At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Thoughts of Asia also tormented SNCC pioneer James Bevel. He stalled overtures from Muste to lead an antiwar mobilization planned for spring, and Nash, his estranged wife, broke off attempts to reconcile in the midst of serial philandering that he rationalized with bold incantations about truth experiments in nonpossessive love. Instead, she had stretched the concept of movement responsibility once again, as in the Freedom Rides, this time to a continent without black people, leaving him behind in Chicago with a moribund anti-slum campaign and rare domestic care of their two small children. Bevel’s agitation intensified until one day, watching a load of diapers wash in the basement, he surrendered to a mysterious gale of voices from the doorway. Recruiting emergency baby-sitters, he told Muste’s colleagues of a peculiar sign favoring the protest job and commandeered enough travel funds to reach Atlanta in search of Martin Luther King.

  King had fled the country to escape daily intruders such as Bevel. Facing a draconian two-month deadline to produce a book manuscript, he managed to compose nearly three thousand words a day between speech trips into January, when the first showdown over Adam Clayton Powell demanded a response. “From my personal relationships with him, I really don’t care what happens,” King confided, “but I have to look beyond that.” Stanley Levison advised that, “unpalatable as it is,” King must defend Powell from an unconstitutional stampede to take his seat in Congress. King temporized with a telegram of personal sympathy, which Powell promptly released as a blanket endorsement. Meanwhile, from California, King agreed with Levison that any credible book must address Vietnam, but he dodged pleas to meet in New York with Al Lowenstein, Benjamin Spock, and Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin. This would be about politics, he anticipated, because Lowenstein already had told him that “a group of people” thought King should run as the antiwar candidate for President in 1968. January inaugurations added pressure for King to interpret the new wave of anti–civil rights governors: Lester Maddox in Georgia, Ronald Reagan in California, and Lurleen Wallace in Alabama. (The Times noted signs of moderation in Governor Maddox, who dropped the word segregation from his address and shook hands with Negroes, telling Julian Bond, “I see you finally got your seat.”) From Bimini, Powell brashly predicted triumph despite the January 10 House vote to bar him pending investigation, and claimed political strength to dominate even “‘Weak-kneed’ Wilkins and Martin ‘Loser’ King.”

  Bayard Rustin warned a civil rights leadership summit on January 14 that Powell’s repellent arrogance could split the movement, while A. Philip Randolph decried irrationality for and against Powell, and King advised the group to be philosophical about joint efforts to uphold impartial standards. “Because Adam will turn right around next week and blast every one of us,” he said. “This is the way he operates.” Telling colleagues he must seal himself off to write, King flew to secluded rooms at Ocho Rios on the coast of Jamaica, beyond telephones and most newspapers but not an alarming story in which the SCLC staff vented its distaste for the Northern registration drive. “I don’t like Chicago,” Hosea Williams told the New York Times of January 16. Lester Hankerson underscored his vivid picture of frostbite and apathy with a quote explaining why he would rather get beaten again in Grenada: “The people here are not interested in first-class citizenship.” The story made King break isolation to call the mainland, where an infuriated Levison urged summary dismissals long overdue—“I mean the movement is entitled to that”—and Andrew Young was predicting that Williams would cry his way to forgiveness as always. King instructed them to postpone drastic punishment until his return. “I got so upset about it I could not write a line,” he said. “And I was doing well, too.”

  Under the circumstances, Young swallowed notice that a possessed visitor had just bowled him over for a plane ticket and directions to the hideaway. Traveling aide Bernard Lee soon banged on King’s door, bracing the surprise with SCLC formality. “Mr. President,” he announced, “Bevel is here.” In rushed Bevel with his bizarre tale of tumbling diapers and noises that first had sounded like a host of familiar cousins but crystallized into one strange voice: “Why are you teaching nonviolence to Negroes in Mississippi but not to Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam?” Bevel recounted the questions that swirled around the basement and left him astonished, ending, “Are the Vietnamese not your brothers and sisters, like those you thought you heard at the door?” King, nervously adjusting his necktie, deflected any summons abroad as an abdication of his civil rights mandate from the SCLC board—“Ben Hooks and Joe Lowery wouldn’t stand for it”—and on January 19 managed to hustle Bevel out of Jamaica with temporary leave to join Muste’s staff. He called his top aides in distress, asking why Young had not noticed something badly wrong. “Bevel sounds like he’s off his rocker and needs a psychiatrist,” he said, recounting Bevel’s visionary instructions for King to take an open boat “peace shield” across the Pacific Ocean into the rivers of Vietnam, “preaching all the way that the war must end.”

  Not for the first time, King dismissed theatrics from Bevel only to have them linger stubbornly in his mind. He kept turning to one item packed with his book research, transfixed by a twenty-four-page photo essay in the January Ramparts magazine of young Vietnamese with stump limbs, shrapnel scars, and faces melted by napalm, its text introduced by the pediatrician Spock: “A million children have been killed or wounded or burned…” It gnawed at King whether Bevel was crazier than the prevailing reasons for such carnage. He acknowledged that Bevel boasted of steering him with wild inspirations in Birmingham and Selma, but he also recognized a fine line between lunacy and wisdom in prophetic movements. No food would taste good, King told Bernard Lee, until he discovered his part to end the war. While cut off four more weeks in Jamaica, laboring feverishly every day for words to reinvigorate civil rights, he started with a January 25 letter to the Nobel Peace Prize committee in Norway nominating the exiled Vietnamese monk for the 1967 award: “Thich Nhat Hanh offers a way out of this nightmare…”

  IN KING’S absence, Al Lownstein pursued many avenues to harness an antiwar coalition. The whirling law professor and citizenship activist orchestrated an open letter from fifty Rhodes Scholars questioning Vietnam policy, which made front pages on January 27, then escorted forty of the one hundred student body presidents who had just issued a similar appeal (“Student Leaders Warn President of Doubts on War”) into an audience with Secretary of State Rusk on January 31. They emerged in numb dismay over Rusk’s stolid reply to a question about what would happen if Vietnam escalated into nuclear war among the superpowers: “Well, somebody’s going to get hurt.” Lowenstein, working separately with chaplain Coffin of Yale (“462 on Yale Faculty Urge Halt in Bombing”), encouraged the ailing theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to make a declaration for peace, and helped Stanford theologian Robert McAfee Brown write a statement of conscience for more than two thousand religious leaders gathering January 31 in Washington. None of the nation’s 250 Catholic bishops attended, but Senator Eugene McCarthy, badgered by seminary constituents for his previous silence, concluded before a mass meeting that Vietnam policy failed Catholic doctrines of justifiable war. Rabbi Abraham Heschel exhorted the assembly to make witness through the corridors against complacency about violence: “In a free society, some are guilty but all are responsible.” After two days of vigils, Heschel calmed six fellow sponsors from CALCAV (Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam) on their way to the Pentagon, designating Coffin their spokesman with instructions to control his emotions. When Secretary McNamara parried them with an opening aside that religious leaders should have been more involved in civil rights, Coffin explained that most of those present had marched or been jailed like McAfee Brown and himself with the Freedom Riders. He and John Bennett, president of Union Theological Seminary, outlined Brown’s statement circumspectly until Heschel interrupted with a passionate jeremiad about the blasphemy of war upon the face and children of God. Tension spiked, but McNamara engaged in the moral dialogue to the point of missing appointments. H
e described religious dissent as legitimate and perhaps even a welcome balance, hinting at a far greater burden of political pressure to escalate the war. The delegation absorbed twin jolts in the cockpit of so much harm: Heschel’s spontaneous outburst and McNamara’s transparent regret.

  Arriving in Jamaica on February 3, Andrew Young relieved Bernard Lee in the marathon flurry of dictation and handwritten changes for King’s book. He brought stateside reports on the antiwar fervor along with an “explosive” cover story in Commentary magazine, “The President & the Negro: The Moment Lost.” Levison warned King of its sweeping thesis by Daniel Moynihan that President Johnson was abandoning civil rights because movement leaders—“unable to comprehend their opportunity…[and] caught up in a frenzy of arrogance and nihilism,” had shunned the Moynihan report’s recommended focus on matriarchal pathology in the Negro family. “An era of bad manners,” Moynihan concluded, “is almost certainly begun.”

  On February 13, King transferred his book operation to a Miami hotel for five days, exchanging draft chapters and revisions with an editorial team. He learned there of the heart attack in New York that abruptly felled A. J. Muste, without whom, King once said, “the American Negro might never have caught the meaning of nonviolence.” Commemorative speakers for the eighty-two-year-old scion of pacifism included Norman Thomas, Bayard Rustin, and James Bevel, the new coordinator of Muste’s antiwar mobilization set for April. They recalled his faith motto from the Book of Job—“Though he slay me, yet will I trust him”—which anchored the pacifist discipline Muste believed essential to progress. “If it does not have the spiritual connection,” he wrote in 1941, “I am sure that it will go wrong,” either by erosion of hope “or by going off the deep end on the use of violence.”

  From Miami, King initiated a conference call about his desire to be more active for peace. He described the goading impact of the Ramparts photographs, but advisers split over participation with Bevel in a giant march to the United Nations. Union leader Cleveland Robinson was strongly in favor, citing the “naked reality” that the war had crippled their domestic work. Andrew Young wanted first to round up other black ministers to cushion the leap. Stanley Levison confessed his fear that clashes between civil rights and peace would neutralize King on both fronts, reducing him to “a small-time peace leader.” He urged an antiwar strategy of recruiting key political figures such as UAW president Walter Reuther, but King stressed the movement’s bottom-up experience in reaching the national leader who mattered most. “You have to have the masses behind you before you can go to the president,” he argued. Still, King shrank from more splits in the movement or damage to its economic base—“We would probably lose the Ford Foundation”—and Levison persuaded him to nestle his antiwar mission in respectable company.

  On February 25, three days after the New York premiere of MacBird!, King joined four U.S. senators in California to address a Vietnam conference at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. The American war effort was pronounced unconstitutional by Ernest Gruening of Alaska, wrong by George McGovern of South Dakota, and misguided by Mark Hatfield of Oregon. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota raised doubts: “We should hesitate to waste our strength…in so highly questionable a cause.” King struck intimate tones in the keynote speech to an overflow crowd of 1,500 “Americans and lovers of democracy,” sketching recent history to lament cultural blinders on a heartfelt national purpose to establish freedom. “For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to re-colonize Vietnam,” he said, and his vision of the war echoed Thomas Jefferson’s haunted premonition of justice awakened for slaves. “When I see our country today intervening in what is basically a civil war,” said King, “destroying hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese children with napalm, leaving broken bodies in countless fields and sending home half-men, mutilated mentally and physically…and all this in the name of pursuing the goal of peace, I tremble for our world.” He likened America in Vietnam to the prodigal son of Christian scripture, “strayed to the far country,” and exhorted his audience to reclaim the prodigal like anguished parents. “I speak out against this war because I am disappointed in America,” he cried. “There can be no great disappointment where there is no great love.” The speech did make scattered front-page headlines—“Dr. King Advocates Quitting Vietnam”—but muted response thereafter signaled a passing nod for the fringe piety of harsh times.

  CHAPTER 34

  Riverside

  March–April 1967

  TREPIDATION and infighting over Vietnam shaped King’s decisive next step to Riverside Church, while ugly racial transitions nagged for attention. In Natchez, Mississippi, Wharlest Jackson punched off-duty from Armstrong Tire and Rubber at 8:01 P.M. on Monday, February 27, ending his first shift on a cement-mixer job previously restricted to white workers, which earned a raise of 17 cents per hour, but an explosion nine minutes later hurled his mangled corpse fifty yards. Investigators said a heat-fuse bomb under Jackson’s pickup resembled one that nearly killed George Metcalfe, Jackson’s fellow NAACP officer and carpool rider from the Armstrong plant. That night at Mississippi State’s Old Maroon Gym, Perry Wallace of Vanderbilt broke the state’s color line for Southeastern Conference sports. (Rival Ole Miss had dodged the hurdle by canceling its home game with Vanderbilt’s freshman basketball team.) Spectators waving a noose rained down betrayal coins, calls of “nigger!” and bone-rattling choruses of “Dixie.” Elsewhere, a bomb ruined the new Head Start preschool of Liberty, Mississippi, while arson fires in Lowndes County, Alabama, destroyed a black church and the makeshift anti-poverty office.

  Wharlest Jackson’s murder would remain unsolved, like the Metcalfe bombing, and a local trial with spectacular revelations soon freed a defendant who confessed the random murder of Ben Chester White during the previous summer’s Meredith march (“Jury Told of Plot to Slay Dr. King / Killing of a Negro Intended as Lure, Sheriff Testifies”). By contrast, Justice Department prosecutors advanced tenaciously against the Mississippi Klan, winning reindictment that same February 27 of thirty-one conspirators in two landmark cases: the 1966 firebomb murder of Vernon Dahmer and the 1964 triple lynching of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Not a few politicians bemoaned the federal effort more than the crimes themselves. Clark Reed, head of Mississippi’s renascent Republican Party, complained on statewide television that the Wharlest Jackson murder “has done more toward destruction of states’ rights than the liberal extremists could have brought about on their own.”

  In Washington, one political drama climaxed on March 1 with House rebellion against a select investigating committee and the leadership of both political parties, which proposed formally that Adam Clayton Powell be admitted once he paid a fine of $40,000 for misuse of funds, surrendered all seniority, accepted garnishment of his congressional salary to pay a court judgment from the Esther James libel case, and stood mute under custody for censure in the well of the House. A few defenders objected that miscreants had retained House standing even in prison without such chastisement, but an opposing groundswell sought riddance of Powell altogether. Republican leader Gerald Ford coyly observed that although the Constitution required a two-thirds vote to expel a seated member, the House could exclude anyone in Powell’s un-sworn limbo status by simple majority without stating a cause. Democrat Emanuel Celler, floor manager for the major civil rights bills, threatened to impeach any Supreme Court Justice who ruled differently. “Mr. Speaker, I have a reasonably strong stomach,” announced Representative H. R. Gross, “but it will revolt at the aroma that will arise if today Adam Clayton Powell is offered a seat in this chamber.”

  Only Drew Pearson, the muckraking columnist, questioned the central complaint that scofflaw Powell refused to pay the libel judgment due a constituent whose integrity he maligned, pointing out in one column that Esther James had a record of gangster arrests back to 1933. Neither Pearson nor the select committee mentioned the libel’s origin in ten extraordinary House speeches that listed h
er among hundreds of names on “police pads” for the Harlem underworld. Ignored, Powell had repeated his radioactive charges publicly in 1960, arguably losing constitutional immunity, and while his lawyers produced ample testimony that criminals gave regular payoffs to Esther James, it would take wrenching scandals well after Powell’s death to prove completed transfers into the chain of police command. Silence smothered his cries against the protected scourge of numbers and narcotics rackets (“All pads are due on the first of the month”), especially since the impish crusader himself sometimes claimed to seek only a fair share for black officers in the corruption dominated by New York City’s all-white corps of 212 police captains. Prevailing fiction suggested that Powell gratuitously insulted a lowly “bag woman” on the streets. The New York Times, which argued that hesitancy to punish Powell marked him the beneficiary rather than the victim of prejudice, nurtured a sympathetic widow’s image for Esther James: “a 66-year-old domestic who lives on her earnings as a servant and her late husband’s railroad pension.” When reporters encamped near his Bimini island hideaway relayed the 307–116 House vote for permanent exclusion, Powell shrugged with affected nonchalance from his boat Adam’s Fancy.