we knew it couldn’t come now.”

  On top of unmet expectations, the movement carried extra burdens from a nonviolent discipline that embraced punishment without the outlet of rage. “We transform the hate element of the traditional revolution into positive nonviolent power,” King asserted, “and it was precisely this hope and nonviolent power that guided the psychological turning point through all of the victories that we achieved.” Yet these achievements were strained by the very tactics that created them. “The minute hopes were blasted,” he said, “the minute people realized that in spite of all these gains their conditions were still terrible, then violence became a part of the terminology of the movement in some segments. It is in this context that we must see what is happening now.” King called it a harsh truth that it was easier to feed the frustrations of violence with more violence than to soothe the frustrations of nonviolence with more sacrifice and hope. “Interestingly enough, in a revolution when hope diminishes,” he said, “bitter hatred develops toward the very people who build up the hope, because in building up the hope they were not able to deliver the promises.”

  His meditation came to a bleak turn. King said the nonviolent movement was menaced on both flanks by the violent tones of white backlash and black power. Then, far from advising a respite to let historic adjustments settle, he pressed the full three-part credo of his Nobel Prize address: “All that I have said boils down to the conclusion that man’s survival is dependent upon man’s ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty, and war.” At Penn Center, he called them “the inseparable triplets.” No longer could the movement expect to make progress on race in Grenada or Chicago while avoiding the violent propensity of “a sick nation that will brutalize unjustifiably millions of boys and girls, men and women, in Vietnam,” King told the assembly. “And the two issues cannot be separated. They are inextricably bound together.” They were chambers of collateral refuge for hostility. So was poverty. He said violence of spirit infected the economic system.

  King smiled at Williams: “Now, Hosea, I want you to hear this because you are a capitalist.” Just as they must “not be intimidated” to speak out against the war in Vietnam, he said, they could not let charges of Communism silence misgivings about the capitalist distribution of wealth. “Maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism,” King bluntly suggested, and the movement must consider econom
ic critiques by taboo thinkers such as Karl Marx. “If you read him, you can see that this man had a great passion for social justice,” he said. “You know Karl Marx was born a Jew, had a rabbinic background.” The early Marx was clearly influenced by Amos and other Hebrew prophets, King asserted, but fell prey to economic determinism that justified “cutting off individual liberties” in a proletarian dictatorship. “The great weakness of Karl Marx is right here,” he said, “that he did not recognize that the means and ends must cohere…. Now this is where I leave brother Marx and move on toward the kingdom.”

  To do so, King said they must set aside the triumphant celebrations of 1965, regird themselves for protracted labor, and deepen their commitment to nonviolence. “We have a method,” he declared, “and we must develop it.” Their method may be only an experiment, but war-hungry critics must understand that violence was uncertain, too. “Violence may murder the liar,” said King, “but it doesn’t murder the lie. It doesn’t establish truth…. Violence may go to the point of murdering the hater, but it doesn’t murder hate. It may increase hate.” The reflex to violence divided mankind into warring tribes, subverting the essential promise of democracy and religion alike. “I still want SCLC to be that lamp of hope, that light in a very dark situation,” he said. “We must still believe that we are going to deal with this problem by enlisting consciences” rather than particular racial groups. “For there is no salvation through isolation.”

  King closed with meditations on history. His small band of cohorts, many of them barely calmed from their internal feuds, absorbed a call to take on nothing less than the global cousins of segregation. He presented a radical leap in the language of steadfast commitment. Far from a plan, it was a raw summons to witness, and King broke off with an awkward new metaphor instead of his polished oratory. The landmarks of 1964 and 1965 had advanced “the football of civil rights” to “about the 50-yard line,” he declared. Now they faced diehard resistance in opposition territory. “As we move on, sometimes we may even fumble the ball,” said King, “but for God’s sake, recover it. And then we will move on down the field.”