On Wednesday, December 9, Malcolm won acquittal in traffic court on his speeding ticket from nine months earlier (the day he had heard Elijah Muhammad rename Cassius Clay on the radio). Outside the courtroom, he denounced Premier Moise Tshombe of the Congo and called Martin Luther King “a friend of mine and one of the foremost leaders of Negroes in their fight for recognition as human beings.” Shortly afterward, at a seminar sponsored by HARYOU-ACT, the new Harlem anti-poverty agency, the program was delayed because no one wanted to sit next to Malcolm for a brief platform ceremony on 137th Street. Gregory Sims of Harlem’s new Domestic Peace Corps said the “word is out” that Malcolm could be gunned down any minute.
King flew from London to Oslo on December 8. Norway’s King Olav V sent for him and Coretta the next afternoon, and received them in private audience at the Royal Palace. There was considerable tension within the King group, which had swelled to thirty people. One family friend, who had talked her way into the traveling party with a lighthearted offer to serve as a dressing-aide for glittering occasions, grumbled that Coretta was far too exacting, and the Abernathys made known that Juanita deserved a lady-in-waiting to match. That evening, at a U.S. embassy dinner in honor of King, Bayard Rustin searched out CIA official Robert Porter among the hosts, then brashly advertised his hunch that Porter would know about Oslo’s hidden nightlife. “At least five other men…,” Porter recorded, “wanted to know where to find the Norwegian girls.” Porter described Rustin to Washington as “erratic, utterly cynical, and a born showman,” whose “theme for the evening was that everyone was ‘depraved’ and ‘selfish.’” When the tipsy Rustin caused a scene with his pronouncement that two thirds of his traveling companions were “merely using Dr. King,” Porter wrote, friends excused him as a good man who was “overly tired.”
Rustin stayed up Wednesday night drafting suggestions for the first of King’s two Nobel Prize speeches, the five-minute acceptance statement for the next day’s medal ceremony. In the end, however, King worked almost entirely from his own handwritten draft, which he fed to typist Dora McDonald after minor editing. His opening declaration accepted the Prize for Peace on behalf of a movement he called far from triumphant. “I am mindful that only yesterday in Birmingham, Alabama, our children, crying out for brotherhood, were answered with fire hoses, snarling dogs and even death,” King wrote. “I am mindful that only yesterday in Philadelphia, Mississippi, young people seeking to secure the right to vote were brutalized and murdered.” After deleting a third “only yesterday” sentence about more than forty churches destroyed in Mississippi alone, he posed a question: “Therefore, I must ask why this prize is awarded to a movement which is beleaguered and committed to unrelenting struggle, to a movement which has not won the very peace and brotherhood which is the essence of the Nobel Prize.”
King would answer that he interpreted the prize as recognition for applied nonviolence itself, which he declared “a powerful moral force” and “answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time—the need to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.” He adopted three short inserts in the handwriting of Andrew Young, and directed Young to modify a credo sentence: “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality,” sharpening a blander faith in “truth, beauty and goodness.” He struggled also with the required gray tailcoat and striped trousers, and quipped that he would never again submit to high formal wear.
Outside the Grand Hotel, officers directed King and Coretta to the limousine with Nobel Committee chairman Gunnar Jahn, and others to the line of cars waiting behind a press barricade. Ralph and Juanita Abernathy requested to ride along in car number one, which pitted them against the Norwegian protocol chief. An argument ensued, with the Abernathys insisting that they always rode with the Kings and the protocol chief standing firm with her calligraphied manifest. Abernathy appealed to King, who stood frozen with embarrassment, then tried to push his way past the security officers. From behind, Bernard Lee and Dora McDonald pleaded with Abernathy that there were plenty of limousines in the motorcade. By the time the Abernathys were removed to their assigned car, Andrew Young and Bernard Lee refused to ride with them. They walked the short distance to the ceremony through the December cold, talking over anew the mystery of King’s attachment to Abernathy.
Upon the entrance of King Olav and Crown Prince Harald, all rose in the packed hall at Oslo University, and photographers from world outlets recorded King’s receipt of the gold Nobel medallion on a platform decorated with one thousand imported carnations. Reporters interrupted the receptions afterward with news from a preliminary hearing that day in Mississippi at which a federal magistrate shocked the Justice Department by refusing a routine motion to send charges in the triple murder to a grand jury—and instead freed the nineteen alleged conspirators. A visibly distressed King called for a protest boycott of Mississippi products, mentioning Baldwin pianos made in Greenwood. “We had hoped that there could be an indictment at least,” he told a press conference. “I must say that I didn’t expect a conviction.”
King joined spontaneous freedom songs that drew applause in the hotel lobby, and was moved by eloquent words from his mother, Mama King, but he had to keep up a show of alarm when Juanita Abernathy swooned to the floor during dinner and was rushed to the hospital for two days. Some in King’s inner circle observed that the incident conveniently thrust her into the limelight. King confessed to his Chicago lawyer, Chauncey Eskridge, a gnawing worry that his own agents in Birmingham still held some $240,000 in SCLC-guaranteed cash bonds from the children’s arrests nineteen months earlier.* He complained to Harry Wachtel of large international phone bills being run up from Oslo on SCLC’s tab, but preferred to absorb the debt quietly than to risk friction with his friends. During rounds of toasts, which drained a case of champagne that night, Wachtel, Septima Clark, and others marveled at King’s gracious ability to deflect praise with kind words all around—and also at the compulsion of the speakers to discuss themselves. Daddy King reviewed his odyssey since teenage migration to Atlanta “smelling like a mule,” then raised his glass. “I want to offer a toast,” he said, “to God!” Nonplussed revelers embraced the “toast to God” as the inspiration of a teetotaling novice, with amused recognition that Daddy King did not easily toast another mortal, including his beloved son.
King returned the next evening to deliver his formal Nobel lecture at Oslo University, where a standing-room crowd included several hundred students carrying Viking torches. Again he used his own handwritten draft with few modifications. He omitted sentences scribbled in his margins, such as “war is the most extreme externalization of an inner violence of the spirit,” and inserted several less abstract ideas suggested by Rustin and Wachtel, including a paragraph welcoming the defeat of Goldwater in the American election. From Gandhi’s India through post-colonial Africa to the American South, said King, “the freedom movement is spreading the widest liberation in human history,” and he recommended the discipline of nonviolence “for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human conflict, by no means excluding the relations between nations.”
He had added sections on poverty and war to his reflections on racial oppression. “All that I have said,” King concluded, “boils down to the point of affirming that mankind’s survival is dependent upon man’s ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty and war; the solution of these problems is in turn dependent upon man squaring his moral progress with his scientific process, and learning the practical art of living in harmony.” Proclaiming new opportunity for “the shirtless and barefoot people” and hope for “a dark confused world,” King pronounced the era “a great time to be alive. Therefore, I am not yet discouraged about the future.” He had inserted the word “yet” between the lines of his handwritten draft as a late change.
Members of the King entourage overran the Grand Hotel after hours. Before Wachtel retired with the �
��squares,” he heard Rustin first turn up his nose at plans to search out Norwegian prostitutes, then say with a twinkle that he was off to cruise the nightlife himself. Rustin returned before dawn in time to intervene with hotel security officers who had been summoned by complaints about loud foot traffic of naked or nearly naked people through the corridors. King’s brother A. D. King fled into Martin and Coretta’s room. Officers chased men who said they were chasing women who had stolen money or personal property, and caught up with prostitutes who said they had been promised Martin Luther King himself in exchange for favors to his unscrupulous associates.
King continued with a small group to Stockholm, where he met the famed sociologists Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, and danced in public with Coretta in a rare, somewhat controversial exhibition for a Baptist preacher, then on to Paris, where he took his parents to a soul food restaurant on Rue Clauzel owned by a Morehouse graduate, and stayed behind when the others visited the Lido nightclub. “Only Martin’s family and close staff members knew how depressed he was during the entire Nobel trip,” Coretta disclosed privately some years later. “…He was worried about the rumors, and he was worried about what black people might think. He always worried about that.” Andrew Young traced his mood more narrowly to disappointment over the childish jealousy from Abernathy: “Ralph’s estrangement was much more worrisome to Martin than anything he thought J. Edgar Hoover might do.”
WHILE KING WAS ABROAD, Defense Secretary McNamara drew President Johnson aside after a Vietnam strategy session with Ambassador Maxwell Taylor. “It would be impossible for Max to talk to these people,” warned McNamara, of White House reporters waiting nearby, “without leaving the impression that the situation is going to hell.” Accordingly, Taylor slipped through a rear exit and returned to Saigon. In meetings between December 7 and 10, he carried out instructions to demand that South Vietnamese military factions unite behind their civilian government in exchange for approval by President Johnson of a morale-building secret bombing campaign against North Vietnamese targets in Laos.
On December 10, Bill Moyers addressed the lingering scandal threat of Adam Yarmolinsky, the former Pentagon official who had been dismissed as the price of Southern support for the poverty bill. “Esquire Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post are both planning stories which will make this a kind of ‘Dreyfus’ case,” warned Moyers, who reminded the President that he had promised to “help Yarmolinsky at the right time.”* Johnson chose to risk the publicity rather than a confirmation dispute over a Yarmolinsky appointment.
In California, more than a thousand members of Berkeley’s Academic Senate met in crisis. A photograph on the front page of the December 8 New York Times showed campus police dragging Mario Savio from the stage upon his first words to a university assembly; nearly eight hundred students had been arrested at sit-ins protesting the reinstatement of restrictions on political speech. “We are told that the mob is waiting outside!” shouted a professor of cell biology. Against an appeal by philosopher Louis Feuer, who recalled how Nazi students “helped destroy freedom and democracy in the universities of central Europe,” the faculty voted to support the basic principles of what was now known as the Free Speech Movement, but the university Regents stood firm against an inchoate public image of unruly youth. Across the country, the New York Times reported that “Berkeley Protest Becomes a Ritual” and noted that “beards and long hair and guitars were much in evidence along the corridors of Sproul Hall. At least one young man came in barefoot.”
In Washington on the night of December 10, Jack Warner of Warner Brothers Studios agreed to pay J. Edgar Hoover $75,000, plus $500 per episode, to film a television series called The F.B.I. Hoover’s negotiator, Deke DeLoach, who had made it his urgent priority to reverse public relations damage from the “notorious liar” incident, faithfully extracted a host of “image” stipulations for the show—among them that the lead FBI character (based on Inspector Joe Sullivan) would always button his coat, never use informants, and always subdue the villain with a single, nonfatal shot—but DeLoach himself grew weary of Hoover’s ever-expanding list of forbidden sponsors: alcohol, lingerie, makeup, footwear, and all bathroom products. The series would enjoy a nine-year run on ABC.
In Los Angeles, not until the afternoon of December 11 did anyone connect the undignified corpse—found in a cheap Watts motel the previous night, clad in a raincoat and one shoe—to the celebrity-red Ferrari parked outside with a copy of Muhammad Speaks on the seat. Police routinely accepted statements that the Negro victim was a foiled kidnapper-rapist, and dispatched the body unclaimed to the morgue before entertainment reporters descended upon the LAPD’s 77th Precinct station with doubts that Sam Cooke died a low-life criminal. Too late, their investigations established it more likely that Cooke, convinced the motel was in cahoots with the prostitute who ran off with several thousand dollars and his clothes, had accused the female desk clerk, who shot him. These clarifications offered modest relief to Cooke’s towering reputation or comfort to the five thousand disbelieving fans who gathered at the Chicago funeral, where Billy Preston played an organ prelude and Lou Rawls performed “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” Ray Charles turned up unexpectedly, and was guided down the aisle of Mount Sinai Baptist Church to sing “Angels Watching over Me.” The death of Sam Cooke remained a sensational tragedy in the Negro press, but elsewhere it was a bigger story that an Illinois schoolgirl claimed to possess the cremated, post-operative tonsil of Beatles drummer Ringo Starr.
In Saigon, Maxwell Taylor dressed down four South Vietnamese officers who had just arrested military rivals and leaders of the civilian government. “I told you all clearly at General Westmoreland’s dinner that we Americans were tired of coups,” the ambassador said sternly. “Apparently I wasted my words. Maybe this is because something is wrong with my French…. Now you have made a real mess. We cannot carry you forever if you do things like this.” The assembled Young Turks, who included future rulers Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu, seethed with humiliation. Their commander, General Khanh, threatened to have Taylor expelled as a colonialist; Taylor countered that Khanh should go into exile. “Generals acting greatly offended by my disapproval of their recent actions,” the ambassador cabled President Johnson before Christmas.
HOME BEFORE KING, Bayard Rustin and Harry Wachtel plotted how they might induce President Johnson to invite King aboard Air Force One after their meeting on December 18, then “drop him off” in Atlanta on his way to the LBJ Ranch. Rustin also told friends of the prostitute chases in Oslo, boasting that he had thought quickly enough to warn that any arrest would bring down shame on Norway for allowing its criminals to pester King’s friends. The calls gave FBI wiretappers “the first indication we have had that President Johnson may see King,” and Hoover wrote “Expedite” on paperwork to send the White House a secret bulletin.
Another FBI wiretap picked up a distress call on December 15 between Clarence Jones and Stanley Levison. Neither had gone to Oslo, but they had heard the wild stories. Jones’s wife, Ann, who idolized King, could not accept that he would allow such antics around him. When Jones tried to excuse the behavior as harmless sport, she confirmed first that he was neither offended nor surprised, then suddenly realized that her husband had been an accomplice to similar events—including some in their own home. “I never want to see Martin again,” said Ann Jones. Clarence Jones would consider the shock of the Oslo reports a precipitating factor in his divorce, and perhaps even in his ex-wife’s untimely death from alcohol depression. At the time he called Levison, who said he knew how much the news had upset the Jones household. They made plans to talk in person, and FBI surveillance agents followed Jones from a distance.
King arrived from Paris to a whirlwind on December 17. Mayor Robert Wagner presented him with New York’s Medallion of Honor at a ceremony that overflowed the City Council chamber in lower Manhattan. An enterprising reporter discovered that King was carrying the Nobel Prize check for 273,000 Swedish kroner in his lef
t inside coat pocket, and counted four floodlights, nineteen microphones, and “14 motion picture and television cameras” at the afternoon press conference in the midtown Waldorf-Astoria. King said he was “greatly humbled” on the Oslo trip to hear that many countries beset by ethnic violence looked to the American freedom movement “with a certain amount of hope,” and he announced his intention to support the MFDP’s expected challenge to the seating of all five Mississippi representatives at the opening of the 89th Congress on January 4.* After an evening reception in his honor at the Waldorf, featuring Vice President-elect Hubert Humphrey, King completed the day’s uptown trek with a tumultuous night rally at Harlem’s 369th Artillery Armory, on 142nd Street.
Rally organizer Cleveland Robinson, King’s friend, who served as New York City’s commissioner of human rights, claimed a crowd often thousand in the armory. Police said eight thousand. Governor Rockefeller joined Mayor Wagner on the speaker’s platform. Andrew Young went down into the crowd to sit briefly with Malcolm X. In his speech, King first returned the Harlem tribute by thanking movement colleagues from “old Sister Pollard” of the bus boycott to “my great abiding friend and a great leader in his own right, Ralph Abernathy.” He wrestled out loud with pressures to grasp sweet renown in the larger world. For ten days he had been “talking with kings and queens, meeting and talking with prime ministers of nations,” King said. “That isn’t the usual pattern of my life, to have people saying nice things about me. Oh, this is a marvelous mountaintop. I wish I could stay here tonight. But the valley calls me.”
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