Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  Lawson pleaded with King to come and address at least one mass meeting. The sanitation workers and the black community needed him. Besides, Memphis wasn’t Harlem or Chicago. Memphis was in the South, King’s home, where hundreds of thousands of Negroes still looked to him as their Moses. Even if he could make only one appearance, it would help the movement immeasurably.

  King thought it over. The strike seemed a prototype of the kind of campaign he was planning for Washington. Here were poor black garbage collectors, asking a racist city government for decent pay and seeking a place in the union movement, a movement that had improved the lot of millions of whites. Here were Negro strikers, enjoined from exercising their constitutional right of assembly by a local court injunction—the very weapon the U.S. Supreme Court had endorsed in the Walker decision. For King, it was unthinkable to ignore the sanitation workers in their struggle. “These are poor folks,” he told his staff. “If we don’t stop for them, then we don’t need to go to Washington. These are part of the people we’re going there for.”

  In mid-March, he embarked on a People-to-People tour to recruit volunteers for the march to Washington, a tour that was to take him through Mississippi—one of the rural target areas—and on up to cities in the East. Since he was going to be in Mississippi, he elected to make an exploratory trip to Memphis; he rearranged his crowded schedule and on March 18 flew there with his staff, taking rooms at the Lorraine Motel—a Negro motor lodge in the waterfront area—where he usually stayed while he was in town. He conferred with Lawson and other local leaders and then hurried to Mason Temple, where 17,000 people gave him a rousing welcome.

  The clapping, the songs, the upturned faces—all were reminiscent of the movement’s glory days—and King spoke to them with the fervor of old. “You have assembled for more than thirty days now, to say, ‘We are tired. We are tired of being at the bottom…. We are tired of having to live in dilapidated, substandard housing. We are tired of working our hands off and laboring every day and not even making a wage adequate with the daily basic necessities of life. We are tired of our men being emasculated, so that our wives and our daughters have to go out and work in the white ladies’ kitchens.’ ” The crowd responded again and again with applause and cries of yessir! awright! “And so I say we’re not gonna let any dogs or water hoses turn us around. We aren’t gonna let any injunction turn us around [cries and shouts]. We’ve gotta march again, in order to put the issue where it is supposed to be, force everybody to see that thirteen hundred of God’s children are suffering, sometimes going hungry “ Over the stamping and shouting, he called for a massive downtown march on Friday, March 22, and urged all Negro employees to boycott their jobs and all Negro students to stay away from school that day. “Try it,” King cried, “and they will hear you.”

  His people in Mason Temple certainly heard him (and so did two FBI agents among them). Glory, look at that crowd! Thrilled by what he felt here, King decided to come back to Memphis and lead the huge march himself, and he told Lawson and his colleagues so. He believed they had a good movement going here, with plenty of local enthusiasm and competent leadership. For the first time, a black community was solidly behind a labor organization drive, and the parallels with the Washington project were striking indeed. If local Negroes could make Memphis deal with poor garbage workers, maybe King could force Washington to deal with all of America’s poor.

  But there were difficulties in Memphis nobody told him about. A group of Black Power youths were determined to challenge the established Negro leadership and its nonviolent approach. In fact, thirty to forty of them had recently interrupted a meeting in Clayborn Temple and distributed pamphlets that contained mimeographed drawings of how to fashion a Molotov cocktail, along with a quotation from Rap Brown that Negroes “must move from resistance to aggression, from revolt to revolution.” At another meeting, an angry young voice had sounded from the floor: “When you talk about fighting a city with as many cops as this city’s got, you better have some guns! You’re gonna need ‘em before it’s over.”

  King knew nothing about such youths, nothing about any generational feuds and disaffection within Memphis’s black community. All he knew was that 17,000 people in Mason Temple were pouring out their love to him and that Lawson and his colleagues were overjoyed that he was returning. Memphis seemed so safe that King didn’t bother to leave any staff members to help organize Friday’s march.

  He headed back to Mississippi and resumed his People-to-People tour, employing a tenant farmer’s shanty as the symbol of his campaign. In a town called Marks, he came face-to-face with what his current struggle was all about. He saw scores of Negro children walking barefoot in the streets, their stomachs protruding from hunger. Their mothers and fathers were trying to get funds from Washington, but nothing had come through yet. They raised a little money here and there trying to feed their children, trying to teach them something. Some parents were unemployed and had no sources of income—no pensions, no welfare checks, nothing. “How do you live?” King asked, incredulous. “Well,” they said, “we go around—go around to the neighbors and ask them for a little something. When the berry season comes, we pick berries; when the rabbit season comes, we hunt and catch a few rabbits, and that’s about it.” Sometimes, though, it was really bad. Sometimes they couldn’t get any food at all, not even for the children.

  When King heard that, he broke down and cried. He vowed to bring them all—every Negro in Marks, Mississippi—to Washington for Congress and the President to see. Maybe that would wake them up to what he was trying to end in America.

  On March 21, he was back in Memphis, holding a strategy session for tomorrow’s march. There had been a threat on his life that day: a man with a foreign accent had phoned radio station WHBQ in Memphis and warned that King would be shot if he returned there. Rumors were abroad in the black community that Carmichael and Rap Brown were coming to town and that militant youths had invaded Negro schools, threatening any teacher and student who showed up for classes the next day. At a meeting with local ministers, one young man had scoffed at marching. What good would that do? “If you want honkies to get the message,” he said, “you got to break some windows.”

  The next day a blizzard struck Memphis, paralyzing the city with sixteen inches of snow and forcing King and Lawson’s group to cancel the march. They rescheduled it for Thursday, March 28, and King flew off to New York for meetings with his Research Committee. By now, the depression was on him again, worse than ever. In New York, Lee, the Wachtels, and Rustin all noticed that something was wrong with him. “Bayard,” King said when they were alone, “I sometimes wonder where I can go from here. I’ve accomplished so much. What can I do now?” Rustin told Wachtel, “You know, Harry, Martin really disturbs me.” Both thought something was happening to him, a kind of psychological deterioration that was hard to describe. “It got scary,” Rustin recalled. “It was a very strange thing. When you would sit and talk philosophy with him or anything, it was the same old Martin. His judgments were not affected. But he was terribly preoccupied with death. And this flaw of ‘will I continue to develop, will I continue to do things’ ” Of course, given the tension and danger he was under, Rustin conceded that “he had some very good reasons to feel anguished.” But Lee thought it was more than the pressure and lack of sleep. “It was deeper than that.” His friends couldn’t quite fathom what it was.

  On March 25 King was scheduled to appear before the annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly, held in the Catskill Mountains, to solicit support for the poor people’s campaign. He rode out to a New York airport with Wachtel and Young, only to become very agitated when he saw a single-engine plane waiting on the runway. He never rode in single-engine planes; even his secretary knew that. How could Young and Wachtel let him risk his life in a plane like that? Wachtel apologized, said they had no other choice, finally got him calmed down and on board the aircraft for the short flight to the Catskills.

  At the convention,
the rabbis gave King a special greeting: they sang “We Shall Overcome” in Hebrew. Then his old friend and ally, Rabbi Heschel, introduced him to the assembly: “Martin Luther King is a voice, a vision and a way. I call upon every Jew to harken to his voice, to share his vision, to follow in his way. The whole future of America will depend upon the impact and influence of Dr. King.”

  King thanked the rabbis for the special rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” He’d never heard it sung in Hebrew, and “it was a beautiful experience for me.” He was not going to make a speech (he was too tired for that) and proceeded directly to their questions, speaking so lucidly that nobody could have guessed him depressed.

  What was King’s view of Negroes who preferred segregation and separation to integration?

  King gave his standard reply that all races in America were tied together and that separate white or black paths would lead to “social disaster.” But then he clarified what he thought true integration would entail. True integration did not mean some romantic mixing of colors. In the past, he said, it had been discussed too much that way and it had “ended up as merely adding color to a still predominantly white power structure.” True integration meant that Negroes would have a real share of power and responsibility in America. In fact, “there are points at which I see the necessity for temporary separation as a temporary way-station to a truly integrated society.” He cited some cases he’d seen in the south, where schools and teachers’ associations had been integrated. “Often when they merge, the Negro is integrated without power. The two or three positions of power which he did have in the separate situation passed away altogether, so that he lost his bargaining position, he lost his power, and he lost his posture where he could be relatively militant and really grapple with the problems. We don’t want to be integrated out of power; we want to be integrated into power.”

  How would he get rid of the ghettoes?

  King had thought a great deal about this since Chicago. “We must seek to enrich the ghetto immediately in the sense of improving the housing conditions, improving the schools in the ghetto, improving the economic conditions. At the same time, we must be working to open the housing market so there will be one housing market only. We must work on two levels. We should gradually move to disperse the ghetto, and immediately move to improve conditions within the ghetto, which in the final analysis will make it possible to disperse it at a greater rate a few years from now.”

  Then came the question he had been expecting—one that Wachtel had warned him was on all the rabbis’ minds. Would King comment on “the vicious anti-Semitism” and anti-Israel sentiments of the H. Rap Browns and Stokely Carmichaels?

  King knew what they were referring to. After the Six Day War in the Middle East the year before, SNCC had blamed “the Palestine problem” on “Zionist imperialists,” denounced U.S. aid to Israel, and ranted against Zionism itself. King explained what he had said before—that black anti-Semitism, “virtually nonexistent in the South,” was an ugly product of the northern ghetto. “We have made it clear that we cannot be the victims of the notion that you deal with one evil in society by substituting another evil,” King said. “You cannot substitute one tyranny for another, and for the black man to be struggling for justice and then turn around and be anti-Semitic is not only a very irrational course but it is a very immoral course, and wherever we have seen anti-Semitism we have condemned it with all our might.”

  Thus far, King’s answers reflected his maturest ideas to date on some of the critical racial problems besetting the country. Then he attempted to answer a difficult and wordy question about what he would say to those Negroes who supported the Arabs against Israel solely because of color. King ascribed that view to some “so-called young militants” who did not represent the vast majority of American Negroes. “There are some who are color-consumed and they see a kind of mystique in being colored,” King said, “and anything non-colored is condemned. We do not follow that course in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.” He went on to offer an opinion about the Middle East crisis itself. What the Middle East needed, obviously, was peace. But that meant one thing for Israel, another for the Arab states. “Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all of our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity. I see Israel, and never mind saying it, as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land almost can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy.”

  On the other hand, peace for the Arabs meant security on another level. It meant economic security. This was how those in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference tried to see the problem. “These nations, as you know, are part of that third world of hunger, of disease, of illiteracy,” and these conditions caused tensions and led to “an endless quest to find scapegoats. So there is a need for a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, where we lift those who are at the bottom of the economic ladder and bring them into the mainstream of economic security.”

  Of course, economic problems alone scarcely accounted for the Arab view of Israel or for the manifold internal troubles of many Arab states. Though King was speaking extemporaneously and was probably getting tired, his remarks about the Arabs did betray a shallowness of thought, indicating that he had yet to refine his ideas about the complex and troublesome Middle East.

  There were final questions about the poor people’s campaign and what the rabbis could do to help “our colored brethren.” Since the press “has gone out of its way in many instances to misinterpret what we will be doing in Washington,” King explained in detail the goals and initial stages of the project there, which was to culminate in a massive demonstration on June 15. He hoped that the rabbis would encourage their congregations to participate in that march and support the demands of America’s poor.

  After the meeting, they seemed ready and eager to back the Washington campaign, and King left for New York in high spirits. “He went back practically flying without the plane,” Wachtel said. But something happened back in New York that made him despondent again. Before returning to Memphis, he and Lee visited with Marion and Dr. Arthur Logan, a couple King had known for years. Marion was a top fund raiser for SCLC, but like Rustin she opposed the poor people’s campaign because she questioned its political value and feared it would end in violence. She had even said so in a memo to SCLC’s Board of Directors—which only convinced King that she and Rustin were ganging up on him. Now, in the Logans’ brownstone on the Upper West Side, he sat on a sofa, coat and shoes off, feet propped up on a coffee table, talking nonstop about the Washington project in a desperate effort to win Marion over. There had always been people who warned him against his campaigns. “If I’d have listened to them, there wouldn’t have been a Birmingham, there wouldn’t have been a Selma-Montgomery, if I’d have listened to them, we’d not have anything! We’d never have had a movement, Marion. Of all people, I never thought I’d have to explain this to you.” He talked almost until dawn, lounging, sitting up, standing, swilling orange juice and vodka—the Logans had never seen him drink so much—and going through mood swings, now agitated, now gentle and measured, now apparently relaxed, his right fist clenched and his thumb rubbing ceaselessly against his fingers.

  But the Logans would not be persuaded; Marion opposed the campaign and that was final. “It really did get to Martin,” Lee remembered. These were his friends, and it hurt him that they did not understand what he was trying to do. He concluded that they had never understood him, not even in the beginning. After he left the Logans, King told Lee that he felt “a great sense of loss and remorse.” But he had to go on. He was trying to brace himself for what lay ahead, to be ready for it. He couldn’t escape the feeling, he said, “that Washington, D.C., might be the place he would be clubbed to death, where he could possibly get assassinated.”

  ON THURSDAY MORNING, March 28, King and Lee returned to Memphis for the big march. Abernathy met them at the airport and
took them to Clayborn Temple downtown, where 6,000 people were milling about, waiting for King. It was now 11 A.M.—about two hours after the march was supposed to begin. The crowd was tense and restless, and march marshals went about cautioning people. Maxine Smith of the Memphis NAACP looked down the line and saw some “very unsavory characters” removing heavy sticks from picket signs. She had never seen picket signs that large—they looked more like clubs. She thought, “We’re going to have trouble today.”

  At last the column surged forward, heading chaotically toward Main Street. As King and Abernathy marched at the front of the procession, young Negroes came up and patted King and said how great it was to have him here. Suddenly there was a crash—the sound of shattering glass. At the back of the line, black teenagers were smashing windows and looting stores. Signs appeared on the sidewalks: “Damn Loeb—Black Power is here.” Ahead, police in full riot gear were cordoning off Main Street and advancing this way. King signaled to Lawson, who came over with a bullhorn. “I will never lead a violent march,” King said, “so, please, call it off.” While Lawson yelled in his bullhorn for everybody to return to the church, King and Abernathy climbed into a car commandeered by Lee, and a motorcycle cop led them away through a police barricade. King wanted to go to the Lorraine Motel, but the policeman said that fighting had broken out and that the route there was blocked. So he escorted them to the Rivermont Holiday Inn on the banks of the Mississippi, where they checked into a two-room suite and switched on the television set.