by Jon Meacham
That night the meeting was stormy. There had been some talk that Ahmed and his people might walk out, but they remained inside and, indeed, dominated the meeting. “The preachers were afraid of them, but they weren’t afraid of the preachers,” said one of King’s aides. Outside one of Ahmed’s followers had decided to lecture to other younger Negroes: “Do you think ol’ whitey, he’s going to come by and say, ‘Why there’s Chuck Hill. He’s a good black man. I’m going to spare that good black Chuck Hill.’ No, whitey’s not going to do that. He’s going to shoot you down like all the others. Whitey doesn’t care about any black man.”
Inside the meeting, one of the more conservative ones said something about good things coming and the need for only a little more patience, and Ahmed jumped up angrily and said, “How can you trust a man that would kidnap a little child, bring him to a country he raped, put him down on stolen property, and then say, ‘Just you wait a few days, I’m going to give you your freedom and lots of other good things’?”
A few minutes later there was a heated debate between Ahmed and a middle-class Negro. Ahmed had been talking, giving his program, when the man rose and shouted:
“Have you got a job? Have you got a job? Have you got a job?”
Ahmed answered, “My job is to free the minds of my people.”
“No no no!” the man shouted. “Do you have an eight-hour job? Do you have an eight-hour job?”
“My job is a twenty-four-hour job,” Ahmed replied, “and as a matter of fact, it’s got just as much risk and danger as your job. Anytime you want to switch I’d be delighted.”
The next day King’s people were delighted with Ahmed. “He was so warm, so beautiful last night,” one of them said, and in the middle of the press conference the next day announcing that King planned to come to Cleveland to organize for better housing and jobs, a King aide suggested to a Negro reporter that he ask Ahmed, sitting next to King, what he thought of King. Ahmed answered that King was a black brother; there was a happy sigh of relief from King’s people.
VIII
One wonders whether King’s alliance with the Nationalists can last. King is hot and they are cool; he overstates and they understate; he is a preacher and their God is dead. They are of the ghetto the way Malcolm X was, and like Malcolm they are flawed by it; that was his great strength. King is not of the ghetto, he is not flawed (he never went around fighting with himself like we all did), he is of the South. The people he touches most deeply are the people they left behind.
When one raises this question with Andy Young, he talks about the church being a force with young people, but one senses that he shares some of the doubts. He tells of when they went to Rochester, during the riots there. The Negro youths refused to talk with them until they beat them at basketball, beat them at shooting craps, proved they weren’t squares. He tells of how the tough kids in Chicago didn’t want to meet King. They finally did, and they were impressed with him, with the sheer power of his moral presence, but when he left they slipped right back into the gangs.
“We see the ghettos now as a form of domestic colonialism,” Andy Young says. “The preachers are like the civil servants in Ghana, doing the white man’s work for them.” King has decided to represent the ghettos; he will work in them and speak for them. But their voice is harsh and alienated. If King is to speak for them truly, then his voice must reflect theirs, it too must be alienated, and it is likely to be increasingly at odds with the rest of American society.
His great strength in the old fight was his ability to dramatize the immorality he opposed. The new immorality of the ghettos will not be so easy to dramatize, for it is often an immorality with invisible sources. The slum lords are evil enough, but they will not be there by their homes waiting for King and the TV crews to show up, ready to split black heads open. The schools are terrible, but there is no one man making them bad by his own ill will, likely to wait there in the school yard with a cattle prod. The jobs are bad, but the reasons Negroes aren’t ready for decent jobs are complicated; there won’t be one sinister hillbilly waiting outside the employment agency grinding cigarettes into the necks of King and his followers.
IX
King admits he is becoming a more radical critic of the society, and that the idea of “domestic colonialism” represents his view of the North. I suggest that he sounded like a nonviolent Malcolm; he says no, he could never go along with black separatism. For better or worse we are all on this particular land together at the same time, and we have to work it out together.
Nevertheless, he and his people are closer to Malcolm than anyone would have predicted five years ago—and much farther from their more traditional allies like Whitney Young and Roy Wilkins. King’s people are privately very critical of both men; they realize that both work through the white Establishment to get things for Negroes, that they often have to tolerate things they privately consider intolerable because they feel in the long run this has to be done. The white man is there, he owns 90 per cent of it, and the only course is to work through his Establishment. King’s people privately feel that this is fine, but that the trouble is the white Establishment has become corrupt, and in modeling yourself after it and working with it and through it, you pick up the same corruptions.
There are some very basic differences at issue here, much deeper than the war in Vietnam (though King’s people see Vietnam as an example of the difference, for they believe that some high-level Negro acceptance of Vietnam is effected not because of agreement with the Johnson Administration’s position, but as a price to pay in order to get other things from the Administration). In the split it is King who is changing, not Young or Wilkins. “For years,” King says, “I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”
This means, he says, the possible nationalization of certain industries, a guaranteed annual income, a vast review of foreign investments, an attempt to bring new life into the cities. His view of whites has also changed deeply in the last year; previously he believed that most of America was committed to the cause of racial justice, “that we were touching the conscience of white America,” that only parts of the white South and a few Northern bigots were blocking it. But after Chicago he decided that only a small part of white America was truly committed to the Negro cause, mostly kids on the campuses. “Most Americans,” he would say, “are unconscious racists.”
X
King is a frustrating man. Ten years ago Time found him humble, but few would find him that way today, though the average reporter coming into contact with him is not exactly sure why; he suspects King’s vanity. One senses that he is a shy and sensitive man thrown into a prominence which he did not seek but which he has come to accept, rather likes, and intends to perpetuate. Colleagues find him occasionally pretentious; and the student leaders have often called him De Lawd, a title both mocking, and at the same time a sign of respect.
Being with him is a little like being with a Presidential candidate after a long campaign; he has been through it all, there has been too much exposure, the questions have all been asked before; the reporters all look alike, as do the endless succession of airport press conferences. King on the inside seems the same as King on the outside—always solemn, always confident, convinced that there is a right way and that he is following it; always those dark, interchangeable suits; the serious shirt and responsible tie.
He has finally come to believe his myth, just as the people in the Pentagon believe theirs and the man in the White House believes his; he sticks to the morality of his life and of his decisions, until there becomes something of a mystic quality to him. His friend, Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker, who is not a mystic, and indeed something of a swinger and finds King almost too serious says, “I am not a mystic but I am absolutely convinced that God is doing something with Martin King that H
e is not doing with anyone else in this country.” And Martin Luther King Senior believes his son is “a prophet. That’s what he is, a prophet. A lot of people don’t understand what he’s doing and don’t like it, and I tell them he has to do these things, things that aren’t popular. Prophets are like that, they have special roles. Martin is just a twentieth-century prophet.”
Friends believe King has become decreasingly concerned with worldly things, and has no interest in money. There are many fine Negro homes in Atlanta, but King’s is not one of them; he lives in a small house right near one of the ghettos. He takes little money from his church and tends to return a good deal to it; despite this attitude his children are protected because Harry Belafonte, a friend of King’s, has set up an educational trust fund for each one.
XI
From Cleveland we flew to Berkeley for a major speech. Berkeley is now the center for the new radicalism in America, and King was likely to get a very warm response there; Berkeley would make him forget about the ghettos. Thousands of cheering young people would be there, applauding him. They would be there not because he led the March on Washington, for those days are easily forgotten (to some of them the March smacks of Tomism now), but because he is saying what they want to hear on Vietnam.
It was Vietnam, of course, which linked him with the new radicalism. His dissent was coming; that had been obvious for some time. Last winter when the peace groups and the New Left planned a major peace demonstration for the spring, the head of it was the Reverend James Bevel, a top King deputy who had organized for King in both Birmingham and Chicago. Bevel is the radical wing of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, deeply Biblical and mystic, weaving in the new politics with the Old Testament. He is also something of a link between King and SNCC.
Bevel is an intense, fiery man, and these days the words genocide and race war come quickly to his lips, and he is obsessed with Vietnam: “The war in Vietnam,” he has said, “will not end until Jesus Christ rises up in the Mekong Delta; the Lord can’t hear our prayers here in America, because of all the cries and moans of His Children in the Mekong Delta, and that is all He can hear as long as the war continues, so forget your prayers until the war is over, America.”
King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference is a rather loosely knit organization, and at Atlanta headquarters, there is a certain fear of what are now called Bevelisms. Recently there was a sharp kickback when Bevel spoke at a Catholic college and apparently made some remarks slurring the Virgin Mary. A young Jesuit questioned him sharply, and Bevel said, yes, he was interested in Mary, “but which Mary, all the thousands of Marys walking the streets of the ghettos, the thousands of peasant Marys being killed in the Mekong Delta, or some chick who lived thousands of years ago?”
The far-left groups who organized the peace march went for Bevel because they wanted King. King had seemed interested himself, but very slightly so. They contacted Bevel and they found he was interested, and ended up coming to their meetings. “Then the question was,” one of them said, “could he deliver King? He said he could and he promised, but weeks went by and no King. We began to wonder. Then finally he came through.”
They wanted King because they wanted a mass basis; they already had the automatics, the pacifists, their very own, but they wanted a broader constituency. As one peace organizer said, “There were a lot of people we felt wanted to come in on this, you know, good-hearted Americans for whom someone like King would make it easier, be a good umbrella. We could then call some of these unions and church groups and just middle-aged people who were nervous about coming in, who wanted to come in a little bit, but didn’t like the whole looks of it, and we could say, Look here, we’ve got King, and it makes them all breathe easier. They think, Why it’s King, it’s all right, it’s safe.”
King repeats over and over again that he does not take stands because of what Stokely Carmichael says. Nonetheless, someone like Carmichael creates pressures to which King must inevitably react in order to retain his position. King would have reacted to the pressures of the ghettos and of Vietnam anyway, but without pressure and the alternative voices of a Stokely or a Floyd McKissick, he might have done it more at his choosing in his own good time. Stokely’s outspoken stand on Vietnam made King’s silence all the more noticeable. For King is a moralist, a fairly pragmatic one, and he does not intend to lose his position with young, militant, educated Negroes.
What was decisive in Bevel’s role was that a trusted lieutenant in the most important of King’s projects wanted out so he could join the peace movement. That moved King. Here was one more sign that a bright and passionate friend judged Vietnam more important than civil rights. It was symbolic of what King saw the war doing; taking all the time, money, energy, and resources of America away from its ghetto problems and focusing them thousands of miles away on a war the wisdom of which he doubted in the first place.
There are friends who feel that other factors affected him profoundly too, one of these being the right of a Negro to speak out. This had come to a point in early March at a fund-raising evening in Great Neck. King, Whitney Young, and John Morsell of the NAACP had appeared for an evening of speeches, questions, and answers. The subject of Vietnam came up, and King was asked how he felt. He answered with a relatively mild criticism of the war, the morality of it, and what it was doing to America.
Young was asked the same question and he dissented. There was the other war here in the ghettos, and that was the war the Urban League was fighting; he as an individual couldn’t speak for the Urban League, but then he made his personal stand clear: communism had to be stopped just as Hitler should have been stopped in World War II. As the evening was breaking up, Young and King got into a brief but very heated argument. Young told King that his position was unwise since it would alienate the President, and they wouldn’t get anything from him. King angrily told him, “Whitney, what you’re saying may get you a foundation grant, but it won’t get you into the kingdom of truth.” Young quite angrily told King that he was interested in the ghettos, and King was not. “You’re eating well,” Young said.
King told Young that was precisely why he opposed the war, because of what it was doing to the ghettos. The argument, with a number of people still standing around, was so heated that King’s lawyer quickly broke it up. Afterwards King felt badly about having spoken so angrily in public, and telephoned Young to apologize. They talked for more than an hour, failing of course to resolve their very basic differences.
This had happened to him once before. In 1965, when he was fresh from the Nobel Prize, King had briefly opposed the war and called for negotiations. There was a violent reaction. President Johnson got in touch with him and persuaded him to talk with that wooer-of-the-strayed, Arthur Goldberg. Goldberg assured him that peace was in the air. Similarly, King admits he was stunned by the extent of the pressure and reaction to him. “They told me I wasn’t an expert in foreign affairs, and they were all experts,” he said. “I knew only civil rights and I should stick to that.” So he backed down, feeling a little guilty and suspecting he had been told that it wasn’t a Negro’s place to speak on Vietnam. This continued to rankle him, and after the Great Neck meeting he felt that if he had backed the war he would have been welcomed aboard, but that if he didn’t back the war it was his place to remain silent.
XII
Though King says he could never live under communism, he does not see the chief division in the world as between the communist and capitalist. His is a more U Thantian view, with the division being between the rich and the poor, and thus to a large degree the white and nonwhite (the East European nations would become Have nations, to the surprise of many of their citizens). His view of violence in Vietnam and violence in Angola are quite different. Yet he is also terribly American, more American than he knows; his church is Western, his education is Western, and he thinks as a Westerner, though an increasingly alienated one.
He does not particularly think of the war in Vietna
m as a racial one (although the phrase “killing little brown children in Vietnam” slips in); rather he sees the American dilemma there as one of face-saving, of an inability to end a miscalculation and a tendency to enhance it with newer and bigger miscalculations. Because there is a good deal of conservatism in King, there was a lively debate among his advisers as to whether he could go into the Spring Mobilization. The Call to the march had the whole works, genocide and race war; and a number of King allies, traditional liberals, advised him against it. The old ladies in Iowa wouldn’t buy it.
But after much negotiating, which King’s people clearly enjoyed, it was finally decided he should go in without signing the Call. “I went in because I thought I could serve as a bridge between the old liberals and the New Left,” he says. He is still somewhat wary of much of the peace movement, however; he does not know all the people as he does in civil rights, and he lacks a sure touch for the vocabulary of peace. He is also angry about having been ambushed by the New Politics people who leaked to the press in Boston recently that King was considering running for President; he was not yet considering it, and he felt they were trying to push him faster than he wanted to go; he remains wary of some of the peace people, and he realizes they are all out to exploit his name for their own purposes.
His stand on Vietnam is not necessarily the most popular one he has ever taken. It is popular on the campuses, of course, but it has hurt him with the editorial writers (Vietnam and civil rights don’t mix), gladdened George Wallace, hurt him in the suburbs, and it has made the ghettos a little uneasy.
Peace is not a sure issue in the ghettos. There have been wars in which the Midwest provided many of the boys, and the small towns rallied around them. There are no picket fences in the ghettos and the American Legion posts are weaker there, but right now our boys are coming from the ghettos, and so it is a very delicate issue. One radical Negro leader thought Vietnam would be an easy whipping boy until he began to hang around Harlem bars, where he found you don’t knock the war (black faces under green berets) and so he toned down his attacks. But some of King’s best friends fear that Roy Wilkins may be wiser than King about how Negroes in the ghetto feel about Vietnam.