Chapter One
King, Johnson, and
the Terrible, Glorious
Thirty-first Day of March
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his last Sunday sermon on
March 31, 1968, at Washington’s still-uncompleted National
Cathedral. Some three thousand people jammed the cavernous
sanctuary to hear him; another thousand listened on speakers set
up outside and in a room at the nearby St. Albans School.
The sermon, one of the greatest of his career, centered around the
upcoming Poor People’s Campaign, in which hundreds would camp
on the Mall and carry out demonstrations around the capital. They
would come from around the country, many by mule train, a host
of Americans of all types-black, white, Hispanic, Native American,
coming from the South, Appalachia, and the Southwest. For King, this
was to be the apotheosis of his lifelong activism: not just civil rights,
but human rights, the right to a decent living, the right from fear and
want. It was, he said, the least a country as rich as his could do for its
downtrodden.
Like Rip Van Winkle, King told his audience, America risked
“sleeping through a revolution.” His voice booming over the loudspeakers,
King said, “There can be no gainsaying of the fact that
a great revolution is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a
triple revolution: that is, a technological revolution, with the impact of
automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution in weaponry,
with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapons of warfare; then
there is a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion that is
taking place all over the world.”
Then, dipping into one of his favorite Gospel parables-that
of Dives, a wealthy man, and Lazarus, a beggar who sat outside his
door-King explained that Dives went to hell not because he was rich
but because he refused to help where he could. So, too, he said, would
the United States be damned if in its abundance it refused to help
those in need, both at home and abroad. “There is nothing new about
poverty,” he said. “What is new is that we now have the techniques
and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we
have the will.”
The question of will was one King had confronted often in recent
months. The past few years had not been kind to the civil rights leader.
Since his success at Selma and the resulting passage of the Voting
Rights Act in 1965, King had been trying to broaden the scope of his
movement, both in its reach-out west, up north-and scope-taking
on housing discrimination, poverty, and the war. But the public, the
media, and the political establishment increasingly saw him in a negative
light, a has-been who achieved great victories earlier in the decade
but who had no answers for the new issues of the day. Even Walter
Fauntroy, his loyal Washington representative, called King a “spent
force.” That previous fall his literary agent had been unable to find a
single magazine to excerpt his latest book.
King had been gradually losing support since 1965, but his real
slide in the public’s eye began on April 4, 1967, when he delivered a
scathing critique of the Vietnam War at New York’s Riverside Church.
King had never addressed the war publicly before. Why now? Because,
he told the overflow crowd of thousands, whenever he went into the
streets to try to tamp down riots and urban violence, people asked,
“What about Vietnam?” If violence is wrong, why is America overseas
killing thousands, to no clear end? “Their questions hit home, and
I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence
of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to
the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”
The audience erupted in applause.
But King’s reception beyond the Upper West Side was not so
positive. The speech was almost universally panned. Johnson’s staff
immediately saw it as a thinly veiled attack on the president. John
Roche, Johnson’s academic liaison, told the president in a memo that
King, “who is inordinately ambitious and quite stupid (a bad combination)
… is painting himself into a corner with a bunch of losers.”
King caught flak from Jewish war veterans (who saw his extreme pacifism
as an implicit criticism of World War II), the Washington Post editorial
board, and thousands of letter-writing Americans. Johnson went
after King with a vengeance, at one point even ordering the Internal
Revenue Service to investigate his tax returns.
The widespread condemnation sent King into a deep funk, one compounded
by the massive riots in Newark and Detroit that summer. On
Labor Day weekend he gave the keynote speech at a gathering of New
Left groups, the Conference for a New Politics, in Chicago; he was
shouted down by black radicals crying, “Kill whitey!” As he told two
of his advisers, “There were dark days before, but this is the darkest.”
King was also in the midst of a personal, intellectual change. He
had always seen economic and social justice as necessary counterparts
to racial justice, but between 1955 and 1965 his activism had focused
on the last of the three. The Watts riots and a summer spent organizing
in Chicago made him reassess. In May 1967, he told workers in
New York City that the movement needed a second phase, an effort
to change not just racial laws, but the unjust allocation of national
resources that upheld poverty and economic division. The achievements
of the civil rights era were necessary and remarkable, but, he
conceded, they did little for lower-class blacks, in the South and elsewhere.
If anything, he said in January 1968, “The plight of the Negro
poor, the masses of Negroes, has worsened over the last few years.”
King soon realized he needed a new project, a way to fuse the successful
strategies of his southern civil rights efforts with his new
emphasis on poverty and the war. And, over the course of the fall and
early winter, he hit on a plan: the Poor People’s Campaign.
First conceived of by Robert Kennedy and given shape by activist
Marian Wright, the campaign would be a latter-day Bonus Army, bringing
hundreds of poor Americans of all races and regions to the capital,
where they would camp on the Mall and conduct sit-ins on Capitol
Hill. Wright first presented the plan to King at a September 1967
Southern Christian Leadership Conference meeting in rural Virginia,
but the bulk of the planning took place during a five-day retreat in
Frogmore, South Carolina, that winter. To dramatize the event, which
was scheduled for mid-April, participants would converge on the capital
by foot and mule train. Once there, they would build Resurrection
City, a massive shantytown on the Mall, positioned with the national
monuments in the background.
The mere presence of so many poor people in Washington would
be disruptive, they realized. Andrew Young, one of King’s closest
advisers, imagined “a thousand people in need of health and medical
attention sitting around District hospitals.” Such aggressive posturing
made others in the SCLC to blanch; as executive director William
Rutherford recounted, “Almost no one on the staff thought that the
next priority, the next major movement, should be focused on poor
people or the question of poverty in America.”
The truth was, no one, not even King, knew what to expect once
everyone arrived in the city. It was one thing to organize a march.
But what to do with hundreds of desperately poor people, so far from
home? How do you feed them? How do you keep them engaged-and
calm? King promised to maintain peace, and he worked tirelessly
that winter to bring militants such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap
Brown onto his side.
But he didn’t help matters by making predictions-which sounded
like veiled threats-about what would happen if no federal action came
of the Poor People’s Campaign. “We are not coming to Washington to
engage in any histrionic action,” he said days before he was killed, “nor
are we coming to tear up Washington. I don’t like to predict violence,
but if nothing is done between now and June to raise ghetto hope,
I feel this summer will not only be as bad, but worse than last year.”
It didn’t really matter what King said, though. Fear of the campaign
was rampant among the public, the media, and Congress. As one
op-ed writer put it in the Washington Evening Star, “There is no point
in blinding ourselves to the obvious: Martin Luther King’s plans for
massive demonstrations and civil disobedience in Washington will create
conditions that could lead to a tragic riot.”
Already agitated by the past summer’s riots and afraid of a repeat,
or worse, in 1968, the federal government looked at the Poor
People’s Campaign from inside a bunker. Congress held hearings.
The D.C. Police Department developed extensive antiriot plans.
Hotline phones, linked to the police, were installed in Senate offices.
And the FBI deployed a massive effort to subvert the entire project,
going so far as to plant stories among southern blacks that the SCLC
would bring them to Washington and then refuse to take them
home. But it didn’t work-by March 1968, hundreds were getting
ready to move on the capital.
In early 1968, though, events transpired that would fatefully divert
King from his planning. On February 12 thousands of city garbage
workers went on strike in Memphis, calling for higher wages and better
working conditions; pay rates had stagnated for years, and two workers
had recently been killed by a malfunctioning garbage compactor.
Memphis is a city of the South, but it is somehow misplaced within
it. Though Tennessee had relatively few blacks in 1968, they made
up 40 percent of Memphis’s citizenry. While the city had a strong,
educated black middle class, 58 percent of its black population was
poor, 10 percent higher than the national average and four times the
rate for the city’s whites. And though Tennessee was not a Deep
South state, in its culture and politics Memphis was all but an extension
of Mississippi-it is said that the Delta begins in the lobby of
the Peabody Hotel. And Memphis mixed the worst of northern and
southern racism: Legal segregation was firmly established, and where
it wasn’t, a thick layer of housing and workplace discrimination kept
blacks down. Whites wistfully called it Bluff City; many blacks called
it an urban plantation.
In the 1960s, Memphis was run by Henry Loeb, a patrician
Memphian who in 1967 won 90 percent of the white vote on a platform
mixing law and order and urban pride. Loeb’s tall, thin frame
and upper-class education (Brown) gave him the air of a minor
European nobleman, and whites loved him. But he was despised by
the city’s blacks, who saw him as an obstinate bigot. Predictably, Loeb
played precisely that part in the strike, refusing to even recognize the
strikers and denying any possibility of negotiations. As he told its leaders
at their first meeting, “This is not New York. Nobody can break
the law. You are putting my back up against the wall, and I am not
going to budge.” With the solid backing of the city’s white business
community, Loeb figured that he could wait out the protesters. With
the sanitary workers on strike, the city slowly filled with the aroma of
sautéing garbage, made worse by the rising temperatures of an early,
muggy spring.
Fortunately for the workers, the strike drew national union support,
along with the backing of major civil rights groups. Organizers and
supporters flocked to the town, and the strike soon became a national
news story. The New York Times called it “the current major civil rights
confrontation in the nation.”
The strike proved irresistible to King. It was, in part, a must-do
for the embattled civil rights leader-how could he afford not to be
involved in the civil rights issue of the year, especially if it were to
eclipse his own plans? Plus, it had been almost three years since the
Selma-Montgomery march, one of the last unalloyed expressions of
nonviolent mass resistance by blacks to receive national attention. But
more important was the precise nature of the campaign. Melding civil
rights and labor rights, it struck to the core of his evolving message: the
need to empower workers and push back against economic injustice.
Going against the express wishes of his advisers, who wanted him to
focus on the Poor People’s Campaign, King decided to visit the city.
His first trip to Memphis came on March 18, when he spoke to an
overcapacity crowd of between nine thousand and fifteen thousand at
Mason Temple. For the first time in months, thousands had come to
hear him, not mock him. King spoke for more than an hour, almost
completely extemporaneously. “You are here tonight to demand that
Memphis will do something about the conditions that our brothers
face as they work day in and day out for the well-being of the total
community,” he told the cheering audience. Now, he concluded,
“the thing for you to do is stay together, and say to everybody in this
community that you are going to stick it out to the end until every
demand is met, and that you are gonna say, ‘We ain’t gonna let nobody
turn us around.'”
The speech left him drained. “Martin was visually shaken by all
this, for this kind of support was unprecedented in the Movement,”
recalled James Lawson, a Nashville civil rights and labor activist who
was helping lead the strike. “No one had ever been able to get these
numbers out before.” But the reception gave King momentum. He
quickly put forth a proposal: he would come back to Memphis and
lead a march to support the strikers. Though he immediately drew
criticism from whites and even some blacks for inserting himself,
uninvited, into a local issue, the strike leaders were overjoyed-King’s
national prominence, sullied as it was, would give newfound speed to
a movement that until then was at a stalemate with the city’s power
structure. It worked, too: as soon as King announced his plan, white
business leaders began to openly question whether Loeb’s intransigence
was the best strategy.
Early on March 28, thousands began to gather at Clayborn Temple
downtown, waiting for King to arrive at 10:00 a.m. But his plane was
delayed, and he didn’t arrive until 10:30. By then the crowd was growing
restless; the air was humid, and it was growing hotter.
They began marching. Signs began appearing in the crowd reading
LOEB EAT SHIT. As they reached Main Street, those in front-King,
Young, Lawson-began to hear commotion behind them. Several militant
groups, along with a klatch of assorted hangers-on, had decided to
embarrass King by turning the march into a riot. They were breaking
windows, looting, and harassing onlookers.
His aides quickly whisked King away. It didn’t take long for the
police, already standing by in riot gear, to move in. What followed
was several hours of mayhem: police, who had stood by while the
strikers turned their city into an open-air garbage dump, wielded
their batons and tear gas with glee. Marchers who sought refuge in
Clayborn Temple were ordered out, and as they left the building they
were beaten by waiting cops. The sole fatality, sixteen-year-old Larry
Payne, was shotgunned in the stomach by a cop who claimed he was
wielding a knife, though witnesses said the boy had both hands raised.
“Instead of King’s nonviolent ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Poor People’s
Campaign,” historian Michael Honey wrote, “the Memphis march left
behind a wasteland.”
King was hardly to blame, but that was not the way the regional
press-goaded by the FBI-spun things. The Bureau sent anonymous
missives to its press contacts the next day, elements of which soon
appeared in editorials in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the Memphis
Commercial Appeal. The St. Louis paper predicted that the Memphis
riot was a “prelude to a massive bloodbath” in Washington, while the
Commercial Appeal labeled King a “hypocrite.” But in other cases it
didn’t take the FBI’s prodding-the New York Times called on King to
cancel the Poor People’s Campaign in Memphis’s wake. King headed
back to Washington to give his Sunday sermon. Forlorn, he declared
the Poor People’s Campaign “doomed.”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from A Nation on Fire
by Clay Risen
Copyright © 2009 by Clay Risen.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
John Wiley & Sons
Copyright © 2009
Clay Risen
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-17710-5
