Death of a King

by Tavis Smiley

  In light of the Supreme Court decision that came down earlier in the month, A. D. is ranting about how he, along with Doc and others, will have to go back to jail. But it’s more than a political rant that Doc is hearing from his brother. A. D. has fallen into a drunken stupor. He has suffered with debilitating depression before, but this time he speaks of taking his own life.

  The words chill Doc’s heart and take him back to a dark childhood day. It was 1941. Martin was twelve years old; A. D. was eleven. It was a morning when Martin was keen on seeing a local parade. He loved the brassy sounds of marching bands and the sight of the high-stepping majorettes. He had chores to do at home and his mother and father nixed the idea, but Martin had a stubborn streak and defied his parents. He ran off to watch the parade.

  A few hours later, he returned home to a tragic scene. His maternal grandmother, whom he adored, had suffered a fatal heart attack. Sliding down a banister, A. D. had unwittingly crashed into her and knocked her to the floor. Martin blamed himself. If he hadn’t run off to the parade, he would have been around to supervise his brother—and his grandmother would still be alive. Later he would be told that her encounter with A. D. did not cause the heart attack. But that was after Martin was so despondent that, in what he later called a suicide attempt, he jumped from the second story of the family home. He was merely bruised, but the bruises to his psyche were severe and long lasting. For days he wouldn’t leave his bedroom.

  Serious melancholia plagued Doc as a child and as an adult. The same was true for brother A. D.

  Now, alarmed by A. D.’s threats to take his own life, Doc gets on the phone and rounds up a group of his Louisville friends to minister to his brother. His friends are able—at least for the time being—to bring his brother around.

  The blues are on Doc’s mind the next day, a Sunday morning, as he ascends to the pulpit to preach at Ebenezer in Atlanta. Not just his blues and his brother’s blues but America’s blues. Hawk versus dove, young versus old, black versus white, black versus Negro—it feels as though his country, like his brother, is on the verge of a nervous collapse. These are dark, dark days.

  In contrast to darkness, Doc preaches about light. Darkness is brought on by ingratitude, the subject of his sermon. The dangers of ingratitude are many, and the antidote, of course, is gratitude. Gratitude, Doc argues, is what protects us from arrogance. Gratitude is our link to sanity. He talks about a rich Negro who boasts in public of his exalted position without giving gratitude to the man and woman who brought him into the world. Without gratitude, ego runs amok. Without gratitude, there is no humility. Doc points out that “we wouldn’t have a civil rights bill today if some three thousand children hadn’t packed up the jails in Birmingham, Alabama.” Gratitude grounds us in God. “Ingratitude,” he preaches, “is a sin because it causes one to fail to realize his dependence on God.” He sees God as the creative power of the universe.

  Doc’s preaching reaches beyond the realm of practical politics or moral behavior. He lifts the congregation—he lifts himself—with talk of dreams and blessed sleep.

  “You dream,” he says, “and you dream about things and you see things and you are away from everything. But then early in the morning you wake up. That’s a miracle to me. And this morning I want to thank God for sleep.”

  “Sure we got the blues,” blues singer John Lee Hooker once said. “But singing the blues is how we lose the blues. When we singing, we free.”

  In the sanctity of the pulpit, Doc loses his blues—if only for the moment. His words relieve the burdens weighing on his heart. His blues sermons are exercises of praise and worship that allow him to transcend the mundane and rise above the muck and mire of a nasty world marred in endless disputation. His blues sermons allow him to soar. They strengthen his resolve and fortify his troubled soul.

  This is Sunday, the Lord’s day.

  But here comes Monday. For good reason they call it stormy Monday, and Tuesday’s just as bad. Doc is back in the world of endless disputations, an all-too-real world that grows nastier by the day.

  Chapter Seven

  CITIES AFLAME

  In his conservative coat and tie, Doc is standing in the wings. At a time when other black leaders are sporting outfits that reflect the mood of the day—dashikis, leather jackets, dark glasses, and berets—Doc is unchanging. His black suits symbolize what he calls “coffin ready.”

  Today he is ready to drum up interest in his new book. A large studio audience awaits his appearance on live national television. Former big band singer and congenial talk show host Merv Griffin introduces him as “one of the great voices in America.” Doc steps out to a standing ovation. Griffin greets him warmly, as does Merv’s first guest, Harry Belafonte.

  Having heard that, behind his serious demeanor, Doc is a fun-loving man known for his jocular behavior, Merv starts off on a light note.

  “You’ve discovered [New York is] a fun city?” he asks Doc.

  “Well, I haven’t quite discovered that side of New York. Being a Baptist clergyman, they keep me involved in other areas.”

  So much for the humor.

  Merv quickly moves to the grave matters of the day. It is July and there is concern that the heat of summer mixed with the scalding discontent in America’s great urban centers will result in riots. In the past, protestors like Doc have been blamed for provoking civil unrest.

  “You can’t blame nonviolent demonstrators who are demonstrating for their constitutional rights when violence erupts,” Doc tells Merv. “This would be like blaming the robbed man for the evil act of robbery because his possession of wealth, money, precipitates the act. Society must always condemn the robber and protect the robbed.…

  “This is like looking at a physician, who, through his skills, through his medical ingenuity, discovers cancer in a patient, and blaming the doctor for causing the cancer. It’s usually the other way around. We praise the physician for using his ingenuity to bring out into the open something that needed to be discovered and something that can be cured if it is caught early enough. And this is exactly what we have done. We can’t be blamed for the violence that emerges. We’ve merely brought it out in the open. We’ve brought the evil conditions, the cancerous disease of racism, out in the open. And far from being the cause of it, we are merely the catalytic agents bringing it out for everybody to see so that society can cure it.”

  As the interview continues, Doc’s new book is barely mentioned. He realizes that he has done a poor job of promoting his book. He also wonders if he has done an equally poor job of promoting his views.

  Doc’s views have never been an easy sell. Seven years ago, when he was the rising star of the civil rights movement, his views did not persuade J. H. Jackson, president of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A. Inc., and perhaps the most powerful black preacher in America. Despite the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Jackson sternly rejected Doc’s strategy of civil disobedience. Jackson’s intransigence convinced Doc that the man had to be replaced. With help from other like-minded minister-activists, Doc supported the candidacy of Reverend Dr. Gardner C. Taylor in hopes that he would replace Jackson.

  At the National Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in Philadelphia in 1960, Taylor won the election. A year later, though, when the group reconvened in Kansas City, Jackson stepped to the podium and flat out refused to give up his presidency. The protest against him took a violent turn. There was pandemonium on the platform. One supporter of Jackson’s fell to the floor, struck his head, and died of a concussion. And Jackson blamed the death on Martin Luther King Jr. Doc, who had not been in the hall when the fight erupted, fired back, “Such an unwarranted, untrue, and unethical statement is libelous to the core and can do irreparable harm to the freedom movement in which I am involved.” As a result, Doc left the National Baptist Convention and helped form the Progressive National Baptist Convention.

  Doc’s progressive politics have always troubled large segments of the black church. J. H
. Jackson is not alone in questioning Doc’s tactics. As a representative of the black bourgeoisie, Jackson cannot understand how a respectable minister like Doc can defiantly march in the streets and openly break the law. Like Thurgood Marshall, Jackson feels threatened by tactics that he considers beneath Doc’s educational and social stature. After all, Doc holds a bachelor’s degree from Morehouse College with a major in sociology; a bachelor’s of divinity from Crozer Theological Seminary; a PhD in the philosophy of systematic theology from Boston University; and honorary degrees from, among others, Howard University, Chicago Theological Seminary, Bard College, Wesleyan College, Yale University, and Oberlin College.

  When Doc’s dad helped arrange his first pastorate—at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama—even he, Daddy King, did not initially approve of his son’s street protests. Ever since then, Doc’s attempt to win over the heart and soul of the middle-class black church has been a long and often unsuccessful effort.

  Toward the end of the Merv Griffin interview, Doc wonders whether he has won over the heart and soul of this largely white audience. When he is asked about what the civil rights movement has ultimately done for blacks, Doc doesn’t point to legislation as the greatest accomplishment; he points to positive self-identity. He says that the movement “has given the Negro a new sense of dignity. A new sense of somebodyness. And this is maybe the greatest victory that we have won.… The Negro has a sense of pride now that he has desperately needed all along. And he is able to stand up and feel that he is a man.… The Negro has straightened his back up… and you can’t ride a man’s back unless it’s bent.”

  At the end of the interview, Doc stands up. His own back is straight. In public appearances such as these, he fortifies his position. Although his national stature is sinking fast, amiable show business figures like Merv Griffin, encouraged by faithful friends like Harry Belafonte, are still willing to give Doc his say.

  Maybe his new book will catch on after all. Maybe the month of July will be a time when the world will recognize the relevance and current value of Martin Luther King’s undying commitment to the creed of nonviolence. Doc knows that militant slogans sound sexy, but surely they repel the great mass of Negroes seeking justice rather than the fleeting satisfaction of mindless violence. For a moment, Doc is optimistic.

  His optimism dies a sudden and awful death on July 14. Sitting at home at 234 Sunset Avenue in Vine City, a historic black neighborhood in Atlanta, Doc’s heart sinks as he watches the televised news reports on Newark. New Jersey’s most populous city is imploding. It is a city that, due to white flight to the suburbs, is among the first in America to have a Negro majority. Abject poverty has long plagued that majority. Rampant unemployment, racial profiling, police brutality, and stunted educational opportunities have been wracking Newark for years. Like so many urban ghettoes, the city has been a smoldering tinderbox. It has the nation’s highest percentage of substandard housing and the second highest percentage of crime and infant mortality. Doc can’t be surprised by the outbreak of violence. He realizes that its cause is far more than a rumor that the police have murdered a black cabdriver who was taken into custody for a minor traffic infraction. Yet even though many have predicted that bloody riots would erupt during this incredibly tense summer, Doc has been hoping against hope that such conflagrations might be avoided. He has been praying for peace.

  Just as the Six-Day War in June undercut the notion of peace in the Middle East, this four-day riot in July is undercutting the notion of peace in America’s chocolate cities. In Newark the destruction does not discriminate. Whether public or private, property is torched. Roving bands of rioters go on all-night looting binges. Black owners attempting to avert disaster by writing “Soul bro” on the windows of their businesses are largely ignored. Rage overpowers reason. As if in answer to Doc’s current book—Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?—chaos rules.

  On the third day, National Guardsmen and state troopers start firing. By the time the riot is quelled, there are nearly fifteen hundred arrests, more than seven hundred injuries, and twenty-six deaths. When Doc reads that among those killed is Edward Moss, a ten-year-old boy, the same age of his own son Martin III, his eyes are wet with tears.

  To those who will listen, Doc condemns the riots while pointing to the corrosive conditions that created them. The press, though, is far more interested in headlining the reactions of the militants.

  On July 18, a day after Newark is finally quiet, the New York Times reports that in nearby Jersey City, “H. Rap Brown, special director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, exhorted about 100 Negroes tonight to ‘wage guerrilla war on the honkie white man’.… Mr. Brown and other militant Black Power leaders had sought to organize a big rally to obtain the release of 13 Negro youths arrested Monday night on charges of looting.… Mr. Brown told an interviewer, ‘If they don’t let them out, we’re going to burn this courthouse down.’ ”

  Deeply disturbed that leaders of a “nonviolent” group are openly advocating violence, Doc considers speaking out. He wants to protest what he sees as a perverted turn on the part of the protestors. But time has run out. In the past, Doc had always moved ahead of the curve; he had always marched at the head of the parade. But in this vicious summer of discontent, there is no orderly march, no disciplined parade. This is the summer of mayhem and misery.

  Barely a week after Newark, Detroit erupts in what will be an even deadlier riot. This time President Johnson responds quickly. Minutes after receiving a request from Michigan governor George Romney, LBJ orders Secretary of Defense McNamara to airlift five thousand federal troops to Detroit. Depending on your point of view, American troops are either defending or attacking American citizens.

  From Cuba, where he has traveled in defiance of the State Department, Stokely Carmichael praises Castro for standing up to the United States and declares, “We must recognize that Detroit and New York are also Vietnam.”

  In Cambridge, Maryland, where he is wounded by shotgun fire, H. Rap Brown characterizes what is happening in Detroit: “This ain’t no riot, brother. This is a rebellion, and we got 400 years of reason to tear this town apart.”

  LBJ addresses the nation and says, “We will not tolerate lawlessness. We will not endure violence. It matters not by whom it is done or under what slogan or banner. It will not be tolerated. This nation will do whatever it is necessary to do to suppress and to punish those who engage in it.”

  Here’s the president, justifying his policy of bloody escalation in Vietnam, attempting to stop the bloodshed at home.

  The next day Doc feels compelled to respond. As he sits at home in front of the television watching the tanks roll through the streets of Detroit, he sends the president a telegram that he later reads at a press conference at Ebenezer Baptist Church. He neither questions the president’s decision to send troops to Detroit nor attacks the militants’ view of the riot as a revolutionary act. Instead he uses the moment to point out the urgent need for immediate legislation to correct the conditions that caused the violence. He excoriates Congress for “moral degradation.”

  “Though the aimless violence and destruction may be contained through military means, only drastic changes in the life of the poor will provide the kind of order and stability you desire,” he tells LBJ. “There is no question that the violence and destruction of property must be halted, but Congress has consistently refused to vote a halt [to] the destruction of the lives of Negroes in the ghetto.”

  In this same telegram, Doc does more than lament the recent rejection of rent supplement legislation and even “a simple bill to protect our cities against rats. The suicidal and irrational acts which plague our streets daily are being sowed and watered by the irrational, irrelevant and equally suicidal debate and delay in Congress.” He lays out a plan to “end unemployment totally and immediately.… If our government cannot create jobs, it cannot govern. It cannot have white affluence amid black poverty and have racial
harmony.

  “The turmoil of the ghetto is the externalization of the Negro’s inner torment and rage.”

  During the press conference, when asked if he’ll go to Detroit to help stop the ongoing riots, Doc demurs. Such a trip would be futile. “I feel that my job,” he says, “is to work in communities to build the programs and to try to bring about the response from administrations that will prevent riots.”

  He reminds the reporters that he has lived in the slums of Chicago and Cleveland and plans to return to those cities this summer to continue the work to heal the terrible wounds bleeding the life out of the nation’s teeming ghettoes. As usual, Doc puts on a brave face. He says what he believes. Violence only breeds more violence. Practical measures, advocated through persistent and peaceful protests, must be realized to relieve the suffering of the downtrodden trapped in the hopeless cycle of poverty and despair.

  But his public statements do not relieve his own despair. He suffers for his people, the people of Newark and the people of Detroit, the people across the country who will live through more than 125 riots before summer is over. He feels helpless.

  He remembers this same awful feeling of helplessness when, two years ago, he went to Los Angeles in the wake of Watts. Ironically, the riots in Los Angeles broke out six days after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, a major achievement of the movement. He arrived in the burned-out ghetto while the fires were still simmering. The devastation was heartbreaking.

  Seeing two young looters walking down the street, Doc got out of his car and approached them. At first they didn’t recognize him. He asked them what motivated them to do what they had done.

  “We won,” said one of the men. “Don’t you understand—we won! We showed these white people!”

  “What did you win?” asked Doc. “What do you have to show for it? What is the point of all this?”