At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  February–April 1968

  GULLY-WASHER storms plagued Elvis Presley’s escape on February 1. In poor visibility, the decoy limousine roared out of his Graceland mansion too fast to draw pursuit, but fans and reporters on stakeout scrambled in time to follow a crowded blue Cadillac that hid the singer and expectant Priscilla within his rowdy entourage called the Guys. Conflicting shouts urged driver Charlie Hodge to outrun labor pains and the chase caravan but not to risk the baby on slick roads. By afternoon, word of the impending delivery drew a hundred Elvis calls per hour through the switchboard at Baptist Hospital, some noting with delight that it was precisely nine months since the Las Vegas wedding. The Guys took over the physicians’ lounge to wait, and Assistant Police Chief Henry Lux announced that Elvis would be billed for two officers guarding a maternity suite on the fifth floor. One reporter found a patient who vacated the room next door to give the Presley clan extra space. “Tell him I moved for him,” said the mother of newborn Deena Castinelli, “and I wouldn’t mind him stopping by and saying hello before I leave.”

  Elsewhere in Memphis, three men opened talks on the trouble in the city’s sewer and drains division. When P. J. Ciampa flew in for a stopover, T. O. Jones introduced himself with a retinue of union supporters, then escorted Ciampa downtown to show that a fired trash man could produce the national field director of the fast-growing American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Charles Blackburn explained to Ciampa that he had been director of public works less than two weeks after a career in the insurance business, but he thought there was a fair way to distribute the rainy day layoffs. Blackburn politely withheld from his job briefing a hard-nosed assessment that of several hundred trash collectors Jones claimed would support a union, only about thirty paid regular dues, and that the city would refuse to recognize a sanitation union regardless. He did say that overall labor policy was reserved for his friend, Mayor Henry Loeb, who preferred to handle such matters personally in open forum every Thursday. (Loeb answered all fifty-four citizens in line that afternoon, telling one delegation that the city garage could not afford to repair vehicles for the Shelby County Rescue Squad.) Ciampa offered to compose a letter about how other cities had established more efficient personnel agreements with AFSCME locals, which Blackburn agreed to receive, then excused himself. On the drive to catch a flight back to Washington, Ciampa confided to Jones why he thought this was enough for a first session. Moments later, two Public Works vans startled Jones by barreling across his path well above ambulance speed, their emergency flashers engaged. He tore after them to a scene of wailing disaster near the corner of Colonial and Quince.

  Foreman Willie Crain’s five-man crew had headed for the dump in one of the early pushbutton compressor trucks that replaced the old flatbeds starting in 1957. Only two of the four collectors could squeeze into the driver’s cab after hauling their tubs on foot, and the two junior men normally jockeyed from handholds and footrests on the outside. They faced a hard choice in bad weather because city rules barred shelter stops in residential neighborhoods—after citizen complaints about unsightly “picnics” by the Negro sanitation workers—and torrential cloudbursts late Thursday drove them through side-loading slits into the huge storage cylinder itself, where a tight mound of garbage left only a small gap behind the pistonlike compacting plate. When Crain heard screams, he could not slam on the brakes, jump out, and disengage the pushbutton compressor fast enough. Investigators would conclude that a freak shift by an onboard shovel may have shorted wet wires to the separate motor. A witness looking through her kitchen window said she saw one man struggle almost out before his raincoat or something grabbed and pulled him back down head first, leaving parts of both legs exposed.

  It was a gruesome chore to retrieve the two crushed bodies from the garbage packer and pronounce them dead at John Gaston Hospital. Echol Cole and Robert Walker soon became the anonymous cause that diverted Martin Luther King to Memphis for his last march. City flags flew at half-mast for them, but they never were public figures like Lisa Marie Presley, whose birth at 5:01 P.M. was being announced by her grandparents Gladys and Vernon. Cole and Walker would not be listed among civil rights martyrs, nor studied like Rosa Parks as the catalyst for a new movement. Their fate was perhaps too lowly and pathetic. Television newscasts ignored them, and the local black newspaper tried to ignite a more dignified scandal by branding the Memphis post office a “fortress of discrimination” that kept Negro employees beneath clerk posts in which they would handle money. Across town, the leading white newspaper emphasized technical efforts to prevent another truck malfunction. Its popular feature about the human dimensions of race—“Hambone’s Meditations”—remained a sore point with the NAACP but was widely defended as harmless and folk-wise. On February 2, the Commercial Appeal offered a minstrel cartoon with Hambone’s daily proverb: “Tom’s boy mus’ be one dem brain workers—he stan’ roun’ wid he han’s in he pocket all de time!!” Privately, T. O. Jones reminded his stunned members that city policy left the families of “unclassified workers” with no death or survivors’ benefits. Mayor Loeb bestowed $500 by special decree, but the pregnant widow Earline Walker made her mark to sign over one of Robert’s last two paychecks for cheap burial across the Mississippi line in Tallahatchie County, where they had been sharecroppers.

  KING PREACHED “The Drum Major Instinct” at Ebenezer that Sunday, February 4. He freely adapted a sermon published under that title during his seminary years by evangelist Wallace Hamilton, based on the biblical story of two disciples who beseech Jesus for the most prominent eternal seats in heaven. Their desire springs from a universal impulse for distinction, said King—“this quest for recognition…this drum major instinct.” He pictured an itch to lead parades in everything from Freud’s ego theories to modern ads for whiskey and perfume. An extreme drum major “ends by trying to push others down to push himself up,” he warned, driving racism in culture and arrogance in nations. Yet Jesus in the Bible account does not rebuke James and John for their ambition itself, but teaches instead that true reward follows humble service. Here King’s message turned. “And the great issue of life,” he declared, “is to harness the drum major instinct.” He sketched the biography of supreme Christian sacrifice with clear echoes of his own turmoil, noting that “the tide of public opinion turned” against Jesus when he was still young. “They said he was an agitator,” said King. “He practiced civil disobedience. He broke injunctions.” Jesus was betrayed by friends, cursed, killed, and buried penniless in a borrowed tomb—but now after nineteen centuries “stands as the most influential figure that ever entered human history.” For all the worldly gloss about a “lord of lords,” King found nothing royal about Jesus: “He just went around serving.”

  This was hardly the first time King flirted with martyrdom in a speech. One of the first profiles written about him during the bus boycott noted “a conspicuous thread of thanatopsis” in his private conversation as well. What emerged this Sunday was a brooding reverie on external and internal burdens from the drum major instinct. “And every now and then I think about my own death,” he told his congregation. He gave fitful instructions for the service—“tell them not to talk too long”—hoping someone would mention “that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to give his life serving others.” The eulogist should omit all his honors and attainments simply to testify perhaps that King tried to love enemies, comfort prisoners, “be right on the war question,” and feed the hungry. “Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major,” he cried, “say that I was a drum for justice! Say that I was a drum major for peace—I was a drum major for righteousness—and all of the other shallow things will not matter.” In thunderclap rhythm, with his distinctive voice blending ecstasy and despair, King finished the oration soon to become famous by the disembodied recording played at his funeral.

  For the moment, King labored at close quarters to harness drum major instincts. He sent Ralph Abernathy, who was back from Asia,
on a mission with his gift for blandishment. Abernathy pretended to confide in Hosea Williams that he had convinced King the only way to pull off the Washington poverty campaign was to “bring back Hosea Williams.” They collaborated on a new master plan for leadership in staggered phases, designating Williams the high-energy recruitment chief for rural areas, which eventually placated the first of SCLC’s three disaffected staff lieutenants.

  King himself flew north on February 5 to parlay for support, but ran into what his hosts consciously prepared as “a grand piece of psychological warfare.” Thirty welfare mothers waited in the Chicago YMCA behind name placards that isolated King next to a woman with a grandchild in her lap. Beulah Sanders of New York interrupted King’s appeal by asking where he stood on the Kennedy amendments to H.R. 12080, and his mumbled responses brought specialized questions about welfare issues until King agreed meekly to listen. From one far corner, Andrew Young winced as the women “jumped on Martin like no one ever had before,” with lectures of extra impact, Young thought, because King was always subject to his mother’s natural authority more than the bluster of Daddy King. From another far corner, Bernard Lafayette rebelled to ask how anyone could accuse King of shirking the struggle of a group less than six months old. George Wiley, founder and executive director of the National Welfare Rights Organization, was the first black scholar to earn an Ivy League doctorate in chemistry. Squeezed out of CORE, he had considered a position with SCLC before launching NWRO with foundation grants, and Lafayette knew Wiley orchestrated this confrontation to promote his grassroots constituency of welfare recipients. Lafayette accosted each woman who scolded King, demanding to know where she had been when his home was bombed in Montgomery or his marches stoned there in Chicago. King kept quiet, but later teased the angel of mercy who had curtailed his whipping, and Wiley soon wrote Young with bargaining terms for a few NWRO women to join the camp-in against poverty.

  King’s party flew into overlapping crises the same night in Washington, where the second nationwide mobilization of clergy gathered to oppose the war in Vietnam. A newly released CALCAV-sponsored book, In the Name of America, analyzed more than a thousand news reports indicating that U.S. war practice routinely violated international law in sixteen areas, including defoliation, aerial bombardment of civilians, and forced relocation of villagers. Its allegations of war crimes, which the State Department branded “absolutely unsupportable,” made front-page news against the shock from the continuing bloodshed of the Tet offensive. On sidewalks three blocks from the White House, a pro-war religious group protested the CALCAV mass meeting at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, and a minister among the hundred pickets said nuclear weapons would be justified “to preserve freedom and lessen the loss of lives.” Inside, by contrast, Rabbi Abraham Heschel asserted that “hardening of the heart is the suspension of freedom.” There would be greatness in common confession that Vietnam was wrong, Heschel pleaded, as “God Himself admitted that He made a mistake.” Last among the speakers, Andrew Young lamented a permeating mood of violence. “Guerilla warfare in the ghettos is a day-to-day conversation,” he said. Young urged the CALCAV audience not to blame circumstances or Lyndon Johnson for the poison of Vietnam. “Why is it that we want to lay it all on one poor Texas school teacher?” he asked. Every citizen has an ownership share in democracy, and must emulate the marching children who acted to redress its faults in Birmingham and Selma even as underage victims of segregation. “Ours has been the mildest and most respectable dissent,” said Young. “When are we really going to stand up and challenge the values of this country?”

  Legal maneuvers intensified through the night over CALCAV’s plan to conduct a one-hour service for war dead at Arlington National Cemetery the next morning, February 6. Moments before the scheduled start, an emergency injunction from the U.S. Court of Appeals sustained a government petition to ban such “partisan” use of patriotic ground. Two rabbis rushed off to find a ceremonial Torah while Richard Fernandez and others gave modified instructions to 2,500 CALCAV members willing to cross the Potomac River on buses at noon. The rabbis joined the head of a wordless procession of eight abreast, hoisting their Torah scroll despite Jewish custom against bearing scripture into graveyards. When they halted before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, King shouted: “In this period of absolute silence, let us pray.” Reporters measured ensuing stillness in suspense to learn how far the clergy would push their risk of contempt of court; one described an eerie clicking of heels as soldiers changed the honor guard nearby. After six minutes, Heschel called out—“Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani?”—and a Catholic bishop gave a terse benediction for silent departure: “Let us go in peace. Amen.” News stories translated Heschel into English—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—pointing out that the Aramaic cry of Jesus in Mark’s Crucifixion story was in turn a quote from King David’s Book of Psalms.

  King shuttled between the mobilization and the Presbyterian Church of the Redeemer, where his SCLC board was debating approval for the poverty campaign. In the car, he scanned last-minute dictation from Stanford theologian Robert McAfee Brown, then laid aside the drafted speech already released to the press. “I have to give it my own way,” he said, and he told CALCAV’s final plenary that the Vietnam intervention “has played havoc with the destiny of the whole world.” King spoke extemporaneously to returned marchers who overflowed New York Avenue Presbyterian: “I said some time ago—and the press jumped on me about it, but I want to say it today one more time, and I am sad to say it—we live in a nation that is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” His speech drifted into underlying unity between causes of peace and humanity—“When I say poor people, I am not only talking about black people”—then stopped abruptly. Newsweek said King “seemed preoccupied with plans for his ‘poor people’s mobilization.’” William Sloane Coffin closed the CALCAV protest with a sermon from Ezekiel: “You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor.”

  The evening recess for SCLC’s board spared a convoy to negotiate privately with Washington’s Black United Front, a pilot group just created by Stokely Carmichael after his five-month tour of Third World countries. (U.S. intelligence agencies sent the White House a digest of his strident comments from Algeria to North Vietnam; the FBI compiled an alarmist secret dossier called “SNCC/Black Power”; lawyers wrangled over his confiscated passport.) Public silence since his return in December gave Carmichael an aura of mystery like Malcolm X, magnified by the spread of black power culture. Members of King’s entourage met hostile passage at the perimeter of the church summit, which one aide called “commandos occupying the place with walkie-talkies and bodyguards.” A white SCLC worker was rudely expelled along with reporters. Preachers were harassed as Uncle Toms, and Rutherford’s secretary left in tears from more personal disparagement. Seconds jousted informally. Hosea Williams renewed antagonisms from the Meredith march, saying SNCC leaders had accomplished nothing with black power except to feed off King’s reputation. A female SNCC veteran accused King of selling out the Selma movement when he turned around the second attempt to march beyond Pettus Bridge, which King hotly denied. He and Carmichael occupied a goodwill zone where they shrugged off the trappings of competition to reminisce about the movement. When King pitched the spring campaign, Carmichael applauded its focus on grassroots poverty but detected “serious tactical error.” By his analysis, the proposed multi-racial coalition missed a correct move toward black solidarity. Also, camp-in boldness risked trapping the poor without honorable retreat, and the underlying hope for national politics was misguided within a system he called fixed upon exploitation. After some debate, King appealed for a benevolent truce. “Well, if you are against this,” he said, “will you let us try?”

  Carmichael postponed judgment while King wrestled his peers. A few SCLC board members worried that the poverty campaign would fail if perceived as an antidote to black power. Walter Fauntroy, the local SCLC representative, was himself a leader
in Carmichael’s Black United Front. Rev. Jefferson Rogers, who hosted the board meeting, reconciled new trends of militant thought with his lifelong devotion to the mystical theologian Howard Thurman, and King’s approach seemed dated when the Amsterdam News of Harlem had just banished the word “Negro” for “black.” Other board members supported the Rustin position that demonstrations in Washington would only exacerbate public backlash and enrage the best civil rights President in history. The crossfire left King raw by the time Carmichael came to declare neutrality on Wednesday, February 7. The Black United Front would neither support nor oppose the Poor People’s Campaign, he said, and Carmichael vowed on principle not to criticize fellow black leaders in public. This was the best outcome King’s staff had hoped for, and they were nonplussed when he erupted against their satisfaction.

  King berated them for agreeing glibly that Carmichael could ridicule nonviolence so long as he did not attack King. He said the priority should be to protect nonviolence—not him—with a vehemence that shook Bill Rutherford enough to seek advice. “Martin got very upset with me,” he complained over Stanley Levison’s wiretapped phone line, “and started shouting and cussing me out.” Rutherford fumbled to discern what made King so unhappy. “He said to me, ‘the enemy is violence, violence begets violence,’” Rutherford told Levison, “and he went into one of these preaching things. I didn’t react at all. I’m really pretty quiet.” He found the sudden fury both unnerving and peculiar, because to him the American Revolution and other wars so clearly proved good, and Levison offered comforting reasons why King was wrong. “The enemy are the forces keeping us from getting rights, and violence is one of their methods,” he explained. “So we try to develop a counterpoint to violence. But violence is not the enemy. What if they could keep everybody in servitude without using violence? Would Martin be for servitude?”