On April 6, 1962, the U.S. Women for Peace delegation departed for Switzerland. In Geneva, we were joined by women from Scandinavia and other countries such as Australia and the Soviet Union. Our goal was to join the international effort to influence the atomic test ban talks being held there by the United Nations Committee on Disarmament. We were there for the sake of our children. We knew that radioactive fallout from atmospheric tests was affecting our children’s milk, bone structure, and overall health. Less than two years after our visit, we felt that our efforts, along with those of other peace advocates, had helped make history when the United States and the Soviet Union signed a nuclear test ban treaty.
I returned home to Atlanta from Geneva on a Friday. To my sorrow, I did not have time to properly rehearse for a concert I was scheduled to perform in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Sunday. I performed the concert, a standard repertoire with French, Italian, and German songs, but I wasn’t happy with it. I thought, “I have three kids. I have to figure out how to do this in a way that isn’t so stressful.”
And so I developed the idea of the Freedom Concert. I patterned it after Paul Robeson’s performances, which I’d had the good fortune of first seeing at Antioch; he would give a political commentary before he sang. Similarly, I would open my concerts by talking about the struggle, the movement. I would narrate and sing, alternating parts of the story with a song, mostly hymns or freedom songs. The Freedom Concerts, though less taxing on my voice than the standard classical music repertoire I had been performing, were highly rewarding: they raised thousands of dollars for the SCLC, which badly needed funds.
So Cincinnati became my last concert with a standard repertoire. Afterward, I took a two-year hiatus and did not sing again publicly until I performed my first Freedom Concert, on November 15, 1964, at New York City’s Town Hall.
As I stepped away from the concert stage during that hiatus, I stepped back into the pace of the movement, which was racing along at a dazzling, tumultuous speed, with both victories and perils around every corner. And when Martin was facing danger, I was facing danger, too, whether I was out in the street with him or awaiting his return to our home. The term other half aptly fit Martin and me. In fact, we were more than that. I often felt as if we were one heartbeat, one soul. When he was in jail, I was in jail. When he was beaten up, I was beaten up. In some instances, his whole family was in pain, due to the emotions my children internalized through me when Martin was endangered. I often said I was stronger in a crisis, but that describes only my response, not my inner feelings. When he was away, I had to wait with my own anxieties—and with the eager eyes of our four children, only two of whom could actually speak well enough to ask, “When is Daddy coming home?”
On one night back in May 1961, Martin barely escaped grave injury from a mob gathered outside a rally for the Freedom Riders at Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church in Montgomery. After Martin’s speech, carloads of angry whites surrounded the church, throwing rocks through the stained-glass windows, showering the worshippers with shards of glass. The men outside cursed and threatened to burn down the church. With rocks and curses filling the air, Martin and the congregation prayed and sang hymns, including “We Shall Overcome.”
As Martin left, a gas bomb whizzed past his head. One of his aides, Rev. Fred C. Bennette, picked up the bomb and threw it over Martin’s shoulder, away from him, and someone pulled Martin back into the church, where he stayed most of the night with the worshippers. Eventually someone reached the U.S. attorney general, Bobby Kennedy, who sent federal marshals to disperse the mob. As was our routine when Martin came home, our family filled the house with prayer and songs of praise. The climate we faced on a daily basis gave us much to pray about.
In the fall of 1961, some SNCC and NAACP leaders turned their focus to Albany, Georgia, a town of about fifty thousand residents (40 percent black) about 180 miles south of our home in Atlanta. Albany was the heart of hard-core “redneck country.” Early that November, SNCC-trained high school students began a peaceful protest at an illegally segregated bus terminal in Albany, and although none of the students was arrested, their actions inspired a movement to desegregate all of Albany. A series of sit-ins, boycotts, and other forms of nonviolent protest started up, so that by December, more than five hundred people had been jailed in Albany. Then Dr. William G. Anderson, a respected black osteopath and a friend of Martin’s from their days as college students in Atlanta, called Martin for help. On December 15, Martin spoke at Shiloh Baptist Church in Albany; the next day, he and Ralph joined a protest there, and were arrested. Martin’s arrival had attracted even more people to protest. In fact, I had never seen anything like Albany. Black maids were going to jail under assumed names to keep from being fired by their white employers. I saw children who had been arrested and released, enlisting to go back to jail again just to be with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
While other people’s children wanted to be jailed with a hero, my own children just wanted Daddy home. Since our family lived within a five-hour drive of Albany, I often left baby Dexter with caregivers and drove with our two oldest children to see Martin. Yoki was seven and Marty was five during Martin’s confinement in Albany. To avoid explaining why we had to go in the back door of a restaurant to avoid being called “nigger,” I always packed our lunch. We also tried to avoid stopping at the segregated restrooms. Albany would be the first time the children saw their father in prison clothes, in a small, dingy cell. I wondered how they would feel. They were confused when the cell door did not open and Daddy did not come out, but moments later, they played happily up and down the darkened jail corridors. It was only as they grew older that the tougher questions came.
In Albany, Martin reached an agreement with city officials: if they released him, he would leave town (which was something they badly wanted), as long as they also agreed to desegregate the buses and also release all the other protesters on bail. Martin left town, the city officials failed to keep their end of the bargain, and on July 10, 1962, Martin and Ralph returned to Albany to face trial. They were convicted of leading the big December march. I attended the trial, and was surprised when Martin and Ralph were given suspended sentences. In fact, they were released from jail to stop the public attention that was being focused on segregation there. Rather than integrate public facilities, Albany officials closed the city parks and the public library. While we did not win a large victory at that time, our loss helped the SCLC learn valuable lessons. True, effective change was hampered by a lack of registered black voters.
* * *
AROUND THIS TIME, I began to agonize over what would become of our movement if something happened to Martin. The movement had many bright, committed people and great civil rights leaders, such as Whitney Young at the Urban League and Roy Wilkins at the NAACP, but the media had essentially anointed Martin president of black America.
I understood that leadership training was basic to the SCLC concept, but I did not know if it was possible for a charismatic leader to establish a permanent organization, since that type of leadership is built on the personality or appeal of that particular leader. For instance, the Marcus Garvey movement became a shell of itself when J. Edgar Hoover, the same man who tried to discredit my husband, succeeded in a campaign to imprison Garvey. Movements headed by other charismatic leaders, including Gandhi, collapsed without the leader or a structure to continue the leader’s passion and programs.
When the heads of General Motors or AT&T move on, the established structure and rules provide a foundation for continuity under the next leader. But in our movement, we were making up the rules as we went from city to city. All too often, the media and the powers-that-be wanted to deal only with Martin, reinforcing the notion that the movement had only one spokesman. In addition to putting a lot of pressure on Martin, this created tension among some of the other movement leaders. But Martin did not think of himself as the chief; he preferred, and worked well with, a coalition.
It was a coalition
that was growing by the day as scores of young people joined the movement. The involvement of dozens of America’s best and brightest, who cast their lot with us, engaged their minds, and readied their bodies for a bloody battlefield, helped reduce some of the angst I had about our future direction. Most were college students or recent graduates. Some, like Andrew Young, had already received movement-related battle scars. A graduate of Hartford Theological Seminary, Young was a pastor at Bethany Congregational Church in Thomasville, Georgia. He knew what it felt like to watch the KKK parade around town in full regalia as a warning against the voting rights drive he was leading there. While the SCLC was well connected through the network of black Baptist and Methodist churches, Young’s ability to plug us into white liberal circles was invaluable. He later moved up through the SCLC to become executive vice president, the rank he held at the time of Martin’s death. He would become one of my closest friends and, after Martin’s death, a surrogate father to our children.
The Rev. James Bevel, along with his future wife, Diane Nash, came from the Nashville movement. James Orange, one of the finest organizers in the country, came from Birmingham. Willie Bolden, Lester Hankerson, and Ben Clark came to us from the Savannah movement, led by that staunch agitator Hosea Williams. Like Williams, Bernard Lafayette specialized in conducting training in nonviolence. Septima Clark brought to the SCLC’s Citizenship Education Program valuable insight from her experiences teaching adult education in her native Charleston, South Carolina. The Rev. Walter Fauntroy, whom I would later help get elected as the first, nonvoting delegate to Congress from the District of Columbia, also became a valuable aide, to the point at which Martin would say, “He is one of two persons who could run SCLC after I’m gone.”
Still, though the future was always in our minds, we didn’t have much time for long-term planning or soul searching or reflection, as there were too often more pressing matters to attend to. That was the case as the work of the civil rights movement moved on from Albany to one of the biggest and most demanding campaigns yet: Birmingham.
TEN
So Evil Only God Could Change It
MARTIN ONCE SAID of Birmingham, “All the evils and injustices the Negro can be subjected to are right here in Birmingham.” I soon found that truer words had never been spoken. Birmingham was notorious for ordinary day-to-day terrorism. The city had been hoisted to national infamy by black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier, which called it the “worst city in America.” Between 1957 and 1963, eighteen unsolved bombings of black churches and homes occurred, earning the city the ignoble title of “Bombingham.”
Bull Connor, the city’s infamous commissioner of public safety, was notorious for his efforts to enforce segregation, deny black citizens their civil rights, and strong-arm any protests. I was told that when the NAACP tried to meet, he sent his police to bust up the meetings, and had thus succeeded in keeping that organization out of Birmingham. In 1962, Bull Connor closed sixty-eight parks, thirty-eight playgrounds, six swimming pools, and four golf courses rather than comply with a federal court order to desegregate public facilities.
Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who convinced Martin to make Birmingham the next major campaign, barely escaped death when his home was bombed to ruins in 1956. When he tried to enroll his children at a public school in 1957, he was chain-whipped on a public street by a white mob, and his wife was stabbed—with the cops present. In none of these incidents were any arrests made. Birmingham was the largest city in a police state presided over by Governor George Wallace, whose inauguration vow was “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
Once Martin and his SCLC team understood the viciousness of Birmingham, I knew what Martin’s reaction would be. What better place to stage a nonviolent direct action than in one of the most violent enclaves in the nation? Before taking that action, however, in early 1963, Ralph Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth met with the Kennedy brothers to urge the federal government to initiate national civil rights legislation, but those efforts didn’t work. Then, early in April, the Birmingham city government obtained a state circuit court injunction against protests, and Martin decided he would defy the injunction and go to jail. The timing of those protests, however, depended on the birth of our fourth child. I was eight months pregnant, and Martin was determined either to slow things down or to speed things up so he could be with me and see his child being born before going to jail.
During the month of March, Martin dashed back and forth between Birmingham and Atlanta, keeping a watch on me. My pregnancy was becoming difficult. I had extreme hip discomfort, as I’d had when I was pregnant with Marty, and could not walk down the stairs. My doctor confined me to bed rest, and Martin had to run up and down the stairs, preparing my meals and bringing me a bedpan. Unable to stand seeing me suffer, he tried to get our doctor to induce labor.
Moreover, Good Friday was approaching. Because of its major symbolic and religious significance, Martin wanted the demonstrations to take place so he could be in jail on that date. He didn’t want events to overtake him and snatch him away from me when he was really needed. A friend recommended that I take a dose of castor oil to induce labor, and Martin and I agreed. Nothing happened. The next day, I took a larger dose, and on Thursday, March 28, as soon as I reached the hospital and was settled, my beautiful little darling daughter was born. We named her Bernice Albertine after her two grandmothers, and called her Bunny.
The very next day, however, Martin left for Birmingham. Five days later, the protests began. Did I feel abandoned or neglected because of my husband’s quick departure after the birth of our daughter? The question has been raised before, but my answer is not complicated. For the most part, Martin and I shared values. I knew he loved his family, but we both had a higher calling and purpose that was much larger than the fulfillment of our own desires. As much as I loved Martin, I knew he belonged not just to me but to his calling. It had to be his first priority.
On April 3, lunch counter sit-ins began in Birmingham. Arrests followed. Over three days, about five hundred people had been jailed. There was a city injunction against protesting, but Martin took a leap of faith. He chose to break the injunction by organizing a march and provoking the police into arresting him on April 12, Good Friday. He announced his decision at Zion Hill Church, where the march was scheduled to begin. In his address, he made the link between the redemptive act of the suffering of Jesus on Good Friday and what lay ahead for those who faced sudden arrests or beatings. As he left the pulpit, women and men shouted out to him, “There he goes, just like Jesus.” Then people poured out into the aisle, following him to the march.
It looked like every police officer on the force was waiting. All along the streets, blacks were encouraging themselves by singing freedom songs. When Martin passed, they applauded.
As the march neared downtown, Bull Connor ordered his men to move in. Two muscular policemen roughly clutched Martin and Ralph by the backs of their shirts and shoved them into a police car. Martin and Ralph were separated and held in solitary confinement. Even their lawyers could not see them.
And neither could I. Because of the complications from my pregnancy, I was confined to my house in Atlanta. I waited by the phone, but there was no call from Martin. Saturday came. Still no Martin. I woke up on Easter Sunday despondent. I knew how badly Martin had wanted to be in his pulpit.
In desperation, I called Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker in Birmingham.
“What have you heard, Wyatt?” I asked.
“Coretta, I haven’t been able to get a phone message to him. Martin is being held incommunicado.”
Wyatt suggested I put in a call to President Kennedy. For a moment, I thought: Me? Call the president?
Kennedy had been helpful to us before. Still, it seemed a bold move to reach out. I mulled it over. I had heard Martin was sleeping on a steel cot with no mattress. I thought about the evil ways of Birmingham, how somebody could kill him.
Resolved, I tried to get th
e number where the president was staying in West Palm Beach, but to no avail. I told the White House operator to find Vice President Lyndon Johnson, but that didn’t work, either. After explaining my situation, the operator, a kind and sympathetic woman, suggested I call Pierre Salinger, the White House press secretary. I reached Salinger immediately, and he promised to make every effort to have the president call me.
While I was waiting for a call from the president, Harry Belafonte called. Harry and I had become close friends ever since performing at the same benefit concert in New York on the one-year anniversary of the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. From then on, whenever tragedy or a crisis hit, which was often, he showed up ready to help. I could lean on Harry. That day, I was very depressed and spilled out my troubles. I explained that I was not trying to get Martin out of jail, because I knew he wouldn’t want that. I was just concerned about his safety. I told Harry about the phone ringing off the hook with inquiries about Martin, the demands of a two-week-old baby, and my desire to go immediately to Birmingham to be with Martin. Harry took charge, telling me that, if Martin wouldn’t object, I should hire a nurse and a secretary at his, Harry’s, expense. How well he knew my husband. Martin objected to anything that might suggest we were living pretentiously or “high on the hog.”
While we were talking, a familiar voice called on the other line. “Mrs. King, this is Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The president wasn’t able to talk to you because he’s with our father, who is quite ill. He wanted me to call to find out how we can help.”
I expressed my concern for his father’s illness, but then I poured out our situation, trying to make it clear that I was only calling out of concern for Martin’s safety and not trying to get him released from jail. Bobby told me how sorry he and the president were about what was happening with Martin, but said that they themselves had trouble dealing with Bull Connor. Bobby promised to do his best to help, however.
My Life, My Love, My Legacy Page 12