Death of a King

by Tavis Smiley

  The president argues that this war in Vietnam is winnable. He vigorously defends his military strategy and, amid his ambitious plans to address pressing domestic issues, makes a point of underscoring the threat of urban crime. “The American people,” he says, “have had enough of rising crime and lawlessness in this country.”

  Beyond being disappointed that LBJ shows no inclination to reverse his disastrous military course, Doc hears “crime and lawlessness” as code words for unrest in the black ghettoes. He worries about white backlash and wonders if Johnson is fueling new fire.

  Fewer than twenty-four hours pass before Doc picks up the newspaper and is captivated by an incident at the White House that’s causing a furor.

  The day after the State of the Union address, Lady Bird Johnson hosts a Women Doers’ Luncheon at the White House. Arranged by the first lady’s social secretary, the event brings together distinguished women involved in social causes. The topic at hand is how to deal with the rising tide of crime.

  Among those guests is Eartha Kitt, the Negro singer, actress, and political activist. Uncomfortable sitting through the innocuous speeches, she bristles when President Johnson himself makes a surprise appearance and a few facile remarks about how crime fighting should be left to the states, not the federal government.

  Before LBJ can get away, Eartha confronts him: “But what do we do about delinquent parents, the parents who have to work, for instance, who can’t spend the time with their children as they should?”

  Social Security provides for day care, Johnson says. He dismisses her by adding, “I think that is a very good question for you to ask yourselves, you women here, and you all tell me what you think.”

  With that, he rushes out of the room.

  There is more talk, more platitudes spoken by respectable women voicing their fears over the spread of lawlessness across the land.

  When Lady Bird finally entertains questions from the floor, Eartha immediately raises her hand. This is the moment she has been waiting for.

  Eartha lets loose. In plain language, she lets the first lady know that she has “lived in the gutters” and knows what she’s talking about. She says that anger in the cities can be traced back to anger over the war, “a war going on that Americans do not understand.” She talks about young men “being snatched away from their mothers and being sent off to Vietnam.… I am talking as a mother who has a child… so I know the feeling of having a baby coming out of my guts, particularly when it’s a boy.… You take the best of the country and send them off to a war and they get shot.”

  Shocked and offended by this outburst of emotion, the first lady tries to mount a defense. Along with the other women in the room, she is outraged by the effrontery. There are tears in her eyes.

  When the luncheon is over, the ladies gather around Lady Bird in solidarity, expressing their regret that their lovely luncheon has been marred by such rudeness. Meanwhile, Eartha leaves the White House alone. Among the many ladies in attendance, she doesn’t have a single supporter.

  After reading the account, Doc jumps to her defense. This is a woman after his own heart. Hers is the kind of courage that he respects. He makes a point of telling the New York Times that he considers Eartha’s remarks “appropriate both as to content and place” while finding her comments to the first lady “a very proper gesture.”

  He personally calls Eartha to say that she’s made him proud. In short, Doc is delighted that a strong independent woman from the black community is giving the Johnsons hell.

  Doc is drawn to strong independent women. And in January 1968, Doc’s relationship with his wife, the strongest woman in his life, is—like everything else—under tremendous strain.

  Chapter Fourteen

  CONFESSION

  Coretta is not happy. While Doc is crisscrossing the country, she is most often alone at home with their four children. She has repeatedly asked him to provide her with a housekeeper, but he has refused. Given his calling as a preacher and advocate for the poor, he feels that they must live modestly. There’s also the question of his unwillingness to provide for their children’s futures. The Kings’ personal finances mirror the finances of SCLC. They barely scrape by.

  The larger question is Coretta’s role in the movement. She wants to travel and speak more. Two days before Eartha confronted the Johnsons, Coretta was in Washington with a silent brigade of five thousand women who walked through the snow to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam. She was among the elite group who entered the Capitol to present the official antiwar petition to members of Congress.

  Yet when it comes to Coretta’s high profile involvement, Doc isn’t always enthusiastic.

  “Martin has very traditional ideas about women,” Coretta says. She struggles to make him understand that she cannot sublimate her own calling to serve. In 1966 she told the press that “not enough attention has been focused on the roles played by women in the struggle. By and large, men have formed the leadership… but… [w]omen have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movement.”

  Doc cannot disagree. But he also cannot deny his deep ambivalence. Part of Doc wishes that she would simply stay home and care for the children. But another part appreciates the acuity of her intellect and the vital role that she has played in his moral and political growth.

  It was Coretta who spent long hours discussing Gandhi with Doc. She understood both the spiritual and the practical properties of nonviolence. Without her encouragement he might have abandoned its principles. In fact, there was a time when he came close to doing just that.

  It was during those frightening days in Montgomery. In 1956, the King family home had been bombed. Coretta and the kids had escaped injury, but the trauma remained. Supporters, including Daddy King, urged Doc to hire armed guards. Shaken to the core, Doc applied for a license and bought a gun. It was Coretta who helped persuade him to give up the weapon.

  “I reconsidered,” Doc would later say. “How could I serve as one of the leaders of a nonviolent movement and at the same time use weapons of violence for my personal protection? Coretta and I talked the matter over for several days and finally agreed that arms were no solution.… We tried to satisfy our friends by having floodlights mounted around the house, and hiring unarmed watchmen around the clock.… I was much more afraid in Montgomery when I had a gun in my house. When I decided that I couldn’t keep a gun, I came face-to-face with the question of death and I dealt with it. From that point on, I no longer needed a gun nor have I been afraid. Had we become distracted by the question of my safety we would have lost the moral offensive and sunk to the level of our oppressors.”

  Coretta emboldened him. But then again, she always had.

  When he met her in 1951 he was immediately smitten. He was a twenty-two-year-old student working on his PhD at Boston University’s School of Theology. She was a great beauty, a brilliant twenty-three-year-old graduate of prestigious Antioch College and a voice student at the New England Conservatory. Within weeks, Doc was telling his family back in Atlanta that he had met the woman he would marry.

  In a love letter written during their courtship when they were temporarily apart, Doc wrote, “My life without you is like a year without springtime which comes to give illumination and heat to the atmosphere of winter.… Oh, excuse me, my darling. I didn’t mean to go off on such a poetical and romantic flight. But how else can we express the deep emotions of life other than in poetry? Isn’t love too ineffable to be grasped by the cold calculating hands of intellect?”

  Coretta waited six months before accepting Doc’s marriage proposal.

  In June 1953, Daddy King officiated at the wedding ceremony; tellingly, Coretta insisted that the vows exclude all mention of the wife’s obligation to “obey” her husband. Coretta had no interest in being a subservient wife.

  When Doc’s political activism kicked off in Montgomery in 1955, Coretta was by his side. She marched on the front lines. In 1957, she journeyed with him to Ghana to celebrate tha
t nation’s independence. In 1958, she joined him on a trip to India, where they paid homage to the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. In 1962, she traveled alone to Geneva, Switzerland, where she was a delegate to the Women’s Strike for Peace. In 1964, she participated in an early incarnation of the Women’s Strike Force.

  Since then Coretta has gone to mobilization rallies, where she is often asked to speak—not as Doc’s surrogate but as a respected activist who uses a voice uniquely her own.

  His ambivalence remains: while he values and loves her for who she is, he also wishes she could be a little more submissive. He has enough rebellious subordinates without having to count his wife among them.

  Of all his subordinates, James Bevel is the most idiosyncratic—a man who, in the view of many, walks the thinnest of lines between brilliance and insanity. It is Bevel who suggests that many of the ministers attached to SCLC are burdened by the guilt of extramarital affairs. They need to confess their sins to their wives.

  Doc’s reaction is immediate: That’s crazy. That’s out of the question. That would accomplish nothing. Besides, many of Doc’s spiritual-theology heroes have been sexually preoccupied. Saint Augustine. Martin Luther. The philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich. Bevel rejects the argument. That was their problem. Our problem is to unburden our souls and be honest with our wives. Doc remains unmoved.

  He thinks back to one of his earliest love affairs. It took place before he met Coretta, during his time at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. He was barely twenty-one. She was a white girl of German heritage. She was involved with a professor, but Doc quickly won over her heart. Their six-month romance was torrid. Doc fell head over heels in love. He spoke of marriage. His friends warned that such a union would prevent him from pastoring a church in the South, not to mention enrage his mom and dad. With great anguish and reluctance, he broke off the relationship.

  Since his marriage to Coretta, Doc has been able to manage their emotional relationship, forming a tricky balance between love, devotion, responsibility, and guilt.

  That delicate balance is upset, though, later in January 1968, when he learns that Coretta requires surgery for a stomach tumor. The thought of losing his wife fills him with fear. He cancels all engagements and remains by her side and in deep prayer. When the operation is successful and the tumor is seen as benign, he rejoices.

  Then—quite remarkably and unexpectedly—Doc does the one thing he told James Bevel that he would never do: he confesses to Coretta that he has had an adulterous relationship. The confession is not comprehensive. But in Doc’s mind the very fact of admitting infidelity is at least a move in the right direction. He will cut off this relationship. From now on, he promises his wife, he will walk the straight and narrow.

  Having heard rumors of Doc’s affairs, Coretta isn’t shocked by his admission, but she is nonetheless hurt and angry. Even more furious is Juanita Abernathy, Ralph’s wife, who cannot understand why Doc has chosen this delicate moment in Coretta’s recovery to make his belated confession. Surely this is the wrong time and the wrong place.

  The answer is simply that, in the aftermath of his wife’s sudden surgery, guilt has overtaken him. Bevel had argued that confession is good for the soul. Doc’s soul is in tremendous pain. To relieve that pain he needs to be honest with the wife whom he loves so dearly. To get himself right, he needs to get right with the mother of his children.

  Spring is only a few months away, and after spending so much time and effort trying to sell his troops on the poverty campaign, and then so much time at home, Doc feels that there’s no time to waste: he needs to give himself over to the upcoming poverty campaign in Washington.

  And at the very moment when it seems that Doc’s organization might finally be sold, the supporter for whom he has utmost respect restates his opposition to Doc’s plan.

  During several difficult seasons, Bayard Rustin argues that these upcoming protests in Washington will lead to “further backlash and repression.” This is just what Doc does not want to hear. Doc desperately wants Bayard to back him. He needs the enthusiastic encouragement of a man respected as an exceptional strategist and deep thinker. If only Bayard could be on his side, Doc’s political life at this point would be so much easier.

  But Bayard, like Doc, is independent of mind. He is also a pragmatist convinced that his friend has lost his way. When it came to the great civil rights events that turned the tide of American history, their hearts and minds worked in harmony. It was a strong partnership: two towering intellectuals, two men instrumental in the formation of SCLC, two pacifist warriors risking their lives for the cause of equality. To lose Bayard’s support leaves Doc that much more vulnerable—especially because so many other active participants in the movement have now joined the ranks of observers. They have moved to the sidelines to watch and critique.

  Martin Luther King Jr., a man who has continually played offense, is now playing defense. Doc spends an inordinate amount of time defending himself against the sniping of critics, including former allies.

  Among the most persistent critics is Adam Clayton Powell, who has ended his Bahamian exile and landed in California. Continuing his assault on Doc’s creed of nonviolence, Powell tells the New York Times that the black revolution will soon become the “Second American Civil War.”

  Doc knows full well what Powell is doing: he is attempting to change with the changing times. Doc argues for the other path. He makes it clear that the job of the true believer—he who embraces the radical love ethos at the heart of Christianity—is not to change with the times but, through the force of his constant conviction, to change the times.

  On February 1, Doc picks up the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and reads that the administration’s military strategy in Vietnam has suffered a powerful blow. In what will soon be termed the Tet Offensive, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese have launched a series of surprise attacks. American and South Vietnamese forces are reeling. Tet is being called the largest operation in the history of this agonizingly long conflict, a stunning setback for Johnson and his hawks. Antiwar protestors are emboldened.

  The very next day, the newspaper runs another item that catches Doc’s eye, but this one is closer to home. It is a small story, but it greatly unsettles Doc’s spirit.

  In the midst of a thunderous rainstorm, two sanitation workers—Robert Walker, twenty-nine, and Echol Cole, thirty-five—were riding inside the compression unit of a garbage truck. According to city rules, there was only one place that black employees could seek shelter: in the storage cylinder containing the garbage. On this tragic day, the mechanism misfired and the men were crushed to death.

  Doc is horrified.

  He notes the dateline on the story:

  Memphis, Tennessee.

  Chapter Fifteen

  DRUM MAJOR

  It is Sunday, February 4, and Memphis is on Doc’s mind.

  His prepared sermon, though, focuses on a psychological matter that has long intrigued him: the potential danger of unchecked ego. To the congregants of Ebenezer Baptist Church, he tells the story from the Gospel of St. Matthew of two brothers, James and John, who ask Jesus if they can sit beside him in glory.

  After a short discussion, Jesus lays it on the line: “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many.”

  Exploring the subject of self-celebration, Doc calls the request of James and John the “drum major instinct.” He shows how the boastful man is a tiresome man, a morally distorted man. Doc shows how this instinct leads to “pushing others down in order to push yourself up.” He relates it to racism—“a need that some people have to feel that they are first, and to feel that their white skin ordained them to be first.” He relates it to exclusivism. “Not too long ago,” he says, “a man down in Mississippi said that God was a charter member of the White Citizens Council. And
so God being the charter member means that everybody who’s in that has a kind of divinity, a kind of superiority. And think of what has happened in history as a result of this perverted use of the drum major instinct. It has led to the most tragic prejudice, the most tragic expressions of man’s inhumanity to man.”

  In relating the psychological syndrome to racism, he offers deep compassion for those white folks afflicted by poverty.

  “The drum major instinct [has you] thinking that you are somebody big because you are white. And you’re so poor you can’t send your children to school.… The poor white has been put into this position, where through blindness and prejudice, he is forced to support his oppressors. And the only thing he has going for him is the false feeling that he’s superior because his skin is white—and can’t hardly eat and make his ends meet week in and week out.”

  He applies his thesis to the notion of nationhood.

  “This is why we are drifting. And we are drifting there because nations are caught up with the drum major instinct. ‘I must be first.’ ‘I must be supreme.’ ‘Our nation must rule the world.’ And I am sad to say that the nation in which we live is the supreme culprit.… God didn’t call America to do what she’s doing in the world now. God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the war in Vietnam. And we are criminals in that war. We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world… and we won’t stop it because of our pride and our arrogance.”

  Then he brings it all back to Jesus. Jesus understands that James and John want to be great—and there’s nothing wrong with greatness. But Jesus, the embodiment of radical love, alters the very meaning of greatness.

  “Recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant,” Doc preaches. “That’s a new definition of greatness.