My Life, My Love, My Legacy

by Coretta Scott King

  In my mind, I was thinking: How can I get all this done, put everything in place, and still be with Martin? I bet people might be saying, ‘Oh, look at that woman running after that man.’” Yet, I lived with the terrible reality that our days together were numbered. I knew that sooner rather than later I would not have Martin, and I didn’t ever want to feel that Martin had asked me to do something I did not do. I was willing to make whatever sacrifice I could.

  It was hard, though. That Tuesday night, I received only one hour of sleep. At the end of the day, I felt as I did the first day I marched in Selma. My legs felt disjointed, like they were coming apart from the hips. And I was so tired.

  Still, the next morning, I dropped everything anyway and took off, leaving all the unfinished business behind. As an admitted perfectionist, that was difficult for me. Yet it was astonishingly easy for me as Martin’s soul mate and wife.

  We had a lovely (and rare) getaway to the Bahamas, and when we got home it was right back to business. In 1965, Martin made a dramatic shift in the movement, from South to North, from the battleground of the Bull Connors and Jim Clarks to the plantation of Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley. In keeping with Martin’s style of leadership, which chose to challenge the worst examples and draw them into the public eye, Chicago became the SCLC’s next target. Its towering housing projects loomed like upright concentration camps, placing abject black poverty within sight of white opulence. These visuals, combined with the deep despair of many of the impoverished blacks, made the city an ideal challenge.

  Switching gears proved more difficult than we could have ever imagined. The black community was spread out over such a large area. It was not as tightly knit in the North as it was down home, which meant there were many more factions to pull together. Moreover, we had never gone up against a sophisticated political machine, one much more devious than that we had experienced at home.

  Martin’s primary goal was to prove to naysayers that nonviolence could work in a tough and gritty urban context. His mission was to dramatize the conditions of the black poor, to create an understanding of their plight among the powerful, to equip blacks to change their conditions, and to bring whites and blacks together in a spirit of cooperation.

  In Chicago, Martin decided to live among the “least of them” and rent an apartment in the ghetto. I agreed to pack up the kids and move with him, since we did not know how long the campaign would take. Martin arrived in Chicago first, in January; I joined him once he’d found an apartment, and we planned to bring the children in at the beginning of the summer.

  In all my life, I had rarely seen anything like the conditions we faced in Chicago. The level of poverty called to mind our travels through Bombay a few years before. Our apartment on the West Side, among the poorest of the poor, was in a dingy building that had no lights in the hall except for a single dim bulb at the head of the stairs. There were no locks on the front door; drunks came in and used the hallway as a public toilet, so it always smelled of urine. Our apartment was on the third floor, up three sets of rickety stairs. The old refrigerator didn’t work; neither did the dilapidated gas stove. The heat didn’t work, and sometimes it felt as cold inside as out, with temperatures that often dropped below zero in the winter. As we became friendlier with our neighbors and were invited into their apartments, we learned that, as bad as our accommodations were, others had it even worse. On the third floor of one building, we met a family of ten who were crowded together in a tiny apartment with no heat or running water.

  I had never seen such depressing conditions, but no matter how miserable we were, we understood that our suffering could not be compared to that of those who lived permanently in the housing projects and had little chance of escaping or improving their lot. Our rent was eighty dollars monthly, which was more than the whites paid in nicer areas in the suburbs. What exploitation. Poor blacks were trapped in a vicious cycle: redlining by white real estate agents and selective covenants restricted them to concrete ghettos where education, medical services, and transportation were grossly limited. Few educational options led to unemployment, which in turn forced many blacks to opt for welfare to feed their families. Those on aid could not own property, not even an automobile. This policy ultimately confined the trapped ghetto dwellers to jobs near their homes, limited though they were. Prices for food and clothing around the ghetto were also hiked up, intensifying the financial exploitation and ensuring the confinement of project residents to the bottom rung.

  Our children’s arrival was delayed when James Meredith, who had been the first black student to integrate the University of Mississippi, was shot and wounded by a white man during a march in Mississippi. Martin flew to Memphis to see James in a hospital there; then Martin and Stokely Carmichael and a number of others restarted James’s march from the spot where he had been shot. When they reached Tougaloo, Mississippi, fifteen thousand black people were gathered there, the largest such gathering in Mississippi history. Yoki and Marty and I joined Martin to march from Tougaloo to Jackson. James Meredith had recovered enough to join us as well.

  After that march, we took all four children up to Chicago with us. We had some furniture by then, some bought secondhand and other pieces that had been donated. Although we lived as simply as we could back in Atlanta, our way of life in the South was totally different from life in the ghetto that summer. There was nothing for the children to do except go outside the apartment building and play in the black dirt. There was nothing green anywhere. Even the playground was black dirt. The moment they were dressed and went outdoors, their clothes were soiled. And when I tried to keep them inside, their tempers flared; there were shouting and pushing matches, which didn’t happen often at home, where they had plenty of room to run off their pent-up energies.

  The Chicago Freedom Movement’s first big rally and demonstration, which had been in the works for more than a year, was planned for July 10, 1966, at Soldier Field. An unprecedented forty-five thousand people showed up. We took all four children to the platform, including Bunny, who was only three. Mahalia Jackson sang. There were speeches. And then Martin read his list of demands for social justice in Chicago. The demands were of real estate boards, banks, the mayor, the city council, the Chicago Housing Authority, politicians, businesses, unions, the governor, the federal government, and of the people. This was a Sunday, so of course City Hall was closed. Still, Martin led that enormous crowd to City Hall and nailed the demands to the closed City Hall door, just as his namesake Martin Luther had done with his Ninety-Five Theses centuries ago in Wittenberg. The march was a beautiful nonviolent demonstration.

  We had planned to allow our three older children to march with us, but when Bunny heard her sister and brothers talking, she started asking “When are we going to march?” And when the speeches were over, she said, “But we haven’t marched yet.” I said to Martin, “What are we going to do about Bunny?,” and he replied, “Let her march with us.” He was particularly unable to resist her wishes in those days. So, even though she fell asleep and was carried more than half the distance by Bernard Lee and Andy Young, Bunny marched with us, and that was the only time our family ever marched together. I wish we had thought to get a picture of it.

  The next evening, before a mass meeting, Martin and I went to dinner at Mahalia Jackson’s house, and after dinner, on our way to the meeting, we ran into our first riot. The outbreak had started when police turned off fire hydrants that young people, who lacked access to swimming pools, were using to cool off. The youths started throwing rocks and breaking windows, and then the gangs got involved. Several black youths were beaten; others were arrested. Two gangs, the Cobras and the Vice Lords, threatened to tear the city up if the prisoners weren’t released. Martin, Andy Young, Bernard Lee, Mahalia, and I all went to the police station, and Martin persuaded the authorities to let us post bail.

  That night, angry crowds milled in the streets. SCLC staff were out all night trying to calm things down. Our children were safe o
n the other side of town, visiting some friends of ours, which enabled me to be out on the streets for most of the night with Martin.

  The next day at noon, I addressed a women’s meeting at the YWCA on the predominantly white North Side. I had been up nearly all night and was depressed, depleted, and completely exhausted. I proposed that one hundred women sign and send a telegram to Mayor Daley supporting Martin’s proposals. Initially, some were reticent about signing because their husbands held jobs with the city. I pushed the point, saying, “What are you afraid of? The time has come when we have to make a decision and make a choice.” After that, they signed the telegram. They also decided to form a permanent organization called Women Mobilized for Change. It was an integrated group, and eventually grew to one thousand members.

  That night our whole family stayed with Mahalia, and the day after that, the children and I returned to our apartment. The next night, Wednesday, July 13, Martin was addressing a mass meeting on the West Side, and I was going to speak to a group on the North Side, taking the children with me because I didn’t have a babysitter. While the children and I were getting ready to go, we heard glass shatter in the street. The children, who were looking out the window, saw some boys breaking a plate-glass shop window and shouting, “Black Power!” That was when it hit us: we were in the middle of a riot. People arrived to take us to the meeting on the North Side. I was addressing the group, with the children, including an overtired and restless Bunny, on the platform alongside me, when I was interrupted by someone saying there was an emergency call from Martin, who had heard about the rioting near our apartment and was worried about us.

  He and I promised to stay in frequent communication by telephone, and I took the children back to the slum apartment that night. It was a nightmare. We traveled back through more glass breaking and through more shots being fired. The rioting went on for most of the night. Eventually we went to bed, listening to the shooting. Needless to say, it was a frightening experience.

  Soon after the rioting ended, I took the children back to Atlanta. As a family, we had spent only a few weeks in Chicago. Meanwhile, the SCLC changed its focus in Chicago to concentrate solely on demonstrations for open housing and an end to economic exploitation. There was tremendous resistance to these efforts. Bricks and bottles were thrown at Martin and his aides as they marched through the lily-white suburb of Marquette Park in a push for open housing. Some of the same type of people who had confronted us in Selma and Birmingham confronted us as we marched in that Chicago suburb. Swastikas and Nazi flags waved. Someone hit Martin in the head with a rock, which brought him to his knees, although he was not seriously injured. He told me, “I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen, even in Mississippi, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as in Chicago.”

  Finally, on August 26, 1966, the Chicago movement came to an end. The SCLC, Mayor Daley, the Real Estate Board, and the Chicago Housing Authority inked an agreement on open housing. It did not live up to its promise, however. As soon as we left, city officials continued to do business as usual.

  That said, there were at least two lasting victories. In 1962, in Atlanta, the SCLC had established a program called Operation Breadbasket, which aimed to take the movement to the next level in its fight for equal economic rights. Now that we were able to get on the bus, we needed to be able to afford the cost of the ride—or even to own the bus company. In Chicago, starting in 1966, Operation Breadbasket, under the able leadership of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, pushed for job promotions, business opportunities, and an end to economic exploitation of the poor, such as the supermarket chains’ practice of selling inferior products at exorbitant prices in the ghetto. In addition, some of the gang members we lived and worked with put down their guns and dependence on violence and marched with us, using nothing but their bodies and their faith to protect themselves against the evil of their enemies.

  Despite the Daley Machine’s unwillingness to honor its commitments, I believe the seeds of nonviolence and direct action we planted, along with our challenge to decades of entrenched economic exploitation, have produced a rich harvest that lingers to this day.

  Personally, I saw Chicago as a first step in spreading our wings. We broke out of the box and moved beyond our southern borders. The northern drive was not without its critics, of course. There were those who believed we should not have stepped beyond the Mason-Dixon line. To the contrary, I say that moral concerns and matters that prick the conscience know no geographic boundaries. After receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Martin also began to talk more about carrying the philosophy of nonviolence beyond American soil.

  In 1965, at an SCLC retreat, Martin asked me to make a general statement about why we should take a public stand against the Vietnam War. I talked about how it would continue to drain resources from education, housing, health, and other badly needed social programs. I said, “Why do you think we got the Nobel Prize? It was not just for civil rights.… Peace and justice are indivisible.”

  Still, the Rev. Otis Moss of Cleveland was the only SCLC board member who encouraged Martin to support peace in Vietnam. All the other members argued that his position would dry up donations to the SCLC, because an antiwar stance would upset too many whites and make us appear unpatriotic.

  For the next two years, Martin agonized over his silence, quietly working behind the scenes on antiwar public policy, raising his concerns about the war in private meetings with the president and in a meeting with UN ambassador Arthur Goldberg, where Martin called for a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam while more peaceful diplomatic efforts were pursued.

  In the meantime, since the spotlight shone so brightly on Martin, the press overlooked my agenda and activities, which had been deeply pro-peace and antiwar since my days at Antioch. I was called upon to participate in a number of antiwar campaigns. For example, in 1965, Martin and I were invited to speak at a major rally in Madison Square Garden protesting the Vietnam War, and while Martin decided not to attend, I participated. In fact, I was the only woman and one of only two blacks invited to speak. I also continued my affiliation with Women Strike for Peace, the group I traveled to Geneva with in 1962 on a peace mission.

  Until 1967, Martin had been content to leave it to me to march, protest, and mount public challenges to the war in Vietnam. With my history of antiwar activism, it was easier to assuage his conscience about not being more strongly involved himself. We were always a team, so he felt that “Well, at least one of us is involved.”

  In March 1967, Martin led his first antiwar march, in Chicago, and a few days after the march, he made it clear through the press that he had marched as “an individual, as a clergyman, as one who is greatly concerned about peace” and not as the leader of the SCLC.

  Then, on April 4, 1967, he gave a speech at Riverside Church in New York City, to a large gathering of clergy and laymen. It was entitled “Beyond Vietnam” and was one of the most courageous and prophetic speeches he ever delivered. He pointed out that “if America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam.” He noted that African Americans were “dying in disproportionate numbers in Vietnam,” and called it a “reflection of the Negro’s position in America.… We [are] taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they have not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”

  Martin knew what would happen once he took this position. Virtually every major newspaper in America, including much of the black press, lambasted him. Members of Congress, his fellow civil rights leaders, and “brethren” of the cloth joined the parade of criticism, accusing Martin either of not sticking to the civil rights struggle or of aiding communism. SCLC funds did suffer. Friends such as Roy Wilkins blasted him publicly. But his answer was this: “Cowardice asks the question ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question ‘Is it politic?’ And Vanity comes along and asks the questio
n ‘Is it popular?’ But Conscience asks the question ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.”

  In spite of the opposition, Martin took part in the Spring Mobilization for Peace in New York City on Saturday, April 15, 1967. When the march was announced, I told Martin, “Finally, I will be able to march with you. All these years I’ve been marching for peace alone, or as the only black and certainly the only woman.” But Martin said, “I want you to go to the West Coast and lead that one. They need you out there. I will be on the East Coast.” I told him how much I’d looked forward to being with him, but in the end, I went to San Francisco, where I was needed. About sixty thousand people participated in the San Francisco march, and about two hundred fifty thousand participated in the New York march led by Martin.

  After the march, the criticism against Martin’s pro-peace views grew even stronger. But he was merely practicing what he had often preached and what we both believed: “If you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live,” he wrote.

  FIFTEEN

  I Don’t Want You to Grieve for Me

  IN THE EARLY months of 1968, Martin was terribly distressed. I had not seen him like this before, and it was heartbreaking for me. When he became depressed, I could usually find the words to help comfort him, to lift him out of the depths of his discouragement. But now my words took root only for a moment.

  Since 1964, riots had been breaking out in urban cities across America each summer. (Harlem and Rochester and Philadelphia in 1964; Watts in 1965; 7 major riots across the country in 1966, and then, in 1967, 159 race riots across the country.) Hundreds were injured; scores were killed. Each summer, as the temperatures started rising, so did tempers, anguish, and rage. Usually the root cause was police brutality, but sometimes it was a lack of jobs; sometimes the cause was not easily understood.