by Jon Meacham
The signs of it are everywhere—at the Lorraine Motel, where King died; it is an extension of the old Lorraine Hotel, once a white whorehouse. Then, when the neighborhood began to go black, it was thrown to a Negro buyer as, in the South, old clothes are given to “the help.” A man named William Bailey bought it, and laboriously restored it to respectability. King stayed there often on his visits to Memphis. It is now a headquarters for the S.C.L.C.’s Project Memphis, a program designed—as its assistant director says—“to make Memphis pay for the death of Dr. King.” Yet the Lorraine is run by a man who could pose for “Uncle Ben” rice ads—an ex–Pullman porter who is still the captain of porters at a Holiday Inn. He works for the white man, and does it happily, while he owns and runs a black motel where activists plot their campaigns. “I’m very proud to be part of the Holiday Inn family,” he told me. “Why, the owners of the whole chain call me Bill Bailey.” That’s the Negro Henry Loeb has always known. It is the other side of him—the owner of the Lorraine, the friend of Dr. King—that is the mystery.
King made the mistake of staying, on his penultimate visit to Memphis, at one of the posher new Holiday Inns—in the kind of place where Bill Bailey works, not in the motel he owns. The Memphis paper gleefully pointed out that King could stay in the Inn because it had been integrated—“without demonstrations.” But the Lorraine is not integrated (except in theory). Neither was the white flophouse in which the sniper lurked. It is good that King came back to the real world, the de-facto segregated world, to die. He was in the right place, after all. Memphis indeed, had taught him to “stay in his place”—a thing it will come to regret. For “his place” is now a command post, a point where marches are planned, and boycotts, and Negro-history classes.
These garbage men are that new thing, Hambones in rebellion—and they have strange new fish to fry. The people who filed past King’s body had said no to the whole city of Memphis; said it courteously, almost deferentially (which only made it more resounding); they had marched every day under their employers’ eyes; boycotted the downtown; took on, just for good measure, firms like Coca-Cola and Wonder Bread and Sealtest Milk; and were ready, when the time came, to join with King in taking on Washington. Patience radiates from them like a reproach. Perhaps that is why the white community does not like to see them in a mass—only in the single dimension, the structured encounter that brings them singly into the home or the store for eight hours of work. These Negroes seem almost too patient—wrong people for rebels. Yet their like has already made a rebellion. A tired woman in Montgomery was the wrong sort to begin all the modern civil-rights activism; but Rosa Parks did it. King was drawn into that first set of marches and boycotts almost by accident—as he was involved, finally, in the garbage men’s strike: “Dat’s always de trouble wid miracles. When you pass one you always gotta r’ar back an’ pass another.”
The buses were late. They were supposed to arrive at eleven-thirty for loading baggage (each man had been told to bring toothbrush, change of underwear, change of outer clothes if he wanted it, and most wanted it.) Besides, there had been talk of a bus for teen-agers, who were now giggling and flirting in the dark vestibule (surrendered to them by their elders). Jerry Fanion, an officer of the Southern Regional Conference, scurried around town looking for an extra bus; like all Negroes, he was stopped everywhere he went. Police recognized him, and they had been alerted about the men who would be leaving their homes for the funeral; but they made him get out of the car anyway, and laboriously explain himself. He never did get the bus. Later in the week, the teen-agers made a pilgrimage to King’s grave.
Meanwhile, the wives in the Clayborn Temple still did not know whether they could go with their husbands. About eleven-thirty, T. O. Jones showed up, with P. J. Ciampa. Jones is the spheroid president of the sanitation local—a man too large in some ways and too small in others for any standard size of shirt, coat, pants. He is content with floppy big pants and a windbreaker that manages to get around him, but only by being too long in the sleeves and too wide in the shoulders. He is a quiet man in his early forties, determined but vague, who began the strike by going to the office of the Director of Public Works and—when the Director told him there was an injunction against any strike by city employees—changing into his “prison clothes” on the spot.
Ciampa is the fiery Italian organizer who came into town for the union and amused people with televised arguments against Mayor Loeb (who insisted that all negotiations be carried on in public). Jones and Ciampa have lost the list of men signed up for the buses; they don’t know how many buses are coming, how many can ride on each. They try to take two counts—of workers alone, and workers with their wives; but it’s difficult to keep track of those who wander in and out of shadows, doors, anterooms.
After an hour of disorder, it becomes clear that everyone can fit into the three buses if folding chairs are put down the aisles. T. O. had told me to save a seat for him, but the chairs in the aisle barricade us from each other. I sit, instead, with a sleepy young man who describes the route we have to take, and then finds confirmation of his theory, with a kind of surprised triumph, all along the way. The route one travels through Mississippi and Alabama is a thing carefully studied by Southern Negroes. After giving T. O. a check for the bus drivers, Ciampa went back to the hotel, T. O. swung onto the lead bus, and we pulled out.
In the seat behind me, a woman is worried over the teen-agers still standing by the church, hoping they will get a bus. “How they gonna get home?” she asks. “Walk, woman,” her husband growls. “But what of the curfew?” “What of it?” “I don’t trust those police. If I hadn’t got on the bus with you, I’d have stayed all night in the church.” As the bus rolls through downtown Memphis, on its way South, the woman sees cars moving. “What are they doing out during the curfew? Why aren’t they stopped?” She knows, of course. Her husband does not bother to answer her.
In our bus, all the animation comes from one voice in the back. A tall laughing man I had watched, in the church, as he moved from one cluster to another, mixing easily, asked to sit beside me while I was still saving a seat for T. O. I was sorry later I had not said yes. As the riders shouldered sleepily into their chair backs, he joked more softly, but showed no signs of fatigue himself—though he had been a marshal all the long afternoon of marching. And as fewer and fewer responded to him, he moved naturally from banter and affectionate insults to serious things: “That Dr. King was for us.” The response is a sigh of yesses. “He didn’t have to come here.” A chorusing of nos. As he mused on, the crowd breathed with him in easy agreement, as if he were thinking for them. This “audience participation” is what makes the Southern preacher’s sermon such an art form. I had been given a dazzling sample of it three days before in the garbage men’s meeting at the United Rubber Workers Union Hall. That was the day after King’s death, and a formidable lineup of preachers was there to lament it. They all shared a common language, soaked in Biblical symbol: Pharaoh was Mayor Loeb, and Moses was Dr. King, and Jesus was the Vindicator who would get them their dues checkoff. But styles were different, and response had to be earned. The whole hall was made up of accompanists for the improvising soloist up front. When he had a theme that moved them, they cheered him on: “Stay there!” “Fix it.” “Fix it up.” “Call the roll.” “Talk to me!” “Talk and a half.” The better the preacher, the surer his sense of the right time to tarry, the exact moment to move on; when to let the crowd determine his pace, when to push against them; the lingering, as at the very edge of orgasm, prolonging, prolonging; then the final emotional breakthrough when the whole audience “comes” together.
Memphis is not really the birthplace of the blues, any more than Handy was the father of them; but these are the same people who created the form—the triple repeated sighing lines, with a deep breathing space between each, space filled in with the accompanists’ “break” or “jazz.” That is the basic pattern for the climactic repetitions, subtle variations, and
refrains of the preacher’s art. That kind of sermon is essentially a musical form; and the garbage men are connoisseurs. When a white pastor from Boston got up, he gave them slogans and emotion; but without a response from the audience—he didn’t know the melody.
Nor did all the black preachers succeed, or win equal acceptance. The surprise of the afternoon, at least for me, came when an S.C.L.C. delegation reached the hall, and the Reverend James Bevel got up to preach. He and his associates looked almost out of place there amid the “do rags” and scarred ebony skulls; they were immaculately dressed, with educated diction, wearing just the proper kind of “natural” and a beard.
Bevel was the fourteenth, and last, speaker of the afternoon. It seemed that earlier emotional talks would have drained these men of all response left them after the shock of the preceding night. But Jim Bevel slowly built them up, from quiet beginnings, to an understanding of what it means to be “on the case.” (This is a phrase he invented a year ago to describe musicians who are perfectly interacting; it is now an S.C.L.C. phrase of wide applicability.) “Dr. King died on the case. Anyone who does not help forward the sanitation workers’ strike is not on the case. You getting me?” (They’re getting him.) “There’s a false rumor around that our leader is dead. Our leader is not dead.” (“No!” They know King’s spirit lives on—half the speeches have said that already.) “That’s a false rumor!” (“Yes!” “False.” “Sho’ nuff.” “Tell it!”) “Martin Luther King is not—” (yes, they know, not dead; this is a form in which expectations are usually satisfied, the crowd arrives at each point with the speaker; he outruns them at peril of losing the intimate ties that slacken and go taut between each person in the room; but the real artist takes chances, creates suspense, breaks the rhythm deliberately; a snag that makes the resumed onward flow more satisfying)—“Martin Luther King is not our leader!” (“No!” The form makes them say it, but with hesitancy. They will trust him some distance; but what does he mean? The “Sho’ nuff” is not declamatory now; not fully interrogatory, either; circumflexed.) “Our leader—(“Yes?”)—is the man—(“What man?” “Who?” “Who?” Reverend Abernathy? Is he already trying to supplant King? The trust is almost fading)—who led Moses out of Israel.” (“Thass the man!” Resolution; all doubt dispelled; the bridge has been negotiated, left them stunned with Bevel’s virtuosity.) “Our leader is the man who went with Daniel into the lions’ den.” (“Same man!” “Talk some.”) “Our leader is the man who walked out of the grave on Easter morning.” (“Thass the leader!” They have not heard, here in hamboneland, that God is dead.) “Our leader never sleeps nor slumbers. He cannot be put in jail. He has never lost a war yet. Our leader is still on the case.” (“That’s it!” “On the case!”) “Our leader is not dead. One of his prophets died. We will not stop because of that. Our staff is not a funeral staff. We have friends who are undertakers. We do business. We stay on the case, where our leader is.”
It is the most eloquent speech I have ever heard. I was looking forward, a day later, to hearing Bevel again, before a huge audience in the Mason Temple. He was good—and gave an entirely different speech. But the magic of his talk to the sanitation workers was gone. It was not merely the size of the crowd (though that is important—the difference between an intimate combo and some big jazz band only partially rehearsed). The makeup of the crowd was also different. Those in the Union Hall were predominantly male. Men accompany; women compete—they talk over the preacher’s rhythms. Their own form is not the jazz combo, but the small group of gospel singers, where each sister fights for possession of the song by claiming a larger share of the Spirit. In a large place like the Mason Temple, women set up nuclei around the hall and sang their own variations on the sermon coming out of the loudspeakers.
But that night in the bus, there was no fighting the jolly voice that mused on “Dr. King’s death.” Responses came, mingled but regular, like sleepy respirations, as if the bus’s sides were breathing regularly in and out. This is the subsoil of King’s great oratory, of the subtly varied refrains: “I have a dream . . . I have a dream today.” He must have been a great preacher in his own church; he could use the style out in the open, before immense crowds. He made the transition more skillfully than Bevel had—and far better than Abernathy does. That very day, the Monday before King’s funeral, Abernathy had paused long on the wrong phrases: “I do not know . . . I do not know.” He had let the crowd fool him by their sympathy; he took indulgence for a demand to linger. He did not have King’s sure sense of when to move.
I suppose I heard thirty or forty preachers on that long weekend of religious eloquence; but not one of them reached King’s own level of skill in handling a crowd. That was the mystery of King. He was the Nobel Prize–winner and a Southern Baptist preacher; and, at places like the Washington Mall in 1963, the two did not conflict but worked together. As the man in the bus kept saying, “He was for us.” (“Unh-hmmn!”) “He was one with us.” (“That he was.” “That he was.”)
But King’s rapport with his people was not the natural thing it seems now. He had to learn it, or relearn it. The man’s voice rose behind us in the bus: “You know what Dr. King said?” (“What?”) “He said not to mention his Nobel Prize when he died.” (“Thass what he said.”) “He said, ‘That don’t mean nothing.’ ” (“Sho’ nuff.”) “What matters is that he helped us.” (“Thass the truth.” “That is the truth.” “That is.”)
In several ways. King was very bright, a quick study. He skipped two grades to finish high school at the age of fifteen. He was ordained at eighteen; graduated from college at nineteen. It was a fast start, for a career that is one long quick record of youthful accomplishment. He got his theology degree at the age of twenty-two. While a pastor (from the age of twenty-five), he got his Ph.D. from Boston University at twenty-six. And he went direct from graduate school to a position of national leadership. His major achievements were already behind him when he became the youngest man (thirty-five) to receive the Nobel Prize. He was dead before he reached the age of forty; and there are constant little surprises in remembering how young he was—as when Harry Belafonte, speaking in Memphis, referred to King as his junior by a year. Was “De Lawd” really younger than that baby-faced singer? And why did we never think of him as young?
He had the strained gravity of the boy who has moved up fast among his elders. That unnatural dignity is in his writing, too, which labors so for gravity that it stretches grammar: “President Kennedy was a strongly contrasted personality . . . trying to sense the direction his leadership could travel.” His acceptance speech will not rank with the great Nobel speeches: “transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm . . . unfolding events which surround . . . spiral down a militaristic stairway . . . blood-flowing streets. . . .”
The young King wanted to study medicine. He majored in sociology at Morehouse College. He thought preachers not quite intellectually respectable, though his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had all been preachers. Even when he accepted ordination, he thought he should become a theologian-minister, perhaps a professor, rather than a mere preacher. He took his first parish—in Montgomery—to get “pastoring background” before accepting a teaching post. To the end of his life he talked of turning to an academic career.
But he was never convincing as a scholar. An account of his own intellectual development reads as if it were lifted from a college catalog: “My intellectual journey carried me through new and sometimes complex doctrinal lands, but the pilgrimage was always stimulating, gave me a new appreciation for objective appraisal and critical analysis, and knocked me out of my dogmatic slumber.” He was not even a very perceptive commentator on the men who created his doctrine of civil disobedience—Thoreau and Gandhi. When he began the Montgomery boycott, he liked to refer vaguely to Hegel as the prophet of “creative tensions.” It was not till someone suggested more likely patrons of nonviolent rebellion that he began referring to Gandhi and Gandhi’s American
forerunner—referring to them—as saints. He never really discusses their philosophy. And his most ambitious defense of civil disobedience—the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, written eight years after the Montgomery boycott—does not even refer to Gandhi or Thoreau. Instead, King uses tags from Augustine and Aquinas (hardly anti-authoritarians). Nor does the Letter deserve high marks for logic. It offers as the model of civil disobedience, not Gandhi, but Socrates, the stock Platonic figure suborned for all noble causes, but something of an embarrassment in this context, since Plato makes him preach history’s most rigorous sermon against civil disobedience in the Crito. The Letter gives three qualifications for a valid act of civil disobedience: 1) that it be open, 2) that it be loving (nonviolent), and 3) that those engaged in it accept their punishment willingly. Then he gives as a historical example of this the Boston Tea Party, whose perpetrators: 1) were clandestine (they disguised themselves as Indians), 2) were armed for violence (they forced wharf guards away and were ready to repel any interruption), and 3) evaded all punishment (Sam Adams and his Committee of Correspondence dared England to attempt punishment). Indeed, none of the historical examples of civil disobedience given in King’s Letter meets the three requirements he had just set up.
Like Moses, he was not “de brainiest.” He only knew one book well—the Bible. It was enough. All the other tags and quotes are meant to give respectability to those citations that count—the phrases sludged up in his head from earliest days like a rich alluvial soil. He could not use these with the kind of dignity he aspired to unless he were more than “just a preacher.” Yet the effect of that more was to give him authority as a preacher. By trying to run away from his destiny, he equipped himself for it. He became a preacher better educated than any white sheriff; more traveled, experienced, poised. He was a Hambone who could say “no” and make it sound like a cannon shot.
