by Tavis Smiley
Chapter Nine
CHAOS
For Doc, loyalty trumps caution. He’s unwaveringly loyal to his core beliefs and to the people who have stood with him through thick and thin. Among those are Dr. Benjamin Spock and clergyman William Sloane Coffin, chaplain of Yale University. Both men have pressed him to attend the National Conference for New Politics, the five-day convocation organized by affluent pro–civil rights Harvard instructor Martin Peretz, who wants to use the occasion to promote a King/Spock presidential ticket. Peretz’s plans—as well as Spock and Coffin’s goal to galvanize antiwar sentiment—prove untenable. From a public relations and policy-making point of view, the conference is an unmitigated disaster. When it is over, Doc realizes that his participation is a major misstep, arming his enemies with even more ammunition with which to attack his standing as a leader with a cohesive constituency.
On August 31, the first day of the convocation, he has high hopes. Riding over to Chicago’s Coliseum to deliver the keynote address to three thousand delegates, he reviews his notes. He will advocate supporting democratic revolutions around the world. Once again he will make the case for an immediate American pullout from Vietnam. He will avoid what he calls “the hate Johnson” thing. He will take the high road.
In essence, though, he will not be heard. The minute he steps out of the car, he realizes that the mood is against him. The mood reflects more than anger. Rage is in the air. Escorted into the Coliseum, Doc’s heart sinks as he hears the cries from a group of black militants: “Kill whitey! Kill whitey!” Everywhere he looks he sees placards that read “Down with nonviolence!” and “Make way for Rap Brown!”
At the podium, he tries to bend the mood from mindless indignation to thoughtful reason. His hope is that by lucidly restating his unequivocal opposition to the war he will strike a common chord with the great assemblage. “No war in our history has been so violative of our conscience and national interests,” he says, “and so destructive of our moral standing.”
But this time Doc’s rhetoric falls flat. Worse than ignored, he is heckled. Young black delegates stand up and shout derisive insults. Others, bored by his long declamation, get up and walk out. He is mocked, disregarded, and, at best, merely tolerated. Later he tells Levison that the experience was “awful.… The black nationalists gave me trouble. They kept interrupting me, kept yelling things at me.” One official report from the Chicago Police Department describes Doc as “afraid, worried and tired.”
Defeated in his attempt to unify the warring factions, he leaves Chicago for Washington the next morning, skipping the rest of the convocation. The National Conference for New Politics becomes a tragic symbol of trouble on the left. According to the Chicago Tribune, it turns into “a maelstrom as communication failed between Negroes and whites who came here to attend what was described as a third national political convention.” The New Yorker calls it “a travesty of radical politics at work.” The New York Times headline reads, “Whites and Negroes Split at New Politics Parley.”
At one point three hundred black delegates leave the meetings at the Palmer House Hotel and occupy the Hyde Park Methodist Church. There are threats: if the white minister and white visitors do not leave, the group will burn down the building. Back at the Palmer House, whites are refused entry to H. Rap Brown’s speech in which he declares, “We should take lessons in violence from the honkies.” At another session in the hotel ballroom, two women seeking to increase female participation are shouted down and forbidden to speak.
Even for James Bevel, perhaps SCLC’s most outspoken radical, the militants’ mercilessness is too much. He calls them “masochistic fascists” and takes at face value the threats against his life because of his disagreement with the convention’s anti-Israel opposition.
As the madness plays out in Chicago, Doc realizes that not only has the conference failed to meet its goal—to unify the leftist political forces—but, even worse, it has demonstrated to a national audience that those forces are at one another’s throats. The dialogue between liberals and radicals has broken down. Mistrust between black and white activists has reached an alarming level. And the Negro-Jewish America coalition, one of the strongest hallmarks of the civil rights movement, is in shambles.
Doc is especially disturbed at this latest development, manifest in the thirteen-point policy statement issued at the end of the National Conference for New Politics. It was only the adoption of this statement—without a single word changed—that, according to the New York Times, “kept 400 Negro delegates from deserting the radical gathering.… The most controversial section of the policy statement drafted by the so-called Black Caucus put the convention on record as condemning ‘the imperialistic Zionist war’ between Israel and the Arab states.”
Out of both personal conviction and the practical need to shore up his coalition with Jewish supporters, Doc later writes to Morris Abram, president of the American Jewish Committee, stating, “The staff members of SCLC who attended the conference were the most vigorous and articulate opponents of the simplistic resolution on the Middle East.… It is not only that anti-Semitism is immoral—though that alone is enough. It is used to divide Negro and Jew, who have effectively collaborated in the struggle for justice.”
After this calamitous Labor Day weekend in Chicago, that collaboration will never be the same.
As doubts grow about Doc’s relevance as an effective public figure, his friends worry about his mental health. No one close to him can fail to see his despondency. When Clarence Jones, one of Doc’s chief counselors, has dinner in New York City at the home of Dr. Arthur Logan, Doc’s personal physician, the topic is the emotional welfare of their close friend. Logan and his wife, Marian, are convinced that Doc’s bouts with depression are more serious and frequent than ever before.
“I’m going to recommend that Doc see a psychiatrist,” Logan tells Jones. “I’m going to strongly urge him to seek counseling.”
“I know your intentions are good,” says Jones, “but your words will be wasted.”
“Why do you say that? After all, I’m a physician offering him a professional opinion and the name of another highly respected physician. Surely he’ll give this serious thought. Surely he’ll respond.”
“He won’t,” Jones says.
“How can you be so sure?”
“I know the man. I know his heart.”
“And what in his heart will keep him from neglecting his mental health? Doc is sophisticated enough to realize psychotherapy has nothing to do with any emotional or moral shortcoming.”
“Of course he realizes that,” says Clarence. “But his greater realization is that, given the FBI surveillance into every aspect of his life, any psychiatric treatment will be used to further besmirch his character. That, in turn, will hurt the movement. The movement is his heart. He’ll do nothing to injure the movement.”
Doc will not be seeing a shrink anytime soon.
Years later, there will be speculation by various psychiatrists that Doc’s “brief depressive episodes” likely contributed to his sense of radical empathy for the suffering of others.
Ironically, the very day after being heckled during his keynote address to the National Conference for New Politics, he is standing before the American Psychological Association in Washington, DC, delivering a major paper: “The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement.”
He is relieved that this audience, as opposed to the fiery radicals he faced in Chicago, regards him respectfully. For the most part they are academics. He delivers a long and learned disquisition on the need for white intellectuals to understand the psychological underpinnings of black rage. He quotes the nineteenth-century French writer Victor Hugo: “If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.” He references black psychologist Kenneth Clark, who “has said that Negroes are moved by a suicide instinct in riots and Negroes know there is a tragic truth in this observ
ation. Social scientists should also disclose the suicide instinct that governs the administration and Congress in their total failure to respond constructively.”
Always the preacher, Doc struggles to conclude on an inspiring note. This time his tone is tentative: “We may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.
“I have not lost hope. I must confess that these have been very difficult days for me personally. And these have been difficult days for every civil rights leader, for every lover of justice and peace.”
Flying from Washington to Atlanta, Doc knows that far more difficult days lie ahead. It is one thing to reflect upon the ever-widening cracks in his longtime coalition with white liberals. Even more urgent, though, is a need to repair the deep divisions threatening to rip apart SCLC. There is also the chronic problem of finances. Fund-raising has always been a challenge, but with the marked decrease in Doc’s prestige as a national leader, money is tighter than ever.
For five days in mid-September, Doc will be at the Airlie Center, a retreat located in the Piedmont foothills in Warrenton, Virginia, an hour’s drive from Washington. Once again, the staff will meet to reexamine the recent past and plan the future. Once again, it will be something of a nightmare.
Before he leaves for Virginia he confesses to Atlanta newspapermen, “I’m tired now. I’ve been in this thing thirteen years now and I’m really tired.”
Doc is deeply familiar with 1 John 4:18, which says, “Perfect love casts out fear,” but there is no doubt that during this season of his life fear is there. Fear, in fact, is the subject of a sermon he preaches at Ebenezer two days before he leaves for the retreat. In addressing the issue, Doc is true to form: he personalizes his preaching, using the pulpit to work through his own internal struggles.
“We often develop inferiority complexes,” he tells the church, “and we stumble through life with a feeling of insecurity, a lack of self-confidence, and a sense of impending failure.… A fear of what life may bring encourages some persons to wander aimlessly along the frittering road of excessive drink and sexual promiscuity.”
The sermon has a confessional feeling as he speaks of dark moments in his own life, times when he was afraid. It’s his faith in God that lets him overcome fear. “I know this,” he says. “I know it from my own personal experiences.”
His personal experience as head of SCLC has never been more difficult. The Airlie Center retreat is rife with discord.
Jesse Jackson wants to focus on local movements like the one he leads in Chicago. Harry Wachtel, a Wall Street lawyer, questions the efficacy of Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket. Jackson, in turn, says he will not listen to the remarks of a “slave master.” Doc tries to keep Jesse cool, but the heat only rises.
Hosea Williams argues that emphasis must be brought back to civil rights and activities in the South.
Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young insist that the organization concentrate on poverty. Doc agrees. He likes the idea of sit-ins at the office of labor secretary W. Willard Wirtz to protest unemployment among the poor.
But always-passionate James Bevel counters that the poverty campaign is little more than “bus fare next to a misguided war.”
None of this matters, argues the finance committee, because none of this will happen until SCLC, on the verge of bankruptcy, is brought to solvency. More than SCLC’s simply lacking funds for current and future activities, there is also the matter of mounting debts. Ironically, there are past-due legal bills incurred during these many years when Doc has taken moral stances against unjust laws.
Doc says he’ll find the money. He’ll recruit his loyal showbiz buddies like Harry Belafonte to do a tour of fund-raising concerts at which they’ll entertain and he’ll make remarks. The tour is certain to bring in considerable cash.
The finance people say that there are no certainties when it comes to fund-raising. Money is needed immediately.
Doc feels that unity is needed immediately. He wants to unify SCLC to mount a massive campaign this fall and winter to protest the plight of the poor. Poverty is the core issue, the fire that is fueling black rage, the reason that his people, living in the midst of an affluent country spending billions on foreign wars and billions more on trips to outer space, are trapped in a cycle of frustration and despair. Doc’s despair was evident when, earlier in the month, he told the convention of psychologists that “the unemployment of Negro youth ranges up to 40 percent in some slums. The riots are almost entirely youth events—the age range of participants is from 13 to 25. What hypocrisy it is to talk of saving the new generation… while consigning it to unemployment and provoking it to violent alternatives.” Decent jobs, equal educational opportunities for the impoverished—these are issues burning within Doc’s soul.
Yet his passion cannot override the dissent among the troops. The arguments over priorities go deep into the night. The strengths of the various personalities—Jesse Jackson, James Bevel, Hosea Williams—are on full display. These are forceful, eloquent men whose agendas often clash with Doc’s. Sometimes the clashes get to the point where Doc feels utterly powerless. On this particular night, he drinks himself into a fury.
This is the same night that Andy Young has brought Joan Baez to the retreat to voice her views. Baez is adamant about focusing on the war. She wants to convince Doc to put SCLC resources behind massive protests at military bases. Before she can make her presentation, though, she and Andy encounter a nasty confrontation between Doc, Jesse Jackson, and James Bevel. Doc is cursing at the top of his lungs. Tears are streaming down his face. Liquor has fueled his rage. He says that he’s had it: He’s had it with the fruitless arguments about policies and strategies; he’s had it with the pressures; he’s had it with trying to manage an unmanageable organization. He screams, “I don’t want to do this anymore! I just want to go back to my little church!”
The tumult causes Joan to quickly leave the scene. It’s hardly the right moment for the folk singer to address the minister. Instead, Andy and Ralph ease Doc into his room to sleep it off.
The next morning, nursing a hangover, he is apologetic.
“Well,” he tells Baez, “now you must know that I’m not a saint.”
“And I’m not the Virgin Mary,” says Joan, before adding, “What a relief!”
Relocating his dignity, Doc patiently listens to his senior staff offer conflicting visions of SCLC’s immediate future. His temples throb. His head aches. The pain is not merely the result of a hangover, but of the undeniable truth that his truth is not shared by the bulk of his immediate constituency. The only truth about which there is no disagreement is a practical one. Without money, nothing will be accomplished.
Doc realizes that he must rise to the occasion. He must recruit the most glittering stars in his galaxy—perennial favorites like Sammy Davis Jr. and current chart toppers like Aretha Franklin—and mount a tour.
Surely such shows will fill the great arenas of the country and tens of thousands of supporters will attend. Surely these musical rallies will not only bring in desperately needed funds but also provide Doc with a platform to express his heart and do what he has been struggling to do ever since he spoke at the Riverside Church: touch the soul of an ailing nation.
Chapter Ten
OMINOUS CLOUDS
The tour is set. Coast to coast, eight dates over twelve days in October: Oakland, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, Philly, and a grand finale in Boston.
The last great fund-raising effort took place in Europe amid significant controversy. It was March 1966. The government, afraid that Doc would openly oppose the Vietnam War—this was a year before his speech at the Riverside Church—tried to get the humanitarian sponsoring organization to cancel. But actors sympathetic to SCLC—Peter O’Toole, Melina Mercouri, Yves Montand, and Simone Signoret—intervened and secured an even larger venue for the event that would feature a speech by Do
c and songs by Belafonte. The U.S. State Department ordered the American ambassador to France not to attend. Even though Doc did criticize the war, he made it clear that this was a personal opinion and not a shift in priorities for his movement. At the time, vehement war protestors, who were hoping for a stronger stance, were disappointed. They would have to wait another year for his thinking to evolve. Meanwhile, the fund-raiser was a huge success.
Eighteen months later, Doc is desperate for another such success.
The lineup is set. Belafonte is on the bill. Aretha will appear at three of the shows. Sidney Poitier will speak at two others. Joan Baez has committed, along with the comic Nipsey Russell. Jazz great Dizzy Gillespie will be playing in Boston.
Hopes are high. And then, on opening night in Oakland, hopes are dashed.
The audience barely fills one-fourth of the Coliseum. When Harry Belafonte and Sammy Davis appear, it is bad enough that their songs seem out-of-date and irrelevant to the current soul music culture. But from the stage Sammy begins to speak about the importance of the civil rights movement not venturing from civil rights. He doesn’t like this antiwar business and wants to talk about his upcoming trip to Vietnam to entertain the troops. When Joan Baez appears, she argues the opposite, urging Sammy to tell the soldiers to come home. She vows that tomorrow she and other protestors will block the entrances to the Armed Forces Induction Center, right there in Oakland. By the time Doc makes his remarks, it is clear that, even during a fund-raising concert, he cannot control the warring factions among his own troops.
The next day Baez is arrested along with 123 other demonstrators and sentenced to ten days in jail, thus keeping her off the rest of the tour.
In Los Angeles, a city known to support liberal causes, the crowd is thin and the event marred by a bomb threat causing an evacuation and long delay.
Houston is worse. Black state legislator Curtis Graves, in charge of promoting the concert, meets with Doc at the Shamrock Hilton a few hours before showtime and tells him that for an auditorium that holds four thousand, only five hundred tickets have been sold.
