Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  And so King saw the riders off for Mississippi, a convoy of Alabama Guardsmen and a helicopter escorting them as far as the state line. The next King heard, they all had been arrested and locked up in Jackson. Over the summer, three hundred more Freedom Riders stormed into Jackson and got arrested, and more than one hundred others went to jail in additional southern cities. As civil-rights lawyers worked feverishly to get them freed, King plunged into a fund-raising campaign to help cover their legal expenses, soliciting contributions from various Jewish and Christian organizations and addressing rallies for the riders at St. Louis and other places. He also helped the Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee line up scholarships for student riders in need of financial assistance for the fall term.

  Nor was that all. In an article published that fall in the New York Times Magazine, he tried to interpret the mission of the Freedom Rider for liberal whites. “He is carrying forward a revolutionary destiny of a whole people consciously and deliberately,” King wrote. “Hence the extraordinary willingness to fill the jails as if they were honors classes.” King pointed out that Negro collegians used to ape white students, dressing and acting like them and aspiring to a professional life cast in the image of their white middle-class counterparts. But this was no longer the case. Through the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides, Negro students were initiating change and liberating themselves from social and psychological servitude. And consider their achievements. To date, lunch counters had been desegregated in 150 southern cities. And Negro students were determined to stand in, sit in, kneel in, and ride in, until every facility in the United States supposedly open to the public admitted Negroes, Indians, Jews, or “what-have-you.” It was time for all America, King asserted, to join the students in a campaign to “end Jim Crow Now.”

  As it turned out, the Freedom Rides dealt a death blow to Jim Crow bus facilities. At Robert Kennedy’s request, the Interstate Commerce Commission that September issued regulations ending segregated facilities in interstate bus stations; the regulations were to take effect on November 1. King pronounced this “a remarkable victory” and attributed it to “the way in which the Freedom Riders dramatized the travel conditions in our nation for persons of color.” But it would take two years of mopping-up activities before Kennedy could announce: “Systematic segregation of Negroes in interstate transportation has disappeared.”

  As he reflected on the Freedom Rides, King found another reason for their spectacular success. “Without the presence of the press, there might have been untold massacre in the South. The world seldom believes the horror stories of history until they are documented via mass media. Certainly, there would not have been sufficient pressure to warrant a ruling by the ICC had not this situation been so well-publicized.” The lesson seemed unmistakable: to attain real success in civil rights, do something dramatic enough to command national media attention. As events were to prove, King learned that lesson better than any Negro leader of his generation.

  ONE NIGHT IN LATE SEPTEMBER, the Kings were dining in a Nashville motel when Wyatt Walker introduced them to William and Lotte Kunstler. King was in town for an SCLC convention, and he had just given a speech on Negro voting rights that powerfully affected Kunstler, a Jewish lawyer deeply involved in civil-rights work. “I had expected someone with the guise of an Old-Testament prophet,” Kunstler said. “Instead I found myself across the table from a pleasant-faced, youthful-looking Negro immaculately dressed in a well-tailored business suit. His most distinguishing features were a small, neatly trimmed moustache, high cheekbones, and slightly slanted eyes that gave his face a somewhat Mongolian cast.” But the most memorable thing about King was his language. “I was convinced,” Kunstler said, “that he was using the finest—and clearest—prose ever uttered.”

  What concerned King in Nashville was SCLC’s sputtering voter-registration campaign. Thanks to increasing white resistance, thanks too to wide-scale Negro fear and apathy, only 29 percent of eligible southern Negroes were now registered to vote. In Alabama, the figure was about 13½ percent; in Mississippi, about 5 percent. These were scandalous conditions in a nation that claimed to be the freest in the world, and King was more than ever determined to rectify them. In his speech at the SCLC convention, King outlined a house-to-house voter-registration canvass that SCLC and allied organizations would undertake that winter. While the civil-rights movement must operate on many fronts, he said in a fund-raising letter, “the central front…we feel is that of suffrage.”

  Up in Washington, meanwhile, Robert Kennedy was arguing much the same thing. Legal action alone would never overcome Negro fear and passivity, he told civil-rights leaders. Neither would any more demonstrations like the Freedom Rides, which he was anxious to avoid. Convinced that the ballot was the key to racial justice in the South, that “from the vote, from participation in the elections, flow all other rights,” Kennedy persuaded SNCC and CORE to concentrate on registering Negroes to vote in what became known as the Voter Education Project. Urged on by the Justice Department and financed by northern philanthropic organizations, SNCC workers dressed in overalls and boots—the uniform of the southern Negro poor—set up outposts in Dixie and organized registration drives similar to SCLC’s.

  In mid-October, meanwhile, King flew to Washington for another private talk with the President. King rehearsed the need for a civil-rights bill and for all Americans to enjoy equal opportunity. But his main point involved something new and “historic.” It had been almost one hundred years since Lincoln had put forth his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, King said, and he wanted Kennedy to issue a second Emancipation Proclamation in the form of an executive order eradicating all state segregation statutes. Later King made the same point at a White House dinner. As the Kennedys were showing him some renovations, King went into the room where Lincoln had signed the final decree. “Mr. President,” King said, “I’d like for you to come back in this room one day and sit down at that desk and sign the second Emancipation Proclamation.” At Kennedy’s request, King later presented him with a formal document outlining an executive attack against all forms of segregation.

  Kennedy was certainly more accessible to King than Eisenhower had ever been. Still, King was disappointed in Kennedy’s civil-rights record for 1961. If his administration had sharply increased the number of Negroes in federal employment, it had also added southern segregationists to the federal bench—a set of rogues who cheerfully obstructed civil-rights litigation. The Kennedys had appointed them mainly to appease southern Democrats on Capitol Hill. For the same reason, the President had declined to sign a federal housing order, which he’d claimed in his campaign could be done “by a stroke of the pen.” As a consequence, pens from civil-rights advocates were piling up in Kennedy’s mail. King too was incensed that he had backed down on the housing order. “The President did more to undermine confidence in his intentions than could be offset by a series of smaller accomplishments,” King wrote later in The Nation, True, “the vigorous young men of the Administration” had “reached out more creatively” than their predecessors and had “conceived and launched some imaginative and bold forays.” But King deemed the overall record “essentially cautious and defensive” and aimed at “the limited goal of token integration.”

  In late October King was in London for an hour-long interview on BBC Television about racism in America and colonialism in Africa and Asia. In November he was back in Atlanta, helping the Georgia Council on Human Relations put on its first interracial dinner at the Progressive Country Club. “This, in itself,” King said, “is an indication of how things are changing in Georgia.” Atlantans themselves had recently elected a new mayor—a young businessman and racial moderate named Ivan Allen, Jr., who pledged to carry out the desegregation of the city. Not that Atlanta was now a mecca of interracial brotherhood. When the mayor-elect distributed a questionnaire about how Atlanta could best be improved, the typical white response was “run Martin Luther King back to Africa.” With Atlanta slowly desegre
gating, with SCLC, SNCC, and CORE all trying to get Negroes on the voter rolls, the cries of a dying order rang across Dixie that fall and winter. At a Klan meeting, one William Hugh Morris declared that southern racial troubles would end if Martin Luther King were assassinated.

  IN HIS RARE MOMENTS AT HOME, King devoted himself to his children—six-year-old Yoki and four-year-old Marty. King worried that the movement robbed him of time with them, and he played with them intensely, trying to cram days and weeks into a few hours. He teased, tickled, and roughhoused them until they practically dismantled the house, Coretta said, looking on with feigned disapproval. Marty recalled that his father told them jokes, too, and was “really funny.” As parents, he and Coretta tried to mix discipline with understanding, for King realized that much of what the children would become was being formed in these crucial years. Trying to learn from his father’s mistakes, he insisted that what children needed was guidance, not suppression, so that they could learn to express their ideas and desires. A friend observed how relaxed King was with his children. As they talked in his study, the children would come in and ask him to arbitrate a dispute, and he would take care of them. “You know,” he said, “we adults are always so busy, we have so many things on our minds, we’re so preoccupied, that we don’t listen to our children. We say to them, ‘See, Daddy’s busy.’ We tend to forget that they are trying to survive in a world they have to create for themselves. We forget how much creativity and resourcefulness that takes.”

  Still, King insisted on proper manners. A New York couple who visited the Kings in Atlanta recalled how the children came well-dressed to the dinner table and how King corrected their grammar. Nor was he averse to spanking the children when he thought it necessary. “Whippings must not be so bad,” he once remarked, “for I received them until I was fifteen.”

  As his parents had done, King tried to shield his children from racial prejudice. But inevitably they had to go through the same traumatic time as he: that first anguished recognition of what it meant to be “colored” in Dixie. For Yoki, it came when she begged her father to take her to Funtown, a segregated amusement park in Atlanta. King gave an evasive answer; he really didn’t know how to tell her she couldn’t go. One day she ran downstairs full of excitement. She had seen a television commercial inviting everyone to visit Funtown, and she wanted to go. At that, King and Coretta sat down with Yoki and for the first time tried to explain segregation to her. “I have won some applause as a speaker,” King said later. “But my tongue twisted and my speech stammered seeking to explain to my six-year-old daughter why the public invitation on television didn’t include her, and others like her. One of the most painful experiences I have ever faced was to see her tears when I told her that Funtown was closed to colored children, for I realized that at that moment the first dark cloud of inferiority had floated into her little mental sky, that at that moment her personality had begun to warp with that first unconscious bitterness toward white people.”

  But the Kings were determined that she would not become bitter. They taught her to be proud that she was a Negro and warned her that the term “white cracker” was as hateful as the word “nigger.” And King assured her that there were plenty of good whites in the world. There were even some in Atlanta who wanted her to go to Funtown, and one day she would go. That was one of the major purposes of the movement—to ensure that children like her and Marty would grow up without the stigma of racial caste. When he spoke on the lecture circuit about the injuries of race, he often referred to Yoki and the Funtown episode. Yes, he wanted freedom now, not in some dim and distant future. He wanted it for his own children in this, the only lives they had.

  As always, King believed it was mainly Coretta’s responsibility to raise their children and care for their home. Of course, when he was there and needed to talk about some movement problem, she was “a great morale booster,” said a friend and SCLC assistant. She listened patiently and offered indispensable encouragement and advice. In a way, she and the children were on the front line in their home as much as King was in the actual struggle. She spoke to Harold DeWolf of “the constant dangers they underwent, of the frequent warnings they had received from friends, and the many threatening letters.” And though she wanted to play a more significant role in the movement (and later would do so), she idolized her husband and did what he said. Friends who dined with them recalled how she sat at the table quiet and subdued, content to let King hold forth about his work and his world.

  Despite his crushing schedule, King tried to preach every other Sunday at his father’s church and to do routine ministerial chores. But he spent most working days in Atlanta at SCLC headquarters, laboring on some upcoming speech or talking with Wyatt Walker or Ralph Abernathy about some staff matter. “Ab,” as some staffers referred to Abernathy, had recently moved to Atlanta, to assume the pastorship of West Hunter Baptist Church and be closer to King. King was happy to have him in Atlanta, for there was no man he loved and trusted more. “He trusted Ralph like he trusted Jesus,” recalled one SCLC official. “Ralph gave him confidence, security, a strong soul to lean on.” True, some of King’s advisers thought Abernathy lacked “intellectual strength” and claimed that he sometimes fell asleep in meetings. Others complained about his “ego” and his insatiable need for recognition. But in King’s eyes Abernathy was a clever, adoring friend who was always there when King needed him. “I want you to know how much I appreciate your loyalty,” he once told Abernathy. “I get all the attention from the press, but you’re just as important to the movement as I am. I couldn’t do my work if you were not here with me…. People often forget that a leader is no stronger than his foundation, the often invisible people who give him support. I’ll never forget that. The newspapermen, the cameramen, some of our own SCLC colleagues may forget it, but I want you to know that I never, never will forget it.”

  As several people described it, King and Abernathy had a friendship that was “spiritual,” even “mystical.” Abernathy is “Dr. King’s spiritual brother in the movement and indispensable in that sense, because Dr. King is a man who needs companionship,” Walker said. “Some people are loners; some people are like Damon and Pythias—the two fellows who are inseparable.” Still, King found in Abernathy something more than spiritual companionship. An aide pointed out how effectively Abernathy arbitrated staff disputes and functioned as unofficial staff pastor, opening and closing meetings with a prayer. Then there was Abernathy’s earthy language, which delighted King and never failed to arouse an audience. Negroes, Abernathy said in a recent speech, “will never give up the fight until we are as free to walk the streets of Montgomery as a jay bird is in whistling time.”

  Thanks to King’s recruiting efforts, there were quite a few new faces around SCLC headquarters by late 1961. Two of the new aides, Bernard Lee and James Bevel, were the vanguard of several young Negroes who came to King from the ranks of the student movement. Lee was a stocky, easygoing Virginian who had served four years in the Air Force and then attended Alabama State, only to be expelled for participating in the sit-ins there. He had befriended King during the Atlanta sit-ins and had worked with SNCC before coming aboard SCLC, eventually functioning as King’s assistant and constant traveling companion. James Bevel, twenty-four now, had grown up in a Mississippi farming community, become an ordained minister, helped establish SNCC, and joined SCLC in 1961 as head of direct action and a specialist in youth training programs. He usually wore overalls and a dungaree shirt, with a Jewish yarmulke pulled over his shaved head. “The Jewish prophets,” he said, “have given more to the world in terms of truth than any others. I wear my yarmulke because I subscribe to the philosophy of the Jewish prophets completely.” He was brooding and reckless. “You have to be reckless. That means going for broke. Jesus was reckless, and so was Moses.” And he was haunted by a vision of the finality of human life. “I don’t get hung up about a hereafter. I always tell drunks, ‘Look, there is no heaven, so you might as well be a ma
n while you’re here.’” He liked to take young people to a cemetery and tell them, “In 40 years you’re going to be here. Now, what are you going to do while you’re alive?”

  Then there was Andrew Young, twenty-nine that fall, a light-skinned Negro with thick, slanting eyebrows and an easy drawl. Born in New Orleans, where his father was a dentist, Young grew up in a poor neighborhood where drugs and junkies were commonplace. He fought constantly with whites—“If anybody calls you a nigger and you don’t hit him,” his grandmother admonished him, “don’t come home unless you want a spanking.” But his parents taught him that racism was a sickness and that there was nothing wrong with him, and he learned to negotiate his way out of difficulties. After high school, he attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., a training ground for black professionals, and competed on the swimming and track teams, offered his fraternity pin to a sorority girl, bragged about his sexual conquests, and prepared himself for life in the Negro middle class. But then he lost all sense of who he was and what he wanted to become. One day in the North Carolina mountains, he had a profound religious experience as he stood naked in a lashing rain. After that he enrolled in the Hartford Theological Seminary and became an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. He studied Gandhi, married, preached in a south Georgia parish, listened to the music of Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Ray Charles, and Bessie Smith, and meanwhile wound up as an executive for the National Council of Churches in New York, where he specialized in youth work and learned the art of diplomacy in dealing with white preachers, especially in the South. Then came the sit-ins and Freedom Rides. “It really disturbed me that things were happening in the South and I wasn’t there,” Young recalled. Anxious to work with his people in Dixie, convinced of “the Toynbee prophecy that the Negro is the hope of America,” he moved to Atlanta in September, 1961, to administer a voter-education program in close association with SCLC. “There is about him an almost hypnotic calm,” two interviewers wrote later. “Nothing hurried, nothing worried.” King soon appointed Andy as his special assistant, certain that his patience and experience with whites would make him an effective negotiator.