Nine Days

by Paul Kendrick

  Confused, given that he was not part of King’s immediate staff, Lonnie replied, “Coretta, why are you asking me to do this? You have all these folks who worked for your husband.”

  She said simply, “Lonnie, would you do this for Martin?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” And so Lonnie reached out to old student organizing friends like Charles “Sit-Down” Black. Lonnie thought no one would be better at finding marshals for the march to the Morehouse campus quadrangle—a hunch confirmed when he learned Black was already working alongside Dr. Mays and other Atlanta University Center college leaders to train students to line the memorial route. The old networks were stirring back to life.

  * * *

  Harris Wofford, by then president of SUNY Old Westbury, was speaking at a conference at Dartmouth College when the news arrived. Surrounded by strangers, Wofford sat down to take in his friend’s fate on TV, recalling all the times King had eluded death. The screen showed Bobby Kennedy speaking at an open-air rally in Indianapolis. On a dark, rain-lashed night, the candidate for president stood on a flatbed truck under poor lighting, appearing shrunken in his flapping raincoat, his manner deliberately calm and straightforward. His mostly Black audience, gathered an hour before, had not yet heard that King was dead. Thus, Wofford heard the confirmation of King’s death from a man of whom both he and King had long been wary.

  Scrambling to leave New Hampshire to join the King circle, Wofford was haunted by the news clip that followed of words King had spoken in Memphis, looped over and over to fill hours of coverage: “And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory”—and here King reeled, suffering from a fever in the thundery heat of a city under a tornado watch, almost collapsing into the arms of Abernathy and Young, and concluding with the words—“of the coming of the Lord.”

  * * *

  On the night of the assassination, after hours of busy signals, Bobby finally got through to Coretta at nearly two in the morning and offered, along with his condolences, a couple of reassurances. He informed her that he had already ordered three new temporary phone lines to be installed at the King house on Sunset Avenue in the morning, and he wanted to make available to the family an airplane to fly her to Memphis the next day to bring home the body of her husband. Coretta thanked him for his help, saying later that year, “I felt that he was a friend.” She continued, “I still had the feeling that my husband was at Reidsville and [Bobby] was concerned.”

  Bobby had said to Xernona Clayton, the King family friend who first answered his call, “My family has experience in this sort of thing.”

  Some SCLC staffers felt that accepting the offer of a plane was inappropriate given Bobby Kennedy’s candidacy for president, but Coretta disagreed, later saying, “I don’t really see anything wrong with it in this crisis period; one friend to another friend.” In a later interview, she recalled the phone conversation she had had with Jack Kennedy eight years before. She felt that such reservations obscured an essential truth about the Kennedys: “Although they were political figures … they were human beings first, and their humanness reached out to the needs of other people.”

  This was not the first time the fateful 1960 call had found an echo in a later moment of crisis. When King was arrested while leading a march in downtown Birmingham in 1963, he was kept in isolation in the Birmingham jail without access to a lawyer or a phone to call his wife for nearly two days. Frightened, Coretta thought back to Kennedy’s campaign call and phoned the White House for help. She received two calls from Bobby, then the attorney general, and one directly from Kennedy. The president said he was seeing to it that the Alabama authorities treated her husband fairly, and that she would soon be able to speak to King, which she did, fifteen minutes later.

  In that phone conversation, after learning that the president had inquired if his wife was feeling well after giving birth to their daughter Bernice, King expressed appreciation for the president’s assistance and was adamant that Coretta and his staff ensure that the press be informed that the call had taken place. With the Birmingham campaign slow to get off the ground, it was imperative to get the news out now that the Kennedy administration was at last paying attention. Within days, the nation would be unable to turn away from the images of the police dogs and fire hoses wielded by Sheriff Bull Connor and his men.

  It seemed that what King had faced in Reidsville steeled him for solitary confinement in the Birmingham jail. King would write of those first nights, “You will never know the meaning of utter darkness until you have lain in such a dungeon, knowing that sunlight is streaming overhead and still seeing only darkness below.” There he wrote the public letter that would become a defining document of the civil rights movement. Birmingham was a campaign that King chose and directed, using all that he had learned since Montgomery, proving against all odds that direct action could move a country to see his cause as nothing less than a response to a moral crisis. After two years of presidential diffidence—and at times indifference—the brutal news coming out of Birmingham convinced a young president that there was no going back. King’s Birmingham campaign forced Kennedy out of his habitual caution and persuaded him, at last, to speak out in favor of civil rights legislation.

  * * *

  After being notified of King’s death, President Johnson got on the line with his adviser Louis Martin and his aide Joseph Califano, asking them to gather as many Black leaders as they could at the White House the next morning. It would be the second time Martin spent the entire night at the White House—Kennedy’s death being the first, when Martin helped a stunned Shriver prepare for the funeral of a man they had helped elect.

  Reports of rioting following King’s assassination came in from major cities, including neighborhoods only blocks away. When the White House meeting was convened, Martin was not present, having been held up at the gates by the Secret Service as they checked the trunk of his car. Finding golf clubs, they wondered if he might be part of the looting. So the vice-chair of the DNC, the man who had just placed Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court, waited while calls were made to put an end to the indignity.

  Martin was pulled in many directions that week: working for a beleaguered president he still believed in; mourning a leader in King whom he deeply respected; and, as a father, having his daughter Anita’s wedding reception at the Mayflower Hotel the night after the assassination. Despite everything, Louis Martin was intent on going to Atlanta no matter how much the president needed him.

  * * *

  While it looked as if all the world were going to descend on King’s funeral, one man had reservations. Richard Nixon, favored to win the 1968 Republican nomination, convened his advisers and told them that while it was expected that candidates should pay their respects, he was having a momentary crisis of conscience. Nixon felt a pull to go, but, he said, “it’s not credible. I mean, I don’t—yes, he’s a national leader, but I don’t like taking advantage of going to a funeral and being there when Martin Luther King and I were not good friends.”

  Advisers argued that not attending would actually draw more attention to the reasons their friendship had ended than his joining the vast sea of dignitaries. Nixon called his stolid campaign manager, John Mitchell, who thought going would make him seem like “a prisoner of the moment,” leaving unsaid the truth that holding on to southern delegates would be a lot easier if Nixon did not go. Much about their party had changed in the years since 1960. Jackie Robinson wrote in 1963 of fears that he and Morrow shared: “The danger of the Republican Party being taken over by the lily-whitest conservatives is more serious than many people realize.” Goldwater supporters in Georgia would purge Black leaders like John Calhoun from the party leadership in 1964.

  William Safire, however, offered a painful reminder of how Nixon’s reluctance to act in 1960 had backfired. Still, Nixon argued that to attend would be “grandstanding.” Safire reminded his boss that was exactly the word he had used when
he had disappointed Jackie Robinson and Nixon did not want to make that same mistake again.

  What if, Nixon wondered aloud, he flew down to Atlanta privately, without publicity, to pay a quick visit to Mrs. King, offer his condolences, and be done with it—leaving unsaid how similar to JFK’s call to Coretta this gesture would be. His aide Dwight Chapin and his advance man Nick Ruwe were tasked with making it happen. Ruwe hired an Atlanta limousine driver and told him, “This can never be talked about.”

  The next afternoon, Ruwe drove Nixon and Chapin to the Kings’ humble home in Vine City—a typical redbrick split-level, with the exception of the security bars over all the windows. Nixon was soon chatting with the four King children and then went to speak with Coretta in her bedroom. For three days, her bed had served as central planning for the Memphis march, the succession process at the SCLC, and the funeral. Mrs. King, propped up by pillows in bed and surrounded by telegrams and newspapers, was gracious as Nixon took her hand. After fifteen minutes, the candidate excused himself and said he was now going to visit Daddy King. He was there for half an hour and soon flying to Key Biscayne, feeling good about the effort. Late that evening, Nixon asked Chapin to come to his villa and said, “Dwight, how’s our trip to Atlanta playing?”

  Playing? Nixon had ordered it all to be private. Chapin went back to his room to figure out if the visit had leaked. One Atlanta reporter had picked up on the quick visit, but otherwise their plan had worked perfectly—silent as could be. When Chapin brought Nixon that news, the furious candidate exploded. “Damn it. I’m going to have to go back there and go to that funeral.” Chapin made new flight and hotel reservations.

  * * *

  On Palm Sunday in Washington, two days before the funeral, Bobby’s adviser Peter Edelman and his fiancée, Marian Wright, picked up the senator and his wife to head for the church of the Reverend Walter Fauntroy, a longtime friend of King’s. As Edelman drove, they saw smoking hulks of buildings along street after street. More than twelve thousand National Guardsmen still patrolled D.C. neighborhoods. Parishioners on Ninth Street stepped over debris and broken glass. Eight years after her Spelman sit-in days, Marian Wright was counsel to King’s Poor People’s Campaign and an advocate for children in poverty. She had just heard King speak at a Washington National Cathedral service four days before his death, talking about his upcoming Poor People’s March. She would return to Atlanta for the sake of her “slain young prophet.”

  When Ethel and Bobby arrived in Atlanta the next afternoon, they first stopped by Sunset Avenue to visit with Coretta. Like his brother when he made his fateful 1960 call, Bobby had never met her. The limo pulled up to the King home in the late afternoon, and after greeting each of the King children, they were ushered back to Coretta’s bedroom.

  There had been so many visitors to Coretta’s bedside that it no longer seemed odd to have Ethel and Bobby there. It was as if they had known each other for years, and in a sense they had. Political violence having racked both families, they understood realities few others had experienced.

  The night of his brother Jack’s assassination, there had been a haunting reminder of the events of late October 1960. A reporter from Atlanta’s WSB station asked Martin Luther King, “Many have said you helped put President Kennedy in the White House. In light of what has happened, do you regret that?”

  King answered that night, “There are those who contend that the Negro vote had a great deal to do with President Kennedy being elected, and that many Negroes were influenced to vote for the President because of a call he made to my wife during an arrest here in Georgia. Now, if this had anything to do with it, I certainly don’t regret it because I think President Kennedy made a most significant contribution in civil rights.”

  After informing Coretta that their sister-in-law Jackie, despite usually avoiding public gatherings, would indeed be attending the service and would stop by for a few minutes the next day, Bobby and Ethel rose and offered a goodbye. Next came a meeting with King’s devastated advisers, one that Kennedy dreaded but knew was important to face. The pain in the room at the Hyatt Regency was palpable, the assembled faces etched with confusion and suffering. Where were they to go next? What was even possible, with King gone, with cities going up in smoke?

  Bobby simply said that he was running for president to make a difference, that they could not erase generations of injustice, but that they had to go forward, somehow, together. Much later, after the doors of Ebenezer were closed, the lines of mourners gone until dawn, John Lewis, who had joined Bobby’s campaign, arranged for the Kennedys to have a private moment by the casket at three in the morning. They entered the darkened church, with a profusion of flowers and a few flickering candles by the body. Bobby and Ethel knelt, crossed themselves, and said prayers quietly. When they stepped back, Lewis had a moment to himself to say goodbye to a big brother, a teacher.

  * * *

  Before heading to Atlanta, Wofford decided that he wanted to join Mrs. King for the memorial march in Memphis itself, the day before the funeral. He asked his sixteen-year-old daughter, Susanne, to go with him. On this muted and mournful day, there was no repeat of the violence that had marred the march King led for Memphis garbage workers just a week before. Later, at the Memphis airport, the grieving family packed the plane flying home for the next day’s nationally televised funeral. Wofford and his daughter joined them. In Atlanta, Wofford reflected on what a strange way it was to celebrate his own forty-second birthday.

  Wofford never formally joined King’s staff but had continued to work to further the aims of the movement after the 1960 election. He had hoped to lead the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, but Bobby decided that Wofford would always put King’s interests above his brother’s—a point Wofford didn’t dispute. He was made special assistant to the president for civil rights instead. Though he arranged a few short, strained meetings between King and Kennedy, he felt the new administration would not dare push for civil rights, at least not in a substantive, legislative way.

  From the second floor of the Executive Office Building, Wofford had looked out at the West Wing, where his requests for action had gone ignored for months. After a frustrating first year, he asked the president to let him work with Shriver on building the Peace Corps. Wofford recommended that Louis Martin take over his job, because they had already worked together to bring about quiet advances in civil rights through the executive branch. He thought Martin could provide the president with a perspective he needed to hear. Eventually, Wofford left for Ethiopia to manage the Peace Corps in Africa, though Kennedy did not take Wofford’s advice about hiring Martin. It was on Ethiopian radio that Wofford listened to reports from Birmingham, feeling the ache of not being alongside King.

  Wofford was back in America by 1965, when John Lewis and other marchers were being beaten in Selma on “Bloody Sunday.” Clare’s pleas could not keep Wofford from heading to Alabama, at last putting his body on the line alongside King. One afternoon, on the long march from Selma to Montgomery, Coretta noticed Wofford resting by the side of the road. Seeing him for the first time in years, she came over to chat and mentioned the 1960 call, saying of Kennedy, “They say that his call to me made the difference, that it elected him President. I like to think so. He was beginning to do so much, he and his brother.”

  * * *

  As he had promised, just after sunrise and a sprinkling of April rain, Lonnie stood at the front door of the church, equipped with a long and growing list of special guests. Charles Black and other former student organizers, equipped with walkie-talkies just as they had been during their sit-in days, readied teams of students wearing gray armbands to restrain the crowds during the procession. Around ten o’clock, long lines of limousines began to appear, and student marshals, staffers, and police officers struggled to hold back the estimated thirty thousand people along the blocks surrounding the church so that special guests could enter. Lonnie’s list was focused on the famous, starting with Harry Belafonte,
who was to sit next to the King family. No one would be surprised to see him there, but Belafonte brought with him many other celebrities, including Jackie Robinson, Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Charlton Heston, Marlon Brando, Stevie Wonder, and Berry Gordy.

  But difficulties arose. “I let Nixon in. He was accompanied by Wilt Chamberlain, and you could tell Wilt! They weren’t on the list to get in, but I let them in.” Lonnie had to be careful, because he was being closely observed by hundreds, many frantic to enter. Louis Martin approached with Whitney Young, and Martin, as a powerful political official, was ushered in, while Young, a major civil rights leader as head of the National Urban League, was inexplicably not on the list. Luckily for Young, Lonnie remembered the former dean of the School of Social Work at Atlanta University and how he had supported the students. “Come round to the side,” Lonnie said, bringing Young in through the basement. Lonnie’s options were dwindling, “because by this time I couldn’t let a lot of others in; I didn’t want to piss off that many other people.”

  All of them, the famous and the obscure, overwhelmed the sanctuary and Ebenezer’s basement Fellowship Hall. Outside, restless crowds jammed in for blocks around. People watched from rooftops and from on top of cars, or climbed up street poles and trees to get as close to the old church as possible. No one had anticipated such a turnout. Recent punditry to the effect that King was irrelevant, a man whose time had come and gone, now seemed absurd.

  Wofford entered the already sweltering Ebenezer sanctuary with the King family. The smell of chrysanthemums and lilies suffused the room, and the choir shifted in the chancel, ready to sing the old hymns. He saw Abernathy ready to preside over the service, looking overwhelmed as more squeezed in. Wofford noted the presence of his friend Shriver, far from the row where Bobby sat. While they were family, Shriver’s choice to remain in the Johnson administration, serving a president Bobby so thoroughly distrusted, had strained their bond. Although Eunice was busy campaigning for her brother, her husband was preparing to fly to Paris as Johnson’s ambassador to France, hoping to help bring an end to the Vietnam War. Wofford regretted the tensions between these two men, both of whom he admired. The sense of estrangement extended to members of Bobby’s staff, who would later push Shriver away when he attempted to help carry Bobby’s casket off the plane from California following his assassination.