At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  In Washington, J. Edgar Hoover announced that Communist leaders “can look back on 1967 with a degree of satisfaction.” News analysts observed that his yearly report, which consolidated fearful threats from subversion, antiwar protest, and racial agitation, converted the acknowledged scarcity of real Communists into a more sophisticated danger. Nothing would please national enemies more, he warned, “than to witness a continuation of widespread opposition, especially non-Communist opposition, to the Government’s policy in Vietnam.” He said the parallel surge of black power “has created a climate of unrest, and has come to mean to many Negroes the ‘power’ to riot, burn, loot, and kill.” Privately, Hoover launched a coordinated alarm. On January 2, he formally requested new wiretaps on King. The next day he sent President Johnson a classified blueprint based on informant reports from James Harrison, listing the fifteen cities and five rural areas from which King sought volunteers for civil disobedience in Washington that spring, together with the intended distribution of forty-six recruiters chosen thus far. On January 4, without notifying the White House, Hoover ordered FBI field offices to develop files on each staff member and volunteer for a new clandestine operation coded POCAM (for “poverty campaign”), designed to stop King in a specialized thrust of the FBI’s COINTELPRO against “Black Nationalist/Hate Groups.”

  Government pressure struck from another quarter on January 5, when the Justice Department filed criminal charges against five of the adults who had facilitated the surrender of nearly a thousand draft cards the previous fall. King addressed blaring headlines—“SPOCK INDICTED”—with a wistful air for the clear-cut moral choice. “I wish I did not have my ministerial exemption,” he declared in his Sunday sermon. “And I say to the federal government, or anybody else, they can do to me what they did to Dr. Spock, and William Sloane Coffin, my good friend the chaplain of Yale. They can just as well get ready to convict me.” All the next week, through speeches from Minnesota into North Dakota, King resisted overtures to join new Vietnam rallies with Spock because of his lingering sponsorship by National Conference for New Politics groups that had organized the venomous Labor Day fiasco in Chicago. More uncomfortably, King refused to ask the defendants to accept prison rather than contest the prosecution, but he did permit an accompanying legal adviser to do so at a January 11 caucus in New York. Harry Wachtel said standard defense strategy would collapse a drama of conscience into protracted litigation about the technical limits of dissent, forfeiting a rare chance to magnify the impact of antiwar sentiment. Coffin at least initially agreed, having aimed the draft card ceremonies toward being imprisoned with otherwise obscure young draft resisters. However, newly retained defense lawyers were scandalized by the notion of surrendering to the government’s draconian conspiracy indictment, and their professional zeal—to fight, win, and keep clients out of prison—bowled over the traumatized, conflicted defendants. King expressed only general support, and justified his reticence to Wachtel. “I can’t tell another man when to go to jail,” he said.

  At a press conference the next morning in the Belmont Plaza Hotel, reporters lost interest when Coffin declared his resolve “to confront the government in the courts of the United States in the traditional American way.” King salvaged news—“Dr. King Calls for Antiwar Rally in Capital”—by announcing a second pilgrimage of CALCAV clergy in February. “Either we will end the war in Vietnam,” King said, “or many of our most sensitive citizens must be sent to jail.” In the Spock-Coffin case, celebrity lawyers would dominate the summer conspiracy trial in Boston by presenting the defendants as strangers to protest and each other. James St. Clair, counsel for Coffin, offered testimony that the collected draft cards actually expedited conscription by pre-identifying miscreants. The radical attorney Leonard Boudin disputed every action charged to Spock, who recorded surprise that “somebody brought up as goody-goody as I was could go to sleep at my own trial for a federal crime.” When Telford Taylor, the former chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, won a jury verdict of acquittal, his client Marcus Raskin collapsed in tearful regret while the four co-defendants welcomed convictions that would be overturned later on appeal. In the end, legal tactics sacrificed civil disobedience to vindicate the First Amendment. By contrast, seminarian Barry Johnson of CALCAV’s New York staff would answer his summer draft notice chained to eight adult supporters, including Rabbi Balfour Brickner and the mother of a soldier killed in Vietnam, praying for the Army to choose: arrest them together, or cut Johnson away from his “co-conspirators.” Officials at the Whitehall Induction Center ignored the tangled implications and never prosecuted Johnson, as government lawyers avoided controversy that would advertise military coercion for an unpopular war.

  KING FLEW to San Francisco for weekend speeches. On Sunday, January 14, he and Andrew Young drove to the Santa Rita Rehabilitation Center in Oakland, where nonviolent teams were incarcerated again for anti-draft sit-ins—their sentences bumped up this time from ten days to three months. The visitors caused a commotion on the female cellblock that housed Joan Baez with her mother, and King hardly exchanged greetings before a regular inmate bounded around the corner with a scrap of paper and a pencil stub. Guards quickly took her away to lockdown penalties without the autograph, but the inmate broke into dance with ecstatic cries that she did not care because she met King and shook his hand. Her shouts spurred a chorus from other cells imploring King to right wrongs, improve the food, bring a good lawyer, and check on neglected children.

  The noise did not die down until he reached an isolated cell in the men’s wing. From solitary, Ira Sandperl interrupted a report on the outside world to suggest a wholly restructured anti-poverty campaign. “Don’t go to Washington,” he advised with customary fervor, warning of centralized corruption there, urging demonstrations instead where poor people lived. As King tried to justify the capital as a proper fulcrum for response, Sandperl felt a silencing contrast between the well-tailored figure in starched cuffs and the face of weary depression. King asked a favor. “When I’m in jail in Washington,” he said, “come visit me there.” Sight of him on departure prompted a round of shouts from the male inmates, including one jaunty plea that stuck in King’s memory: “Doctor, you all be sure to fix it up now so I can get me a job when I get out of here.” Emerging from Santa Rita into foggy rain and startling applause, King managed a short pep talk on Vietnam and poverty. “I might say that I see these two struggles as one struggle,” he said, and closed by asking the informal street vigil to “join in the old Negro spiritual, ‘I ain’t gonna study war no more.’” With Young, King took a midnight flight through Dallas and reached home early on January 15.

  They arrived late and exhausted for King’s morning presentation at Ebenezer. Some sixty members of the SCLC staff were gathered from scattered posts with their travel possessions, ready to disperse straight from Atlanta to recruiting assignments for the poverty campaign. Bill Rutherford’s summons had described a mandatory workshop of crisp final instructions—“it is imperative”—but King labored more broadly to overcome festering doubt and confusion about why they must go to Washington. He thanked Daddy King and others for fill-in speeches to cover his tardiness. He made a faltering joke about the tepid response of friends with their coats still on—“they act like it’s cold in my church”—and betrayed rare unease in a defensive speech.

  Unemployment statistics could not capture the plight of poor people, he argued, nor did the popular lure of riots and black power supersede SCLC methods. “Riots just don’t pay off,” said King. He pronounced them an objective failure beyond morals or faith. “For if we say that power is the ability to effect change, or the ability to achieve purpose,” he said, “then it is not powerful to engage in an act that does not do that—no matter how loud you are, and no matter how much you burn.” Likewise, he exhorted the staff to combat the “romantic illusion” of guerrilla warfare in the style of Che Guevara. No “black” version of the Cuban revolution could succeed without widespread political sympath
y, he asserted, and only a handful of the black minority itself favored insurrection. King extolled the discipline of civil disobedience instead, which he defined not as a right but a personal homage to untapped democratic energy. They must “bring to bear all of the power of nonviolence on the economic problem,” he urged, even though nothing in the Constitution promised a roof or a meal. “I say all of these things because I want us to know the hardness of the task,” King concluded, breaking off with his most basic plea: “We must not be intimidated by those who are laughing at nonviolence now.”

  By tradition, workshops closed Monday night on a plenary round of music. “Talk about Peter, talk about Paul!” they sang in jubilant harmony, stomping their feet ahead of claps on the back beat. “Talk about Doctor King, you can talk about ’em all! Long as I know I’m gonna get my freedom, it’s all right, whoa, it’s all right!” A shout from Andrew Young blocked King at the door—“Don’t let him out of here!”—and hands pulled him into a sudden chorus of “Happy Birthday.” King wore a sheepish, captured look, recorded by one home movie camera, when pioneer Coca-Cola executive Xernona Clayton came forward to toast his turning thirty-nine. “We know you really don’t need much,” allowed Clayton, a former SCLC employee, but she recalled complaints about food and the shoestring policy in prison. “So when you go to jail, here’s some shoestring potatoes,” she said. Laughter spread while King solemnly examined the canned snack, his necktie slightly askew. “Then we know how fond you are of our President and Mrs. Johnson,” Clayton added, holding up an illustrated novelty mug, stifling giggles to read the inscription: “We are cooperating with Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty/Drop coins and bills in the cup.”

  Contention returned on Tuesday with a vengeance. King coaxed Hosea Williams to stand beside him at an interim press conference, silent and fuming, while he sketched a poverty campaign “patterned after the bonus marches back in the ’30s,” with encampments and disciplined petitions to dramatize hardship. “I guess the only difference is that we aren’t going to be run out of Washington,” vowed King. Reporters sought confrontational details such as predicted jail numbers or an early threat to tie up street traffic and sabotage power grids. Some made news from King’s forthright agreement that he could be indicted like Dr. Spock—“I heard a rumor that they are going to indict ninety more”—and his pledge to keep Ebenezer a sanctuary for draft resisters. “We don’t have a bit of business in Vietnam fighting today,” he said. “That is a civil war.”

  King retreated to the poverty workshops, which he conceded were “rather stormy.” James Bevel and Jesse Jackson maintained strategic objections to the entire Washington plan. Hosea Williams, who filed a written protest that his once formidable Selma department “at this time consists of one person, the Director,” sulked openly about being stripped of staff and budget. “I couldn’t hardly get gas money down the street,” he recalled. Fieldworkers complained directly to King that their leaders drifted away from the sessions, undercutting morale. “Who ain’t here?” asked one. “I don’t see Hosea.” Organizers also confessed practical troubles. They found poverty an abstraction, unlike skin color or the ballot, and complained that potential recruits did not want to think of themselves as poor. Should the staff look for degraded human exhibits or articulate witnesses? They found uprooted people nevertheless resistant to change—homeless but reluctant to leave hometowns, filled with unanswerable questions about what to expect. Some SCLC workers shared Jesse Jackson’s qualm that President Johnson could foil the drama simply by endorsing their poverty agenda. Others fretted that alluring competitors would brand their nonviolent approach old-fashioned and pious. “What’s gonna happen when we bring these people to Washington,” a staff member asked King, “and Stokely’s gonna be there?”

  King remonstrated almost until the moment on Wednesday, January 17, when Bernard Lafayette sent staff members to recruiting destinations with knapsacks and bus tickets, mostly in pairs. “I don’t want to psychoanalyze anybody but myself,” King said, admitting that he straddled love and hate, hope and despair. He speculated that similar frustration afflicted the whole country, including war hawks and segregationists with their own “haunting doubts,” then encouraged his colleagues to look past conflicting goals and unfinished plans. “Just go to Washington,” he urged. If a Rosa Parks committee had waited months to refine its blueprint in 1955, King warned, “we never would have had the Montgomery bus boycott.” He said movements had a way of distilling choices, and perhaps a committed poverty campaign would decide to “call the peace movement and let them go on the other side of the Potomac.” First, he said, “we got to be fired up ourselves.” To illustrate the contagious power in nonviolence, King recalled the sight of the ferocious Blackstone Rangers absorbing blows in Chicago. He encouraged his staff relentlessly, calling hope a “final refusal to give up.” The sick world needed a jolt of conscience, he said, and this might be their last movement. He preached like a salmon fighting upstream.

  IN WASHINGTON, when five thousand women of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade marched through snow for the January 15 opening of Congress, rows of police blocked them on the authority of Vice President Humphrey. Senator Ernest Gruening, whose wife, Dorothy, was among the marchers, mustered only three votes against a hasty ruling that no visitors or petitions should be received before Wednesday’s State of the Union address, out of courtesy to President Johnson. A standoff ensued with the women massed at the foot of Capitol Hill, dressed in mourning black. Singer Judy Collins led choruses of “We Shall Overcome.” Coretta King, missing the birthday celebration in Atlanta, joined leaders, including Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and the brigade’s namesake, eighty-seven-year-old Jeannette Rankin—a suffragette and pacifist from Montana, the first female ever to serve in the U.S. House and the only representative to vote against American entry into both world wars. Lively internal debates posed a linkage between violence and patriarchy. A caucus from Chicago resolved that full citizenship required women to go “beyond justifying themselves in terms of their wombs and breasts and housekeeping abilities.” One feminist troupe improvised a “Liturgy for the Burial of Traditional Womanhood.” A critic from Ramparts magazine derided “narrow-minded bitches” for dividing the antiwar movement, but brigade leaders held the factions together in broad protest—“because,” declared Jeannette Rankin, “you can’t have war without women.” Congressional leaders ended the snow vigil by allowing a small delegation inside to deliver the brigade’s consensus petition, which called for legislators to stop the war and “make reparation for the ravaged land we leave behind in Vietnam.” House Speaker John McCormack emphasized his distaste for both measures.

  Safely in their wake, President Johnson entered the House chamber on the evening of January 17. Resting his short, sobering State of the Union address on a theme of perseverance, he said the American people “have the will to meet the trials that these times impose.” Johnson omitted the annual Vietnam review and prognosis from early speech drafts. “The enemy has been defeated in battle after battle,” he declared simply, adding that Americans were equally steadfast on the conditions for peace. Johnson surveyed a vast array of new freedom and prosperity at home, then paused. “Yet there is in the land a certain restlessness, a questioning,” he said. As though in disbelief, he reviewed seven years of unparalleled economic growth, with seventy million television sets and legions of parents “who never finished grammar school” but would see their children finish college. “Why?” he asked again. “Why then this restlessness?”

  “Because,” Johnson answered rhetorically, “when a great ship cuts through the sea, the waters are always stirred and troubled.” His nautical metaphor for the era dominated reviews. In the Times, James Reston faulted the President for a deaf ear to the “mutinous cries below decks.” The speech received only one thunderous ovation from Congress—for a statement that Americans “have had enough of rising crime and lawlessness”—and many observers said Johnson missed his own signals to slow down
the ship of state. Others criticized his focus on speed rather than the compass, saying the President evaded moral choice and the clash of democratic values by pushing hard in every direction. King lamented in a sermon what he called “a spiritless message.”

  Johnson insisted that the nation must not wait for peace to enact his stalled Great Society agenda. “Especially the civil rights measures,” he told Congress. “Fair jury trials, protection of federal rights, enforcement of equal employment opportunity, and fair housing.” Beyond these, he proposed significant new initiatives, including tripled construction of low-income housing and a $2.1 billion subsidy for business “to train and to hire the hard-core unemployed.” His speech confronted cost implications for a national treasury that had just suffered by far the largest annual deficit since World War II—running at $25 billion, or nearly the whole war bill in Vietnam, fully one-sixth of the national budget. Johnson pleaded again for a temporary surtax to cover half the shortfall, and he vowed economies to attack the rest. Few believed him, but the task came to possess Lyndon Johnson. The weaker his presidency, the more determined he grew to prove—at least by the budget—that a battered, polarized nation could afford both his military and social commitments. While pushing through token initiatives for the Great Society, he pared federal expenditures with a vengeance to eliminate the annual deficit. Almost unnoticed in 1968, Johnson engineered a landmark feat despite the bloodiest, costliest year of foreign war and domestic disorder. His final budget cycle left national accounts $3.242 billion ahead, posting the last surplus for the next twenty-nine years and six Presidents.