At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  On March 16, while Robert Kennedy’s campaign announcement jolted American politics from the room where his late brother had announced for President in 1960, a fresh unit of the Army’s Americal Division raided a remote cluster of hamlets in Quang Nai Province, which was base area also for the Tiger Force. Since arriving in February, soldiers from Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 11th Brigade, had endured losses without seeing an enemy to fight—six killed and twelve wounded in a minefield, a sergeant killed two days previously when he picked up a disguised bomb that cost others an arm, two legs, and an eye. On their traumatized march back to camp, the head of the column had come across a lone farmer in a rice field. “They shot and wounded her,” Private Greg Olson wrote home just before the raid. “Then they kicked her to death and emptied their magazines in her head. They slugged every little kid they came across. Why in God’s name does this have to happen?…This isn’t the first time, Dad…. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this; I guess I just wanted to get it off my chest.” Olson, a Mormon from Oregon, rushed early into the reported enemy stronghold of My Lai, with commanders from other outfits poised to reinforce the only major thrust in the region.

  From above, pilot Hugh Thompson of Georgia first puzzled that his three-man scout helicopter drew no fire for the hovering big gunships to suppress. Not a hostile shot was reported, nor a weapon captured all day. He dropped green (meaning safe) smoke flares near an alarming number of killed and wounded civilians around the village perimeter, marking them for assistance by the ground troops—only to fly over again and find the wounded all dead. Mounting horror drove Thompson to land three times. At a drainage ditch filled with casualties, a Charlie Company sergeant said the only way to help was to put them out of their misery. Back in the air, Thompson’s crew frantically debated whether an artillery accident, enemy atrocity, or any logical military action could explain the methodical rifle fire into stacks of bodies. Groups of soldiers across the scattered hamlets pushed families and isolated peasants into dugout cellars or water wells, then dropped grenades in after them. Several groups of sixty or more were herded into open spaces and mowed down. Some soldiers balked. Some made light of it and paused for lunch. Some sobbed and shot at the same time. Thompson next landed ahead of a pursuit squad from Charlie Company, shouting orders for eighteen-year-old gunner Larry Colburn to shoot his fellow Americans if they fired at him or the ten villagers huddled ahead. Colburn was as stunned as Private Olson, who, from the refuge of his nearby machine gun post, watched the strange pilot interpose himself on the verge of an enraged fight with the 2nd platoon’s lieutenant, until unprecedented SOS landings by two gunships evacuated the Vietnamese to safety. Thompson flew back to the drainage ditch to check for survivors and his own sanity. His crew chief waded hip-deep in the carnage to pry from a mother’s corpse one silent but squirming small boy, so covered in blood and filth that they were well into the escape flight before they decided he was not hit.

  At brigade headquarters, the three helicopter soldiers filed complaints about a massacre of civilians, and South Vietnamese district officials compiled a secret burial list of some five hundred My Lai villagers, including more than a hundred children younger than six. However, only the authorized account of My Lai reached front pages like Sunday’s New York Times: “American troops caught a North Vietnamese force in a pincer movement on the central coastal plain yesterday, killing 128 enemy soldiers in day-long fighting.” This version remained intact until a young draftee returned home in 1969 with notes of terrible witness unburdened on him by training buddies assigned to Charlie Company. Ron Ridenhour, who inspired confidence in his citizen’s gumption, sent thirty registered letters to generals, Cabinet officers, members of Congress, and the new President, Richard Nixon. Eight months later, news tips about a simmering military investigation led to publication in Life magazine of graphic My Lai photographs taken by an Army photographer, which triggered a national scandal of colliding emotions: denial, outrage, dogged pride, and wrath against war or disclosure. Nixon freed the one lieutenant convicted by court-martial, of twenty-two My Lai murders, and it took decades to open perspective across enemy lines. In 1998, the Army gave the Soldier’s Medal for Gallantry to former pilot Thompson, gunner Colburn, and posthumously to the crew chief, Glenn Andreotta, long since killed in combat. In 2001, returning to Vietnam for dedication of My Lai Peace Park, Colburn was dumbfounded to compare life stories with forty-one-year-old Do Hao, who remembered vividly the day he was yanked into the sky from a ditch full of silent relatives.

  IN TUMULTUOUS mid-March 1968, Martin Luther King quietly tested strategies to overcome social barriers by nonviolence, being far from sure they would work. He closed to reporters his anxious summit meeting with seventy-eight “non-black” minority leaders on Thursday, March 14. Mostly unknown to each other, let alone to King, they ventured by invitation from across the United States to Paschal’s Motor Lodge in the heart of black Atlanta. Wallace Mad Bear Anderson spoke for a poor Iroquois confederation of upstate New York. A deputy came from the bedside of César Chávez, who had barely survived a twenty-five-day fast in penance for violent lapses by striking California farmworkers. Tillie Walker and Rose Crow Flies High represented plains tribes from North Dakota, while Dennis Banks led a delegation of Anishinabes. During introductions, Bernard Lafayette whispered to King what he had gleaned about basic differences among Puerto Ricans, as distinct from Mexicans (Chicanos), or the defining cause of the Assiniboin/Lakota leader Hank Adams, who spearheaded a drive for Northwestern salmon fishing rights under the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek. Lafayette had checked repeatedly to make sure King wanted the hardscrabble white groups, and the answer was always simple: “Are they poor?” Paschal’s was dotted with coal miners, some of whom braved fierce criticism from Appalachian rivals, and Peggy Terry admitted being raised in a Kentucky Klan family. After moving to Montgomery during the bus boycott, she had gone once on a lark to see “that smart aleck nigger come out of jail,” and the actual sight of King buffeted by a mob churned into her independent nature. Now Terry kept a few black friends in the Jobs Or Income Now (JOIN) group from uptown Chicago’s poor white district, and she wowed movement crowds by asking where else a hillbilly housewife could trade ideas or jail cells with a Nobel Prize winner.

  Hosea Williams made no secret of his wish for the nonblack summit to fail. With several other SCLC staff leaders, he mercilessly ribbed young Tom Houck, who had come into the St. Augustine movement as an orphaned high school dropout from Massachusetts, then stayed on to chauffeur the Kings, and since had developed enough grit to scour the country for nonblack leaders under tutelage from Lafayette and Bill Rutherford. “First he was Coretta’s boy,” groused Williams. “Now he’s taking our money and giving it to Indians.” Internal staff resistance complained that these strangers would slow them down, ruin cohesion, and make it even tougher to compete with the black power trend. Lafayette fretted constantly over the risk of insult to, from, and between the guests. Leaders did rise from the floor to complain of exclusion, but they also acknowledged initiatives adapted from the black movement. Since the bus boycott, said several Native Americans, the model tribal leader no longer was an “Uncle Tomahawk” angling for token promotion. Others questioned nonviolence with doubtful respect. Vincent Harding, who had drafted most of the Riverside Vietnam speech, came late to observe and made note of hushed deliberation on assorted faces contemplating whether to recommend the experimental coalition under King.

  In an aside, King first asked, “Tijerina who?” He absorbed a fiery speech about regaining communal lands stolen by noncompliance with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which the United States had acquired the territory that became seven Southwestern states to end the Mexican-American War of 1848. Lafayette cautioned that Reies López Tijerina was a charismatic, chronic fugitive—hailed as a Chicano Malcolm X, disparaged as a “wetback” Don Quixote—best known for leading an armed protest posse that briefly occupied a New Mexico courthouse on Ju
ne 5, 1967. At Paschal’s, Tijerina asked what mention of land issues would be offered in return for nonviolent discipline, and King said the answer flowed from the movement’s nature: a common willingness to sacrifice put all their grievances on equal footing. On reflection, Tijerina proposed that particular stories from Native American groups be dramatized first in Washington, followed by black people second and his own Spanish-speaking groups last. His offer, which deferred both to historical order and the spirit of King’s presentation, received acclamation that extended to Chicano leaders sometimes at odds with Tijerina, such as Corky González of Denver. The summit closed on a wave of immense relief. Myles Horton, who helped recruit the white Appalachians, expressed euphoria after nearly four decades of cross-cultural isolation at his Highlander Center. “I believe we caught a glimpse of the future,” he told Andrew Young.

  King broke away to give a Thursday evening speech to nearly three thousand cheering supporters in the wealthy Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe. Some of the two hundred pickets on the sidewalk crashed inside with shouts of “Commie!” and “Traitor!” until officers ejected them to end heckling that King called the most intense yet during a speech, and tremors from national politics followed him. Robert Kennedy left a message for King at the SCLC office. Burke Marshall persisted until he reached King late Friday, saying Kennedy knew the California Democratic Council endorsed Senator McCarthy that night—amid rumors that King would do the same when he addressed the group at noon—and he hoped King at least could refrain from political commitments until they talked. King did stay noncommittal to reporters who intercepted him at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, where his speech earned cheers without preferring a candidate or attacking President Johnson by name. “The government is emotionally committed to the war,” King charged that Saturday, March 16. “It is emotionally hostile to the needs of the poor.” Kennedy’s delayed entry and McCarthy’s shortcomings roiled voter loyalties from the first weekend of a bitter three-way contest, when the President issued his most bellicose call for “total national effort” to win in Vietnam. “We love nothing more than peace,” Johnson told the National Farmers Union, “but we hate nothing worse than surrender and cowardice.”

  King withdrew in Los Angeles to manage the aftermath of his non-black summit. He sent a telegram to César Chávez (“We are together with you”), knowing Robert Kennedy had just visited Chávez dramatically at the end of his fast. He resolved to change Michael Harrington’s draft call to Washington with broader emphasis on all the invisible sub-nations of American poverty. He promised to squeeze in personal visits to Indian reservations and migrant labor camps from California and Appalachia to Massachusetts. With his schedule already jammed, and the start date looming in April, these extra commitments sorely distressed King’s aides even before James Lawson tracked him down by telephone in Los Angeles through the leaders of Holman United Methodist Church—where King would preach the first of several sermons on Sunday, and where Lawson already had designs to become pastor. Lawson could hear Andrew Young and Bernard Lee remonstrating in the background. Any thought of going to Memphis was preposterous, they said, because King would get snared and bogged down as always, then have to postpone Washington again. To counter, Lawson told King why he would find no more potent juncture of poverty and race than the month-long garbage strike. He played to an orator’s vanity with glowing accounts that Wilkins and Bayard Rustin had just drawn upward of seven thousand people, then closed with a practical argument that King’s upcoming poverty tour of Mississippi could begin from Memphis, like the Meredith march.

  A flurry of logistical changes began with flight detours out of New Orleans from Los Angeles on Monday, March 18. Lawson met King’s plane that evening with Jesse Epps, an AFSCME representative known for volunteer work in SCLC’s Grenada, Mississippi, movement. When Epps apologized that the crowd waiting was not the ten thousand Lawson had promised, King looked so crestfallen that Lawson quickly waved off the ruse. “Jim was wrong,” Epps corrected, beaming. There were fifteen thousand at least, he said. “No one else can get in the house.”

  It took a flying wedge of preachers and sanitation workers to guide King’s party into the cavernous Mason Temple through crowded aisles and a pulsing crescendo of cheers. Against all fire codes, some spectators climbed high into rafters that suspended a giant white banner with a Bible quote from Zechariah: “NOT BY MIGHT, NOT BY POWER, SAITH THE LORD OF HOSTS, BUT BY MY SPIRIT.” The platform below teemed with dignitaries, from AFSCME president Jerry Wurf to Rev. H. Ralph Jackson in his spats, plus three stately new garbage cans filled with donations. When King in his blue suit reached the bank of microphones, the noise receded no lower than a constant hum, and applause erupted again each time he paid tribute to their unity and purpose. “You are demanding that this city will respect the dignity of labor,” he said.

  They clapped when he asked if they knew most poor people worked every day, and even cheered most sentences of his exegesis on the parable of Lazarus and Dives. “You are here to demand that Memphis will see the poor,” King cried. Energy in the hall brimmed so close to the surface that he backed off to summarize the previous decade. “Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality,” he resumed. There was no need to build or persuade by the rules of oratory, as a feeder line in rhythm easily rekindled the crowd. “We are tired,” said King. “We are tired of being at the bottom. [“Yes!”] We are tired…. We are tired of our men being emasculated so that our wives and our daughters have to go out and work in the white lady’s kitchen.” He used old riffs—“Now is the time…”—and improvised new ones on staying together and the nature of power. “Power is the ability to achieve purpose,” said King, to applause. “Power is the ability to effect change…and I want you to stick it out so that you will be able to make Mayor Loeb and others say ‘Yes’ even when they want to say ‘No.’” He paused through the next ovations with a quizzical look.

  “Now you know what?” he asked. “You may have to escalate the struggle a bit.” His conversational tone for once hushed the crowd. “If they keep refusing, and they will not recognize the union,” said King, “I tell you what you ought to do. And you are together here enough to do it. In a few days you ought to get together and just have a general work stoppage in the city of Memphis.”

  This time cheers rose into sustained, foot-stomping bedlam, which drowned out further words, and King stepped back into the embrace of colleagues already in furious consultation. With Lawson, Andrew Young passed King a note that perhaps he could swing back through Memphis. Temporarily at least, the rejuvenating clamor made the garbage strike seem the heart of a poverty movement instead of a foolish diversion from the Washington goal. Abernathy tried to hold the departing crowd until King returned to the podium. “I want to tell you that I am coming back to Memphis on Friday,” he said, “to lead you in a march through the center of Memphis.”

  Walter Bailey welcomed his guests when the excitement was over. He had bought the old Melba Inn in 1945, when he could still raise turkeys in the back, and meant to name it for his wife, Lorene, before the sign came out Lorraine Motel “some kinda way.” Bailey enjoyed the SCLC preachers above Count Basie and many celebrities, because King was approachable enough to let people slap him on the back. “You could touch him,” said Bailey, who remembered the thick shoulders. “He was hard as a brick.”

  Into the night, King coldly appraised the strike with his friends Benjamin Hooks and Billy Kyles. A shopping boycott hurt downtown merchants, but AFSCME sustenance for families ran low. Garbage piles grew slowly because the city found emergency crews for nearly half its trucks. Mayor Loeb’s majority held solid. Later, eager students in bathrobes and slippers intruded with a command invitation to the Lorraine conference room, where the traveling women’s choir from a Texas college serenaded King with a midnight medley on the theme “Hallelujah.”

  KING’S BARNSTORMING caravan descended from Memphis into the wonder and strain of Mississippi. With
Bevel and Dorothy Cotton, he appealed for poverty recruits Tuesday morning in Batesville, then pushed west into Marks, where a small crowd waited in a flimsy board church with old funeral parlor calendars for interior walls. “Statistics reveal that you live in the poorest county in the United States,” King told them. “Now this isn’t right.” He was describing the “great movement” ahead in Washington when a white man wobbled through the door and reached furtively in his pocket. The man pulled out a hundred-dollar bill for the collection plate, turning panic to awe, then introduced himself as a Mr. Mobley with a slurred speech to the effect that they were all going to the same place and should mind their own business. “But let me say this,” he added. “There ain’t nobody hungry here in Mississippi. Old Kennedy got up here the other day and said folks are starving to death.”