Death of a King

by Tavis Smiley

  Isn’t your Riverside speech injuring your own cause and your own people?

  Tired of the assault, Doc fires back at the press: “The war in Vietnam is a much greater injustice to Negroes than anything I could say against that war.”

  From Los Angeles Doc flies to San Francisco and on Friday, April 14, is driven to Stanford University in Palo Alto, where he’s set to give another speech. During phone calls to New York and Atlanta, he is in continual consultation with his advisers, who are now warning him about the danger of his appearing at still another pivotal event, this one to unfold back in New York City the very next day.

  A massive assembly of antiwar protestors will march from Central Park to the United Nations. Called The Mobilization, the rally will surely ratchet up the impassioned positions—pro and con—concerning Vietnam. The media will treat it as headline news.

  Doc is slated to speak. Now his advisers are urging him not to. Their most critical concern is that Doc’s appearance will link him to the radical left, thus undermining his credibility with more moderate liberals, the source of the civil rights movement’s strength. Again, it’s Stanley Levison who warns Doc that the press will further excoriate him for associating with extremists, especially Stokely Carmichael, the face of the rising black militancy and a man for whom Black Power has turned into a battle cry—a chant that is exciting black youth and alienating King’s white supporters.

  But even before Doc deals with Stokely, how does he address the more militant segment of his own movement? The brilliant but wildly unpredictable James Bevel, Doc’s own director of education for SCLC as well as one of the architects of the March on Washington and the Selma-to-Montgomery march, has talked about coming to The Mobilization with a group of Sioux Indians. Bevel wants to demonstrate against the United States’ original sin—the genocide of Native Americans.

  In an urgent call to Doc from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a noted professor-philosopher and another close ally, the clergyman is claiming that Bevel’s demonstration will serve only to radicalize the march, causing Doc further damage.

  Though Doc and Bevel are both Southern Baptist preachers, the two men are a contrast in styles: Doc is the conservative coat-and-tie dresser, while Bevel wears funky farmer’s overalls and, on his shaved head, a yarmulke, the skullcap of observant Jews, in tribute to the Old Testament prophets.

  Back in January, Doc was in Jamaica working on his new book when Bevel unexpectedly appeared. Doc has always held deep affection for James. Their Christian bond is strong. And though Doc has long benefited from Bevel’s visionary thinking, he also knows that James is something of a firebrand whose impetuosity is not always productive. James’s arrival came at a propitious time: Doc was still formulating his Vietnam position. Riverside was four months away.

  It was in Jamaica that Bevel asked the question for which Doc had no easy answer: Why was he “teaching non-violence to Negroes in Mississippi, but not to Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam? Are the Vietnamese not your brothers and sisters?”

  That was winter. Now in spring Doc has embraced Bevel’s unequivocal antiwar stance. He still gives consideration to his other advisers’ characterization of Bevel as a lunatic “over-simplifier,” but of greater concern is Carmichael, head of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an organization that is quickly—and ironically—becoming disenchanted with the premise of nonviolence.

  As spring turns to summer, Stokely’s status is rising as Doc’s is falling. Stokely is brimming with fresh charisma. Doc is tired. Stokely is angry black America’s warrior prince. Doc is the older generation’s portly preacher. Lean and tall, with burning dark eyes and chiseled facial features, Stokely is twenty-five; Doc is thirty-eight. The incendiary tone of Stokely’s oratory triggers the volatile restlessness of the counterculture sixties. In this increasingly violent decade, his call to arms resonates. Doc’s defense of nonviolence, with its historical roots in Mahatma Gandhi’s 1920s pacifism, seems to have lost steam and struggles for relevance.

  Doc has delivered his speech at Stanford. Now he faces another decision: Should he or should he not race up to the San Francisco airport and catch the late-night flight to New York? Given Doc’s state of mind, canceling his appearance at another mega-media antiwar event makes good common sense. With both the press and his advisers on his back, why not skip it, remain in California, get a good night’s sleep, and go home to Atlanta for a day or two of much-needed rest?

  It’s 8 a.m. when the red-eye touches down on the runway at New York’s Kennedy Airport, so renamed only four years prior. Doc awakens with a startle. With just a few hours’ sleep behind him, he is driven into Manhattan and rushed through the throng of waiting marchers to The Mobilization’s meeting point in Central Park, where he is escorted to the front line. His great friend Harry Belafonte is waiting for him. The men embrace.

  Of all of Doc’s celebrity supporters, Belafonte is by far the most serious. In the fifties, dubbed the “King of Calypso,” he became one of America’s biggest pop stars as both a singer and an actor. He joined up with Doc during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and has remained close to him ever since. Recently, he has dedicated far more time to his role as social activist than entertainer.

  Doc and Harry are joined by Dr. Benjamin Spock, another activist as well as a renowned pediatrician, and Dave Dellinger, a radical who visited South and North Vietnam in 1966 and returned with a firsthand report on the catastrophic impact of the American bombing. Stokely Carmichael emerges from the crowd, shakes Doc’s hand, and takes his place with the others in the front rank.

  Before the march starts, several police officials take Doc aside to report a rash of assassination threats. There is talk of snipers. The cops make it clear that there is simply no way to guarantee King’s safety. It’s another chance for the minister to withdraw.

  Doc has been threatened before. He’ll be threatened again. He’s learned to live with the feeling of extreme vulnerability. He stuffs the fear in his back pocket and rejoins his fellow protestors.

  In the spring before the Summer of Love, there is already a large constituency of hippies cropping up in the mass protest movements in the country’s major cities. Today in New York is no different. Young women in tie-dyed granny dresses and their long-haired boyfriends mingle with professors, physicians, and other professionals, plus scores of everyday people—garment workers, secretaries, sales clerks—fed up with a war policy that they can no longer accept or tolerate. The protestors feel empowered by their sheer number. Comprising a twenty-block procession, they are 125,000.

  Before the march begins, there is a ceremony that the news media eagerly photographs and films: as the crowd cheers wildly, seventy Cornell students light matches to their draft cards.

  This is the era of brutal confrontation. The hippies and peaceniks excite violent animosity. Their detractors are out in force. Along the way the marchers are splattered with paint. When they pass a construction site, the hard hats pelt them with nails. It takes four hours to reach the United Nations.

  Before Doc goes to the podium to deliver a speech, an abbreviation of his Riverside remarks, he glances up at the United Nations headquarters and, for a fleeting second, thinks of Nobel laureate Ralph Bunche, whose offices are on the thirty-fourth floor of this very building. Back in California, Doc had called Bunche, hoping to reconcile the growing differences between them. The conversation was less than satisfying. Doc complained to his aides that Bunche had been maddeningly evasive.

  The assemblage cannot help but contrast Doc’s speech with Stokely’s. Doc concludes his remarks with a plea to stop the bombing. But Carmichael is more dramatic and dynamic.

  “When we look at the America which brought slaves here once in ships named Jesus, we charge genocide. When we look at the America which seized land from Mexico and practically destroyed the American Indians—we charge genocide. When we look at all the acts of racist exploitation which this nation has committed, whether in the name of manifest destiny or a
nti-Communism, we charge genocide.…

  “There is an almost endless list of these other Americas, but they all add up to the same thing: this nation was built on genocide and it continues to wage genocide. It wages genocide in many forms—military, political, economic and cultural—against the colored peoples of our earth. This nation has been not only anti-revolutionary but anti-poor, anti-wretched of the earth.…

  “This nation’s hypocrisy has no limits. Newspapermen speak of LBJ’s credibility gap; I call it lying. President Lyndon Baines Johnson talks of peace while napalming Vietnamese children, and I can think of just one thing: he’s talking trash out of season, without a reason. Let’s not call it anything but that.

  “It is up to you—to the people here today—to make your fellow citizens see this other side of America. In your great numbers lies a small hope. But this mass protest must not end here. We must move from words to deeds. We must go back to our communities and organize against the war. Black people must begin to organize the ghettoes for control by the people and against exploitation. Exploitation and racism do not exist only in this nation’s foreign policy, but right here in the streets of New York.”

  Bringing it home to the hot-button issue being played up by the press—today’s destruction of draft cards—Stokely reaches a fever pitch. “The draft,” he shouts, “is white people sending black people to make war on yellow people in order to defend the land they stole from red people. The draft must end: not tomorrow, not next week, but today.”

  When Stokely quotes the black poet Margaret Walker—“Let another world be born. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth.… Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control!”—he is clearly not referring to men who belong to the generation of Martin Luther King Jr.

  That night in Belafonte’s Manhattan apartment, Doc and the others stay up till the wee hours of the morning analyzing the day’s events. Doc is gratified that the turnout was enormous, the biggest antiwar rally in the history of New York City. He is convinced that the enormity of The Mobilization exceeded that of the 1963 March on Washington. Some of his supporters feel that Stokely was condescending to Doc. Others, like Belafonte, are obviously taken with the young leader’s fiery rhetoric.

  If you asked the FBI agents what they heard, since they’d been listening in all the while via a wiretapped call, they might tell you that Levison is worried that Belafonte will move into Stokely’s camp. But Doc is certain that the entertainer will not abandon the cause of nonviolence—his cause.

  Still sleep deprived, Doc is up early on Sunday morning for an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, on which a panel of journalists, especially eager to break him down, grill him for thirty minutes.

  “Dr. King, yesterday you led a demonstration here which visibly featured the carrying of Vietcong flags, a mass burning of drafts cards and one American flag was burned.… How far should this go?”

  Without compromising his staunch antiwar position, Doc carefully separates himself from draft card burners and Vietcong flag-wavers. At the same time, he states that if he were facing the draft, “I myself would be a conscientious objector.”

  When asked why he would share a platform with a radical like Carmichael, Doc answers that he recently appeared in Nashville with segregationist senator Strom Thurmond. “I don’t think you have to agree with someone politically and philosophically in order to appear on the same platform.”

  Displaying his usual aplomb, Doc doesn’t sidestep the questions but deftly manages to make larger points. “The Great Society,” he says, “with its very noble programs, in a sense has been shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam.”

  When asked about the white backlash against the rising black militancy, he says, “It may well be that Black Power and riots are the consequence of the white backlash rather than the cause of them.… In the final analysis a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear—it has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last twenty years, that the promises of justice and equality have not been met, and that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity. This, to me, is the white backlash.”

  Later that day, when reporters ask about talk of a Martin Luther King candidacy for the presidency—with Dr. Benjamin Spock as his running mate—Doc denies any interest in mounting such a campaign.

  Throughout April, the talk doesn’t go away. Spock himself wants Doc to make the run. The White House is so concerned that it contacts King aide Andrew Young to see if Doc will agree to see the president.

  Doc is interested in neither meeting with the president nor becoming the president. He continues to disavow any presidential ambitions, telling this to Spock himself when the two men meet in Cambridge to announce their plans for a “Vietnam Summer,” a national volunteer movement to mobilize opposition.

  Doc’s mantra doesn’t change: he’s a preacher, not a politician.

  He’s a preacher who, in his own words, “lives out of a suitcase and needs only four hours sleep a night,” a preacher who must continually fight back the demons of despondency as the challenges facing his ministry grow greater. To meet those challenges, he does what preachers do: he preaches.

  For all his hyperactive work as a social justice spokesman and political reformer, Doc is essentially a clergyman. Every Sunday that he can, he comes home to minister in the pulpit of his church, Ebenezer Baptist. It is the church where his father has preached for decades. It is neither the largest nor the most prestigious church in the city. It is a respectable but in most ways ordinary church situated in the middle-class black community of Atlanta.

  The church is Doc’s anchor. It is where he returns to reflect on the state of his soul. In the middle of his tumultuous public life, the church provides him with great solace. In the sermons he preaches at Ebenezer, we see not only a man who is speaking to his congregation but a man who is speaking to God, a man seeking spiritual energy to drive him forward.

  Chapter Four

  “ANXIETY AND SORROW IN MY HEART”

  For Doc, the route back home to Ebenezer is always circuitous. The demands on his time—like the demands from conscience—never cease.

  He stops off in Cleveland to meet with the United Pastors Association, a group of black ministers, who are worried about the upcoming summer. A year ago there were riots in the Hough ghetto. Seeking Doc’s advice, the preachers want to avoid another violent insurgence. Before leaving town, Doc lends his support to Carl Stokes, who, in the fall, has a chance to become the first black elected mayor of a major American city.

  On his way back to the airport, Doc remembers another trip to Cleveland, when aide Bernard Lee was driving him and Andy Young down Euclid Avenue. Doc was scheduled to deliver a sermon at the Olivet Institutional Baptist Church, pastored by his dear friend and fellow Morehouse man Otis Moss. When the car stopped at a red light, a group of young black prostitutes recognized Doc and began taunting him.

  “There’s that old Uncle Tom.”

  “Why don’t you just go back to Georgia?”

  As Bernard drove on, Doc was still trying to process the sneers. A few seconds later, he told Bernard to turn the car around.

  “What for?” asked Andy.

  “I need to talk to those girls. I need to explain.”

  “Look, Doc,” said Andy. “We don’t have time. We’ll be late to church.”

  Doc was unmoved. Church will wait. “Bernard,” he repeated, “turn this car around.”

  When they had driven back up to the women, Doc got out of the car. He explained that he could understand their feelings about him. At the same time, he wanted to clarify what he was trying to accomplish. He didn’t have time to go into it now, but would they do him the courtesy of meeting him later that afternoon at his hotel, where, over a cup of coffee, they could all have a chance to speak openly? Surpris
ed, the women agreed.

  At 4 p.m., more than a dozen women in miniskirts and short shorts marched into the Sheraton, went up to the reception desk, and asked to see Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Taken aback, the clerk wasn’t sure what to do.

  “Just call up to his room,” said one of the women. “We’re his guests. You’ll see.”

  The clerk made the call and Doc arranged to meet them in the hotel’s conference room, where coffee, sandwiches, and sweets were served. He thanked the women for coming and let them know that he was interested in hearing their points of view.

  The women were hardly reticent. They explained how they related much more to the late Malcolm X than to King. A former hustler, Malcolm knew the streets; he understood their harsh reality; he’d been in touch with the brutal struggles of black folks. His response to those struggles was aggressive—not passive, like Doc’s.

  Rather than defend himself, Doc let the women go on telling their stories. A few of them were still teenagers; others were in their early twenties. He thought of the abject conditions of ghetto life that force females to sell their bodies. He thought of the terrible pain ensuing from the destruction of innocence.

  Lives demolished by neglect.