King’s other aides, no matter how close their relationship with him, called him Martin or “Doc.” Not Abernathy. For Abernathy the name was Michael. Nor did King call his friend Ralph, as others did. To each other they were Michael and David. Those were their boyhood names. Using them was a private compact between best friends, a sign of the special bond between them.
That night, during his address to the garbage workers in Mason Temple, King would express his feelings publicly for Abernathy. Once Abernathy had finished the introduction and yielded the rostrum to him, King would say: “Ralph Abernathy is the best friend that I have in the world.”21
They were not obviously cut out to be best friends. King was the heir to the ministerial crown of his father, one of Atlanta’s most esteemed African American ministers. The younger King was a highly educated scholar of theology. Abernathy was one of twelve children born to a poor cotton farmer in Marengo County, Alabama. Though he had a master’s degree in sociology from Atlanta University, Abernathy, a self-described “country preacher,” was not known for his erudition. As historian David Lewis summed it up, Abernathy’s “intellectual pretensions were modest.”22
That said, both were Southern-born Baptist preachers. They were roughly the same age, Abernathy being three years older. Called to serve in pulpits at two leading African American churches in Montgomery, they seemed destined either for friendship or crosstown rivalry. Close friends they became. They enjoyed each other’s company and a common sense of humor. They shared a profound commitment to work together and face constant danger during their years of struggle for racial justice.
It did not seem to undercut their friendship that the chunky, sluggish Abernathy was a favorite butt of King’s pranks and ribbing. King would josh him about how snoring kept him awake all night when they were in a jail cell together.23 Once, according to an account in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, King ushered Abernathy into a car that had a rusted-out floorboard with only a gaping hole for his friend’s feet. Sometimes the teasing had an edge. The only organization that Ralph could lead was the “National Association for the Advancement of Eating Chicken,” King once ridiculed his buddy, according to Andrew Young.24
If Abernathy seemed good-natured about jokes at his expense, he had his pride. At times he exhibited jealousy at all the attention showered on King. In Oslo for the Nobel Prize ceremony in King’s honor, Abernathy had demanded that his wife, Juanita, and he ride in a limousine carrying Nobel Committee chairman Gunnar Jahn, King, and King’s wife, Coretta. The request was denied, but Abernathy protested. According to historian Taylor Branch’s account: “Abernathy appealed to King, who stood frozen with embarrassment, then tried to push his way past the security officers.” Abernathy finally relented and resigned himself to riding in a car apart from Jahn and the Kings.25
On this night in Memphis, however, Abernathy betrayed no trace of jealousy. On the contrary, he launched into a glowing, twenty-five-minute tribute. “Brothers and sisters, ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “too often we take our leaders for granted. We think we know them, but they are really strangers to us. So tonight I would like to take a little time to introduce you to our leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”26
He went on to recite highlights of King’s biography: his birth, early schooling, college years, deep involvement in the civil rights movement, and finally his plunge into the Memphis crisis on behalf of the garbage workers. “Now all you know that Martin Luther King Jr. is a great preacher,” he said. “But I want you to know that he was prepared by God to be a great preacher.”
Warming to the theme, Abernathy continued, “His great granddaddy was a preacher. His granddaddy was a preacher. His daddy is a preacher. His brother is a preacher, and, of course, his dearest friend and other brother . . .”—here Abernathy gestured toward himself—“is one of the world’s greatest preachers. So Martin Luther King Jr. is not only a great preacher but a great leader who has the courage and ability to translate the Sermon on the Mount into lessons for our times. He’s giving Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas new life.”27
In a final gush of praise that the Commercial Appeal would quote the next day, he said that, despite King’s many honors, he was not yet seeking to be president of the United States, but “he is the man who tells the president what to do.”
With applause rippling through the auditorium Abernathy paused. Then he said, “Let’s give Martin Luther King a warm welcome back to Memphis.” And the crowd lurched to its feet in a standing ovation.
Abernathy would say later that he had been “trying to sum up the greatness of the man in a way I had never done before.”28 After Abernathy sat down, a minister on the podium whispered to King that the introduction could have been a eulogy. King welcomed the joke with a smile.29
Chapter 15
From the Mountaintop
And God grant that we shall choose the high way, even if it will mean assassination, even if it will mean crucifixion.
—MLK, in a sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, March 22, 1959
KING SAT QUIETLY through Abernathy’s flattering introduction. Abernathy sat down, and King replaced him at the rostrum. Pausing a moment, he peered over a welter of microphones. As TV cameramen flooded him with light, his face took on a luminous sheen.
But something seemed amiss. He looked “harried and tired and worn and rushed,” observed one minister.1 He had a sore throat and was sleep-deprived. By the end of the speech that he would deliver that night, everyone in Mason Temple would know another reason why he seemed out of sorts.
As he gazed into the vastness of the auditorium, he could see hundreds of strikers and their supporters bunched together near the speaker’s platform. Beyond that crowd of rapt faces, he could see the dispiriting sight of row upon row of empty seats.
Speaking slowly, softly, he thanked Abernathy for the kind introduction.
Then he greeted the audience, lauding them for braving the storm, coming to the rally, showing that they had the backbone to carry on with the strike.2
In the words to follow he had nothing more to say about the storm. Yet you could say that the storm still had something to say to him. Near the ceiling of the auditorium were two large window fans. They were turned off, their shutters closed. But wind gusts punched them open time and again. The shutters clacked shut each time, startling King. “Every time there was a bang, he would flinch,” Billy Kyles would recall.3
Someone finally turned on the fans to open the shutters and stop the racket, but King had to deal with other irritations. There was the numbing exhaustion from travel and his chronic insomnia, and despair at being trapped in Memphis. Somehow he had to muster the energy and gumption to lift the spirits of this crowd, even though his were terribly low.
There had been no time to prepare, even if he had intended to do so. He often spoke without notes, even when the stakes were extremely high. He was doing it again on this night.
He had an astonishing knack for speaking off the cuff. He seemingly had a photographic memory. In his first big moment as a civil rights leader, during the kickoff rally to commence the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, he had twenty minutes to compose his remarks.4 He had delivered a riveting speech that had his audience clapping and howling their support. The “I have a dream” finale of his speech at the March on Washington in 1963 catapulted him to legendary heights. That stunning riff was famously a spur-of-the-moment departure from the prepared text.
The first theme of his remarks at Mason Temple that Wednesday night seemed far removed from Memphis. Imagine, he said, still speaking quietly, that the “Almighty” was transferring him back in time. King’s first stop, he said, would be Egypt in biblical times. He would visit classical Greece, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, the Christian Reformation under his namesake Martin Luther, and Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.5
King said he would not stop his trip through history there. No, he would ask the Almighty to allow him to live i
n current-day America.
The specifics of the trip through time, of course, were not the point of King’s speech. They were a rhetorical device to lend emphasis and gravity to his words. It was the kind of flair that King employed to infuse his speeches and sermons with dramatic power. In the Memphis speech he was mixing the simplicity of a children’s story, a bird’s-eye view of history, with references to lofty historical figures.
As he imagined the stop in ancient Greece, he spoke of his expectation that he would bump into Pluto, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides, and Aristophanes. If few of his listeners would have recognized all those names, that did not matter. King was burnishing his speech with a dash of intellectual gloss. It was not just Martin Luther King speaking. It was Dr. King, the theologian with a PhD from Boston University. It was a learned man who could rattle off the names of ancient philosophers and dramatists to poetic effect.
His voice built in intensity and rose in volume as he went on. That voice, a rich baritone, seemed to emerge from deep within him, as though rumbling from an oak barrel. His voice was almost musical in its harmonic rise and fall. It was at once lucid and richly ornate. On another occasion the timbre of that voice had bowled over the newspaper columnist Mary McGrory. Writing in the Washington Evening Star on December 16, 1966, she noted how “baroque phrases” slid off his tongue in “mellifluous, mesmerizing tones.”
King’s voice could, depending on the race or sophistication of his audience, exhibit the clipped diction of a lofty academic or the earthy vernacular of African American speech. For example, on one occasion, in 1965, when he was speaking in the vernacular, he proclaimed from the steps of the Alabama statehouse at the conclusion of a triumphant march from Selma to Montgomery: “We ain’t goin’ let nobody turn us around.”6
As he moved to a major theme of his speech at Mason Temple, King turned darkly pessimistic. He said that the choice for humankind was no longer between violence and nonviolence. Tapping his fingers on the rostrum, he said the choice, rather, was between nonviolence and “nonexistence.” Unless the government moved swiftly to alleviate the poverty of African Americans, he said, the nation was doomed.
It was not a momentary lapse into overstatement. King had been saying much the same thing for months. He was warning of catastrophe. Nothing less. It was why he saw poverty as an issue of overriding urgency.
King shifted to another message, a plea for unity. He urged the strikers to stick together, invoking a passage from the Old Testament. Just as the slaves of ancient Egypt united against the Pharaoh to escape their bondage, so the strikers had to stay together, united.
In a jab at the mayor he insinuated that Loeb was not just wrong to defy the strikers. He was sick, King said. King sympathized with the strikers’ hardship, as they struggled to feed their families and put their livelihood at risk without knowing if their strike would succeed or fail.
To signal that victory was at hand, he recounted the familiar story of Birmingham: how his legion of protesters had withstood fire hoses, police dogs, mass arrests, and jail sentences. Just as the power of the nonviolent movement had worked in Birmingham, he said, that same spirit could win the struggle in Memphis.
Then his words took on a sharply defiant tone. He declared that neither Mace nor a court injunction would defeat the cause of the Memphis strikers. He repeated the call for an economic boycott of certain stores and products in order to exert business pressure on the mayor. Ever more animated, his right hand slashing downward, he extolled the boycott as the force that would win the day. He said it would cause downtown businesses to demand that Loeb grant the rightness of the strikers’ cause.
King shifted his focus again, from the immediacy of the strike to a second biblical theme. This time he drew on the parable of the Good Samaritan to urge people who had no vested interest in the strike to support it anyway. The story, told by Jesus and recorded in the Gospel of Luke, speaks of a traveler on the dangerous Jericho Road who is robbed and beaten by thieves. A priest and a Levite pass the man as they hurry on their way. Then a Samaritan, who belonged to a different ethnic group, stopped to aid the injured man. King suggested that the priest and the Levite did not stop to help because of fear that thieves might also attack them. King said that, like the Samaritan, people in Memphis should not ask about the risk to themselves if they helped the garbage workers. No, he said, they should be thinking about the fate of the garbage workers if they did not help them.
King had preached the parable of the Good Samaritan in many of his Sunday sermons.7 He had done so just six weeks before. Then he had added another thought. Good deeds were admirable, he said, but they were not enough. Stronger laws were essential as well.
He had a keen sense of what messages and symbols would resonate with which audience. Relying on biblical tropes was very much in tune with the makeup of the crowd at Mason Temple. Ingrained in the marrow of most everyone in that auditorium was a biblical heritage and Christian belief. Thus far into the speech he had invoked the name of God (or “Almighty”) fourteen times, and he had summoned parables from the Old and New Testaments. He would refer to God twice more before he finished.
Religious motifs came naturally to him. Even when King was a small boy, his father, the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr., had him memorizing scripture and reciting it at the dinner table. His mother, a church organist, instilled a religious spirit through the power of song. Every Sunday he sat in a wooden pew of his father’s church. Before his eyes were the biblically themed stained glass windows above the pulpit. Into his ears poured Gospel-laden sermons and the voices of the white-robed choir, all radiating the Christian faith and the African American Baptist tradition.
From a young age he had displayed a knack for public speaking. He was only fifteen, in his last year of high school (he skipped two grades in high school), when he won a statewide oratorical contest for African American students. When he was eighteen, his father invited him to deliver a trial Sunday-afternoon sermon at Ebenezer. Though he had no formal training in the ministry, he obliged. King biographer Taylor Branch described what happened: the novice preacher “seemed to project his entire being in the expression of his sentiments,” and the worshippers “rose up in celebration.”8
As a graduate student in theology King honed and refined his speaking style. He mastered the charismatic techniques and sermonizing of African American Baptist preachers, such as C. L. Franklin, and white clergymen Emerson Fosdick and George Buttrick. He scrutinized and memorized their mannerisms until he could do dead-on imitations. He had a repertoire of them, and years later he would amuse his aides with exaggerated renditions of one preacher’s style or another.
He was alert to the possibilities of metaphor and imagery and systematic in building a stock of rhetorical material. In a brown pocket-sized spiral notebook he jotted down witticisms that caught his eye. “Nothing so educates as a shake” was one scribbling. Another was from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Above the logic is the feeling of the heart.”9
Flashes of his mastery with words were on display at Mason Temple that Wednesday night. As he often did in his speeches, he elevated a local issue into a sweeping, transcendent national cause. He implored his listeners to support the garbage workers of Memphis. By doing so, he said, they would not just shape their city’s future; they would also transform the nation with their example.
Then his speech took a highly personal turn. He told of being stabbed in 1958 by a crazed African American woman while he was signing books in Harlem. The tip of the blade lodged in his chest a fraction of an inch from his aorta. Surgery removed the knife and repaired the wound. He later learned that he had been extremely lucky. If he had so much as sneezed while the knife impinged on the artery, he would have died. He told of receiving a letter from an eleven-year-old girl. King quoted from the letter in which the girl said she was glad that he had not sneezed.
The story of the stabbing and the girl’s letter served as a rhetorical lead-in for a recap of his career. “If I ha
d sneezed,” he sang out over and over in a melodic refrain, each time citing a key event in the civil rights movement that he would have missed had he died from the stabbing in Harlem. If he had sneezed, he said, he would have missed the sit-in protests to desegregate lunch counters. If he had sneezed, he would have missed the Freedom Rides to end Jim Crow on interstate buses, the Birmingham campaign, the enactment of the federal civil rights bills, the chance to deliver the “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, the showdown in Selma over voting rights, and the outpouring of community support in Memphis for the strike that had brought him there.
Reciting the story about his near death seemed to transport him into a profound gloom about mortality—his mortality. Still fresh on his mind was the death threat that forced the delay of his flight from Atlanta that morning, and he could not let it go now. He told his listeners how the airline had taken the threat seriously because he was on board, had guarded the plane during the night and checked all the passengers’ bags for explosives. Upon his arrival in Memphis, King said, he had heard yet more talk about death threats against him.
He continued in a melancholy, self-reflective mood, saying he was facing some difficult days ahead. But he said he was prepared for anything, no matter what might lay ahead, because he had “been to the Mountaintop.”10
His words reflected a soul searching as he contemplated the specter of death. He had talked many times before about his fear of dying a violent death. But it was unusual for King to dwell openly on the depth of his despair as he pondered his fear of death. His manner typically was lighthearted, self-assured, and unflappable. This night in Memphis, however, he seemed near panic, anxious that he might be the target of an assassin’s bullet at any moment.
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