Ralph Alswang, one of Broadway’s greatest set designers, had worked up detailed sketches of the center, which would arise from a central plot of land donated by Sékou Touré. In its design it would resemble a chief’s hut, only one as big as an auditorium, cast in concrete and steel. From the roof’s concrete surface, water would run down the walls in a constant stream to cool the interior. The water would also run inside, along the lip of the stage, to keep the performers especially cool. Tethered to the complex would be small satellite buildings, one for drama, one for music, one for ballet, and so forth. On an offshore island we dubbed the “Isle of Dance,” we built barracks for dancers from all over Guinea, where they could live and practice while they prepared to tour the United States. We even planned their diets, incorporating Western food little by little so they’d acclimate to it and not get sick when they traveled. Sékou Touré himself came up with a name one day for the traveling troupe. We were looking at a map of the country. “Djoliba,” he said, and pointed to the Djoliba River that flowed through Guinea to become a source of the Niger. “You can safely say that all of the dances done in Guinea come from the Niger. So why not call it Ballet Djoliba?”
By now, Sékou Touré had found some money to help underwrite the project. The Johnson administration, unfortunately, had no more interest in contributing to our cultural exchange than the previous one had. U.S. policy was preposterous. We gave Guinea nothing, our allies did the same, and so Sékou Touré had no choice but to accept aid for his desperate country from the Soviet Union and China, the only available sources of it. For that, Guinea was viewed as a communist satellite.
Evidence of Soviet aid to Guinea appeared modest—as far as I could see—and in some regards amusing. One afternoon we drove by a field with hundreds of large, identical vehicles of some kind. “Snowplows,” Sékou Touré explained. “The best in the world.”
“Does it snow in Guinea?” I asked.
Sékou Touré shook his head. “But they will be very useful. Our roads get so muddy in the rainy season that trucks and cars get stuck. Even the paved roads are impassable because of mudslides from the hills. So we’ll use the snowplows to move all the mud. We haven’t used them yet, though.”
“Have you not had much rain?”
“Oh, yes, lots of rain. But we need to redesign the snowplows before we can use them. The exhaust pipe runs through the plow’s cabin, you see.”
I wondered if Achar had mistranslated. “The exhaust pipe runs through the cabin? Why?”
“To heat the cabin,” Sékou Touré explained. “Very useful in the Russian winter. Here it makes the cabin so hot that the drivers can’t bear it. We’re waiting for some Russian engineers to come change the design.”
The spell, for the SNCCers, was broken all too soon by worrying news from back home. SNCC’s fault lines were suddenly much wider. The moderates still advocated nonviolence. But for many in SNCC, the short, tragic story of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party had been the last straw. As John Lewis would note in his autobiography, Walking with the Wind, the SNCC, in taking on Mississippi’s all-white delegation, had played by all the rules, only to see their effort crushed by raw, racist politics. Their patience with nonviolence was spent. From now on, SNCC would go an increasingly radical route, and I would find myself mediating not just between SNCC, on the one hand, and Martin on the other, but among these new SNCC factions, the most radical of which would soon become the Black Panthers.
For all the angry rhetoric, the final break lay some months off. Before it, there would be one more campaign that all of us could fight together: to cross a bridge in Selma.
15
Almost a decade had passed since my fateful meeting with Martin in the basement of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church. Since then, I’d done all I could to uphold my vow. I had no doubt that in helping the movement, I was serving a sacred cause. But I was also helping my friend. By the fall of 1964, I would go so far as to say we were the best of friends. Not that Martin didn’t have other close friends. But the trust and love we shared was, for me at least, unique.
Like all close friends, we loved to talk. When Martin stayed in the apartment overnight, Julie would cook a simple kitchen dinner, and then we’d adjourn to the red living room, our shoes off and our feet up. (The first time he did that, I noticed that for a man of modest height, Martin had big feet.) Eventually Julie would pad off to bed, but we’d stay up late into the night talking. We talked about everything, but to me, the most interesting discussions we had were about the existence of God.
Martin truly believed. I admired his faith; I envied it. I just couldn’t make that leap myself. To me, faith as practiced all around me was blindly tied to religion, and religion was preachers in Harlem and Jamaica passing the hat for Jesus and driving off in fancy cars. It was my mother’s last resort, only it never made her happy. It was nuns invoking the Christian spirit and rapping my knuckles with sticks. It was priests blessing Italian troops on the newsreels, sending them off to slaughter defenseless Ethiopians. I failed to see any good in the hypocrisy of all that.
None of this Martin denied. But none of it troubled his faith.
All right, then, I would say, let’s just talk concepts of faith: theological constructs. I was willing to accept that our life on earth was more than an accident of evolution, but who could say what force was behind it? Unlike other preachers I’d known, Martin made no effort to convert me to his religious views. In those late-night talks, he answered my questions and shared his faith, but never proselytized. I admired Martin’s faith, but even more, I admired the values he lived by. Unlike those preachers of my youth, Martin had virtually no possessions. His commitment to the poor was profound. I had never met anyone as true to the teachings of Christ. His kindness, his sense of justice, above all his humility—these were astounding to me. He was the first pure spiritual force I’d met. And while I kept my doubts, his spirituality changed my life. Even now I hear his voice with great regularity, and continue to be guided by it. Paul Robeson had been my first great formative influence; you might say he gave me my backbone. Martin King was the second; he nourished my soul.
I don’t mean to imply that those talks were all abstract and philosophical. Not at all. We spent a lot of time—most of the time—strategizing. What city should we take on next? What new act of nonviolence would really shake things up? As an entertainer, I’d always rehearsed with deep intensity, going eight or ten hours at a stretch, often forgetting to eat. I was that same way in planning a next campaign—and so was Martin.
That fall, for all his triumphs, Martin felt more beleaguered than ever. There were fault lines and factions at his own SCLC, deep tensions with SNCC and the other movement groups. The strategy of nonviolence was under increasing challenge. At the same time, the Johnson administration was telling Martin that even one more nonviolent campaign would be too much. The country had had enough trouble absorbing the Civil Rights Act; a voting rights bill was out of the question. The pressures Martin felt weren’t just political. Death threats came with unnerving frequency. Often he heard about them from the FBI. Yet this was the same FBI that under J. Edgar Hoover was wiretapping his conversations in motel rooms. If he didn’t know for sure that Hoover’s agents had tapped conversations in which he talked of extramarital trysts, he had to suspect as much. He never knew when Hoover might try to ruin him. But he would soon find out.
As close as we were, Martin never touched on those trysts in our late-night talks. I think he would have been embarrassed to tell me about them; they were for bull sessions with his constant traveling companion and aide-de-camp, Bernard Lee, or perhaps with Andy Young, who in Martin’s circle had the keenest appreciation for sexual adventures. Nor did Martin meet available women through me, as Coretta may have thought. But he did lay bare some feelings about his marriage and the trade-offs he’d made. Back in college, Martin had fallen in love with a white girl—the daughter of a cook at the college cafeteria—and told friends they in
tended to marry. Black classmates questioned that: What black church would hire a pastor who had a white wife? And what would his parents say? Martin felt he could withstand the fury of Daddy King, but not his mother’s broken heart. After much soul-searching, he ended the romance and started looking for a more socially acceptable mate. Coretta Scott was a proper bourgeois prospect, with light skin, straight hair, and social ambitions. With her as his perfect partner, he’d landed his first ministry, at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. The bus boycott had come barely a year later. Suddenly Martin was a hero, a role model, a husband and father, but also a young man who’d left his preferred love behind to make the bargains of a throne.
He had a lot of conflicted feelings, but his sense of mission forced him to endure.
I saw Martin and Coretta together a lot, and I did sense a mutual affection. Martin was very sensitive toward her, and very caring. But I felt nothing transcendent between them. They seemed to me a couple who’d made a pact that worked to the advantage of both. I found Coretta very obliging, always ready to make public appearances as the dutiful wife. In return, she expected her audiences to treat her accordingly. She was perfectly suited for all the privileges that came with being Martin’s wife—the seats of honor, her picture in the paper, invitations from high black society—and she dressed the part, with pearls and flattering dresses. Her manner was stately and stern. You could never tell an off-color joke around Coretta, or even make a teasing remark if it had some salacious spin. I know Martin chafed at that, and so did I. And I had no idea how he endured her singing. Coretta had studied music at Antioch College, and in her role as preacher’s wife, she liked to perform solos for the congregation. I took to stealing a look at the program before the service, and waiting until she’d finished her song before slipping back into the pew. She wasn’t tone-deaf, but she wasn’t far from it. Soon enough, you knew she’d go flat or sharp. The suspense was almost worse than the note itself.
Given the trade-off he’d made, Martin was fascinated by my own choices. Coretta was my Marguerite; the parallels were all there. And yet I’d divorced Marguerite … for another woman. A woman who happened to be white—and Jewish! Another taboo shattered. Martin couldn’t get over that. He was so intrigued that I’d done this and my reputation was untarnished. He more than envied me. He would say that, in fact, he admired the strength he thought it took to endure the animus that was a constant in our lives. He turned wistful when he compared his story to mine. I remember exactly where we were sitting when Martin bared his heart about this. He was on the stool in front of the big wooden bar in my living room; I was on the stool behind it. I was like the bartender, hearing out the lonely guy across the bar when everyone else has left. Out of discretion, he never brought up the subject again.
We talked a lot about society’s expectations of us, which rules we were bound by and which we could break, as black role models in our respective worlds. Martin’s pedestal was a lot higher and more fragile than mine. He wasn’t just a role model. He was a moral leader. He knew how little it would take for him to be perceived as a hypocrite. Even his friendship with me was fraught with risk. I was his staunch supporter, but also a force that could give him access to the devil’s desires. Broadway showgirls, Hollywood starlets—the smallest exposure to these lures might be used against him. Often these days I brought SNCCers or members of Martin’s own circle to Vegas for a few days of R&R, paying their way out, giving them tickets to my show, fronting them a little cash to blow at the casino. I knew better than to invite Martin to Vegas, and he knew not to come. But I think he would have welcomed the experience.
Coretta might have worried that I’d lead Martin astray, except that by the fall of 1964, I’d become as useful to her as I was to him. Along with the household help I now employed for her, I sent a limousine to pick her up at the airport whenever she came to New York. On occasion, she stayed at the apartment, came and went as she liked. Julie and I took her to dinners, to Broadway shows, and more. I’d also taken out a $50,000 life insurance policy on Martin, with Coretta as the beneficiary. We all knew Martin’s life was in danger on a daily basis, and yet Martin had no life insurance; he felt he couldn’t afford it. These were not acts on my part to endear me to her; I did these things because I could. But they did have the effect of inoculating me against any fears Coretta might have that I was leading Martin into temptation.
That fall came the news that Martin had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was the youngest ever to win it, and the grandeur of that tribute carried its own risks. Amid the movement groups, envy and resentment swirled. Some SNCCers felt Martin had won for work they’d done. Some in King’s entourage felt the same way. I told the grumblers to get real. No one thought Martin had done all the work himself. So many people were committing daily acts of courage in the South for civil rights. But Martin was the embodiment of our movement. He was the force. And winning the Nobel might give him the clout to keep young, angry skeptics in line with nonviolence a short while longer.
That hope was put to the test early in the new year, and so, too, was Martin’s public image.
Selma, Alabama, was, like Birmingham, a city steeped in segregation, with a top lawman, Sheriff Jim Clark, every bit as brutal as Birmingham’s Bull Connor. When students in Selma, with help from SNCC, tested the new Civil Rights Act by trying to enter the city’s segregated movie theater, Sheriff Clark’s troops dispersed them with tear gas. When the students persisted, a judge issued an injunction forbidding gatherings of more than three people in the city. In a state ruled by Governor George Wallace, voting rights weren’t even an issue; for Selma’s blacks, they didn’t exist. On his way home from receiving the Nobel in Norway, Martin met in Washington with President Johnson, who reiterated that the country needed a rest from civil rights. Martin wavered. But when a delegation of citizens from Selma came to plead for his help in desegregating the city, he felt the calling.
Martin led a first rally in Selma on January 2, 1965, demanding a free and fair vote for all. Weeks of marches and mass arrests followed. After a night of brutal beatings by Sheriff Clark’s troops on February 18, a marcher named Jimmy Lee Jackson died of his wounds, and James Bevel, a SNCCer, first suggested carrying the victim’s coffin the fifty-four miles from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery. The plan to take the body was eventually put aside, but not the march to Montgomery.
Martin was out of town, on March 7, 1965, for the march over Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge that would come to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” In juggling his many obligations, he’d found himself pulled between leading the march, which other organizers had set for that day, and fulfilling a commitment to preach in Atlanta. He chose Atlanta—a mistake, as he later admitted to me.
Instead, John Lewis ended up leading some six hundred mostly local citizens over the bridge, into the teeth of Sheriff Clark’s armed and mounted troops. John had already shown extraordinary courage on the Freedom Rides. He showed it again in staring down Sheriff Clark and ignoring his order to retreat. The melee that resulted was one of the movement’s bloodiest, with mounted policemen mercilessly clubbing and bullwhipping defenseless churchgoers who’d joined the march in their Sunday best. Once again, John was clubbed on the head. This time his skull was badly cracked, his survival a miracle.
Martin told me later that had he led that first march, it might have turned out very differently. It might have looked, in fact, a lot like the second march over the bridge, two days later, which Martin did lead. This time, Martin and his followers reached the foot of the Pettus Bridge, where Sheriff Clark and his troops waited—and then, at Martin’s signal, retreated. In private talks with the U.S. Justice Department and the White House, Martin had learned that this second march was scheduled too soon for the federal government to provide adequate protection. A judge hadn’t even sanctioned it yet. Unless Martin wanted a reprise of Bloody Sunday, a compromise would have to be struck. Many of the marchers on that second crossing were horrif
ied when they saw Martin waving them back. They felt he’d surrendered before a shot was fired. Bloody Sunday had shocked the world—a costly success, but a success all the same. The second march, they felt, was a disgrace; many felt Martin had betrayed them. And yet as Martin reminded me on the phone that night, compromise was a crucial tenet of nonviolence. If compromise got you closer to your goal, then it was worth any loss of face.
An Alabama judge did, at last, grant permission for a march not only across Pettus Bridge but from Selma to Montgomery. To me, that showed Martin had been right, at least in regard to that second confrontation on the bridge. This time, the marchers would be protected, along their whole route, by the Alabama National Guard. By the end of the third day, Martin expected, the exhausted marchers would need pumping up for the last few miles into Montgomery the next morning. That, Martin told me, was where I could help. Could I get some of my friends to come entertain the marchers at their third-night campsite?
I said I thought I could.
I was calling on short notice, and yet the cause was so compelling, the news photos of violence on the Pettus Bridge so fresh, that almost everyone I reached out to agreed to come. Nina Simone, Joan Baez, Johnny Mathis, Billy Eckstine, Tony Bennett, Odetta, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and more all said yes.
Sammy Davis, Jr., was especially enthusiastic. “Absolutely, man, I’m in.” After I’d used his name in helping promote the concert, Sammy called to say he had to back out. He’d thought he could cancel a performance of Golden Boy on Broadway, but his producers, and the play’s backers, had raised holy hell about it. “They just won’t let me do it, brother. What can I do?”
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