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March 31, 2022 - January 9, 2023
When the Republican convention chose Barry Goldwater as its presidential candidate on July 15, King denounced the “unfortunate and disastrous” nomination. Goldwater, he said, “articulates a philosophy which gives aid and comfort to the racist,” and urged all supporters to vote against the Republican nominee and other Republican candidates who did not disassociate themselves from him.
ability for this.” Combat with people outside the movement
On the long flight to London, an unhappy King talked haltingly to Wachtel about his fears of what could happen should the FBI succeed in leaking its material about his personal life. He had thought long and hard about this for two weeks now, and he admitted to himself that there were many instances in which he had sinned, instances that called out for him to do better in the future.
that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time.” His realization of America’s need for “economic justice” had been reinforced by his visit to Scandinavia, where the countries “have no unemployment and no slums” and better educational and medical systems than in the United States.
While King returned home, the Selma workers got down to business. The day after King’s visit, Bevel and SCLC’s staff met with the three SNCC staffers and E. L. Doyle, representing the local citizens. Also sitting in was Rev. Ralph E. Smeltzer, a white representative of the Church of the Brethren who had been working behind the scenes in Selma for more than a year to improve race relations.
King and his aides had little doubt about the origin of the package: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The material on the tape—dirty jokes and bawdy remarks King had made a year earlier at Washington’s Willard Hotel, plus the sounds of people engaging in sex—had obviously been acquired by bugging King’s hotel rooms.
Their surmise was correct: The embarrassing recording, and the threatening letter that seemed to suggest King commit suicide, had been prepared at the behest of Assistant FBI Director William C. Sullivan just two days after Hoover’s public attack on King in mid-November.
During our whole marriage we never had one single serious discussion about either of us being involved with another person.… If I ever had any suspicions … I never would have even mentioned them to Martin. I just wouldn’t have burdened him with anything so trivial … all that other business just didn’t have a place in the very high-level relationship we enjoyed.
Three particular relationships had flowered to the status of something more than occasional one-night stands, and for almost the past two years King had grown closer and closer to one of those women, whom he saw almost daily.
Some longtime friends viewed it as “a natural, human concomitant” of the tense, fast-paced life King had led for almost a decade. Others thought of it as standard ministerial practice in a context where intimate pastor-parishioner relationships long had been winked at, and where King and theology school classmates joshed openly about their success in “counseling” attractive women.
Bernard Lee put it more bluntly. “Martin … was absolutely a male chauvinist. He believed that the wife should stay home and take care of the babies while he’d be out there in the streets.”
Dorothy Cotton saw it regularly. “He would have had a lot to learn and a lot of growing to do” concerning women’s rights. “I’m always asked to take the notes, I’m always asked to go fix Dr. King some coffee. I did it, too,” but she fully realized “the male chauvinism that existed within the movement.” “They were sexist male preachers” and “grew up in a sexist culture.… I really loved Dr. King but I know that that streak was in him also.”
Levison counseled. “Selma and Montgomery made you one of the most powerful figures in the country—a leader now not merely of Negroes, but of millions of whites.” The civil rights movement was “one of the rare independent movements” America had seen, “and you are one of the exceptional figures who attained the heights of popular confidence and trust without having obligations to any political party or other dominant interests. Seldom has anyone in American history come up by this path, fully retaining his independence and freedom of action.”
Exhausted, King resumed his schedule, barely missing a beat. He met with the Catholic Interracial Council in midmorning, with a businessmen’s group at lunch, and then delivered a lengthy address at Buckingham Fountain to a crowd estimated at between fifteen thousand and thirty thousand people. His weariness showed as he spoke about how “so often in these past two years I have had to watch my dream transformed into a nightmare.”
A sharp edge was increasingly apparent in King’s public rhetoric as he decried “our vicious class systems” and explained that “we are now embarked upon a radical refurbishing of the former racist caste order of America.”
and of how in the two years since 1963, “I have constantly watched my dream turn into a nightmare. I have constantly watched my dream shattered.”
“The intense expectations and hopes of the neglected poor in the United States must be regarded as a priority more urgent than pursuit of a conflict so rapidly degenerating into a sordid military adventure.”
Friday evening’s rally was Martin King’s first exposure to the “black power” slogan Carmichael had introduced the night before. Longtime SNCC worker Willie Ricks, an even more ardent proponent of black separatist ideology than Carmichael, had been overjoyed at the response to the new rallying cry. Ricks used Carmichael’s fiery speech at the Friday rally to lead the enthusiastic crowd in repeated chants of SNCC’s new watchword: “We want black power. We want black power.”
“he fails to understand that if gains are not made, and made in a hurry through responsible civil rights organizations, it will open the door to militant groups to gain a foothold.” To encourage the mayor in the proper direction, King said, the movement would step up its tactics:
Speaking trips kept him constantly on the go, and expressions of disillusionment crept into his public addresses. “Large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity,” King complained in one sermon.
the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now rather widely discussed measure—the guaranteed annual income.… Our emphasis should shift from exclusive attention to putting
“is that America as a nation has never yet committed itself to solving the problem of its Negro citizens,” and for its own good had better do so quickly.
We are engaged in a war that seeks to turn the clock of history back and perpetuate white colonialism.” America’s forces were “committing atrocities equal to any perpetrated by the Vietcong,” and Johnson’s policies exposed both “our paranoid anti-Communism” and “the deadly western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long.” America was now “isolated in our false values in a world demanding social and economic justice. We must undergo a vigorous reordering of our national priorities,”
“I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, extreme materialism and militarism.”
Additionally, his ministerial role and Christian convictions gave him “allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism,” and required him to adopt a world perspective rather than a narrowly American
have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights,” he said, “an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society.” For the past twelve years, “we have been in a reform movement.… But after Selma and the voting rights bill we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution. I think we must see the great distinction here between a reform movement and a revolutionary movement,” and how the former had been directed at making America live up to its professed values. “I’m convinced,” he told his colleagues, “that a lot of the people
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coupled with serious voter registration work, would lead to significant minority political influence. However, he emphasized, “our beloved nation is still a racist country” and “the vast majority of white Americans are racist.”
“These are evil times,” King told the congregation, repeating his comment of four months earlier that “the United States of America is the greatest actual purveyor of violence in the world today.”
King told the realtors. He spoke again about “little children being burned with napalm,” and about how “the roots of racism are very deep in our country.” Nonetheless, he declared, “I’m not going to despair, even on the race question.… Somehow I still believe that we’re going to get there.”
The disruptive tactics of urban “dislocation,” tactics that King had dismissed with a laugh four years earlier in the wake of the deaths at Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street church, he now advocated. Although the details were fuzzy, the course had been set, as one headline made clear: KING CALLS FOR A NEW DRIVE OF MASSIVE CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE.
resolution was adopted opposing all electoral candidates who supported the Vietnam War, and King announced he would go “all out” to defeat Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 presidential election.
“I heard him … saying that he wanted to just be a preacher, and he was sick of it all. And that the Lord called him to be a preacher, and not to do all this stuff, and he wanted to leave it and he was tired. And he
King was laughing too, a further reflection of SCLC’s “very relaxed attitude toward sex” and the “genuine ribald humor” that predominated.
King believed, Levison stressed, that he simply was an actor in history at a particular moment that called for a personality, and he had simply been selected as that personality … but he had not done enough to deserve it. He felt keenly that people who had done as much as he had or more got no such tribute. This troubled him deeply, and he could find no way of dealing with it because there’s no way of sharing that kind of tribute with anyone else: you can’t give it away; you have to accept it.
“Fatigue was not so much physical with him as it was emotional,” Young explained. “He had the constitution of a bull. He could go on and on and on when things were going well. It was when he didn’t have a clear sense of direction that he got very tired.” Bill Rutherford held a similar
The hectic week of Deep South traveling had increased King’s fears that the Poor People’s Campaign was in trouble. The anticipated number of volunteers had not been recruited, and the financial situation was so bad that not only was SCLC taking in less than it was spending, but funds were not available to meet the most minimal field staff expenses. Additionally, some workers were openly hostile to King’s emphasis on drawing other economically deprived groups into the campaign. “I do not think I am at the point where a Mexican can sit in and call strategy on a Steering Committee,” one aide told
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The movement had to confront America’s domestic crisis, to make everyone “face the fact that America is a racist country,” to discover some method “as attention-getting as a riot” to make the nation deal with its problems.
“That poor man was so harassed at home,” Rutherford remembered while emphasizing that “you cannot write about Dr. King without dealing with the reality.” “She was as much a part of his depression as his staff.… Coretta was a part of the problem, but … also in many ways she probably was a much put-upon person.” Rutherford and other aides recognized what different conceptions of the wife’s role King and Coretta held, and how her unhappiness with the constraints King successfully imposed on her made King’s home life so tense. “Had the man lived, the marriage wouldn’t have survived, and everybody
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