Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  As March passed, sit-ins broke out in Atlanta and numerous other southern cities, and King tried to defend and interpret the student movement for the nation at large, contributing his observations to magazines like U.S. News & World Report and the Progressive. He corrected a popular misconception that he was the leader of the sit-ins—no, this was something the students had begun themselves. Historically, the sit-ins were a logical outgrowth of Negro discontent that had been building since World War II—a discontent with empty white promises, impotent committees, flatulent campaign oratory, hollow legislative enactments, and token integration. The students had grown up in an age of Negro activism, they themselves had fought on the front line of the school desegregation struggle. They also identified with nationalist movements in Africa and took inspiration from the fact that blacks in new African states could vote and run their own affairs. “But in state after state in the United States the Negro is ruled and governed without a fragment of participation in civic life. The contrast is a burning truth which has molded a deep determination to end this intolerable condition.” “A generation of young people,” King wrote, “has come out of decades of shadows to face naked state power; it has lost its fears, and experienced the majestic dignity of a direct struggle for its own liberation. These young people have connected up with their own history—the slave revolts, the incomplete revolution of the Civil War, the brotherhood of colonial colored men in Africa and Asia. They are an integral part of the history which is reshaping the world, replacing a dying order with a modern democracy.”

  But to be truly effective the students must organize, must coordinate their activities and forge a Southwide strategy. At the recommendation of Ella Baker, King called a student conference, to meet at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and SCLC contributed funds to help cover expenses. On the weekend of April 15–17, more than two hundred students from North and South alike gathered on the Shaw campus, holding workshops in humid classrooms or outside on shrub-scented lawns. Though pledging themselves to nonviolence, the students warned that “arrest will not deter us.” “This is no fad. This is it.” “We’re trying to eradicate the whole system of being inferior.”

  King joined the conference on Saturday. There were speeches by James Lawson, known as “the young people’s Martin Luther King,” and Ella Baker, whom the students regarded as “our spiritual mother.” But “the high point” of the conference occurred that evening, when they crowded into City Auditorium to hear King. He rehearsed his usual message about the goals of nonviolence, reminded the students that the American Negro was out to save the soul of America and create the beloved community. With an eye on reporters, who scribbled away in the press section, King refuted the accusation that the student movement was Communist inspired. “If a man is standing on my neck,” King said, “I don’t need Mr. Khrushchev to come over from Russia to remind me someone’s standing on my neck.”

  Before and after his address, King talked to the students about the need to organize on a permanent basis. In fact, he invited them to become a youth wing of SCLC. But Ella Baker, on her way out as SCLC’s temporary executive director, clashed with King over this. She urged the students to shun established organizations, so that they could develop their youthful zeal and idealism without adult interference. Ultimately the students agreed with her and voted not to affiliate with SCLC or any other Negro organization. In a spirit of exaltation and togetherness, the students all stood in a circle in a local church, holding hands and singing “We Shall Overcome.” “We all believed,” recalled a young southern white woman. “We thought all was going to be okay.”

  In subsequent meetings in Atlanta, student leaders formed an independent organization called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was to orchestrate the sit-ins and mobilize students across America to combat segregation through nonviolent protest. King, for his part, harbored no ill will toward the students for refusing to align with SCLC. On the contrary, he served on SNCC’s Adult Advisory Committee, attended the students’ organizational meetings, raised money for them, and even provided SNCC with a temporary office at SCLC’s Atlanta headquarters. “The coordinating committee owes its very existence to SCLC,” SNCC leaders wrote him later that year. “You have been an inspiration to us all.”

  IN MAY, KING MET REPEATEDLY with a battery of white and Negro lawyers hired to represent him in his trial for tax fraud in Alabama. He fretted over how much it cost to prepare his defense—$10,000 already spent for lawyers and accountants, who pored over his financial statements and the state examiner’s review sheets. King complained that it was “immoral and impractical” to pay out so much money on his case when the movement was in dire need of funds. Besides, he was still convinced that he could not win in Montgomery. Sure, his attorneys thought the state’s case patently absurd, so groundless that not even a white jury would be able to find against him. But King refused to be optimistic. “I have been in Alabama courts too many times when the evidence was clearly in my favor, and yet I ended up being convicted,” he said. In his opinion, his only hope was to win on appeal in a federal court. But he was glad about one thing: the state of Alabama had failed to discredit his integrity among Negroes.

  On Monday, May 23, King was back in Montgomery, standing trial once again in the white man’s court of law. Though his attorneys exposed the state’s case as little more than a frame-up, forcing even the prosecution’s star witness to concede that King was honest, King had little hope for a favorable decision. But on Saturday the jury returned a verdict of “not guilty,” and King was astounded. It was hard to believe that a jury of twelve white men in the Deep South had let him off. What could he learn from so significant a victory? “I learned that truth and conviction in the hands of a skillful advocate could make what started out as a bigoted, prejudiced jury, choose the path of justice.” He thought this boded well for the future of race relations in Dixie. It boded well for the movement, too, since Alabama’s attack on him, which was really an attack on militant black leadership across the South, had been roundly defeated.

  Still, the tax case left its mark on him. James Baldwin heard him preach in Atlanta after the trial, and King described the torment of white people who knowingly defended wrong. In Baldwin’s judgment, “He made the trials of these white people far more vivid than anything he himself might have endured.” King insisted that whites like them were ruled by terror, not by hate. If blacks and whites were ever going to live together as a community, they must not hate one another. “It was a terrible plea,” Baldwin observed, “and it was a prayer.” He surmised that King “had looked on evil a long, hard, lonely time” and had realized that it was probably here to stay. Perhaps he had discovered a new and more somber meaning in the command “Overcome evil with good,” which was not to say that evil could be eradicated. Maybe evil could only be arrested, subdued, so that the forces of light could guide human destiny.

  KING WAS WORRIED ABOUT SCLC. It was still desperately in need of money, its programs still largely unimplemented. On July 23, he installed Wyatt Tee Walker as permanent executive director, hoping that a man of Walker’s talents could mold SCLC into a disciplined and effective outfit. A native of Massachusetts, with a B.S. in chemistry and a divinity degree from Virginia Union University, Tee had spent eight stormy years in Petersburg, Virginia, where he’d led Negro efforts to integrate public facilities. Blunt, aggressive, and egocentric, he was six feet tall and slender, with a mustache and eyes that blazed with intensity. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and was immensely sure of himself and proud of his candor. He called King “the leader” and referred to himself variously as “Dr. King’s chief-of-staff,” “attorney general,” and “nuts-and-bolts man.” He drove his subordinates as hard as he drove himself, demanding exactitude and close attention to detail. “Like Ray Charles said,” he told his office people, “I’m not hard to get along with, darlings. I just have to have perfection.” He set to work expanding SCLC’s voter-registration effo
rts, refining direct-action techniques, and enlarging the organization’s leadership training program, carried out in an SCLC facility in southeast Georgia. He launched an emergency fund-raising campaign and set up SCLC outposts in numerous northern cities (one was already functioning in New York), which served as a network to facilitate fund-raising operations. Henceforth Tee himself handled King’s public appearances and always demanded top fees for his services. At the same time, Walker increased SCLC’s staff, which now included Reverend Walter Fauntroy, who served as director of the organization’s Washington bureau.

  With Tee running the machinery of SCLC, King could devote more time to goals and strategy. In truth, he was the creative thinker of the organization, Walker the man who put ideas into action. “Our personalities sort of merged,” Walker recalled. “People said that I was his alter ego. I think in many ways I was.” Together, as a King friend and writer said, they honed SCLC “to a fine fighting edge,” with an effective staff, affiliates across the South, and an annual operating budget by 1963 of around $900,000.

  Inevitably, SCLC’s growth brought about conflicts with the NAACP, as competitive staffers in both organizations took to demeaning one another. Certain SCLC people made no secret of their scorn for the NAACP, calling it a “black bourgeoisie club” that had outlived its usefulness. NAACP men replied in kind. Inordinately jealous of King’s popularity, they accused him of laboring under a messiah complex.

  King abhorred such sniping. When former baseball star Jackie Robinson wrote him about it, King replied that he had always stressed the need for cooperation between the two organizations, and had always made it clear that the NAACP was “our chief civil rights organization” and that it had done more for the Negro than any other. “I have constantly said that any Negro who fails to give the NAACP this backing is nothing but an ingrate.” But “I have no Messiah complex, and I know that we need many leaders to do the job…. Please be assured that you can count on me to give my ultimate allegiance to the cause. Even if it means pushing myself into the background. I have been so concerned about unity and the final victory that I have refused to fight back or even answer some of the unkind statements that I have been informed that NAACP officials said about me and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Frankly, I hear these statements every day, and I have seen efforts on the part of NAACP officials to sabotage our humble efforts. But I have never said anything about it publicly or to the press.” But let us not succumb to divisions and conflicts. “The job ahead is too great, and the days are too bright to be bickering in the darkness of jealousy, deadening competition, and internal ego struggles.”

  ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 22, 1960, King met privately with Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, and they talked for about an hour and a half over breakfast. Kennedy had won a series of dazzling primary victories in the presidential race of that year and was a front-running candidate for the Democratic nomination. Forty-three now, twelve years older than King, the senator was tanned and fit, with a shock of hair, a crisp Boston accent (“cah” for car), and a debonair style. The scion of a rich and famous Massachusetts family, Kennedy was a Harvard man, a war hero, a Pulitzer-prize historian, and a Catholic, which was a major obstacle to his presidential aspirations. In private, he described himself as an “idealist without illusions”: a man who combined high purpose with a sense of irony and detached, dispassionate views toward social problems. His record on civil rights was unspectacular, and King at first was not very enthusiastic about his candidacy. But King changed his mind when he learned that two of his white liberal friends—Chester Bowles and Harris Wofford—were on Kennedy’s campaign staff.

  At breakfast with the senator, King talked about the urgent need for strong executive leadership in civil rights and doubtless specified what he wanted from a Democratic administration—federal registrars to oversee southern elections, endorsement of the sit-ins, legal reprisals against states that denied citizens the right to vote, and “a clear moral stand against colonialism and racism in all its forms, East and West.” Perhaps Kennedy assured King (as he had prominent liberals) that he favored congressional and executive action in support of voting rights and the Supreme Court’s desegregation decisions. The next day, King wrote Bowles that the meeting with Kennedy was “very fruitful and rewarding.” The senator struck him as “forthright and honest” and definitely concerned—if not deeply knowledgeable—about American racial matters. King expected that he would do the right thing in civil rights should he become President.

  Still, King refused to endorse Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson, or any other liberal candidate. As he repeatedly said, no white leader except Lincoln had ever given enough support to the Negroes’ struggle to warrant their confidence. Moreover, “I feel that someone must remain in the position of nonalignment, so that he can look objectively at both parties and be the conscience of both—not the servant or master of either.”

  When Kennedy won the Democratic nomination and squared off against Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee, King followed the campaign with a watchful eye. Whereas Nixon was appallingly silent about civil rights, Kennedy promised vigorous presidential leadership in that area. He denounced Eisenhower for not ending discrimination in federal housing programs, which could be done “by a stroke of the Presidential pen,” Kennedy said. He also promised “innovative legislation” to integrate schools and strong measures to ensure the Negro’s right to vote and to fair employment in businesses connected with the federal government.

  Though King still declined to endorse Kennedy, he left little doubt as to where he stood. He was “neutral against Nixon” and the Republican party. “I have always argued,” he said, “that we would be further along in the struggle for civil rights if the Republican party had risen above its hypocrisy and reactionary tendencies.” In particular, he flayed right-wing Republicans for lining up with Dixiecrats to obstruct new and creative civil-rights legislation.

  But in September King seemed to cool toward the Democrats, too. “The fact is that both major parties have been hypocritical on the question of civil rights,” he remarked in a speech in New York City. “Each of them has been willing to follow the long pattern of using the Negro as a political football.” What was needed, he said, was a new kind of white liberal, the kind “who not only rises up with righteous indignation when a Negro is lynched in Mississippi, but will be equally incensed when a Negro is denied the right to live in his neighborhood, or join his professional association, or secure a top position in his business. This is no day to pay mere lip service to integration; we must pay life service to it.”

  On his way home to Atlanta, King stopped off in Georgetown to dine with Kennedy, whose forces were trying to woo the Negro vote and to secure King’s help as America’s most popular black leader. Frankly, Kennedy was worried about the attitude of black voters. The election was going to be close; what did King think he should do? “I don’t know what it is, Senator, but you’ve got to do something dramatic,” King said.

  Home in Atlanta, King found himself caught in a bitter crossfire between SNCC and the established Negro leaders in town, including his own father. Last spring, the students had begun a sit-in movement in Atlanta, but it had dwindled when schools had closed for the summer. After the fall term began, however, student leaders planned an ambitious campaign against segregated facilities, to commence on October 19 and to include sit-ins and boycotts against Rich’s and other downtown department stores with whites-only lunch counters.

  But the old-guard Negro leadership objected to the projected campaign. They cringed at the idea of boycotts and sit-ins, fretted over how white Atlanta would react to such disruption. They wanted to fight segregation in the schools and at the voting polls, not in the streets. They worried, too, that the kids might march off with the Negro masses, thus undermining their hard-won status as spokesmen for Atlanta’s black community. They would tell the students, “Don’t you know you can’t force Rich’s to change? Rich’s has millions of dolla
rs. How are a bunch of little niggers going to do that? Some of you can’t even buy a tencent handkerchief down there.”

  Repelled by such attitudes, the students prevailed on King for support. They regarded him as the symbol of the movement and pleaded with him to join their campaign. But King balked at doing so. For one thing, he had agreed to stay out of local affairs. For another, he hoped that there would be no new civil-rights disturbances until after the presidential election, which pollsters considered too close to call. In fact, King and Kennedy staffers were trying to work out a southern summit meeting between the two, perhaps to take place in Miami during the week the sit-ins were to start. King told the students he could not join them because he would likely be out of town.

  At about this time a staff writer for Life magazine interviewed King about his role as symbol and leader of the movement. “At times I think I’m a pretty unprepared symbol,” King said. “But people cannot devote themselves to a great cause without finding someone who becomes the personification of the cause. People cannot become devoted to Christianity until they find Christ, to democracy until they find Lincoln and Jefferson and Roosevelt, to Communism until they find Marx and Lenin…. I know that this is a righteous cause and that by being connected to it I am connected with a transcendent value of right.”

  During breaks in their discussions, the Life man talked with Coretta, too. “He is always calm and even-tempered,” she said of her husband. “He sleeps at night. He is not a worrier. He knows that there are some things you can’t do anything about.” She added, “Still, it all takes a toll on the family. We like to read and listen to music, but we don’t have time for it. We can’t sit down to supper without somebody coming to the door. And the problems they bring Martin aren’t always racial. Sometimes a man just wants to know how he can get his wife back.” She paused to think. “The pressure of all this dulls you. Or perhaps you grow better prepared for anything. When some men came one night and burned a cross on the lawn, Martin was away and the children were asleep. But when I went outside and looked, I wasn’t afraid. It just seemed like a piece of wood burning to me.”