He said the same thing to Negroes and Puerto Ricans in other cities. And he talked and negotiated with poor whites, Indians, and Chicanos in the South, Southwest, and Far West. He hoped they would march to Washington with him, because power for poor people meant developing “the ability, togetherness, the assertiveness, and the aggressiveness to make the power structure respond.”
By February 12, meanwhile, he and his staff had completed the master plan for the Washington campaign. In phase one, to commence in late April, several thousand poor people—the initial force now being recruited in the cities and the South—would march on Washington and encamp in a plainly visible shanty town. King even thought of a mule train traveling from Mississippi to Washington to help dramatize the pilgrimage. “We hope that the sound and sight of a growing mass of poor people walking slowly toward Washington will have a positive, dramatic effect on Congress,” King said later. Once assembled in Washington, the poor would undertake brief, exploratory demonstrations and then hold a giant rally like that at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, a rally that would draw hundreds of thousands of people for a show of togetherness that might last several days. King hoped it would be the largest march ever to occur in the national capital.
In phase two, the poor-people’s army would start disrupting government operations with nonviolent sit-ins and demonstrations and get themselves arrested. As they went off to jail, hundreds of thousands of reinforcements, recruited from college campuses and the Washington ghetto, would continue demonstrations, dislocating the Labor Department and other federal agencies, until Washington jails were packed to capacity with singing, disciplined, nonviolent warriors. What they were organizing, King explained in a Look magazine article, was a “Selma-like, Birmingham-like” effort to arouse “a moribund, insensitive Congress to life” and force it to grant poor people “an Economic Bill of Rights,” including guaranteed jobs to all people who could work and a guaranteed income for those too old, too young, or too disabled to do so.
The projected campaign was not without precedent. A. Philip Randolph had long dreamed of a Washington march for jobs and income, and that had been the original purpose of the great 1963 demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial. SNCC, too, had once envisoned militant sit-ins and demonstrations in the national capital. What King was planning, though, was a full-scale war on poverty, to last three months or longer, putting relentless pressure on Congress and spotlighting for the entire nation the paradox of “poverty amid plenty” and the miser able realities of America’s poor. He intended, he said, “to dramatize the gulf between promise and fulfillment, to call attention to the gap between the dream and the realities, to make the invisible visible. All too often in the rush of everyday life there is a tendency to forget the poor, to overlook the poor, to allow the poor to become invisible, and that is why we are calling our campaign a poor people’s campaign.” He would expose, too, how Congress was playing “Russian roulette” with riots, ignoring the social maladies that ignited them while squandering America’s ample resources on the accursed war in Vietnam.
He realized, though, that Congress might not respond. “It is a harsh indictment, but it is an inescapable conclusion, that Congress is horrified not at the conditions of Negro life but at the product of these conditions—the Negro himself.” If Congress did not act, King would launch phase three of the campaign: he and his legions would undertake nationwide boycotts of selected industries and shopping centers in big cities targeted for action. These would be supported by continued demonstrations and arrests in Washington and allied marches in other parts of the country. The boycotts, accompanied perhaps by sit-ins at factories, would force business leaders to press Congress to meet King’s demands, and Congress, he hoped, would be unable to resist that kind of persuasion.
It was going to be “a mammoth job,” King admitted. “Before we have mobilized one city at a time, now we are mobilizing a nation.” Apart from an alliance of the poor, the most novel feature of the campaign was the idea of national boycotts, which grew out of the Alabama boycott he had contemplated in 1965 and the local boycotts SCLC had conducted in its previous campaigns and was still employing in its Operation Breadbaskets. Recalling how SCLC had forced Birmingham merchants to meet movement demands, King and his lieutenants intended in phase three to take the problems of the poor beyond the state to the very center of the economic system.
As Rustin said, King was getting up a class movement against the national economic power structure, which included not just Washington, but the powerful corporations and business moguls of capitalism itself. There were similarities here to the Populist crusade of 1892 and the organized labor movement of the 1930s, both of which had sought major economic reforms for the victims of industrial consolidation and had tried with varying success to bridge the cleavages between races and classes. Though much thinking and planning remained, “there was an awareness,” recalled King’s advisers, “that we were going to confront the economic foundations of the system and demand reforms”—in short, said Bernard Lee, “what the powers of the country will kill you for.” “White America must recognize,” King wrote in an article published in Playboy, “that justice for black people cannot be changed without radical changes in the structure of our society,” changes that would redistribute economic and political power and that would end poverty, racism, and war.
This was reminiscent, of course, of Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel. In truth, the poor people’s campaign was King’s “last, greatest dream” because it sought ultimately to make capitalism reform itself, presumably with the power of redemptive love to win over economic oppressors, too, and heal antagonisms. Certainly the projected campaign reflected King’s unhappiness with capitalism, an unhappiness that had begun in his youth, even before he had studied Rauschenbusch’s impassioned denunciations of it. This hardly made King a Marxist. He meant it when he told his staff that Marx “got messed up” when he failed to “see the spiritual undergirding of reality” and embraced an odious “ethical relativism” which led him to believe that the ends justified the means. And King continued to preach against the evils of Russia’s dictatorial Communist state. No, somehow a better social order than Communism or capitalism had to be constructed, one that creatively blended the need for community and the need for individuality. Perhaps in this, his most imaginative, desperate, and far-reaching scheme, he could take his country a step closer to the realization of an old dream: the forging of a Christian commonwealth that was neither capitalist nor Communist, but a synthesis of the best features of collective and individual enterprise, a commonwealth that cared for its weak and handicapped even as it encouraged its strong and gifted.
The stakes and risks involved were enormous, and King himself expected massive resistance from both the public and private sectors. But he was convinced that anything less than the poor people’s campaign was not enough. It was either that or more devastating riots and possibly guerrilla warfare in the cities. This was “the showdown for nonviolence,” King warned his countrymen, “a ‘last chance’ project to arouse the American conscience toward constructive democratic; change.”
PART TEN
FREE AT LAST
Whenever you set out to build a temple, you must face the fact that there is a tension at the heart of the universe between good and evil.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., 1968
IN HIS PUBLIC APPEARANCES, King seemed confident and composed. But among his intimates, away from the crowds and cameras, he showed the prodigious strain he was under. Abernathy thought him more troubled than ever; “he was nervous and very, very jittery.” In mid-February, 1968, he got away for a few days before the final drive on Washington. He went to Jamaica with Coretta and Young and then to Acapulco with Abernathy. On the plane to Acapulco, King acted strange. He preached his sermons to Abernathy and even repeated his self-eulogy, “A Drum Major for Justice,” which he’d given at Ebenezer. One night in Acapulco, the two friends went out to eat and then came home to bed. Around three in the morning
, Abernathy awoke with a start. King’s bed was empty. “I was terribly frightened,” Abernathy said, “and I went out in the living area looking for him.” But King wasn’t there, and Abernathy didn’t know what to do. Should he call hotel security? Then he saw King standing on the balcony in his pajamas, gazing in the gloom at the Pacific. Abernathy went to him. “Martin,” he said, “what are you doing out here this time of night? What is bothering you?”
King kept staring at the ocean, listening to the roar of the waves. “You see that rock out there?” he said.
“Oh, sure, I see it,” Abernathy said.
“How long do you think it’s been there?” King asked.
“I don’t know,” Abernathy said. “I guess centuries and centuries. I guess God put it there.”
“Well, what am I thinking about?” King asked him.
Abernathy was perplexed. He didn’t know what King was thinking, what was troubling his friend.
“You can’t tell what I’m thinking?” King asked again.
“No,” Abernathy said.
Then King started singing, “Rock of Ages, cleft for me; let me hide myself in thee….”
Abernathy was deeply concerned. King seemed so distraught, so frightened. On the plane home, he kept repeating his sermons and telling Abernathy what he wanted him to do with SCLC.
But in a few days he seemed to pull himself together. On February 23 he appeared in Carnegie Hall for a tribute to W. E. B. Du Bois. “He confronted the establishment as a model of militant manhood and integrity,” King said of Du Bois. “He defied them and though they heaped venom and scorn on him, his powerful voice was never still.”
King’s own voice was never still. Despite his moods, his recurring depression and sense of doom, he took to the road again, visiting his field staff in the cities and the South and trying to muster support for the Washington project. In his public utterances, he insisted that he was still an optimist. No matter how desperate things were, no matter how grave the crisis, no matter how much his dreams had been shattered, he refused to become a hard, grim, bitter man. He might well falter and fail, he wrote in a magazine article, but he would remain secure in his knowledge that “God loves us: He has not worked out a design for our failure. Man has the capacity to do right as well as wrong, and his history is a path upward, not downward. The past is strewn with the ruins of the empires of tyranny, and each is a monument not merely to man’s blunders but to his capacity to overcome them. While it is a bitter fact that in America in 1968, I am denied equality solely because I am black, yet I am not a chattel slave. Millions of people have fought thousands of battles to enlarge my freedom. Restricted as it still is, progress has been made. This is why I remain an optimist, though I am also a realist about the barriers before us.”
In late February, he read a summary of the report of the Kerner Commission, appointed by Johnson to investigate the origins of race riots. The report warned that the United States was “moving toward two separate societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal”—and concluded with what King had been saying since 1964: that brutalizing discrimination had spawned the riots and that the nation must strike at the roots of urban disorder by allocating massive funds to improve education, unemployment, and housing opportunities for Negroes. King declared this “a physician’s warning of approaching death with a prescription to life. The duty of every American is to administer the remedy without regard for the cost and without delay.”
But Johnson didn’t see it that way. The President announced that it would cost $30 billion to implement the Kerner proposals and that the United States could not afford them. “This means he’s not going to do anything about the war and he’s not going to do anything about the cities either,” cried Robert Kennedy. To deal with urban disorders, in fact, the administration was mobilizing an awesome military force. The Justice Department, functioning as the nation’s command post for riots, was watching pressure points and working up “response capacities,” and the army was stockpiling military equipment and opening liaisons with the National Guard and state and local police for maximum response should violence erupt in any of 124 “hot” cities. It was as though the administration were preparing for civil war.
Meanwhile the war in Vietnam ground on without end. Though Johnson had boasted that “the enemy has been defeated in battle after battle” and that America was winning the war, the Vietcong on the last day of January launched a massive Tet offensive in South Vietnam, attacking thirty-six of forty-four provincial capitals, sixty-four district towns and countless villages, twelve U.S. bases, and even the American Embassy in Saigon. Here was undeniable proof that Johnson’s military solution was a failure and that the claims of the President and his generals could not be believed. The Tet offensive proved that the Vietcong were a power to be reckoned with and that the South Vietnamese people were not loyal to the Saigon government. Yet American reinforcements continued to be shipped in, and King grumbled that Johnson “seemed amazingly devoid of statesmanship,” incapable of admitting an error and caught in an irreversible spiral of “irrational militarism.” But at least the Tet offensive inflamed public opinion against the administration and gave new life to the “Dump Johnson” movement within the Democratic party. On March 12, dovish Eugene McCarthy, U.S. Senator from Minnesota, almost whipped Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, which stunned the President and astonished political analysts. Four days later, Robert Kennedy announced that he too would run against Johnson for the Democratic Presidential nomination.
Wherever King went, people asked which peace candidate he intended to support—McCarthy or Kennedy? He hedged in public, saying that he thought highly of both men and that both their candidacies offered excellent alternatives to Lyndon Johnson. But in private he was leaning toward Kennedy. He had never been close to McCarthy, whose campaign was white-oriented and who had given little credit to King’s antiwar activity, which had helped make his campaign possible. Kennedy, on the other hand, was an old battle-tested ally. Not only was Kennedy’s office cooperating with SCLC representatives in organizing the Washington project; he was also speaking out in behalf of the poor and the powerless. He had taken up the cause of itinerant farm workers in California, visited Indian reservations, toured the Mississippi delta to see for himself what black poverty was like, and become increasingly absorbed in the problems of the northern ghettoes. His compassion made him immensely popular among American Negroes, especially in the slums. Asked what he would do if he were President, Kennedy replied that he would have the major television networks show in prime time a two-hour documentary about ghetto life—maybe that would shock white Americans out of their apathy. And he would push for recovery within the ghettoes, so that black people could develop a sense of pride and cultural identity before moving out into white communities. A Negro minister thought no white leader more welcome in the slums than Kennedy, because he “had this fantastic ability to communicate hope to some pretty rejected people.” “Kennedy is on our side,” said a ghetto youth. “We know it. He doesn’t have to say a word.”
That wasn’t the only thing King appreciated about Kennedy. In international matters, the senator sounded like King in criticizing America for failing to identify herself with the nationalist movements in the Third World and for siding much too often with repressive, anti-Communist regimes there. Moreover, Kennedy also enjoyed the unmitigated hatred of the man in the White House, who called him that “little fart” and viewed him as “the enemy.” Though King made no official endorsement of Kennedy at this juncture, taking pains not to divide the inchoate anti-Johnson forces, he knew they were allies in a common struggle.
But in King’s view the salvation of America did not rest with Kennedy or any other white leader. What she needed was Negro political leaders who would adopt an integrated foreign policy and teach the country how to get along with the colored majority in the world. United States involvement in Vietnam, King wrote in an article for Playboy, was the result of “racist deci
sion making” from “men of the white west” who had grown up in “a racist culture” and couldn’t respect anybody who was not white. There could be no peace on earth without mutual respect, and those who had suffered racial discrimination themselves would make better policy decisions and conduct better negotiations with underprivileged and emerging nations. White men, he admitted, had no monopoly on sin and greed and warfare. But Negroes had a collective experience, “a kind of shared misery,” that made them generally more sensitive to the misery of others. Because the American Negro had roots in both the white and the black worlds, he had the capacity to bridge them both. Instead of being inferior “drones,” as white society had characterized them since slavery days, black Americans could be the nation’s best leaders, providing “a new soul force for all Americans, a new expression of the American dream that need not be realized at the expense of other men around the world, but a dream of opportunity and life that can be shared with the rest of the world.”
THERE WAS TROUBLE IN MEMPHIS, trouble in the valley in Tennessee. James Lawson, an old friend and pastor of the Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, contacted King and briefed him on the situation there. Memphis’s sanitation workers—nearly all of them black—had established a local chapter of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees and had asked the city to recognize the union and grant them a contract that improved wages and working conditions. But the city adamantly refused, and on February 12 most of Memphis’s 1,300 Negro sanitation employees went on strike, vowing to stay away until their demands were met and holding protest marches with signs reading, “I AM A MAN.” When the police broke them up with mace and night sticks, an aroused black community closed ranks behind the sanitation workers, organized a strike-support group called the Community on the Move for Equality (COME), and staged daily marches from Mason Temple to city hall. But Mayor Henry Loeb refused to negotiate and threatened to fire the strikers if they did not return to their jobs; and the city secured a local court injunction against further marches. At that, Lawson and other COME members voted to bring in King and other national leaders to give speeches and rally local support for the strike. “We wanted to escalate the whole effort,” said one Negro. “We were still at the point in this city where Martin Luther King could pull out a lot of people.”
Let the Trumpet Sound Page 58