At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  LEVISON URGED King not to attend the National Conference for New Politics at all. Two years in the making, the event brought together nearly three thousand delegates from 372 political reform groups, but ethnic and ideological splits already paralyzed the sponsors. One board member resigned to protest the excesses of black power, and another proposed an internal truce committee to deal with “the ancient corruptions of populism”: white racism and anti-Semitism. Harvard instructor Martin Peretz, the NCNP’s principal architect, had expelled young activists from his home for singing anti-Israeli songs about the Six Day War. Peretz wanted King to develop a Vietnam peace constituency for the 1968 presidential election, but others either manipulated King to run himself or called him an Uncle Tom. “What rubs off on you,” Levison warned, “is that you are dealing with people who do not know their politics.” King said it was too late to abandon Spock and William Sloane Coffin, especially since they supported his notion of civil disobedience in distressed cities. Hoping for the best, he gave the kickoff speech on August 31.

  Bongo drummers mocked his arrival outside the Chicago Coliseum with a rhythmic chant, “Kill whitey, kill whitey,” and Ralph Abernathy confided that King hesitated to speak because of threats from delegates inside. Pre-set groups heckled King from the perimeter as he presented a new line of advocacy for Vietnam peace. He argued plainly for U.S. military withdrawal, having resolved that calls for negotiations, bombing halts, and deescalation only evaded the necessary hard decisions. To make his case, King wrestled the most compelling justification for the war—democratic solidarity with anti-Communist Vietnamese. (“I do not want to be on any ‘hate Johnson’ thing,” he had insisted on a wiretapped phone line.) His restrained political stance only inflamed the confrontational moods in the Coliseum. Pickets carried banners such as “Down with Non-Violence,” and decoys distracted the crowd with shouts of “Make way for Rap Brown!” It was “awful,” King told Levision after woodenly completing the address. “The black nationalists gave me trouble. They kept interrupting me, kept yelling things at me.” A police surveillance report noted that King looked “afraid, worried and tired” as he left the Coliseum. He ducked out of Chicago early the next morning. Foreboding and clashes in the hallways made Julian Bond abandon the conference, too, even though he was its national co-chair.

  Chaos reigned for the five-day conference beneath ballroom chandeliers at the Palmer House Hotel, where the Chicago housing summit had concluded the previous summer. Some three hundred black delegates withdrew to the Hyde Park Methodist Church, which they threatened to burn down until the host clergy and all white visitors departed. One speaker proposed to burn the many black churches whose pastors still refused them space. Others suggested thirteen disparate resolutions—“Condemn the imperialistic Israeli government,” and “Demand the immediate re-seating of Adam C. Powell”—that were dispatched to the Palmer House as a nonnegotiable condition for black delegates to rejoin the main conference. A tumultuous vote there to acquiesce prompted a minority lament from NCNP founder Arthur Waskow that “a thousand liberals thought they could become radicals by castrating themselves.” Next the black caucus forwarded a new ultimatum that it would stay in Hyde Park unless granted half the ballots on every formal vote—to redress the legacy of racism—and a Michigan State professor helped persuade the main body to accept the heavily weighted formula. “We are just a little tail on the end of a very powerful black panther,” he said. By then the Palmer House was a maze of caucuses and manifestos. Burly guards admitted only black delegates to Rap Brown’s rambling speech: “The only difference between Lyndon Johnson and George Wallace is that one of their wives got cancer…. We should take lessons in violence from the honkies. Lee Harvey Oswald is white. This honky who killed the eight nurses is white…. You see, it’s better to be born handicapped in America than to be born black.” In the ballroom, James Forman rammed through resolutions about Africa without bothering to call for the “nays.” When two women moved that half the delegates should be female, men drove them from the microphone with catcalls and wolf whistles. Charles Sherrod, then in his sixth year of SNCC fieldwork in Albany, Georgia, pleaded against posturing games: “I am here to remind you that there are still people in the South fighting to be free.” James Bevel, who later branded the delegates “masochistic fascists,” said he believed the angry men who promised to kill him if he opposed the anti-Israel resolution.

  Of the nonsectarian press, only The New York Review of Books claimed for the NCNP deliberations a shining political discovery. “The organizers are ‘the movement,’” wrote Andrew Kopkind. Everyone else saw fiasco and folly. New Yorker correspondent Renata Adler, who had been bemused at times but captivated by the long trek from Selma to Montgomery, ridiculed the self-absorption of organizers as a fantasy detachment from the citizenry at large. “Throughout the convention,” she wrote, “delegates seemed constantly to emerge, wet-lipped and trembling, from some crowded elevator, some torrent of abuse, some marathon misrepresentation of fact, some pointless totalitarian maneuver, or some terminal sophistry, to pronounce themselves ‘radicalized.’” Most participants lapsed into delusion or searing regret. “I am afraid that many of our friends are so flipped out that they think events in Chicago were just marvelous,” Martin Peretz wrote Andrew Young. NCNP executive director William Pepper went so far as to extol the convention as “the most significant gathering of Americans since the Declaration of Independence.”

  To answer a volley of protest from Jewish political leaders, and at least thirty letters from rabbis, King busily disclaimed the NCNP’s unbalanced resolution against Israel.* Diminishing press coverage relieved the larger embarrassment, as mainstream reporters rapidly lost interest in the squabbling caucuses once delegates dropped any pretext of concerted action on Vietnam or their stated agenda—especially the newsworthy goal to unite behind a presidential candidate or third party for the 1968 election. Still, the unseemly disintegration of a citizens’ mass movement was a blow for King. It raised the odds against both alternative new campaigns. It hardened prior resistance to his Riverside speech on Vietnam and his call for nonviolent protest in riot-torn cities. Far more openly than Mississippi Freedom Summer, it revealed the strain of fresh cross-cultural alliances besieged by old habits of race and war. “Coalitions are virtually impossible in this reactionary climate,” Andrew Young wrote the Singer heiress Anne Farnsworth, a large contributor to SCLC with her husband, Martin Peretz. Depression left him on the verge of giving up, Young added on September 6—“about three steps away from ‘the Hippy solution’”—but he recalled the Selma breakthrough and said maybe they could find another one.

  KING’S FIRST attempt to set a course for nonviolent struggle collided with his headstrong inner circle. On Wednesday, September 12, when SCLC’s executive staff gathered at the Airlie House conference center in rural Virginia, James Bevel enjoyed a prodigal’s welcome south after two years in Chicago and the peace movement, but celebrations turned into a strategic dispute. Folksinger Joan Baez favored a coordinated offensive to resist the war in Vietnam. She outlined her own preparations for pacifist demonstrations at military posts and conscription centers, protesting the coercion of young Americans to kill and be killed. In sharp contrast, the young lawyer Marian Wright maintained a priority to uplift the invisible poor. She said that whereas the antiwar movement already had legions of recruits, national attention was turning away from people like her clients in Mississippi. She proposed to transport into Washington a representative host of faces from every region and race—men who never worked, women who could not read, children who seldom ate—for educational witness until Congress provided jobs or income. Wright modeled her notion on the Bonus Army of World War I veterans, who had occupied the capital to seek relief from the Great Depression.

  Hosea Williams attacked both ideas. Civil rights had stalled over black power and urban riots beyond its Southern turf, he said, while even Willie Bolden’s mother complained that “Dr. King went too fa
r” to question foreign policy in wartime. Williams favored training new voters from the last great success at Selma, and still resented the reduction of his own South-wide staff from 180 fieldworkers to roughly a dozen. Bevel eloquently rebutted Williams, as usual. He argued that peace must be the first priority for any vanguard, prophetic movement, because Vietnam was devouring the spirit and treasure for any other national purpose. Jesse Jackson, Bevel’s protégé, opposed either national drive before a catalyzing local success like Birmingham. For him, a move from weakness only invited humiliation. Jackson wanted first to rebuild SCLC’s movement in heartland Chicago, where he said abundant numbers could be mobilized either for peace marches or the destitute poor.

  King mostly listened. Abernathy and Young occasionally made favorable comments about a poverty caravan, but they reflected King’s guarded wish rather than their own conviction. In fact, King alone had received Marian Wright’s proposal like an answered prayer. Its focus on abject poverty opened an important but neglected dimension in human rights, where there was ample space for democratizing nonviolence outside the factional glare of the peace movement. Also, having been stumped about how to dramatize poverty from remote Mississippi or Alabama, King welcomed the inspiration to bring its faces and stories into the capital instead. Wright got the gist of her idea from Robert Kennedy, who told her after the hearings in Mississippi that Congress would address such misery only if someone made it more uncomfortable not to.

  Warring critiques elevated tension at Airlie House for five days. Historian Lawrence Reddick, King’s first biographer, stalked out with a prickly declaration that he would hear no more grandiose plans while SCLC remained functionally incompetent and nearly bankrupt. When King tried a musical metaphor, imagining poverty harmonized in diverse strains from black and native Indian to Appalachian white, Joan Baez tartly questioned all that effort tuning an orchestra for slaughter in Vietnam. When Wall Street lawyer Harry Wachtel asked whether Operation Breadbasket really hoped for more than token jobs and corporate write-offs, Jesse Jackson bristled against doubt from “a slavemaster.” King rebuked Jackson, then invited him to preach reconciling devotionals, and Jackson dazzled his detractors with eloquence on Ezekiel’s vision of new life from dry bones. To counter King’s worry about surging hostilities that fragmented and discredited the Vietnam protest, Bevel belittled the poverty campaign as bus fare next to the crisis of a misguided war. He said the first duty of nonviolence was to resist organized brutality. If Washington and Jefferson risked “crucifixion” by kings to establish democracy, he preached, the lowliest American should do no less to refine the spirit and practice of equal citizenship. Late one night, King literally howled against the paralyzed debate. “I don’t want to do this any more!” he shouted alone. “I want to go back to my little church!” He banged around and yelled, which summoned anxious friends outside his room until Young and Abernathy gently removed his whiskey and talked him to bed.

  King greeted colleagues sheepishly the next day. “Well, now it’s established that I ain’t a saint,” he told newcomers before the retreat ended on Sunday, September 17.

  Back on the road, King renewed a determined search for executive staff to help resolve the strategic impasse. In Cleveland and San Francisco, pressed for comment about the interracial marriage of Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s daughter, he called the ceremony at Stanford “a mighty fine thing.” The cover story of Time magazine recorded President Johnson’s emphatic assurance that the Secretary of State need not resign, and emerging private details included the formal stipulation by Rusk of disregard for a deeded covenant still prohibiting the resale of his Washington home to any descendant of Africa, Asia, or “a denizen of the Ottoman Empire.” The New York Times described several pioneer weddings made possible by the Supreme Court’s Loving decision—“Negro and White Wed in Nashville”—and other scattered events marked lighter anxiety after the grim summer of riots and war. FBI agents in the Grand Bahamas tracked a ring of pranksters who skillfully covered George Washington’s portrait on dollar bills with an image of King. Republican U.S. Representative George Bush pronounced himself satisfied that seven new microscopes in his Houston district were academic and benign, not rifle scopes secretly retooled for insurrection as he had suggested in a speech about miscellaneous purchases under the federal anti-poverty program. Governor Lurleen Wallace, though gravely ill, pushed through an amended resolution for the song “Dixie” and a presentation of Confederate colors to precede every football game at a public school or site in Alabama—not just the homecoming game, as legislators had proposed.

  King worked to convince the mild-mannered Bernard Lafayette, who had shifted from SNCC to Quaker-sponsored slum projects in Chicago, that he was fierce enough in nonviolence to supervise the combative energies of Bevel, Jesse Jackson, and Hosea Williams. In public, meanwhile, King and Harry Belafonte launched an eight-city fund-raising tour that sorely disappointed their hopes to replenish the SCLC treasury. Audiences fell short, and performers even quarreled on stage. At the Oakland Coliseum, singer Sammy Davis warned a meager first-night crowd not to stray from traditional civil rights issues, and promoted his goodwill trip to entertain U.S. troops in Vietnam. Joan Baez promptly challenged Davis to beckon the soldiers home instead, winning mixed applause for her resolve to blockade the Army induction center nonviolently at dawn. As Baez stayed behind to serve ten days in jail with 123 fellow resisters, a bomb-threat evacuation delayed another small concert the next evening in Los Angeles.

  AUDIENCE APPEAL for King dipped into a kind of public relations trough, obscured between dramatic youth clashes over Vietnam and nostalgia for simpler racial heroes and villains. Early in October, a showcase federal trial finally commenced in the lynch-murder of three civil rights workers more than three years earlier on the first night of Mississippi Freedom Summer. With an all-white jury impaneled, a jovial mood prevailed when one of the first prosecution witnesses was asked if the murder victims really had recruited “young male Negroes to sign a pledge to rape a white woman once a week during the hot summer of 1964.” On objection, asked to supply legal ground for the lewd inquiry, the defense lawyer disclosed that the handwritten speculation had just been passed to him from defendant Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen. U.S. District Judge Harold Cox banged his gavel to silence laughter in the Meridian courtroom. “I’m not going to allow a farce to be made of this trial,” he declared. Cox, though himself an ardent segregationist, fixed a tone of decorum for proceedings marked by jolting surprise. FBI Inspector Joseph Sullivan delivered witnesses who elicited gasps by revealing that they had worked for the FBI from inside the local White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. A local police officer identified prominent fellow Klansmen, including several mortified defense lawyers. Rev. Delmar Dennis said he had turned against the White Knights because of sickening violence and the chronic refusal of rowdies to pay fines levied by the Klan chaplain for vulgar language. He described firsthand an elaborate plot consummated with orders for Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price to hold the civil rights workers in jail while a lynch party was assembled, quoting boastful but inaccurate congratulations from White Knights founder Sam Bowers: “It was the first time that Christians planned and carried out the execution of a Jew.” After the trial, Dennis would remain besieged under threat, abandoned by his family and ambushed more than once as a turncoat to the Klan. Almost daily, the trial revealed bombshell witnesses who had confessed their part in the systematic murder of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. James Jordan, pale with heart trouble and remorse, petrified of Klan retribution, recounted details of the night’s frantic coordination to bury the three bodies fifteen feet deep in a fresh earthen dam.

  Courtroom drama from Mississippi shared headlines with National Draft Resistance Week. On Monday, October 16, hours after the Joan Baez group was arrested in California, one hundred clergy led four thousand people from the Boston Common to historic Arlington Street Unitarian, which rested on 999 pilings sunk in Old Back Ba
y. Bells tolled “We Shall Overcome” while police lines restrained crowds of hecklers, and nearly three hundred prescreened volunteers filed solemnly into the last home church of the Selma martyr James Reeb. Sixty-seven of them burned their draft cards with a church candle in front of whirring cameras from the television networks. Another 214 surrendered cards to Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, who announced that senior counselors would share the risk of punishment by presenting the cards to Washington authorities on Friday in ritual defiance of conscription laws. “Are we to raise conscientious men,” Coffin cried from the pulpit, “and then not stand by them in their hour of conscience?”

  Across the country in Oakland, a coalition of militant student groups took their turn trying to shut down the Army induction center by more aggressive tactics than the previous day’s pacifists, whom they derided as “jailbirds.” A series of blockades, feints, and rolling jeers led to a police countercharge that cleared entrances quickly at the cost of some fifty arrested or wounded students. The incident, dubbed “Bloody Tuesday,” attracted thousands from Berkeley and San Francisco, some with makeshift helmets and shields behind street barricades, to harass the induction center in “urban guerrilla” fights modeled on the 1871 Paris Commune.