Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  His aides and advisers were deeply divided over his speaking out. Even pacifist Bayard Rustin urged caution. King and Johnson were on the best of terms now, and criticism of the war might alienate the President and Congress, too. The country was extremely hawkish over the war—Congress rushed through huge supplementary military appropriations with scarcely a dissent—and Levison feared that SCLC would lose its donors and slide into bankruptcy. The northern crusade against slums and poverty would have to be abandoned.

  But King would not be restrained. Racial injustice, poverty, and the Vietnam War were all “inextricably bound together,” he asserted, and in August he made his stand. On the platform, in press conferences, and on a CBS television show, he urged the United States to stop bombing North Vietnam and “make an unequivocal and unambiguous statement” that she was willing to negotiate with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front. He warned that if the United States continued to escalate the war, it could imperil “the whole of mankind.” He even offered to mediate himself—was he not a Nobel laureate for peace?—and try to bring the United States, Russia, China, and the Vietnamese to the conference table.

  Reactions were swift and hostile. “Is he casting about for a role in Vietnam because the civil rights struggle is no longer adequate to his own estimate of his talents?” chided columnist Max Freedman. Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young, courting the President’s favor, begged King to be quiet about Vietnam lest he wreck the Johnson consensus on civil rights. And the President himself was furious—who in the hell did King think he was?—and moved behind the scenes to shut him up. “They told me I wasn’t an expert in foreign affairs,” King recalled of the warnings he received from the administration, “and they were all experts. I knew only civil rights and should stick to that.”

  That attitude rankled King. He had thought that Johnson respected him and welcomed his views even if they challenged administration policy. Clearly that was not the case. Given all that he had done for the Negro, the President expected King to agree with his war policy and regarded him as an ingrate when he did not. King was only now beginning to understand Johnson’s “ego thing.”

  DURING THE SECOND WEEK OF AUGUST, as King was taking his stand on Vietnam, Al Raby met with him in Birmingham and implored him to return to Chicago and conduct demonstrations against segregated housing as well as segregated schools. Since King’s visit, the Chicago movement had flagged so badly that Raby was down to leading “nine people and a dog.” He reminded King of his promise to come back and “lend a hand.”

  King was still looking for a target city for a northern direct-action campaign, and he agreed to give Raby’s request careful and prayerful consideration. Then he flew to Puerto Rico for a religious convention and a little rest. While he was there, the Watts ghetto of Los Angeles exploded in the worst race riot in American history. Negroes there burned and looted stores for six days before police and California guardsmen could quell the disturbances. Thirty-four people had been killed, 900 injured, some 3,500 arrested, $46 million worth of property destroyed, and incalculable harm done to the civil-rights movement. White America recoiled in revulsion, contending that ghetto Negroes were too lawless to merit help or sympathy. “Everything seemed to collapse,” Ramsey Clark moaned of the white backlash. “The days of ‘We Shall Overcome’ were over.”

  King was devastated by the news. He had warned America that something like Watts was going to happen, that time bombs were ticking away in her neglected cities. He flew to Los Angeles with Rustin and Bernard Lee and walked the streets of Watts, pleading with residents to understand that violence and rioting were not the answer to their miseries. All around him were fire-gutted stores and smoldering shops, shabby bars and pool halls, boarded-up doors and windows and garbage-strewn alleys. People he spoke to were skeptical and angry; some even heckled him. When a group of youngsters announced that “we won,” King was stunned. “How can you say you won when thirty-four Negroes are dead, your community is destroyed, and whites are using the riots as an excuse for inaction?” “We won,” explained an unemployed young man, “because we made the whole world pay attention to us.”

  It was a painful lesson for King. He called rioting “the language of the unheard,” a desperate and suicidal cry of one “who is so fed up with the powerlessness of his cave existence that he asserts that he would rather be dead than ignored.” It was no accident, he and Rustin noted, that the rioting moved in almost a direct path toward City Hall. It was significant, too, that the rioters had assaulted stores notorious for high prices and hostile attitudes; they had spared Negro-owned establishments, white stores that gave credit to Negroes, and nearly all public facilities like schools and libraries. In looting pawn shops, groceries, liquor and department stores, the rioters took things that “all the dinning affluence of Los Angeles had never given them,” Rustin observed.

  Which was what he and King tried to tell Mayor Sam Yorty and Police Chief William Parker. The riot broke out, they explained, because Watts was four times as congested as the rest of Los Angeles, because 30 percent of Watts’s working-age Negroes had no jobs, because the police treated every Negro as a criminal merely because he was a Negro, because California voters only last year had rescinded the state’s fair-housing law, which convinced Watts’s Negroes that their own city and state were reinforcing racial barriers against them …because nobody in city hall seemed to care…because over Watts hung a miasma of rage and despair….

  But Yorty and Parker were not impressed. Los Angeles had no racial prejudice, they said. As for the housing-law vote, “That’s no indication of prejudice. That’s personal choice.” When Rustin asked the police chief why he had referred to rioters as “monkeys” and “the criminal element,” Parker huffed that this was the only language that Negroes understood.

  King left Los Angeles certain of Parker’s “blind intransigence and ignorance of the social forces involved.” All those rioters had not been criminals: more than a third of those taken into custody had never been arrested before and most of the others had only minor police records. King complained that this city, this “luminous symbol of luxurious living for whites,” was inviting a holocaust if it did not wake up to the wretched conditions that had produced the rioting. But Los Angeles did not wake up. An official report on Watts—the McCone Report—devoted not a single word to the social and economic ills that plagued Watts, instead accepting Parker’s contention that “criminals” were behind the outbreak and citing him for exemplary service to “this entire community.” At the same time, President Johnson also denounced urban violence like that in Watts, and powerful voices on Capitol Hill chorused that rioting was the Negroes’ answer to all that Congress had done for them.

  All this convinced King that he must get on with his northern crusade without delay. He must make the country tend to its smoldering cities before they all went up in flames. Negroes in Los Angeles had invited him to come there, but King knew where he was going now. Back in Atlanta, he informed his staff they they were heading for Chicago. Here they would mount their northern direct-action campaign. Here they would spotlight the myriad slum conditions—substandard housing and unequal job opportunities, racist real-estate practices, police brutality, de facto school segregation—that fomented riots. Of all the cities he had considered, only Chicago had a strong Negro leadership structure already functioning and a local movement already under way. He had “great faith” in Raby and CCCO and thought an effective campaign could be built around them. Moreover, he considered Chicago the closest northern equivalent to Birmingham. It was the most “ghettoized” city in America, the symbol and capital of segregation in the North. If he and SCLC could solve northern problems here, King felt, they could solve them anywhere.

  He intended to give Chicago itself a last chance—an alternative to Watts. The city was due for a major eruption; yet if he could produce a nonviolent movement in Chicago, he sincerely believed that he could reduce the possibilities of riots by 80 percent.

&nbs
p; But several of his aides and advisers raised objections. Hosea Williams, trying to salvage SCOPE, insisted that SCLC ought to stay home in the South and register Negroes under the new voting law. “We need to clean up at home,” argued Williams and his SCOPE staff. “Chicago is not our turf.”

  Bayard Rustin agreed. He was a New Yorker; he knew what King would be up against in a big northern city like Chicago: a complex, interlocking chain of realtor interests, City Hall, banks, and other businesses that was far different from Selma and Birmingham. Worse, he would be taking on Mayor Daley, whose sophisticated machine had inroads in the black community itself. Was King prepared to fight Daley himself? Was he ready to battle Daley’s Negroes? “You won’t beat Daley on his home ground,” Rustin warned, “and you’ll come away with nothing meaningful for all your efforts.”

  King realized that Chicago would be tough—the toughest challenge he had ever faced. But he was not going to stay away because the odds were against him. He was not going to surrender to “the paralysis of analysis.” No, he felt that he had “divine guidance,” felt that God was calling him to work in the valleys of Chicago. The poor needed him there; he had to go. God wanted him to go.

  King’s other staffers were spellbound. “Well, Bayard,” said Andrew Young, “Martin’s been called by God to go to Chicago and therefore he should go.” With planning and effort, Young thought SCLC could raise a nonviolent army of 100,000 people in Chicago, whose black population, numbering almost a million, was larger than that in some individual southern states. Think what an army of 100,000 could accomplish if it conducted a week-long vigil in the “Spaghetti Bowl” interchange of Chicago’s expressway system. For Young, it boggled the imagination.

  But Rustin was still skeptical. When King acted on inspiration, as he had in Albany, he was usually wrong. Rustin feared “a fiasco.”

  King had made up his mind, though, and that was that. In early September, he called Raby to Atlanta to discuss the goals of the campaign. When Raby reported back to Chicago, the CCCO people were ecstatic—they thought the messiah was coming. King meanwhile dispatched an advance team under James Bevel to lay the groundwork for battle, to hold workshops on nonviolence and the causes of slums. King planned to scale down SCOPE and eventually augment his forces in Chicago to two hundred field workers—the largest of any previous campaign. In announcing the Chicago project, which he hoped would be operational by the spring or early summer of 1966, King contended that poverty was the fundamental problem of Negroes in this country. “The nonviolent movement must be as much directed against the violence of poverty, which destroys the souls of people, as against the violence of segregation.” He pronounced Chicago “an experiment in faith” and “the test case for the SCLC and for the freedom movement in the North.” He was going there with “some fear and trembling,” because the difficulties were vastly more complex and his enemies craftier than any he had faced in Selma or Birmingham. “In the North we will not be aided as much by the brutality of our opponents,” he added. “Egypt still exists in Chicago but the Pharaohs are more sophisticated and subtle.”

  IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, THE PRESIDENT asked King to talk with United Nations Ambassador Arthur Goldberg about the situation in Vietnam. On September 10, in the company of Rustin, Wachtel, and Young, King conferred with Goldberg in New York and maintained his position that there must be a negotiated settlement that included the Vietcong. Goldberg looked at Wachtel with a pained expression, as if to say, “Can’t you do something with this man?” The ambassador assured King that the United States was committed to peace in Vietnam and that he could expect a resolution of the war in the near future. But King was far from convinced. “We weren’t sure that Goldberg even believed what he was saying,” Young recalled.

  In a press conference afterward, King took another controversial stance: he asserted that the United States must “seriously consider” reversing its policy toward the People’s Republic of China. He meant that Communist China should not only be admitted into the United Nations—something the United States bitterly opposed—but be included in any peace negotiations. The leading power in Asia and the largest country in the world, Communist China was crucial to any lasting solution in Vietnam. King’s remarks, Young said, started “the holocaust,” as Democratic and labor bosses howled in protest. In the fall of 1965, King’s stand on Vietnam was unpopular enough; his views on Communist China were heresy. Wachtel claimed that several New York businessmen who had pledged large sums of money to King and SCLC canceled them in a furor. And the pressure from the White House and the conservative Negro leadership was unrelenting for him to stay “in his own depth” and stick to civil rights.

  But King had his defenders too. Coretta had been active in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and had even addressed an antiwar rally that year in California, and she urged her husband to hold his ground on the war, as did Harold DeWolf and pacifist A. J. Muste, whom King had criticized back in Crozer days. Dr. Benjamin Spock, a popular pediatrician and a spokesman for an incipient antiwar movement, met King on an airplane that autumn and urged him to make a world tour for peace and then return to unite the antiwar forces in a national crusade. Spock regarded King as “the most important symbol for peace in this country” and the one personality around whom people would rally.

  King shared Spock’s feelings about the war. But he couldn’t do everything. He couldn’t go on a world tour and lead a national peace movement at the same time that he was organizing the Chicago operation and battling the slums of the North. Still, Vietnam continued to torment him. By the end of 1965, some 185,000 American soldiers—a disproportionate number of them Negroes—were fighting in that fire-scarred land; and the administration was soon talking about escalating U.S. forces to 450,000 men. Despite Goldberg’s claims, peace was obviously not close at hand. And the rising civilian casualties were intolerable. “Now in the confrontation of the big powers occurring in our country,” a Vietnamese Buddhist monk wrote King, “hundreds and perhaps thousands of Vietnamese peasants and children lose their lives every day, and our land is unmercifully and tragically torn by a war which is already twenty years old. I am sure that since you have been engaged in one of the hardest struggles for equality and human rights, you are among those who understand fully, and who share with all their hearts, the indescribable suffering of the Vietnamese people. The world’s greatest humanists would not remain silent. You yourself cannot remain silent…. Recently a young Buddhist monk named Thich Giac Thanh burned himself to call the attention of the world to the suffering endured by the Vietnamese, the suffering caused by this unnecessary war—and you know that war is never necessary…. Nobody here wants the war. What is the war for, then? And whose is the war?”

  One day in early 1966, King sat in a parked car with Harold DeWolf, several blocks from SCLC headquarters in Atlanta. King was going through spiritual turmoil about how strongly he should oppose the war. He had answered his pro-war critics in a recent column for the Chicago Defender, a Negro newspaper: “The Negro must not allow himself to become a victim of the self-serving philosophy of those who manufacture war that the survival of the world is the white man’s business alone.” But how far could he go at this time in making the war a major issue? According to Young, he finally elected to restrict his antiwar criticism to carefully chosen thrusts, trying to find some middle ground between the majority of civil-rights leaders who supported Johnson and the out-and-out antiwar advocates, some of whom Young viewed as “kooks.” But one of King’s former staffers, a young white named Charles Fager who had served with him in Selma, lamented King’s perilous and tortuous middle course on Vietnam. In an article published in the Christian Century, which was put out in Chicago, Fager contended that “Vietnam is perhaps the gravest challenge of Dr. King’s career.” “When he accepted the Nobel peace prize he baptized all races into his congregation and confirmed the world as the battleground for his gospel of nonviolence and reconciliation. He is no longer—and pr
obably never can be—a spokesman for just an American Negro minority.” In his struggle with himself over Vietnam, Fager contended, King must answer not only to all races in the world, but to history. If in his agony he failed to lead, would history forgive him?

  IT WAS A DISPIRITING WINTER for King. The Chicago campaign was running behind schedule, and he planned to move there in mid-January to take personal charge of operations. Coretta would remain in Atlanta, where Yoki and Marty were now enrolled in a desegregated public school—one of the best in Atlanta; Coretta had seen to that. Just before he left for Chicago, the Kings attended a school program on “Music That Made America Great.” The children—Yoki and Marty included—sang melodies of various immigrant groups, and the Kings looked on with approving smiles, certain that the chorus would conclude with a Negro spiritual, the most original of all American music. Instead, the children ended with “Dixie,” the hymn to the Old South. As the Kings rose to go, they looked at one another in amazement and indignation that not a single Negro song had been on the program. “I wept within that night,” King wrote later. “I wept for my children, who, through daily miseducation, are taught that the Negro is an irrelevant entity in American society; I wept for all the white parents and teachers who are forced to overlook the fact that the wealth of cultural and technological progress in America is a result of the commonwealth of inpouring contributions.”

  PART EIGHT

  THE ROAD TO JERICHO

  IN JANUARY, 1966, A NEWSMAN OBSERVED, King “hit Chicago in a swirl of jet smoke and under a screen of secrecy.” He met in strategy sessions with CCCO and SCLC—now combined into the Chicago Freedom Movement—and emerged after two days to sound the trumpets of battle. “Our primary objective will be to bring about the unconditional surrender of forces dedicated to the creation and maintenance of slums,” he told reporters—and Chicago’s city leaders beyond. The Chicago movement would press the political power structure to “find imaginative programs to overcome the problem.” King’s order of operations, to unfold in stages, called for block-by-block canvassing of black neighborhoods to generate grassroots support (which was already under way), followed by the formation of a “Slum Union” to bargain with absentee slumlords and organize strikes and boycotts if necessary to improve conditions. Around May 1, the campaign would build into mass direct action in the form of southern-style street demonstrations, designed to expose and protest “the slow, stifling death of a kind of concentration camp life” in the ghetto. In the process, the movement would demonstrate to slum dwellers that all was not hopeless, that they could “do something about their problems.” The aim of the movement, King went on, was to secure the blessings of America for Negroes, in housing and educational and social opportunities. But its overall goal was “to create the beloved community,” which required a qualitative change in our souls and a quantitative change in our lives. “It will be done by rejecting the racism, materialism and violence that has characterized Western civilization and especially by working toward a world of brotherhood, cooperation and peace.”