Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  But the Cleveland Reverend keeps on; the Negroes have got to clean it up; they’ve lost these homes.

  This time it is Andy Young: “You ain’t lost it, Reverend. They lost it for you. You never had it.”

  In all this King has said nothing, letting Lee and Young do the stalking. (Later I am to find that this is his standard technique, holding back, letting others talk themselves out, allowing his men to guide the conversation to the point where it can be finally summed up by him.) “Well, Reverend,” King finally says, “these communities have become slums not just because the Negroes don’t keep clean and don’t care, but because the whole system makes it that way. I call it slummism—a bad house is not just a bad house, it’s a bad school and a bad job, and it’s been that way for three generations, a bad house for three generations, and a bad school for three generations.”

  Then Andy Young starts telling of a home-owning community in Atlanta. Recently somewhat lower-class white, it was now turning quickly black, and somewhat middle-class black: “And so, of course, as soon as they’ve moved they all get together and have a big meeting about how to keep the neighborhood clean . . . and they want that garbage picked up, you know all that, and in the middle of the meeting, a man stands up at the back of the room and he tells them they’re kidding themselves. ‘Forget it,’ he says, ‘just forget it, because you’re not going to get these services. I work for the sanitation department and I want you to know that they’ve just transferred twenty men out of this area, so you can just forget it all.’ ”

  “Same old story,” Bernard Lee says. “Negroes buy houses and immediately the services stop, and these aren’t Negroes on relief, Reverend.”

  King, to ease the tension, asks about the Negro community of Cleveland, and the preacher becomes so eloquent on the subject of the division within the Negro church community that Andy Young finally says, “Reverend, go back all the way to the New Testament. Even Peter and Paul couldn’t get together.”

  “But they got it. They already got theirs, and we’re trying to get our share,” the preacher says.

  King then asks, Is the Mayor a racist? No, says the preacher, it’s not racism, “it’s just ignorance. He doesn’t know the pulse of the new Negro. The wrong kind of people are advising him, telling him handle the Negro this way, give him just a very little bit of this and a very little bit of that; give him a pacifier, not a cure, a sugar tit, that’s what we used to call it in the South, a sugar tit, just enough to take away the appetite but doesn’t fill you up . . . feed one man, give one man a job, and you’ve taken care of the Negroes.” As he finishes, one can sense the relaxation in the car. The preacher has rehabilitated himself, he’s not as much of a Tom as you think.

  Then King starts talking about the cities. So very few of the mayors have the imagination to deal with the complexity of the problems, and the handful who do can’t really handle it because they lack the resources. The problems are so great that they must go to the federal government, but most of them don’t even know the problems in their own cities. It is almost as if they are afraid to try to understand, afraid where that trip would lead them. “Why, this Mayor Locher here in Cleveland,” he says, “he’s damning me now and calling me an extremist, and three years ago he gave me the key to the city and said I was the greatest man of the century. That was as long as I was safe from him down in the South. It’s about the same with Daley and Yorty too; they used to tell me what a great man I was.”

  IV

  That was a simpler time. He had exuded love and Christian understanding during the nation’s dramatic assault on legal segregation. In retrospect it was not so much Martin Luther King who made the movement go, it was Bull Connor; each time a bomb went off, a head smashed open, the contributions would mount at King’s headquarters. They bombed King’s own house, an angry black mob gathered ready to do violence, and King came out and said, “We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them and let them know you love them. What we are doing is right and God is with us.” And, of course, it was a time of television, we could tune in for a few minutes and see the cream of Negro youth, the slack-jawed whites answering their love with illiterate threats and violence, shouting what they were going to do to the niggers, and reveling in this, spelling their own doom.

  King was well prepared for his part in that war; the weapon would be the white man’s Christianity. He knew his people, and he could bring to the old cadences of the Southern Negro preacher the new vision of the social gospel which demanded change in America. He was using these rhythms to articulate the new contemporary subjects they were ready to hear (“America, you’ve strayed away. You’ve trampled over nineteen million of your brethren. All men are created equal. Not some men. Not white men. All men. America, rise up and come home”). Before Birmingham, the Montgomery bus strike was a success, and other victories followed. Grouped around King were able young ministers, the new breed, better educated; in a changing South he became the single most important symbol of the fight against segregation, culminating in his great speech before the crowd which had marched to Washington in 1963. Those were heady years, and if not all the battles were won, the final impression was of a great televised morality play, white hats and black hats; lift up the black hat and there would be the white face of Bull Connor; lift up the white hat and there would be the solemn black face of Martin King, shouting love.

  V

  But in Cleveland in 1967 the Negro ministers are in trouble. They are poorly educated products of another time when a call to preach, a sense of passion, was judged more important than what was being said. Their great strength is organization; they try to hold their own separate congregations together. They get their people out of jail and they get them on welfare, and if that is not very much, there is nothing else.

  But now they are divided—by age, by denomination, by style, by petty jealousies. They have not yet found the unifying enemy which bound their contemporaries together in the South, and they are unable to deal with the new young alienated Negroes, for whom their talk about damnation and salvation is at best camp; in the ghettos they cannot help those who need aid most. They are frightened by the Nationalists and Muslims, the anger spawned in the streets, the harshness and bitterness of these new voices, the disrespect to elders, the riots. In the South in the ’fifties all the preachers were on the outside looking in, but here in the North there is sometimes the illusion that they have made it and opened the door to the Establishment. So there is double alienation, not just black from white but black from black middle class.

  When King arrives in Cleveland, he is immediately hustled off to a meeting of the ministers. The meeting lasts more than three hours, and there is a general agreement that King should come into Cleveland to organize; there is some doubt expressed because of what happened to his Chicago program, doubts which some of the ministers counter by listing otherwise unknown accomplishments and blaming the white press.*4

  Afterwards, King has dinner in a Negro restaurant with eight key preachers, some of them old friends. At least one went to Stockholm with him to get the Nobel Prize, and he is letting people know about that. There is something here of a self-consciously jovial atmosphere, curiously reminiscent of white Rotary clubs in the South. King takes the menu and tells one preacher he sees something just right for him. “What’s that?” the preacher asks. “Catfish!” King says. There is a considerable ritual of joke telling, most of the jokes dealing with very old wealthy men interested in marriage with young and pretty women. One very wealthy old man is finally permitted to marry, and the Lord says after some deliberation that he can marry a forty-year-old woman. The old man thinks about this some, and then asks, “Lord, would two twenties be all right?”

  King laughs enthusiastically, and then tells the story of the young, well-educated minister who visits a church as a guest pastor; he is introduced to the congregation by the pastor as “Dr. So and So.” The preacher is embarrassed, and he says, “Sorry, Revere
nd, I’m not a doctor.”

  “You’re an ordained minister, aren’t you?” asks the older man, quite surprised. The younger man nods, and the older preacher says, “Well, then, you’re an automatical doctor.”

  Everyone tells King how glad they are to learn what a success the Chicago program was, and that they should have known that the distortions were the fault of the white press. The white press is soundly castigated. “Even here in Cleveland,” one of the ministers says, “why, some white reporter asks Martin a question about the Mayor and Martin makes the answer that he thinks the Mayor is apathetic, and the next day the headline says, ‘King Attacks Mayor.’ They got to sell newspapers that way.”†5

  The dinner is pleasant, a discussion of the problems of Cleveland (“the middle-class Negroes are our problem, they’ve all gone to Shaker Heights and don’t give a damn about being Negro anymore”); King says yes, it’s the same all over. Finally there is some mild joking and one of the preachers, very dark in skin, points to another and says how much darker the other is. There is almost a reproach in King’s remark: “It’s a new age,” he says, “a new time. Black is beautiful.”

  Just as they are about to break up one old friend, the one who went to Stockholm, starts talking about what a great man Martin Luther King is, how he is sent to them from Above. Then the preacher tells about the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm and Martin King, Senior. “There was to be a huge party afterwards,” he explains, “and the champagne was all ready to be popped, and Daddy King stopped them. He’s a complete teetotaler, and he said, ‘Wait a minute before you start all your toasts to each other. We better not forget to toast the man who brought us here, and here’s a toast to God.’ And then he said, ‘I always wanted to make a contribution, and all you got to do if you want to contribute, you got to ask the Lord, and let Him know, and the Lord heard me and in some kind of way I don’t even know He came down through Georgia and He laid His hand on me and my wife and He gave us Martin Luther King and our prayers were answered and when my head is cold and my bones are bleached the King family will go down not only in American history but in world history as well because Martin King is a Nobel Prize–winner.’ When he finished everyone was so moved, why the champagne just stayed there, and they made the toast to God and the champagne just stayed there afterwards. No one drank any, not even Bayard Rustin.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then one of the other ministers said, “Yes, sir, the Negro preacher is something. He sure is. God has use for him even when the Negro preacher didn’t know what he was saying himself.”

  VI

  The Kings of Atlanta are aristocrats of power and influence in the Negro world in the way that the Lodges have been among the Yankees and the Kennedys are among the Irish. The Negro church, particularly in the South, has always been the Negroes’ great cultural base. The Baptist church was the church with the largest mass base, untouched by the white man. He did not appoint its preachers, he did not control them. One of the big churches of Atlanta, the greatest city of the South, is the Ebenezer Baptist Church. To have been pastor of it was to have a real base in the Negro community, not just of Atlanta, but in Negro America. Its pastor fifty years ago was a man named A. D. Williams, considered one of the finest preachers of his time; his sweet and gentle daughter married an ambitious young rural Negro from Georgia named Martin Luther King.

  Martin King Senior, M. L. Senior, or Daddy King in Atlanta is probably not so outstanding as his son, but he is in many ways more interesting. He is a man of great intensity and willpower, not entirely committed to nonviolence; he goes along with it for his son’s sake, but some of those who have physically pushed or hit Martin Junior would regret it if they tried it on his father.

  Martin King Junior’s reminiscences of his childhood are largely gentle stories; the inevitable hurts are bathed in the love of his parents. But Martin King Senior’s stories of his boyhood are stories of violent racial confrontations with the whites of that day. Every angry face is still sketched in full detail, every taunt, every humiliation, every cheating recalled.

  As a boy King Senior was the best Bible student around; he went to Atlanta, worked hard, studied at night, married Reverend Williams’ daughter, and became assistant pastor of Ebenezer, where today he is pastor and his son Martin Junior is assistant pastor. By this time his father-in-law was treasurer of the National Baptist Convention, a powerful position which took him all over the country. The Williams family and the Kings came to know the important Negroes in other cities. To this day whenever there is a city in racial trouble King Senior knows the names of all the important people and preachers in town.

  Martin King Senior instilled in his family a sense of pride and confidence; every time there was an incident involving the children King Senior repeated to them: Don’t be ashamed, you’re as good as anyone else. The family grew up well-to-do. “Not wealthy really,” says young Martin King, “but Negro-wealthy. We never lived in a rented house and we never rode too long in a car on which payment was due, and I never had to leave school to work.”

  Six years ago in a loving and prophetic piece about him, James Baldwin quoted a friend’s saying of King, quoted and requoted it because Baldwin felt it told so much about King: “He never went around fighting with himself like we all did.” (The Baldwin essay was prophetic in that it saw the darkening clouds for any Negro leader; it was also poignant. Baldwin saw King as “a younger much-loved and menaced brother; he seemed slight and vulnerable to be taking on such odds,” and one senses, reading it, that King with his happy home as a young man, and with the warmth of his present home, is somebody Baldwin would like to have been.)

  As a young man he grew up in the world of preachers; by the time he went off to college, to Morehouse (father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had gone there; it was where you went) he had decided to become a doctor; he was an agnostic. Part of the reason was a contempt for the Southern Negro preacher, the low level of intellectual training, the intense emotionalism.

  He had simply turned on the church: “If God was as all-powerful and as good as everyone said, why was there so much evil on the face of the earth?” Later at Morehouse several teachers, including Dr. Benjamin Mays, the president, and Dr. George Kelsey, a philosophy professor, convinced him that religion could be intellectually respectable; he returned, and then went on to Crozier Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. There for the first time he entered the white world. He was terribly aware of their whiteness and his blackness, and the stereotypes they had of Negroes. Negroes were always late for things, Martin King was always first in a classroom. Negroes were lazy and indifferent, Martin King worked hard and studied endlessly. Negroes were dirty, Martin King was always clean, always properly, perhaps too properly, dressed. Negroes were always laughing, Martin King was deadly serious. If there was a school picnic, Martin King did not eat watermelon.

  He had gone in 1951 from Crozier to Boston University to study for his Ph.D., and entered there the social and intellectual world of the Northern Negro. King felt Morehouse had committed him to work in the South, and besides it was 1955 when he took his degree, the year after the Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation. King had three offers to stay in the North, including one teaching position, but he chose a small church in Montgomery. He arrived just in time to be there when Rosa Parks’ feet hurt, and he was catapulted to national prominence with the bus strike. He was the new boy in a divided city, and he became the leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association precisely because he was both new and yet known and respected through his family.

  VII

  In Cleveland King was to meet with both the preachers and the Black Nationalists, who have the support of the alienated young people.

  The leader of the Nationalists is a tall mystic young man named Ahmed, who has a particular cult of his own combining racism and astrology—the darkness of the white man and the darkness of the skies. Earlier in the year he predicted that May 9 would be the terrible
day when the black ghetto erupted. He made this prediction partly because there was to be an eclipse of the sun that day. Everyone laughed, old Ahmed, that crazy astrologer, but the police picked up him and a group of his followers that day just in case. Ahmed is mocked not only by the whites, but by the preachers as well. To them he represents nothing, has no job, all he does is talk.

  King’s people, however, believe Ahmed has a considerable, if somewhat fluid, influence. At first Ahmed and his men put out the word they were not interested in meeting with King; they were down on preachers, and he was a sort of Superpreacher. “He’s really a Tom, you know,” one of them told a King aide, “and one thing we don’t need, that’s more lectures from more Toms.”

  King went out to meet with them, however; he talked with them, but more important he listened to them, and it went surprisingly well. While he spoke nonviolence to them he did tell them to be proud of their black color, that no emancipation proclamation, no act of Lyndon Johnson, could set them free unless they were sure in their own minds they liked being black. And of course he talked with them on Vietnam, and they liked that also. The most important thing, however, was the simple act of paying attention to them. In Cleveland, King’s people believe, the Nationalists are extremely important. Cleveland has particularly restless youths, up from Mississippi, either born there, or the first-generation children of parents born there. They are ill prepared for the cities. They come to these compact places like Hough, so that finally the inner ghetto is filled with the completely hopeless, floating, and rootless. It is estimated that one-third of the people in the inner ghetto change residence every year.

  “There’s a little power in these street gangs,” one Negro says, “but power that doesn’t go beyond a few blocks. Within those few blocks a man can be pretty big, you know he can shout, ‘This is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong.’ But it doesn’t go much beyond that. Past Fifty-fifth Street (the ghetto line), they’re nothing, so they speak for the poor, but only to the poor.”