Death of a King

by Tavis Smiley

  Recognizing Doc and realizing just who was addressing him, the second young man took a moment to think about the questions.

  “At least we made them pay attention.”

  Doc had no answer. All he could think of was how all people require attention. All people require respect. All people require acknowledgment. All people require love.

  But what a desperately sad and self-destructive way to gain it!

  Later he warned the people of Watts against hating whites, reminding them that “when we marched from Selma to Montgomery, it was a white woman—Viola Liuzzo—who died on that Highway 80,” referring to the civil rights protestor murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.

  That was Selma. That was Watts. But today is different. Today is Detroit, a city whose people are not clamoring to hear from Martin Luther King Jr., who remains in Atlanta.

  Doc may be a dreamer, but he’s also a realist. And he can’t deny his precipitous loss of influence with the Johnson administration to support the legislation that he favors—the very legislation that he feels may prevent further riots. Never has he been out of favor with so many factions.

  The faction that works hardest against him is undoubtedly the FBI, which continues to secretly monitor his every move. Hoover redoubles his pernicious efforts to destroy him. In wiretapping a conversation between Doc and Levison, the director misinterprets Doc’s remarks and runs to LBJ, insisting that King is planning to incite riots and take over Chicago’s Loop. While Doc bemoans his ineffectiveness as a peacemaker, Hoover maligns him as an instigator, further eroding the president’s faith in his former ally’s intentions.

  For five long, agonizing days, Detroit continues to burn. By the time the troops put down the looters, more than fifteen hundred buildings are torched. Destroyed property is valued at more than $100 million. Most tragically, forty-three people are dead. The riot is called the worst the country has suffered in the past hundred years.

  Coretta and Doc’s closest aides worry about him. They discover him, usually a model of self-restraint, openly weeping.

  On August 2, he’s due to fly from Atlanta to Louisville, where he has promised to address the urgent need for voter registration. This time, though, he simply can’t get on the plane. Despondency has rendered him inert.

  “I know why I missed my flight,” he tells Coretta from an airport pay phone. “I really don’t want to go. I get tired of going and not having any answers. People feel that nonviolence is failing.”

  “But this is not so,” Coretta replies. “You mustn’t believe that people are losing faith in you. There are millions of people who have faith in you and believe in you and feel that you are our best hope.… I believe in you, if that means anything.”

  “Yes,” says Doc. “It means a great deal.”

  Doc finds the wherewithal to wait at the airport for the next flight to Louisville. He’s seven hours late to the city, but somehow he makes it to his speech on time. He delivers the address. He fulfills his commitment. And then it’s back on the plane, back home to Atlanta, back to reading dire newspaper reports about the fallout from last month’s riots.

  He ruminates on the flight home. As appalling as the war in Vietnam might be, it is a world away. But these riots—these horrific nightmares in which black people are burning down black neighborhoods—are on American soil. These are the neighborhoods in which he has toiled for the past twelve years. He knows now that everything he has worked for is in danger of dying. How can he reconcile his sacred belief in nonviolence with this, the most violent summer in the history of his movement? The short-lived period of landmark legislation is gone. An embittered and divided Congress is unwilling to respond to the needs of the poor. Despite massive protests, the foreign war escalates. Despite the call for calm, the domestic situation deteriorates.

  Fire is more than a metaphor. Fire is a reality on the streets of black America. Burning cities, burning hopes, burning bridges to reason and righteousness.

  The plane lands with a thud on the Atlanta runway, snapping Doc back into the moment. A waiting car speeds him home. He is happy to be in his own house. He embraces Coretta and looks in on his precious children, who have already gone to sleep. He envies their easy sleep. He needs sleep himself. But sleep does not come. He struggles through the night, and at daybreak he prays for strength.

  Chapter Eight

  RESPECT

  In one form or another, strength returns. Doc fights through exhaustion and frustration. He does not give in to what he calls “the luxury of despair.” His resilient character moves even those who oppose him within his own movement. In the face of his fiercest assailants, he is charitable to a fault. He listens carefully. He patiently considers their points of view. Facing an adversary, he seeks to bring to each conversation a sense of understanding. There are times when he stumbles, but his aim never changes: every day he works to deepen his compassion.

  Some of his closest observers, like Vincent Harding, his Atlanta neighbor who drafted the Riverside speech, are convinced that they are watching a man being born again. In the Book of John, when Jesus tells Nicodemus that “except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God,” Nicodemus is perplexed. How can a man reenter his mother’s womb to experience a second birth? Jesus’s answer is that this rebirth is “of water and of the Spirit.”

  Harding is certain that Doc is being rebaptized in the spiritual realm of a greater God consciousness. Doc’s former concerns about the racist policies restricting the civil and voting rights of black folks have largely been addressed. But now it is becoming increasingly evident that his wider concerns—his distress over the crippling effects of poverty, racism, and militarism—have radically broadened his work and witness.

  While Doc is experiencing a spiritual rebirth, he is calling for a rebirth of America itself. The nation’s initial birth—with its genocidal treatment of Native Americans and inhumane enslavement of African Americans—must be reexamined. In his recent book, he wrote, “Ever since the birth of our nation, white America has had a schizophrenic personality on the question of race. She has been torn between selves—a self in which she proudly professed the great principles of democracy and a self in which she sadly practiced the antithesis of democracy.… What is the source of this perennial indecision and vacillation? It lies in the ‘congenital deformity’ of racism that has crippled the nation from its inception.”

  At Riverside, Doc said, “A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

  Doc understands that the angry reaction to his call for this rebirth concerns, in part, money. His victories for integration and equality did not carry a price tag; they represented no monetary cost to America. But now Doc is demanding that we reexamine our economic priorities. He insists that budgets are moral documents. It is transparently immoral to pay the outrageous price of a reckless military adventure while cutting out the very heart of our domestic social programs. In no uncertain terms, he brings home the point: bombs being dropped in Vietnam are landing in the ghettoes of America.

  Such statements threaten both white and black America.

  White America has told Doc: We have created a space for you. We have allowed you to be the leader of your people for your cause. We have become comfortable seeing you in this space. This space has resulted in your receiving a Nobel Peace Prize. But that leadership and prize do not allow you to address issues outside your space.

  And when Doc addresses those issues head-on, other mainstream black leaders react in fear. One after another, major Negro figures aba
ndon Doc. For centrists like Carl Rowan, Doc is too far to the left. For leftists like H. Rap Brown, Doc is too much a centrist. Among those who continue to denounce him publicly and privately are Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young, who lead the NAACP and the Urban League, respectively; clergyman and congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr.; and legal giant Thurgood Marshall. Some are essentially surrogates for the White House, men unwilling to side with anyone who dares to defy a president.

  But it isn’t all bad. In the summer of 1967, Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” a number-one hit on both the rhythm-and-blues and pop charts, does nothing but help the movement. With its irresistible rhythms and insistent upbeat cry, the song is an anthem for not only the right of a woman to be respected by her man but the right of a people to be respected by a nation.

  In mid-August, as Doc walks into the ballroom of an Atlanta hotel to address a convention of black radio deejays, “Respect” is blasting over the loudspeakers. In the form of a long and rousing standing ovation, respect is exactly what the deejays afford Doc. They are especially gratified that he has agreed to deliver the keynote speech.

  Like his good friend Reverend C. L. Franklin, Aretha’s illustrious father and head of Detroit’s New Bethel Baptist Church, Doc has decried the old myth embraced by many in the black community that sacred and secular music are incompatible, that you’re either singing the gospel’s good news or the devil’s soul-crushing blues. Doc has celebrated the genius of worldly rhythm and blues before. Today, at this convocation, he reminisces about his love of soul music. He praises the work of legendary deejays like Pervis “The Blues Man” Spann in Chicago, Magnificent Montague in Los Angeles, and Georgie Woods in Philadelphia. He acknowledges how deejay “Tall Paul” White helped mobilize the massive nonviolent demonstrations in Birmingham back in ’63. He recognizes the role that black popular music—manifest in stirring songs like “Respect”—has played in freeing the hearts and minds of a people searching for a strong self-identity.

  “You introduced youth to that music and created the language of soul,” he says, “and promoted the dance which now sweeps across race, class, and nation. It is quite amazing to me to hear the youthful rhythms which I found time to enjoy as a youth here in Atlanta years ago coming back across the Atlantic with an English accent.”

  He speaks about the American nation that has “produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space” and yet faces the challenge of “transforming a neighborhood into a brotherhood.”

  He speaks about the deep roots of racism—“the black man’s burden and the white man’s shame”—and how history has conspired to reinforce that racism. The problem of racial injustice, he argues, cannot be solved without persistent nonviolent pressure. He contrasts that to the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, who “believed that the problem could be solved through pressure-less persuasion.” But for Doc, Washington “misread history.… He started saying everything that the white people wanted to hear. He was honored for it. He was called a responsible leader. I always get a little worried when I’m referred to as a responsible leader because… they are really telling you that you are a leader who will not tell the truth on behalf of your people.… Booker T. Washington went on with the notion of pressure-less persuasion and the reactionary forces of the white South used that only to plunge deeper into the oppression of the Negro. He told us to let our buckets down where we were, and the problem was that there wasn’t much water in the well.

  “Somewhere we must come to see that we must rise up and stand on our own two feet and say to our white brothers that we are determined to be men. That is what the movement is saying. We are somebody. We are determined to gain our freedom. And we are going to start with ourselves by freeing our own psyche, our own souls.”

  After the speech, Aretha’s “Respect” is revived. The song plays another three or four times before the evening is over.

  After a late-night flight to New York, Doc is shown little respect by the reporters grilling him on NBC’s Meet the Press. One, in fact, is looking to nail him for the riots.

  “Some of your strongest critics have charged that you yourself are responsible for part of the urban violence that afflicts us recently in the riots, in that by advocating civil disobedience the logical and inevitable effect of that is civil disorder, that people who have no respect for law and authority then take things into their own hands. How do you answer such charges?”

  Doc is quick to respond, calling the accusation “absurd.” “I have never advocated anarchy,” he says. “I have never advocated arson, I have never advocated sniping or looting. I have only said, and I still believe this, that if one finds a law unjust, then he has a moral responsibility to take a stand against that law, even if it means breaking that law.”

  He goes on to point out that “less than 1 percent of the Negroes of our country have engaged in riots. More than 99 percent of the Negroes have remained nonviolent tactically.”

  When given an opportunity to endorse the negative outlook of the day, Doc goes the other way.

  “I refuse to give up,” he asserts. “I refuse to despair in this moment. I refuse to allow myself to fall into the dark chambers of pessimism, because I think in any social revolution the one thing that keeps it going is hope, and when hope dies somehow the revolution degenerates into a kind of nihilistic philosophy which says you must engage in disruption for disruption’s sake.… I believe that the forces of goodwill, white and black, in this country can work together to bring about a resolution.… We have the resources to do it.… Certainly the Negroes and the decent committed whites—maybe they are in a minority now, but they are there—must work together to so arouse the conscience of this nation.”

  Back in Atlanta, “Respect” is the highlight of SCLC’s annual banquet on August 14, in the same ballroom where Doc addressed the deejays. This time it isn’t a record: it’s Aretha herself. She is the hottest singer in the country, who, only last April, was crowned “Queen of Soul” by deejay Pervis “The Blues Man” Spann at the Regal Theater in Chicago.

  Doc calls her “Ree.” He has known her since she hit the gospel circuit as a thirteen-year-old girl opening the services for her preacher father, wrecking the church with her versions of “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood” and “Precious Lord.” In fact, when in Detroit, Doc stays at the Franklin family home. He takes particular pride in the fact that Aretha is the product of his black Baptist culture and that she, along with Ray Charles, has been able to sanctify the spirit of secular music with the unmistakable glory of God. Among the veteran singers, Mahalia Jackson has a special place in Doc’s heart. But this twenty-five-year-old truth-telling Aretha Franklin, her hair piled high on her head, is something else entirely. Doc loves how she brings that black church feeling to the world. Together with the other fourteen hundred people who’ve come to support SCLC, he’s on his feet, clapping his hands to the rhythms of “Ree-ree-ree-ree respect.… Give it to me when I get home.”

  The three-day convention is notable for the absence of Black Power posters and the presence of banners that say “Black Is Beautiful.” In Doc’s presidential address—the last he will give before the only organization he ever founded—he broaches the thorny issue of egotism as it impacts public figures like himself: “What I’m trying to get you to see this morning is that a man may be self-centered in his self-denial and self-righteous in his self-sacrifice. His generosity may feed his ego, and his piety may feed his pride. So without love, benevolence becomes egotism, and martyrdom becomes spiritual pride.”

  The convention itself is rife with conflict. Arguments over strategy go on for hours, the infighting among SCLC factions more vicious than ever. The drinking is as intense as the disputes. When Bayard Rustin fails to show up for a panel discussion on the ongoing crisis in the ghettoes, Doc takes over and delivers a scathing critique.

  “The tragic truth,” he says, “is that Congress, more than the American people, is now
running wild with racism.” Addressing the issue of the growing rage among black Americans, he says he feels that it is “purposeless to tell Negroes they should not be enraged when they should be.” When pressed for a solution, his answer is, “Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force.”

  The next day the New York Times takes his remarks out of context: “Dr. King Planning Protests to ‘Dislocate’ Large Cities.” On the editorial page the paper denounces him for what they called a “formula for discord.”

  The vague nature of a civil resistance project has the SCLC staff confused. As summer turns to fall, what will Doc be doing? Working in the Northern ghettoes? Bringing focus to the flagrant inequities that still plague the South? In the face of the recent riots, will his inflammatory rhetoric about the tragically misguided war in Vietnam be muted in order to reestablish his relationship with the administration, as a way to bolster social services?

  Decisions must be made. Priorities must be set. The path ahead must be clear. Doc does not have the luxury of hesitation. History is moving with lightning speed. No matter his decision, he will be assaulted by the left, right, or center—or very likely all three. But he must decide.

  Within days he is scheduled to fly to Chicago to deliver the opening address to the National Conference for New Politics, a landmark event long in the planning. Some 372 various political groups will be represented, including radical splinter factions on the left.

  Ever mindful of Doc’s eroding image, Stanley Levison urges him not to attend. It will be undisciplined. It will be a circus. It will reflect badly on Doc’s judgment. “What rubs off on you,” Levison tells his friend, “is that you are dealing with people who do not know their politics.”

  Doc deliberates.

  Caution says “Stay away.”

  Doc throws caution to the wind.