Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

by David J. Garrow

think of what the other woman might have to offer that she did not. What faults of her own might make her husband look elsewhere? “Do you nag?” King asked

King and Granger in particular felt that Eisenhower had seemed very poorly informed, as well as totally noncommittal. The White House staffers were more pleased, though they expressed some concern about the attitude of “the most militant of the group,” Roy Wilkins.

Still, India had had more success in eliminating caste discrimination, he believed, than had the United States in combating racial discrimination.

But if you are going to serve humanity you’ve got to neglect your family to some extent.

Birmingham’s Fred Shuttlesworth wrote a strong letter to King in advance of the major spring meeting in Tallahassee in mid-May. Not enough was being done to combat segregationist forces in Alabama, Shuttlesworth said.

King at that time, Levison said later, was very thoughtful, quiet, and shy—very shy. The shyness was accented, I felt, with white people. And even in his relations with me in the early period, there was not always a relaxed attitude, but one of carefully listening to every word that he was saying so that he might not offend me, and that I might not offend him. There was a—a certain politeness, a certain arm’s length approach, and you could feel the absence of relaxation. As the years went on this vanished.

principal speakers were King, Kenyan leader Tom Mboya, visiting in the United States, and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation had warned the White House that the American Communist party had taken a special interest in both Youth Marches.

FBI was particularly curious about the role that an inactive party member, Stanley Levison, had played in the two events. Randolph had publicly commended Levison for his work on the October March, and the acknowledgment had aroused the FBI’s

“The Negro must make it palpably clear that he is not inextricably bound to either political party.… We will not blindly support any party that refuses to take a forthright stand on the question of civil rights.”

announced at a New York rally that blacks would march on both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions to urge both parties to adopt strong stands on civil rights. Then, for one last time, King went home to Montgomery.

I have a sort of nagging conscience that someone will interpret my leaving Montgomery as a retreat from the civil rights struggle. Actually, I will be involved in it on a larger scale. I can’t stop now. History has thrust something upon me from which I cannot turn away.

King told the student leaders not to forget that the struggle was justice versus injustice, not black versus white, and reminded them always to be open to compromise with local whites.

Policemen broke it up, and King, back in Atlanta, said he was sending a telegram to President Eisenhower demanding federal action. No response was forthcoming.

One of the most enthusiastic observers of the student protests was Ella Baker. She knew that her time with SCLC was limited, that many of the ministers resented having an outspoken woman as chief of staff, and that King had discussed the executive directorship with Wyatt T. Walker.

thus made up his mind not to fight a battle that he could win but which would exact too high a price—an open break with the increasingly unhappy Baker. On Saturday, as the delegates split up into discussion

They focused in particular upon a statement by former President Harry S. Truman that Communists were behind the sit-in protests. King said he was “very disappointed” and that Truman ought to make a public apology.

Two magazine articles set off the uproar. In one, “The Negro Revolt Against ‘the Negro Leaders,’” black journalist Louis Lomax asserted that the spring protests showed that younger blacks had bypassed the older, adult leadership signified by the NAACP.

kept a low profile, hiding in a hotel room and talking politics with Michael Harrington, the young activist who had organized the picketing. King surprised Harrington with “how intellectually serious he was, that he was radical on all kinds of economic issues, and as far as I was concerned he was a socialist, although he didn’t use the word and I was much too discreet to pose”

Baker’s departure, however, left a legacy of strained feelings in its wake. She had never held King or Abernathy in high regard, and once she had formally left the organization, she made no secret of her attitude.

“Martin had real problems with having a woman in a high position.” Baker also did not support a “leader-centered” approach to organizing a movement, and felt no special awe for King. “I was not a person to be enamored of anyone,” she noted. The ministers of SCLC, on the other hand, thought Baker was haughty and aloof, with what they felt was a disdain for anyone who was a black male preacher. The resulting bitterness would not mellow with time.

Coretta told Daddy King of Kennedy’s phone call as they prepared to see Morris Abram. King, Sr., was ecstatic, and said that this was enough to shift his traditionally Republican presidential preference and vote instead for Kennedy, the man who had called his daughter-in-law.

concern he expressed.… [He] exhibited moral courage of a high order.” In private, he added that the contrast between Kennedy’s call and Nixon’s inaction was very real to him. Even though Nixon had known him longer, he had done nothing. “I really considered him a moral coward,” King remarked.

“the key thing that is involved are questions of property rights.” King responded that “any law that degrades human personality is an unjust law,” and morally should not be obeyed.

The many responsibilities of that public leadership role continued to make King a sometime father and husband.

“I spoke to my husband about it,” she recalled later, “and he said he would leave it up to me because those were the things that I had to deal with and he was very busy and so on.” He was not intentionally uncaring, but sometimes it seemed that way. All of that selflessness might be commendable in a famous public figure, but King’s version brought no pleasure to his own family.36 In early September,

Without the presence of the press, there might have been untold massacre in the South. The world seldom believes the horror stories of history until they are documented via mass media.

a meeting of all the parties, including Sherrod, Reagon, and

Two board members, Roland Smith and Dearing E. King, took the opportunity to suggest that President King should receive a salary from SCLC. King declined the offer, and explained that what he kept from his speaking fees and royalty income—some $6,000 per year—was sufficient to supplement his salary from Ebenezer Baptist Church. “I think I get along fairly well by speaking and writing.… I must never give people the impression that I am out for big money.… All of us have our shortcomings. I always ask God to help me. One of my shortcomings, I feel, is not in the realm of money.”

believe that in some marvelous way, God worked through Gandhi, and the spirit of Jesus Christ saturated his life. It is ironic, yet inescapably true that the greatest Christian of the modern world was a man who never embraced Christianity.” Appropriately reprimanded, the editors printed an apology.

After a quiet week of rest in Atlanta, King returned to Albany on Monday, August 27. That same day, two groups of white northern ministers from New York and Chicago arrived in Albany. Encouraged by Dr. Anderson and other local leaders, the visitors hoped to serve as mediators and reach out to the white community. However, Albany’s white ministers announced they would not speak with the outsiders. On Tuesday afternoon, seventy-five visiting preachers were arrested after conducting a prayer vigil at City Hall, and eleven of them chose to stay in jail.

that every time he made a commitment to something like this he was committing his life.… He thought in everything he did it meant his death.

We must rise above our fears.… There is nothing to be afraid of if you believe and know that the cause for which you stand is right. You are ready to face anything and you face it with a humble smile on your face, because you know that all of the eternity stands with you and the angels stand beside you and you know that you are right.

King’s arrest, some of Birmingham’s most liberal white churchmen had condemned the protests as “unwise and untimely” and had urged “our own Negro community to withdraw support from these demonstrations.” They had lashed out at “outsiders,” and had

asserted that black demands “should be pressed in the courts and in negotiations among local leaders, and not in the street.”

The ministers failed to mention that almost every white church in Birmingham refused to admit black worshipers, and also omitted any reference to the undependable track ...

At the city jail, King was placed in solitary confinement, cut off from contact even with Abernathy. He expected some word from the movement’s lawyers, but the long night passed without news from anyone on the outside. Jail going had always been extremely difficult for King, even when Abernathy accompanied him, but the loneliness of solitary confinement and absence of outside contact made it considerably more painful. King said later that first night in the Birmingham jail represented some of “the longest, most frustrating and bewildering hours I have lived … I was besieged with worry.”

promised to make inquiries, and later in the morning

Kennedy said, was his relative moderation and his commitment to nonviolence. “If King loses, worse leaders are going to take his place.”

Then the president expressed a sentiment that both he and his brother strongly shared, a sentiment that said much about their political and emotional evolutions over the preceding six weeks. “I don’t think you should all be totally harsh on Bull Connor. After all, he has done more for civil rights than almost anybody else.”

The Negro in the South can now be nonviolent as a stratagem, but he can’t include loving the white man.… Nonviolence has become a military tactical approach.” King had come to appreciate that it was the coercive direct action of Birmingham, and not persuasive moral appeals aimed at winning over the hearts of southern whites, that the movement would have to pursue.

they’re for violence, why don’t they say so?” Comments like these further heightened the Muslims’ antipathy toward King, and one late June night in Harlem the group threw eggs

at King as he arrived to speak at a church rally.

those matters were swept aside on Sunday morning, September 15, when a powerful dynamite blast devastated Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and killed four young black girls who were attending Sunday school. It was the greatest human tragedy that had befallen the movement. The rage and desperation felt by black Birmingham exploded on the city’s streets as hundreds of furious citizens pelted police with rocks and other debris.

Officers tried to disperse the crowds by firing shotguns over their heads, and one black youth was struck in the back and killed. Another young black man was murdered in a racial shooting incident just outside of town, and a half-dozen other people, black and white, were injured during the disturbances.

“You can tell people not to fight only if you offer them a way by which justice can be served without violence.”

Others reported that some people in SNCC were becoming increasingly vocal in their criticisms of SCLC, King, and especially Walker, and that those attitudes were promoted by Ella Baker, who had become a trusted advisor to the younger activists.

Director J. Edgar Hoover expressed disappointment, and dissented from Milwaukee’s hypothesis for King’s supposed restraint. “I don’t share the conjecture. King is a ‘tom cat’ with obsessive degenerate sexual urges.”

It is my opinion that many white workers whose economic condition is not too far removed from the economic condition of his black brother, will find it difficult to accept a “Negro Bill of Rights,” which seeks to give special consideration to the Negro in the context of unemployment, joblessness, etc. and does not take into sufficient account their plight (that of the white worker).

It was true, King said, that the movement should avoid tactics that needlessly offended potential allies, but, he emphasized, “we do not need allies who are more devoted to order than to justice.… Neither do we need allies who will paternalistically seek to set the time-table for our freedom.… If our direct action programs alienate so-called friends.… they never were real friends.”32 Throughout