“Now Billy,” said King, “if you’ve bought this big new house and can’t afford to feed us, I’m gonna tell everybody in the country.”
Kyles rejoined that there would be more soul food than King’s waistline needed.
“Your wife can’t cook, anyway,” King teased. “She’s too good-looking.” He fell into a chauvinist bromide about the value of plain wives, and Abernathy took up the flip side with remarks on the beauty of Gwen Kyles. He retreated to the bathroom with a flirtatious grin that he must splash on Aramis cologne just for her.
King walked ahead of Kyles to look over the handrail outside, down on a bustling scene in the parking lot. Police undercover agent Marrell McCullough parked almost directly below, returning with James Orange and James Bevel from a shopping trip to buy overalls. Orange unfolded his massive frame from McCullough’s little blue Volkswagen, tussling with Bevel, and Andrew Young stepped up to rescue Bevel by shadow-boxing at a distance. King called down benignly from the floor above for Orange to be careful with preachers half his size. McCullough and Orange walked back to talk with two female college students who pulled in just behind them. Jesse Jackson emerged from the rehearsal room, which reminded King to extend his rapprochement. “Jesse, I want you to come to dinner with me,” he said.
Kyles, overhearing on his way down the balcony stairs, told King not to worry because Jackson already had secured his own invitation. Abernathy shouted from Room 306 for King to make sure Jackson did not try to bring his whole Breadbasket band, while Chauncey Eskridge was telling Jackson he should upgrade from turtleneck to necktie for dinner. Jackson called up to King: “Doc, you remember Ben Branch?” He said Breadbasket’s lead saxophonist and song leader was a native of Memphis.
“Oh yes, he’s my man,” said King. “How are you, Ben?” Branch waved. King recalled his signature number from Chicago. “Ben, make sure you play ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand,’ in the meeting tonight,” he called down. “Play it real pretty.”
“Okay, Doc, I will.”
Solomon Jones, the volunteer chauffeur, called up to bring coats for a chilly night. There was no reply. Time on the balcony had turned lethal, which left hanging the last words fixed on a gospel song of refuge. King stood still for once, and his sojourn on earth went blank.
EPILOGUE
POLICE undercover agent Marrell McCullough first reached the victim and grabbed a cleaning-cart towel to stanch blood loss from a massive wound opened downward through the jaw. The knot from King’s necktie was blown off the balcony. Frantic telephone calls for help went nowhere because Lorene Bailey kept slapping her head oddly to mutter nonsense instead of working the motel switchboard, saying, “Somebody done hit that old white truck.” She went to the hospital, too, with a fatal cerebral hemorrhage. Someone whisked A. D. King from the trauma of sirens to the Kyles home, where the evening’s banquet was spread untouched. “They got my brother,” he said vacantly. Gwen Kyles said Negroes were “born to truth,” compelled to face hard realities in a white world, and she supported a remarkable civic commitment across racial lines to gather every scrap of memory or fact that might shed light on the world-shaking local tragedy.
Volunteers from the Memphis Search for Meaning Committee managed to secure even the unused news footage normally discarded by local television stations. In a segment filmed outside the emergency room at St. Joseph’s, one young reporter failed to elicit any response from a catatonic Ralph Abernathy about the crime scene or how King had been pronounced dead, but a throwaway question on personal history brought forth a reverie about the cold January morning in 1954 when a friend-to-be turned up at the Montgomery parsonage in the company of a pulpit legend, and Abernathy launched into yarns about the irascible genius Vernon Johns, oblivious to the reporter’s desperate pleas for comment on bulletins of looting in Washington and fires in Chicago. Riots erupted in 110 American cities. A remorseful Congress passed the nondiscrimination bill for housing transactions one day after what amounted to a state funeral in Atlanta, with the casket wagon drawn by mules. On orders from President Johnson, federal mediators settled the Memphis strike with a 10 cents-per-hour raise and Mayor Loeb’s face-saving claim of helplessness to stop a sanitation union imposed by the City Council. The probate court in Atlanta established that King died intestate, leaving no will and a net worth less than $6,000—his estate’s largest asset being a disputed bequest of $12,351.36 from the eccentric poet and essayist Dorothy Parker.
In 1970, Alabama voters elected to countywide office three founding members of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, which by then had merged into affiliation with the statewide Democratic Party. The new sheriff, John Hulett, served continuously for twenty-two years and then won three terms as county probate judge before retiring in 2001. Lowndes County remained conspicuously poor, owing in part to the scarcity of larger vision, but the climate of racial terror and subjugation long since had dissipated from the courthouse in Hayneville.
On December 12, 1972, a ripple of surprise passed through surviving luminaries of the civil rights era—including Roy Wilkins, Clarence Mitchell, Whitney Young, and Justice Thurgood Marshall—when ex-President Lyndon Johnson slowly entered the dedication ceremony for the LBJ Library. He rose to commend a speech by State Representative Julian Bond of Georgia—“whom I don’t know so well but admire a great deal”—in remarks about why the presidential papers on equal rights held the “most intimate meanings” for him on the nature of government. Johnson warned of complacency that could visit storms upon future generations. Afterward, short of breath and gobbling blood pressure pills, he sought out an awed Bond to offer private encouragement with a heartfelt note of thanks for his independent convictions on freedom, overlooking Bond’s signal dissent against a Vietnam War that still raged more than four years after it broke Johnson’s presidency. Six days later, President Nixon ordered 36,000 tons of ordnance dropped on Hanoi and Haiphong. Although the “Christmas bombing” killed some 2,196 North Vietnamese civilians at a cost of ninety-three more U.S. airmen lost from twenty-six aircraft, its true purpose was to force South Vietnamese allies to pretend that American withdrawal was a victory. Johnson died a month later, just before the Vietnam settlement signed on January 27, 1973.
In July of 1974, lawyer Pauli Murray knelt trembling in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s, Church of the Advocate to receive a blessing from the newly priested Jeannette Piccard, a seventy-nine-year-old chemist and pioneer of high-altitude balloon flight. Male priests shouted in the background that female clergy were a grave sin against the peace of Christ. “God here and now as father and judge sees you trying to make stones into bread,” cried one, and the Episcopal House of Bishops quickly pronounced the ordination of Piccard’s maverick group “invalid” by emergency decree. Murray herself persevered with her seminary education through the upheaval over the sanctity of male-only clergy, and on January 8, 1977, at the age of sixty-six, she became the only black pioneer among the first female priests ordained by official sanction of the Episcopal Church, at a ceremony in the Washington Cathedral. It was a decade since her Lowndes County lawsuit with Charles Morgan had opened jury service to women in many states.
The church struggles of the 1970s coincided with special investigations of corrupt government secrets in the Cold War era—political manipulations, assassination plots, spy games, and petty tyranny from high officials. News of the FBI wiretaps, which had emerged from the Muhammad Ali draft trial in 1969, led to muffled allegations about King’s extramarital affairs. A comprehensive review of the murder investigation showed FBI agents capable of disciplined public duty alongside a numbing array of extra-constitutional bugs, vendettas, and crimes. Within days, they had traced the mark in a T-shirt abandoned with the assassination rifle to the Home Service Laundry in Los Angeles, while following a service sticker from the suspected getaway car in Atlanta to a Los Angeles address listed in the same phony name as the bundle of clothes. Neighbors remembered a loner who attended bartender school. The Birmingham
clerk who sold the murder weapon identified his customer among bartenders in a graduation photograph, and fingerprints from the weapon led to a matching photograph of the escaped convict James Earl Ray, who evaded capture through two months of clumsy stickups and street-savvy acquisition of false identities. Meanwhile, the political side of the FBI brazenly suggested to President Johnson that Stokely Carmichael or Rap Brown ordered King killed, and high FBI officials planted a malicious story that the family of King’s Los Angeles mistress had arranged the murder—going so far as to arrange a confrontation with the couple by columnist Jack Anderson.
Shortly after the assassination, a grief-stricken Stanley Levison complained that most Americans already distorted the loss of “their plaster saint who was going to protect them from angry Negroes.” Pride and fear subverted King’s legacy from all sides. James Bevel, ignoring the frailty of life, promptly declared James Earl Ray a mere pawn, because “there is no way a ten-cent white boy could develop a plan to kill a million-dollar black man.” In 1978, Bevel stood witness at an eerie wedding ceremony conducted in prison by James Lawson, helping inmate Ray begin his short-lived marriage to a courtroom artist. More than forgiveness, the motive of Bevel and Lawson was to assert that some evil greater than Ray must account for all the pain, and some casualties from the movement gave way to the undertow of many conspiracies. Dennis Sweeney, who suffered greatly in Mississippi demonstrations, was committed to an asylum for the unhinged murder of his mentor Allard Lowenstein in 1980. Rap Brown, as the sectarian Muslim leader Jamil Al-Amin, was sentenced to life for the baffling murder of a sheriff’s deputy. Dexter King publicly proclaimed James Earl Ray innocent of his father’s murder in 1997—“in a strange sort of way, we’re both victims”—citing fantastic theories grounded in dogma that the federal government was guilty instead.
Critics of the movement made political history from a mirror distrust. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced his belief that secret FBI files one day would establish whether King was a loyal American or a Communist sympathizer. “But since they seem bent on making it [King’s birthday] a national holiday,” he added, “I believe the symbolism of that day is important enough that I will sign that legislation when it reaches my desk.” Reagan’s sunny disposition tempered his political platform that government was bad—proven despotic, incompetent, and wasteful—at least when aimed toward the purposes of the civil rights era. This became the dominant idea in American politics, as a cyclical adjustment in history shifted the emphasis of patriotic language from citizenship to command, shrinking the public space.
A paradox remains. Statecraft is still preoccupied with the levers of spies and force, even though two centuries of increasingly lethal “total warfare” since Napoleon suggest a diminishing power of violence to sustain governance in the modern world. Military leaders themselves often stress the political limits of warfare, but politics is slow to recognize the glaring impact of nonviolent power. In 1987, students spilling into the streets of South Korea compelled a dictator to respect a permanent structure for elections. In 1989, the Soviet empire suddenly dissolved in a velvet revolution of dockworkers’ strikes and choruses of “We Shall Overcome” at the dismantled Berlin Wall. There was no warning from experts, nor any hint of the nuclear cataclysm long prepared for and dreaded. That same year, Chinese students inspired the world from Tiananmen Square with nonviolent demonstrations modeled on the sit-ins, planting seeds of democracy in the authoritarian shell of Communist control. In 1990, Nelson Mandela emerged from twenty-seven years in prison to a Cape Town balcony, where he destroyed the iron rule of apartheid not with Armageddon’s revenge but a plea for hopeful consent: “Universal suffrage on a common voters’ roll in a united, democratic, and non-racial South Africa is the only way to peace and racial harmony.”
Like America’s original Founders, those who marched for civil rights reduced power to human scale. They invested enormous hope in the capacity of ordinary people to create bonds of citizenship based on simple ideals—“We the people”—and in a sturdy design to balance self-government with public trust. They projected freedom as America’s only story in a harsh world. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” King often said, quoting the abolitionist Theodore Parker, “but it bends toward justice.” His oratory mined twin doctrines of equal souls and equal votes in the common ground of nonviolence, and justice refined history until its fires dimmed for a time.
King himself upheld nonviolence until he was nearly alone among colleagues weary of sacrifice. To the end, he resisted incitements to violence, cynicism, and tribal retreat. He grasped freedom seen and unseen, rooted in ecumenical faith, sustaining patriotism to brighten the heritage of his country for all people. These treasures abide with lasting promise from America in the King years.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
IN August of 1983, completing the first year’s run of archival work on a book project contractually designed for three years, I stayed a week at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The assassination site, which is now the widely acclaimed National Civil Rights Museum, was then more or less a flophouse. Guests were obliged to knock at the office to be let in each time they returned, as the room keys had been stolen. One moment from that research trip struck me with particular force: a television news outtake of one young white reporter struggling to coax any word from Ralph Abernathy on the night of the murder, then giving up, unexpectedly jumpstarting him with a question about the past, and finally struggling just as hard to interrupt nonstop reveries about an unknown man. Something about the memory of Vernon Johns revived Abernathy from mortal shock into mirth and wonder.
Homework on Johns, King’s predecessor at his first pulpit, did far more than enliven my own interviews with Abernathy, which had been wooden at best. Almost any mention of Johns started an engine of candor in many preachers of their generation, and the lively character who emerged suggested a way out of my first paralysis: how to begin without an essay on Southern black churches, which would violate a cardinal rule that storytelling narrative offers the most durable path for historical work across racial barriers. Vernon Johns seemed human and authentic enough to bring alive the culture of American black churches in the age of segregation.
Alice Mayhew is one of the few editors who would support a first chapter for Parting the Waters that set aside historical interest in King to introduce a predecessor drawn from folk sources. Her confidence has sustained this trilogy for two extra decades. We share devotion to the material, and I will always treasure her friendship. Many of her colleagues at Simon & Schuster have carried heavy loads gracefully again through the production for this volume, especially our skillful coordinator, Roger Labrie, along with Karolina Harris, Irene Kheradi, Ted Landry, Victoria Meyer, Allison Murray, Jackie Seow, Gypsy da Silva, and John Wahler. Carolyn Reidy and David Rosenthal kept faith from the top. Elisa Rivlin provided able counsel. Copy editor Fred Chase patiently cleaned the words, and Kevin Kwan tracked down the illustrations. Elizabeth Hayes fostered promotion, Sonny Luo solved technical problems, and I wish to thank the many publishing professionals who tended this book beyond my sight.
By gathering the television outtakes with a host of oral histories and artifacts from 1968, eighty citizens from an ad hoc Memphis Search for Meaning Committee created the most unique of many special archives indispensable to research in the civil rights era. Eleanor McKay, John Terreo, David and Carol Yellin, and author Joan Turner Beifuss guided me through the resulting Mississippi Valley Collection at Memphis State University. To study the Jonathan Daniels Collection at the library of Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, I relied on Barbara Bishop, Esther Griswold, and David Siegenthaler. Wendy Chmielewski steered me through the vast holdings of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection at the McCabe Library in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.
This work rests on documentary sources from many institutions acknowledged in the two previous volumes, but several of new or continuing value merit special notice. Coretta Scott King kindly encouraged
me to continue work in the central repository of primary documents at the King Library and Archives in Atlanta, where archivist Cynthia P. Lewis offered knowledgeable help. Among the employees of libraries and archives cited here, I am especially indebted to the following: Claudia Anderson, Barbara Constable, Regina Greenwell, Tina Houston, Harry Middleton, Rebekah Ross, E. Philip Scott, and Linda Sulkey of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas; David Coleman, Taylor Fain, Kent Germany, Max Holland, Ken Hughes, Frederik Lovevall, Timothy Naftali, Jon Rosenberg, Lorraine Settimo, David Shreve, and Philip Zelikow of the Presidential Recordings Project at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, where I have benefited greatly from an advisory role in the transcription and interpretation of the newly released Lyndon Johnson tape recordings; Debbie Beatty, David M. Hardy, John Kelso, Linda Kloss, Helen Ann Near, and Tamara Lingham of the FBI’s Records Management Division; Linda Evans, Archie Motley, Ralph Pugh, and Corey Seeman of the Chicago Historical Society; Judy Edelhoff, Katherine King, Mary Roonan, and Steve Tilly of the National Archives; James H. Hutson of the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress; Mark J. Duffy and Jennifer Peters of the Archives of the Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas; Melissa Bush and George King of the Richard B. Russell Library at the University of Georgia in Athens; Kristin Gleeson, Sarah Vilan Kuhn, Peggy Lou Shriver, and Margaret Sly of the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Ann L. Koch and Deborah Slinghuff of the Sheridan Libraries at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; and Carla Hayden of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore.
For the FRUS series of official government documents essential to passages on the Vietnam War, I am grateful to editorial teams led by Glenn W. LaFantasie, David C. Humphrey, Edward C. Keefer, Ronald D. Landa, David S. Patterson, Kent Sieg, and Louis J. Smith. For reciprocal study in Vietnam, I am grateful above all for the courtesy of Lady Borton, along with Christian G. Appy, Murray Hiebert, and Nguyen Qui Duc, who suggested or arranged the following contacts for an all-too-brief research visit in Hanoi: Nguyen Thi Ngoc Toan, David Elder, Vo Dien Bien, Col. Chuck Searcy, Dinh Xuan Lam, Ngo van Hoa, David Thomas, David Lamb, Sandy Northrop, Duong Hanh, Nguyen Hoang van Khoan, Hoang Cong Thuy, and Dang Hoang Tinh, director of the Ho Chi Minh Museum.
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