The Soul of America

by Jon Meacham

  An elegant formulation, but Kennedy continued to speak in concrete terms, making the issue as tangible as he could: “If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?”

  Wallace was forced to step aside at Tuscaloosa (“Now you sonuvabitches are on the other side, ain’t you?” he joked to the federalized Alabama National Guard, now under presidential orders to enforce the law against their governor), and his stand in Tuscaloosa in the early summer of 1963 helped push Kennedy to introduce a wide-ranging civil rights measure—the legislation that was still pending when the president was killed in November. Kennedy had carried the day against Wallace, but it was just that—the day, not eternity.

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  Title II of the proposed bill outlawed segregation in public accommodations. One day in the Senate, Johnson, still the vice president, called over John Stennis of Mississippi, a fellow Democrat. As a Senate Democratic aide recalled the moment:

  Johnson said, “How do you like that Title II of the civil rights bill, John?”

  Stennis said, “Oh, Lyndon, well, you know, our people just can’t take that kind of thing. It’s just impossible. I mean, I believe a man ought to have the right to—if he owns a store or owns a café—he ought to have the right to serve whom he wants to serve. Our people will just never take it.”

  Lyndon said, “Then you don’t think you’ll support it.”

  “Oh, no, Lyndon, I don’t think I’ll support it at all.”

  Johnson said, “Well, you know, John, the other day a sad thing happened. Helen Williams and her husband, Gene, who [are African Americans and] have been working for me for many years, drove my official car from Washington down to Texas, the Cadillac limousine of the vice-president of the United States. They drove through your state, and when they got hungry, they stopped at grocery stores on the edge of town in colored areas and bought Vienna sausage and beans and ate them with a plastic spoon. And when they had to go to the bathroom, they would stop, pull off on a side road, and Helen Williams, an employee of the vice-president of the United States, would squat in the road to pee. And you know, John, that’s just bad. That’s wrong. And there ought to be something to change that. And it seems to me that if people in Mississippi don’t change it voluntarily, that it’s just going to be necessary to change it by law.”

  “Well, Lyndon, I’m sure that there were nice places where…”

  Then the vice-president just said, “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” and sort of looked away vacantly and said, “Well, thank you, John.” And Stennis left. Johnson turned around to me and winked. It represented, as I say, the first time I had ever really had the feeling that the comprehension of the simple indignity of discrimination was deep in Johnson.

  On the evening of Kennedy’s funeral in Washington, Johnson tracked King down in New York City. King, who was staying at the Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue, had issued a supportive statement the day after the assassination, and Johnson was grateful. “President Johnson will follow the path charted by President Kennedy in civil rights,” King had said. “It does not at all mean a setback.”

  “We know what a difficult period this is,” King said to Johnson on the telephone.

  “It’s just an impossible period,” Johnson said. “We’ve got a budget coming out that’s practically already made, and we’ve got a civil rights bill….We’ve got to just not give up on any of them.”

  “Well, this is mighty fine,” King said. “I think one of the great tributes we can pay in memory of President Kennedy is to try to enact some of the great progressive policies that he sought to initiate.”

  “I’m going to support ’em all and you can count on that,” Johnson said. “And I’m going to do my best to get other men to do likewise and I’ll have to have you-all’s help. I never needed it more’n I do now.”

  Providence—or fate, depending on one’s worldview—had brought King to the center of the great domestic drama of the American Century. A scion of the African American ecclesiastical elite—his father, Martin Luther King, Sr., was a leading preacher, the pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church—the younger King was educated at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, and Boston University. He was called to the pulpit of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery in 1954. In December 1955, when Rosa Parks, a seamstress, was arrested after declining to surrender her seat on a Montgomery city bus to a white passenger, organizers needed a place to meet to explore a boycott of public transportation. E. D. Nixon, the president of the local NAACP, called King. Nixon wanted to hold the gathering at Dexter.

  Geography, as Napoleon is sometimes said to have remarked, was destiny. Dexter’s “central location made the church convenient for people working in downtown offices,” wrote King biographer Taylor Branch. Yes, of course, King told Nixon.

  On the night he first spoke to a mass meeting on the boycott, in a scene vividly described by Branch, King sensed the possibilities of the moment—not least because there were so many people flocking to the gathering that his car could not get near the building. “This,” King remarked to a friend, “could turn into something big.”

  “We are here this evening—for serious business,” King told the huge crowd on Monday, December 5, 1955. “We are here in a general sense, because first and foremost—we are American citizens—and we are determined to apply our citizenship—to the fullness of its meaning.”

  He saluted Rosa Parks’s courage, then offered a trilogy of sentences that transported his audience and set the keynote for the next dozen years of his now-public life. “And you know, my friends,” King said, “there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July, and left standing amid the piercing chill of an Alpine November.”

  As the ecstatic crowd calmed, he said again: “We are here—we are here this evening because we are tired now.”

  And at last, at last: “And we are determined here in Montgomery—to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream!”

  From that moment until his assassination on the balcony of a Memphis motel in April 1968, King would lead a complex movement of nonviolent protest against segregation and for economic justice. His house in Montgomery was bombed within two months of his debut boycott sermon. “Nigger, we are tired of you and your mess now,” a caller told King on the telephone after the attack. “If you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out and blow up your house.” In the face of such hate, King’s faith sustained him. “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right,” he prayed after the call. “But Lord I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering, I’m losing my courage.”

  As King recalled it, “I could hear an inner voice saying to me: ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And, lo, I will be with you even until the end of the world.’ I heard Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.”

  By making a nonviolent case against segregation, King and innumerable others appealed to the nation’s conscience in memorable campaigns—from sit-ins to Freedom Rides to Mississippi’s Freedom Summer to the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham. Protest and high politics—the crucial forces that history usually requires to make great changes—intersected most notabl
y, perhaps, on Wednesday, August 28, 1963, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

  King’s address to the march that afternoon was not going well, or at least not as well as he had hoped. The day had been long; the crowds massed before the Lincoln Memorial were ready for some rhetorical adrenaline, some true poetry. King’s task was to lift his speech from the ordinary to the historic, from the mundane to the sacred. He was standing before the greatest audience of his life. Yet with the television networks broadcasting live and President Kennedy watching from the White House, King was struggling with a text that had been drafted by too many hands late the previous night at the Willard Hotel. One sentence he was about to deliver was particularly awkward: “And so today, let us go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction.” King was on the verge of letting the hour pass him by.

  Then, as on Easter morning at the tomb of the crucified Jesus, there was the sound of a woman’s voice. King had already begun to extemporize when the singer Mahalia Jackson spoke up. “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin,” said Jackson, who was standing nearby. King left his text altogether at this point—a departure that put him on a path to speaking words of American scripture, words as essential to the nation’s destiny in their way as those of Lincoln, before whose memorial King stood, and those of Jefferson, whose monument lay to the preacher’s right, toward the Potomac. The moments of ensuing oratory lifted King above the tumult of history and made him a figure of history—a “new founding father,” in Taylor Branch’s apt phrase.

  “I say to you today, my friends…even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream,” King said. “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American Dream”—a dream that had been best captured in the promise of words written in a distant summer in Philadelphia by Jefferson. “I have a dream,” King continued, “that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ ”

  Drawing on the Bible and “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” on the Emancipation Proclamation and the Constitution, King projected an ideal vision of an exceptional nation. In King’s imagined country, hope triumphed over the fear. In doing so, King defined the best of the nation as surely as Jefferson did in Philadelphia in 1776 or Lincoln did at Gettysburg in 1863.

  I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

  I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

  I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character….

  I have a dream today.

  Like our more familiar founders (Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson), King was a practical idealist, a man who could articulate the perfect but knew that human progress, while sometimes intoxicatingly rapid, tends to be provisional. The march was but a step. Nineteen sixty-three, King said that day, was “not an end but a beginning.”

  It’s tempting to romanticize the words King spoke before the Lincoln Memorial. To do so, however, cheapens the courage of the nonviolent soldiers of freedom who faced—and too often paid—the ultimate price for daring America to live up to the implications of the Declaration of Independence and become a country in which liberty was innate and universal, not particular to station, creed, or color. In Washington to demand legislative action, King spoke as a minister of the Lord, invoking the meaning of the Sermon on the Mount in a city more often interested in the mechanics of the Congress.

  White Washington had expected mayhem. Few bureaucrats or lawyers who worked downtown in the capital showed up for work on the day of the march. That many blacks? In one place? Who knew what might happen? Even the ordinarily liberal New York Times was wary. “There was great fear there would be rioting,” recalled The New York Times’s Russell Baker, who was assigned a front-page feature on the march, “so the Times chartered a chopper.” Boarding the helicopter early in the day, Baker grew so bored by the peaceable spectacle that he asked the pilot to fly over his house so he could check on the condition of his roof. “Finally,” said Baker, “I had him land at National Airport and went to the Lincoln Memorial.”

  It was, it turned out, not only orderly but also integrated. Bob Dylan, Charlton Heston, and Marlon Brando were there; Baker took note of the series of speeches and songs, including Mahalia Jackson’s “I Been ’Buked and I Been Scorned,” a spiritual delivered with such power that Baker reported Jackson’s voice seemed to echo off the far-off Capitol. Speaker after speaker—the young John Lewis, the aged A. Philip Randolph—made the case for racial justice. “For many, the day seemed an adventure, a long outing in the late summer sun—part liberation from home, part Sunday School picnic, part political convention, and part fish-fry,” James Reston wrote in his piece for the Times the next day.

  In the White House, “JFK heard some of the speeches and chants through an open window of the third-floor White House Solarium,” the historian Michael Beschloss wrote. “Gripping the windowsill, he told the Mansion’s courtly black doorman, Preston Bruce, ‘Oh, Bruce, I wish I were out there with them!’ ” But not enough to risk appearing at an event that Kennedy believed would alienate many white voters.

  The president watched King’s speech on television, listened with appreciation, then readied for a meeting with the march’s leadership to discuss pushing legislation through a Congress still dominated by white-segregationist Democrats. The conversation did not produce much in the way of progress. Kennedy feared moving too quickly, and, as they had said again and again all afternoon, the civil rights delegates from the Mall believed the time for action was at hand.

  King had anticipated Kennedy’s temporizing. The pilgrimage would be long, he had told his listeners, and the pilgrims had to maintain the moral high ground they had so effectively claimed through nonviolence. “In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds,” King had told the crowd. “We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline.” If the politicians were too slow, well, that meant there had to be yet more dignity and yet more discipline.

  The Times’s Reston, a reliable molder and barometer of Establishment opinion, however, believed the day had in fact accomplished something, even if JFK was less than enthusiastic during the White House meeting late that afternoon. “The demonstration impressed political Washington because it combined a number of things no politician can ignore,” Reston wrote. “It had the force of numbers. It had the melodies of both the church and the theater. And it was able to invoke the principles of the founding fathers to rebuke the inequalities and hypocrisies of modern American life.”

  On that August Wednesday, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial—the spot on which he stood is marked there now, a sacred slab hidden in plain sight in the middle of the American capital—King drew from scripture as he joined the ranks of the founders. In the beginning of the Republic, men dreamed big but failed to include everyone in that dream, limiting liberty largely to white men. Speaking in 1963, King brilliantly argued for the expansion of the founders’ vision—nothing more, but surely nothing less. In so doing, a preacher from the South summoned a nation to justice and won his place in the American pantheon. “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and every mountain shall be made low,” King said. “The rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” He paused, then pressed on: “This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the
South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” Transforming that hope into history remained the work of King’s days.

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  And of Lyndon Johnson’s. In the months after the Kennedy assassination, the new president pressed his old colleagues on Capitol Hill to give the civil rights bill a full and fair trial. President Johnson asked King to come see him in the Oval Office on Tuesday, December 3, 1963. LBJ spoke of the minutiae of reform—he needed to force the legislation out of the Southern-controlled Rules Committee in the House with a “discharge petition,” a device that would put the bill on the floor for a vote. Johnson was understandably consumed with the maneuver. Without it the bill would die a procedural death; with it progress was possible. “He made it very clear he wants the civil rights bill out of the Rules Committee before Christmas,” King told reporters afterward. “He means business. I think we can expect even more from him than we have had up to now.”

  The day before his meeting with King, Johnson had also made himself clear in a telephone conversation with Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. “Now every person that doesn’t sign that petition has got to be fairly regarded as being anti–civil rights,” Johnson had said. “I don’t care if he votes against the bill after he gets a chance to vote on it….But I don’t think any American can say that he won’t let ’em have a hearing either in the committee or on the floor. That is worse than Hitler did. So we’ve got to get ready for that and we’ve got to get ready every day. Front page. In and out. Individuals. Why—are—you—a-gainst—a—hearing? And point ’em out and have their pictures and have editorials and have everything else that is in a dignified way for a hearing on the floor.”

  Johnson went to work on members of the House and, after victory there in January (when the Rules Committee forwarded the bill to the full House) and in February (when the House passed the legislation), he shifted his energies to his former colleagues in the Senate. He needed sixty-seven votes in the upper chamber to invoke cloture and cut off the Southern-led filibuster.