At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  These were shadings of conviction at the heart of politics. Consensus among his bosom advisers left King isolated with his obsessive belief that nonviolence remained a force for freedom stronger than all the powers of subjugation. Late Wednesday, to a mass meeting of civil rights dignitaries at the Vermont Avenue Baptist Church, he preached against the grip of despair. “And if I can leave you with any message tonight,” said King, “I would say don’t lose hope…. It may look like we can’t get out of this thing now. It may appear that nonviolence has failed, and the nation will not respond to it. But don’t give up yet. Wait until the next morning.” He stayed overnight to address Washington’s Chamber of Commerce, arguing that the self-interest of wealthy Americans required opportunity among the poor, and fell so far behind schedule to New York that he nearly missed his national appearance on NBC’s Tonight Show. Harry Belafonte extended the film session at Rockefeller Center to include King in a broadcast that marked sensitive transitions in media history. King mixed small talk about his family and frantic schedule with frank thoughts on martyrdom and Vietnam. Belafonte, while holding superior ratings through the week as the spotlighted black substitute for entertainment icon Johnny Carson, survived a primitive scandal elsewhere in network television. When British singer Petula Clark placed a hand on Belafonte’s wrist to close a duet, representatives of the sponsoring Chrysler Corporation mounted a hushed campaign to snip her interracial touch from the finished broadcast.

  King’s Tonight Show moment coincided with a signal tragedy in Orangeburg, South Carolina. All Star Bowling Lanes, a prime recreational facility for the rural town of twenty thousand, still maintained strict segregation despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and when students from Orangeburg’s two black colleges belatedly demanded service—eight years after the sit-ins of 1960—owner Harry Floyd successfully appealed for some five hundred troopers and National Guard soldiers to help police defend his property rights under state law. They repulsed would-be bowlers with some violence on February 6, then deployed two nights later to seal off the South Carolina State campus as students rallied outside behind a bonfire—some singing “We Shall Overcome,” others chanting “Your mama is a whore,” a few throwing projectiles. Loud volleys killed three students and sent twenty-seven others into the segregated emergency ward of Orangeburg Hospital, but public reaction stayed mute from the first AP bulletins that students had been hit “during a heavy exchange of gunfire.” The AP wire omitted subsequent corrections that no students fired weapons, and that nearly half the victims were shot in the back or the soles of their feet. Two reporters would write a haunted book about why the massacre story disappeared for lack of interest—or never registered—without even a mention in Time magazine. Quietly, Justice Department lawyers intervened to end the laggard segregation at the hospital, and they secured an order that made protest survivors the first black customers at All Star Bowling Lanes. Meanwhile, news followed a melodramatic theme of riot and retribution to South Carolina’s death row, where SNCC leader Cleveland Sellers was transferred with a bullet wound in the left shoulder. The governor’s spokesman pronounced him the outside agitator behind a black power insurrection in Orangeburg—“the biggest nigger in the crowd”—even though Sellers had retreated to his parents’ nearby home before his federal trial, becoming a peripheral adviser in the student bowling crisis, which he found anachronistic. In March, Sellers would draw the five-year maximum sentence for draft resistance, with another year added on state conviction for unspecified criminal activity at Orangeburg. By his final release in September of 1974, he had a new family, a Harvard master’s degree, and a laconic sense of recovery. “Being locked up for something I hadn’t done when my first child was born was frustrating,” he recalled in a 1990 memoir.

  King sent a lonely Orangeburg appeal to U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark: “We demand that you act now to bring to justice the perpetrators of the largest armed assault undertaken under color of law in recent Southern history.” He relied on private reports from college administrators who had opposed the student demonstrations, but three FBI agents hamstrung any federal investigation with false statements that they did not witness the incident personally. King moved on to recruit poverty volunteers Saturday in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he fell briefly ill from exhaustion, and summoned seventeen top staff people to Atlanta for a rare Sunday showdown on February 11, one week after his “Drum Major” sermon. He listed the blunt failures of preparation: lackadaisical staff work, negligible progress, weak recruits. He wanted a legion of hard-core poor for Washington, but saw only a few half-committed middle-class young people. “I throw this out to get us shocked enough to start doing the job,” King said, adding that he would rather cancel the April campaign than launch a halfhearted effort. Staff members vowed to do better. Bernard Lafayette raised the fallback option of delay.

  In Memphis, public works director Charles Blackburn promised to review a $6.97 payroll deduction for the replacement rain gear of sanitation worker Gene Falkner, but he saw no room to bargain on the larger items, including pay raises, union recognition, safety equipment, rainy days, or health benefits. “Well, the men want an answer,” said a union steward who invited city officials along to explain their stance to the men. This gave Blackburn his first inkling that sanitation workers were assembled and waiting on a Sunday night. He saw no reason to repeat himself, nor any pressing danger, but the stewards’ report touched off floor speeches about the lessons of Echol Cole and Robert Walker. “This was a strike that we called,” a veteran trash collector would remember. “Labor didn’t call it. We called it.” On Monday morning, 930 of the 1,100 sanitation workers walked off the job with 214 of the 230 affiliated men in the sewer and drains division. From AFSCME headquarters in Washington, P. J. Ciampa dampened the euphoria of local leader T. O. Jones by chewing him out for basic errors: a wildcat action without a treasury or plan, begun in winter when garbage does not stink, against a mayor too new to have many enemies. Still, Ciampa flew in with union supporters by afternoon, when Mayor Loeb pronounced the strike illegal and vowed to hire replacements if necessary. “Let no one make a mistake about it,” Loeb declared. “The garbage is going to be picked up in Memphis.”

  PRESIDENT JOHNSON convened his own Sunday night council in the White House residence. Like most Americans, his advisers scarcely noticed news squibs about Orangeburg or Memphis labor trouble, but the second week of Tet rattled experts no less than average citizens—perhaps more so—beneath a careful public posture of control. Officials of divergent views swayed daily to the point of vertigo inside a shifting government. Senator Robert Byrd, a staunch supporter, had alarmed the White House with forceful reasons why Tet proved everything in Vietnam was wrong. “I do not want to argue with the president,” Byrd privately told Johnson, “but I am going to stick with my convictions.” On Friday, when General Westmoreland had cabled secretly for “reinforcements at any time they can be made available,” Clark Clifford, the incoming Secretary of Defense, questioned the “strange contradiction” of sending more troops to answer an enemy offensive already pronounced a catastrophic failure. The Sunday war council puzzled over the wording of Westmoreland’s cable that he would “welcome” reinforcements. How badly did he need them?

  On Monday morning, February 12, after back-channel exchanges with the Pentagon, Westmoreland declared his need “desperate” and the time window small. “We are now in a new ball game,” he cabled Washington, “where we face a determined, highly disciplined enemy, fully mobilized to achieve a quick victory.” President Johnson regathered his advisers to ask what could have changed so drastically since Friday. He said the two Westmoreland cables did not seem written by the same person. Some military leaders supported Johnson’s nagging worry that Tet was a diversion for the real target at Khe Sanh. Others thought the enemy was prolonging suicidal losses to cripple the “badly mauled” South Vietnamese army, which made White House advisers fret more about Americanized war. But they approved the immed
iate call for six new battalions, and Johnson sent his top general to assess Westmoreland’s further requests in person. News of the surprise escalation paralleled the renewal of the siege at Khe Sanh. “More exploding rockets sent showers of hot fragments zinging,” said the AP dispatch. “The Americans dove for cover…. One prayed, a few cried, some were unconscious.” General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, generated more front-page headlines before leaving for Vietnam: “Wheeler Doubts Khesanh Will Need Atom Weapons.” Johnson himself sought counsel from former President Eisenhower, who urged deference to Westmoreland as the general carrying the gravest responsibility in American history. Johnson asked how that could be, given that Eisenhower once commanded ten times as many soldiers, and Eisenhower replied that World War II was different. “Westmoreland doesn’t know who the enemy is,” he said, “and there is not any clearly defined front.” The President also toured military installations in that third week of the Tet offensive, when American casualties set a new weekly high of 543 killed and 2,547 wounded. He reported back to his foreign policy team that talks with departing paratroopers in North Carolina “really melted me and brought me to my knees.” He described a miserable Saturday night of insomnia aboard a Vietnam-bound troopship off California. “About three o’clock, and every hour after, I went to the door and saw this big hulk of a Marine,” said Johnson. “I kept telling him, ‘I am freezing.’ He kept saying, ‘Yes, sir,’ but he never moved.”

  While Johnson toured, Hosea Williams barnstormed the South in a twin-engine Cessna 406, whose pilots were most unsettled to see that Martin Luther King was an unnamed passenger on the charter contract fobbed off by another company. A writer for the New York Times Magazine probed King in transit on press themes. Had he abandoned moral issues for class struggle? Did he know black militants were scoffing at nonviolence? Landing in Jackson on February 15, they drove to the first mass meeting at the Mt. Beulah Center of Edwards, Mississippi. FBI agents and state “sovereignty” investigators followed as King detoured past an all-black junior high school where squealing students waited outside to see him. Williams and Andrew Young sometimes fanned out to separate caucuses of poor people undecided about the new campaign. The Cessna reached Birmingham Thursday night for King to salute veterans from the breakthrough freedom marches of 1963. “I’m here to solicit your support!” he cried. “I want to know if you’re going to Washington.” The next morning, King told a packed house at Selma’s Tabernacle Baptist what a blessing it was to be met at the tiny airport by a black deputy sheriff instead of Jim Clark’s posse. He greeted Amelia Boynton, “mother” of the local voting rights movement, and Marie Foster, who still taught literacy for citizenship—also Rev. Lorenzo Harrison, who had fled the Lowndes County Klan into Brown Chapel a week before Bloody Sunday. “Believe in your heart that you are God’s children,” King told the crowd. “And if you are a child of God, you aren’t supposed to live in any shack.” Offstage, Rev. M. C. Cleveland discreetly presented a bill for three-year-old damages to First Baptist Church, including windows smashed by the posse and eight chairs ($36) broken by the voting rights pilgrims.

  Young pulled at King to leave, and they flew over the Highway 80 march route from Selma to Montgomery. From the pulpit of Maggie Street Baptist Church, King introduced Mrs. Johnnie Carr, who headed the improvement association formed during the bus boycott, and acknowledged Rev. A. W. Wilson of Holt Street Baptist, “who pastors the church where we had our first big mass meeting,” said King, “and I see Brother Marlow and Brother James and Brother Tom…” He reviewed a dozen years from the stirring of Rosa Parks through the glory of civil rights into riot and war. “I’ve agonized over it, and I’m trying to save America,” he said. “And that’s what you’re trying to do if you will join this movement.” He exhorted the middle-class crowd to organize contributions through their churches, which added a tone of reproach to his favorite ecumenical parable from Luke. “Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich,” said King. “Dives went to hell because he passed by [the beggar] Lazarus every day but never really saw him. Dives went to hell because he allowed Lazarus to become invisible…. And I’ll tell you, if America doesn’t use its vast resources and wealth to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor nations, and between the rich and poor in this nation, it too is going to hell.”

  He lingered briefly with deacon R. D. Nesbitt, who had hired him for Dexter Avenue Baptist in 1954. During the Cessna flight home, when the magazine writer asked on camera about the constant threats of jail and ambush, King described his two scariest memories—one from the march “through that narrow street” in Chicago as thousands of screaming people threw rocks even from the trees, when his police guards themselves ducked at once, the other from the commemorative march to the Neshoba County courthouse in Mississippi, when voices growled that the killers of the three young civil rights workers were standing close behind. “I just gave up,” said King, but his talk of surrender to death turned playful. “Well, it came time to pray,” he intoned, “and I sure did not want to close my eyes. Ralph said he prayed with his eyes open.” In Atlanta, King switched to commercial flights for hurried engagements in Detroit before preaching at Ebenezer February 18 on a theme for the poverty campaign—the familiar parable of the Good Samaritan. King confessed that fear had made him bypass needy strangers on dangerous roads in modern Atlanta, falling short of the Samaritan’s example. “And until mankind rises above race and class and nations,” he told the congregation, “we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own power and instruments.” Observers noted an air of frantic melancholy about King, who rushed on to Miami Sunday night.

  J. Edgar Hoover secretly notified the White House that King was hosting black preachers from major cities at Miami’s “plush new Sheraton-Four Ambassadors Hotel,” courtesy of the Ford Foundation. Prompted by President Johnson, National Security Adviser Walt Rostow asked McGeorge Bundy if he realized he was sponsoring a weeklong event likely to promote attacks on Vietnam policy along with “massive civil disobedience” in Washington. By coincidence, the front page of Sunday’s New York Times broke news of a major shift by the Ford Foundation to fund programs on race. “The first conclusion I offer is that the most deep-seated and destructive of all the causes of the Negro problem is still the prejudice of the white man,” wrote Bundy in a lofty but introspective president’s report. “Prejudice is a subtle and insidious vice. It can consume those who think themselves immune to it. It can masquerade as kindness, sympathy, and even support.” The Times story did not mention specific initiatives such as the leadership conference in Miami, where King somberly welcomed 150 ministers on Monday, February 19. “The problem is that the rising expectations for freedom and democracy have not been met,” he said. “And interestingly enough, in a revolution when hope diminishes, the bitterness is often turned toward those who originally built up the hope.” Death threats were so specific—a bomb warning into the Miami FBI office, a sniper boast from a caller who asked the hotel for King’s room number—that police security officers convinced King to miss two days of the proceedings under guard.

  JAMES LAWSON declined the trip to Miami, leaving him and King mildly disappointed in each other. King had hoped the preachers gathered by the Ford Foundation would take workshops from the movement’s most gifted teacher of nonviolent theory and tactics, and he still wanted to pursue with Lawson a job to rebuild the SCLC staff. Lawson, for his part, doubted from prior assignments that King really could bring himself to address battle fatigue and dissipation among his young aides, or correct the bullying of underlings by Hosea Williams. He remained a loner within SCLC’s prevailing Baptist culture, whose freelance pastors lacked patience for Lawson’s delicate side negotiations with the United Methodist bishop in charge of his job placement. So Lawson stayed home to monitor the sanitation strike in Memphis.

  The aspiring union workers had suffered badly in public relations. Local editorials rallied behind the city government against the effrontery of the
strikers and the health hazard of garbage piles on the streets. News broadcasts made permanent replacement collectors seem swift and inevitable: “The city hired 47 new sanitation workers today, turned down an estimated 30 other applicants, and is expecting ‘many, many more’ to apply tomorrow.” Bumper stickers appeared on Memphis cars—“CIAMPA GO HOME”—after AFSCME’s site representative spoke sharply in televised negotiations. (“Oh, put your halo in your pocket and let’s get realistic!” he told Mayor Loeb.) Union officials made an emergency decision that the gruff son of a Pennsylvania coal miner was culturally unsuited to a Southern campaign, and Jerry Wurf, AFSCME’s international president, assumed command in the strike’s second week. Mayor Loeb promptly escorted Wurf to the annual Memphis banquet for the National Conference of Christians and Jews, where Loeb drew thunderous ovations above barely polite reception for the union executive. To Wurf, Loeb’s intended lesson was to demonstrate that he had no exploitable weakness among prominent citizens as a converted Jew, recently confirmed into the Episcopal Church, and that Wurf of New York could expect little rebound sympathy from fellow Jews in Memphis. At six feet five inches, Loeb stood a head taller than Wurf. A graduate of elite schools—Andover Academy and Brown University—Loeb had commanded a PT boat in the Navy, then inherited a chain of businesses from a father he said would turn over in his grave if he recognized a union. When Wurf asked in private what made sanitation workers different from bus drivers, teachers, and police officers with local unions, Loeb vowed to protect his workers from outside exploitation. When Wurf offered to donate the first year’s dues to Loeb’s favorite charity, the mayor replied that the strike was illegal and defeated already. He would discuss issues only after the men went back to work.