Nine Days

by Paul Kendrick

  The competing Harlem rallies were an unusual interlude in a campaign season largely devoid of talk about civil rights. But there was something else striking about them, too: the conspicuous absence of Martin Luther King.

  * * *

  Back in the summer, Lonnie King—the lively, impatient Morehouse student leader—said to King, “Can I get you to go to jail with us? ’Cause if you go to jail with us, because of Montgomery, it will become an international story.” The plan, he said, was to stage a sit-in at Rich’s.

  For generations, Rich’s department store had been the place where Atlanta families shopped for fashionable clothes, where kids got to ride the beloved Pink Pig monorail, and where restaurants and bathrooms were humiliatingly segregated by race. Lonnie believed that if the students could force Rich’s—the most prominent department store in Georgia, if not the whole South—to desegregate, every downtown business would follow suit.

  As a test, Lonnie had visited Rich’s lunch counter over the summer with the family of Howard Zinn, a white professor at Spelman College. The staff turned off all the lights, preferring to close the restaurant rather than risk a confrontation. After perturbed white patrons had filed out and Rich’s called the police, Lonnie was brought to police headquarters for a warning, by way of a talk in Chief Herbert Jenkins’s office. The owner of Rich’s, Dick Rich, was also present. To Rich, criticism of his store felt personal, because he thought of himself as a liberal on race. He told the student leader how much he supported the Atlanta University Center and how his store was the first to give Black people charge cards—all true. So he felt justified in asking Lonnie to stop any future student protests at his store.

  Lonnie responded that Rich needed to integrate his store fully, even allowing Black shoppers to eat in the elegant Magnolia Room. The meeting fell apart, and Rich’s face turned red as he shouted, “If you bring your Black ass in again, I’m telling you, Chief, put his ass under the jail.”

  Lonnie shot back, “I’m coming back in October, and I’m going to bring thousands of students with me, so Chief Jenkins, get your cells together, ’cause we will be back.”

  As October approached, Dr. King had encouraged Lonnie’s student leadership while keeping his own counsel as to whether he would be participating in the students’ direct action. That was fine with Lonnie; King hadn’t said no, so Lonnie assumed that meant yes. The pensive King had always been hard to read, but there was no denying his strong support for the exploding sit-in movement across the South. The movement began in February 1960, when four North Carolina A&T students ordered food at a segregated Greensboro lunch counter and refused to leave when asked. Having seen the effects of Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat five years before, King knew the importance of seizing transformative moments when they unexpectedly presented themselves. Only fifteen days after the Greensboro students first began the sit-in movement, King addressed a group in Durham, North Carolina, praising the bold move. He told his audience, “Remember that both history and destiny are on your side … And one day, historians of this era might be able to say, there lived a great people, a black people who injected new meaning into civilization.” King spoke words that day that would soon have unforeseen implications for him: “Let us not fear going to jail. If the officials threaten to arrest us for standing up for our rights, we must answer by saying that we are willing and prepared to fill up the jails of the South.”

  Within weeks, there were dozens, and then hundreds, of similar student sit-ins erupting all across the South. King’s success with the Montgomery bus boycott after Rosa Parks’s arrest continued to inspire students, showing what could be accomplished by citizens through nonviolent civil disobedience. Now a younger generation was propelling the movement forward, and King could catch up or be left behind. He was quick to support the student sit-ins.

  The minister saw in these students a spirit that his own SCLC seemed to lack, and King wondered, as the movement exploded, if he might be able to guide it while also harnessing its power. At Spelman College’s Founders Day on April 10, he said, “You’re not merely demanding a cup of coffee and a hamburger here and there. You are demanding respect.” After watching King put the moral clarity of the sit-ins into words, a student named Marian Wright (later Marian Wright Edelman) wrote in her diary, “There’s something almost holy about him.”

  In the months before the election, the energy was exhilarating. In February, Lonnie King had read in the Black-owned, Republican Atlanta Daily World about the North Carolina lunch counter sit-in, and everything about the students’ actions resonated with him. Quickly, he organized a team from the adjacent campuses of Morehouse, Spelman, Morris Brown, Interdenominational Theological Center, Clark College, and Atlanta University to follow their example. In preparing students for sit-ins, he taught them that their method of resistance must be nonviolent, but warned them that the other side might not be. In mid-May, Lonnie led nearly three thousand students in a march up the hill to Georgia’s capitol on the sixth anniversary of the still unenforced Brown v. Board of Education decision. The students had invited Dr. King to walk with them, and as they set out that morning, they wondered if he would make an appearance.

  Governor Vandiver, however, had the protesters met with armed troops and fire hoses. As the marchers approached the gold-domed statehouse, Lonnie elected to detour to avoid the capitol and the danger it posed. He would not risk lives being lost—not this time. When the students finally arrived at Wheat Street Baptist Church, King was waiting for them on the church steps, greeting them with pride and relief.

  When students returned for the fall semester, planning for the big push against Rich’s segregationist policies began. The students had skirted a confrontation with the authorities in their spring march, but there was no guarantee they would be so lucky again. Lonnie understood the fears expressed by Daddy King’s generation of leaders: “They were concerned we were going to overshoot the runway; a lot of us were going to get killed—that’s understandable.”

  Lonnie watched the presidential campaign with mounting anger, however. He thought both candidates seemed to talk about every problem in the world except their own country’s problem with racism. He reflected, “If you had been from Mars, you wouldn’t have known any Black folks were in this country … and thousands of young Black kids, and some white kids too, were raising heck all over the South.” The students decided the most opportune time to act would be after the third presidential debate, to put “this issue of civil and human rights on the burner and make the Kennedy Nixon people discuss it.”

  With the planned sit-in at Rich’s less than a week away, emotions were running high. Student activists from around the country, including the formidable Nashville crew of John Lewis, Diane Nash, Marion Barry, and James Bevel, descended on Atlanta for a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) conference over the weekend. A message arrived from the Kennedy campaign reading, “The human rights for which you strive are the definite goal of all America.” A student leader announced a message from Nixon would be coming as well, but none arrived.

  King spoke at the SNCC gathering and praised the students’ efforts, but he was upstaged by the Reverend James Lawson of Nashville, who told the students that the next time they went to jail, they all needed to refuse bail. Soon a rhythmic chant of “jail/no bail” filled the conference hall. King had been saying for years that there was “great suffering” soon to come, but many students—some starting to judge the thirty-one-year-old minister as more oratorically gifted than daring—wondered who, precisely, would bear the brunt of this suffering. John Lewis saw the Atlanta students repeatedly pulling King aside, prodding him to make a decision.

  King understood how upset the students were about the prospect of his not participating in their planned act of civil disobedience. But an arrest in Montgomery years earlier, when he came close to spending a night in jail, had left him shaken, and he was personally hesitant about the movement’s radical tactic of going
to jail. John Lewis believed King nonetheless recognized SNCC’s increasing influence on the civil rights movement and saw the need to act. “If he stayed on the sidelines much longer,” Lewis wrote, “he and the SCLC risked losing us. Basically he knew it was time for him to stick his neck out, as so many of us had been doing for months.”

  Six students followed King to the airport later that weekend as he was leaving to deliver a series of speeches up and down the East Coast, and they walked with him through the terminal, continuing to pressure him. An onlooker thought King seemed to be on the verge of tears.

  Once King was back in Atlanta, a group of students found him eating at his parents’ house and invited themselves inside. Feeling trapped, King was forced to listen as they implored him to get arrested alongside them at the upcoming sit-in. When Daddy King walked in, he said angrily, “M.L., you don’t need to go! This is the students, not you.” Then he kicked the students out of his house.

  * * *

  Harris Wofford heard with dismay King’s soft Georgia murmur offering conditions that he was certain the Kennedys were not going to like. The minister was laying out his reasons for why their hopes for a joint appearance with John F. Kennedy—not an endorsement, but something close to it—were misplaced. King told Wofford, “I’ve learned that Nixon is going to be at the veterans’ convention, and I have a rule to be bipartisan, and not one or another, so I have to offer that I would meet with him too.”

  “Do you really feel you have to?”

  “Yes,” said King, knowing he was thwarting Wofford’s efforts. King told him Nixon might not show, but that he needed to invite him and make it a joint appearance. Wofford said he understood and would plead with the Kennedys to not let Nixon’s presence in Miami force them to abandon the whole idea. But he knew his perfect event was slipping away.

  Putting down the phone, a disappointed Wofford began strategizing with Louis Martin because it was clear that a daunting task lay ahead of them. Shriver was back in Illinois, preparing for the final push in that state. They would have to persuade Bobby, on their own, to accept the conditions offered by a controversial activist with whom the Kennedys were not completely comfortable—a task made even more difficult by the fact that Kennedy was increasingly allergic to getting anywhere near Nixon if he could avoid it.

  Wofford got a chance to convince the candidate himself as well, but JFK exploded: “To hell with that, Nixon doesn’t have much to lose in this whole situation … I lose Southern votes.” Kennedy had the white South to hold on to; Nixon had it to gain.

  Kennedy seldom lost his temper, usually opting for deft, deflective humor. But months of campaigning had worn down any hope of his showing much sympathy for Nixon—Nixon, whose Senate office was across from his and whose political career had, from the moment they both entered Congress as newly elected navy veterans from the Pacific theater, so closely tracked his own. While they were once friendly, if distant, Kennedy now routinely attacked Nixon with expletives.

  Bobby, too, was curt when Wofford floated King’s proposal: “No. You can’t possibly do that.” Wofford argued the Miami event could still be worth it, given that he and Martin were virtually certain that Nixon would decline, just as he had declined invitations to Howard and the New York City conference.

  Bobby dismissed this idea; there was no way they were going to risk offering Nixon a large stage to do whatever he wanted. If this young preacher wanted to make demands, then “take it off the agenda, we’re not meeting him. That’s not going to do us any good.”

  Wofford’s relationship with Bobby had been fraught since the day they had met on the Hill three years earlier. Kennedy was then chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, and a mutual friend thought that they should know each other. As Wofford looked on, Bobby calmly ate the lunch that a Black attendant set out for him, until at last he picked up Wofford’s résumé and perused it. He said, before sending Wofford away, “One thing I just can’t understand is, why did you go to Howard Law School? I could understand going and teaching there, but how in the world did you go there to be a student?”

  Now, three years later, Bobby dismissed the idealistic Wofford once again. It was Wofford’s turn to give King some bad news. When Wofford called King to tell him the Miami event was off, he sensed unexpected disquiet in King’s response. To Wofford’s surprise, the minister sounded even more distressed than he himself felt.

  While refusing to compromise the obligation he felt toward nonpartisanship, King confided in his old friend why he really wished for the Miami event to take place: “I’m in a real jam ’cause they’re going ahead despite my urging them not to do a sit-in before the election; they’re going to go ahead and do it for Rich’s department store. I’m under great pressure to go there. I don’t really want to, I don’t think it’s the best thing, but they’re doing it and I probably am going to have to go with them.”

  King had wanted a good excuse to avoid the Rich’s protest, which being in Miami would have provided, and now it had been yanked away. He felt boxed in by students whose idealism matched their determination. Without an important event to attend, King conceded, “I have to participate now.”

  Wofford’s disappointment was insignificant compared with what King felt as he canceled his plans to go to Florida. There would be no packing of suitcases for Miami, only a paper bag of toiletries for a booking cell. He had endured much since Montgomery, but this was different.

  * * *

  The day before the sit-in, Lonnie King was at the Spelman library trying to inspire more students to join them. He asked his new co-chair Herschelle Sullivan to “call M.L. and just remind him to meet me at ten o’clock on the bridge tomorrow.” From his conversations with King dating back to August, Lonnie believed King would join the sit-in. Sullivan didn’t know Dr. King, but Lonnie said, “Just tell him that I asked you to call him and he’ll talk to you.” Though Lonnie did not doubt King’s commitment to the cause, he preferred to leave nothing to chance. He knew King was hesitant to take part, which he believed came not from King’s own fears but from his father’s. Sullivan later wondered if Lonnie chose her to make the call to King because, if the pastor was considering backing out, he might be less likely to do so speaking to a woman.

  Sullivan had been studying in Europe in the spring but dove into the student movement upon her return to Atlanta. Her strengths complemented Lonnie’s, and she made a solid partner as the crucial day neared, but her call to the King residence was met with a disappointing reply. Sullivan walked back to Lonnie with a distressed look. “Lonnie, he said he can’t go.”

  “Can’t go?”

  A shocked Lonnie soon had King on the phone, along with Daddy King and the SCLC administrative head, Wyatt Tee Walker. A furious Daddy King replied with what Lonnie thought was a bombastic no, but Lonnie held his ground: they needed King there.

  Lonnie said, “M.L., let me say something to you: you are the moral leadership of this movement, whether you like it or not, and you promised me you were going to go.”

  The younger King stayed silent. Daddy King replied that it made no sense for his son to subject himself to further legal peril, especially because he was supposed to be preparing for a trip to Nigeria. King’s return to Atlanta earlier that year had nearly been thwarted when Alabama indicted him for submitting fraudulent tax returns. Though the charges were baseless, they threw King into a depression. He feared all he had worked for could be stripped from him. It took the effort of family and friends to get him back on his speaking schedule to face audiences still eager to hear him. King’s response was hardly surprising, though, given that a white Alabama jury would almost certainly find him guilty. Jail time looked like a very real possibility.

  At around the same time, he faced another legal entanglement, though it seemed like a minor nuisance compared with the tax indictment. On May 4, 1960, King volunteered to drive the novelist Lillian Smith, a white ally of the movement, to her
breast cancer treatment. DeKalb police spotted this Black man and white woman in a 1957 Ford near Emory University’s campus on Clifton Road and pulled King over. As he sat in the driver’s seat, the police told King his car tags were out of date, though Smith knew that her presence was the real reason why her friend had been pulled over. King explained that the car did not belong to him. The officer ticketed him for this and then, fatefully, also wrote him a ticket for not carrying a Georgia driver’s license, though he still carried a valid Alabama one. King took a day off to appear before Judge Oscar Mitchell in nearby Decatur, and in a quick and seemingly uneventful trial he was ordered to pay a twenty-five-dollar fine, which he paid.

  To King’s amazement, on May 28, 1960, he was declared innocent of all tax charges by an all-white Alabama jury. Suddenly the whole wretched specter of jail evaporated. The fine for an out-of-state driver’s license seemed of no importance. Still, King’s legal travails left him skittish; he had been in enough courtrooms that May to last a lifetime.

  On the phone, Lonnie reiterated the plan: “You and I are going down to Rich’s. There’s going to be hundreds of us all over downtown.” Lonnie interpreted King’s silence as a sign that he was torn between an old friend and his father. Lonnie said, “This is your hometown, and I think you need to go with us. If you get arrested with us, it’ll be in the national news, and I think that’s what the movement needs.” King understood Lonnie’s sense of urgency; he knew the indignity of not being able to get a hamburger and a coffee at a lunch counter, and would speak later of seeing tears in his daughter’s eyes when he had to tell her they were not allowed to go to the Funtown amusement park.

  As the call dragged on, Daddy King’s resistance aggravated Lonnie. He decided to play a card only someone who’d been attending Ebenezer Baptist Church since 1945 could possibly hold. Every year, without fail, Daddy King preached a sermon about how you must be ready to engage and sacrifice for your cause. So Lonnie quoted the sermon’s title by saying, “M.L., you can’t lead from the back. You gotta lead from the front.”