At the White House, by contrast, President Johnson wrenched slowly from the grip of enemies. On Wednesday, one day after the stunning shift by the Wise Men, he asked who would get the Democratic nomination if he decided not to run for another term. One aide said Kennedy, and braced for a Johnsonian tirade against the Harvard tormentor and sniveling runt, or worse, but the President asked benignly instead, “What’s wrong with Bobby?” A new President Kennedy would have a grace period with Congress to work on his major liability, Johnson observed. “He doesn’t know how to deal with people on the Hill, and a lot of them don’t like him, but he’ll try.”
Such dispassion baffled wary aides. They had no way to guess how the storied Kennedy-Johnson animus might fare if detached from the rivalry for the White House, nor could they picture Johnson relinquishing power. Defense Secretary Clifford scowled down one whisper about possible abdication as juvenile lunacy. Still, the President received a private tabulation that Kennedy had voted with him on three-quarters of key Senate decisions, and he wrestled alone with contingent issues of political survival, honor, and Vietnam.
On Thursday morning of the ill-fated Memphis march, top foreign policy officials reviewed the presidential address for Sunday evening. Secretary Clifford roundly criticized an eighth draft presented by counselor Harry McPherson, which announced a modest troop increase with resolve. Clifford said it was all war, therefore out of step with the mood of the country, and the administration’s Vietnam policy softly collapsed. Secretary of State Rusk, the war’s steadiest defender, conceded without objections on precedent or authority, and National Security Adviser Rostow, the war’s most unshakable optimist, gave no rebuttal. Instead, the three-hour meeting simply drifted into preparations for a unilateral bombing halt above North Vietnam’s 20th parallel. The watershed was tacit—without calculations of battlefield attrition, political settlement, or personal consequence—and floated on an unspoken amazement that survived into memoirs by McPherson and Clifford. Rusk would remember suggesting that the President deserved an alternative, and McPherson delivered to the White House residence before midnight a companion draft with a new tone from its first sentence: “Tonight I want to speak to you of the prospects for peace in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.”
Johnson decried the Memphis riot in two speeches and a statement on Friday, pledging to “stand behind local law enforcement agencies to the full extent of our Constitutional authority.” He called the events a reminder that “violence and repression can only divide our people.” In the Rose Garden that morning, the President spoke to young people from the Philadelphia Police Athletic League about vital civic lessons—respect for others, the rules of fair play—and quoted Lincoln that no grievance was fit for “redress by mob law.” He broke away at ten o’clock to dictate changes by telephone for Sunday’s Vietnam speech. Again, perhaps inevitably, not a word acknowledged painful and momentous choice. McPherson scribbled notes blindly until he realized Johnson was working from the peace draft.
KING WOKE groggy for the aftermath. Memphis television showed littered but deserted streets patrolled by National Guard vehicles with mounted machine guns, and Hambone’s cartoon meditation in the Friday morning Commercial Appeal offered dubious cheer: “Don’ mak no diff’unce whut kin’ o’ face you’s got, hit look mo’ bettuh smilin’!!” At ten o’clock, Abernathy answered sharp knocks at the Rivermont suite to find three young men from the local Black Organizing Project, closely watched by an encamped white reporter. When he ducked back into King’s bedroom to say strangers had come with apologies—apologies for all the rumors that they had started yesterday’s riot through their affiliated youth gang called the Invaders—King asked Abernathy to receive them because he was already late for a press conference. While getting dressed, he heard introductory disputes over basic terms. Rather than a gang, insisted the Black Organizing Project leaders, the Invaders was a political awareness and fitness group for students, modeled on Elijah Muhammad’s Fruit of Islam.
“We aren’t saying that you caused the trouble,” Abernathy conceded. “But everybody else is saying so. If you didn’t do it, who did?”
“The people,” replied one of the BOP leaders. He said local preachers had led the march into a trap by concealing the leadership struggles within the black community, and that King would fare worse next time if he blamed the Invaders. King emerged just then buttoning his shirt. He exchanged pleasant greetings that briefly stilled the room, and returned fully dressed to lament that he had not known of such friction. “Cabbage, why didn’t you tell me?” he asked spokesman Charles Cabbage, “if for no other reason than you’re a Morehouse man. We are brothers.” He flattered the new graduate of his alma mater partly for exceptional height—a foot taller than he—and recalled him as a campus activist who had applied for an SCLC job under Hosea Williams.
Cabbage brightened. “Dr. King, I tried to get to you to tell you, but they wouldn’t let me,” he replied, adding that Lawson in particular had belittled and excluded the youth representatives on the strike council. King said this was news to him. Abernathy said he had heard from the other side that the Invaders had scattered through the pre-march crowd to make incendiary speeches before melting away on King’s approach. The Invaders hotly rebutted him with professions of good faith.
Yesterday’s violence was gone, King interrupted quietly, and blame mattered less than preventing another riot. Extraneously, as though puzzled, he asked why any leader would resort to violence anyway, since riots never lasted more than two or three days of destruction that fell heavily on bystanders and other black people. When he asked what the BOP leaders could do to ensure a badly needed peaceful march now, Cabbage ran down a list of transportation needs and unmet budgets for up to two thousand members from local colleges and high schools. King carefully replied that his staff would review the list to put them in touch with potential supporters, and he made only one comment. You can’t hold yourself out as leaders of these young people and then hide behind random violence, he warned. You have influence—that’s why you are in this room.
On their way out, the BOP trio soared with relief. “We are going to get our program going,” Cabbage confided, “because that man is good for his word.” One of his colleagues was elated but dazed, sensing that King saw through their contrivance with a strange absence of reproach. “Nobody could be as peaceful as that man,” he would recall. “It was one of the few times in my life when I wasn’t actually fighting something.” King, for his part, sent Abernathy and Lee downstairs to the press conference while he composed himself, and his resilient bravado startled them a few minutes later. Without waiting for an introduction, King told assembled reporters that yesterday’s violence was at least partly planned. He said greater preparation was required to safeguard peaceful protest with the sanitation strikers, but it could and should be done. “Nonviolence can be as contagious as violence,” he declared, and dismissed suggestions that failure obliged him to cancel the larger anti-poverty campaign. “We are fully determined to go to Washington,” said King. Violence permeated American society, he declared, and he could not promise a summer free of riots. “I can only guarantee that our demonstrations will not be violent.”
Back upstairs, King called Stanley Levison with thanks for encouragement on points that had sustained him through the press conference, then relapsed into fears of ruin. He said influential black critics scented his weakness over this—Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin, Adam Clayton Powell—and would reinforce the public damage. “You know, their point is, ‘Martin Luther King is dead, he’s finished,’” King complained. “‘His nonviolence is nothing. No one is listening to it.’ Let’s face it. We do have a great public relations setback.”
“That is only if you accept their definition,” Levison replied, “and this, I think, is a profound error you are making.”
No, King insisted. The problem was widespread eagerness to see things that way. “I talked to the fellows who organized the violence business this morning
in my room,” he said. “They came to me. I didn’t even call for them. They came up here—they love me. They were fighting the leadership of Memphis. They were fighting Jim Lawson…. They were too sick to see that what they were doing yesterday was hurting me much more than it could hurt the local preachers. But it is out now. What do we do?” He said he was thinking of extremes such as one of Gandhi’s long fasts for penance.
“Martin, I’m not just talking about this march,” Levison persisted. “I’m talking in general about what seems to me the box or the trap that you are placing nonviolence in. The other side can always find a few provocateurs to start violence no matter what you do.” King would be paralyzed unless he could “hypnotize every single Negro alive,” said Levison. “That’s too much to ask.”
King, like James Lawson, said the movement was distorted by unstable myths in the press. For years, stories suggested that most American black people accepted nonviolence, when in fact only a tiny fraction practiced its severe leadership discipline. Then stories perceived a massive shift from the presumed weakness of “Negro nonviolence” to the projected virility of black power, although even tinier numbers accepted political violence. Still, King told Levison he was in no position to correct false impressions now that a riot “broke out right in the ranks of our march.” He could not go to Washington promising only one percent violence, and therefore he must seek rehabilitation in Memphis. “So I’ve got to do something that becomes a kind of powerful act,” he said. Until then, he would be dismissed.
“This is what I am not so sure about,” said Levison.
“Well, you watch your newspapers,” said King. “Watch the New York Times editorials…. I think it will be the most negative thing about Martin Luther King that you have ever seen.”
“For a time, yes,” admitted Levison, unable to check King’s mood.
“There will not be even one sympathetic—even with our friends, it won’t be there.”
King broke away to catch an afternoon flight home. AFSCME president Jerry Wurf escorted him to the airport so they could exchange crisis strategy in person, and they agreed the sanitation strike had very little time to mount a comeback. Wurf admitted a negotiating error in his early offer to defer all economic demands, including a 10 cent hourly raise, which left no room for compromise once Mayor Loeb publicly rejected bargaining rights for the union as immoral. Wurf had just squeezed a $20,000 sustenance donation from AFL-CIO leader George Meany, but strike support was costing $50,000 per week. Impoverished strikers already were suffering evictions and repossessions of scarce property. For Wurf, the desperate challenge was to find reinforcements among distant white trade unions that were tepid at best about civil rights or critics of the Vietnam War, and thereby raise bargaining leverage decisively above the uncollected garbage and daily marches. Doggedly at that moment, Lawson was leading sanitation men back to City Hall under a precarious truce, secured by intermediaries, that police would attack only if they saw young people in the line. (“We never had any problem with what we called the ‘tub-toter,’” said assistant chief Lux.) With their placards now hung from strings instead of sticks, as a nonviolent precaution, marchers stepped gingerly over riot debris between boarded windows and National Guard formations of bayoneted rifles, past piles of garbage starting to cook in 82 degree weather.
This was plainly not enough to secure a settlement. For King, Memphis prefigured the huge dilemma of Washington. How could he mobilize a large coalition in the face of a hostile consensus that nonviolence would not work? His internal opposition now included young factions maneuvering a treacherous line between competitive hustle and sincere belief that guerrilla methods superseded “old-time” civil rights. “The young people here have reached a political consciousness that those ministers do not understand or control,” one Invader told a movement journal. “As for nonviolence, that died in Newark and Detroit.” Another proclaimed the end of marches in an interview featured among world events on NBC’s Nightly News. “I think my answer is ‘by any means necessary,’” Coby Smith told viewers, echoing Malcolm X. “If the community can only respond to force and burning and shooting and looting, then we’ll do it.”
KING ASKED Abernathy to drop him off straight from the Atlanta airport at the downtown Butler Street YMCA, where he hoped a steam bath and rubdown from his blind masseur would revive him for a promised Friday night out with Coretta and the Abernathys. Shortly, however, he called Juanita Abernathy from the gym to say he did not feel like going to a restaurant or movie. “If I get some fish, will you cook it?” he asked. “Corrie will help you.” She readily agreed, in part because he sounded so needy, and saved for a surprise her annual casserole of leftover pig dishes that he and Abernathy considered a sublime delicacy. That night, after the casserole and fish, the other three instinctively tried to divert King with light memories from Montgomery before the bus boycott, about church gossip and eager young couples. Although vacant and depressed, he seemed vaguely entertained and refused to go home. He fell asleep in his clothes on a love seat, grumbling that it was too small. Abernathy dozed nearby. Coretta, still tender from surgery, lay across a bed, and Juanita Abernathy slumped over a kitchen counter.
They woke late for the emergency meeting about Thursday’s riot. Lawyer Chauncey Eskridge had arrived from Chicago along with Stanley Levison from New York, Walter Fauntroy from Washington, and Joseph Lowery from Mobile. Jesse Epps came from Memphis with a mandate from AFSCME and James Lawson to ensure King’s return for a “redemption” march, but the top SCLC staff members lodged dozens of complaints by the time Abernathy and King trudged up to the third-floor conference room at Ebenezer. Some said trade unions always shortchanged partnership with black groups. Several grilled Bernard Lee about Memphis. Who trained the marshals? Did Lawson collect weapons in advance, or conduct workshops on nonviolence with the participants? Did the marshals even try to keep bystanders separate from the lines? Why did King and Abernathy start the march if they felt ominous stirrings all around them? Not a few critics recalled their predictions that King would get bogged down in this backwater movement. Bernard Lafayette objected that Memphis would mean more strain and distraction for a Washington crusade they had postponed twice already. “Why take us to Memphis, broke as we are?” he asked.
King absorbed the raw speeches mildly, as was his custom, then rose from a wooden Sunday School table to argue that they all underestimated their problem. “We are in serious trouble,” he said. The Memphis riot had discredited nonviolent tenets at the heart of their movement. If they simply abandoned the garbage strike, a presumption of violence would follow them to the national stage with greatly magnified risk and opposition. Therefore, said King, he felt by no means committed to either Memphis or Washington—regardless of what he told the press—unless first convinced that they could restore the integrity of nonviolent protest. This was a staff decision, because he could not do it alone. “Memphis is the Washington campaign in miniature,” he said.
His appeal backfired by reopening dissent against the Washington campaign itself. Andrew Young warned that the whole plan might be moot for the year, anyway, as the tangled logistics could well push the start back into June, when the summer recess of Congress would deprive them of “Pharaoh” rulers to plague. Young proposed to make constructive use of delay, and questioned the enormous effort to assemble and maintain a novel protest army of polyglot poor people in Washington. He doubted Stanley Levison’s analogy with the Bonus Marchers of 1932–34, whose suffering and rejection had kindled delayed support for New Deal initiatives, and James Bevel renewed his attack on the entire calculation. “Aw, that’s just a bunch of bullshit,” he declared. “We don’t need to be hanging around Washington. We need to stop this war.” Bevel described Vietnam as a political sickness more deeply rooted than poverty, and his rhetoric bristled with street militancy poised ingeniously at the limit of nonviolence. Jesse Jackson, like Bevel, excelled in slashing vocabulary that suggested a competitive preacher’s “chop
s” better suited to the new moods than King’s ecumenical language. Jackson called Memphis too small and Washington too unformed. Nobody could tell him how long they might be in Washington, where they would be suspended on nothing more than political supplication tied to the lowest strand of the economy. How could he justify breaking off commitments to Operation Breadbasket, which forged real power out of settlements ranging from neighborhoods and youth gangs to big corporations?
This time King stood seething. “Ralph, give me my car keys,” he said quietly. Abernathy surrendered them with a stricken, quizzical look as King said they could go on without him. “He did something I’ve never heard him do before,” Levison confided afterward on his wiretapped phone. “He criticized three members of the staff with his eloquence. And believe me, that’s murder. And was very negative.” King said Young had given in to doubt, Bevel to brains, and Jackson to ambition. He said they had forgotten the simple truths of witness. He said the movement had made them, and now they were using the movement to promote themselves. He confronted Bevel, who had been a mentor to Jackson and Young, as a genius who flummoxed his own heart. “You don’t like to work on anything that isn’t your own idea,” said King. “Bevel, I think you owe me one.”
Abernathy, Jackson, and Young rushed after King. “Doc, doc, don’t worry!” called Jackson in the stairwell. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
King whirled on a landing and pointed up to shout. “Jesse, everything’s not going to be all right!” he cried. “If things keep going the way they’re going now, it’s not SCLC but the whole country that’s in trouble. I’m not asking, ‘Support me.’ I don’t need this. But if you’re so interested in doing your own thing that you can’t do what this organization’s structured to do, if you want to carve out your own niche in society, go ahead. But for God’s sake, don’t bother me!” His fury echoed in the conference room.
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