by Jon Meacham
For the trip to Memphis was an important one. He did not so much climb to the mountaintop there as go back down into the valley of his birth. Some instinct made him return to the South, breathing in strength for his assault on Washington, which he called the very last hope for nonviolence. He was learning, relearning, what had made him great—learning what motels to stay at; what style to use; what were his roots. He was learning, from that first disastrous march, that he could not come in and touch a place with one day’s fervor; that he had to work with a community to make it respond nonviolently as Montgomery had, and Birmingham, and Selma.
It is ironic that the trouble on that first march broke out on Beale Street, where another man learned what his roots were. W. C. Handy did not come from Memphis, like Bessie Smith; he did not grow up singing the blues. He learned to play the trumpet in Alabama from a traveling bandmaster, a real Professor Harold Hill. Then he went North, to tootle transcribed Beethoven on “classical cornet” afternoons in Chicago. It was only when he came back South, and saw that the native songs worked better with audiences, that he began to write down some of those songs and get them published.
King, after largely ineffectual days in Chicago, returned to Memphis, the deracinated Negro coming home. Home to die. His very oratory regained majesty as he moved South. He had to find out all over what his own movement was about—as Marc Connelly’s “Lawd” learns from his own creation: “Dey cain’t lick you, kin dey Hezdrel?” Bevel said the leader was not Martin King. That was true, too, in several ways. In one sense, Rosa Parks was the true leader. And T. O. Jones. All the unlickable Hezdrels. King did not sing the civil-rights blues from his youth. Like Handy, he got them published. He knew what worked—and despite all the charges of the militants, no other leader had his record of success. He was a leader who, when he looked around, had armies behind him.
This does not mean he was not authentic as a leader. On the contrary. His genius lay in his ability to articulate what Rosa Parks and T. O. feel. Mailer asks whether he was great or was hamboning; but King’s unique note was precisely his ham greatness. That is why men ask, now, whether his kind of greatness is obsolete. Even in his short life, King seemed to have outlived his era. He went North again—not to school this time, but to carry his movement out of Baptist-preacher territory—and he failed. The civil-rights movement, when it left the South, turned to militancy and urban riots. Men don’t sing the old songs in a new land.
Yet it may be too soon to say that the South’s contribution has been made. After all, the first two riots in 1968 were in South Carolina and Tennessee. The garbage strike opens a whole new possibility of labor-racial coalition in those jobs consigned exclusively to Negroes throughout the South. And, more important, the Northern Negro, who has always had a love-hate memory for the South, begins to yearn for his old identity. The name for it is “soul.”
The militant activists insist on tradition (Africa) and religion (Muslimism, black Messianism, etc.) and community (the brothers). Like the young King, many Negroes feel the old Baptist preachers were not dignified. Better exotic headdress and long gowns from Africa than the frock coat of “De Lawd.” But the gowns and headgear are exotic—foreign things that men wear stiffly, a public facade. There are more familiar Negro traditions and religion and community. Black graduate students have earned the right to go back to hominy and chitlins and mock anyone who laughs. The growth of “soul” is a spiritual return to the South—but a return with new weapons of dignity and resistance. Religion, the family, the past can be reclaimed now without their demeaning overtones. In this respect, the modern Negro is simply repeating, two decades later, King’s brilliant maneuver of escape and reentry. He got the best of both worlds—the dignity that could only be won “outside,” and the more familiar things which that dignity can transform. King was there before them all.
He remained, always, the one convincing preacher. Other civil-rights pioneers were mostly lawyers, teachers, authors. They learned the white man’s language almost too well. King learned it, too; but it was always stiff. He belonged in the pulpit, not at the lectern. Bayard Rustin, with his high dry professional voice and trilled r’s, cannot wear the S.C.L.C.’s marching coveralls with any credibility. The same is true, in varying measure, of most first-generation “respectable” leaders. Some of them would clearly get indigestion from the thinnest possible slice of watermelon, Adam Powell, of course, can ham it with the best; but his is a raffish rogue-charm, distinguished by its whiff of mischief. King, by contrast, was an Uncle Ben with a degree, a Bill Bailey who came home—and turned the home upside down. That is why he infuriated Southerners more than all the Stokelys and Raps put together. In him, they saw their niggers turning a calm new face of power on them.
King had the self-contained dignity of the South without its passivity. His day is not past. It is just coming. He was on his way, when he died, to a feast of “soul food”—a current fad in Negro circles. But King was there before them. He had always loved what his biographer calls, rather nervously, “ethnic delicacies.” He never lost his “soul.” He was never ashamed. His career said many things. That the South cannot be counted out of the struggle yet. That the Negro does not have to go elsewhere to find an identity—he can make his stand on American soil. That even the Baptist preacher’s God need not yield, yet, to Allah. God is not dead—though “De Lawd” has died. One of His prophets died.
IV
Twilight
By 1968, the “White Only” signs were down, blacks were winning elections, and the battle shifted from fighting segregation to trickier terrain. “Affirmative action” entered the language; the country began to realize that the problem of poverty was more intractable than Jim Crow. King’s next great crusade was to have been the Poor People’s Campaign, in Washington: a massive demonstration on behalf of economic justice. Pat Watters (1927–1999) journeyed to the Mall after King’s assassination. Watters had been a newspaper reporter in the South, but the force of the movement drove him from the ranks of the objective to the staff of the Southern Regional Council, a progressive organization based in Atlanta. His clear-eyed assessment of what he found in Resurrection City (the Poor People’s Campaign’s main camp in the center of the capital) evokes the profound disappointment of life after King.
As the seventies began, Peter Goldman (1933– ), a Newsweek senior editor, summed up a decade of the magazine’s groundbreaking coverage of race with a book entitled Report from Black America. Beginning in 1963, Newsweek launched the first extensive survey of African-American opinion and had, in 1967, published a landmark editorial, “The Negro in America: What Must Be Done.” Goldman’s book drew on Newsweek’s research and reporting; the chapter excerpted here is “ ‘We in a War—Or Haven’t Anybody Told You That?’ ”
One day in 1970, Tom Wolfe (1931– ), then writing for New York magazine, happened to be visiting Harper’s. Wandering into David Halberstam’s office, Wolfe saw an invitation to an event at the conductor Leonard Bernstein’s Manhattan apartment in honor of the Black Panthers. Wolfe, who was then thinking of writing a novel about New York society on the scale of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, thought the spectacle at the Bernsteins’ might make a good chapter. He copied down the reply number on the card and called it. “I’m Tom Wolfe with New York magazine and I accept,” he said—and the ploy worked. When Wolfe arrived at the appointed hour, there was a cardboard table outside the apartment and his name was on the list. By the time the evening ended, Wolfe knew he couldn’t hold back what he had seen for a novel. The result: “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” a brilliant portrait of the liberal elite’s fascination with the Black Panthers.
Alice Walker (1944– ) describes her reasons, a decade after the March on Washington, for building a life in the South. In his book The Rage of a Privileged Class, Ellis Cose (1951– ) put his finger on an important new phenomenon: that many of the outward trappings of progress and success merely masked inward fury and frustration for professional black
s in the 1980s and 1990s. In the summer of 1985, Cose was running the Institute on Journalism Education, and one of the programs was a training session for middle managers. Fifty percent were people of color, so Cose decided to host an evening seminar on whether management was different for them than for whites. “It was a fascinating night,” Cose recalls, “and soon the participants, particularly the blacks, were finishing each other’s sentences. That’s where the seed was planted.”
Calvin Trillin (1935– ) had covered the South in the Atlanta bureau of Time from 1960 to 1961, but soon left the newsmagazine for The New Yorker. There, his first piece was “An Education in Georgia,” an epic 1963 account of the struggle of Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes to integrate the University of Georgia. In the 1995 article collected here, Trillin takes readers inside the files of Mississippi’s Sovereignty Commission, an arm of the state government that spied on its own citizens at the height of the movement.
Finally, in a Pulitzer Prize–winning essay, Howell Raines (1943– ) remembers his family’s complex relationship with its housekeeper. “I had wanted to find Grady for years but had lost track of her,” Raines says. “Then I was visiting Birmingham one day and my sister had run into a relative of Grady’s and had gotten her telephone number. So I called her, and we got back together.” The reunion shed light on the ambiguities that long characterized relations between the races in the South.
“Keep On A-Walking, Children”
New American Review, January 1969
PAT WATTERS
I had decided during the week after they killed Dr. King that I would go to Washington for the Poor People’s Campaign—whenever it would be they wanted white people there. What prompted me to go was not my respect for Dr. King’s life, the special feeling that Southerners in the civil rights movement had for his style and spirit. It was not even the sense of our loss, or the knowledge (never to be shaken) of all the hope—Southern and, in the way of Southern hopes and lost causes, naïve—which had been destroyed. In those nightmare days of the spring of 1968, I felt too despondent or too angry for these motives to have much force. Acting out of numbness, I went to find out what would happen now, what there was left to hold onto, what the future of the civil rights movement could possibly be.
There was a time of strong hope that what Dr. King preached—his grandly universalist faith in mankind, couched in a Southern Negro Baptist idiom—might, if not prevail, at least enter and renew the core of American culture. At the very least, the greatest of the Southern nonviolent demonstrations (and most of these were organized not by his SCLC, but by SNCC and CORE) had dramatized for the nation, like a man teetering on a high wire, the precarious course that American democracy had now taken, the fateful tension between the spirit that Dr. King preached and the spirit of obscene violence attracted to these demonstrations. The bullet through John Kennedy’s brain signaled the breaking point of the teetering balance. From then on, violence—obscene violence—became more and more dominant, and the spirit that Dr. King embodied progressively declined until the bullet that destroyed him made us recognize that it was defeated. (I make a distinction about violence, calling “obscene” the kind which has come to prevail in the American psyche: a hysterical objectiveless, morbid, unrealistic, neurotic violence, in quality much the same as the Southern racist violence I happen to know well.)
Our poets know about the killing of the spirit of nonviolence, the capture of America by the spirit of obscene violence—especially those whose medium is journalism, whose muse is paranoia. They have told it, like the Old Testament prophets, over and over in the course of filing their suspicions, their distrust, their theories of national and international conspiracy. Whether the intricate webs of facts and surmises by which they weave their poetry are in themselves true or not is irrelevant: it is the metaphor these poets of paranoia make that holds the truth, and the nation, in its avid reading of all this stuff about Oswald, Garrison, etc., in its enthusiasm for the play MacBird, knows the truth of that metaphor. The CIA, it is often said in their poetry, engineered the assassinations, as it has engineered violent events around the world, for its own ugly purpose. This purpose, in sum, is to make prevalent and permanent in this land the spirit of violence whose medium is the Cold War, whose rationale is that there is a strategy, an ideology, more important than all and any human life, and whose ultimate obscenity is nuclear holocaust. True, not true—in the factual sense? Who is to say? True, metaphorically? Look about you. When they killed Robert Kennedy, when that obscene spirit killed him, if it said anything at all, it said: do not even allow yourself to hope, against all evidence, just to hope there might be chance for something else, for the spirit embodied in the words, the efforts, the life of Dr. King.
And when the time came to attend the sad finale to his efforts, the Poor People’s Campaign, there was no longer even any of the rage I had intermittently felt; nor the idea of going there not as a journalist but as a participant—white, Southern, middle-aged, middle class, without ideology, really, not radical only radically angry—to show them, by God, they just couldn’t get away with it, couldn’t kill what Dr. King stood for. That was gone. For the knowledge was there, underscored by the assassination of Robert Kennedy, that they had indeed killed it, that it was gone in this nation, and that violence, obscene violence, unclear violence controlled.
So when I arrived in Washington on June 18, it was with much the same feeling that has hung over the liberal establishment for some time now, and has spread to those varieties of left-of-center people who had thought they were better than the liberals: numbness, let us call it, weariness, the sense of going through the motions because there is not even energy enough, will enough, to call a halt to say no more of this, it is hopeless. I had not understood this malaise in the liberals before, seeing diabolical motives in their willingness these past several years to keep on trying all those obsolete methods—study groups, pilot studies, conferences, papers—in situations that demanded drastic action, certainly not more words. But now I was in Washington, a notebook in my inside coat pocket, though stuck there indecisively. I had always gone to these events as a reporter—first as a newspaperman, later as a representative of the Southern Regional Council and its small magazine, New South. The Southern Regional Council is a civil rights organization whose role has been mainly fact-gathering, setting the record straight rather than direct action. Normally, I had worked with the conviction that trying to tell the truth had importance, could make a difference. But this time I didn’t know that I would act even as a reporter, knowing that I wouldn’t participate as a marcher—would perhaps just stand around, observe, absorb the full meaning of the thing.
“This will be the whimper,” a friend who had observed a good bit of the Poor People’s Campaign heretofore in Washington during the spring and the summer had said, “with which the Movement will die.” I had once before just stood there and taken in the full impact of an event. That had been John Kennedy’s assassination. Until a month before I had been a newspaperman for eleven years, and when the flash came from Dallas, my every instinct was to get up from my new job, rush out, and begin putting together a story. Instead I had to sit there and just feel what had happened. Journalism is a cold and callous calling; out of the necessity to get the news while it is breaking, the best workers have a conditioning and an ability to divert all the energy of their emotion into the skills of gathering information and writing it coherently. Sometimes this can be a blessing.
My notes on the three days in Washington reflect my inner ambivalence; they are fragmentary, disinterested, without passion. (On the first view of Resurrection City: “A-frame huts. Mud. Handball mud-encrusted in the middle of mudhole. Sewage pipes in mud alongside ditch. Mess tent: dried mud on plywood floor. Sign: ‘Please Brother, Clean Up.’ ”) I was neither participant, fully feeling observer, nor reporter. On the eve of the Solidarity Day march, I stepped out of the Dupont Plaza (not the best of hotels but luxurious enough to make ludicrous the
notion that I was there in solidarity with the starving children of Mississippi). Over in Dupont Circle a demonstration was being formed, a line of maybe two hundred ready to go, an even mixture of white and black, mostly young, excited, even ebullient. They were a contingent of the National Welfare Rights Organization, a group recently formed to organize welfare recipients. A young Negro had given fliers to a good-looking girl, and he was trying to get the older guy beside her on the bench—in a business suit, frowning, shaking his head—to take one of them. “At least read it, get both sides of things,” he was saying to the man. Conditioned by what I had read and heard of the Poor People’s Campaign, the Black Power attempts at bullying the Indians and Mexicans, conditioned by encounters with Southern varieties of Negroes emancipated into an ability to express racial animosity, bad manners, or strong-arm predilections, I had been walking warily amid this crowd of demonstrators, as among Southern whites at a Citizens Council meeting or a straight political rally. I was waiting for one of those ugly, defeating episodes of inane nastiness which has become the coin of all social intercourse in our cities and has spread finally into the nonviolent movement that Dr. King founded. But here this young Negro, proffering his flier about welfare rights, was smiling, was sincere, was simply trying to get the guy to read the thing—truth in open encounter. The guy kept refusing it, the Negro looked at the girl, who was dutifully glancing over hers. “He with you?” he asked, as though she could do something about the other’s intransigence, but she only nodded, sloe-eyed, smiling up. No intimidation here, nor white guilty fear. Just people. (In the next two days I would keep coming back to Dupont Circle—a circle of sanity, a place of the future where people might just be people.)
