When Harlem Nearly Killed King (4 page)

The worried Harriman, for instance, blanketed Negro communities with campaign pamphlets showing him and his wife with Little Rock school desegregation leader Daisy Bates as she visited the couple in the governor’s mansion. The text detailed his list of accomplishments, including hiring Negroes to two state judicial posts: State Rent Administrator and Assistant Counsel to the Governor, as well as to other posts. It reminded Negro voters that Harriman had launched fair employment and fair housing initiatives, and that he had spoken out against school segregation in Little Rock. In that same literature—well aware that, as an individual, Rockefeller had spoken out against segregation too—Harriman and his aides attempted to bypass the man himself in leveling their criticism and going after the rest of his party with
statements like: “Republican officials have been counseling Negroes to be patient [on the subject of civil rights] …”

In response to such criticisms, Rockefeller knew he could always distance himself from the rest of the party due to his background and wealth. Even before the rise of his legendary grandfather, the Rockefellers had distinguished themselves as abolitionists who aided the Underground Railroad, sending slaves to freedom. And after his grandfather accumulated his massive wealth, had it not been for his family’s philanthropy, important Negro institutions across the country probably wouldn’t even exist. Or if they did, they would do so in facilities vastly inferior to the ones they were in by 1958. Through the years the Rockefellers had done such an exemplary job of covering up for the robber-baron ruthlessness of John senior, to the benefit of people of all colors, that all Nelson had to do was remind audiences that he played no small role in the initiatives, beginning with his role in overseeing the family’s gift to New York City during the height of the Great Depression.

By 1958, Rockefeller Center was a fixture in the pantheon of New York City landmarks. It also happened to be headquarters for several blue-chip corporations, including the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), owner of the NBC television station that broadcast a morning show from Rockefeller Center that had taken the nation by storm. The program featured a host who regularly sat with a chimpanzee named J. Fred Muggs, who by 1958 was replaced with another chimp named Mr. Kokomo. Prior to that year, the show was broadcast live while spectators gazed through a large plate glass
window into the curbside studio on West 49th Street. Dave Garroway had turned
The Today Show
into an American institution.

Thus, in September 1958, as King prepared to trek to New York City to launch the promotional campaign for
Stride Toward Freedom
in the midst of the governor’s race between Harriman and Rockefeller, there was no question that Martin Luther King, Jr., would have to appear on
The Today Show
. An appearance would boost sales of the new book. And there was no question that basking in King’s aura would be useful to both gubernatorial candidates. During the days of September 16th to the 20th, the interests of King, Harriman, Rockefeller, and local Negro politicians would all converge. Tuesday, the 16th was the day King made his way to Rockefeller Center to tape his book promotional appearance for
The Today Show
, to be broadcast the following day. That Friday would be the day he would appear with Harriman and Rockefeller, as well as local Negro leaders, on a dais in Harlem in front of the community’s historic Hotel Teresa. It would be both
Harriman and Rockefeller’s third appearance in Harlem that week as they battled each other for the Negro vote. While they prepared to voice the luminous hopeful platitudes always expressed in speeches at such rallies, neither was aware of what would occur the day after the rally. Privately, Harriman—who portrayed himself as more liberal than his Republican opponent—would express himself with far more racial candor, raising many of the same doubts about Negro intelligence that served as the basis for the overt injustices King and the other Montgomery victors were battling in the Deep South. Doubts that would prove so
enduring that even after the civil rights movement totally defeated Jim Crow six years later, the questions about Negro intelligence and ability expressed by Harriman regarding what happened to King on the fateful day of September 20, 1958, would remain common among Americans for decades to come. They would endure right up to the present.

THREE
putting the right spin
on a huge embarrassment

AS HE PREPARED
to make his way to New York City, King and the movement were still basking in their inadvertent success in turning a huge embarrassment into an asset for the movement. During the prior month, autographed, advanced copies of
Stride Toward Freedom
had been sent to several notables, including President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren. In the time between handing in the manuscript to Harper and Brothers and receiving finished copies of the book, King was flooded with even more speaking invitations and requests to meet with him in Montgomery from important people around the world. He received a delegation of prominent Indians visiting Montgomery, who echoed what he had written at the end of his book, but in more personal terms:
King would have to be prepared to make physical sacrifices if he was to lead the budding movement as Gandhi had led his. He received correspondence indicating that the editor-in-chief of a major Swedish daily was about to travel to America and that, as part of his study of race relations, Montgomery would be one of his stops and he would like to see King while in the city. Two distinguished Japanese writers were traveling to America, too, intent on making Montgomery one of their stops, eager to meet with King.

Locally, King’s right-hand man, Ralph Abernathy, was charged with laying the groundwork for future civil rights protests in Montgomery under the auspices of the MIA. The organization continued to consider suggested new municipal targets of Jim Crow in Montgomery. The most popular idea was to launch a campaign to desegregate the public parks and playgrounds. MIA was preparing the Negro citizens of the city to go to jail for this cause, when, suddenly, it was stymied by the city of Montgomery’s response that if it tried to integrate the parks and playgrounds, the facilities would simply be closed.

Like King, Abernathy was pastor of his own church in the city (in fact, the largest Negro church in America). But running MIA and his local church wasn’t the only thing the married Abernathy was alleged to be up to. He was also accused of having affairs with his parishioners (years later Abernathy would admit to such infidelities, and accuse King of the same thing, including participating in some of the sexual escapades with him). In that, they were not unlike plenty of prominent married men, such as Harriman’s
gubernatorial opponent, the married Nelson Rockefeller, and possibly Harriman too, though they were not men of the cloth. And by the end of August (Friday the 29
^th
, to be exact), the husband of one of the women Abernathy was said to be having an affair with appeared at his church brandishing a hatchet and a revolver, warning Abernathy he intended to kill him.

What ensued next was the huge embarrassment that ultimately and inadvertently turned into an asset as King made his way to New York City just a week and a half later. Fleeing his office with blood streaming down his head, Abernathy ran down the street with the husband chasing him in broad daylight still brandishing the gun and hatchet. Soon the police stopped and arrested the man. His wife came down to the station and grew so hysterical that she, too, was arrested under the charge of disorderly conduct. The chastened Abernathy refused to file a complaint. One of the police officers who witnessed the chase filed one instead. Five days later (September 3) along with many of the other Negroes in Montgomery, Martin Luther King, Jr., decided to go to court for the preliminary hearing of the case, in order to show support for his top local assistant. He and his wife, Coretta, accompanied Abernathy and his wife. Upon arriving, they found the courtroom jammed with lines of people waiting to get in. Only Abernathy was allowed inside. King waited outside with his wife and Mrs. Abernathy, hoping Abernathy’s lawyer could get him a seat. But the police sergeant who admitted Abernathy commanded King to leave. King peered into the courtroom to see if Abernathy’s lawyer was coming to help. At that the sergeant lost his temper, no doubt thinking that just
because King had turned into a world-renowned celebrity for forcing the city to give into what was, in the sergeant’s opinion, a “preposterous” demand, didn’t mean King should be accorded special treatment. In the sergeant’s eyes, he was just another nigger. So he beaconed two officers, who then very roughly seized King as the Negro spectators gasped in horror, which only encouraged the officers to tighten their grip. The photograph of a young King in a tan suit and Fedora being manhandled as he stands at the front desk of the police station house, with his right arm twisted around his back while his wife looks on in horror, would become one of the most famous of the entire civil rights movement.

King would be charged with loitering and allowed to post bond. The following day he was tried, convicted, and ordered to pay a fourteen-dollar fine. He refused saying he elected to serve time. But in order to avert further publicity and martyrdom for King, the city’s police commissioner paid his fine instead. Such publicity and martyrdom had come in spades. Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP (who privately had mixed feelings about King’s rise along with so many other prominent Negroes of the era), shot off a telegram to President Eisenhower, admonishing him to make a statement expressing outrage at King’s treatment. Through an aide, Eisenhower refused, reiterating in a carefully worded letter that the entire affair was a state concern (evincing no more sympathy for King than his words to Wilkins: “Your interest and concern in this matter are fully understood”).

Harriman, by contrast, wouldn’t be so shy. He publicly stated, “The recent arrest and abuse of the Reverend Martin Luther King
was an outrage that dealt our national prestige a damaging blow before the peoples of the world.”

His statement was what one could expect from a patrician governor of a relatively liberal state running scared that he might lose the election, eager to mine Negro votes that could prove to be his margin of victory. The rough manhandling of King took the heat off of Abernathy, shifting attention away from the issue of his adulterous liaison, even causing speculation that the incident may have been engineered by enemies of civil rights. As such, the contretemps was chalked up as one more example of the injustices Negroes had to suffer, and the original confrontation that had precipitated it as the embodiment of how low the authorities will stoop in order to hound a civil rights leader. Shrewdly, in line with this interpretation, Abernathy continued to plead his innocence of the affair with the parishioner. And after his Negro lawyer withdrew from the case, the jealous husband was forced to hire the same Caucasian lawyer who had defended the city of Montgomery’s segregation policies during the bus boycott, which only added fuel to such an interpretation.

The movement withstood its first major embarrassment. King returned to his hectic schedule, including making preparations for traveling to New York City to promote his book. Little did he know that the shameful scenario of Abernathy and the jilted husband was a mere dress rehearsal for the far more dangerous embarrassment he and the movement would endure in New York City.

FOUR
taking the kid-glove approach

EXCITEMENT OVER
the success of King and the MIA in desegregating Montgomery’s buses had caused plenty of people to forget that not long before, the acronym NAACP stood for the same degree of daring. Just a year prior to the launch of the boycott, everyone had been overjoyed at what the NAACP’s legal defense and educational fund had accomplished in winning
Brown v. The Board of Education
. Despite putting in forty-eight years as the “radical” alternative to the “go slow” gradualist approach pioneered by Booker T. Washington after the advent of Jim Crow in the late 1800s; despite laying the legal foundation for challenging Jim Crow (and offering legal assistance that led to the successful legal challenge of bus segregation); despite the fact that before the Montgomery miracle, in plenty of places in the Deep South a
person caught paying dues to the NAACP risked the loss of his livelihood if not his life; at this point the organization looked conservative. For nearly two years now King had been under tremendous pressure to take the movement to its next level. Yet in the midst of the insistent defiance of the school desegregation ruling by Orvall Faubus, and, by comparison, the obedience of the city of Montgomery to a ruling prompted by the bus boycott, he was still treated as the most promising leader. King and his entourage were being counseled by visitors from around the world eager to ally themselves with American Negroes in a struggle that they viewed on an international level; a struggle of non-Caucasian peoples against Western imperialism.