Death of a King

by Tavis Smiley

  From the poor of Greenwood and on to the poor of Grenada and Laurel and Hattiesburg and Jackson, where, due to the long rallies along the way, Doc arrives four hours late. The volunteers to join his effort are few, but he keeps on preaching.

  He tells the crowd in Jackson that after giving his speech in Memphis and many more, “I [have] just about lost my voice. But we’re going from here to tour Alabama and then on to Georgia and then we’re going to move right on through the nation to outline this program.” When his voice finally fades, he turns to Ralph Abernathy to do the actual recruiting.

  By Wednesday his voice is barely back. But he presses on.

  “Many of you are unemployed,” he tells the gathering in Eutaw, Alabama. “You don’t have adequate jobs, you don’t have anything to lose. But by going to Washington, you have everything to gain.”

  Once again he paints a picture of a shantytown up on the great Mall, only this time, as part of the protest encampment, he expands his vision to include festivals of music, art, poetry, and science.

  “We’re going to let them know that Shakespeare was not the only poet that entered history, but Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes came by. We’re going to let them know that Einstein wasn’t the only scientist, but that George Washington Carver came by. Every day we’re going to learn a little more about our heritage.… We’re going to have a mighty time in Washington.”

  Like the good Baptist preacher that he is, Doc wraps up with an altar call:

  “All ye who are burdened down, come unto us. All ye who are heavy laden, come unto us. All ye who are unemployed, come unto us. All ye who are tired of segregation and discrimination, come unto us. All ye who are overworked and underpaid, come unto us.… Put on your walking shoes and walk together, pray together, struggle together, believe together, have faith together, and come on to Washington. And there will be a great camp meeting in the Promised Land!”

  It’s a triumphant note, but bad weather dampens the momentum, cancels the remainder of his Alabama rallies.

  Then bad news of the tepid response to Doc’s recruitment drive is personally brought to President Johnson by J. Edgar Hoover. The spies inside SCLC have told the FBI that, for all Doc’s efforts in the Delta, only a thousand dollars has been raised. Prospects for Doc’s dream of a spectacular monthlong mass demonstration are growing dim.

  But then there is Friday, and there is Memphis.

  Memphis is the rallying point, the new hope of a movement that many see as dissipating and close to dissolution. Memphis will turn it around. Memphis will be the scene of Friday’s triumphant march. In Memphis supporters will rally in great numbers. Memphis will renew the energy for positive change and put Doc’s campaign back on track.

  But strangely enough, here in the third week of March, an unseasonable blizzard is blasting its way through the Delta. A blanket of fresh snow has covered Memphis, and before Doc leaves for the airport, James Lawson calls to say that the march has been postponed.

  A lover of literature, Doc is well aware of the concept of pathetic fallacy—when writers imbue nature with human emotions.

  He can’t help but see the snow as carrying a weight of sadness.

  Only weeks earlier, citing the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to those questioning his pacifism, Doc said, “May it not be that the new man the world needs is the nonviolent man? Longfellow said, ‘In this world a man must either be an anvil or a hammer.’ We must be hammers shaping a new society rather than anvils molded by the old.”

  That was the upbeat Longfellow. But there was also the downbeat Longfellow, who wrote something else:

  Silent, and soft, and slow

  Descends the snow.

  Even as our cloudy fancies take

  Suddenly shape in some divine expression,

  Even as the troubled heart doth make

  In the white countenance confession,

  The troubled sky reveals

  The grief it feels.

  This is the poem of the air,

  Slowly in silent syllables recorded;

  This is the secret of despair.

  Chapter Twenty

  FIREMEN

  It is Saturday, March 23, and Doc introduces his two young sons, Martin III and Dexter, to the crowd in Waycross, Georgia, where he continues his recruitment for the Poor People’s Campaign.

  The old Cessna, with one misfiring engine, carries a nervous Doc and his excited boys all over the state as he continues to paint the picture of springtime in Washington, when an encampment of unprecedented size will awaken an indifferent nation to the plight of the poor.

  When a writer wonders whether it’s a good idea for Doc to be traveling in the rural South without a bodyguard, Doc waxes philosophical:

  “I’d feel like a bird in a cage.… There’s no way in the world you can keep somebody from killing you if they want to kill you.”

  Because of the malfunctioning plane, he arrives four hours late in Augusta, where he makes his impassioned pitch for Georgians to join his grand crusade.

  On a wing and a prayer, the Cessna makes it back to Atlanta. The boys are driven home to Coretta while Doc boards a late-night flight to New York so that he can arrive in time to preach a Sunday sermon in Harlem.

  He’s exhausted.

  Aides remind him that SCLC funds are exhausted too. For all Doc’s herculean efforts, recruits are not enlisting in anywhere near the number that he had hoped.

  His only comfort is in sleep—and the knowledge that in a few hours he will be helping an ex-assistant and trusted friend move into a position of greater prominence. He does not envision that even this happy occasion will be marked by an ugly confrontation.

  Arriving at Canaan Baptist Church, the last thing in the world Doc expects is a protest by Adam Clayton Powell, returned from Bimini and enraged at Doc and Doc’s former chief of staff Wyatt Tee Walker, who this very morning is being inaugurated as pastor of the Harlem church. In a display of great loyalty, Doc has come to lend his prestige to the man with whom he shared a jail cell back in Birmingham. He sees Walker as one of his best and brightest soldiers.

  Powell is incensed. He accuses Walker of luring congregants away from his own Abyssinian Baptist Church, where Walker once served as his assistant minister, before Powell publicly fired him. In a broader attack, Powell tells the press that “the white man is finished. I don’t call for violence or riots, but the day of Martin Luther King has come to an end.” He insists that pacifists will never again control the black movement.

  In his own press conference that day, Doc again refrains from attacking Powell. He sticks to the principles, insisting that “reasonable, meaningful non-violence” is as relevant as ever. In fact, he says, “I think it’s just arrived.”

  The Monday meeting with SCLC staffers in Manhattan is another heartache. The same laments: the lack of money, the disagreements over the upcoming Poor People’s Campaign. With all issues unresolved, Doc rushes off to a small airport where he boards a tiny one-engine for a bumpy flight to the Catskill Mountains. He’s there to fulfill his promise to speak to the Sixty-Eighth Rabbinical Assembly.

  “Where in America today,” asks his great friend Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “do we hear a voice like the voice of the prophets of Israel? Martin Luther King is a sign that God has not forsaken the United States of America.… The situation of the poor in America is our plight, our sickness. To be deaf to their cry is to condemn ourselves.”

  Doc uses the occasion to ask the rabbis to help him recruit volunteers for his spring crusade.

  “We need bodies,” he says, “to bring about the pressure to get Congress and the nation moving in the right direction.”

  At the evening’s end, the rabbis serenade the Baptist preacher with a Hebrew version of “We Shall Overcome.”

  The prop plane flies him back to Manhattan, where that evening he’s due for dinner at his physician Arthur Logan’s home for what he hopes will be a relaxing night.

  The evening is anything
but relaxing. Doc engages in heavy drinking and even heavier disputations with Logan’s wife, Marian, the SCLC board member vehemently opposed to his Poor People’s Campaign. Her husband’s attempt to change the subject falls on deaf ears. Doc can’t fathom how a bright woman like Marian can’t understand the urgency of his plan. Marian can’t understand how a bright man like Doc can’t understand its impracticality. Their argument goes on for far too long. In Marian’s view, Doc is “losing hold.”

  They call it stormy Monday

  But Tuesday’s just as bad

  On Tuesday, his head aching from the night before, Doc leaves the Logans’ elegant East Side brownstone for a Harlem tenement, where, in a press event geared to highlight the impoverished state of urban America, he visits a welfare mother of eight, followed by a meeting with community activists, followed by an address to clergymen in Queens, followed by a speech at the Convent Avenue Baptist Church back in Harlem.

  On Wednesday, he rides through the Lincoln Tunnel to New Jersey, where, in Newark, scene of last summer’s calamitous riot, he meets with two dozen businessmen, asking that they back his Poor People’s Campaign, before telling a rally of fourteen hundred students and teachers at the predominantly black Southside High, “Stand up with dignity and self-respect.… I’m black and beautiful!”

  Before leaving Newark for recruitment rallies in churches in two of the state’s poorest cities—Paterson and Jersey City—Doc visits two welfare families and then pays a surprise visit to the home of LeRoi Jones (who would later change his name to Amiri Baraka), a celebrated black playwright and intellectual and an impassioned militant who has openly ridiculed Doc’s pacifism. Jones is facing a weapons charge brought during last summer’s Newark riots.

  “Hello, LeRoi,” says Doc, standing on Jones’s porch. “You don’t look like such a bad person. People told me you were a bad person.”

  The purpose of the meeting is to show Jones, one of his most vociferous critics, that Doc is willing to hear him out. Doc is also concerned that if Jones works to provoke another riot, it will impede the Poor People’s Campaign.

  When the press asks Jones about the meeting, his remarks are surprisingly measured. By simply listening to his adversary, Doc’s loving spirit has impacted the fiery revolutionary.

  “We talked about unifying the black people,” Jones says with untypical humility.

  Because he allows so many opponents to speak for so long, Doc is habitually late. Today is no different. After a half-dozen grueling events in New Jersey, he hurries through the Holland Tunnel and up Manhattan’s West Side Highway, where, hours behind schedule, he shows up at the apartment of Harry and Julie Belafonte for a big fund-raiser party for SCLC.

  In addition to supporters, there are a number of writers in attendance, including Tom Wicker and Anthony Lewis of the New York Times. Doc speaks eloquently about his Poor People’s Campaign. But when the reporters and supporters leave, and it’s just Harry, Julie, Doc, and a few of Doc’s closest aides, Doc takes off his tie, kicks off his shoes, and throws back a little sherry.

  His mood turns dark.

  “What bothers you, Martin?” asks Harry. “What’s got you in such a surly mood?”

  “Newark. Beyond what an eruption in that city would mean, how it would take us off-course, I’m just so disturbed at what I’m hearing.… Frustration over the war has brought forth this idea that the solution resides in violence. What I cannot get across to these young people is that I wholly embrace everything they feel. It’s just the tactics we can’t agree on. I have more in common with these young people than with anybody else in the movement. I feel their rage. I feel their pain. I feel their frustration. It’s the system that’s the problem, and it’s choking us to death!”

  When Andy Young breaks in to say, “Well, I don’t know, it’s not the entire system. It’s only part of it, and I think we can fix it,” Doc loses his cool and admonishes Andy, who continues to harbor grave doubts about the Poor People’s Campaign. Doc can tolerate dissent coming from those, like LeRoi Jones, who oppose him. But his patience with dissent from within his own troops is wearing thin.

  “The trouble,” he tells Andy, “is that we live in a failed system. Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level.”

  Reminded that there has been success with the struggle against that system, Doc rejoins, “Yes, we’ve fought hard and long, and I have never doubted that we would prevail in this struggle. Already our rewards have begun to reveal themselves—desegregation, the Voting Rights Act.… But what deeply troubles me now is that for all the steps we’ve taken toward integration, I’ve come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house.”

  “If that’s what you think, what would you have us do?” asks Harry.

  His answer comes unhesitatingly:

  “We… have to become firemen.”

  The heat is coming from Memphis.

  Tomorrow—Thursday, March 28—Doc will lead the rescheduled march through the middle of Memphis.

  Tonight, though, he’ll catch a couple of hours of sleep before making the early morning airport run.

  He’d like to take a break. He’d like to have a few days at home, a few days away from the pressure and the press and the overstimulation of these tumultuous public demonstrations.

  But there’s not a chance in the world that he’ll skip Memphis.

  After all, he looked the strikers in the eye and gave his word.

  His commitment to their cause is ironclad.

  Here, at the end of another crazy, draining day of overexertion, over-speaking, over-listening, his thoughts keep coming back to Memphis.

  And here, at the break of dawn, his head throbbing, so many ideas, so many dreams, so many hopes, so many fears…

  Memphis stays on his mind.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  MIDNIGHT HOUR IN MEMPHIS

  The day is done.

  The march is done.

  Doc’s world has come undone.

  The moment of triumph has turned catastrophic. What should have been a peaceful march through the heart of black Memphis to the steps of city hall exploded into a full-on riot. Looters ran wild. The police moved in with Mace, nightsticks, and tear gas. A sixteen-year-old boy was shot to death by the police. Fifty other people were injured and another 120 arrested. The governor called up four thousand National Guardsmen to restore order and the mayor virtually shut down the city.

  Doc has been subjected to violence during demonstrations many times before—but violence generated by angry whites. Now, for the first time, a march led by Martin Luther King Jr. has degenerated into violence instigated by the black demonstrators themselves.

  It could not have happened at a worse time.

  Doc saw Memphis as the place where his leadership as a committed pacifist would be firmly restored. Memphis would show militants like LeRoi Jones how peaceful protest—in contrast to indiscriminate violence—produces remarkable results. Success in Memphis would perpetuate his Poor People’s Campaign and bring in recruits by the thousands. Memphis would prove to be the glorious gateway to Washington.

  Those were Doc’s hopes when his plane landed an hour late and he was rushed to the Clayborn Temple African Methodist Church, where, at 11:05 a.m., six thousand citizens—the vast majority of whom were Negroes—began the march. Then, within minutes of turning onto fabled Beale Street, a group of young demonstrators, using sticks holding support-the-garbage-workers-themed signs, started smashing store windows.

  As chaos broke out, Doc did not want to leave; he wanted to stay and do what he could to dissuade the rioters. But he was given no choice. Officials feared for Doc’s safety and whisked him away. Unable to reach the Lorraine Motel—the police were blocking off streets in every direction—he had to be taken to the Holiday Inn Rivermont Hotel, where, some thirteen hours later, Doc is in bed, still unable to sle
ep, his spirit at the lowest ebb of his life.

  How did it happen?

  How did the hope of Memphis turn into absolute hell?

  Doc has been told that the strike leadership, both among union organizers and local black preachers, was in disarray. They had not adequately prepared the marchers. They had failed to root out the militants, particularly the instigators, a group of black youth known as the Invaders.

  But the cause hardly matters.

  Doc is distraught. Facing defeats in his past, he has often fallen into despondency. But this time the debilitation is far deeper; the blues have rendered him inert. Fully clothed, with the covers pulled over his body, he cannot sleep yet cannot get out of bed.

  Cannot imagine how his movement can possibly recover from the calamity. Cannot help but see his grand vision of a Poor People’s Campaign crumbling before his very eyes. Cannot summon forth his usual reservoir of tenacity and optimism. Cannot move. Cannot be consoled.

  In an attempt to reassure him that not all is lost, Doc’s loyal friend Stanley Levison called him after the riot. Aware that Doc is physically and emotionally exhausted, Levison wants Doc to acknowledge that the overwhelming number of marchers remained peaceful, and that only a few had turned violent. Surely Doc can take comfort in that fact.

  But comfort does not come. Levison and Abernathy and Andy Young and even Coretta cannot understand what Doc has been feeling these past weeks and months: he feels the angel of death hovering over him.

  He has spoken of it time and again, but no one really wants to take his remarks about impending doom at face value. The thought is too terrible, the prospect unthinkable.

  And yet the urgency that Doc has been feeling—the need to bring an army of impoverished blacks, whites, Latinos, and Native Americans to the doorstep of Congress—has been made all the more frantic by his sense of tragic fate. His insane schedule has been fueled by the certainty of his uncertain future. The Poor People’s Campaign is the job and the job must get done. Now the outbreak of violence in Memphis means that the job will not get done. All is lost. All Doc can do is weep and pray for sleep.