Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  The men were silent. Then Daddy King broke down sobbing. King looked at Dr. Mays, desperate for support. Deeply moved by King’s speech, Mays said, “Martin must do what he feels is right. No great leader runs away from the battle.” The others nodded in agreement. One even phoned Thurgood Marshall, general counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who promised King the best legal help available.

  At last Daddy withdrew his objections, and King felt better. He had stood up for himself against the strongest man in his life. But, characteristically, Daddy insisted on going with him when he and his family returned to Montgomery the next morning. There King found out from Abernathy that many of the boycott leaders had turned themselves in yesterday, a spectacle that had set black Montgomery ablaze with excitement. Never had the leaders made such a show of defiance and solidarity. King resolved to give himself up, too, and drove to the jail with Abernathy and his father. At the jail, “an almost holiday atmosphere prevailed,” King said, as other Negro leaders stood happily in line to get booked. King himself was photographed and fingerprinted and his trial set for March 19. At a mass meeting that night, standing before 5,000 clapping, stamping people, King cried that their movement could never be broken now.

  Sometime that day or the next, King had “a wonderful talk” with Bayard Rustin, a Negro who worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an old pacifist organization that had helped establish CORE and pioneer nonviolent direct action in the North. Rustin had come down from New York to advise the MIA on the organizational techniques of nonviolence. Forty-five now, he spoke with an elegant British accent and stood six feet three, with high cheekbones and vigorous gray hair that flared out of his head like a fountain. Born illegitimate in West Chester, Pennsylvania, he grew up in his grandparents’ home and saw his father only twice before he died in an accident. Struggling against the currents of conformity, he became a Quaker and a socialist, and he read extensively in pacifist literature. In 1938, as a student at the City College of New York, he joined the Young Communist League, only to quit when it tried to restrict his integration efforts. During World War II, he served as FOR youth secretary, helped establish CORE chapters in the North, and went to prison for twenty-eight months for resisting the draft. After the war, again affiliated with FOR, he developed a philosophical pacifism that earned him recognition as a leading radical intellectual.

  When he came to Montgomery that February, Rustin heard all the talk about Communist influences on the boycott, and he warned King that his own political history might hurt the movement. “Look,” King said, “we need everybody who can come to help us.” Besides, Rustin’s brush with Communism had happened a long time ago; he was certainly no Communist now. He became King’s adviser, helping him write speeches, filling him in on CORE and FOR direct-action operations in the North, and communicating with key figures across the country about the significance of Montgomery. King was very fond of Rustin, a bona-fide intellectual who could talk with him about philosophical matters, and enjoyed his company immensely. King had so little time to read and reflect these days, what with the boycott demanding almost all of his time, and he found Rustin a marvelous source of information on the latest studies of pacifism and nonviolence.

  Rustin was worried about King, though. “Martin,” he said one day, “I don’t see how you can make the challenge you are making here without a very real possibility of your being murdered, and I wonder if you have made your peace with that.” Rustin added: “I have the feeling the Lord has laid his hands on you, and that is a dangerous, dangerous thing.”

  According to Rustin, Daddy King made a final effort in this period to fetch his son home to Atlanta. He called King, Coretta, and Rustin to a prayer session and enlisted the Lord in his efforts to get King out of Montgomery, talking to God about how his boy had done his duty here and how the safety of his family was now the important thing. Rustin noticed that King was weeping. “Daddy,” he said, “you ought not to do this to me.” Then: “You know, I will have to pray this through myself.”

  But humiliating though it was, the prayer session proved a liberating moment in King’s life, Rustin said. After that, he was firmer with his father than Rustin had seen him before. He would say, “Now, Daddy, I know how you feel. If you want to debate this with me, I’m willing to debate it. But I want you to know that this I’ve got to do.”

  ON MARCH 19, King’s trial began in the old Montgomery County courthouse, with more than five hundred Negroes milling about outside. King entered the crumbling courtroom pursued by a gaggle of American and European reporters. He waved to Coretta, A. D., Christine, Daddy King, and friends and supporters from as far away as Michigan and New York. On the bench was Judge Eugene Carter, a stern man who taught a Bible class. Warning the mostly Negro audience that “this ain’t no vaudeville,” the judge ordered the hall cleared of spectators. But the courtroom was almost always filled with blacks, many wearing improvised white crosses that read, “Father, forgive them.”

  The first to be tried of the eighty-nine Negroes indicted by the grand jury, King sat at the front with MIA attorney Fred Gray and a battery of highpowered lawyers from Alabama and the New York office of the NAACP, which assumed King’s legal costs. Though he and his counsel had little hope for justice in a southern court, they were still well prepared, for they wanted to prove that Negroes could argue as diligently and forcefully as whites.

  In the defendant’s chair, King watched transfixed as rival white and Negro lawyers haggled over the legality of the boycott. When Mayor Gayle took the stand, a Negro attorney cunningly asked if a black defendant worked for him as a maid. “No, sir, she don’t,” the mayor said. King and the other Negroes gave a smile: a black lawyer had made a white man say “sir” to him.

  As the trial dragged on, the defense summoned a parade of witnesses to demonstrate that the Negroes had legal reason and just cause for boycotting a bus company that abused them so. One woman recounted how a policeman had shot and killed her husband after a run-in with a white driver. Another told how a driver had slammed the door on her blind husband and driven away with his leg caught in the door. The bus went some distance before the man got free. King felt a tender sadness as these “simple people—most of them unlettered—sat on the witness stand without fear and told their stories.” Then it was King’s turn to take the stand. He was self-possessed and forthright as the prosecution interrogated him. When he stepped down, the Negroes in the courtroom applauded so loudly that the judge had to pound his gavel for order.

  On March 22 the rival lawyers gave their summations. At once the judge found King guilty and fined him $500 and court costs—equivalent of 386 days at hard labor. Surprised at the speed of the verdict, King’s attorneys made it clear that they would appeal; and the judge entered a continuance for the other indicted Negro leaders, until final appeal action in King’s case. When a reporter asked him about King and the boycotters, the judge grunted that “they didn’t seem like Communists.”

  As King left the courtroom, newsmen bombarded him with questions: Would he call off the boycott? What were his plans now? King had pulled his hat down tightly on his head and clenched his right fist. “The judge’s verdict will not increase or decrease in any way my interest in the protest. The protest goes on!” At sight of King, the crowd outside broke into cheers. “Hail King!” a Negro cried. “Hail the King!” someone else shouted. “King is King!” yelled another.

  King was smiling when he drove away. He was proud to be a convicted criminal and proud of his crime. It was the crime of leading a nonviolent protest against injustice and trying to instill a new self-respect in his people. On this cloudy afternoon, he thought, Judge Carter had convicted more than Martin Luther King, Jr., case number 7399. He had convicted every Negro in Montgomery. For they were all bound together in a common purpose, drawn close by their shared trials and by the tactics of their opponents. Their opponents could not understand what was going on in Montgomery because their methods were aimed at the old Ne
gro. But they were dealing with a new Negro in the South today, a Negro “with a new sense of dignity and destiny.”

  KING’S ARREST AND TRIAL made the boycott national front-page news and brought reporters streaming into town to cover the Negro mass movement now rocking the cradle of the Confederacy. “This city became an international stamping grounds for newspapermen from everywhere,” said B. J. Simms. They came from all over America, from England, France, and India, from China, Japan, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

  The big story, of course, was King, and reporters and television people swarmed after him like hornets. King handled them with great eclat, for he understood the power of a favorable press. In one press conference, a reporter asked about the Communist charge, and King “proceeded to give a perfectly beautiful little thumbnail sketch of the development of Marxism and how he differed from this,” said an adviser from FOR. “He used with ease and explained carefully the teachings of Feuerbach, Hegel, Marx, Engels, and so on, just very casually and easily. Then he said that he, himself, was a man of nonviolence.” The reporters were enthralled. They had never met a Negro like King in their lives.

  Neither had people who witnessed him on television. Neither had they seen a Negro speak with such eloquence and erudition about the promise of America and the aspirations of “her citizens of color” to gain their full citizenship. “We were then, without knowing it, into the era of electronic perception of the world and our own history,” wrote a sensitive white journalist named Pat Watters, a southerner. King’s ringing oratory, carried into millions of homes by the power of television, electrified an entire generation of Negro Americans, especially the young, who sent love letters cascading into his home and church office. “THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU,” wrote a young woman from the Bronx in New York. “You are truly a remarkable person; a great leader and a courageous fellow citizen. We are all very proud of you as our leader in the fight for human dignity.” Everywhere she went in New York black people were talking about King. “For years to come—for centuries hence—as long as human existence—the name of Martin Luther King, Jr., will sing triumphantly in the hearts and souls of mankind.” And whites wrote him, too, praising his “wise and statesmanlike leadership” and his “success in leading your people through one of the world’s greatest tribulations.” But it was the black masses that he touched the most, for he gave them (as Harry Belafonte phrased it) a “personal direction and…a personal sense of hope and identity.”

  But there was hate mail as always, a blizzard of racist diatribes from as far away as California and Maine. Clearly King was getting to American segregationists, or they would not have responded to him with such desperate bombast and at such length. Some of these letters ran from ten to twenty pages. Remarkably enough, King answered some of his hateful correspondents. He would thank them for taking the time to write him, though “I must confess that I am in total disagreement with your views.” Then he would set their views straight with a calm and judicious argument, citing in particular New Testament passages which demonstrated “that segregation is a tragic evil that is unchristian.”

  But he was getting tired from all his work, extremely tired. “Frankly, I worry about him,” Coretta told a reporter. “He never has a minute to himself. When he isn’t in court, he is attending meetings of the MIA. When he’s home, he’s always on the phone. People call him from all over the country. I try to protect him as much as possible so that he can rest, but there is little that I can do.” Though he had once required seven to eight hours of sleep, he now got by on a few hours a night. Sometimes he would get so tired that he would put his head on his desk for a catnap, or pull two chairs together and lie down for a few precious moments of oblivion. But most of the time, he wrote Rustin, “I find myself so involved I hardly have time to breathe.”

  His work was so overwhelming that he could no longer do it alone. Consequently the MIA provided him with a permanent office and an executive assistant and secretaries to answer his phone, deal with his voluminous correspondence, and account for contributions, which poured in from all over the world. The largest donors were church groups, especially Negro churches. But money came from various other organizations too—$2,000 from A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, $1,000 from the National Negro Funeral Directors Association, and thousands of dollars from NAACP national and local chapters. King, for his part, was scrupulously honest in handling contributions. “In the position that I find myself in at this time,” he wrote, “I am extremely vulnerable, and it is necessary to be extremely cautious.”

  In May and June there was a flurry of court activity about the buses. First, the Montgomery bus company dropped its segregated seating policy, only to be overruled by an order from an Alabama circuit court that segregation on the buses must continue. Two days later, on May 11, King was in federal court when a three-judge panel opened hearings on the case the MIA had filed in February, which claimed that bus segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment. For King, it was a relief to be in a federal court, what with the “tragic sabotage of justice in the city and state courts of the South.” But in the federal courts the Negro had an honest chance for justice. In June the federal panel ruled that the Alabama bus laws were unconstitutional, and lawyers for the city of Montgomery at once filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Montgomery now operated under conflicting court orders—one from a federal court against segregated buses, another from a state court maintaining Jim Crow seating patterns. The issue would have to be settled by the U.S. Supreme Court, as Nixon had wanted all along.

  Meanwhile King set out on a grueling coast-to-coast speaking tour that lasted through the spring and summer. His national fame brought people flocking to churches, auditoriums, and convention halls, to hear him relate “The Montgomery Story” and expound a world view of great historical and spiritual insight. The Negroes of Montgomery, he told his audiences, are proving how far we have come since the Negro first landed in America in 1619, only to end up as the white man’s slave—as “a depersonalized cog in a vast plantation machine.” In time Negroes lost faith in themselves and succumbed to the white-supremacist argument that they were nobody, a race of inferiors. “The tragedy of physical slavery was that it gradually led to the paralysis of mental slavery,” King said; “the Negroes’ mind and soul became enslaved.” But there were whites who had a nagging conscience and realized what a monstrous moral contradiction it was that slavery should exist in a country based on the proposition that all men are created equal. There was Thomas Jefferson, who wrote of slavery that “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” There was Abraham Lincoln—King’s favorite white hero—who overcame his vacillations about slavery and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. But emancipation did not bring full freedom to the Negro, for “the pharaohs of the South,” supported by the U.S. Supreme Court, shackled him with racial segregation, “a new form of slavery disguised by certain niceties of complexity.” And too many Negroes accepted their “place” in the Jim Crow system, thus becoming a party to “a pagan peace” that lasted well into the twentieth century.

  But then something happened to the Negro, King said. He renounced this pagan peace and started fighting for his rights in the federal courts. At the same time, Negro veterans returning from World War II demanded justice in a country that had fought a war in part against racism, and Negroes themselves battled for the right to vote. Then came the Montgomery bus boycott, a mass movement that ignited ordinary black people and brought them for the first time into the struggle for equality. Yes, something happened to the Negro, and it was the realization that he was somebody.

  Still, King warned, we must be realistic in our movement. We must avoid extreme optimism—the notion that “we have come a long way” and have nothing to do but await the inevitable. We must also avoid extreme pessimism—the notion that “we have come nowhere” and can do nothing to alter our lives. We must say realistically that we have come a long way, but still h
ave a long way to go. We must realize that change does not roll in “on the wheels of inevitability,” but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our own freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent. We stand today between two worlds—the dying old order and the emerging new. With men of ill will greeting this change with cries of violence, some of us may get beaten. Some of us may even get killed. But we’re not going to stop until we’ve won our full freedom now—in this century—and redeemed the soul of America. Today, psychologists have a favorite word, and that word is maladjusted. I tell you today that there are some things in our social system to which I am proud to be maladjusted. I shall never be adjusted to lynch mobs, segregation, economic inequalities, “the madness of militarism,” and self-defeating physical violence. The salvation of the world lies in the maladjusted. By resisting nonviolently, with love and unrelenting courage, we Negroes can speed up the coming of a new world “in which men will live together as brothers; a world in which men will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; a world in which men will no longer take necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes; a world in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of all human personality.”