Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  After King’s speech, several people lingered to talk. Among them were two whites who had come down to run seminars in the institute: Paul Simon, a young Democratic state legislator from Illinois, and Harris Wofford, a prominent Washington attorney who had studied Gandhi and advised King on his projected trip to India. The group got to discussing King’s enormous popularity. “Don’t you worry about our deifying Martin,” said a local Negro preacher. “He’s a great leader but Jesus Christ is the captain [of] our ship.”

  “It would help, though,” a King friend said, “if he did something to curtail this hero-worship, a few jokes to show that he knows he’s not a messiah.”

  “He knows it,” a third man said. “He has a sense of humility and awe at what has happened to him, but he also has a sense of destiny. He sees himself as an instrument of history—of God—and is very earnest about finding and doing his duty.”

  King joined his friends. He complained about the difficulties of being a leader. “I haven’t read a book—really sat down and read a book—for a year.” And all the requests and demands on his time were getting him down. “Sometimes I accept an engagement just to get people off my back because I know if I say No they will be inviting me again a month later.” He had a secretary to screen his calls, but black leaders tended to resent this. Said one organizational head a few days before: “Don’t talk with me through no secy-tary. I’m as big as you are, King.”

  “There’s a lot of jealousy of Martin among Negro leaders,” a friend added. “Negro leadership is still the barrel of crabs that Booker T. Washington described. King is the youngest crab and the others near the top are afraid he is going to pull them down on his way up. And then a lot of people honestly disagree with him. They don’t like all the acclaim he is getting, because they oppose his religious approach. They want us to rely on good lawyers rather than to look for an American Gandhi.”

  On the way out of the church, Simon asked Coretta if King was always so electrifying a speaker. “Sometimes he’s even better,” she said, and smiled. But behind her cheerful veneer Coretta was worried about King’s safety. She confessed to Mrs. Wofford that she had a recurring nightmare in which her husband was killed.

  AFTER THE INSTITUTE, King tried desperately to make some headway on his Montgomery book. Now represented by Marie Rodell’s New York literary agency, which negotiated his contract with Harper & Brothers, King discovered what it was like to do business with big-time commercial publishing. “We have been growing more and more concerned as no further copy from you has come in,” Rodell wrote him in mid-December. “We had hoped to have the entire first draft long before this. I know your illness caused some delay beyond your control, but time is slipping by fast. It is of the utmost importance that the book come out by next September, while the memory of the Montgomery protest is still fresh on every one’s mind, and when, with the opening of school, the whole integration problem will be front-page news. It would be a pity—and I think represent a sizable loss in sales—to bring it out any later than that.” The agency must have the manuscript by March 15—only four months away.

  Faced with such a horrendous deadline, King hid out in an Atlanta hotel and toiled on his book in a wilderness of paper. One night a friend brought a visitor by—novelist James Baldwin, heralded as the most talented Negro writer to appear since Richard Wright. King was quite taken with this delicate man, whose large, kind eyes took in everything. As they chatted about King’s leadership, Baldwin found him “immediately and tremendously winning,” but observed that King did not like to talk about himself. Baldwin felt as though King were “a younger, much-loved, and menaced brother,” and thought him “very slight and vulnerable to be taking on such tremendous odds.”

  For now, the worst odds seemed to be the completion of his book. With New York badgering him to distraction to get it done, King prevailed on Lawrence D. Reddick, an Alabama State history professor, to help him do background research and check facts. And he begged New York to understand the hell he was going through, what with trying to write a book and plan SCLC’s Crusade for Citizenship all at the same time. “It would be a great pity,” Reddick wrote Rodell in King’s behalf, “if so many demanded so much of him that hassled and harried he will not be able to do anything well—and never fulfill his bright promise.”

  In February, 1958, King abandoned his composition and devoted his energies to the Crusade for Citizenship, designed to double the number of Negro voters by 1960, a presidential election year. “We feel that one of the most decisive steps that the Negro can take at this time is that short walk to the voting booth,” King said.

  The crusade began on Lincoln’s birthday, 1958, with twenty mass meetings taking place simultaneously in major cities across Dixie. King himself turned up at a mass meeting in Miami, Florida, to give a hardhitting speech on Negro voting rights. “Let us make our intentions crystal clear,” he declared. “We must and we will be free. We want freedom now. We want the right to vote now. We do not want freedom fed to us in teaspoons over another 150 years. Under God we were born free. Misguided men robbed us of our freedom. We want it back.”

  He rapped Negroes for their own “shameless indifference” to voting and contended that Negro apathy today was “a form of moral and political suicide.” He also castigated the federal government for hypocritically advocating free elections in Europe while tolerating Negro disenfranchisement at home. If democracy was to win its rightful place in the world, “millions of people, Negro and white, must stand before the world as examples of democracy in action, not as voteless victims of the denial and corruption of our heritage.”

  Then he appealed to southern white moderates, insisting that they and not the Senator Eastlands truly represented Dixie. “We Southerners, Negro and white, must no longer permit our nation and our heritage to be dishonored before the world,” King said. “We have a moral obligation to carry out. We have the duty to remove from political domination a small minority that cripples the economic and social institutions of our nation and thereby degrades and impoverishes everyone.”

  It was a fitting speech for Lincoln’s birthday, recalling as it did Lincoln’s own defenses of popular government as a noble experiment marred by slavery and threatened by southern reactionaries of his time.

  And so the Crusade for Citizenship was on, with SCLC exhorting affiliate churches to run voting clinics and canvass Negro neighborhoods, urging all eligible Negroes to turn out for voter registration. Alas, the crusade added few new Negro voters that spring, but it did stimulate local groups already in the field. Later Atlanta blacks launched a voter-registration campaign, and King lent his support, his heart “throbbing for joy” because Atlanta was his home. “If Atlanta succeeds,” he said, “the South will succeed. If Atlanta fails, the South will fail, for Atlanta is the South in miniature.”

  IT SEEMED THAT HE HAD NO PRIVATE LIFE any more. He felt consumed by the movement, transformed into its most visible and sought-after public figure. He spoke in all directions for the NAACP, solicited contributions for CORE and served on its advisory board, and gave stemwinding SCLC speeches in churches and auditoriums from one coast to the other. He was the leading fund raiser for SCLC and the other major Negro organizations—”a helpful hand from you,” wrote a thankful NAACP official, “is ten, twenty-five, one hundred times more productive than that of countless other friends.”

  But he had his critics, too. When he preached Negro self-help in Los Angeles, a black newspaper accused him of becoming the white man’s lackey and selling Negroes a “dolled-up Uncle Tomism” reminiscent of Booker T. Washington. King expected flak from Negroes who disagreed with him—that went with being a big-time leader. But it still hurt him that anyone should think him an Uncle Tom.

  Back in Montgomery, he tried to work on his book, but despaired of ever completing a first draft with all his other obligations. In desperation, he secured the services of a former Harper editor named Hermine Popper, who polished chapter drafts King sent her. Sh
e was not a ghostwriter; she functioned officially as his “editorial associate,” tightening his prose, deleting repetitious material, and dividing excessively long chapters—corrections King himself would have made had he had the time. In whatever changes she made, though, she took pains to retain King’s style and language. But it was still a marathon effort to get the manuscript completed, with Levison, Rustin, and others offering advice and criticism. On separate occasions, Marie Rodell and Popper even flew to Montgomery to expedite King’s composition. “Dr. King has been under terrific pressure this year,” his secretary noted in April. “The writing on his book which has an almost immediate date for press time, his heavy speaking schedule and the pressure from his own community have all taken their toll on him. His physician is urging him to slow down.”

  But he could not slow down. There was the Easter sermon to give at Dexter and SCLC meetings to attend on the Crusade for Citizenship. Meanwhile New York wanted revisions in his manuscript and more anecdotal and descriptive material to enliven the story. For his part, Harper editor Melvin Arnold was anxious about a passage in which King assessed the failures of both Communism and capitalism, for Arnold wanted nothing said in the book that could be construed as friendly to Communism. Accordingly, Arnold asked King to change “my response to Communism was negative” to “my response to Communism was and is negative.” King made the change because that was exactly his sentiment. As for his remarks about capitalism (it failed to see “the truth in collective enterprise,” failed to see that “life is social”), Arnold and Popper both thought him wrong. They urged him to distinguish between nineteenth-century European capitalism, which Marx assailed, and modern American capitalism, which in their view had developed a sense of social responsibility in order to survive. King refused to make that distinction outright; his “anticapitalist feelings” would not permit him to do so. He settled for references only to the weaknesses of “traditional” or “nineteenth-century” capitalism, and in May sent off his final revisions to New York. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story was done, and King was exhausted from the effort. His advance came to $3,500, out of which he paid Popper $2,000 for her editorial labors.

  A slim and simply written book, Stride Toward Freedom was partly the story of the bus boycott, partly an autobiography, and partly an argument for nonviolence and racial change. King opened with a dramatic account of his return to the South in 1954 and what it was like to live in Montgomery as a Negro. Then he plunged into the story of the boycott itself, from Rosa Parks’s momentous arrest down to “Desegregation at Last,” with an interim chapter on his own “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” at Crozer and Boston University. Throughout, King was careful not to overplay his own role in the protest. He was the central figure, to be sure. But the real hero was the new Negro in Dixie, who, in a time of world-wide revolutionary ferment, straightened his back and started battling for his own freedom. The spirit of the age was at work in Montgomery, moving in Rosa Parks, then in Nixon and the established leaders, then in King in his response to them. Then it ignited the people and propelled King himself to the forefront of the struggle. Though he did not say so in his book, he often thought that the Zeitgeist had been tracking him down all along, since he had come south in the same year as the Brown decision, at a time when the Negro masses were beginning to stir. As it turned out, the young preacher who had studied Gandhi and Christian activism in college was ideally prepared for the kind of moral leadership thrust on him in Montgomery. King became the voice and symbol of the nonviolent movement, a historical figure identified with the truth of his age.

  The last chapter—”Where Do We Go from Here?”—brimmed with trenchant insights into America’s historical crisis at midcentury. “The crisis developed,” King wrote, “when the most sublime principles of American democracy—imperfectly realized for almost two centuries—began fulfilling themselves and met with the brutal resistance of forces seeking to contract and repress freedom’s growth.” Americans of King’s generation then faced a crucial choice. “We can choose either to walk the high road of human brotherhood or to tread the low road of man’s inhumanity to man.” “History has thrust on our generation an indescribably important destiny—to complete a process of democratization which our nation has too long developed too slowly.”

  King went on to list the agencies—the federal government, labor unions, northern white liberals and southern white moderates, the church, and the Negro himself—that could produce meaningful change in American race relations. But King bristled at the hypocrisy of the church. “How often the church has had a high blood count of creeds and an anemia of deeds!” He quoted Dean Listen Pope of Yale Divinity School: “The church is the most segregated major institution in American society,” one that lagged behind courts, schools, and even department stores when it came to desegregation. What an appalling irony it was “that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, the same hour when many are standing to sing, ‘In Christ there is no East nor West.’ ”

  Still, it was a great time for America’s long-maligned Negro. “To become the instruments of a great idea is a privilege that history gives only occasionally. Arnold Toynbee says in A Study of History that it may be the Negro who will give the new spiritual dynamic to Western civilization that it so desperately needs to survive. I hope this is possible. The spiritual power that the Negro can radiate to the world comes from love, understanding, good will, and nonviolence. It may even be possible for the Negro, through adherence to nonviolence, so to challenge the nations of the world that they will seriously seek an alternative to war and destruction. In a day when Sputniks and Explorers dash through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, nobody can win a war. Today the choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. The Negro may be God’s appeal to this age—an age drifting rapidly to its doom. The eternal appeal takes the form of a warning: ‘All who take the sword will perish by the sword.’ ”

  ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 23, 1958, King, Randolph, Wilkins, and Lester Granger of the National Urban League met with the President in a White House reception room. SCLC had persuaded Eisenhower to grant King an audience, and he and his associates had put together a six-page statement about what American Negroes wanted from their President. With Eisenhower standing at attention, Randolph read the statement in his melodious voice, urging that the President announce to the nation that he would uphold the Brown decision and the 1957 Civil Rights Act, press Congress to pass even more effective civil-rights legislation, safeguard the right of Negroes to vote and protect them from bombs and terrorism, and cut off federal funds to states that maintained segregated public facilities. The Negroes made it clear that they were unhappy with the administration’s lackluster record in civil rights, and Eisenhower said he was surprised that they felt that way. King could scarcely believe what he heard. Did the President think them happy with his refusal to endorse school integration, happy with his lack of moral fervor and vigorous leadership in the crucial area of civil rights? Eisenhower spoke in generalities about how all citizens should have their rights, but he would not commit himself to a single point in the Negroes’ statement. As the meeting broke up, he found King near him and sighed, “Reverend, there are so many problems…Lebanon, Algeria…”

  King was disgusted with Eisenhower. Though King thought he seemed sincerely interested in the Negro, he had no idea how to translate that into public policy, or even to define civil rights as a domestic issue. “Moreover,” King said, “President Eisenhower could not be committed to anything which involved a structural change in the architecture of American society. His conservatism was fixed and rigid, and any evil defacing the nation had to be extracted bit by bit with a tweezer because the surgeon’s knife was an instrument too radical to touch this best of all possible societies.”

  In July King and Coretta escaped to Mexico for a vacation—their
first real vacation since their marriage. King enjoyed the unhurried two weeks they spent in Mexico, but the poverty there made him “alternately rage and despair,” Coretta said. Then it was home to his unrelenting schedule, including a conference with Harper & Brothers about the promotional campaign for his book; Harper planned a first printing of 30,000 copies. King himself sent inscribed advance copies to Eisenhower, Nixon, Truman, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and other notables. And he prevailed on influential figures (Ralph Bunche of the United Nations, Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution) to write reviews.

  King had scarcely returned to Montgomery when an ugly incident occurred. On September 3 the Kings accompanied Abernathy to the Montgomery County Courthouse, where Abernathy was involved in a case. At the courtroom door, a rude guard refused to let them enter the room. When King asked if they could speak with Abernathy’s lawyer, the guard became enraged. “Boy,” he yelled at King, “if you don’t get the hell away from here, you will need a lawyer yourself.” At that, two policemen rushed up to King. “Boy, you done done it; let’s go.” They twisted his arm behind him and dragged him outside and around the corner to the police station. Coretta ran after her husband. “Gal,” one of the cops shouted over his shoulder, “you want to go, too? Just nod your head.” “Don’t say anything, darling,” King warned her.

  At the station, the desk sergeant growled, “Put him in the hole,” and tossed the cops a key. Clearly they had no idea that this “sassy nigger” was Martin Luther King. Nor did they seem to notice that a photographer was taking pictures.

  At a cell in the dim corridor, the two policemen made King raise his hands and frisked and kneed him. Then they grabbed him by the throat and choked him, spun him around, and kicked him into the cell. Minutes later King saw them returning and braced himself for another beating. But the cops were quiet, almost civilized, as they led him back to the front desk, where in a deferential atmosphere he was charged with insulting an officer and released on his own bond. Obviously some authority had discovered what a “colossal blunder” had been made and upbraided the two policemen for their imbecility.