Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  The city council got the hint. The next day, noting that the courts had outlawed local segregation statutes one after another, the council rescinded “all ordinances which require the separation of persons because of race, color or creed.” Out went measures that prohibited bars from serving Negroes and whites in the same room, Negro barbers from cutting white women’s hair, white and Negro baseball teams from playing within two blocks of one another, and blacks from visiting whites-only parks.

  So it was that Atlanta, “the city too busy to hate,” joined the list of southern municipalities that made strides toward freedom that year of the Negro revolution in Dixie. Even Funtown—the segregated amusement park that had upset Yoki so—had quietly opened its doors to Negroes. King took his daughter there for a day of cotton candy and whirling rides, and clouds of uninhibited delight now replaced “clouds of inferiority” in her “little mental skies.” Whites came up to him and asked, “Aren’t you Dr. King, and isn’t that your daughter?” King nodded, and Yoki heard them say “how glad they were to see us there.”

  PART SIX

  LIFE’S RESTLESS SEA

  INSIDE THE JETLINER, which raced from Atlanta toward Los Angeles, King sat against a white pillow, looking out the window at the shadowy outlines of the Appalachians below. Suddenly the plane shuddered in severe turbulence. King turned to a reporter sitting beside him and said with a wry smile, “I guess that’s Birmingham down below.”

  The reminder of the campaign there set King to discussing the events of 1963, “when the civil rights issue,” he said, “was impressed on the nation in a way that nothing else before had been able to do. It was the most decisive year in the Negro’s fight for equality. Never before had there been such a coalition of conscience on this issue.”

  And never before had an American Negro attained such fame as King had in 1963. Among scores of other honors, he was Time’s “Man of the Year”—the first American Negro to win that distinction—and his portrait graced the cover of Time’s January 3, 1964, issue. In 1963, he had worked twenty hours a day, traveled some 275,000 miles, and given more than 350 speeches, though it was his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial that had borne him to glory.

  When he reached California, it seemed that everywhere he went friends wanted him to appear here and say a few words there, and he was “running all over the place,” a woman friend recalled. Going up a hotel escalator, King said wearily, “It’s not going to be the movement that will kill me. It’s going to be my friends.” It distressed him that he had to give the same address over and over, with no time to revise or even polish his utterances. “I have lost freshness and creativity,” he complained. “I cannot write speeches each time I talk, and it is a great frustration to have to rehash old stuff again and again.”

  But people idolized him all the same, whites because he appealed to the best in America and did not rant at them, Negroes because he articulated their longing, hurts, and aspirations with what Time called an “indescribable capacity for empathy.” The adoration of the Negro masses really did make him their Gandhi. But his popularity could be a terrible hindrance. Wherever he found himself in public, in hotels, restaurants, and airports, swarms of people hounded him for his autograph, Harry Wachtel claimed that even on a rare vacation, say to the Bahamas, King virtually had to hide out in his hotel room to escape the crowds. And all the attention embarrassed him, his intimates said, because King was an extremely humble man. “Martin did not have any of this pompous arrogance that characterize so many people who have high education and also get into a position of leadership and power,” recalled a friend. “I never met a man in my life,” said Wyatt Walker, “who has been so completely unaffected by the attention that has come to him in the world. He’s always just Martin around anybody…. There isn’t any swagger to his psyche at all.”

  He worried that people viewed him as a saint, an angel with a halo, a messiah. “I’m no messiah,” he kept saying, “and I don’t have a messiah complex.” Behind his public image, aides and friends were quick to point out, “Martin was very, very human.” Sure, he could be unrelentingly serious in public, seemingly devoid of a sense of humor (as Time said). But away from the crowds, away from the reporters and television cameras, he could relax with close companions and laugh and tell his preacher jokes. “Doc thought he was a great joke teller,” said Hosea Williams, a newcomer to SCLC’s staff. “His jokes weren’t very funny to me sometimes. But he thought they were.” He loved to banter with his young aides. It was a way to let off steam, especially during a campaign, and “keep us from being so uptight all the time,” Lee said. In mock derision, they would call him “Liver Lip King”—a favorite segregationist nickname—and giggle that he couldn’t be recognized if he kept a hand over his mouth. Gleefully, King would razz them back, twitting Young as “a Tom” and ribbing Lee mercilessly about how his eyes crossed in a moment of danger. “He could tease you harder than anybody I know,” Lee remembered. “I mean, he could really get on your case.” When something struck him as hilarious, “he would practically fall out of the chair, he’d laugh so hard.”

  There was a droll, ironic side to him, too. He could make white liberals squirm with mirth when he recounted, in a heavy southern accent, how one of his Montgomery followers had responded to his plea for nonviolence: “Aw right, Reverend, if you says so. But Ah still thinks we oughta kill off a few of ‘em.” He grinned with delight when Wyatt Walker told the story of “this big Negro guy” who stood up to an insulting bus driver, saying, “I want you to know two things. One, I ain’t no boy. And two, I ain’t one of those Martin Luther King nonviolent Negroes.” Once, when he and some white associates were riding an elevator up to Wachtel’s Manhattan law offices, a white woman got on and said to him, “Six, please.” Despite his business suit and tie, she thought him the operator. “And Martin just pushed the button,” Wachtel said, “and when she got off he laughed as hard as everyone else.”

  Thanks to all the sedentary traveling, the endless breakfasts and luncheons, King was now “a heavy-chested 173 lbs.,” as Time reported. To keep his weight down, he used a sugar substitute and tried to diet, though that was difficult given his love for good food. At a table with friends and staff members, he had a habit of sampling their salads and entrées, eating joyfully from everyone’s plate. He fancied chicken wings and frequented a fast-food place in Washington, D.C., which served them up with a zesty sauce.

  Though in public he could be remarkably self-assured, unflappable in interviews and at the rostrum, he was deeply sensitive and easily hurt. Severe criticism depressed him. And depression often brought on the hiccups, which would last for hours. Once, Lee recalled, King had an attack before he was to give a speech, a sure sign that he was dejected. Amazingly, the hiccups stopped when he went to the podium, and he spoke with his usual lucidity for an hour and fifteen minutes. After he said “Thank you” and sat down, he started hiccuping again.

  By his own admission, King had “a troubled soul”—troubled not only by the misery and inequity he saw everywhere, but by his own inner conflicts. “Martin could be described as an intensely guilt-ridden man,” said his friend Stanley Levison, because “he didn’t feel he deserved all the tribute he got.” Raised in material comfort and given a superior education, he had never suffered like the Negro masses who loved him so. He felt he had not earned the leadership they thrust on him. So he would think of ways to justify his renown—would talk about taking a vow of poverty and giving up possessions like his house, so that “he could at least feel that nothing material came to him from his efforts.” But, of course, he never took such a vow. How could he provide for his family if he did? In any case, he still enjoyed the amenities of life—a nice hotel suite, a good meal with wine—and was still impressed with multi-millionaire Jewish benefactors in New York.

  But there were other reasons for King’s troubled soul. He felt a great deal of anger in him for the evils he had witnessed in Dixie—particularly the murder
of those four Birmingham girls—and relied more than ever on “creative nonviolence” to funnel his fury into constructive channels. He was talking about his own feelings when he argued that a man must have the courage to resist an evil system nonviolently; otherwise he ran the risk of a self-destructive explosion. He never told Negroes not to be angry, as many of his black critics charged. On the contrary, “Martin always felt that anger was a very important commodity,” recalled his close friend Harry Belafonte, “a necessary part of the black movement in this country.” It was anger, after all, that fueled Negro resistance, anger that helped black people overcome lifetime habits of shame and servility and start fighting for their rights. But theirs must not be a hateful anger, for that was debilitating and ruinous; it must be a disciplined, nonviolent anger—what King called a “creative dissatisfaction.” “It is still my basic article of faith,” he told Playboy in 1964, “that social justice can be achieved and democracy advanced only to the degree that there is firm adherence to nonviolent action and resistance in the pursuit of social justice.” But he stated with equal emphasis: “As much as I deplore violence, there is one evil that is worse than violence, and that’s cowardice.”

  When King spoke of “the deep longing for the bread of love” in the world, he was not just talking philosophically. True, he still believed in Gandhi’s Satyagraha as the salvation of the human race—as the great moral force that would bring on the brave new order he had long prophesied. Yet he also needed love personally, needed companionship, acceptance and approval. To be sure, he cared deeply for his wife and could be tender to her when they were together, extremely tender. By his own estimation, though, he spent only about 10 percent of his time at home, and his long absences took their toll. Lonely and troubled, gone from home so much of the time, he surrendered himself to his passionate nature and sought intimacy and reassurance in the arms of other women, sometimes casually, sometimes with “a very real feeling,” as he told a confidant. He needed desperately not just to be free as a man, but to be cherished and loved as a man. “My life,” he complained constantly, “is one of always giving out and never stopping to take in.” At night, away from the crowds and the cameras, he found a way to take in.

  His close associates were aware that he strayed and did not judge him for it. “I didn’t see Martin as a saint, a god, no way, shape, or form,” recalled one staff member, echoing what others said. “I saw him as a man.” Some white friends argued that King had an unconscious need to demonstrate that he was as virile as his father. Certain black friends, on the other hand, cited “the historic obligations of evangelical preachers in the South to the women of their congregations.” As one Negro put it, “Martin really believed in the gospel of love.” And there were plenty of women who wanted him, who were attracted by his impassioned voice, his gentleness, his air of vulnerability. Wherever he went, females of both races, old and young, married and single, sought him out. “I can’t tell you the number of women that would proposition me in hopes of getting to Martin,” recalled Bernard Lee, his special assistant and traveling companion. “If I were a dishonest person…and greedy, I could have gotten rich.”

  Still, with his enormous conscience, King felt guilty about his sexual transgressions. In Strength to Love, his book of sermons, he betrayed something of his suffering when he wrote of how every man had good and evil warring inside and how we see evil expressed in “tragic lust and inordinate selfishness.” He bemoaned “the evils of sensuality” and warned that “when we yield to the temptation of a world rife with sexual promiscuity and gone wild with a philosophy of self-expression, Jesus tells us that ‘whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.’” But in moments of loneliness, beset with temptation, he would succumb again to his own human frailties. Perhaps those were weighing on him when he asserted in a speech that segregation was “the adultery of an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality” and could not “be cured by the Vaseline of gradualism.”

  King confided to friends that “I am conscious of two Martin Luther Kings” and that “the Martin Luther King that the people talk about seems to be somebody foreign to me.” “Each of us is two selves,” he remarked in a later sermon. “And the great burden of life is to always try to keep that higher self in command. Don’t let the lower self take over.” But he confessed that “every now and then you’ll be unfaithful to those that you should be faithful to. It’s a mixture in human nature.”

  In early 1964, King was still not aware that the FBI knew about his “lower self” and was snooping into his private life. In fact, in January and February, Hoover’s agents launched counterintelligence, “dirty tricks” operations against him, planting unauthorized and illegal microphones in his hotel rooms from Washington out to Honolulu and forwarding tapes of the recordings to Hoover and his deputies, who then had national political and religious leaders secretly briefed about his personal conduct as well as his alleged Communist associations. In January, a bug in King’s room in the Willard Hotel recorded a party that involved King, some SCLC colleagues, and two Negro women employed at the Philadelphia Naval Yard. When he heard highlights of the tapes, Hoover exulted that this would “destroy the burrhead”—his favorite nickname for King—and had a transcript sent to the White House. In February, at the Los Angeles Hyatt House Motel, King and his companions delighted in some lascivious repartee, and King himself told a joke about the supposed sexual practices of John F. Kennedy, unaware of course that an FBI bug was recording it all. “This is excellent data,” beamed a bureau official, “indicting King as one of the most reprehensible…individuals on the American scene today.”

  That individual, so celebrated in public, was paying a heavy price indeed for his fame and his cause. He suffered from stomach aches and insomnia—symptoms of the guilt he felt and the stress he was under—and took sleeping pills a New York physician and friend gave to him. Yet “suffering is part of the process of life,” he once said. “Ultimately the question is not whether or not we will suffer, but whether or not we will have the inner calm to face the trials and tribulations of life.” To face the tribulations of his life, he subjected himself to painful self-analysis and attempts at self-purification. “I can’t afford to make a mistake,” he would tell Coretta or a friend. And he would ask himself: Am I making the correct decision? Maintaining my sense of purpose? Holding fast to my ideals? Guiding “the people” in the right direction? Confronting my own shortcomings and doubts?

  “But whatever my doubts, however heavy the burden,” he said to Playboy, “I feel that I must accept the task of helping to make the nation and the world a better place to live in—for all men, black and white alike.” Whatever his flaws as a man, he found comfort—a sense of security—in the knowledge that the struggle itself was right, “because it is a thrust forward…that will save the whole of mankind, and when I have come to see these things I always felt a sense of cosmic companionship. So that the loneliness and the fear have faded away because of a greater feeling of security, because of commitment to a moral ideal.” In his efforts to “do God’s will,” he could lose himself and prepare to lay down his life. “The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what is important,” he assured Time, in reference to the mounting threats to murder him. “If you are cut down in a movement that is designed to save the soul of a nation, then no other death could be more redemptive.”

  Armed with that conviction, King demonstrated extraordinary physical courage in the face of danger. Observers who saw him in action were struck by “the feeling of power” he projected “while physically remaining so calm.” His gentle manner, wrote a New York Times journalist, cloaked “a core of steel.” “He was the truest militant I ever met,” said Hosea Williams. “He not only talked that talk; he walked that walk.” Williams was with him on occasions when “I had so much fear the flesh trembled on my bones.” During one southern campaign, Williams saw King walk right through a mob of white toug
hs gathered across the street from a courthouse. As he pushed forward, smiling, saying, “Excuse me, please,” they were stupefied and made way for him without raising a hand or saying a word.

  He had the strength, too, to be tender with people, listening patiently to their troubles, commiserating with them. In need of love himself, he could give love to others with enormous sensitivity. He was especially affectionate toward members of his executive staff, whom he treated as an extended family that belonged to him. “He was able to find that common bond of love and worth in each of us that would make us produce our best,” said Andrew Young. “We were strong-willed,” Williams remembered, “and it took a terrible amount of love to handle us. I would lose my temper, and Dr. King would caution, ‘Hosea.’Just like that. Where others would get angry with me around the table, he had the capacity to love me instead.”

  When it came to SCLC, various observers disparaged King as a poor administrator, a man “more at home with a conception than he is with the details of its application,” a man with “small talent for organizing outside or inside his own group.” Even Bayard Rustin asserted that leaders like King were “great dreamers,” not effective administrators. But Wyatt Walker emphatically demurred. “When you say it like that, you sound like that’s an indictment. He’s Martin Luther King! What else does he need to be? He’s a symbol that there needs to be a moral voice in America talking about the injustice and inequity…. That’s his job. That’s his function. And that’s all he needs to be. He doesn’t need to know how to answer a telephone or write a sentence straight. It is his honor and glory that he’s also an author, that he’s a profound religious thinker who has had an impact on modern-day theology, and that he’s one of the great orators of the nation, maybe of the world.”