Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  Though Rustin, Wachtel, and other advisers had serious reservations about a northern campaign, King would not be dissuaded. He was no longer a spokesman and a combatant solely for the southern Negro. He was a national leader—an international leader—whose moral vision encompassed the entire country.

  As King prepared his People-to-People tour of the North, he received several urgent communications from Al Raby of Chicago’s Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, a coalition of thirty-four civil-rights, religious, and civic groups. As Raby explained it, CCCO was currently involved in a fierce struggle against de facto school segregation in Chicago and was trying desperately to oust Superintendent Benjamin C. Willis, whose policies had worsened school conditions in Chicago’s slums. In June, CCCO had launched school boycotts and mass demonstrations to get rid of Willis. But the protest had begun to dwindle, and Raby, CCCO’s “convener” and a teacher himself, wanted King to help revive it. “We came South to help you in Selma,” Raby said, “now we need you here.”

  King came on July 23 and huddled with Raby, a lean, nervous man with a heavy mustache and balding head. Then King embarked on a whirlwind two-day tour of Chicago’s ghettoes, speaking at one street corner after another in support of CCCO’s battle with Willis. A reporter observed that he styled his message to suit his audience, “playing the role of a fourth generation Southern Baptist preacher at one street corner and alternating as a smooth, articulate national leader of the civil rights movement to the next group.” The highlight of his visit came on July 26, when he led 30,000 people on a march to City Hall at the peak of rush-hour traffic. It was twenty times larger than the biggest demonstration thus far in Chicago, and Negro leaders there were euphoric. “Chicago will never be the same now that the people here see what he brought,” said William C. Berry of the Chicago Urban League. Even Mayor Richard Daley, whose powerful political machine controlled the city, called the march a “tribute” to King and unctuously declared that “all right thinking Americans” shared his position on poverty and segregation.

  Though suffering from bronchitis and extreme fatigue, King was happy with his trip, regarding it as “one of the most successful experiences” of his career. The giant march to City Hall seemed proof of his drawing power in the North, proof that he could get up a “dynamic movement” there to rival that in Selma and Birmingham. Before leaving for other northern cities, King told Raby that if the fight against Willis didn’t go as planned, he would return to Chicago and “stay as long as possible to lend aid.”

  DURING HIS NORTHERN TRAVELS, King kept in close contact with civil-rights forces in Washington, which were lobbying to get the strongest possible voting bill enacted. The major dispute involved a poll-tax ban in state and local elections, which the administration ruled out of the bill on grounds that it would probably be declared unconstitutional. With bipartisan support, the measure passed in the Senate on May 26, in the House on July 9. At Howard University’s commencement exercises, a triumphant Lyndon Johnson announced that the “next and more profound” goal in the civil-rights struggle was “not just legal equity but human equity—not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and a result.” King loved that “magnificent” speech and sent Johnson a telegram saying so. At this time, their public friendship had never been warmer: they exchanged copies of their addresses, and King had access to the President by telephone. There was only one thing about Johnson that troubled King: the administration was escalating American involvement in an embattled little Asian country named Vietnam.

  In early August, Congress approved the final version of the voting-rights bill, and King flew to Washington for the presidential signing. The day before that celebrated event, he met with Johnson in the White House, and they talked about the remarkable achievements of 1965, not only the voting bill, but other measures in Johnson’s heralded Great Society program—Medicare, federal aid to education, relief for preschool children from poor families, a large additional antipoverty program—which were now on the books and which Johnson thought would improve the lives of all Americans, particularly Negroes. King believed that Johnson possessed “amazing sensitivity to the difficult problems that Negro Americans face in the stride toward freedom.” In fact, the voting-rights bill marked the high point of the Johnson consensus on civil rights, with Rustin, Wilkins, Randolph, and other Negro leaders all acclaiming him the greatest President the American Negro ever had. And that, said Randolph, included Abraham Lincoln.

  The next day, August 6, King and his colleagues gathered in the Rotunda of the Capitol for the voting-bill ceremonies. The President stood directly in front of a statue of Lincoln, facing radio microphones and television cameras. “Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that’s ever been won on any battlefield,” Johnson said. He recalled how the slaves had come here “in darkness and chains” three hundred years ago and asserted that “today we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds.” Then he strolled into the President’s Room and signed the voting bill into law. It was the same room in which Lincoln had endorsed the first Confiscation Act in 1861, which had seized all slaves employed in the Confederate war effort. In the Cabinet Room afterward, Johnson met with King, Wilkins, Randolph, and Clarence Mitchell of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, which had lobbied for the bill on Capitol Hill. “There was a religiosity about the meeting,” recalled a Johnson aide, “which was warm with emotion—a final celebration of an act so long desired and so long in achieving.”

  The act meant business. It outlawed all literacy tests and similar voting restrictions, empowered the Attorney General to supervise federal elections in seven southern states by appointing examiners to register those kept off the rolls, and instructed him “forthwith” to challenge the constitutionality of poll taxes in state and local elections in the four states where they were still law (the 24th Amendment had already prohibited the poll tax in federal elections). At the time, political analysts almost unanimously attributed the voting act to King’s Selma campaign. Without the pressure from there, it would have taken years to extract such legislation from Congress. Now, thanks to his own political sagacity, his understanding of how nonviolent, direct-action protest could stimulate corrective federal legislation, King’s long crusade to gain southern Negroes the right to vote, which had begun with the formation of SCLC in 1957, was about to be realized.

  That summer, Washington moved swiftly and forcefully to implement the new law, filing suits against all southern poll-tax statutes and dispatching federal registrars to counties in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi with the stiffest barriers to Negro voting. Once federal examiners were supervising voter registration in all troublesome areas in Dixie, Negroes were able to get on the rolls and vote by the hundreds of thousands, forever altering the pattern of southern politics. In Alabama, where the number of registered Negroes rose by 150 percent in three years, there were incredible spectacles: George Wallace himself courting the Negro vote…. Al Lingo, in an unsuccessful bid for Jefferson County sheriff, allowing himself to be photographed as he contributed money to an SCLC collection plate…. Sheriff Jim Clark, his NEVER button gone now, throwing a barbecue for Selma’s Negro voters in a bitter re-election campaign, only to lose to Wilson Baker, who enjoyed solid black support. As King had predicted, Alabama Negroes, once they gained the ballot, voted the Lingos and Clarks right out of office.

  In truth, the impact of King’s campaign was nowhere more evident than in Selma, the old black-belt town where it had started. Within a few years the city’s racial caste system was dead—the obstacles to Negro voting gone, the city council and the police force both racially mixed, the schools and public accommodations all desegregated. While racial prejudice continued to infect the white community (“we still need a few more funerals,” Mrs. Jackson said), some upper-class whites considered it stylish to invite prominent Negroes to their social gatherings. And Negroes and white moderates could now befriend one another w
ithout fear of reprisals. In time, Mrs. Jackson found that she and a white team teacher, a Mississippi woman, could tease and talk to each other without worrying about a color barrier— something that would have been impossible before 1965.

  Selma Negroes rejoiced at the tremendous changes the movement had brought about. They spoke with unabashed reverence for “Dr. King,” never forgetting the pensive way he had looked at them, his hands clasped before his face, during those wondrous mass meetings in Brown Chapel. “I just love that man,” Marie Foster would say, her voice trailing off as she searched for words to describe all he meant to her. When out-of-town visitors would call, she would bring out a box and exhibit a pair of shoes. Across the box she had written: “Shoes that carried me through 50 mile trek from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. 1965. We walked for freedom, that we might have the right to vote.”

  For her and the others who participated, the movement of 1965 became the central event of their lives, a time of self-liberation when they stood and marched to glory with Martin Luther King. Yes, they were surprised at themselves, proud of the strength they had displayed in confronting the state of Alabama, happy indeed, as Marie Foster said, to be “a new Negro in a new South—a Negro who is no longer afraid.”

  And that perhaps was King’s greatest gift to his long-suffering people in Dixie: he taught them how to confront those who oppressed them, how to take pride in their race and their history, how to demand and win their constitutional rights as American citizens. He helped them “destroy barriers of fear and insecurity that had been hundreds of years in the making,” said a young Negro leader. “He made it possible for them to believe they could overcome.” And the powerful civil-rights legislation generated by his tramping soldiers eventually ended statutory racism in the South, enabling Negroes there to realize at least the political and social promise of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

  King, though, had no illusion that legislation alone would end racism itself, convert his country into a “symphony of brotherhood,” and restore the beloved community he still dreamed of. But he had learned that legislation was indispensable in making that community possible. “It may be true that you cannot legislate integration,” he had said in Boston, “but you can legislate desegregation. It may be true that you cannot legislate morality, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me.” Because legislation and court orders could proscribe a man from killing, excluding, and oppressing him with impunity, they were “of inestimable value” in bringing about a desegregated society. But as he said on another occasion, “desegregation is only a partial, though necessary, step toward the final goal which we seek to realize, genuine inter-group and interpersonal living.” And here laws and vigorous law enforcement were not much help. While they could alter the habits of men, King believed, they could not eliminate “fears, prejudice, pride, and irrationality, which are barriers to a truly integrated society. These dark and demonic responses will be removed only as men are possesed by the invisible, inner law which etches on their hearts the conviction that all men are brothers and that love is mankind’s most potent weapon for personal and social transformation. True integration will be achieved by true neighbors who are willingly obedient to unenforceable obligations.”

  AT THE TIME JOHNSON SIGNED the voting-rights bill, King was increasingly apprehensive about administration policies in Vietnam. For more than twenty years, war had racked that distant Asian land, as Communist forces under Ho Chi Minh battled to liberate their country, first from the French, then from the United States. After France withdrew in 1955, the U.S. moved in, ignored an international agreement in Geneva which called for free elections, and installed a repressive, anti-Communist regime in South Vietnam, supplying it with money, weapons, and military advisers. From the outset, American policy makers viewed Ho Chi Minh’s government in North Vietnam as part of a world Communist conspiracy directed by Moscow and Peking: if Communism was not halted in Vietnam, they feared, then all Asia would ultimately succumb. American intervention, of course, aroused Ho Chi Minh, who rushed help to nationalist guerrillas in South Vietnam and set out to unite all of Vietnam under his leadership. With civil war raging across South Vietnam, the United States stepped up its flow of military aid to Saigon. Under Kennedy, the number of American advisers rose to 23,000, but Kennedy became disillusioned with American involvement in Vietnam and actually devised a disengagement plan before he was assassinated. Johnson, however, nullified the plan and continued American assistance to South Vietnam, though he scarcely mentioned the war in his first State of the Union message. In the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August, 1964, Congress did empower the President to use armed force against “Communist aggression” in Vietnam, but Johnson repeatedly vowed, “We are not going to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”

  But over the winter all that changed. In November and December, South Vietnamese guerrillas of the National Liberation Front (or Vietcong) killed seven U.S. advisers and wounded more than a hundred others in mortar and bomb attacks, and Johnson got mad. He wasn’t going to let them shoot our boys out there, fire on our flag. He talked obsessively about Communist “aggression” in Vietnam, about Munich and the lesson of appeasement, about how his enemies would call him “a coward,” “an unmanly man,” a “Weakling!” if he let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon. He couldn’t depend on the United Nations to act—“It couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.” In February, 1965, with the Vietcong pounding American outposts at Pleiku and Quinhon, the administration became convinced that the coup-plagued Saigon government was about to collapse and that the United States had to do something drastic or South Vietnam would be lost and American international prestige and and influence severely damaged. Accordingly, Johnson moved to Americanize the war and sent waves of U.S. warplanes roaring over North Vietnam in a sustained bombing attack called Operation Rolling Thunder. In March he ordered the first American combat troops into South Vietnam, and 3,200 marines waded ashore near Da Nang.

  The next month Johnson’s propensity for deviousness and concealment began to show. He announced that the United States was ready for “unconditional discussions” with an eye toward a negotiated peace, but then added a condition—the hated Vietcong could not participate, which guaranteed that Hanoi would spurn his offer. The truth was that Johnson and his planners were now sold on a military solution: American firepower would blast the Vietnamese to the peace table and save the South (or what was left of it) for freedom.

  The Americanization of the war took place with such stealth that people at home were hardly aware of the change. As David Halberstam later wrote, U.S. decision makers “inched across the Rubicon without even admitting it,” and the task of their press secretaries was “to misinform the public.” The biggest misinformers were Johnson and his spokesmen, who lied about costs (which were staggering), casualties, victories, and buildups. By June, more than 75,000 American soldiers were in Vietnam, and combat troops were fighting Vietcong and North Vietnamese regulars in an Asian land war Johnson had sworn to avoid. When the U.S. commander in Vietnam clamored for 200,000 men, the President resolved to “meet his demands.” By August, troops were pouring in, and the war reeled out of control as each American escalation stiffened Vietcong and North Vietnamese resistance, which in turn led to more American escalation. In the eyes of the administration and the Pentagon, it was unthinkable that America’s awesome military power could fail to crush tiny North Vietnam and the pajama-clad Vietcong.

  The events in Vietnam haunted King through the summer. He could not bear to see his country muscling its way into the internal affairs of another nation, bombing and shooting people—and brown-skinned people at that—under the deluded excuse of stopping Communism. When was America ever going to understand the nationalistic fervor sweeping the colored people of the world
, including the Vietnamese? When was she ever going to get on the right side of the revolutionary spirit of the age? He hated war anyway, had denounced “the madness of militarism” since Montgomery days, and had long hoped that once he and SCLC had broken down Dixie’s racial barriers, they could apply creative nonviolence to the world theater. And now that moment had arrived. “I’m not going to sit by and see the war escalate without saying something about it,” he told his SCLC followers. “It is worthless to talk about integrating if there is no world to integrate in. The war in Vietnam must be stopped.”