Nine Days

by Paul Kendrick

  Nixon replied, “My only regret is that I have been unable to do more than I have. Progress is understandably slow in this field, but we at least can be sure that we are moving steadily and surely ahead.”

  When a mentally ill woman stabbed King at a 1958 book signing in New York and his life hung in jeopardy, Nixon wired support, saying he was “terribly distressed to learn of the attack that was made on you.” Though “this incident added to all the unfortunate indignities which have been heaped upon you,” Nixon assured King, “the Christian spirit of tolerance which you invariably display in the face of your opponents and detractors will in the end contribute immeasurably in winning the support of the great majority of Americans for the cause of equality and human dignity to which we are dedicated.” While corresponding with a biographer of Nixon’s that year, King remarked, “It is altogether possible that he has no basic racial prejudice.”

  Yet King added an interesting paragraph to his letter. Pastors are inclined to think the best of others, but they also see people’s shadow selves. King wrote, “Finally, I would say that Nixon has a genius for convincing one that he is sincere. When you are close to Nixon he almost disarms you with his apparent sincerity … And so I would conclude by saying that if Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.”

  “YOU CAN’T LEAD FROM THE BACK”

  Daddy King was a force of nature, with a booming voice and presence that could at times be overwhelming. Martin Luther King Jr.’s father might have lacked his son’s diplomatic subtleties, but his elemental strength offered protection. He foresaw such great things for his son that he named him twice: Michael, at birth, and then, after a European trip that elevated his sense of ministerial mission, he changed his own name as well as that of his five-year-old son to Martin Luther. Evoking the radical reformer who transformed Christendom, the change indicated the promise Daddy King saw in his gifted son.

  Yet his great shadow was also something the young M. L. King retreated from. The younger King went to Pennsylvania to attend Crozer Theological Seminary, then to Boston University for a PhD, and finally to Montgomery, Alabama, for his first pastorate. As a brand-new twenty-six-year-old minister in Montgomery, King was unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight as one of the foremost leaders of the civil rights movement. Had boycott planning after Rosa Parks’s arrest not been held at his own Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he might have gone home before the meeting ended. Yet when he was asked to speak at the Holt Street Baptist Church mass meeting, a voice flowed out of him that sounded more like that of a prophet than an organizer. His impassioned words helped sustain the Montgomery bus boycott for over a year—longer than many thought possible for a campaign like that.

  Near the end of the boycott, King foretold what their mission from that point on would entail: “It might even mean going to jail. If such is the case, we must be willing to fill up the jail houses of the South. It might even mean physical death. But if physical death is the price that some must pay to free their children from a permanent life of psychological death, then nothing could be more honorable.”

  Yet despite his confident oratorical skills, King had his share of doubts. He confided in Harry Belafonte when they first met, “I need your help … I have no idea where this movement is going.” King said, “I’m called upon to do things I cannot do, and yet I cannot dismiss the calling. So how do I do this?”

  What sustained him then, and would for the rest of his days, was an experience he had one night sitting alone in his kitchen during the most difficult days of the boycott. After receiving a threatening phone call, he suddenly felt the presence of God, promising he would never be left alone, never. But beyond even this experience, he needed something else to justify his hope that he could help America change. He found this additional strength in the organizing tactics of Gandhi. The radical ethos of organized nonviolence, present in both the Sermon on the Mount and the Mahatma’s campaign, offered King a path forward, no matter how dangerous it might prove to be.

  The Supreme Court intervened to give the bus boycott a surprising victory, but this did little to ease King’s worries. He told Coretta, “People will expect me to perform miracles for the rest of my life. I don’t want to be the kind of man who hits his peak at twenty-seven, with the rest of his life an anticlimax. Neither do I want to disappoint people by not being able to pull rabbits out of a hat.” He wondered if he had reached “the zenith of my career too early … I might be on the decline at a fairly early age.” Any hopes for a life as a quiet (however proudly intellectual) parish minister were changed forever by fame and the promise others saw in him, and there was no going back. King would later lament in a sermon to his Montgomery congregation, which ended with him in tears, that he was tired of “the general strain of being known.” He distrusted this fame that, to his perplexity, kept growing, kept seeking him out as he spoke and organized. The more renowned he became, the more he felt unmoored as he tried to do God’s will to the degree he could perceive it.

  As King increasingly captured the nation’s attention, he felt he was “a pretty unprepared symbol.” Yet how could he possibly prepare himself to become a representative of the people? This was something circumstances thrust upon you—no one, from Isaiah on, trained for it; there was only the image of the prophet’s lips being singed by hot coals, the admission that “I am undone.” Not even being Daddy King’s son could prepare you for this. And yet the younger King spoke of the zeitgeist of history plucking him up, his sense that no one else could do what he was seemingly being asked to do.

  He would tell Coretta, “I can’t afford to make a mistake.” Though his hold on being a public figure felt tenuous, he accepted it. Every time he was offered an escape route—and he was offered many, from illustrious pulpits to prestigious professorships—he declined and packed his bag for another road trip, another march. Other Black leaders were often jealous of his gifts, his ability to claim the spotlight, but few understood what came with the weary pursuit. It was a hard road, even harder when he could not see where it was leading.

  In late 1959, he acquiesced in Daddy King’s plea for him to come home to Atlanta, thinking his father’s imposing strength might in some measure protect him from these growing pressures while he contemplated how to lead a national movement as he had led a movement in an Alabama city. There, as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), King’s headquarters would be just a few doors down the street from Ebenezer Baptist Church. King could now constantly fly in and out of the hub of Atlanta to fulfill dozens of speaking engagements. His scattered life made the prospect of being co-pastor at his childhood church seem like a secure home base, anchored in the supportive locale that had raised him. After all, it was here, in the middle-class, professional surrounds of Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn neighborhood, that he had been told he was born to do great things.

  Yet five years after the boycott, he was still struggling to figure out—as he put it to increasingly larger audiences—how to save the soul of America, nothing less. There was momentum from what he had begun in Montgomery, but could America be moved, shocked, persuaded to abandon its racial caste system? Just because his twenties were more eventful than the lives of most mortals did not mean King understood where to go in his thirties. In moving his growing family back home to Atlanta in early 1960, King was hoping to avoid being a one-hit wonder, trying to translate his early, signal success into something larger.

  * * *

  As the 1960s loomed on the horizon, however, King was floundering in his efforts to build a mass movement for a civil rights revolution. He had talked of organizing an American version of Gandhi’s Salt March, but the conference he planned in Atlanta to bring it to fruition mustered fewer than a hundred sign-ups. He organized voter registration sit-ins around the South, expecting two thousand participants in thirteen locations. There was no response in key cities and a mere handful of protesters in others. The New York Times wrote almost mockingly about how sm
all the turnout was. King had championed the Crusade for Citizenship, aiming to double the number of registered voters in the South by the 1960 election, but he was nowhere near this goal. It was unclear to King what his Southern Christian Leadership Conference should even be: a leadership association of ministers, a platform for King, or more of a grassroots organization? Should it focus on the vote or on direct action? How could its impact be more than regional? When describing King in 1960, The New York Times still had to remind readers that he was known for an Alabama bus boycott.

  Amid these struggles, Daddy King promised city elders and fellow Black leaders that his son would not make trouble locally, that his reputation as a movement leader would be muted in his hometown. Georgia’s governor, Ernest Vandiver, a man King would never meet (but who would end up playing a consequential role in the events of October 1960), immediately denounced King’s homecoming, saying that “anyone, including King, who comes across our state lines with the avowed intention of breaking laws will be kept under surveillance at all times.” Longtime Atlanta Black leaders, Daddy King’s proud Republican allies and friends, were nearly as uneasy with the wunderkind’s return, worried that he might disrupt long-standing accommodations forged with local white politicians. Daddy King assured them that America’s challenges were vast enough that King did not need to make Atlanta his target, telling friends, “He’s not coming to cause trouble.”

  And he didn’t. Trouble claimed him.

  After returning home to Daddy King’s world, King retained a measure of independence by resisting the old man’s partisan loyalties. The self-confident and increasingly economically secure world of King’s Sweet Auburn was a strong redoubt of Republicanism. Nationally, surveys at the time showed that Black Americans were split on the question of which party was better for them, narrowly favoring the Republicans. Roosevelt’s New Deal had indeed swayed many formerly staunch Black Republicans through job creation, particularly in the North, but Black communities in southern cities like Atlanta remained GOP strongholds. Atlanta’s Black Republicanism was more than a residual memory of Lincoln. With a southern Democratic Party that fiercely protected its segregationist power, allegiance to the GOP was a matter of survival for families like the Kings. Yes, FDR had made the party more palatable in many Black communities, but here in the South, men like Daddy King were only being attentive to the reality they saw around them.

  In December 1959, King junior told a friend how Nixon was the only candidate who would call him and invite him to his home, which made him inclined to support Nixon, as he thought increasing numbers of Black Americans would. The Reverend Ralph Abernathy, King’s close friend, had already made clear that Nixon was his man. King voted Republican in the 1956 presidential election, as did nearly 80 percent of Atlanta’s Black voters. In addition to his father, other leaders whom King had respected all of his life such as the real estate broker John Calhoun—head of the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP and a wily Republican wheeler-dealer—held a modicum of political power by way of the organizations they had built with the support of Black Republican voters. But men like Calhoun did not operate in this political world on their own; they needed the power of Black preachers.

  While the younger King remained publicly neutral, which both candidates took as an invitation to court him, Daddy King was not at all tempted to back Senator Kennedy. At an event held at Mount Zion Second Baptist Church on October 10, an impressive array of Black Atlanta preachers gathered to champion the Republican ticket. Daddy King was more than ready to support Georgia’s GOP. The celebratory event was vintage John Calhoun, deftly rallying Black Atlanta for his party once again. The charismatic, round-faced Calhoun told the sizable crowd that Nixon and Lodge both possessed better records than Lyndon Johnson, a Texan they most certainly did not trust, and that JFK had been vague, at best, in his previous civil rights positions. Daddy King then used this opportunity to offer a full-throated endorsement of Nixon.

  Both M.L. and A.D. were spotted at the program, dutiful sons that they were, but neither made an endorsement. Onlookers could only wonder if their father’s stance was rubbing off on his uncommitted son. Yet that fall, King continued to refuse to be partisan, labeling both parties “hypocritical” on the subject of equality, saying, “The dearth of positive leadership from Washington is not confined to one political party. Each of them has been willing to follow the long pattern of using the Negro as a political football.” Ultimately, King was trying to keep both parties from co-opting him and his movement.

  * * *

  While Louis Martin had persuaded Kennedy to speak at Howard University, Wofford’s turn to assert himself came when he led a national, nonpartisan convocation on equal rights in New York City in mid-October, less than a month before the election. The CRS’s goal was to burnish Kennedy’s lackluster civil rights record, with a conference stuffed with NAACP and National Urban League leaders, academics, community activists, and even a few liberal Republicans. They invited Vice President Nixon to attend, but as they predicted, he declined.

  Wofford’s and Martin’s years of connections gave them the credibility to put the gathering together, and in doing so, Martin felt that the CRS not only surpassed the Nixon campaign but firmly established their candidate as a credible civil rights advocate. When the CRS was later praised for helping turn the election, Martin maintained that helping King had been “the icing on the cake, but the cake was already made.” Nonetheless, the event did reveal some deference on the part of the CRS to more conservative elements in the Kennedy campaign. In Wofford’s words, some of Kennedy’s associates were “tremendously scared of losing white votes.” The vice presidential nominee, Lyndon Johnson, recommended that instead of explicitly evoking “civil rights,” the convocation should be called the National Conference on Constitutional Rights. If that was what it took to talk about equality, the CRS would happily accept a change of name.

  On October 11, a week before the sit-in at Rich’s in Atlanta, the National Conference on Constitutional Rights convened at the Park Sheraton, just below Central Park, with its grand awning of golden lights. The chief draw was not Kennedy but Eleanor Roosevelt, given the trust Black leaders had in her. Hence the shock when she proclaimed, in the summer, that “Kennedy can’t win the Negro vote.” (She famously quipped that JFK needed “a little less profile and more courage.”) Now, at last warming to Kennedy, she told the gathering, “It took courage to call this conference … Senator Kennedy will fight to get prompt action on civil rights.”

  With the conference concluding successfully on the second day, participants boarded buses to head uptown for a Harlem campaign rally. In front of the Hotel Theresa, on a stage erected over the wide sidewalk of Seventh Avenue, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell greeted a crowd of two thousand people. When JFK joined him, Powell proclaimed, “This is the next President!”

  Kennedy cried, “Are we going to vote Democratic?” and Harlem roared back. He reminded the crowd how democratic revolutions were once inspired by America: “There are children in Africa called Thomas Jefferson. There are none called Lenin or Trotsky or Stalin in the Congo, or Nixon.” After pausing, Kennedy added, “There may be a couple called Adam Powell.”

  “Careful, Jack!” Powell interjected from behind, and his hometown audience roared with knowing laughter.

  Kennedy accused Nixon of concealing his own civil rights record, whereas he was proud of his. He asked the crowd to stand with him in moving the country forward, “until the United States achieves this great goal of practicing what it preaches.”

  Coincidentally, on the same night and in the same neighborhood, Nixon’s vice presidential nominee, Henry Cabot Lodge, wooed Black and Puerto Rican voters at a rally at 116th and Lexington, among searchlights and fireworks. The Republican set off an explosion of his own. Lodge pledged, for the first time in American history, that Nixon would appoint a Black man to the cabinet if he won. Nixon now had to deal with what most white Republicans felt was an unforced error by Lodge.


  When Louis Martin heard the news, Lodge’s pledge “hit like a bomb.” This was a far more specific promise for action than Kennedy’s rhetoric on equal opportunity. Should they make a similar commitment? Then it struck him: Nixon would not back up Lodge. Martin and Wofford bet Nixon would not have the courage to support his vice presidential candidate. As they gamed it out, they decided their campaign should not make any panicked promises. It would be better to highlight the substantive policies that had been spotlighted at the New York conference.

  They anxiously waited to see how Nixon would react. When the morning papers arrived, their prediction was borne out. While campaigning in his native Southern California, Nixon disowned Lodge’s pledge, saying only, “I will attempt to appoint the best man possible without regard to race, creed or color.” A Nixon aide told The New York Times, lest his statement be less than clear, “Mr. Nixon would not appoint a Negro just because he was a Negro.” The Nixon campaign was now in a terrible bind, having offered something, only to yank it away. One Virginia Republican said of Lodge, “Whoever recommended that Harlem speech should have been thrown out of an airplane at 25,000 feet.”

  In truth, Lodge’s promise upset Martin on a deeper level than even Wofford knew. What Lodge proposed, ill-advisedly or not, was exactly what Martin hoped to accomplish. He vowed to ask Kennedy to “move decisively toward the integration of the Supreme Court and the Cabinet.” If Martin could bring about these groundbreaking appointments, “there was no job in the federal establishment too big for a black man,” or in any part of American life.