To the embarrassment of the police department, news of the arrest hummed over the wires, and papers across the country published accounts and ran photographs of the two policemen twisting King’s arm on the way to jail. Police Commissioner Sellers only made matters worse by telling the press that King’s treatment was nothing unusual in his town. To avoid further embarrassment, Sellers could have apologized to King and dropped the charge against him. But for Sellers, a dedicated segregationist, apologizing to King was unthinkable. No, he was going to be tried like any other lawbreaker.
As his trial approached, King told Coretta and some friends that “the time has come when I should no longer accept bail. If I commit a crime in the name of civil rights, I will go to jail and serve the time.” He brushed aside their objections. “You don’t understand. You see, if anybody had told me a couple of years ago, when I accepted the presidency of the MIA, that I would be in this position, I would have avoided it with all my strength. This is not the life I expected to lead. But gradually you take some responsibility, then a little more, until finally you are not in control anymore. You have to give yourself entirely. Then, once you make up your mind that you are giving yourself, then you are prepared to do anything that serves the Cause and advances the Movement. I have reached that point. I have no option anymore about what I will do. I have given myself fully.”
King stood trial on September 5, with the national press on hand to cover what had become front-page news. The judge could have dismissed the case and denied King any more publicity. But, no, that would mean that whites were giving in to “coloreds.” So he found King guilty of loitering and refusing to obey a police officer. The penalty was $10 and court costs or fourteen days in jail. King chose jail. Then he asked if he could read a statement, and the judge unwittingly agreed.
“Your Honor,” King said in the hushed courtroom, “I could not in all good conscience pay a fine for an act that I did not commit and above all for brutal treatment that I did not deserve…. I also make this decision because of my deep concern for the injustices and indignities that my people continue to experience. Today, in many parts of the South, the brutality inflicted upon Negroes has become America’s shame. Last month, in Mississippi, a sheriff, who was pointed out by four eye witnesses as the man who beat a Negro to death with a black jack, was freed in twenty-three minutes. At this very moment in this state James Wilson sits in the death house condemned to die for stealing less than two dollars. Can anyone at this court believe that a white man could be condemned to death in Alabama for stealing this small amount?”
Then he addressed the nation beyond. “I also make this decision because of my love for America and the sublime principles of liberty and equality upon which she is founded. I have come to see that America is in danger of losing her soul and can so easily drift into tragic Anarchy and crippling Fascism. Something must happen to awaken the dozing conscience of America before it is too late. The time has come when perhaps only the willing and nonviolent acts of suffering by the innocent can arouse this nation to wipe out the scourge of brutality and violence inflicted upon Negroes who seek only to walk with dignity before God and Man.”
King handed his statement to the startled judge, and Abernathy distributed copies to the newsmen. It was brilliant theater, reminiscent of John Brown’s legendary address to the Virginia court that sentenced him to hang for attacking Harpers Ferry and trying to free the slaves. Like Brown, King took advantage of the blindness of his adversaries to play on the moral conscience of his countrymen. And it worked, too, as sympathetic letters and telegrams poured into his office from all directions. Even whites in Montgomery were moved by the moral grandeur of his statement.
Though King was determined to serve his sentence, Commissioner Sellers paid King’s fine himself, informing the press that he intended to foul up this “publicity stunt” and “save the taxpayers the expense of feeding King for fourteen days.”
Stride Toward Freedom OFFICIALLY CAME OUT in September, with advance sales climbing to 18,000 copies. Ultimately the book would sell more than 60,000 hardback copies in the United States alone, would come out in a paperback edition from Ballantine Books, and would appear in at least twelve other countries, including Great Britain, Sweden, India, and Japan. The American reviews were almost all laudatory. “By any standards, North or South, Christian or secular, [King] has written a major tract for the times” enthused historian Perry Miller in the Reporter. The New York Times extolled King as “an original thinker as well as a man of generous spirit,” and the Christian Century contended that “Dr. King and his people have unlocked the revolutionary resources of the gospel of Christ.” Wrote southern novelist Lillian Smith in the Saturday Review: “Because their purpose was big, their philosophy firm, because the means they used were without hate, because all of it together cut through level after level of human experience, the account of a bus boycott in Montgomery will, I think, become a classic story—as has Gandhi’s salt march—of man demanding justice and discovering that justice first begins in his own heart.” In the South, though, the Chattanooga News-Free Press dismissed King’s philosophy of love as “muddled thought sequences and ‘non sequiturs.’” “It would appear, after many tedious pages, that this man envisions himself as a self-appointed arbiter to correct all ills, whether real or imaginary. Saner generations would have laughed him into scorn.”
“Although we are facing some dark moments in the South now,” King wrote one reviewer, “I am convinced that we stand in the glow of our nation’s bright tomorrows. This is a daring faith, but I choose to invest my life in it.” Meanwhile he was busily promoting his book, which was on display (and sold almost two hundred copies) at the National Baptist Convention in Detroit arid which brought him even more fame. But his popularity caused a family friend a great deal of anxiety. You must beware, he wrote King after the convention. You must avoid even the appearance of evil, for you are “a marked man.” All kinds of subtle attempts will be made to discredit you. Some Negroes in Montgomery would like to see you fail, as would most whites. Some might even try to lead you into error. But “one of the most darning influences is that of women. They themselves too often delight in the satisfaction they get out of affairs with men of unusual prominence. Enemies are not above using them to a man’s detriment. White women can be lures. You must exercise more than care. You must be vigilant indeed.”
In mid-September, King was in New York for several days of radio and television appearances, including the NBC Today Show. On a dark Saturday afternoon, September 20, he turned up at Blumstein’s department store to autograph copies of his book. As he was inscribing one at an improvised desk, a well-dressed Negro woman approached. “Are you Martin Luther King?” she asked. “Yes,” he said without looking up. Suddenly he felt something beating at his chest. He heard the woman cry, “Luther King, I’ve been after you for five years.” Then, as in a dream, she was running away, a man chasing after her. King sat there in a daze, staring at an instrument stuck in his chest, near his heart. The woman had stabbed him with a razor-sharp Japanese letter opener. There was great commotion about him: voices, a tattoo of footsteps. He knew he could be dying, yet was calm and felt no pain. At one point he accidentally touched the blade and cut his finger.
An ambulance bore him to Harlem Hospital, where orderlies wheeled him to an operating table in an emergency room. As he lay there, the police entered with the Negro woman so that King could identify her. “Yah,” she snarled, “that’s him. I’m going to report him to my lawyers.” After they led her away, a black physician came in, introduced himself as Aubre D. Maynard, and examined the blade in King’s chest. Assisted by an interracial surgical team, Dr. Maynard had to remove one of King’s ribs and part of his breastbone to get the knife free. In a burst of inspiration, he made the incision over King’s heart in the shape of a cross. “Since the scar will be there permanently and he is a minister, it seemed somehow appropriate,” the doctor said.
After the ope
ration, King lay in a private room with a tube in his nose and throat to drain his chest. Though heavily sedated, he recognized Coretta when she arrived. Nurses said he’d been calling for her through the night. She had flown up from Montgomery with Abernathy, fighting back her tears, telling herself that this could be fatal. “If this is the way it’s got to be,” she kept thinking, “then this is the way it’s got to be.” The doctor, however, assured her that King would live.
By now, the news of King’s stabbing had flashed across the nation, and radio and television stations broadcast hourly bulletins about his condition. New York Governor Averell Harriman, A. Philip Randolph, and other luminaries all rushed to his bedside, and Randolph helped raise more than $2,000 for King’s hospital expenses. King was especially glad to see “Mr. Randolph,” the “Dean of Negro leaders,” whose life and dedication “served as a real inspiration to me.” Coretta, for her part, screened his visitors as best she could, arranged all the fruit and flowers people sent him, tried to answer some of the thousands of telegrams and messages of sympathy he received.
For a time pneumonia hampered his recovery. But in a few days he felt strong enough to talk with Dr. Maynard, who disclosed how close he had come to dying. The tip of the letter opener had touched King’s aorta, the main artery from the heart. “If you had sneezed during all those hours of waiting,” the doctor said, “your aorta would have been punctured and you would have drowned in your own blood.”
Four days after the operation, King was out of bed and moving about the room and the corridors in a wheelchair. He read through the messages of sympathy—telegrams from Eisenhower and Nixon, cards and letters from people all over the world. But one letter in particular caught his eye. He would never forget what it said.
Dear Dr. King,
I am a ninth grade student at the White Plains High School. While it shouldn’t matter, I would like to mention that I’m a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed you would have died. I’m simply writing you to say that I’m so happy that you didn’t sneeze.
That letter brought tears to his eyes. He told Coretta he was glad he hadn’t sneezed too. “What makes you think you are the ‘exclusive property’ of the Negro race only?” a white woman wrote him. “You belong to us too, because we love you. Your voice is the only true voice of love today & we hear, we hear…Please don’t lose faith in us ‘whites,’ there are so many of us who are good & pray for your triumph.”
After he left the hospital, King spent another three weeks recovering in the Brooklyn home of a friend. He talked with Coretta about his would-be killer, a demented woman named Izola (or Isola) Curry, age forty-two, “a rootless wanderer” who came from a broken home and failed in her marriage and almost everything else she tried. As she saw and heard King on television and read about him in the papers, her tormented mind became fixed on him as the author of all her woes. And so she tried to murder him. But King harbored no malice toward the woman. “Don’t do anything to her,” he counseled the authorities; “don’t prosecute her; get her healed.” Later he learned that she had been committed to an institution for the criminally insane.
As he convalesced, King had time to do what he had longed for all these months: he read books and meditated. And he talked a good deal about the trial he was going through. He decided that God was teaching him a lesson here, and that was personal redemption through suffering. It seemed to him that the stabbing had been for a purpose, that it was part of God’s plan to prepare him for some larger work in the bastion of segregation that was the American South.
THAT WINTER KING DECIDED to make his long-delayed trip to India. He thought it best to go now, instead of plunging back into “the seat of Southern segregation struggle.” Besides, in this “very difficult period of my life,” he was under doctor’s orders to cut back drastically on his speaking engagements. And a trip to India would be good for his health. Through the efforts of Harris Wofford and Libby Holman Reynolds, the singer, King received a $5,000 grant from the Christopher Reynolds Foundation to defray expenses, and the American Friends Service Committee worked out his itinerary.
Not wanting to travel alone, King invited Coretta and L. D. Reddick to accompany him. Reddick had just completed a biography of King called Crusader without Violence, which Harper would publish that year, and he contended that King’s ultimate test would come when Gandhi’s disciples passed judgment on him and his work in Montgomery. Meanwhile Gandhi scholar Richard Gregg advised him on what to expect in India. “Beware of pick-pockets,” Gregg wrote. “They are slick operators.” And try to get out of the cities into the outlying villages. “To understand Gandhi’s program you must see some of village life. You can’t imagine the poverty; it must be seen to be comprehended and believed.” With his plans solidified, King tried desperately to catch up on his work. Otherwise “my trip to India will be so frustrating that I won’t gain the spiritual enrichment that that great country affords.”
At last, on February 3, 1959, the Kings and Reddick flew out of New York, heading for India by way of Paris. Seven days later their plane broke out of the clouds over Bombay; it was nighttime, and a necklace of lights circled the harbor below. On the ground, riding in a bus through Bombay’s narrow streets, King was shocked at all the destitution. Gregg was right—this had to be seen to be believed. Men everywhere wore grimy loincloths and people carried all their possessions in newspapers or rags. They scavenged garbage cans for food, huddled forlornly in doorways, slept in filthy blankets on the pavement”a homeless, miserable rabble of almost a million souls. King had never seen such suffering, not even in Nigeria. He blamed it all on British colonialism.
At the Taj Mahal Hotel, a man approached King with a starving child, gesturing at him and babbling in a tongue King could not understand. His sponsors had warned him not to give money to beggars, since the Indian government was trying to end the practice. But King soon ignored their advice. “What can you do when an old haggard woman or a little crippled urchin comes up and motions to you that she is hungry?” King asked.
The next day he flew to New Delhi, capital of India, to commence his visit in earnest. At the New Delhi Hotel, he told a crowd of reporters: “To other countries I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim.” He visited the great shrine where Gandhi had been cremated, kneeling and placing a wreath there. He met President Rajendra Prasad in a home that was two blocks long and crowned with a golden dome, talked with Vice-President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and dined with Prime Minister Nehru in a large, neo-classic brownstone house built by the British at the zenith of their empire. All three statesmen had been Gandhi’s followers in the struggle for Indian independence, and meeting them, King said, was like seeing Washington, Jefferson, and Madison all in the same day.
In the days that followed, King toured New Delhi in a Gandhi cap, giving talks and asking questions about what the Mahatma had accomplished. Nehru told him a good deal about India’s low-caste untouchables, so long maligned by high-caste Hindus. A lot of Indians were still prejudiced against them, still thought it defiled a high-caste Indian to touch one. But it was no longer popular to admit to such prejudice, Nehru said. He explained that the Indian constitution prohibited discrimination against untouchables, and that the Indian government spent millions of rupees annually to improve their lot. Moreover, if an untouchable and a high-caste Indian competed for college admission, the school had to take the untouchable. “But isn’t that discrimination?” Reddick asked. “Well, it may be,” Nehru said. “But this is our way of atoning for the centuries of injustices we have inflicted upon these people.”
King was impressed. In his view, India had made more progress against caste untouchability than the U.S. had against racial oppression. True, both countries had laws against discrimination. But unlike Americans, Indian leaders placed “their moral power behind the law.” From the Prime Minister down to the village councilman, “everybody declares publicly that
untouchability is wrong.”
It was Gandhi, of course, who had brought this about. For Gandhi not only denounced the caste system but acted against it. He called untouchables “Harijans,” which meant “children of God,” and even adopted an untouchable as his daughter. He took untouchables by the hand and led them into the temples that excluded them. “To equal that,” King said, “President Eisenhower would have to take a Negro child by the hand and lead her into Central High School in Little Rock.”
From New Delhi, the Kings set out on a month-long tour of the country. They rode clattering trains from one city to another and bounced along in jeeps to the more remote villages. “Everywhere we went,” King recorded, “we saw crowded humanity—on the roads, in the city streets and squares, even in the villages. The people have a way of squatting, resting comfortably (it seemed) on their haunches.” Most men, if they had employment at all, toiled at seasonable agricultural jobs. And nearly everyone was impoverished—the average personal income was less than $70 a year. And food shortages were epidemic. “They are poor, jammed together and half starved,” King said of Indians, “but they do not take it out on each other…. They do not abuse each other—verbally or physically—as readily as we do. We saw but one fist fight in India during our stay.” In sharp contrast to the poverty, King saw a lot of opulence, too, riding by great homes on vast landed estates. “The bourgeoisie—white, black or brown—behaves about the same the world over,” he said.
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