Death of a King

by Tavis Smiley

  “I know a man who was born in an obscure village… an itinerant preacher… didn’t have much… never wrote a book… never held an office… never went to college… did none of the usual things that the world would associate with greatness… had no credentials but himself… was only thirty-three when the tide of public opinion turned against him.… They called him a rabble-rouser… a troublemaker… an agitator… he practiced civil disobedience, he broke injunctions.… His friends turned him over to his enemies, and while he was dying the people who killed him gambled for his clothing, the only possession that he had in the world.…

  “Nineteen centuries have come and gone and today he stands as the most influential figure that ever entered human history. All of the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, and all the kings that ever reigned all put together have not affected the life of man on this earth as much as that one solitary life.… He didn’t have anything. He just went around serving and doing good.”

  Doc startles his congregants by shifting gears, moving from the narrative of Christ to chillingly prescient meditations on his own demise:

  “Every now and then I think about my own death and I think about my own funeral. And I don’t think of it in a morbid sense.… I ask myself, ‘What is it that I would want said?’…

  “If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. And every now and then I wonder what I want them to say. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize—that isn’t important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards—that’s not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school.

  “I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others.

  “I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody.

  “I want you to be able to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question… say that I did try to feed the hungry… say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked… say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that’s all I want to say.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  HUMILITY, LEVITY, AND LONGEVITY

  The confrontation is nasty.

  An assemblage of women that Doc presumed to be enthusiastic sympathizers verbally assaults him. The day after delivering his drum major sermon, Doc is back in the thick of it. He’s in Chicago facing the outrage of representatives of the National Welfare Rights Organization.

  He has come to the YMCA to share his grand vision of the Poor People’s Campaign, which will descend on Washington in the spring. Latino migrant workers, Appalachian farmers, coal miners, ditchdiggers, and dishwashers—impoverished Americans of every color and religion—will march arm in arm to protest this nation’s brutal economic inequality. They will encamp on the grounds of the Capitol and remain there until legislators heed their demands. Can Doc count on the vast membership of the National Welfare Rights Organization to stand with him?

  Hell no.

  Not only are the women in no mood to hear about some high profile poverty demonstration, but they want to know what Doc knows about their agenda to reform the current welfare laws. They cross-examine him ruthlessly. Andy Young will later say that he has never seen Doc treated so insultingly.

  “Do you know about Anti-Welfare Bill H.R. 12080, passed by Congress on December 15 and signed into law by Lyndon Baines Johnson on January 2?” asks one woman.

  No, Doc answers honestly. He is not familiar with the bill.

  “Where were you last October when we were down in Washington to get support for Senator Kennedy’s amendments?”

  Again Doc demurs, confessing that he is not conversant with those amendments. He admits ignorance and, rather than defend himself and his record—as his aides are quick to do—he invites the ladies to educate him about their legislative efforts. He knows that there will be no recruiting them for his campaign. His job is to simply sit and listen. He is humbled.

  Then on a bright, sunny day he is marching in Washington, leading some twenty-five hundred members of the Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam on a vigil through Arlington National Cemetery. When he reaches the steps of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Doc says simply, “In this period of absolute silence, let us pray.” For the next six minutes, eyes are closed, heads bowed.

  Later, at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, a sanctuary, he is speaking, saying, “The war in Vietnam has exacerbated the tensions between the continents and between the races.… It does not help America and her so-called image to be the most powerful, richest nation in the world at war with one of the smallest poorest nations in the world that happens to be a colored nation.”

  He turns from guns to butter.

  “When poor people and Negroes are way down in a depression situation economically, we call it a social ill, but when white people get massively unemployed we call it a depression. And the Negro is facing a depression.… When you get to the Negro youth, the unemployment is probably in some cities between 30% and 40%. Now this is a depression more staggering than the depression of the 30s.”

  Even as Doc continues to use the word “depression” to describe the plight of poor people, those in his inner circle apply that same word to his state of mind.

  Looking back at this period, Andy Young will say, “He was given to a kind of depression that he had not had earlier. He talked about death all the time.… He couldn’t relax, he couldn’t sleep.… Even when we were away on trips, he’d want to talk all night long.”

  According to Coretta, “He got very depressed… a state of depression that was greater than I had ever seen before.”

  “I felt his weariness,” Dorothy Cotton will remember. “The weariness of the whole struggle.”

  In the view of Clarence Jones, “he was never getting enough sleep, never able to eat regularly, torn by his obligations as a husband and father to his kids… constantly worrying about whether there was going to be enough money to meet payroll for SCLC.”

  “He was very unhappy,” according to associate Gwendolyn Green. “He was depressed.… He was dark, gaunt and tired. He felt that his time was up.… He said that he knew that they were going to get him.”

  To the comedian Dick Gregory, Doc says the same thing. With tears in his eyes, Doc tells him he’s certain that the end is near. He’s certain that he’ll be killed.

  Yet no matter the depth of his despondency or fears, Doc stays on the front line, facing the threatening forces, both visible and invisible. Among the visible are those in the movement who continue to oppose his grand plans to dramatize the plight of the poor.

  While still in Washington, he meets with Stokely Carmichael’s Black United Front. At the gathering, one of SCLC’s white members is denied entrance. The mood is sullen. The group not only questions Doc’s spring poverty campaign but denigrates his celebrated Selma march by questioning his tactic of having turned around when confronted with the police barricade. Once again, Doc must play defense. Carmichael offers no support for Doc’s poor people’s project and calls it “a serious tactical error.” He doesn’t like its multiethnic hue. His only concession is not to oppose it.

  The divide between Doc and Stokely—nonviolence versus violence—widens. Even as Doc’s aides defend him against the militants’ biting charges, Doc accuses his team of failing to defend nonviolence. His voice rises—he’s angry and tired. He tells his people that his own prominence isn’t important; what’s important is the inviolable principle of nonviolence. He views some of his supporters as apologi
sts. For an impassioned pacifist like Martin Luther King Jr., that’s morally reprehensible.

  Despite how dark and down he feels, Doc can’t help being a humorist. In the midst of his insane travel schedule, the countless speeches and press conferences and board meetings and strategy sessions, Doc likes to cut up. He’ll banter back and forth with the best of them. He’ll come up with one-liners that can crack up the crowd. And though there is no doubt that, in the winter of 1968, he’s experiencing increasing gloom and decreasing joviality, at times his mood can brighten.

  On February 8, the day after the trying confrontation with the militants, he’s downright funny. He’s on national television in New York, where Harry Belafonte is substituting for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show.

  In the guest chair, Doc appears relaxed. Before getting serious, he describes his day thus far: “I flew out of Washington this afternoon, and as soon as we started out they notified us that the plane had mechanical difficulties.… Finally, we took off and landed, and whenever I land after mechanical difficulties I’m always very happy. Now, I don’t want to give the impression that as a Baptist preacher I don’t have faith in God in the air. It’s simply that I’ve had more experience with Him on the ground.”

  Doc goes on to describe the harrowing trip from the airport to the television studio. Due to the late landing, he worried that he might miss the broadcast, and he urged the cabdriver to make haste. The cabbie’s response was to drive so recklessly that Doc had to modify his original request and remind the man that he’d rather be “Dr. King who arrives late than the late Dr. King!”

  For all the light banter, Belafonte does not avoid the troubling subject of Doc’s vulnerability.

  “Dr. King, do you ever fear for your life?” Belafonte asks.

  “I’m far more concerned about doing something for humanity and what I consider the will of God than longevity. Ultimately it isn’t so important how long you live. The important thing is how well you live.”

  Two days later, Doc is not well. He falls sick in Philadelphia, where he is due to speak, and is treated for an upper respiratory infection. When Walter P. Lomax Jr., a black physician, asks to take a photograph with him, Doc graciously agrees.

  “Would you be good enough to write something for my children?” the physician asks.

  Doc inscribes the words, “May you have a noble future.”

  Recovering from his illness, Doc still has Memphis on his mind. Events in Memphis continue to demand his attention.

  From his close friend and fellow activist-pacifist James Lawson, pastor of Centenary United Methodist Church in Memphis, Doc learns that, even in light of the recent tragedy, city officials have flat out refused to negotiate with the garbage workers. They will not consider pay increases or benefit improvements; they will not tolerate a union; they will not reexamine their safety regulations.

  On February 11, Doc is back on his feet, back in Atlanta, and encouraged to learn that most of Memphis’s sanitation workers—930 out of 1,100 men—have walked off the job. Lawson heads the strike committee. The mayor declares the strike illegal. No matter: the men are doing what needs to be done. Doc considers this an act of bold nonviolent protest. What alternative is there but to stop working and force the issue? The workers have no money, no power, no recognized union. Civil disobedience is their only weapon.

  Memphis stays on Doc’s mind.

  The poverty encampment is also on his mind. He tells the SCLC Action Committee that “we are not doing our homework.” He’s concerned that without renewed effort the campaign will falter. Given the deep concern about the budgetary crisis, it’s another difficult, drawn-out meeting.

  If these truths don’t seem to change, neither does the fact that Doc can’t sit still for long, and in the middle of the month, the preacher is on the move again. At the break of dawn he’s off to the airport. This time the mode of transportation has him concerned. It’s a Cessna prop, a puddle jumper from Atlanta to Selma, Alabama, where he’s due to speak. Beyond the fact that the plane is small, Doc worries that there’s only one pilot. Without a backup, he’s nervous. But he’s also determined to recruit volunteers for the poverty campaign from among his core constituents doing civil rights work in the early sixties, and so he boards.

  It’s a bumpy landing and a quick drive to Tabernacle Baptist Church, where he tells those assembled that it was a treat to be met at the airport by a Negro deputy sheriff as opposed to the posse of Jim Clark, the white sheriff whose attitude about integration was expressed by the button he often wore: “Never.”

  Doc’s speech focuses on poverty.

  “What does it profit a man to be able to have access to any integrated lunch counter when he doesn’t earn enough to take his wife out to dinner? What does it profit a man to have access to the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities and not earn enough to take a vacation?”

  Then it’s back to the airport, back on the Cessna for a quick hop to Montgomery. Looking out the little window, Doc gazes down at Highway 80. His mind is flooded with memories. It was here on March 7, 1965, that Ralph Abernathy and Hosea Williams led protestors on a march from Selma. Their destination was the capitol in Montgomery. The issue was voting rights. The issue was also a recent murder. During a nonviolent protest a month earlier, Jimmie Lee Jackson, a twenty-six-year-old church deacon, was shot to death by a state trooper as Jackson shielded his mother from the trooper’s nightstick.

  The marchers were teargassed and brutalized. Young freedom rider John Lewis, his head bloodied from a billy club beating, looked into the television cameras and said, “I don’t see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam, I don’t see how he can send troops to the Congo, I don’t see how he can send troops to Africa and can’t send troops to Selma.” Two days later, Doc ignored a court order and reinitiated the march, this time crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge but turning back at the barricade of state troopers. On subsequent days, the marchers kept coming, finally reaching the Alabama state capitol. By then they were marching under the protection of the U.S. Army. Johnson had heeded Lewis’s call. By August, the Voting Rights Act was the law of the land.

  That was nearly three years ago. It was a moment when the movement won over the heart of a nation, a time when the startling effectiveness of peaceful protest was apparent to all. It was a victory to be cherished. Doc was lionized. He was satisfied that, despite the heartbreaking sacrifices made, his push for freedom for the disenfranchised had gained critical new ground.

  As the Cessna makes its descent into Montgomery, Doc wonders if he can ever again make such dramatic strides. He wonders whether all the warring factions dividing his movement and the nation will ever coalesce.

  “I’ve agonized over it,” he tells the crowd that has come to hear him at Montgomery’s Maggie Street Missionary Baptist Church, “and I’m trying to save America. And that’s what you’re trying to do if you will join this movement.”

  He tells the gospel story of Dives, the rich man who goes to hell for not helping the beggar Lazarus. “Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich. Dives went to hell because he passed by Lazarus every day but never really saw him. Dives went to hell because he allowed Lazarus to become invisible.… If America doesn’t use its vast resources and wealth to bridge the gap between the rich and poor nations, and between the rich and poor in this nation, it too is going to hell.”

  America may be going to hell.

  Despite all the criticism swirling around him, despite all the push back that he endures, Doc continues to articulate the hard truths that he feels in his heart.

  From Montgomery it’s back on the Cessna and back to Atlanta, where Doc hopes to catch still another flight—to Detroit, where, that very evening, the city is celebrating Aretha Franklin Day with a gala concert.

  As the Cessna bounces through the clouds, Doc entertains the questions of a reporter who has come along for the ride. Doc wants to promote his poverty campaign, but the reporter wants to discuss
death—that is, previous assassination attempts. He wants to know about the most frightening moments in Doc’s life.

  Doc remembers a march in Philadelphia, Mississippi, last June, when he was told that the killers of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner—the three freedom riders—were there to kill him too. He also remembers the march in Chicago last August, at which he was pelted with rocks.

  The interview hardly helps Doc’s dark mood, but the thought of getting to Detroit does. He wants to honor the Queen of Soul, who has given so generously of her time to their cause. In Atlanta he quickly transfers from the Cessna to a commercial flight, arriving in Motor City just in time to dash over to Cobo Hall and take the stage, where he presents Aretha with a special award from SCLC. The Queen is thrilled at Doc’s surprise appearance, and Doc is thrilled to kick back and hear her tear up “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.”

  Doc feels the song deep in his soul. Aretha is singing the blues. She’s singing about getting up, looking out on a gloomy day, and feeling “so uninspired.” She’s singing about having to face another day, and she’s moaning, “Lord, it made me feel so tired.”

  Doc’s had a long, long day.

  Atlanta.

  Selma.

  Montgomery.

  Back to Atlanta.

  Up to Detroit, where Aretha is singing about the time her soul was in the lost and found.

  Doc relates.

  He’s been lost.

  He’s been found.

  He’s still searching. Still moving, always moving.

  Tomorrow he’ll rush back to Atlanta.

  Sunday he’ll preach.

  Sunday night he’s off again—this time to a big ministers’ meeting in Miami.

  The drive never diminishes.

  The travel never stops.

  Bone weary, on the edge of nervous exhaustion, downhearted and far from home, Doc is nonetheless grateful to be in Detroit. The music calms his spirit. The music refreshes his soul.