July–November 1967
J. Edgar Hoover sent his liaison to the White House on July 10 with a secret report that King and Stokely Carmichael opposed the Vietnam War in order “to replenish their empty larders” among other nefarious motives. “It was indicated,” Deke DeLoach reported back to headquarters, “that the general public is gradually beginning to realize that the civil rights activities of these men have been phoney since their start.” In response, President Johnson urged DeLoach to arrange leaks against Carmichael but not King. His careful evasion was a double letdown for Hoover, because Johnson still shielded King and declined to undertake leaks himself. “I assume we have to do it,” Hoover grumbled, “but I don’t like it.” He knew that only a President had the stature to generate derogatory King stories without implicating the FBI as his source.
Two days later, Johnson imposed a Vietnam policy truce in the Cabinet Room. “There is not a military stalemate,” Secretary McNamara agreed from his latest inspection trip to Vietnam. General Earle Wheeler echoed the desired words—“There is no stalemate”—for the Joint Chiefs, who trimmed the pending troop request by 100,000. McNamara insisted they could make do with less, but he declared for the first time in council that the prescribed steady course would win the war. He and Wheeler thought American war reporters were “in a very bad mood,” which obscured progress, and President Johnson recessed negotiations on a note of grim consolation. He said constant reminders of ten thousand war dead since 1965 left him certain North Vietnam must feel the loss of that many in the past sixty days alone.
That night, taxi driver John Smith was reported tailgating a police cruiser in Newark, New Jersey, which would have been strange behavior even if Smith’s driver’s license had not been revoked for a series of eight minor accidents. Shortly after 9:30, taxi dispatchers relayed word that Smith was seen dragged prostrate into the Fourth District police station behind his passenger. Upward of two hundred people gathered, and several Molotov cocktails smashed against the station’s exterior wall, before a joint delegation of citizens and police commanders refuted rumors of lynching but confirmed Smith’s transfer to a hospital. When the community leaders tried to channel the hostility into a midnight march, broken store windows littered the route.
Mayor Hugh Addonizio declared early on Thursday, July 13, that the isolated trouble was over, and a front-page New York Times story—“Racial Violence Erupts in Newark”—outlined local controversies preceding the Smith incident. The mayor had just appointed a white precinct worker with a high school education to become superintendent of a school system abruptly turned 70 percent black. (Since 1960, seventy thousand white residents had left the city of 400,000.) Eighty percent of crime took place in a dilapidated ghetto where officials proposed to condemn 150 acres for a medical school. By afternoon, picketers outside City Hall were demanding housing instead, and cries of “Black Power!” scorned news that the city agreed to hire its first Negro police captain. A distant glow of store fires scattered police officers and reporters along with the crowd.
In a sitting room of the White House residence, President Johnson had summoned news photographers to display what he called “a meeting of the minds.” One by one, he polled McNamara and the Joint Chiefs about whether an unspecified number of reinforcements would meet all military requirements for Vietnam, and cameras recorded each emphatic assent. Through a night of escalating riot bulletins, Johnson agreed with New Jersey Governor Richard J. Hughes, a staunch political ally, that state forces could handle Newark without emergency federal assistance. State troopers entered the central ghetto at dawn Friday, and National Guard soldiers threw up 137 roadblocks by afternoon. Sporadic gunshots punctuated fires and generalized looting. Newark Police Commissioner Dominick Spina would testify that much of the alleged sniper fire was stray shots from police officers, troopers, and Guardsmen, whose separate radio frequencies did not allow them to communicate. A small girl lost an eye and her hearing to a bullet that penetrated her bedroom wall. When Spina ducked into the Hayes Housing Project, a resident told him teenagers on the fourth floor were dropping cherry bombs, but massive retaliation from the street killed two mothers and a grandmother on the tenth floor, where an orphaned son vacantly collected a dozen spent bullets in a coffee can. When violence subsided on Monday, Newark counted 1,200 people jailed, six hundred injured, and twenty-three dead, including two white officers and two small children. Images flashed around the world of soldiers standing over prostrate looters outside the burned shells of ghetto stores. A leading newspaper in Johannesburg archly observed that stubborn Yanks should understand at last the moral necessity of South African apartheid. “America’s obsession with integration only causes chaos, strife and destruction,” argued Die Vaderland.
Detroit police raided five “blind pigs,” or unlicensed speakeasies, toward dawn the next Sunday. Four raids netted the usual handful of inebriated gamblers, but the fifth ran into eighty-two people celebrating the safe return of two black veterans from “the ultimate riot,” as some soldiers called Vietnam duty. Scuffles, sirens, and accelerated calls for backup marked protracted efforts to haul away all the prisoners, and some 540 police officers responded by 8:30 that morning to showers of rocks and pockets of looting. U.S. Representative John Conyers appealed for calm but was hooted down and his district office ransacked. Looters beat to death a black man who tried to protect his store. A rioter ripped open his shirt before a cowed reporter and said of an ugly scar, “I got that in Germany. I was in Korea, too. I’m 42, and I can’t get a job.” Governor George Romney, flying over in a helicopter, ordered seven thousand Michigan National Guard troops into what he said looked like a bombed city. Attorney General Ramsey Clark woke President Johnson at 2:45 A.M. on Monday, July 24, with word that Romney was inquiring about federal troops. Johnson yanked Cyrus Vance from his fresh retirement into Detroit as an ad hoc emissary, and McNamara rushed two airborne brigades into Selfridge Air Force Base outside the city.
“There were dark days before,” King told a conference call of advisers that night, “but this is the darkest.” He approved Stanley Levison’s doleful statement warning that any nation failing to provide jobs ultimately cannot govern. He would remind people that a prostrate, Depression-era America had treated employment conditions no worse than those in black Newark and Detroit as a national emergency, but he knew most Americans heard him only when he dutifully denounced violent crime and supported federal intervention to restore order. By coincidence, the deadline to abort his trip to the Middle East fell just when responsibility seemed urgent at home and his nonviolent message most awkward for triumphant Israel. A visit centered in annexed Jerusalem would provoke antagonisms, King said, “and any way you say it they don’t plan to give it up.” So he canceled.
President Johnson anguished late Monday over a final decision to deploy the airborne brigades. “Well, I guess it’s just a matter of minutes before federal troops start shooting women and children,” he said morosely. Vance reported fires raging out of control, 1,200 arrests, and a disorganized, ill-trained Michigan Guard. Justice Fortas was drafting legal proclamations based on President Franklin Roosevelt’s precedent in the 1943 Detroit race riots. Some hesitation was political, as Governor Romney, a Republican presidential contender for 1968, was loath to declare the situation beyond state control. Democrats jockeyed with Republicans over shadings of blame and intrusion. When Vance urged that the Guard be federalized to gain experienced command, Johnson worried out loud that critics would say, “We cannot kill enough people in Vietnam, so we go out and shoot civilians in Detroit.” General John Throckmorton said his men would fire only upon life-threatening provocation. J. Edgar Hoover rushed into the Oval Office with ominous intelligence that Detroit was lost and Harlem would be “torn to pieces” in half an hour. The President went on national television just before midnight to explain his dispatch of troops.
Two thousand Army paratroopers proved decisive while firing a minuscule total of 205 bullets over fiv
e days. The sole military fatality died in crossfire between Michigan National Guard units at a poorly marked roadblock, as inexperienced Guard troops ignored Throckmorton’s orders to unload weapons. One unit fired several thousand rounds into a single house, then delivered three occupants to an “alley court” of police officers who tried to extract confessions that they were the riot masterminds. The result was concussion for absentee landlords trying to safeguard their property, but an immediate wire service account folded the mistake into sensational coverage: “Two National Guard tanks ripped a sniper’s haven with machine guns Wednesday night and flushed out three shaggy-haired white youths…. Detroit’s racial riot set a modern record for bloodshed.” Press reports of $500 million in property damage exaggerated by a factor of twenty, according to the subsequent national inquiry on civil disorders. “We deplore the few who rely upon words and works of terror,” President Johnson declared on Thursday, July 27, announcing the bipartisan study commission to be headed by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner. Forty-three people were killed in downtown Detroit. Groping for perspective, a shell-shocked New York Times editorial observed that the cumulative toll from Newark and Detroit fell far beneath the Pentagon’s latest casualty report in Vietnam, which was the lowest weekly total for 1967: 164 Americans killed and 1,442 wounded. Selective panic hushed savagery but magnified suspicion. John Hersey, author of Hiroshima, was asked to investigate riot mysteries for the Kerner Commission and became transfixed by the case of police officers who had rounded up ten unarmed black men and two young white prostitutes for interrogation in a motel, after which all suspects emerged beaten, unclothed, and terrified except for three found executed on the floor.
In California, Governor Reagan denounced “mad dogs against the people,” and a hundred Los Angeles police stormed the Muslim mosque again on a false tip about concealed arms. President Johnson called J. Edgar Hoover about stories that former President Eisenhower accused him of failing to see or control a “pattern of insurrection.” Hoover called Johnson with electrifying reports that Martin Luther King himself was implicated in plans to destroy the Chicago Loop. This absurd contention receded when Chicago stayed quiet, but Johnson clung to notions that his torment was plotted and artificial. “I don’t want to foreclose the conspiracy theory now,” he instructed his Cabinet.
Black power enthusiasts fed speculation with competitive rhetoric. From Bimini, Adam Clayton Powell predicted riots for thirteen new cities in “a necessary phase of the black revolution.” (He praised rioters for attacking John Conyers, who had served on the House committee that investigated him, and quipped, “No wonder he was hit by a rock.”) Rap Brown became famous between Newark and Detroit, beginning with a news squib that it might be time for “guerilla war on the honkie white man.” President Johnson called Hoover about a remark quoted from Washington’s Episcopal Church of the Incarnation—“If you give me a gun and tell me to shoot my enemy, I might shoot Lady Bird”—and Brown coined in the same pulpit speech an epigram that gripped the country as truism or demonic slander: “Violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.” Some fourteen charges of incitement had already been lodged when a manhunt located the SNCC chairman in a Virginia airport on July 26, during the Detroit riots. (Hoover’s success bulletin to the White House preserved a whisper of FBI reform: “I took occasion to have a Negro Agent participate in the arrest.”) Ex-chairman Stokely Carmichael released a statement the next day on arrival in Havana as a guest of Cuban Premier Fidel Castro: “We are preparing groups of urban guerillas for our defense in the cities.” Roy Wilkins, newly appointed to the Kerner Commission, all but shuddered on a televised news panel. King, asked if he wished to interpret for viewers Carmichael’s uncanny timing or purpose, said, “No.”
President Johnson allowed an interval of recovery before making harsh summer news on August 3. To curb inflation, and reduce a budget deficit projected to exceed $28 billion, he called for a 10 percent income tax surcharge. He also announced his decision to send another 55,000 soldiers to Vietnam, toward a new ceiling of 525,000 by mid-1968. The Pentagon request for 200,000 reinforcements remained officially secret, but a seminal New York Times story debunked the labored claim of slow victory only days later. It provoked Johnson enough to call the military press office in Saigon and denounce Communist influence behind the radioactive thesis, “Vietnam: The Signs of Stalemate.” The President demanded action to root out commanders who disclosed to reporter R. W. Apple that they expected years more combat because enemy troop strength actually had increased despite thirty months of rising carnage: an estimated 200,000 enemy dead with 12,269 Americans killed and 74,818 wounded. On Meet the Press, meanwhile, correspondents pressed King to choose whether he would seek to revive nonviolent demonstrations against Vietnam or the race riots. They said colliding passions weakened either course. “The tragedy is that we are today engaged in two wars and we are losing both,” King replied. “We are losing the war against poverty here at home. We are losing the war in Vietnam morally and politically.”
KING HAD promised to clarify a new strategic role at his annual SCLC convention. He flew to San Francisco, where he spoke privately of ambitious hopes and then addressed an association of black real estate agents on their obligation to “the least of these.” Back east the next day, he paid tribute to high-spirited radio pioneers such as Purvis Spann, the Magnificent Montague, and Georgia Wood of Philadelphia before an audience of minority disc jockeys. “No one knows the importance of ‘Taul Paul’ White in the massive nonviolent demonstrations of the youth of Birmingham in 1963,” said King, adding with levity that it was a miracle to hear “joyful rhythms” from the cocoon of his own youth flung all around the globe and now “coming back across the Atlantic with an English accent.” He praised the radio crowd for using the vitality of black music to build crossover bridges on the strength of nonviolence. “Yes, you have taken the power which Old Sam had buried deep in his soul!” King cried, soaring on hyperbole above laughter and applause. “And through amazing technology performed a cultural conquest that surpasses even Alexander the Great and the culture of classical Greece.” Yet he said they had barely begun the larger quest for freedom. He exhorted them to nourish comfort in being black—“We’re gonna start with ourselves by freeing our own psyche”—and move resolutely against the evil triumvirate of poverty, racism, and war.
From a brisk overnight trip for Meet the Press, King returned home for the opening SCLC banquet on August 14. Mayor Ivan Allen welcomed 1,400 guests to the ballroom of Atlanta’s new Hyatt Regency Hotel. Aretha Franklin performed her hit songs “Respect” and “Baby I Love You,” which shared the top of the current music charts with the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album and Scott McKenzie’s rhapsody on a flowering San Francisco youth movement. Actor Sidney Poitier described his pioneer screen roles since being stranded years ago on the “colored” side of the Atlanta bus station, and proclaimed King “a new man in an old world.” Over three more days, Benjamin Spock addressed an overflow session on peace in Vietnam, and King explained to a heritage workshop that the convention’s “Black Is Beautiful” posters signaled a drive to upgrade negative connotations buried deep in the English language.* “They even tell us that a white lie is better than a black one,” he said. Delivering the annual president’s report from his own pulpit, King recalled that when a handful of black preachers had gathered there at Ebenezer to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, just after the Montgomery bus boycott, such a glamorous banquet with three hundred white participants was scarcely conceivable. Libraries, white-collar jobs, and “the fresh air of public parks” had been off-limits to black people. Even casual association between races, when not illegal, was suffused with danger. “A decade ago, not a single Negro entered the legislative chambers of the South except as a porter or chauffeur,” he said. To confront poverty and war above the stupendous legal achievements taking hold on the civil rights front, King called for renewed dedication to nonviolence. He waxed philosophical a
bout a narrow path between anemic love and abusive power, preaching as though to himself on the trials of ministry in public service. “What I am trying to get you to see this morning is that a man may be self-centered in his self-denial and self-righteous in his self-sacrifice,” King declared. “His generosity may feed his ego and his piety may feed his pride. So, without love, benevolence becomes egotism and martyrdom becomes spiritual pride.”
King connected these difficult ideas with inspirational oratory on freedom, but his themes lacked practical direction. Priorities scattered under the compound trauma of hardship, fatigue, riots, and foreign war. A delegate from Birmingham complained that he could not understand a word of the seminar on poverty. Former SNCC chairman John Lewis stayed up all night arguing against “the politics of alienation” with Stanley Wise and Willie Ricks, who said black militants should jettison deadweight liberals in favor of political alliances overseas. Personal disputes and alcohol plagued leaders behind the scenes. When Bayard Rustin and Kenneth Clark did not appear for their panel on the urban crisis, King filled in alone. He attacked Congress in unusually strong language for hooting down President Johnson’s modest rat-control bill that aimed to reduce the 14,000 bites reported per year, mostly of children: “The tragic truth is that Congress, more than the American people, is now running wild with racism.” Of ghetto conditions, King said it was “purposeless to tell Negroes not to be enraged when they should be,” and he sketched a plan to channel grievances into organized nonviolence. “Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force,” he asserted. Demonstrations could curtail violence “if we set to the task.”
These remarks received an unfriendly reception on front pages everywhere. “Dr. King Planning Protests to ‘Dislocate’ Large Cities,” headlined the August 16 New York Times. In “Formula for Discord,” an editorial the next day said King courted disaster “in the present overheated atmosphere.” The announcement alone had damaged his cause “whether or not Dr. King goes ahead with his perilous project,” the Times added, because it strengthened “powerful Congressional elements already convinced that the answer to urban unrest lies in repression.” Similar reactions followed, and King’s own staff confessed shock that he laid out such an undigested plan. If the goal of the Chicago movement had to be scaled back from ending slums to denting residential segregation, how could a national drive on cities lead to better results? In the wake of the SCLC convention, Stanley Levison guessed King must see opportunity in a surprisingly mild public reaction to the riots—measured by low constituent mail to Congress and a national poll showing that two-thirds of Americans still favored aggressive steps to eliminate ghettoes. Some aides thought King was laying ground to shift the venue from Northern cities back to Southern ones, or the method from protest to political action, or the issue from poverty to Vietnam. To sort through the options, King scheduled a retreat with key advisers after a Labor Day conference in Chicago.
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