by Hugh Pearson
By 1958, Rockefeller Center was a fixture in the pantheon of New York City landmarks. It also happened to be headquarters for several blue-chip corporations, including the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), owner of the NBC television station that broadcast a morning show from Rockefeller Center that had taken the nation by storm. The program featured a host who regularly sat with a chimpanzee named J. Fred Muggs, who by 1958 was replaced with another chimp named Mr. Kokomo. Prior to that year, the show was broadcast live while spectators gazed through a large plate glass window into the curbside studio on West 49th Street. Dave Garroway had turned The Today Show into an American institution.
Thus, in September 1958, as King prepared to trek to New York City to launch the promotional campaign for Stride Toward Freedom in the midst of the governor’s race between Harriman and Rockefeller, there was no question that Martin Luther King, Jr., would have to appear on The Today Show. An appearance would boost sales of the new book. And there was no question that basking in King’s aura would be useful to both gubernatorial candidates. During the days of September 16th to the 20th, the interests of King, Harriman, Rockefeller, and local Negro politicians would all converge. Tuesday, the 16th was the day King made his way to Rockefeller Center to tape his book promotional appearance for The Today Show, to be broadcast the following day. That Friday would be the day he would appear with Harriman and Rockefeller, as well as local Negro leaders, on a dais in Harlem in front of the community’s historic Hotel Teresa. It would be both Harriman and Rockefeller’s third appearance in Harlem that week as they battled each other for the Negro vote. While they prepared to voice the luminous hopeful platitudes always expressed in speeches at such rallies, neither was aware of what would occur the day after the rally. Privately, Harriman—who portrayed himself as more liberal than his Republican opponent—would express himself with far more racial candor, raising many of the same doubts about Negro intelligence that served as the basis for the overt injustices King and the other Montgomery victors were battling in the Deep South. Doubts that would prove so enduring that even after the civil rights movement totally defeated Jim Crow six years later, the questions about Negro intelligence and ability expressed by Harriman regarding what happened to King on the fateful day of September 20, 1958, would remain common among Americans for decades to come. They would endure right up to the present.
THREE
putting the right spin
on a huge embarrassment
AS HE PREPARED to make his way to New York City, King and the movement were still basking in their inadvertent success in turning a huge embarrassment into an asset for the movement. During the prior month, autographed, advanced copies of Stride Toward Freedom had been sent to several notables, including President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren. In the time between handing in the manuscript to Harper and Brothers and receiving finished copies of the book, King was flooded with even more speaking invitations and requests to meet with him in Montgomery from important people around the world. He received a delegation of prominent Indians visiting Montgomery, who echoed what he had written at the end of his book, but in more personal terms: King would have to be prepared to make physical sacrifices if he was to lead the budding movement as Gandhi had led his. He received correspondence indicating that the editor-in-chief of a major Swedish daily was about to travel to America and that, as part of his study of race relations, Montgomery would be one of his stops and he would like to see King while in the city. Two distinguished Japanese writers were traveling to America, too, intent on making Montgomery one of their stops, eager to meet with King.
Locally, King’s right-hand man, Ralph Abernathy, was charged with laying the groundwork for future civil rights protests in Montgomery under the auspices of the MIA. The organization continued to consider suggested new municipal targets of Jim Crow in Montgomery. The most popular idea was to launch a campaign to desegregate the public parks and playgrounds. MIA was preparing the Negro citizens of the city to go to jail for this cause, when, suddenly, it was stymied by the city of Montgomery’s response that if it tried to integrate the parks and playgrounds, the facilities would simply be closed.
Like King, Abernathy was pastor of his own church in the city (in fact, the largest Negro church in America). But running MIA and his local church wasn’t the only thing the married Abernathy was alleged to be up to. He was also accused of having affairs with his parishioners (years later Abernathy would admit to such infidelities, and accuse King of the same thing, including participating in some of the sexual escapades with him). In that, they were not unlike plenty of prominent married men, such as Harriman’s gubernatorial opponent, the married Nelson Rockefeller, and possibly Harriman too, though they were not men of the cloth. And by the end of August (Friday the 29th, to be exact), the husband of one of the women Abernathy was said to be having an affair with appeared at his church brandishing a hatchet and a revolver, warning Abernathy he intended to kill him.
What ensued next was the huge embarrassment that ultimately and inadvertently turned into an asset as King made his way to New York City just a week and a half later. Fleeing his office with blood streaming down his head, Abernathy ran down the street with the husband chasing him in broad daylight still brandishing the gun and hatchet. Soon the police stopped and arrested the man. His wife came down to the station and grew so hysterical that she, too, was arrested under the charge of disorderly conduct. The chastened Abernathy refused to file a complaint. One of the police officers who witnessed the chase filed one instead. Five days later (September 3) along with many of the other Negroes in Montgomery, Martin Luther King, Jr., decided to go to court for the preliminary hearing of the case, in order to show support for his top local assistant. He and his wife, Coretta, accompanied Abernathy and his wife. Upon arriving, they found the courtroom jammed with lines of people waiting to get in. Only Abernathy was allowed inside. King waited outside with his wife and Mrs. Abernathy, hoping Abernathy’s lawyer could get him a seat. But the police sergeant who admitted Abernathy commanded King to leave. King peered into the courtroom to see if Abernathy’s lawyer was coming to help. At that the sergeant lost his temper, no doubt thinking that just because King had turned into a world-renowned celebrity for forcing the city to give into what was, in the sergeant’s opinion, a “preposterous” demand, didn’t mean King should be accorded special treatment. In the sergeant’s eyes, he was just another nigger. So he beaconed two officers, who then very roughly seized King as the Negro spectators gasped in horror, which only encouraged the officers to tighten their grip. The photograph of a young King in a tan suit and Fedora being manhandled as he stands at the front desk of the police station house, with his right arm twisted around his back while his wife looks on in horror, would become one of the most famous of the entire civil rights movement.
King would be charged with loitering and allowed to post bond. The following day he was tried, convicted, and ordered to pay a fourteen-dollar fine. He refused saying he elected to serve time. But in order to avert further publicity and martyrdom for King, the city’s police commissioner paid his fine instead. Such publicity and martyrdom had come in spades. Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP (who privately had mixed feelings about King’s rise along with so many other prominent Negroes of the era), shot off a telegram to President Eisenhower, admonishing him to make a statement expressing outrage at King’s treatment. Through an aide, Eisenhower refused, reiterating in a carefully worded letter that the entire affair was a state concern (evincing no more sympathy for King than his words to Wilkins: “Your interest and concern in this matter are fully understood”).
Harriman, by contrast, wouldn’t be so shy. He publicly stated, “The recent arrest and abuse of the Reverend Martin Luther King was an outrage that dealt our national prestige a damaging blow before the peoples of the world.”
His statement was what one could expect from a patrician governor of a relatively liberal stat
e running scared that he might lose the election, eager to mine Negro votes that could prove to be his margin of victory. The rough manhandling of King took the heat off of Abernathy, shifting attention away from the issue of his adulterous liaison, even causing speculation that the incident may have been engineered by enemies of civil rights. As such, the contretemps was chalked up as one more example of the injustices Negroes had to suffer, and the original confrontation that had precipitated it as the embodiment of how low the authorities will stoop in order to hound a civil rights leader. Shrewdly, in line with this interpretation, Abernathy continued to plead his innocence of the affair with the parishioner. And after his Negro lawyer withdrew from the case, the jealous husband was forced to hire the same Caucasian lawyer who had defended the city of Montgomery’s segregation policies during the bus boycott, which only added fuel to such an interpretation.
The movement withstood its first major embarrassment. King returned to his hectic schedule, including making preparations for traveling to New York City to promote his book. Little did he know that the shameful scenario of Abernathy and the jilted husband was a mere dress rehearsal for the far more dangerous embarrassment he and the movement would endure in New York City.
FOUR
taking the kid-glove approach
EXCITEMENT OVER the success of King and the MIA in desegregating Montgomery’s buses had caused plenty of people to forget that not long before, the acronym NAACP stood for the same degree of daring. Just a year prior to the launch of the boycott, everyone had been overjoyed at what the NAACP’s legal defense and educational fund had accomplished in winning Brown v. The Board of Education. Despite putting in forty-eight years as the “radical” alternative to the “go slow” gradualist approach pioneered by Booker T. Washington after the advent of Jim Crow in the late 1800s; despite laying the legal foundation for challenging Jim Crow (and offering legal assistance that led to the successful legal challenge of bus segregation); despite the fact that before the Montgomery miracle, in plenty of places in the Deep South a person caught paying dues to the NAACP risked the loss of his livelihood if not his life; at this point the organization looked conservative. For nearly two years now King had been under tremendous pressure to take the movement to its next level. Yet in the midst of the insistent defiance of the school desegregation ruling by Orvall Faubus, and, by comparison, the obedience of the city of Montgomery to a ruling prompted by the bus boycott, he was still treated as the most promising leader. King and his entourage were being counseled by visitors from around the world eager to ally themselves with American Negroes in a struggle that they viewed on an international level; a struggle of non-Caucasian peoples against Western imperialism.
This continuing popularity for King, and the outdated manner in which the NAACP was now painted, was a tough pill to swallow for NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins. His organization had long preached that activism through the courts—not boycotts, or any other type of civil disobedience—was the only way to topple Jim Crow. Publicly, Wilkins was very careful in dealing with King. Prior to rallying to support King in the embarrassing Abernathy adultery imbroglio, the two had been in frequent contact. Many of the important people eager to visit King in Montgomery first approached the NAACP in New York. And as SCLC got off the ground and the media began reporting stories of competition between the NAACP and SCLC for membership and dues, both strove to refute the stories. They were lying. As soon as the SCLC was formed, Wilkins set to work calling his NAACP field secretaries in the Deep South, to get them to persuade local Negro leaders not to cooperate with King (which may have been one of the reasons SCLC’s Crusade for Citizenship voter registration drive was such a disappointment). He was especially in touch with his Mississippi Field Secretary Medgar Evers, who busily obeyed his directive. And that King was so young compared to Wilkins (who was fifty-one) didn’t help matters any. Neither did the fact that after so many years of working hard to expunge the NAACP of any hint of association with Communists (even NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Director Thurgood Marshall served as an informant for the FBI), King was introducing people into the movement who made Wilkins nervous (long after the movement was over it would be revealed that King’s most important non Afro-American adviser, Stanley Levison, was indeed a Communist at the time he aided King).
Nevertheless, it would look quite bad if, while King was in New York City, someone from the NAACP didn’t demonstrate some modicum of public cordiality. Wilkins decided not to join the list of notables who would sit on the dais of the rally to be held in front of the Hotel Teresa in Harlem on Friday, September 19. Besides Harriman and Rockefeller, joining King would be baseball great Jackie Robinson; A. Phillip Randolph; Duke Ellington, whose band would provide music for the rally; Manhattan Borough President Hulan Jack; and Reverend Gardner Taylor, pastor of Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn. Conspicuously absent would be Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. And none of the heavyweights from the NAACP would be there. Other officers in the organization realized it would look very bad if someone didn’t make a public gesture of some kind. One such person was Arthur Spingarn, the organization’s eighty-year-old Jewish president.
Spingarn and his brother, Joel, were so important to the early days of the NAACP and the early fight for racial justice that they deserved to be considered as integral to laying the groundwork as A. Phillip Randolph, W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter White, James Weldon Johnson, Ida B. Wells, and all the other men and women who carried the torch prior to the rise of King. The NAACP’s highest award, the Spingarn Medal—which would become the equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize in the Negro world—would be named for Joel. Both brothers joined not long after the organization was formed in 1910, primarily by a coalition of Caucasians alarmed at the racial atrocities taking place in the early twentieth century. (Though this coalition included Du Bois, he came along shortly after the first meetings were held and, of course, played a defining role upon joining.) Among the founders was Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of the famed pre–Civil War abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (who was instrumental in launching the career of Frederick Douglass). Villard was publisher of The Nation magazine and the New York Evening Post. In the early days of the NAACP, he provided free rent to the organization in the same Fifth Avenue building that housed The Nation. While suffering through the boredom of working for a private law firm on, of all issues (in light of the source of wealth for Averell Harriman’s family), the reorganization of railroads, Arthur was approached by Villard to take a civil rights case. Upon doing so, he caught the civil rights bug and ended up chairing the NAACP’s legal committee (precursor to its Legal Defense and Educational Fund) shortly after its formation, serving in that capacity for twenty-seven years, winning eleven cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Then in 1940, Arthur became president of the organization.
At the beginning of their involvement, the Spingarns often encountered people who were amazed at their commitment. During debates on the subject of Negro intelligence, Caucasian acquaintances would say to the younger Spingarn, “You say the Negro has the same capabilities as the white. What books has he written?” In response to this, Arthur started collecting books by Negro authors. (By 1966 his collection of 3,000 would be donated to UCLA.) Through most of the first half of the 20th century, the Greenwich Village home he shared with his wife (they’d have no children) was a stopover for notable New York intellectuals, writers, and artists such as Eugene O’Neill and John Sloan. After the death of Booker T. Washington in 1915, Arthur and his brother (with heavy influence from Du Bois) organized a famous civil rights conclave for notable Negro activists and intellectuals on the grounds of Joel’s Amenia, New York, residence. To be known as the Amenia Conference, virtually everyone of consequence on the race issue in those days was present, representing the full spectrum of opinions on the subject. Designed to bring the Bookerite faction of the movement together with those who believed in agitating for immediate rights, in the end the conference didn’t
bring many of the Bookerites into the fold. Except for one key man. Not long after it ended, poet, composer, lawyer, author, and diplomat James Weldon Johnson would join the NAACP, assuming the newly created office of national field secretary, which eventually became the office of executive secretary, a position held next by an insurance salesman from Atlanta named Walter White; then after White, a journalist from Kansas City by the name of Roy Wilkins. The same man who now nervously contemplated the phenomenon of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Under the constitution of the NAACP, the president had very little power. Most authority resided with the executive secretary. Ever since the days of Johnson it had been up to the executive secretary to serve as the principal face of the organization, dealing with the myriad matters his role required him to address: fund-raising, speaking engagements, traveling to the latest racial hotspots, keeping local chapters in line with national policy, and now, with the rise of King and his followers and allies, serving as informal envoy between such “hotheads” and high government officials who might listen to the head of the NAACP before they would leaders of other Negro organizations.