Nine Days
Page 29
Martin left Washington after Nixon’s victory in 1968 to return to editing in Chicago, feeling he had accomplished what he had set out to do. As the years passed, his wife, Gertrude, felt some frustration that Martin never asked for any credit. But Martin understood how to play the system—how to operate without notice while allowing others to win acclaim. So that the Black elected officials he mentored around the country would have the resources needed to advance their policies, Martin helped found the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. When President Carter was in political trouble, Vernon Jordan and Andrew Young advised him to bring Martin on board. As in the 1960 campaign, Martin considered himself “a pinch hitter,” and he liked helping Carter. Ten years after he left the DNC, Martin finally had his office in the West Wing, and his White House log reveals that he was visited by Wofford there on several occasions.
Martin’s and Shriver’s correspondence continued for the rest of Martin’s life. After reading an article that called Martin the “godfather of Black politics,” Shriver wrote that he was the “godfather of many of the specific actions taken on behalf of better race relations in the U.S.A.” After a stroke placed Martin in a wheelchair in the late 1980s, Shriver wrote, “Even though I am hoping your recovery continues to make great progress, I cannot help but say that it would be more fun for me if I had a chance to talk to you. To hear your voice would be a warm consolation.” Martin came back to D.C. one more time to receive the DNC’s Lawrence O’Brien Achievement Award at the Capitol. Shriver and Senator Wofford proudly joined Martin. Even though the old editor was physically frail, his wit and his smile seemed unchanged.
Martin was the first African American to become a close adviser of three sitting presidents. Frederick Douglass spoke only three times with Lincoln, and Morrow was often ignored by Eisenhower, but Martin managed to become an effective president whisperer. At a celebration of his and Gertrude’s fiftieth wedding anniversary, Martin recounted being in a cab in Liberia when the driver mentioned a village built by Americans during World War II. Locals had been able to smell the good barbecue the American cooked. The cabbie said, “You Americans back home are in the same boat: you can smell it, but can’t taste it.” Martin said to the gathering, so overcome that he could barely get the words out, “The one thing that would give me the greatest joy in life would be to make certain that everyone has a taste.”
When Martin died in 1997, Wofford and Shriver were on the honorary planning committee for the funeral and honorary pallbearers. Shriver spoke at both the ceremony at Howard University’s Rankin Chapel and at the service in Los Angeles, to which his son Robert took him. Shriver said, “Kennedy would never have telephoned Coretta Scott King to express his concern about her husband’s imprisonment if Louis had not produced the idea. That idea and Kennedy’s action definitely changed the election results in Illinois. I was there, and know what I’m talking about.” Vernon Jordan called Martin “the unsung, unheralded, and to some, unknown hero of our times.”
Martin and Shriver both hailed Wofford’s upset victory in the 1991 special election for a Senate seat representing Pennsylvania; Martin wrote in the Defender that his friend had “imagination and guts. He was the most liberal, practical idealist I had ever met. He knew how to get things done and he was straight on the race issue.” Wofford ran a new kind of campaign by proclaiming that all Americans had a right to health care—an idea Bill Clinton borrowed the following year for his presidential campaign. Though President Clinton was not able to enact universal health care, Wofford is still seen as the candidate who made the idea politically credible, even if the backlash to Clinton’s efforts cost Wofford reelection. One of Wofford’s proudest moments as a senator was when he stood behind President Clinton in the Rose Garden for the signing of a bill he had introduced, with Representative John Lewis co-sponsoring it in the House of Representatives: the Martin Luther King Holiday and Service Act. With Martin Luther King III and Representative Lewis next to Wofford, the law turned MLK Day into a national day of service. After his Senate defeat, Wofford led the Corporation for National and Community Service (AmeriCorps) for the rest of Clinton’s term.
Wofford would end up playing an unexpected role in a few more events in recent political history. When Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was embroiled in controversy related to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, Senator Obama needed to deliver the speech of his life in order to right the ship of his candidacy. He decided to speak candidly and forcefully about race in American life, just as Kennedy had addressed Houston evangelical ministers about his Roman Catholicism in 1960. Wofford introduced Obama in Philadelphia that day, saying he had waited a long time to meet someone he thought the country needed as badly as the Kennedys. Wofford quoted what King once told him about what he hoped to find in President Kennedy: intelligence, political skill, and moral passion. He told the 2008 audience that he believed King would agree that Obama possessed all three. President Obama would award Wofford the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2012.
* * *
Around this time, Lonnie King was working on a late-life PhD dissertation after a long career in business and government administration, and he decided to give Harris Wofford a call, unsure if he was alive. After leaving a message, Lonnie soon received a voice mail in return that said, “Is this the Lonnie King who almost got me fired?”
Lonnie called Wofford back, saying, “Yeah, I’m the one.” Lonnie remained a member of Ebenezer Baptist Church, having returned to Atlanta from Washington and Baltimore to teach at Georgia State. He expressed wistfulness about having left civil rights activism, saying, “We put democracy on cruise control after the 1960s and the folks who were opposed to us … they put their efforts to block us into overdrive.”
In 2017, Lonnie and Charles Black spoke to supporters of the DREAM Act in Atlanta about the effective use of nonviolence as these students undertook sit-ins at their universities. Lonnie would declare that he had one more battle in him when he ticked off statistics about unregistered young Black and Latino voters in Georgia. Even though he was in his eighties, he planned to partner with churches and colleges on a new Georgia Student Movement. He was determined to organize young people one more time, saying, with the broad smile that persuaded Julian Bond to help him start a movement, “That’s my last hurrah.”
His death in March 2019 assembled the surviving Atlanta Student Movement veterans once more at Ebenezer to celebrate the leader who first brought them together. Under his online obituary is a comment from Marilyn Pryce Hoytt, one of the two women who went with Lonnie and Dr. King to the Magnolia Room: “Well done, brave warrior.”
The Sam Nunn Federal Center now stands on the site of Rich’s department store, and it boasts a thirty-foot-tall mosaic in the lobby portraying Lonnie and Dr. King being arrested together.
* * *
Many historians and reporters crossed the threshold of Harris Wofford’s West End home in Washington over the years, seeking a sense of what it was like to sit across from figures such as King and Kennedy—to have known them not as monuments but as young men facing difficult, sometimes overwhelming choices.
Wofford was one of the last living figures from that era, but he wore the responsibility lightly. True, he was a godfather of the national service movement in America, among other historic achievements, but he was also happy to talk about the beer with Louis Martin that likely changed the outcome of the 1960 election. He loved a good story, but like Lonnie he was more inclined toward the future than the past, eager to strategize as he once did with a minister from Montgomery. He remained relentlessly attuned to what was next. Wofford was proud to be part of another equal rights movement, when, five years after Clare’s passing in 1996, the person he met and fell in love with was a man. After fifteen years together, he married Matthew Charlton, writing a New York Times op-ed about their union.
Wofford often walked through West Potomac Park, just off the National Mall, to where the new Martin Luther King Jr. Memoria
l stands. Wofford went there because he missed his friend. King’s resolute face, emerging from the stone in which his figure is carved, stares across the Tidal Basin to where the Jefferson Memorial stands, a perfect symbol of the tortured history of race in America. The statue’s determined look reminded Wofford of how King appeared when facing a hard decision.
It would be on Martin Luther King Day 2019 that Harris Wofford died at age ninety-two. His public memorial service was held at Howard University, where he went to law school, where he and Louis Martin brought Kennedy to speak, and where a service for Louis Martin was held.
King’s words are paraphrased in carved relief on the wall of the memorial: “Out of the Mountain of Despair, a Stone of Hope.” It was Louis Martin who said, “It wasn’t just a job with me. I looked on it as a lever, to move the mountain of racism.” Along with Shriver and Wofford, the team found an opening and pressed their point of maximum leverage.
When King faced down his fears of solitary confinement, when he was arrested more than twenty times, he was attempting to deliver Americans from the stony encasement of racism. The struggle to shatter that rock, to break free from it, takes courage and more:
The very time I thought I was lost,
My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.
Martin Luther King Jr. being greeted by his family as he disembarks the plane that brought him home from Reidsville to Atlanta
Martin Luther King Jr. speaks with student sit-in organizers in his office on September 1, 1960. Lonnie King is to Dr. King’s left. Julian Bond is facing Dr. King in a white shirt, fourth on the right. (DONALD UHRBROCK / THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION / GETTY IMAGES)
Police take Martin Luther King Jr. out of Rich’s department store in Atlanta. Behind him are Atlanta Student Movement leader Lonnie King and Spelman College students Blondean Orbert and Marilyn Pryce. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Lonnie King, Marilyn Pryce, and Martin Luther King Jr. under arrest in downtown Atlanta (CHARLES JACKSON / THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS)
King and Blondean Orbert being taken to jail following their arrest. Driving the car is the Atlanta police captain, R. E. Little. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Two officers escort King from Fulton County Jail on the way to the DeKalb County courthouse. (HORACE CORT / ASSOCIATED PRESS)
King prior to his appearance before Judge Oscar Mitchell at DeKalb County Civil and Criminal Court (DONALD UHRBROCK / THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION / GETTY IMAGES)
Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King with their children Yolanda and Martin, King’s sister Christine King Farris, and student activists at Peachtree-DeKalb Airport after King’s return from the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville (AFRO AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS / GADO / GETTY IMAGES)
Louis E. Martin with President John F. Kennedy at a 1963 White House reception celebrating the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation (COURTESY OF THE JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM)
Harris Wofford and President Kennedy on the South Lawn of the White House (COURTESY OF THE JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM)
Sargent Shriver with Peace Corps members on the South Lawn (COURTESY OF THE JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM)
Donald Hollowell and student activist Prathia Hall leaving federal court early in the sit-in movement (BETTMANN / GETTY IMAGES)
Lonnie King leads demonstrators in prayer before a protest against segregated retail shops in Atlanta on December 12, 1960. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
E. Frederic Morrow and Richard Nixon sometime in the 1950s (E. FREDERIC MORROW PAPERS [BOX 11, PHOTO 007], VIVIAN G. HARSH RESEARCH COLLECTION OF AFRO-AMERICAN HISTORY AND LITERATURE, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY)
E. Frederic Morrow, left, and Jackie Robinson, center (CECIL LAYNE / E. FREDERIC MORROW PAPERS [BOX 12, PHOTO 088], VIVIAN G. HARSH RESEARCH COLLECTION OF AFRO-AMERICAN HISTORY AND LITERATURE, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY)
Louis E. Martin and President Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House colonnade (YOICHI OKAMOTO / LYNDON B. JOHNSON LIBRARY)
Harris Wofford and Sargent Shriver on a Peace Corps trip in Africa (COURTESY OF HARRIS WOFFORD)
Robert Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, pay their respects to Coretta Scott King in her home after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. (FLIP SCHULKE ARCHIVES / GETTY IMAGES)
NOTES
The page numbers for the notes that appear in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.
ABBREVIATIONS
AC: Atlanta Constitution
ADW: Atlanta Daily World
AI: Atlanta Inquirer
AJ: Atlanta Journal
AJC: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
DHP: Donald Hollowell Papers
JFKL: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
LMP: Louis Martin Papers, Library of Congress
Lonnie King, interview: Lonnie King interviews with the authors, 2017–2018
NYT: New York Times
PC: Pittsburgh Courier
RNL: Richard Nixon Presidential Library
Wofford, interview: Harris Wofford interviews with the authors, 2016–2017
EPIGRAPHS
“Martin told me”: Young, Easy Burden, 175.
“And Dr. King can”: Dorothy Cotton, interview in King, History Channel, 2008.
PROLOGUE
Coretta Scott King eagerly waited: King, My Life with Martin Luther King Jr., 176–77.
The dining room at Atlanta’s Paschal’s: Frank Wells, “King Held on Old Count as Sit-Inners Leave Jail,” AC, Oct. 24, 1960.
The word from Mayor: Ibid.; “Rich’s Declines to Prosecute Pastor King on Sit-In Count,” AJ, Oct. 24, 1960.
She knew her visits: Coretta said of her husband and his fear of prison, “He needed and depended upon the support of people he loved.” King, My Life with Martin Luther King Jr., 179.
she were imprisoned with him: Ibid., 176.
plates of food: Marilyn Pryce Hoytt, interview by Jeanne Law Bohannon, July 13, 2018, Atlanta Student Movement Project, Kennesaw State University (KSU).
there was no sign of King: King, My Life with Martin Luther King Jr., 177.
Student leaders ran out: Gwendolyn Iles-Foster, interview by Junior and Senior Everest high school students, 2012, D. C. Everest Oral History Project.
The sullen, stubborn attitude: Abram, Day Is Short, 129.
“We now await substantial”: “Rich’s Declines to Prosecute Pastor King on Sit-In Count.”
“You gotta wait, there’s people”: Lonnie King, interview.
DeKalb was Klan country: King, My Life with Martin Luther King Jr., 177.
brief newspaper stories: “DeKalb Seeks to Jail Rev. King,” AC, Oct. 21, 1960; “King Faces Year in Jail on Old Count,” AJ, Oct. 21, 1960.
the weight of responsibility for King’s fate: Lonnie King, interview.
As King talked with his brother: Otis Moss, interview by the authors, May 27, 2017.
“M.L. will be all right”: Branch, Parting the Waters, 357.
“Why are you releasing us?”: Dr. Herschelle Sullivan Challenor, interview by Jeanne Law Bohannon, Aug. 25, 2017, Atlanta Student Movement Project, KSU.
under the terms of the agreement: “Rich’s Declines to Prosecute Pastor King on Sit-In Count.”
have Coretta call his lawyer: Iles-Foster, interview by D. C. Everest students.
One young woman, Carolyn: Tatum, “Atlanta Student Movement Historical Trail to Be Unveiled with Interactive Markers.”
through the glass doors: AI, Oct. 31, 1960.
his son’s enemies might strike: King Sr., Daddy King, 157.
“I think I should choose”: Rieder, Gospel of Freedom, 5.
Martin’s role has largely been neglected: Louis Martin, despite Wofford’s interviews with the author, did not get a mention in Theodore White’s Making of the President, 1960—considered the definitive work on the 1960 ele
ction. He received only two passing references in both Theodore Sorensen’s Kennedy and Arthur M. Schlesinger’s Thousand Days.
“It wasn’t just a job”: Poinsett, Walking with Presidents, 11.
“too-liberal-in-law”: O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano, 195.
“bureaucracy, routine, rules”: Stossel, Sarge, xv.
“IN TROUBLE”
“We’re in trouble with Negroes”: Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, 47.
most of any Republican: Rigueur, Loneliness of the Black Republican, 311. As a swing voting community, Black Americans were evenly split in party identification by the first half of the 1940s, although Roosevelt hovered around 70 percent of the Black vote in his final three elections. Black voters went for Roosevelt by 71 percent in 1936, 67 percent in 1940, and 68 percent in 1944.
connection with King: Harris Wofford, interview by Berl Bernhard, #1, Nov. 29, 1965, JFKL.
“good people, the right people”: Martin Luther King, interview by Berl Bernhard, March 9, 1964, JFKL.
for King’s 1958 book: Carson et al., Papers of Martin Luther King Jr., 4:29.