As December came on, King sought to strengthen SCLC’s ties with organized labor, with which Negroes shared a “community of interests.” Since SCLC’s inception, King had actively solicited union support; and Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the Packing House Workers of Chicago, and District 65 of the Distributive Workers of America, situated in New York, had all contributed generously to SCLC’s coffers. King had visited and spoken so often before District 65 that it made him an honorary member. Now he prepared to address George Meany’s AFL-CIO, the nation’s most powerful labor organization, at its Fourth Constitutional Convention on December 11 in Bal Harbour, Florida, near Miami. This was an excellent forum for King to promote a Negro-big labor alliance, and also to help A. Philip Randolph in his troubles with Meany and the AFL-CIO Executive Council, of which Randolph was a member. Thanks largely to Randolph’s influence, all unions in the AFL-CIO except one had dropped their constitutional clauses barring Negro members. Randolph had exhorted the AFL-CIO to expel the offending union and end all forms of discrimination in union ranks, and in 1960 he had become president of the Negro American Labor Council, which he viewed as a Negro-rights pressure group within organized labor. But Meany, a blunt and burly ex-plumber, denounced the NALC as a form of black separatism and Randolph himself as a renegade who refused to work with “the team” (there were militants in the NALC who envisioned it as independent of the AFL-CIO and wanted to fight Meany, but Randolph remained his loyal if critical ally). When Randolph, in a memorandum to the Executive Council, pointed out that several unions in the AFL-CIO either segregated Negroes into separate locals or excluded them by tacit agreement, and demanded that such practices be abolished within six months, Meany and his Executive Council overreacted: in October, 1961, they not only denied the charges but censured Randolph for making them. Negro and white leaders alike condemned the action—King called it “shocking and deplorable”—and rumors flew about that black unionists would picket the upcoming convention in Bal Harbour. According to Cleveland Robinson, an official of District 65 and an assistant to Randolph in the NALC, Meany invited King to address the convention as a peace offering to Randolph and his angry followers. On the prescribed day, standing before a massive gathering of unionists from all over America, King delivered a speech that implicitly defended Randolph—long his hero—and reminded all workers of their common bonds.
Well versed in labor history, he recalled how workers less than a century ago had led barren and exploited lives, enjoying few rights and little respect. He quoted Jack London’s description of the twisted and stunted body of a child worker; he quoted Victor Hugo about how there was always more misery in the lower classes than humanity in the upper classes. But there came a time when the working man grew tired of his lot. Determined not to wait for “charitable impulses to grow in his employer,” King said, the workingman organized in order to gain a fair share of the fruits of his toil. But he had to battle for years with those “who blindly believed their right to uncontrolled profits was a law of the universe.” King pointed out that the most momentous labor struggles came in the 1930s, when legislation like the Wagner Labor Relations Act asserted labor rights but failed to deliver them. So labor itself had to implement the law by striking and demonstrating against a ruthless opposition. From all directions came warnings “to go slow, to be moderate, not to stir up strife.” But labor ignored such entreaties and spread itself across the land, until “the day of economic democracy was born.”
Negroes, King-said, found that the history of labor “mirrors their own experience.” Today, Negroes also confronted formidable forces that implored them to go slow and to rely on “the good will and understanding of those who profit by exploiting us.” And Negro protest—boycotts and sit-ins—antagonized these forces as much as labor strikes had provoked anti-union people in the 1930s. What was more, Negroes had learned from labor the imperatives of sound organization and self-initiative. In truth “labor’s historic tradition of moving forward to create vital people as consumers and citizens has become our own tradition,” King said.
In his judgment, labor had done more for the Negro than any other agency in American life. Still, there were unions that were rife with racism. He repeated Randolph’s charges that some unions not only barred Negroes from membership but erected “serious and vicious obstacles” to Negroes who sought jobs or improved conditions. This to King was intolerable, since labor and the Negro were natural allies. Negroes, after all, were almost entirely a working-class folk. Their needs were identical to labor’s needs: decent wages and housing, fair working conditions, old-age pensions, and health and welfare programs. Moreover, labor and the Negro faced an array of common foes: fanatical right-wing organizations like the John Birch Society, the alliance between big industry and the military, and the coalition of southern Dixiecrats and northern reactionaries in Congress—all were antilabor and anti-Negro. Organized labor must stamp out discrimination and bigotry within its ranks and join forces with America’s twenty million Negroes. The Negro by himself could not eradicate the socio-economic problems that plagued him; he needed the help of organized labor. Labor, on the other hand, stood to gain enormous political strength should working-class Negroes in the South win the right to vote. Together, labor and the Negro could halt the march of automation, whose “humanlike machines,” turning out “human scrap along with machine scrap,” menaced black and white workers alike. Most important of all, labor and the Negro could reform the South and bring about a day when all workers could stand as one without distinction of color. Together, they could bring about the American dream—“a dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed,” “a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity…. That,” King said, “is the dream.”
Randolph, of course, had addressed his colleagues many a time about unionism and racial brotherhood. But as an orator King was unsurpassed in his ability to move people, to bring them together. “He made that great crowd of hardened unionists—most of them white—stand up and cheer and cheer,” recalled Robinson. “I was so affected I found myself crying.” Meany himself offered Randolph a conciliatory hand, remarking that those in the labor movement could understand the Negroes’ struggle and maybe even their impatience. Before it adjourned, the convention unanimously approved a resolution summoning the AFL-CIO to reinforce its drive to secure equal rights for all Americans and the blessings of union membership to all workers regardless of race or creed. Maybe it could have been stronger, Randolph said, but it was “the best resolution on civil rights that the AFL-CIO has yet adopted”—and the first ever passed unanimously.
King’s speech, published in the AFL-CIO IUD Digest, reached hundreds of thousands of additional workers and undoubtedly won converts to the civil-rights cause. As the movement intensified, King found an ardent and active friend in red-haired Walter P. Reuther, AFL-CIO vice-president and head of the United Automobile Workers. Within a couple of years, the AFL-CIO itself was functioning as a powerful lobby for civil-rights legislation. But to King’s dismay the AFL-CIO failed to get up an uncompromising campaign against union discrimination, and labor’s more conservative bosses frowned on Reuther’s brand of civil-rights activism.
ON DECEMBER 14, four days after his Bal Harbour speech, King received an urgent phone call from William G. Anderson, a young Negro osteopath in Albany, Georgia. Anderson was president of the Albany Movement, an amalgam of Negro groups struggling to desegregate public facilities and register Negro voters in the city. The movement had begun earlier that year when SNCC workers arrived in Albany to start a voting-rights drive as part of SNCC’s new southern strategy. Various local Negro groups had soon joined the students and clamored for an end to segregated public facilities as well as Negro disenfranchisement. A group of Negro students even invaded the bus and railway terminals, to test the ICC’s integration order, which went into effect on Nove
mber 1. But city officials ignored the order, rebuffed the Negro demands, and threw all demonstrators into jail. When local leaders called for mass protests, hundreds of aroused blacks streamed into Shiloh Baptist Church, clapped and sang freedom songs, and marched downtown to demonstrate at the Trailways Bus Terminal, the symbol of white resistance. But the police only arrested them, too. By mid-December hundreds of Negroes were languishing in jail, some in hellish conditions: fifty-four girls found themselves jammed into a cell designed for six people. Afraid that white intransigence was destroying the Albany Movement, Dr. Anderson called King for help, overriding the strenuous objection of SNCC (they wanted to keep this a local people’s movement, SNCC said; Dr. King would only attract a lot of outside attention and turn it into a leader’s movement). But Anderson was convinced that King’s presence would rally his people and maybe even scare the city into negotiations. “Please,” he told King on the phone, “just speak for us one night.”
King agreed to make an appearance—he had no intention of getting involved in Albany—and flew there the next evening with Walker and Abernathy. The plane swam through the winter night, until at last King could see the lights of the little Albany airport below. Situated in southwestern Georgia, Albany claimed a population of some 56,000 people, almost half of them Negroes, in what was now pecan, peanut, and corn country. Before the Civil War, though, Albany had been a slave-trading center in a region dotted with plantations. Perhaps King recalled what Du Bois had written about the area in The Souls of Black Folk: “For a radius of a hundred miles about Albany stretched a great fertile land, luxuriant with forests of pine, oak, ash, hickory, and poplar, hot with the sun and damp with the rich black swampland; and here the cornerstone of the Cotton Kingdom was laid.”
Anderson met King and his companions at the airport and drove them through Albany’s wide, flat streets to the Negro section. A nervous, excitable man, easily moved to tears, Anderson spoke with great feeling about the demonstrations and the large crowd awaiting King at Shiloh Baptist Church. Presently, they came to a red-brick, wide-gabled structure with three crosses on the roof, the middle cross lit up with neon. As King got out of the car, he could hear people singing inside:
Integration is on its way
Singing glory hallelujah
I’m so glad.
Then they started shouting, “Aaa-men, Aaa-men, Aaaaaaaaa-men, FreeDOM, FreeDOM. Everybody say freedom. Everybody say freedom. Everbody say Freedom. FreeDom, FreeDOM.” King found the sanctuary so crowded that people were standing and sitting in the aisles. As he and Abernathy made their way to the platform, the people shouted louder still, “FREEDOM, FREEDOM, FREEDOM, FREEDOM! Martin Luther King says FREEDOM.” Their faces were transfixed with joy, white reporter Pat Waiters noted, their voices chorusing spontaneously without a signal given or a beat missed. “I woke up this morning, With my mind, set on freedom, Hallelu…hallelu…hallelu….” King could feel their excitement. There was something magical going on here, something electrifying. But suddenly the singing stopped, “the sudden quiet,” Watters recorded, “as full of meaning as the great cry of the song.” Abernathy, his “round face glistening,” gave a preliminary speech to build the tension for King. Then amid a “pandemonium of applause,” King walked smiling to the pulpit. He spoke slowly at first, almost falteringly. But then he moved into “the singsong cadence of his delivery,” Watters said, and reached a fervor that matched the fervor of the crowd. “Go to jail without hating the white folks…. They can put you in a dungeon and transform you to glory; if they try to kill you, develop a willingness to die.” As King sang on, an old black man punctuated each of his remarks with an explosive “God Almighty!”
“How long will we have to suffer injustice?” King asked.
“God Almighty!” the old man shouted.
“How long will justice be crucified and truth buried?”
“God Almighty!”
“Before the victory is won some must face physical death to free their children from a life of psychological handicaps. But we shall overcome.” “Shall overcome,” the crowd roared back. Then, with a current of emotion flowing back and forth between him and his audience, King cried, “Don’t stop now. Keep moving. Walk together, children. Don’t you get weary. There’s a great camp meeting coming.”
Abruptly he stopped. In the silence came the first notes of “We Shall Overcome.” Then it rang out, verse after verse, until King felt the soul force of his people as he had never felt it before. Now young Anderson was on his feet, calling for a mass march tomorrow. “Be back in the morning at nine o’clock and bring your marchin’ shoes, and Dr. King is gon’ march with us. Dr. King will lead us, won’t you, Dr. King?” And though he had vowed not to get involved here, King nodded his assent. Of course he would lead them tomorrow. He would go to jail with them tomorrow. Listen to that singing. He had never felt so close to his people.
The next morning, he and Anderson went to City Hall and tried to talk with the mayor and other city officials. Anderson had given them until noon that day to open negotiations; otherwise the Negroes would demonstrate en masse. But the mayor still refused to talk, and they returned to Shiloh Church, where black folk had been waiting to march since seven that morning. “Hundreds of our brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, are in jail,” King told them. “We will not rest until they are released. I can’t afford to stand idly by while hundreds of Negroes are being falsely arrested simply because they want to be free. We have a right to demonstrate. It is deeply imbedded in the Constitution—the right of assembly, freedom of speech.
“You hear it said some of us are agitators. I am here because there are twenty million Negroes in the United States and I love every one of them. I am concerned about every one of them. What happens to any one of them concerns all indirectly.
“I am here because I love the white man [cries of yes, yes, well]. Until the Negro gets free, white men will not be free…. I am here because I love America. I’m going to live right here in the United States and probably here in Georgia the rest of my life. I am not an outsider. Anybody who lives in the United States is not an outsider in the United States.”
After King spoke, Anderson prayed with his fingertips on the pulpit and tears in his eyes. Then King led them all out of the church, 237 strong, with Anderson and Abernathy at his side. They turned left through the Negro business section, past Carver Junior High a block away, and then headed downtown, passing a building that housed a radio station (part of a chain called Johnny Reb) with an oversized Confederate flag drooping overhead. At last King halted the column at the bus station, where grim-faced policemen in yellow raincoats stood in line. Beyond them paddy wagons blocked the intersections. Police Chief Laurie Pritchett, a round-faced, impish-looking man with pink skin and light red hair, confronted King and Anderson, threatening to arrest them if they proceeded. With great dignity, King and his followers knelt to pray. Two little boys stood alone for a moment, smiling nervously, then got down on their knees as well. Then the marchers surged forward, and the police arrested and herded the lot of them to jail. As they lined up in an alley by the jail’s booking office, Pat Watters noticed a Negro woman leaning against the building, her head back, eyes closed, mouth opened wide, singing in solitary exaltation, “We are not afraid, We are not afraid, We are not afraid, Today, Oh-oh-ooh deep in my heart, I know that I do believe, oh-ohh-oh, WE SHALL OVERCOME…Some day.”
In the booking office, King, Abernathy, and the other demonstrators were charged with parading without a permit, disturbing the peace, and obstructing the sidewalk. King refused bond and surrendered himself to the jailer. “If convicted,” he said, “I will refuse to pay the fine. I expect to spend Christmas in jail. I hope thousands will join me.”
So here he was, locked up in Albany, the wire services flashing the news across the country. Would his imprisonment spur Washington to intervene? Force the city to negotiate? Word reached him of salutary developments on the outside. From what he could make out,
the city had agreed to a truce with other local leaders. The demonstrations were over. King allowed his bond to be posted and left jail to celebrate the victory.
But there was no victory. As King now discovered, the Albany Movement was rent with factional bickerings, and his appearance in the city had made them worse. Jealous and resentful of him, fearful that he would grab all the headlines and usurp the movement, certain rival leaders had negotiated the settlement themselves. By its terms, the demonstrations stopped and the bus terminal desegregated, and the city promised to entertain a petition of Negro grievances in January. But the buses themselves, the parks, theaters, and lunch counters all remained segregated. The agreement was far short of the movement’s original demands, and King was terribly embarrassed. “I’m sorry I was bailed out,” he said later. “I didn’t understand at the time what was happening. We thought that the victory had been won. When we got out, we discovered it was all a hoax.”
City officials, of course, were ecstatic. They claimed a triumph over King and (with the mayor alone dissenting) refused to consider any Negro demands. Then the bus company simply shut down, leaving Albany Negroes without public transportation and the movement itself without a single gain. A black group did undertake a selective boycott of white businesses, but Pritchett’s cops intimidated and arrested the pickets, and one officer killed a Negro man in what the police claimed was self-defense.
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