When Harlem Nearly Killed King
Page 1
Copyright © 2002 by Hugh Pearson
First trade paperback edition December 2003.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Excerpts from Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story reprinted by arrangement with the Estate of Martin Luther King Jr., c/o Writers House as agent for the proprietor. Copyright Martin Luther King 1963, copyright renewed 1991 Coretta Scott King.
SEVEN STORIES PRESS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pearson, Hugh
When Harlem nearly killed King : the 1958 stabbing of Martin Luther King, Jr. /
Hugh Pearson.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-60980-321-6
1. King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968—Assassination attempt, 1958. 2. Attempted murder—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. 3. Harlem (New York, N.Y.)—History—20th century. 4. Harlem (New York, N.Y.)—Race relations. 5. New York (N.Y.)—History—1951–6. New York (N.Y.)—Race relations. 7. Stab wounds—Treatment—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. 8. Harlem Hospital Center—History. I. Title.
E185.97.K5 P42 2002
364.15′24′092—dc21
2001007352
College professors may order examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles for a free six-month trial period. To order, visit www.sevenstories.com/textbook, or fax on school letterhead to (212) 226-1411.
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
PREFACE mendacity springs eternal
ONE where do we go from here?
TWO a tight race
THREE putting the right spin on a huge embarrassment
FOUR taking the kid glove approach
FIVE why isn’t king signing books at my bookstore?
SIX not quite in touch with reality
SEVEN stride toward critical acclaim
EIGHT crisis
NINE why did they take king to harlem hospital?
TEN waiting for little napoleon
ELEVEN roots
TWELVE saving king
THIRTEEN convalescence
FOURTEEN subsequent fates
epilogue
NOTES
PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
mendacity springs eternal
IN 1958, THE YEAR described in When Harlem Nearly Killed King, African American elected officials were virtually unheard of in the South, while barely registering a presence in New York City. Things have certainly changed since then. In 2000 there were 9,040 African American elected officials across the country. In New York City, from 1990 to 1994 there was an African American mayor. Currently, the city has four African Americans representing it in U.S. Congress. The New York City council has numerous African Americans. And as was true in 1958, Manhattan’s borough president (back then, Hulan Jack) is African American (today, C. Virginia Fields). And almost everybody, in some way, shape, or form, invokes the name of the deceased Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who now has his own national holiday. Rather than losing his life violently as was feared would take place in 1958 in New York City after he was stabbed by a deranged woman, King instead lost it 10 years later in Memphis, Tennessee at the hands of an assassin.
In September 1958, the most prominent African American politician in America was Harlem’s own congressman, also a preacher, Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr. In two years, Powell would become chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. In 1958, when King appeared in Harlem to promote his new book, Stride Toward Freedom, describing the Montgomery Bus Boycott that successfully desegregated buses in that city, Powell found a reason to stay away from his own constituency. This was probably due to his ego. The rise of King eclipsed his popularity, as it did that of all other leaders among African Americans.
Today, not only is King’s name often invoked here in New York City by the Harlem-based Reverend Al Sharpton—a controversial man who aspires to be a political kingmaker—Sharpton also invokes the name of Powell. He claims that he views Powell as a role model, even as he runs for president of the United States, an office that, experts agree, Sharpton hasn’t the slightest chance of winning. Which begs the following comparison between Powell and Sharpton. During his heyday, despite all of Powell’s excessive egocentricity, at least he was a pragmatist, running for political offices he could win—first a city council seat from Harlem, then the U.S. House of Representatives. So if Powell is Sharpton’s role model, one might ask, why isn’t Sharpton running for a political office he can win?
All of this is to say that even though conditions for African Americans have improved since 1958, still, numerous African Americans find themselves wedded to the notion of needing the same type of Moses that Martin Luther King Jr. appeared to be in 1958, while he basked in the victory of Montgomery. And Reverend Sharpton seeks to fill that role. Hence, opportunities for his misplaced egotism. The type of racism honestly expressed in 1958 by New York’s governor Averill Harriman only behind closed doors after hearing of King’s stabbing, is still the rule with numerous Caucasian elected officials today: say one thing before the general public, and something else when out of earshot of African Americans.
In other words, things have changed. Yet the mendacity and venality that has always ruled human behavior remains constant. When Harlem Nearly Killed King dramatizes such behavior as it played itself out over a few harrowing days in September and October of 1958, even among the surgeons saving King.
Hugh Pearson
New York City
October 2003
ONE
where do we go from here?
EUPHORIA FROM THE November 13, 1956, Supreme Court decision desegregating buses in Montgomery, Alabama, after a year-long boycott spread across the country. It deluged soon to be twenty-eight-year-old Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., with speaking engagements, requests for advice on how to organize similar boycotts in other Southern cities and towns, and suggestions of new local Jim Crow targets for the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the organization that had spearheaded the boycott. A year earlier, King had been the city’s new Negro pastor, treated by most of the established Negro leaders of Montgomery as gullible enough to take the heat for boldly trying to convince ordinary Negroes who depended on the mass transit system in the small capital city to stay away and instead walk or carpool to work until their demands were met—a risky proposition that most observers initially predicted would end in disaster. The middle-class and well-to-do Negroes of Montgomery, especially the leaders of the most influential churches (who never rode the buses anyway) concluded that King could afford to take a foolish risk because he was new enough and young enough (thus naïve enough) not to accommodate the city’s Caucasian power structure. He had no relationships that could be jeopardized or doomed.
Then, after pulling off the miracle, due to the gravity of the achievement it became impossible for King to return to a normal life. The boycott soon ended up enlisting the aid of even the initial doubters, who didn’t want to be judged too harshly by posterity. In the aftermath of victory, King would garner the lion’s share of strokes to the ego, as well as the attendant pressures and dangers that came along with becoming an icon. Part of him wanted to return to something resembling a normal life. But now that was impossible.
During the year in which the protesters held out for the v
ictory, King led them across a moral and philosophical watershed. Near the beginning of the boycott, the Caucasian power structure of Montgomery lost patience with a unity enabling them to organize as many as 350 automobiles for carpools. After two months of this, city officials decided to search through the municipal ordinances to find some way to rein in the protest, only to discover a 1921 statute prohibiting boycotts “without just cause or legal excuse.” At that point they convened a grand jury, which soon returned indictments against the boycott leaders, meaning, of course, that all of them were to be arrested and stand trial (but would be released on bail). Up until then, the thinking among decent, respectable Negro citizens had been, It was one thing to stay off of buses (or anywhere else you were allowed) voluntarily, but quite another to be arrested, and possibly convicted for doing so, ending up with a criminal record. Did they really want to besmirch their reputations and possibly compromise their futures in such a manner?
King was out of town when the indictments were handed out. On his way back to Montgomery through his hometown of Atlanta, he was met by his nervous father (known as Daddy King) who was certain that this was a line his son should not cross. The elder King convened a group of friends, the most prominent Negroes in Atlanta (including the president of King’s alma mater, Morehouse College) to come by his home and help him convince King junior not to return to Montgomery. But the younger King was adamant that he be arrested with the other leaders. Upon hearing this, King senior cried like a baby.
Daddy King sensed the greater implications of what was happening, as did others. At first he predicted disaster for the boycott effort and the possible murder of his son. The entire nation watched in amazement as the determination of the city’s Negro citizens remained high. Elsewhere in the South there had been isolated protests of segregation ordinances. But such protests fizzled. None of them lasted this length of time, or featured unity and resolve in such large numbers. Among those captivated by what was taking place was Bayard Rustin, a forty-six-year-old New York City–based itinerant activist with pacifist sensibilities. Rustin headed for Montgomery just as the boycott leaders were about to be arrested. With his Gandhian sensibilities, he was destined to become a key aide to King. The first advice he offered was that the boycott leaders not wait for police officers to come and arrest them as if they were common criminals. Rather, they should seize the moral high ground and appear at jail to give themselves up. Their proactive gesture had the effect of shocking the law enforcement officers. As word spread of what they were doing, spectators showed up to cheer them on. The tactic further backfired on the city when the indictments prompted the legal process that eventually led the Supreme Court to outlaw segregation on Montgomery buses.
While he did his best to handle the attention and demands that cascaded upon him due to the boycott’s success, King was introduced to another man who would become very important in defining the direction of future activism. Stanley Levison was a forty-four-year-old independently wealthy New York City–based socialist (his fortune due to wise real estate investments) with a passionate concern for what was taking place in the Deep South. After the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi (the fifteen-year-old who had allegedly wolf-whistled at a Caucasian woman), Levison, who was Jewish, helped launch an emergency organization called In Friendship, to raise money in the North for victims of Southern racial violence. As the Montgomery bus boycott dragged on, In Friendship also raised money to support the boycotters. Up until Rustin introduced him to King, this had been the extent of Levison’s involvement as a facilitator of change in the South.
Boycotting Montgomery’s buses had been relatively easy compared with the other arenas in which Jim Crow existed. Municipal transit systems depended on Negro as well as Caucasian patronage. However, to eradicate the practice among other municipal facilities (to say nothing of privately owned establishments) would require a far more brazen confrontation with Southern authority. Would the protesters go to jail (and suffer even worse consequences) for being somewhere Jim Crow did not allow them? It was far easier for King to accept the constant invitations from across the country to preach against the evils of segregation than it was to deal with this conundrum. In the aftermath of the Montgomery victory, he was making as many as four speeches per week (which would work out to approximately two hundred per year), and his powerful oratory was bringing audiences to their feet.
With these difficulties in mind, Levison’s first idea for what the movement should do next was for King to broadcast his own regularly scheduled national television or radio program designed to persuade the nation to stop the practice of segregation. All that was needed was a corporate sponsor. In 1957 this was not a realistic possibility. No major company was about to take such a risk.
Other ideas included tackling segregation city by city, town by town, by holding racially mixed mass meetings in which King would communicate the ideals that formed the basis of the bus boycott, first in the North, then in border states, then in the Deep South. Such a tactic would amount to crusades against segregation modeled off of the religious crusades of evangelist Billy Graham. In fact, at one point King discussed holding such rallies in tandem with Graham. But the idea foundered on the issue of where the greater stress should be placed—political change or religious transformation. Graham was a moderate and thus believed he couldn’t get too political. He felt he had to walk a fine line so as not to turn off his Caucasian religious supporters. Eventually the crusade idea was modified (Graham had nothing to do with this modification). Instead of pushing for citizens of all persuasions to agitate for desegregation, the Southern Leadership Conference (SCLC)—the new organization King had founded in the aftermath of the Montgomery victory to further civil rights interests across the South—would launch crusades in Southern cities and towns to register Negro citizens to vote. The campaign would be called the Crusade for Citizenship. Yet it, too, would meet with disappointment, as the turnout in places where King was to speak ended up being quite small, and the number of new voters registered, negligible. It appeared that the level of excitement about what the boycott had accomplished still outweighed the risks Negroes in the South were willing to take to abolish discrimination on the next level.
As he tried to figure out what to do next, King also had problems with the leadership of his own religious denomination. After the Montgomery victory, he dreamed of turning the five-million-member National Baptist Convention into a civil rights vehicle by electing a president allied to his interests. The twenty thousand ministers and their congregations for his cause would be a far more potent force to count on than the hundred or so ministers and congregations who formed SCLC. It would also be far more powerful than the NAACP. But this idea, too, would come to nothing after J. H. Jackson, current president of the Baptist convention, who was not about to be upstaged by King, got his cronies to vote by acclamation to reelect him president in violation of the Baptist convention’s own constitution. Over the years Jackson would consolidate his power and block the denomination from ever formally supporting the civil rights movement.
In the months following the boycott victory, reporters began alleging there were other Negro leaders who were jealous of King. This was an understandable sentiment in light of the manner in which King had rocketed to fame virtually overnight, while so many of them had spent entire careers agitating for civil rights through other channels or otherwise distinguishing themselves. Just a few months after the boycott victory, several American Negro leaders were aboard an airplane heading to the newly formed nation of Ghana, formerly the West African colony known as the Gold Coast, to celebrate its independence. They included Nobel Peace Prize–winner Ralph Bunche (who won the award in 1950 for his role in helping quell the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict); Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., of New York, the most powerful Negro politician in the nation; Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University, the largest Negro university in the country; A. Phillip Randolph, head of the first labor union to or
ganize Negroes and the man responsible for forcing President Franklin Roosevelt to issue an executive order during World War II ensuring Negro employment in wartime industry, the same man who founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; and Martin Luther King, Jr., recent subject of a cover story in Time magazine, due to the Montgomery victory. Of the five leaders only King was invited into the cockpit by the plane’s crew and provided the honorary opportunity of playfully taking the controls.
The following May saw King organize a Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington, D.C., in light of the refusal of President Eisenhower to even listen to Negro grievances at that point. But it took the NAACP working its back channels with the presidential administration to get approval of the Lincoln Memorial as the staging area. While privately consulting with White House aides, the lawyer who successfully argued before the Supreme Court Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which outlawed school segregation, and future Supreme Court justice himself, Thurgood Marshall, repeatedly referred to King as a “first-rate rabble-rouser,” assuring Maxwell Raab, the White House’s designated point man on “Negro issues,” that in exchange for the go-ahead the NAACP would make sure that King’s emotional pulpit style was toned down. With this assurance clearance was received. And the reception given to King at the Pilgrimage prompted the media to further single him out as the titular Negro leader.
While King continued to try to figure out the best direction in which to take the movement, Levison had settled on at least one way he could capitalize on the nationwide interest generated up to that point: write a book describing how tired maids, washwomen, manual laborers, cooks, gardeners, nannies, and chauffeurs had been inspired to stay off of Montgomery buses until the Supreme Court ruled in their favor. Using his connections in publishing, Levison persuaded Harper and Brothers to sign King to write what was to be called Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story for an advance against royalties of $3,500.