The broad “coalition of conscience” with which Dr. King hoped to work was too broad, in the end, to satisfy those blacks who rejected the goal of “working into” a white society they considered malignant. A coalition that included the churches, the unions, the N.A.A.C.P., and the Liberal Democrats might effect gradual reforms, they conceded, but they, or many of them, had grown indifferent to any kind of “progress” short of radical social upheaval. Reforms did not come thick and fast enough to hold black leadership in line behind him. During the summer of 1964—which culminated, at the Democratic National Convention, in the Atlantic City compromise over the Mississippi Freedom Democrats—it became clear that the movement that Martin Luther King had fostered and unified was now polycentric. Yet large numbers of even the most militant Negroes continued to revere Dr. King. People knew that he could not be bought. Even if they themselves saw a different reality, they knew that he was true to his own vision. They knew that his caution was also tranquillity, that his arrogance came from deep within him, and that its source was the source of his humility as well. In a struggle in which hatred is often met with hatred, they knew he was genuine in loving the human being, however he deplored the deed. To the last, Dr. King assumed that when the legal and extralegal barriers to communication between races were hewn down, people would begin to see their brotherhood beneath the skin and begin to know “the majestic heights of being obedient to the unenforceable.” In recent years, many blacks came to lose faith in this theory altogether. Others simply grew impatient waiting for it to come true in their own lives. But even Stokely Carmichael, who on the night of the assassination urged “retaliation by the black community,” in the kind of rhetoric that Dr. King most deplored, called him the only member of the older generation whom young blacks still heard.
When Dr. King was scheduled to take part in a conference or a rally, black people of every persuasion knew it would be honest. They knew he wouldn’t try to trick them. White people believed in his honesty, too. He never “told it like it is,” the way Malcolm X and, later, Stokely Carmichael did—he was perhaps the most courteous revolutionary who has ever lived—but neither did he misrepresent situations by telling audiences what they wanted to hear. Radicals sometimes tried, without success, to lump Dr. King with the placators among his colleagues. A refined civility ran through him to the core; he didn’t need to dissemble, to conceal hatreds, for none smoldered within him—except the hatred of evil. This is why Dr. King never frightened whites; however radical his remarks may have seemed ideologically, they were never venomous. It was a failure that cost him admiration within his own flock, perhaps, but never among those who understood that he confronted problems head on, in their total enormity, without wasting an ounce of energy on blame or vengeance. Whites could listen to him because he managed to attack evil without attacking them—because he always made evil seem something they could separate themselves from and join with him against.
Dr. King was a radical in the truest sense: he insisted at the same time upon the terrible reality of our problems and upon their solubility, and he rejected everything that was irrelevant to their solution. Could his death be a radicalizing event, in this same sense, for both races? Perhaps no one was completely happy with him—what he finally did was always a little different from what anyone wanted him to do—but he came closer to being a national hero for both blacks and whites than any other figure in history. Last April, when Dr. King became the first prominent American to oppose the war in Vietnam publicly, he became more than a “black leader.” He made himself a leader of all men who care for peace and justice, and reluctantly estranged those of his colleagues who had focussed single-mindedly on the issue of civil rights. He served a complicated cause in a complicated time. In his life, no faction could ever fully claim him as an ally. But with his death every faction—from ghetto blacks tossing brickbats to the Administration of the United States government—loses an ally. His death is difficult for us because it deprives us of the embodiment of the cause he represented for all Americans—the more difficult because of the threat inherent in that deprivation. Incidents of arson and other violence were reported from over forty cities within twenty-four hours of his murder, and on Friday lootings occurred two blocks from the White House. Before the weekend was over, twenty-eight were dead and more than six thousand arrested across the country. But his death also forces upon us the possibility that our common need to avoid the danger of losing touch with his ideals can bring us together in a kind of desperate symbiosis. Perhaps that desperation might even draw us close enough together to see that, as one of Dr. King’s annoying plagiarisms insisted, the same things make us laugh and cry and bleed.
· · ·
One tends to forget, under the pressure of events and of the fashions of political vocabulary, that most men, black or white, are essentially non-violent, and that Dr. King was trying to marshal this non-violence—to inspire and direct it, and make it count for something in the affairs of men. He brought about a sense of a black-and-white community of decent men, and until the Mississippi march of 1966 he shakily maintained it. On the day after Dr. King’s death, we went to a small, dispiriting rally for him on the Mall in Central Park. As the ideologues dwelled too long and too stridently on the irony of his murder, it began to seem that the course of events would again be determined by that diffuse community of the deranged—black and white, Right and Left and apolitical—which Dr. King, at the time of his death, was again forming a community to overcome. But by Sunday—Palm Sunday—things had changed. As marchers gathered, twenty abreast and eventually seven dense blocks long, at 145th Street and Seventh Avenue, and as they marched—with few signs, and, for the most part, silently—black and white, arms linked, down Seventh Avenue, there was a sense that the non-violent, freed ever so slightly by the President’s speech of last week from the dividing pressure of Vietnam, were returning in force to civil rights. It seemed that Dr. King’s people, of both races, were assembling again from everywhere, to resume where they left off after Mississippi. They marched past cars whose headlights were on out of respect for Dr. King. They marched over the splinters of broken glass lining the streets of Harlem, past the churches, the abandoned houses, the stores, and the funeral homes. Some carried palm fronds; others wore armbands that read “Our King will never die.” A group of the ultra-militant young Five Percenters took their places at the front of the march. No one questioned them. They were as quiet as the rest. The march was informal—no marshals and no leaders. Bystanders on Seventh Avenue joined at the front or the sides or the rear, or did not choose to join. It was completely reflective and completely orderly. At 110th Street, the march paused, and a siren was audible in the distance. A jet passed overhead. Little boys standing at the entrance to the Park put their feet in the line of march, as though testing the water, and then joined in. Photographers were scattered on overhanging rocks. Reporters for various radio news services spoke very quietly, in their several languages, into microphones. Children gathered around them. The march entered the Park, and walked past cyclists, past very good-natured police, past players on a baseball diamond (an integrated game) near Ninety-sixth Street. Mayor Lindsay and Governor Rockefeller joined it there, and people from all over the Park, some with dogs or balloons, began to drift toward the march, inquire what it was, and then join it. The Mall, by the time the marchers got to it, was filled with a crowd several times the size of the march itself. There were hippies, two Great Danes, and several hot-dog stands, but mainly the crowd looked citywide, very mixed. We stood on the hill in back of the Mall and watched the two crowds merge. They did so almost silently, and totally, in great waves, so there was no way of knowing, from that distance, who had marched and who had been standing on the Mall waiting, and it was hard to tell who was black and who was white.
Michael J. Arlen
APRIL 13, 1968
HE WAS SHOT in secrecy, away from cameras. No strange slow-motion scenes, as when the young Japanese student, sw
ord in hand, rushed across the stage to lunge at a Socialist politician, or when Verwoerd, the South African, was shot at and for whole crazy moments (it seems so long ago; so many people shot at since then) the cameras swirled and danced around the tumbling, stampeding bodies of the crowd—and then John Kennedy was killed, his life made to disappear right there before us, frame by frame, the projector slowing down, s-l-o-w-i-n-g d-o-w-n, s…l…o…w…i…n…g d…o…w…n as we watched (three consecutive days we watched), gathered in little tight-gutted bands around the television set, meals being cooked somehow, children put to bed, sent out to play, our thoughts of abandonment and despair and God knows what else focussing on the images of the television set, television itself taking on (we were told later) the aspect of a national icon, a shrine, an exerciser of grief; we were never so close (we were told later) than in those days just after Dallas. It could not have been quite close enough, it seems, or lasted long enough. The man who was shot in Memphis on Thursday of last week was standing on a second-floor balcony of a motel, the Lorraine, leaning over the railing of the balcony in front of his room, which was No. 306. (We have been told it was No. 306.) He was shot once and killed by a man who fired his rifle (a Remington 30.06), apparently, from inside a bathroom window of a rooming house some two hundred feet away. The address of the rooming house is 420 South Main Street. There was no film record of the act, no attendant Zapruder to witness for us the body falling and other memorabilia, but most of us found out about it by television, and it is by television that most of us have been connected with whatever it is that really happened, or is happening now. Television connects—the global village. We sit at home—We had been out, actually, a party full of lawyers, and had come back early, and turned on the eleven-o’clock news. “I have a dream…” young Dr. King was chanting, “that one day on the red hills of Georgia…” C.B.S.’s Joseph Benti said that Dr. King had been shot and killed, was dead. The President was speaking. “I ask every citizen to reject the blind violence that has struck Dr. King, who lived by non-violence,” he said. They showed us pictures of Dr. King in Montgomery. They showed us pictures of the outside of the Lorraine Motel.
The telephone rang. A friend of my wife’s. “Have you heard?” she said. I said we’d heard. “It’s so horrible,” she said. And then, “I can’t believe it.” And then, “I feel we’re all mad.” I held the phone against my ear, mumbling the usual things, feeling, in part, her grief, her guilt, her sense of lunacy—whatever it was—and, in part, that adrenalin desire we strangers have who have been separate in our cabins all the long sea voyage to somehow touch each other at the moment that the ship goes down. She talked some more. “I’m keeping you from watching,” she said at last. I mumbled protests, and we said goodbye, and disconnected. We will all meet for dinner three weekends hence and discuss summer rentals on the Vineyard.
All over the country now the members of the global village sit before their sets, and the voices and faces out of the sets speak softly, earnestly, reasonably, sincerely to us, in order once again (have four and a half years really gone by since Dallas?) to bind us together, to heal, to mend, to take us forward. The President appears. His face looks firmer, squarer, straighter now than it has looked in months. “We can achieve nothing by lawlessness and divisiveness among the American people,” he says. “It’s only by joining together and only by working together we can continue to move toward equality and fulfillment for all of our people.” The Vice-President speaks. “The cause for which he marched and worked I am sure will find a new strength. The plight of discrimination, poverty, and neglect must be erased from America,” he says. Former Vice-President Richard Nixon is expected to release a statement soon. There are brief pictures of a coffin being slid onto a plane. The Field Foundation, one hears, has just undertaken to donate a million dollars to the civil-rights movement. Dr. Ralph Bunche asks for “an effort of unparalleled determination, massiveness, and urgency to convert the American ideal of equality into reality.”
The television sets hum in our midst. Gray smoke, black smoke begins to rise from blocks of buildings in Washington and Chicago. Sirens whine outside our windows in the night. The voices out of Memphis seem to be fainter now; the pictures of that little, nondescript motel, the railing, the bathroom window are already being shown to us less frequently today. Down below us on the sidewalk, six blue-helmeted policemen are gathered in a group. Three police cars are parked farther down the street. The television beams out at us a Joel McCrea movie. Detroit and Newark have been remembered. Responsible decisions have been made in responsible places. The President is working now “to avoid catastrophe.” The cartoons are on this morning. The air is very bright outside. The day is sunny. All day long, the sirens sound. The television hums through its schedule. There is a circus on Channel 4. Back from the dime store, my daughter asks one of the helmeted policemen if anything has happened. He seems surprised. No, nothing, he says. A squad car drives slowly, slowly by. A bowling exhibition is taking place on Channel 7. Another movie—and then the news. Great waves of smoke, clouds, billowing waves are suddenly pouring out of buildings. The sounds of bells and sirens. Mayor Daley speaks. Mayor Daley declares a curfew. Six Negro boys are running down a street carrying armfuls of clothes. Police cars streak by. More smoke. The news is over. We are reenveloped in a movie. We sit there on the floor and absorb the hum of television. Last summer, it inflamed our passions, did it not? This time, the scenes of black men running past the smoking buildings of Chicago are handled briefly, almost dreamily—a light caress by cameras and announcers. The coffin—one wonders where the coffin is at present, who is with it. Boston University announces that ten new scholarships for “underprivileged students” have just been created. The Indian Parliament pays tribute. The voices of reason and reordering rise out of the civic temples of the land and float through the air and the airwaves into our homes. Twenty-one House Republicans have issued an “urgent appeal” for passage of the new civil-rights bill. “With whom will we stand? The man who fired the gun? Or the man who fell before it?” Senator Edward Brooke, of Massachusetts, asks. The City Council of Chicago meets and passes a resolution to build a “permanent memorial.” Senator Robert Kennedy deplores the rise in violence.
There was a moment the other evening when (just for a few seconds) everybody stopped talking, when (just for a few seconds) the television stopped its humming and soothing and filling of silences and its preachments of lessons-we-have-just-learned and how-we-must-all-march-together—and (just for a few seconds) Mrs. King appeared; she was speaking about her husband, her dead husband. She spoke; she seemed so alive with him—it’s marvellous how that sometimes happens between people; he really had been alive, and one knew it then—and for a few scant moments, just at that time, and afterward, sitting there looking at the set, that very imperfect icon, that very imperfect connector of people (will somebody really have the nerve to say this week that we are a nation “united in grief”?), one could almost hear the weeping out there, of real people in real villages, and the anger, this time, of abandonment.
And then the sounds came back—the sounds of one’s own life. The weatherman came on. A Negro minister on Channel 13 was talking about the need to implement the recommendations of the President’s new Commission on Civil Disorders. He had been alive…hadn’t he? Later that night, one could hear the sirens—very cool and clear—and, somewhere nearby (around the corner? blocks away?), the sounds of footsteps running.
Richard H. Rovere
JUNE 15, 1968 (THE ASSASSINATION OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY)
JUNE 9
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, who opposed the war in Vietnam and proposed to escalate the war on poverty, was, it would appear, assassinated because he supported the Middle Eastern policy of the President he hoped to replace—a policy that is not a major, or even a minor, cause of divisiveness in this country today. Although the indicted assailant spent his adolescence here and must have been exposed to much of the worst of our commercialized popular c
ulture, which exploits violence as it does anything else that is easily exploitable, he spent what Drs. Freud and Spock and the Roman Catholic Church assure us are the truly formative years in a part of the world where violence, organized and otherwise, has been a commonplace of life throughout much of recorded history—a part of the world, indeed, that gave our language the very word “assassin” and that, almost a millennium ago, institutionalized political and religious murder in a secret society that terrorized the Levant and parts of Europe for centuries. In this there is no vindication for our American ways. The Senator was shot in the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A., in the near presence of local police and other security agents. The murder weapon was no scimitar; it was an ugly little pistol of native manufacture and—if we are to credit preliminary reports released to the press by authorities in California—easily procured, thanks to the laxity of our nation’s laws and those of most of the states. To the best of our present knowledge, no Arab zealot had anything to do with the killing of John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King or Medgar Evers or Malcolm X or Mrs. Viola Liuzzo. But the extinction of an American leader by a Jordanian nationalist does seem to suggest that we cannot altogether explain our latest loss or our plight as a people by pointing to the iniquity of the war in Vietnam or by berating ourselves for letting our children play with guns and be spellbound by shoot-outs on television. It is entirely possible—it might even have been likely—that if Senator Kennedy had not been mortally wounded on June 5th, apparently for reasons having no connection with Vietnam or our domestic arrangements, he would sooner or later have been murderously assaulted by some native son inflamed by some hatred or injustice for which there would be no one to blame but ourselves. But it is every bit as possible that Sirhan Bishara Sirhan would have been moved to commit the act he is charged with if we had never intervened in Vietnam, if poverty and bigotry had been wiped out long ago, and if our popular entertainment dealt with nothing but love and gentleness and brotherhood.
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