I urged Martin to take the chance, and told him I’d start making calls to actors and entertainers who might lend their names and presence. That very day, I happened to speak with Paul Newman, whom I’d known since my days at the New School, when he was at the Actors Studio and I would sit in on classes; he and Joanne Woodward agreed on the spot to participate in the march. So did Marlon, whom I reached on the West Coast. When I called Martin back to say all three had signed on, I could hear the excitement in his voice. “I wonder,” he mused, “what the Kennedys will think of that….” Martin appreciated the nuance: Newman, Woodward, and Brando were all strong Kennedy backers. For them to sign on so readily to a march undertaken, in a sense, as a challenge to the Kennedys—that would send quite a signal.
To everyone’s surprise, the President heeded another, very different signal just days later, when Governor George Wallace made a dramatic show of blocking two black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama. The President startled his aides by declaring that on that very night, June 11, 1963, he would deliver a speech announcing he was, after all, submitting a comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress. “The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality,” the President told the nation, “that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them…. We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and a people…. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all.”
We couldn’t have asked for a more strongly worded declaration. Martin was in tears. So were a lot of other people I talked to that night. So was I. Our jubilation was shattered, though, when word came that Medgar Evers had been shot dead late that night in his driveway. The KKK and their brethren wouldn’t go down without a fight.
With the Kennedys, as we had learned, progress came as one step forward and two steps back. Or maybe two steps forward and one back. The President had just called for a civil rights bill. So as far as Bobby could see, there was no longer any reason to stage a march on Washington. Why, he asked me in our next phone talk, were we bothering with that? Our target now, I said, was Congress, not the Kennedys. We had to show all those yellow-dog Democrats and Republicans that a broad cross section of the country wanted this civil rights bill.
Bobby had one reason after another for why we should cancel the march. By marching, we’d only jeopardize the bill, not enhance its chances. Congress didn’t like being told what to do by a crowd outside its door. If the march did reach the scale we predicted, it would overwhelm Washington’s local police force. And that was alarming, because a crowd that large would have “crazies” of all kinds, including, Bobby suggested, violent ones. It was true that in SNCC’s ranks, I was hearing more and more talk of militancy. In Michigan, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had sprung up to fight racism by any means necessary. Malcolm X and his Nation of Islam had publicly rejected nonviolence as a strategy and mocked Martin as a “chump.” But so far, all that was talk. At the other extreme, Bobby warned, the Ku Klux Klan might disrupt the march, perhaps with gunfire; the FBI had been picking up a lot of alarming threats on monitored calls.
“Every time the FBI weighs in with ‘intelligence,’ it’s always to fan fears of violence,” I countered. “The FBI has no reason to fear us on that score. If they really think white extremists may be a threat, then you need to do whatever you can to contain them. And if that means federal troops, then so be it.”
Did I realize, asked Bobby, how much all that federal protection would cost?
“Are you telling us that we should abandon our constitutional right to freedom of assembly as a cost-saving measure?”
The point was, said Bobby, that it would be money—taxpayer money—needlessly spent. Civil rights would come with or without a march on Washington.
“Bobby,” I said, “I appreciate the position you’re in. But you’re not going to stop us. So you better start getting used to the fact that it’s going to happen, and start trying to help us make it work.”
That message seemed to reach the President. Shortly after, Martin and other civil rights leaders were invited to the White House to discuss the march, among other matters. The President asked Martin to come to the Oval Office first for a private chat. After pleasantries, as Taylor Branch reported in Parting the Waters, the first book of his remarkable trilogy on King and the civil rights movement, the President had Martin step out into the Rose Garden. It was a bit bewildering, but the President soon made himself clear. The FBI had come up with credible evidence that two of Martin’s closest advisers, Stan Levison and Jack O’Dell, were active, high-ranking communists, manipulating the SCLC on behalf of the American Communist party. By having this chat in the Rose Garden, the President seemed to be implying that he himself was under surveillance—presumably by J. Edgar Hoover—and had to step outside the Oval Office to give Martin this secret counsel, for fear that Hoover would regard it as tipping off the target of an FBI investigation.
This was not the first time Hoover had struck. From the earliest days of the bus boycott in Montgomery, Martin had relied on a New York organizer and intellectual named Bayard Rustin. It was Rustin who, when boycotters began to be hauled off to jail in the wake of Rosa Parks’s arrest, told Martin this was the best thing that could happen. The black community, Martin included, was appalled by the very idea of jail and the social stigma it carried. Bayard was the one who told Martin about Mahatma Gandhi and the tenets of nonviolence. “You should be as willing to go to jail,” he declared, “as a bride to go to bed on her wedding night. Going to jail is precisely what we should be doing.” For the past several years, Bayard had been an integral member of Martin’s kitchen cabinet, counseling him almost every day. But Bayard was vulnerable, for the reason Martin and all of us knew: He had been sentenced to sixty days in jail after pleading guilty to a morals charge for homosexual acts. Not long before Martin’s Rose Garden stroll with the President, Hoover had threatened to expose Bayard’s criminal record and, in so doing, smear the whole SCLC as a den of iniquity. Only later would the staggering hypocrisy of this charge become clear: The FBI director was himself gay and, according to biographer Anthony Summers, an enthusiastic cross-dresser in his private time. Tragically, Martin had felt compelled to cut Bayard loose. And now this.
Martin was shocked. He asked the President what proof there was of either man’s communist activities. Kennedy wasn’t at liberty to provide more specific evidence, he said, but the FBI had it, Martin could be sure of that. Keeping Levison and O’Dell on staff, the President warned, could ruin Martin’s credibility and kill the movement. Clearly, it would keep the Kennedys from being able to work with Martin on passing the civil rights bill.
In a New York hotel room not long after, Martin related his meeting to half a dozen of his inner circle, including O’Dell, but not Levison, who was away on vacation. O’Dell was appalled. Everyone knew of his youthful support of communist-related causes, he said. He had no regrets about any of that. But the rest of it was just Hoover’s fantasy; O’Dell had no involvement with the American Communist party. Nor, he felt sure, did Stan. Martin listened. And then, after the meeting, he came over to my apartment to ask what I thought he should do.
I didn’t know O’Dell that well, but I’d come to admire Stan Levison enormously. A nonpracticing lawyer and fundraiser for various left-wing causes, Stan had made money in real estate and car dealerships, then spent a lot of it fighting for the victims of the McCarthy era, specifically Americans targeted by the McCarran and Smith acts. He did that, I felt sure, not as a communist but as an American outraged at how those acts denied fellow Americans their constitutional freedoms. With the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955, Stan had turned his attention to targets of Jim Crow in Mississippi. That had led him, in turn, to Martin and the Montgomery Improvement Association. Soon Stan was Martin’s most trusted aide. In person, he was completely nondescript: short, a little on the chubby side,
bespectacled, and very quiet. But he was a brilliant tactician and tireless fundraiser. Again and again, he came in with wise advice that steered Martin away from some pitfall, or toward some opportunity. He was also a brilliant speechwriter who contributed significantly to nearly every speech Martin gave. The President had Theodore Sorensen, who’d come to know Kennedy so well that he could tailor phrases perfectly to the President’s sensibility and speaking style. Stan did that for Martin. “I know Stan’s not a communist,” Martin said. “At least, I certainly think he’s not. But to have the President and the Attorney General and the director of the FBI all telling me otherwise—that’s somewhat overwhelming.”
I told Martin that from a personal point of view, I felt the worst thing he could do was kowtow to the administration and banish his trusted advisers based on not a shred of evidence. We should stand and be tested. Because if they pulled that thread once, they would pull it again; most of us had marched in some communist-backed rally against racism, or signed some letter of social protest sponsored by a group that had some communist ties. “But here’s the thing,” I said. “Stan is a man of tremendous intellectual capability and moral integrity. So put it to him. And let’s see what he has to say, since he’s usually right about things.”
With Stan still away, Martin could push off that decision. O’Dell required immediate attention. Unlike Stan, he was a full-time paid staffer on the SCLC. If the price of continuing Kennedy support on the civil rights bill was letting O’Dell go, regardless of how unfair that might be, Martin could do that. The stakes were simply too big to stand on principle here. Reluctantly, Martin told O’Dell he had to leave. So guilty did he feel about this, however, that he urged O’Dell to stay until he found another job. This quickly reached the Attorney General. Back came word that soon was not soon enough. O’Dell had to be gone right away. Heartsick, Martin complied. By then, Stan was back from vacation. As I’d suggested, Martin asked him what he thought it best to do. Stan was unequivocal. “I’ll resign,” he said.
Perhaps Martin should have taken Stan at his word. Instead, still acting out of guilt, he had Clarence Jones tell Bobby Kennedy that the matter had been resolved. Martin would no longer have direct contact with Stan. Since Stan was an independent businessman based in New York, Martin could simply stop being his client. That, Clarence cheerfully noted to Bobby, would keep the FBI from taping any conversations between the two men. Clarence asked Bobby if there was anyone else at the SCLC that he would suggest Stan not contact directly. Kennedy grew apoplectic. Here was Martin’s lawyer—the same lawyer who’d patronized Bobby at the disastrous Central Park South get-together a month or so before—asking Bobby to collude with him in protecting Stan Levison from FBI scrutiny, implying that all of this was a game and that Stan would maintain some back channel to Martin. So angry was Bobby, especially after the fiasco of the Baldwin evening, and the ensuing story in The New York Times, that he proceeded to sign off on Hoover’s request to wiretap Clarence. Bobby also brooded hard about whether to approve a wiretap on Martin himself. In the end, he backed off from that, but as Taylor Branch noted, the wiretaps on Clarence made the FBI privy to conversations between Clarence and Martin—essentially opening Martin’s private life to FBI scrutiny.
Stan did stop talking directly to Martin—for a while. The truth was, though, we needed Stan too much to let him go, especially with the March on Washington looming. He was just too powerful a chess player. So risking the Kennedys’ rage, and perhaps with the civil rights bill hanging in the balance, Clarence and I became Stan’s secret conduits to Martin. I didn’t call Stan at his office; he didn’t call Clarence or me directly, either. Instead, I’d go to a friend’s house and call a third party, who would relay the message that Stan should call their mutual friend. Stan would then go out to a pay phone and call me at that friend’s house. Both parties were then on “safe phones,” as we called them, and the FBI was, we hoped, left out of the loop.
Through these covert conversations, Stan kept in touch, closely enough to guide us as we organized the March on Washington. Closely enough, too, to help Martin write one of the most famous speeches of the twentieth century.
A. Philip Randolph had cautioned Martin not to schedule the march too soon. Endless logistics were involved. It was like planning the Normandy invasion. Randolph knew what he was talking about; he’d planned a march on Washington as far back as 1941, until a last-minute political compromise with President Roosevelt led him to call it off. So Martin set the date for late August, and Randolph, along with the rest of us, began reaching out to organized labor. We all hoped that a hundred thousand people would show up. But only if you had labor working with you could you feel pretty sure you’d get that kind of crowd.
The first calls went out to the leaders who’d pulled together the Birmingham bail money, among others. Walter Reuther of the UAW, Mike Quill of the New York Transit Workers Union, John Lewis of the United Mine Workers, and Moe Foner of 1199, the New York hospital and health-care workers’ union—we needed all these leaders to commit troops. All did, though not without getting something in return. If the unions were going to lend their muscle, they wanted a march not just for civil rights, but for workers’ rights, too. So now we were planning “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” Some worried that the march might lose its focus on civil rights. Martin didn’t. If one hundred thousand people massed in front of the Lincoln Memorial, he said with a laugh, no one would care about the march’s name. Just its motive!
I started making calls of my own, to corral more stars.
There was nothing new about putting a star onstage to draw a crowd. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger had headlined all those union benefit concerts I went to in the forties, and if they weren’t there, Paul Robeson was. A lot of us had grown up with that—seeing the power of celebrity to help social causes—and as our own stars had grown, a whole generation of us had kept faith with that sense of mission. My thought was: Why stop at two or three? Why not get them all onstage?
I called Tony Bennett. Without missing a beat, he said, “You got me.” I called Shelley Winters, Diahann Carroll, Lena Horne, Billy Eckstine, Burt Lancaster, James Garner, James Baldwin, Sidney Poitier, Tony Curtis, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Jackie Robinson, Josephine Baker, Robert Ryan, Leonard Bernstein, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joseph Mankiewicz, and more. Every one of them said yes. Partly they agreed to come because they were friends of mine. But this cause was so just, so undeniable, everyone wanted in. And the larger our group got, the more power it had. Everybody felt that—even the Kennedys. With all of us aboard, there was simply no doubt the march would happen. And it would be huge.
When I went back to Martin to tell him who’d signed on, he was, of course, highly pleased, but to my surprise, he paused and then said, “That’s a lot of friends.”
Yes, I said, I was very proud of that.
“All quite liberal.”
“Well, sure.”
“Have you reached out to anyone across the divide?”
I told him I didn’t see how I could reach out to Ronald Reagan, or George Murphy, two of Hollywood’s best-known Republican actors. I really didn’t know them at all. I did know Charlton Heston; he was on the other side of the divide.
“What did he say when you spoke to him?”
“I didn’t speak to him.”
“I think it would be in our interest,” Martin said, “to have such a presence.”
I pondered how to do this. Then I called Marlon. I told him I hoped he’d chair the march’s Hollywood delegation. “Someone needs to lead the posse,” I said. “But I’d like to exploit you a bit.”
“A bit?”
I chuckled. “Yeah, I’d like to ask Charlton Heston to join us, and I’d like to propose that he co-chair the delegation with you.”
Marlon groaned. If I had such a galaxy of stars, he said, why did we need Heston? I pitched Martin’s point, and Marlon gave a grudging sigh. But then I added one of my own. The fact was, I said, that
Heston knew he wasn’t a great actor. Behind those iconic good looks and macho swagger was an insecure guy who yearned for the approval of his peers. Co-chairing a Hollywood delegation with Marlon was exactly the blessing he needed. And he would help our cause. Charlton Heston marching with us would be a powerful image for mainstream America. “Okay,” Marlon said with a laugh. “Enough! You got me.”
So I flew out to Heston’s home and proposed that he and Marlon co-chair the Hollywood delegation. Heston gave me a look—that craggy, deep Charlton Heston look. “Co-chair with Marlon?” he echoed. “I’d be delighted.”
And could we bring the Hollywood delegation to Heston’s home for a press conference when we announced that?
No problem.
I called Martin as soon as I got back to my hotel. “We got Heston!” With that, Martin’s spirits went way high. Now he, too, knew the march would succeed, and lead us where we needed to go. How could it not? We had Moses!
The Kennedys were cautiously onboard now, reassured and impressed by the star power. Instead of some gathering of scruffy activists, this march was starting to sound almost glamorous. Not, though, to J. Edgar Hoover. Behind the scenes, he was our biggest adversary. On an almost daily basis, he preached fire and brimstone in his interoffice memos. The nation would be destroyed! Communists everywhere! He had his agents call each of the actors and entertainers I’d lined up, warning them the march might be violent, and urging them not to attend. When the march turned out to be peaceful and joyous, the stars would seem to have done a modest thing by showing up. But ignoring those dire FBI warnings, in the days before the march, took some courage.
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