by Garry Wills
After each sentence there is a high sobbing response. He has touched just the right chords for that day and that place.
Bevel speaks to an even larger crowd the next day, and speaks well, but not with the magic of the moment in that first speech. After this second sermon, I go up and ask Bevel for an interview. He brushes past me, saying he has no time for that; he has to get ready for the funeral in Atlanta. Mrs. King is conferring with Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, and others. They are preparing for a memorial march in Memphis before going to Atlanta for the burial (Robert Kennedy has chartered a plane to take them there). The SCLC leadership seems to be neglecting the sanitation strikers. The union spokesman, a rotund little garbageman named T. O. Jones, tells me that SCLC leaders promised to arrange for a fleet of buses to take them to the funeral in Atlanta, but T.O. has trouble confirming the arrangements. A hundred and fifty or so are supposed to gather at Clayborn Temple, the unofficial headquarters of the strike, on Monday, April 8, bringing their best clothes to wear at the funeral when they reach Atlanta.
But at nightfall, long after the buses were to be there, none have come. Some white clergymen, able to move around in the curfew, manage to scout up three buses—not enough for the crowd. The only way to fit everybody into the three is to take folding chairs from the church and line them up in the bus aisles as the regular seats are filled in. A person must take a chair with him or her to the back and sit in it, followed by another person with a chair, carrying it and sitting, leaving minimal space for knees and feet. I ask if one journalist can be fitted in, and T.O. assures me I can. They welcome the only white person in their midst.
The trip was long—ten hours—but it passed quickly in joint musings, hymn singing, and laments for King. To get to Atlanta, the buses had to dip down into Mississippi, then cut across Alabama, going on into Georgia. When a man said we were now in Mississippi, a woman moaned, “Oh no.”
T.O. worried what would happen in Mississippi if some white hotheads saw 150 blacks debouching from buses in the middle of the night. He decided that rest stops should take place in isolated places, where unwelcome company was least to be expected. The buses could not stop at gas stations with restrooms. There were restrooms in the back of only two buses. The aisles of those two had to be cleared, while men used the john in one and women used that in the other. Then the chairs had to be replaced, one by one. Some men naturally tried to go behind a tree to relieve themselves, but T.O. did not want them exposed singly to any passersby, and he herded them back to the johns on board.
The strikers and their wives arrived in Atlanta, rumpled and tired, on Tuesday morning, too late to file by the casket that lay in state at Spelman College, or for the funeral service held at Ebenezer Church. They had no time or place to change into their good clothes. Two men rushed the wreath they had brought, a tribute from the strikers, over to the church. The rest watched on the street the funeral procession to South View Cemetery. The casket was carried on a wooden farm cart drawn by mules, followed by a huge procession filled with dignitaries, including some of that year’s presidential candidates: Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, John Lindsay, and Hubert Humphrey. The burial over, the strikers and their wives went back to their buses for the ten-hour return trip to Memphis.
After Dr. King’s death the SCLC people had to complete the Poor People’s Campaign he had begun. They lobbied in Washington for the Economic Bill of Rights. Bevel was active in this effort, and he decided to make Washington his headquarters when it ended. While he was there, someone brought to his attention what by then I had written in Esquire about his great Memphis speech. He called me in Baltimore and invited me to come see him in Washington. I said I was busy at the time, so he asked to come visit my home. I said I would be glad to see him. He arrived in his neatly tailored coat with a cape over it, hugged me, beamed: “Brother Garry!” Hugged my wife: “Sister Natalie!” I hung up the coat and cloak in the closet, then he got on the case.
He was founding a new organization, MAN, an acronym for Making a Nation. He was planning a one-man march from Washington to the UN building in New York, to demand that a separate black nation be created in America. He wanted me to accompany him on the march as he stopped at various cities to speak. I was to record his exploits in a book. He would give me 10 percent of the royalties. I said I had other writing projects I could not interrupt. He protested, “You owe it to the movement. It needs you. Your talent should be dedicated to this great cause.” He was good with words, and a seductive demagogue. But I still resisted, and he said he would give me 50 percent of the book’s profits. No. Finally, he said I could keep all the proceeds—this would be his own donation to the cause. When it became clear that he was not going to get his way, without a word he got up, went to the closet, took his coat and cloak, and left. No good-bye. No Brother Garry. No Sister Natalie.
It was the last I ever saw of him, but I heard of him over subsequent years as he grew more weird and exotic. He became a Republican congressional candidate in 1984, and the vice-presidential candidate of Lyndon LaRouche′s party in 1992. In 2007, three of his daughters, who had been sexually molested by him in their youth, decided his youngest daughter should be protected from him. (He admitted at this time that he had sired sixteen children from seven women.) One daughter let Virginia police record a phone call as he admitted that he had had intercourse with her and administered a vaginal douche afterward. That was enough to convict him of incest in 2008. There is no statute of limitations for incest in Virginia, and it took the jury only three hours to convict him. The judge fined him fifty thousand dollars and sentenced him to fifteen years in prison, though he died of cancer while trying to mount an appeal.
My experience with other men who worked with Dr. King was far happier than my brush with Bevel. I especially came to admire Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson, who were initially less important to the SCLC than Bevel but were ultimately more solid in support of Dr. King’s goals. Once, when I went to visit Young during his time as mayor of Atlanta, the black cabdriver taking me to City Hall said, “I don’t like that place. Just about all the people there are preachers—or lay deacons, which is worse.” I said that these were preachers who had gone to jail. “That’s the trouble. They’re trying to put everyone else in jail, just because they went.” When I repeated this conversation to Young, he laughed and said the man was almost right—he reeled off the names of all his aides and appointees who were veterans of the SCLC or other civil rights ministries. I asked about the claim that he wanted to put other people in jail. He explained that the cabdrivers were angry at him for new restrictions on rapacious drivers or those ignorant of the city.
Young came to the civil rights movement as a comparative outsider, but he turned that position into an advantage. Like Obama after him, he was accused of not being black enough. Other SCLC leaders were Baptists; Young is a Congregationalist, trained in the North (at Connecticut’s Hartford Seminary). Others, like Bevel, Ralph Abernathy, and Hosea Williams, had rural and hardscrabble childhoods in the Cotton South. Young was the son of a prosperous dentist in cosmopolitan New Orleans. His father had white as well as black patients, and some patients (like Louis Armstrong) were celebrities. Both of Young’s parents were college graduates, and he was mocked by other blacks in grade school for being too snooty and middle-class. Young told me that his mother and father were not interested in black culture—a thing one might have guessed from the fact that they named him Andrew Jackson Young after the white president.
Young originally became a minister with the goal of doing missionary work in Angola, as one of his pastor mentors had done, but by the time he was ready to go there the Angolan government was banning Christian missionaries. Young went to work for the National Council of Churches in New York, running youth outreach projects. From there he wrote to Dr. King (whom he had not yet met) asking for advice on contributing to the civil rights movement. When he flew into Tennessee to join in a voter-registration drive, he arrived in a chartered plane
. The down-to-earth organizer Septima Clark let him know this was no way to join dirt-poor people getting literacy qualifications in order to vote.
Young would continue to have problems being accepted by people like Hosea Williams, but King knew exactly how to use Young’s quasi-outsider status. Williams would mock Young for going to jail so infrequently (only three times), but King wanted him outside when King was inside. They became the Blanchard and Davis of the movement, “Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside.” (Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis, both Heisman Trophy winners on the same West Point football team, made thirty-eight touch-downs between them, Blanchard plunging through the line as Mr. Inside, Davis sweeping around the end as Mr. Outside.) King wanted Young to be outside negotiating with authorities and publicizing what he was doing in jail. Young told me that he tried to keep sheriffs and the FBI informed of the SCLC′s plans, to prevent violent reactions to surprise. His diplomatic role made Hosea Williams charge him with being an FBI plant—and the needling finally brought the nonviolent Young to fisticuffs.
I went back to Atlanta in 1990 to report on Young’s race for governor. He had been re-elected twice as mayor of Atlanta (the second time with 80 percent of the vote), but in a statewide race for governor he was having trouble with the white rural areas of Georgia. Taking no security detail with him, he drove me around the city in his own car, pointing out projects for which he had brought in funding, the Underground Atlanta stores he had brought back. He took me to Jimmy Carter’s presidential library. Young had worked mightily to bring the summer Olympics to Atlanta, but the Olympics board had not yet announced its decision by Georgia’s election day. If it had, Young might have beat Zell Miller in the gubernatorial race, but he was losing when I talked with him.
I asked Young why he had reversed his earlier stance against capital punishment, though his daughter remained a passionate activist against execution. I had just come from covering Dianne Feinstein’s campaign for governor in California. She too had changed her views on capital punishment, after having opposed it while serving on the state’s parole board. I asked her why she switched her stand. She said she had read recent studies that proved capital punishment is in fact a deterrent to crime. I said I had read much of the recent material that reached an opposite conclusion. Which studies was she referring to? She said she could not remember them, but would send me their titles (she never did). Had Young become convinced that executions are a deterrent? No, he said; but the anger of his police officers who caught murderers and saw them get life sentences, with the possibility of parole, made him feel he had to recognize their feelings, for the sake of their morale. The price Mario Cuomo had paid in New York for his principled opposition to the death penalty had been studied by others running for governor in their states.
Though Young never became governor, his services to Dr. King will live in history, and his implementation of President Carter’s human rights policies while Young was the ambassador to the UN was a kind of late fulfillment in Africa of his early longing to go to Angola.
I came to know Jesse Jackson better than Andrew Young. Jackson, in fact, asked me twice to ghostwrite his memoirs. He had the contract for a book, and Frank Watkins, the man who ghostwrote his newspaper columns, had drafted a proposal, but the publisher was displeased with it. Memoirs by veterans of the civil rights movement were a touchy subject. Young refused to write one—his book was about the goals of the movement. Young would not even talk with Taylor Branch while he was writing the first volume of his great biography of Dr. King—only after he saw how profound was Branch’s respect in the first volume did he cooperate on the next two volumes.
The civil rights movement, occurring in the turbulent sixties, with young people carried away by passion and the fear of death, had some scandals that people wanted to hide. After Ralph Abernathy’s book referred in a gingerly way to Dr. King’s sexual affairs, Coretta King froze him out of the King community. Bevel’s weirder antics were even more embarrassing. And in a homophobic time, Bayard Rustin’s gay life, though well known to journalists and others, was not explicitly mentioned for a long time. There were also jealousies and backbiting, like that between Hosea Williams and Young or between Bevel and Jesse Jackson.
I followed Jackson in his first quest for president, in 1984, beginning with his “exploratory” trips, when I was the only journalist with him on commercial airline flights. He went back to schools that he had visited at a time after Dr. King’s death, when the civil rights movement seemed to have faded away. One teacher told me she always welcomed him back, since students were more earnest, at least for a while, after he gave them his pep talks on black achievement. “They did their homework, they wanted better grades.” Jackson told the students they had to better themselves, no one else would do it for them. There were some years in the seventies when his was the only voice these students would hear from a civil rights leader.
That became clear when, on the floor of the 1984 Democratic convention in San Francisco, Andrew Young was booed by some black delegates. Leaders called an emergency black caucus meeting to repair the damage done to their solidarity. But when Coretta King rose to demand an apology to Young, she was booed also. Young slipped away, out the back of the stage. A young black delegate standing next to me shouted at Mrs. King, “That was yesterday. What have you done for us today?” A panicky call went out to Jesse Jackson. When he arrived, he stormed onto the stage next to Mrs. King and gave the assembled young delegates a tongue-lashing. “How dare you show disrespect to this woman, whose husband was killed, whose children were threatened, working for the rights of blacks?” After he had silenced the flashy young delegates, he called many onto the stage to lock arms and sing “We Shall Overcome.” No other leader had, at that time, the credentials with young blacks to pull off that act of reconciliation.
I saw Jackson’s approach to the young when I went with him, during that exploratory campaign, to see his son Jesse Jr. play football at St. Albans prep school in the District of Columbia. Jackson was up and down the sidelines cheering his son on, and Jesse Jr. ran well, but not well enough for his team to win. The other side had an even better black runner. At the end of the game, Jackson raced over to the other side to talk with the young star. “You’re a great runner. What’s your time in the hundred-yard dash?” “Oh, I don’t know,” he answered, “but I’m fast.” “What about the grades?” “Not so good.” “Well, you know, there will be a time when you aren’t so fast anymore. Then you’ll wish you had studied more, to be good in other ways.” The boy said he would try. As we walked away, Jackson chortled to me, “Don’t you love it? ‘I’m fast.’ ” He was taking great pride in the kid’s pride.
Jackson impressed on his own son the need for study. When Jesse Jr. entered Congress, he took his oath of office in Spanish. When a journalist asked him why, the new representative said, “My father told me he was embarrassed to travel the world and be unable to speak any language but English. He had studied French in college, but not enough to command the language. He made me promise I would learn at least one other language.” I remembered the teacher who had told me her students studied harder after Jackson warmed up her classroom with the chant “I am—somebody!” The country is full of people who stood a little taller in their youth because of Jesse Jackson.
3
Dallas
Ovid Demaris said that he never saw me looking more out of place than when I sat on the floor of a stripper’s changing room, under a rack of scanty clothes, while “Tami True” came offstage and threw a robe over her pasties. We were soon joined by Bill Willis, who had been underlining Tami’s bumps and grinds with his drums. Tami pouted that Bill “takes limits,” which meant he forgot his rhythms while composing plays in his head. We were in Barney Weinstein’s Theater Lounge, one of the rivals to Jack Ruby’s Carousel strip joint, and Weinstein had inherited Tami and Bill, with other entertainers, after the police closed the Carousel. These Carousel veterans loved to tell Jack Ruby stories—he was a clumsy b
ut lovable clown in their eyes. He was too impulsive and undisciplined to be a trustworthy member of any conspiracy.
Bill Willis, a bodybuilder who won the title Mr. Texas, was supposed to be a bouncer as well as the club’s drummer, but he said that Jack often got to a troublemaker and threw him out before Bill could get off the stage and do the job. Ruby cultivated the police, haunted their headquarters, taking them coffee, giving them free tickets to his club. He often carried a gun because he took the money from the club to the bank every day. My friend Ovid, who was in Dallas writing about organized crime at the time of the assassination of Kennedy, had stood around for hours waiting for Oswald to be brought out into the police garage. He told me there was no way to know exactly when that would happen, and Ruby—who had run some ordinary errands just before—happened to come into the garage when Oswald appeared. None of those who knew Ruby thought he was capable of a deliberate plan. He just reacted as he did when throwing a troublemaker out of the Carousel.
Ovid and I were in Dallas in 1966 because Harold Hayes, the brilliant editor of Esquire in its glory days of the sixties, sent us there to write about Ruby. Ovid was a former police reporter who knew Dallas well. Hayes admired his ability to get interviews with elusive characters but did not think he wrote very well. Hayes believed that if anyone could arrange an interview with Ruby, it was Ovid. Hayes’s plan was that Ovid would set up an interview with Ruby and I would conduct the interview and write it up. None of us knew, when this article was conceived, that Ruby was about to be diagnosed with terminal cancer and the authorities would cut off all access to him.
I was still teaching Greek at Johns Hopkins, so the interview was supposed to be arranged for my Christmas break. Ovid had spent several weeks lining up his old contacts in Dallas. It soon became clear to him that we would not get to Ruby, but he did not want to tell Hayes that, since he was collecting a vast body of material—from a colorful cast of people who had known Ruby: from the Dallas establishment; from the city’s strip-joint underworld; from those who had participated in Ruby’s arrest and trial. He felt that, if I agreed with him, he could justify the project in ways that Hayes had not envisaged. I went to Dallas from Baltimore at the beginning of my extended Christmas break (Hopkins had a “minimester” before the resumption of regular classes). This was the first Christmas I would be away from my family. (The next one would also be caused by Hayes.) Ovid sat me down to hear tapes he had made with the district attorney and city prosecutor, with some of Ruby’s defense attorneys, with a motley assortment of businessmen (including Stanley Marcus), with strippers, police pals of Ruby, and others. Though Ovid had not got to Ruby, he seemed to have set up cordial relations with everybody who had anything to do with Ruby’s club life and shady acquaintances. He suggested I go see any of these people I thought promising for an article.
