At the end of his life, King seemed in some transfigured state, even though politically he had become more radical and there were traces of disillusionment—with what? messianic hope perhaps. He had observed that America was sicker, more intransigent than he had realized when he began his work. The last, ringing, “I have been to the mountaintop!” gave voice to a transcendent experience. It is this visionary strain that makes him a man elusive in the extreme, difficult to understand as a character.
How was it possible for one so young as King to seem to contain, in himself, so much of the American past? At the very least, the impression he gave was of an experience of life coterminous with the years of his father. The Depression, the dust bowl, the sharecropper, the old back-country churches, and even the militance of the earlier IWW—he suggested all of this. He did not appear to belong to the time of Billy Graham (God bless you real good) but to a previous and more spiritual evangelism, to a time of solitude and refined simplicity. In Adam Bede, Dinah preaches that Jesus came down from Heaven to tell the good news about God to the poor. “Why, you and me, dear friends, are poor. We have been brought up in poor cottages, and have been reared on oatcake and lived coarse. . . . It doesn’t cost Him much to give us our little handful of victual and bit of clothing, but how do we know He cares for us any more than we care for the worms . . . so long as we rear our carrots and onions?” There remains this old, pure tradition in King. Rare elements of the godly and the political come together, with an affecting naturalness. His political work was indeed a Mission, as well as a political cause.
In spite of the heat of his sermon oratory, King seems lofty and often removed by the singleness of his concentration—an evangelical aristocrat. There is even a coldness in his public character, an impenetrability and solidity often seen in those who have given their entire lives to ideas and causes. The racism in America acts finally as an exhaustion to all except the strongest of black leaders. It leads to the urban, manic frenzy, the sleeplessness, hurry, and edginess that are a contrast to King’s steadiness and endurance.
Small-town Christianity, staged in some sense as it was, made King’s funeral supremely moving. Its themes were root American, bathed in memory, in forgotten prayers and hymns and dreams. Mule carts, sharecroppers, dusty poverty, sleepy Sunday morning services, and late Wednesday night prayer meetings after work. There in the reserved pews it was something else—candidates, former candidates, and hopeful candidates, illuminated, as it were, on prime viewing time, free of charge, you might say, free of past contributions to the collection plate, free of the envelopes of future pledges.
The rare young man was mourned and, without him, the world was fearful indeed. The other side of the funeral, Act Two ready in the wings, was the looting and anger of a black population inconsolable for its many losses.
“Jesus is a trick on niggers,” a character in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood says. The strength of belief revealed in King and in such associates as the Reverend Abernathy was a chastening irregularity, not a regionalism absorbed. It stands apart from our perfunctory addresses to “this nation under God.” In a later statement Abernathy has said that God, not Lester Maddox or George Wallace, rules over the South. So, Negro justice is God’s work and God’s will.
The popular Wesleyan hymns have always urged decent, sober behavior, or that is part of the sense of the urgings. As you sing, “I can hear my Savior calling,” you are invited to accept the community of the church and also, quite insistently, to behave yourself, stop drinking, gambling, and running around. Non-violence of a sort, but personal, thinking of the home and the family, and looking back to an agricultural or small-town life, far from the uprooted, inchoate, communal explosions in the ghettos of the cities. The political non-violence of Martin Luther King was an act of brilliant intellectual conviction, very sophisticated and yet perfectly consistent with evangelical religion, but not a necessary condition as we know from the white believers.
One of the cruelties of the South and part of the pathos of Martin Luther King’s funeral and the sadness that edges his rhetoric is that the same popular religion is shared by many bellicose white communicants. The religion seems to have sent few peaceful messages to them insofar as their brothers in Christ, the Negroes, are concerned. Experience leads one to suppose there was more respect for King among Jews, atheists, and comfortable Episcopalians, more sympathy and astonishment, than among the white congregations who use, with a different cadence, the same religious tone and the same hymns heard in the Ebenezer Church. Under the robes of the Klan there is an evangelical skin; its dogmatism is touched with the Scriptural, however perverse the reading of the text.
•
At one of the memorial services in Central Park after the murder, a radical speaker shouted, “You have killed the last good nigger!” This posturing exclamation was not meant to dishonor King, but to speak of his kind as something gone by, its season over. And perhaps so. The inclination of white leaders to characterize everything unpleasant to themselves in black response to American conditions as a desecration of King’s memory was a sordid footnote to what they had named the “redemptive moment.” But it told in a self-serving way of the peculiarity of the man, of the survival in him of habits of mind from an earlier time.
King’s language in the pulpit and in his speeches was effective but not remarkably interesting. His style compares well, however, with the speeches of recent presidents and even with those of Adlai Stevenson, most of them bland and flat in print. In many ways, King was not Southern and rural in his address, although he had a melting Georgia accent and his discourse was saturated in the Bible. His was a practical, not a frenzied exhortation, inspiring the Southern Negroes to the sacrifices and dangers of protest and yet reassuring them by its clarity and humanity.
His speech was most beautiful in the less oracular cadences, as when he summed up the meaning of the Poor People’s March on Washington with, “We have come for our checks!” The language of the younger generation is another thing altogether. It has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.
The murder of Martin Luther King was a “national disgrace.” That we said again and again and it would be cynical to hint at fraudulent feelings in the scramble for suitable acts of penance. Levittowns would henceforth not abide by local rulings, but would practice open housing; Walter Reuther offered $50,000 to the beleaguered sanitation workers of Memphis; the Field Foundation gave a million to the Southern Christian Leadership movement; Congress acted on the open housing bill. Nevertheless, the mundane continued to nudge the eternal. In 125 cities there was burning and looting. Smoke rose over Washington, D.C.
The Reverend Abernathy spoke of a plate of salad shared with Dr. King at the Lorraine Motel, creating a grief-laden scenery of the Last Supper. How odd it was after all, this exalted Black Liberation, played out at the holy table and at Gethsemane, “in the Garden,” as the hymns have it. A moment in history, each instance filled with symbolism and the aura of Christian memory. Perhaps what was celebrated in Atlanta was an end, not a beginning—the waning of the slow, sweet dream of Salvation, through Christ, for the Negro masses.
1968
CHICAGO
PHARAOHS of a Late Dynasty, Mayor Daley and Governor Connally, behind the podium, rock-strong in their desert, brooding, grunting, and nudging. Sometimes a finger was lifted to direct the hapless felaheen of the Illinois delegation, a band of folk sunk in apathetic unanimity. Or glumly a sign exacted a cheer from the citizen-guests of the Mayor’s own Chicago hectares. Their hymns, rising up, spoke not of Right or Necessity, but, simply, of Love. We Love Mayor Daley!
Everyone in Chicago, in the lobbies, in the bars, at the Amphitheater, had his story, bore his witness to horrors in the park, shoving and fraud at the convention, the menace of powers. There was even a certain amount of com
petition to have large Experiences, since experience could not be avoided altogether. At the beginning of the week, even the squares for Humphrey clung to the Yippies, gulping, “Did you hear they have arrested Pigasus?” Heavy, sheepish smiles. “Platform of garbage, a pig you see . . . No pay toilets . . .” Ha, ha.
No pleasure or irony or pop humor attended the world debut of Mayor Daley. He was visible and comprehensible instantly and as a whole: a figure to fear. Who would willingly have dealings with him? Affection and good deeds would no doubt be attributed to him, as an explanation, but if he fell it would be like the fall of King Farouk or Nkrumah. Goodbye, goodbye, forever; the same banners would suddenly say on the other side. Even as he began his plans to gather the flocks in Chicago, vanity and folly and cruelty trailed him like glowering bodyguards. Johnson, of course, deferred, as to the military, confident that Himself could handle it. The end was five days of pain and suffering, of lawless squalor and idiocy in the name of the State. Try as you would to remain fixed on the local and to be faithful to the particular, to the American root, images of Stalin and Hitler refused to fade away. The obvious was the most accurate.
Wednesday night, during the siege of the Hilton, when the police mercilessly beat young men before the eyes of everyone, you could hear the timid but determined voices of “concerned” women calling out, “What are the charges against that young man?” Or, “Stop, please, Sir, you are killing him!” The mention of the instruments of law and order sent the police into a wild rage and for a moment they stopped beating demonstrators and turned to threaten the frightened suburbans. During the raid on the McCarthy Headquarters, a girl in tears asked, “What are the grounds?” The police answered, “Coffee grounds.” With this lawlessness of the Law, misery fell from the sky. Suppose, you found yourself wondering, they should take over! “I have been a lifelong Democrat,” people kept whispering in bewilderment. Few had realized until Chicago how great a ruin Johnson and his war in Vietnam had brought down upon our country.
Hysterical supervision and repressiveness edged every important arrangement and decision of the Chicago administration. And even the most trivial details were marked by an intense, mystifying, futile fraudulence. What actually was there behind the ugly fences put up along the route to the Amphitheater? Sometimes a run-down building much more pleasing to one’s sense of life than the blind fences stood in hiding there—or we were, in this menacing way, simply being protected from an encounter with a vacant lot. One side of an old brick slum was painted a glaring, fresh, improbable red—a grotesque compliment to the sensibilities and common sense of the visitors. The coarseness of mind that produced these improvements and camouflage blacked out the beauty and fascination of the city. Inevitably with so much care and effort all artfully flowing from the singular inspiration of Mayor Daley, a style came to life. The style was defined by its unmistakable origin in a previous tradition: it was police-state, concentration-camp style, a mode always available to the mood of tyranny. One is almost ashamed to admit how frightening it was.
•
Fear and anger: these had been growing and gnawing in many a Chicago planning session, in all those burly conferences. They feared, dismaying as it is to imagine—at the least a blot on the name of Chicago! At the worst—a disaster, single tragedies, multiple blows, assassinations, fire, poisoned water, Japanese-style suicide planes crashing on the gathered delegates, blackouts. Humphrey spoke with feeling of threats to himself; and indeed who among the crowd of youth honored him, who would save him, when there was not a single vote winging his way from out there, unless it might be those of the five plainclothesmen, shoeless, in hirsute disguises? “It was all programmed!” he exclaimed. They were out to get him, out to get Mayor Daley’s city, out to get the Nomination, out to get the Democratic Party. These hordes, born too late to understand those who had made their way, those who, as they kept insisting, “loved and believed in this country.” Several times, in the last year, Humphrey had, using a homely verb phrase, found that demonstrators and striking students made him “feel sick to my stomach.”
Assassinations: why should we doubt that the threats were made? It is a question simply of who made them. And here, without evidence, what can we call upon except our sense of things? Perhaps there is some secrecy in the militant peace groups, but secrecy is hard to credit among those whose strength comes from free and open assault on the sensibilities, the frayed nerves, of those in charge of things.
Answer this: how could youngsters milling and screaming in the streets possibly assassinate in their hotel rooms the heavily guarded candidates who sat, safely working the dials on the TV set. CBS or NBC? Exhausting. Shut out the message from Gulf. And what was threatened except the grass and certain city ordinances by the Yippies in the cold dark park after the curfew? It was anger, surely, and not fear that drove the scourgers against the Yippies. A father, sweating, red-faced, unchallenged, beating up his son, “over-reacting.” Bad young people and, particularly, their “bad language”—standing for what buried offenses? It was a misfortune that the curious, jowly, porky figures of many of the policemen and the memorable configuration of Mayor Daley gave a stinging lift to the shout of “Pig!” (Mayor Daley has some difficulty with speech; he grunts out words that are themselves prone to mishap. Thus in his welcoming he said the visitors to Chicago would be “subjected to the famous hospitality of the middle West.”)
The words of the demonstrators enraged because with a frankness and economy they represented attitudes. They speak of an unwanted future. Clothes, hair: this too is language. A terrifying succession stands impatiently in line. The brutality of the nightstick, the thick skin of the victorious candidates, the meanness, the lies, the unmanly fears: all of this allowed the sordid, parental self-protection to show itself. Insofar as the safety of the community was concerned, the actions of the police were a dangerous and stupid diversion, alas like Vietnam. We see that, deep down, truly, the police and Mayor Daley did not believe in hidden and sinister danger from the demonstrators; otherwise they would not have been out on the street beating them up, making it easy for some clean shaven Nihilist to wander where he would.
•
When the authorities spoke, in justification, they trembled at the recollection of the revolutionary, guerrilla warfare rhetoric of the “Free Press” and student newspapers. These publications so filled with jokes and gags and dirty cartoons are read with iron literalness by the FBI, the vice president, the leaders of the Democratic Party, and by the police. I am reminded of Disraeli who, although a Jew himself, did not know much about the Jews and found the Jewish power described in the protocols of Zion strangely fascinating. He hadn’t until then thought his people controlled so much. “Why they’ve got maps of the city, of the transportation system!” Mayor Daley said. Surely, he was talking about the newspaper Rat, whose Convention Special with its maps and its account of the action to come was an encyclopedia for all who were puzzling over the distance between the Hilton and Grant Park. The “intelligence” gathered from the newspapers around Greenwich Village will apparently be a large part of the case for the defense. There is pathos and humor in all this, like a dinosaur choking on bubble gum. A fearful gap, not only in generations, but in common sense, in ordinary understanding of the world about us, has opened up. And how can we face this, except with dread?
•
In Grant Park, the demonstrators gathered for the Wednesday afternoon march they were not allowed to have, just as they had not been allowed permits for any of their rallies or marches. Here again swollen fear seemed determined to make the “confrontation” uniquely dramatic. In the late afternoon the “non-violent” group began to assemble under the statue. A middle group, apparently made up of those willing if necessary to suffer violence but not to inflict it, gathered elsewhere. And a third group, “those who would take part in the action,” was directed to its starting place. Tom Hayden—“Mr. Underground” they were calling him now—said, “if they gas us, the gas will
go all over the city; if they burn us they will burn.” This is militant dialogue and one is never quite sure just what is meant by it, how “self-defense” is to work for the appallingly outnumbered and weak. But in Chicago exaggeration became fact. The police—“over-reacting”—caught everyone up in their violence. Tear gas vexed the eye of candidate, party hack, and demonstrator. What revolutionary could have imagined the useful violence against the press and the television crews?
The youngsters assembled for the “action” were told, “You may be going to your death, but it will be worth it.” In those words, there in the bright, crowded, excited afternoon all of the pity and terror of the future lies. Bolivian adventures in unprepared mountains—and death. Wave a Viet Cong flag and drive them out of their minds! Take down the stars and stripes and watch them charge, ready for the kill. The more militant demonstrators, resting later in the week, told newsmen they were going into training for battle, they would learn, among other things, how to trip the horses that carried the policemen when they came charging down on them. In Chicago, neither a shooting, nor a stabbing, nor a burning, nor a sabotage has been reported. Guerrilla rhetoric, determination to cross the line into the street, rocks and bottles provoked outstandingly furious, awful reprisal. And we remember the story of the policeman, true or not, who fainted when a stream of hairspray surprised him. As he went down no doubt he felt on his face the cool touch of a death-dealing Commie ray. . . . The “confrontation” took place. Many dreams came true. A bunch of ministers and minstrels could not have brought it off by songs and prayers of PEACE NOW. Is it birth or death?
•
Hubert Humphrey is an altogether embarrassing figure, with his dyed black hair and glowing television make-up. He creates a sense of false energy—like an MC on an afternoon show. The present Democratic leadership appears to be divided between bullies and cowards and Humphrey asks us to take our chances on the coward. You will find me less dangerous, he seems to be trying to assure us.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 20