Voices in Our Blood (62 page)

The Second Coming of Martin Luther King

Harper's Magazine,
August 1967

D
AVID
H
ALBERSTAM

He is perhaps the best speaker in America of this generation, but his speech before the huge crowd in the UN Plaza on that afternoon in mid-April was bad; his words were flat, the drama and that special cadence, rooted in his Georgia past and handed down generation by generation in his family, were missing. It was as if he were reading someone else's speech. There was no extemporizing; and he is at his best extemporaneously, and at his worst when he reads. There were no verbal mistakes, no surprise passions. (An organizer of the peace march said afterwards, “He wrote it with a slide rule.”) When he finished his speech, and was embraced by a black brother, it seemed an unwanted embrace, and he looked uncomfortable. He left the UN Plaza as soon as he could.

On that cold day of a cold spring Martin Luther King, Jr. made a sharp departure from his own past. He did it reluctantly; if he was not embittered over the loss of some old allies, he was clearly uneasy about some of his new ones. Yet join the peace movement he did. One part of his life was behind him, and a different and obviously more difficult one lay ahead. He had walked, marched, picketed, protested against legal segregation in America—in jails and out of jails, always in the spotlight. Where he went, the action went too. He had won a striking place of honor in the American society: if he was attacked as a radical, it was by men whose days were past. If his name was on men's room walls throughout the South, he was celebrated also as a Nobel Prize–winner, the youngest one in history; he was our beloved,
Time
Magazine's man of the year; his view of Christianity was accepted by many Americans who could never have accepted the Christianity of Billy Graham. In the decade of 1956 to 1966 he was a radical America felt comfortable to have spawned.

But all that seemed long ago. In the year 1967, the vital issue of the time was not civil rights, but Vietnam. And in civil rights we were slowly learning some of the terrible truths about the ghettos of the North. Standing on the platform at the UN Plaza, he was not taking on George Wallace, or Bull Connor, or Jim Clark; he was taking on the President of the United States, challenging what is deemed national security, linking by his very presence much of the civil-rights movement with the peace movement. Before the war would be ended, before the President and King spoke as one on the American ghettos—if they ever would—his new radicalism might take him very far.

On both these issues there had been considerable controversy and debate within the King organization, especially among those people who care most deeply for King, and see him as the possessor of a certain amount of moral power. On the peace issue none of King's associates really questioned how he felt; rather they questioned the wisdom of taking a stand. Would it hurt the civil-rights movement? Would it deprive the Negroes of King's desperately needed time and resources? And some of these peace people, were they really the kind of people King wanted to play with? On the ghettos there were similar problems.

No one is really going to accomplish anything in the ghettos, goes the argument, until the federal government comes in with massive programs. In the meantime King can only hurt and smear his own reputation; he will get dirt on his hands like the other ward heelers if he starts playing with practical day-by-day politics in the North. In the North, in addition to the white opponents, there are all the small-time Negro operators who will be out to make a reputation by bucking Martin King. Yet the ghettos exist, and to shun them is to lose moral status.

II

After the New York peace rally I traveled with King for ten days on the new paths he had chosen. It was a time when the Negro seemed more than ever rebellious and disenchanted with the white; and when the white middle class—decent, upright—seemed near to saturation with the Negro's new rebellion. The Negro in the cities seemed nearer to riots than ever; the white, seeing the riots on TV, wanted to move further away from the Negro than ever before. A terrible cycle was developing. At press conference after press conference he said no, he didn't think his stand on Vietnam was hurting the civil-rights movement or damaging the Negro cause with the President; no, he didn't think Stokely Carmichael's cry of black power had hurt the Negroes; no, he didn't plan to run for the Presidency. It was a week which began in New York with an announcement that King would go to the Holy Land in the fall on a pilgrimage.

Then came the first question: “And do you relate this to Vietnam?” No, King said, there were no political implications.

A Negro reporter who had been out to St. Alban's Hospital in Queens and had talked to the soldiers there said, “The war doesn't bother them. The soldiers are for it.”

Later, on the way to the airport (most of King's life is spent going to airports, and it is the only time to talk to him), King's top assistant, Andy Young, commented on the fact that the Vietnam question had come from a Negro reporter. “It always does,” he said. “Every time we get the dumb question, the patriot question, it's a Negro reporter.” A New York minister said it was the Negro middle class wanting respectability and playing it close on Vietnam. “They're very nervous on Vietnam, afraid they're going to lose everything else.” King added, “Yes, they're hoping the war will win them their spurs. That's not the way you win spurs.” The ghettos, he said, were better on the war issue than the middle class.

III

The most important stop on King's trip would be Cleveland, where he was thinking of making a major summer effort to break down some of the ghetto barriers. It is a strange thing the way a city can rise to national and international fame over racial problems. Sometimes it is predictable. The word was always out in the South, for instance, that Birmingham was a tough city with a tough police force and Bull Connor; Negroes in Georgia and Mississippi knew about Bull Connor fifteen years before. Little Rock, which we once heard so much about, was an accident, its crisis deriving from its own succession laws and Orval Faubus' ambition.

Now there are cities imprinted on our memories that we barely know about, cities which we have forgotten, but in the Negro world, and in that part of the white world which is trying to cope with the coming fire, the word is out: Cleveland, where four people died in riots last summer, is likely to be a very tough place with all the worst aspects of the ghetto, and almost none of the safety valves. Unlike New York, where Mayor John Lindsay at least visits the slums, Mayor Ralph Locher seems to have written off the Negro vote, and to depend on the Italians, the Poles, and other white minorities. The Negro ministers there are interested in King's coming in for the summer action program, and though this is early May, a chilly day, and King is asking someone to find him a topcoat, there is a feeling that we will hear a good deal more about Cleveland before the summer is over, probably more than we want to.

King is edgy because the Negro community is divided. He does not want to get caught in a cross fire, and he is sensitive to what happened with his ill-fated organizing effort in Chicago last year.

Yet there are advantages in Cleveland. It is smaller than Chicago, better laid out geographically, and the Mayor is not so smart as Daley. His Chicago machine has enough Negro support to keep the Negro community divided; Locher's indifference to the Negroes in Cleveland may eventually force them to unite. But they must be brought together by someone from the outside. Here, then, is one of the ironies: for years the crisis was in the South, and Northern Negroes sent money and support there. In the process the most skilled leadership rose up in the South, fashioned out of the crises faced there, while in general the Northern leadership, so far lacking such direct and dramatic crises, lacks prestige; it must summon help from the South.

King is met at the airport by one of the older Negro ministers who is representing the Negro Ministers' Association. The preacher is about sixty, very pleased to be meeting King. As soon as we are in the car he starts talking about an earlier King speech and how much he liked it. Everyone else smiles politely, and there is a murmur of approval from King, which dies as the preacher continues, “I mean the way you got up there, Doctor King, and you told those Negroes they got to improve themselves, they got to help themselves more, isn't anyone else going to help them, and they got to clean up themselves, clean up their houses, clean up the filth in the streets, stop livin' like pigs, they've got to wash up. They can't just wait for someone to come to their doors with a welfare check, they got to help themselves.”

There is silence in the car as he continues, his voice gaining in enthusiasm as he carries on, for he is preaching now, and driving a little faster too.

King says nothing, but from the back of the car, quite softly, the Reverend Bernard Lee, a King assistant, says, “You got to have something worth cleaning up, Reverend,” almost as an apology.

The tension rises a little in the car; King is silent, and Bernard Lee speaks again. “It's easier said than done, Reverend. You've got six generations just trying to make do, and they've given up fighting.”

But the Cleveland Reverend keeps on; the Negroes have got to clean it up; they've lost these homes.

This time it is Andy Young: “You ain't lost it, Reverend. They lost it for you. You never had it.”

In all this King has said nothing, letting Lee and Young do the stalking. (Later I am to find that this is his standard technique, holding back, letting others talk themselves out, allowing his men to guide the conversation to the point where it can be finally summed up by him.) “Well, Reverend,” King finally says, “these communities have become slums not just because the Negroes don't keep clean and don't care, but because the whole system makes it that way. I call it slummism—a bad house is not just a bad house, it's a bad school and a bad job, and it's been that way for three generations, a bad house for three generations, and a bad school for three generations.”

Then Andy Young starts telling of a home-owning community in Atlanta. Recently somewhat lower-class white, it was now turning quickly black, and somewhat middle-class black: “And so, of course, as soon as they've moved they all get together and have a big meeting about how to keep the neighborhood clean . . . and they want that garbage picked up, you know all that, and in the middle of the meeting, a man stands up at the back of the room and he tells them they're kidding themselves. ‘Forget it,' he says, ‘just forget it, because you're not going to get these services. I work for the sanitation department and I want you to know that they've just transferred twenty men out of this area, so you can just forget it all.' ”

“Same old story,” Bernard Lee says. “Negroes buy houses and immediately the services stop, and these aren't Negroes on relief, Reverend.”

King, to ease the tension, asks about the Negro community of Cleveland, and the preacher becomes so eloquent on the subject of the division within the Negro church community that Andy Young finally says, “Reverend, go back all the way to the New Testament. Even Peter and Paul couldn't get together.”

“But
they
got it. They already got theirs, and we're trying to get our share,” the preacher says.

King then asks, Is the Mayor a racist? No, says the preacher, it's not racism, “it's just ignorance. He doesn't know the pulse of the new Negro. The wrong kind of people are advising him, telling him handle the Negro this way, give him just a very little bit of this and a very little bit of that; give him a pacifier, not a cure, a sugar tit, that's what we used to call it in the South, a sugar tit, just enough to take away the appetite but doesn't fill you up . . . feed one man, give one man a job, and you've taken care of the Negroes.” As he finishes, one can sense the relaxation in the car. The preacher has rehabilitated himself, he's not as much of a Tom as you think.

Then King starts talking about the cities. So very few of the mayors have the imagination to deal with the complexity of the problems, and the handful who do can't really handle it because they lack the resources. The problems are so great that they must go to the federal government, but most of them don't even know the problems in their own cities. It is almost as if they are afraid to try to understand, afraid where that trip would lead them. “Why, this Mayor Locher here in Cleveland,” he says, “he's damning me now and calling me an extremist, and three years ago he gave me the key to the city and said I was the greatest man of the century. That was as long as I was safe from him down in the South. It's about the same with Daley and Yorty too; they used to tell me what a great man I was.”

IV

That was a simpler time. He had exuded love and Christian understanding during the nation's dramatic assault on legal segregation. In retrospect it was not so much Martin Luther King who made the movement go, it was Bull Connor; each time a bomb went off, a head smashed open, the contributions would mount at King's headquarters. They bombed King's own house, an angry black mob gathered ready to do violence, and King came out and said, “We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them and let them know you love them. What we are doing is right and God is with us.” And, of course, it was a time of television, we could tune in for a few minutes and see the cream of Negro youth, the slack-jawed whites answering their love with illiterate threats and violence, shouting what they were going to do to the niggers, and reveling in this, spelling their own doom.

King was well prepared for his part in that war; the weapon would be the white man's Christianity. He knew his people, and he could bring to the old cadences of the Southern Negro preacher the new vision of the social gospel which demanded change in America. He was using these rhythms to articulate the new contemporary subjects they were ready to hear (“America, you've strayed away. You've trampled over nineteen million of your brethren. All men are created equal. Not some men. Not white men. All men. America, rise up and come home”). Before Birmingham, the Montgomery bus strike was a success, and other victories followed. Grouped around King were able young ministers, the new breed, better educated; in a changing South he became the single most important symbol of the fight against segregation, culminating in his great speech before the crowd which had marched to Washington in 1963. Those were heady years, and if not all the battles were won, the final impression was of a great televised morality play, white hats and black hats; lift up the black hat and there would be the white face of Bull Connor; lift up the white hat and there would be the solemn black face of Martin King, shouting love.