At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  “All right, all right,” King said carefully. “Thank you so much, brother Mobley. Thank you.”

  “Wait a minute here,” said Mobley. “I ain’t just exactly through.” In fits and starts, he said an old colored preacher was supposed to come with him but could not make it. That was all.

  “Well, we want to thank you so much, brother Mobley,” King said, beckoning Abernathy and Hosea Williams to escort the troubled donor outside, and there was no way to tell how much the odd exchange put King off balance for the subsequent presentations. On invitation, local residents came forward in a stream. One mother said her children ate pinto beans “morning noon and night.” Another said hers stayed home from school because they had no clothes. Both Abernathy and Andrew Young were surprised to see tears roll down King’s face from the plainspoken eloquence about hurt and disease. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I’ve listened to your problems, and it is—it has touched me,” said King. As he fumbled for words, Nina Evans walked up to say she had no food and no way to get any. King asked Hosea Williams to take down her name.

  Right then, on the drive to Clarksdale, King resolved that the mule train for Washington would leave from Marks. He delivered an inspired pitch for volunteers to six hundred people waiting in Chapel Hill Baptist Church, but only two tentative hands went up to show interest in the long journey. They moved on to Greenwood two hours behind schedule, touching off shouts of joy—“He’s here! He’s here!”—as two local ministers virtually lifted King through the crowd at Jennings Temple Church. Praising Greenwood as “a real movement town,” he spoke nakedly of the testimony about Delta conditions in nearby Marks. “I wept with them as I heard numerous women stand up on their feet,” said King. “I heard them talking about the fact that they didn’t even have any blankets to cover their children up on a cold night. And I said to myself, ‘God doesn’t like this.’ And we are going to say in no uncertain terms that we aren’t going to accept it any longer. We’ve got to go to Washington in big numbers.”

  He pleaded for lone grandparents or whole families alike, saying food and shelter would be provided. “Now we just want you to sign up and go,” King exhorted. “Don’t have to worry about anything. Just have the will to go to Washington.” He promised freedom schools and music festivals along with demonstrations every day. He said they were going to put real sharecropper huts on trucks and present them to the Smithsonian as relics of modern poverty. “We’re not playing about this thing,” cried King. “We’re going to have a time in Washington. We’re going to make this nation move again, and we’re going to make America see poor people.”

  Once again, King’s call for volunteers turned cheers into fearful silence. Switching to the chartered Cessna, he flew to the same result at packed churches in Grenada and Laurel. Nearly eight hundred people still waited at St. Paul Methodist when the Cessna landed after midnight in Hattiesburg—four hours late—and the Mississippi marathon ended toward dawn in a Jackson motel. Though back up early, they were still six hours late to the last stop Wednesday night in Bessemer, Alabama, outside Birmingham. Crowds waited endlessly to press around King. Pleading hoarseness, he left most of the speaking to Hosea Williams, who announced another delay until April 27 on the start date for the mule train to Washington. Behind the scenes, recruitment troubles in rural areas stiffened resentment of Indian and Hispanic groups scheduled to join the Southeastern pilgrimage in Jackson. One of Williams’s deputies grumbled that the newcomers failed to understand they were mere children within the freedom movement. In public, Williams pointed to three white observers with tape recorders in the balcony. “You can pass all the riot laws you want,” he shouted, “but you cannot suppress the dignity of man!” Bad weather mercifully allowed King to cancel several Alabama stops on Thursday, March 21, for sleep at home before the flight back to Memphis.

  Crises converged for nonviolence and violence alike. In Washington, J. Edgar Hoover reported secretly to President Johnson that King had raised only $1,000 from eight Mississippi rallies and was discouraged by a lack of response to his anti-poverty drive. The President was consumed by his forthcoming speech on the big Vietnam troop request. To clear the way, he decided to relieve General Westmoreland from battlefield command with a promotion to Army chief of staff. He complained to Senator Russell that Robert Kennedy already was “storming these states and those governors and switching the bosses all over the country.” Of the Wise Men summoned for final advice the next Monday, only Justice Fortas of Memphis pushed in advance to send all the soldiers, telling Johnson that anything less would advertise weakness with “our own sensitivity to criticism, our own dislike of bloodshed.”

  From Memphis, an amazed James Lawson called King before dawn on Friday, March 22. A rare dusting of snow in the Mississippi Delta had become a freak blizzard of sixteen inches on the first day of spring. The march would have to wait a few days, Lawson said wryly, but King could claim delivery of a work stoppage beyond dreams. Nothing moved at all, and interpretations of providential wonder circulated through silent, blanketed Memphis. “Well, the Lord has done it again,” H. Ralph Jackson mordantly declared. “It’s a white world.” A church woman in white Memphis claimed to receive a sobering command for charity toward the strike: “The Lord sent the snow to give us another chance.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Requiem

  March 23–April 4, 1968

  FINAL choices pressed hard upon the leaders of refined democracy. Uncannily for King, they tested nonviolent commitments widely deemed foolhardy or weak. When a prominent black editor scolded him for traveling through Klan countryside without bodyguards, King rejected armed security as an uncomfortable illusion. “I’d feel like a bird in a cage,” he said. His two sons, but not their sisters, crisscrossed rural Georgia in the chartered Cessna on a rare family trip, landing with extra relief after one of the twin engines stalled both in Macon and Waycross. “Now Marty and Dexter have been to Albany before,” King told a church crowd, recalling the 1961–62 struggle when toddler Dexter “came to visit daddy in the city jail.” He apologized for being late, but extolled again his summons to join poor people across cultural lines. “There is a day when the bones get back together,” said King. Like Ezekiel’s biblical vision of dry bones, mule trains from the Black Belt would connect with caravans from barrios and coalfields and Indian reservations, springing to life in Washington. “Finally, this is a nonviolent movement,” he said. “I don’t apologize for nonviolence. I have no apology to make.”

  The next morning, March 24, King preached the Sunday installation service for Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker at a newly organized church in Harlem. Not by coincidence, Adam Clayton Powell marched outside the converted theater on 116th Street with a thousand followers, shouting “Judas!” to accuse Walker of poaching from his immense congregation nearby. This display of shrill pulpit politics was lost in spectacular news from Powell’s fugitive return to the United States. With the lawsuit to overturn his expulsion from the House still headed for the U.S. Supreme Court, Powell had slipped from Bimini into momentary custody of the New York county sheriff, then to a judge’s apartment for arranged parole on various contempt judgments—all to reclaim pastoral and political supremacy after eighteen months in exile. Newspapers, including the New York Times, covered on their front pages his dramatic appearance in Abyssinian Baptist’s platform pulpit of semicircular marble, with a dozen somber bodyguards he called “the wave of the future.” Led by Charles 37X Kenyatta of the Harlem Mau Mau Society, “Adam’s Commandos” embraced Powell when he denounced a light-skinned portrait of Jesus—“Get that out of here!”—and ordered black replacements throughout the church. One commando lifted a Bible impaled on the tip of his machete. “The audience reaction was mixed,” reported the Times.

  “The man hanging on that cross might be me,” Powell cried in his sermon, “but Jesus had one Judas and I have about 5,000!” Predicting worldwide revolution by autumn, he implored the congregation not to “die like hogs in
some inglorious spot.” He promised to crush incipient church revolt, and scoffed that he could win absentee reelection to Congress with Mickey Mouse as his campaign manager. “I’m here to preach black leadership for you white people,” Powell told two hundred reporters, many of whom rushed to Walker’s new church for reaction to Powell’s acid declarations that nonviolent protest was dead. On the contrary, replied King, “I think it is just arriving.” He refused comment otherwise, which earned a small news item beneath Powell’s apocalyptic convulsions: “Nonviolence Tactic Defended by King.”

  King’s advisers gathered Monday in New York for a contentious review of the poverty campaign. Every aspect of the preparations struggled uphill, especially fund-raising, and several advisers remained wary at best of King’s commitment to detour again into Memphis on Thursday, now that the snow had melted. To shore up one avenue of recent promise—for logistical support in Washington from religious groups and civic coalitions—Harry Wachtel broke away to a private airport with a small group. Only King, Andrew Young, and the pilot would fit with him in a single-engine charter that King beheld with dismay, saying he much preferred at least two engines. They survived an argument and a hurried evening flight into the Catskills, where conservative rabbis from the 68th Rabbinical Assembly waited for an introduction. “Where in America today do we hear a voice like the voice of the prophets of Israel?” asked Abraham Heschel. “Martin Luther King is a sign that God has not forsaken the United States of America…. The situation of the poor in America is our plight, our sickness. To be deaf to their cry is to condemn ourselves.”

  King returned Heschel’s salute by describing their first encounter more than five years earlier in Chicago, when Heschel’s exhortation before the Birmingham movement had “inspired clergymen of all the religious faiths of our country…to do something that they had not done before.” In lieu of a speech, King responded to an inquiry moderated by Rabbi Everett Gendler, and the rabbis submitted a host of questions about separatism, “anti-Israel Negroes,” and practical politics. “Have your contributions from Jews fallen off considerably?” asked one. Another sought behavioral tips “if we are on a committee and there is a Negro militant and a Negro moderate.” A third questioned the huge disparity in social energy for war over justice. King’s replies followed nonviolence as the plumb line of engagement. He said Israel needed security for the outpost of vibrant democracy, just as displaced Arabs needed a foothold for opportunity, and that violence would secure neither. He said militancy was a term of persistence, and therefore balance, rather than violence. He mused that segregation once looked impregnable in Birmingham, and that President Johnson called a voting rights bill impossible until Selma unlocked hidden powers of freedom. Now King asked the rabbis to take a new leap of faith in Washington. “We need bodies to bring about the pressure that I have mentioned to get Congress and the nation moving in the right direction.” As Young moved around the convention to secure pledges, King thanked Rabbi Gendler for answering his call to jail witness long ago in Albany, Georgia, on devotion alone, before there was a glimmer of success. They sang “We Shall Overcome” for him in Hebrew.

  Back in Manhattan that night, King jumped from a car to walk the last crosstown block over the objections of Wachtel, who said it would be safer to circle the one-way streets. “Harry,” said King, “if they couldn’t protect Kennedy, how can anything protect me?” He soon knocked unannounced to resume a running debate. Arthur Logan was an uptown physician to celebrities from Duke Ellington to Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and a source for sleeping pills that King often fussed were no match for his insomnia. His son-in-law Clifford Alexander, a Harvard protégé of McGeorge Bundy, had become a pioneer black executive in the Johnson administration. Logan’s skin was so fair that he and Adam Clayton Powell greeted each other with chortling irony—“Us black folks got to stick together!”—but Logan agreed that Powell’s desperate street rebellion had gone too far. King was glad to hear of delicate maneuvers to terminate Powell’s career while vindicating his rights in Congress, but the immediate quarrel lay with Logan’s wife, Marian—cousin of NAACP leader Walter White, and former club singer at Café Society and the Blue Angel. Nicknamed “Madame Board,” the only female on SCLC’s governing body had channeled all her stage pluck into a six-page memo arguing that King should abort the anti-poverty mobilization to Washington. Her opposition pained King, and he asked why she was circulating the private memo to all the other SCLC board members. Any leak would be trumpeted as internal rebellion, King groaned, which made him feel stabbed in the back. He suspected collusion with Bayard Rustin, who had not been “right” since he went to work for labor unions supporting the Vietnam War.

  “Martin, I did it because lots of times you don’t listen to me,” Marian Logan replied. She accused him of preaching to her instead, and she cried into the night as he preached again that she should reconsider. Arthur Logan refereed the prolonged tussle with reminders of shared ordeals and a steady supply of vodka and orange juice. To his plea for a respite, when Logan said anxiety had injured his wife’s health already, King paused to agree she did look poorly, then lurched off again on reasons why she could support his cause and thereby look better as well. He said the flaws predicted in her memo had been attributed to each movement since the bus boycott—it would raise tensions, invite repression, expose disunity, and make things worse. “We’d never have had a movement, Marian,” King declared. “Of all people, I never thought I’d have to explain this to you.” He protested most bitterly her written charge that he was “prepared to court violence as a last resort.” Never, he said. Demonstrations would accept punishment, as always, and nonviolence helped each movement look for ways to break through political indifference and disdain. King conceded that the poverty campaign might fail, but he begged her not to foreclose the effort.

  Arthur Logan called a truce near dawn. They agreed for the moment that while every movement was daunting, an economic campaign across barriers of culture and class seemed more so. King retreated from his favorite sofa in a living room that held three hundred for receptions at the elegant Logan brownstone. Exhausted, he canceled early recruitment events Tuesday morning, March 26, then rallied to visit a selected tenement family in Harlem. “I am still so excited,” sputtered Mrs. Bennie Fowler, mother of eight, who served King a home-cooked lunch under her kitchen clothesline.

  A DOZEN members of the Senior Advisory Group—the Wise Men—crowded into the family dining room of the White House residence to hear General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and General Creighton Abrams, who would succeed Westmoreland in the Vietnam field command. Wheeler backed off the pressure for all or most of the 205,000 additional troops, saying, “We do not fear a general defeat with the forces we now have.” Abrams predicted a year of hard fighting and attrition. After the Tuesday lunch, President Johnson invited the generals to walk over to the West Wing for consultations with these Wise Men—looking toward war decisions to be announced Sunday night in a televised presidential speech.

  McGeorge Bundy chilled the Cabinet Room with his opening words. “Mr. President, there is a very significant shift in most of our positions since we last met.” He reported gravely that last November’s unanimity for slow but steady war progress had given way to a reverse majority: “We must begin the steps to disengage.” One by one, the eminent guests tersely confirmed Bundy’s summary of their individual opinions—World War II general Omar Bradley, Korean War general Matthew Ridgway, McNamara deputy Cyrus Vance, Republican treasury secretary Douglas Dillon—and not until Maxwell Taylor, the Army general and former ambassador to South Vietnam, did a steadfast hawk register shock. “Well, I have been somewhat amazed, Mr. President, by the views expressed here by some of my friends,” he said.

  The President seemed numb. He stirred to rumors that the classified war briefings for the Wise Men must have been skewed. “The first thing I am going to do when you all leave here is to get those briefers [from] last night,” he joked
wanly, but the repeat performances would demonstrate consistency and balance across the top agencies. They agreed that U.S. allies had inflicted enormous military casualties on a Communist force structure of 230,000 before Tet: eighty thousand killed, with an estimated three soldiers wounded for every death. By elementary math, U.N. ambassador Arthur Goldberg had asked an instantly famous question the previous night during the Pentagon presentation by Major General William DePuy: “Who the hell is there left for us to be fighting?” The troublesome answer was North Vietnamese infiltration plus South Vietnamese recruitment spurred by hostility to foreign troops. Analysts agreed that the latter phenomenon was political and intractable.

  In the Cabinet Room, war loyalists stifled alarm. Walt Rostow later said he “smelled a rat” among the Wise Men. General Taylor decided Pentagon dissenters must have “impregnated them with their doubts.” Out loud, several voices recommended a more defensive military strategy to make up for broad withdrawals from the South Vietnamese countryside since Tet. Former ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge proposed to abandon search-and-destroy missions in favor of a “shield” posture in populated areas. Rusk thought U.S. forces still could “deny military victory to the Vietcong and North Vietnamese.” Both Fortas and Wheeler asserted that the American goal always was to force a settlement—never to achieve a military solution.

  Dean Acheson erupted at General Wheeler. “Then what in the name of God are five hundred thousand men out there doing?” he demanded. “Chasing girls? This is not a semantic game, general. If the deployment of all those men is not an effort to gain a military solution, then words have lost all meaning.”