More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 20 - June 27, 2020
“He had a remarkable facility for sitting through long, contentious meetings and then summarizing what everybody had said and synthesizing that” into a conclusion that appealed to all. That skill was not happenstance, but a repeated, practical application of the Hegelian method of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that King had been fascinated with and attached to ever since graduate school.
Part of the problem, Levison said, was that the Vietnam War was supplanting civil rights as the foremost concern of American liberals. If SCLC’s income did not pick up, the $100,000 reserve fund would last hardly a month at the rate the organization was spending money.
“I am confused by it all,” King told one questioner. The outcome would probably have more to do with the strength of whites’ commitment to racial justice than with Carmichael’s proclivities. “I’m trying desperately to keep the movement nonviolent, but I can’t keep it nonviolent by myself. Much of the responsibility is on the white power structure to give meaningful concessions to Negroes.”
Given Roy Wilkins’s sentiments, King said, “I get the impression that the NAACP wouldn’t mind a split because they think they are the only civil rights organization.”
A genuine leader doesn’t reflect consensus, he molds consensus. Look at myself. There are lots of Negroes these days who are for violence, but I know that I am dealing with a moral issue, and I am going to oppose violence if I am the last Negro in this country speaking for nonviolence.
I want to say particularly that your second point about the demonstrations being the wrong approach bothers me, because the problem is not created by the marches. A doctor doesn’t cause cancer when he finds it. In fact, we thank him for finding it, and we are doing the same thing.
“I’m tired of marching,” he told the crowd, tired of marching for something that should have been mine at first.… I’m tired of the tensions surrounding our days … I’m tired of living every day under the threat of death. I have no martyr complex, I want to live as long as anybody in this building tonight, and sometimes I begin to doubt whether I’m going to make it through. I must confess I’m tired.… I don’t march because I like it, I march because I must.
“If we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society.”30
The New York Times decried any combining of the civil rights and peace movements, and rebuked King for “recklessly comparing American military methods to those of the Nazis.” The black Pittsburgh Courier complained that King was “tragically misleading” American Negroes on issues that were “too complex for simple debate.” New York Senator Jacob Javits branded the speech “harmful,” and Life magazine called it “a demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” King “goes beyond his personal right to dissent,” Life said, “when he connects progress in civil rights here with a
...more
“There has never been any single, solid, determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans to genuine equality for Negroes,” he asserted. The country needed “a radical reordering of priorities,” whether people wanted to admit it or not. “Too often when you’re called a responsible leader, it means you’re an Uncle Tom leader,” King sighed.
“For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the society, a little change here, a little change there,” King told Halberstam. “Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values,” and perhaps the nationalization of some major industries.
King told the staff that the last few months of wrestling with the war issue had made him realize that the movement must undergo a significant transformation. “We 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.”
“I’m convinced,” he told his colleagues, “that a lot of the people that supported us when we were in those glowing, epic-making days in Alabama and in Mississippi, when we were in Birmingham and Selma, many of the people who supported us supported us because they were against Jim Clark, because they were against Bull Connor, but they were not for genuine equality for Negroes.”
“Let us do one simple, direct thing—let us end unemployment totally and immediately,” he told Johnson. “I propose specifically the creation of a national agency that shall provide a job to every person who needs work.” While “I regret that my expression may be sharp … I believe literally that the life of our nation is at stake here at home,” King stated. “I urge you to use the power of your office to establish justice in our land by enacting and implementing legislation of reason and vision in the Congress.”
However, he emphasized, “our beloved nation is still a racist country” and “the vast majority of white Americans are racist.” Local reporters who had heard King’s speeches earlier that spring were struck by his new harshness, by how he “had departed from the rhetoric of hope and had taken up the rhetoric of power.”
He said, “You’ve never really given this organization full credit for what it really stands for.… It’s a nonviolent organization, and when I say nonviolent I mean nonviolent all the way.… Never could I advocate nonviolence in this country and not advocate nonviolence for the whole world.… That’s my philosophy … I don’t believe in the death and killing on any side, no matter who’s heading it up—whether it be America or any other country, or whether it be for black folks.… Nonviolence is my stand, and I’ll die for that stand.”
A 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.
King was despondent during part of the five-days retreat at Airlie House. Baez, a participant, recalled one evening, as everyone relaxed, “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 had a couple whiskies in him,” and perhaps “he was really just saying it.”
King said. “Something is wrong with capitalism as it now stands in the United States. We are not interested in being integrated into this value structure. Power must be relocated, a radical redistribution of power must take place. We must do something to these men to change them.”10
King expressed similar sentiments to SCLC’s staff at the Frogmore retreat. “The decade of 1955 to 1965, with its constructive elements, misled us,” King said. “Everyone underestimated the amount of rage Negroes were suppressing, and the amount of bigotry the white majority was disguising.” True, the movement had won some battles, “but we must admit that there was a limitation to our achievement,” King emphasized. “The white power structure is still seeking to keep the walls of segregation and inequality substantially intact,” and was beating back the movement’s assaults.
Among the goals must be a guaranteed annual income and the elimination of slums. “Nonviolence must be adapted to urban conditions and urban moods. Nonviolent protest must now mature to a new level … mass civil disobedience.… There must be more than a statement to the larger society, there must be a force that interrupts its functioning at some key point.… The Negro will be saying … ‘I am willing to endure all your punishment, because your society will not be able to endure the stigma of violently and publicly oppressing its minority to preserve injustice.’”
“The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win.… Hence, riots are not revolutionary,” and are inferior to other tactics that are more radical in their possible effects. “The movement for social change has entered a time of temptation to despair, because it is clear now how deep and how systematic are the evils it confronts.”
Our economy must become more person-centered than property-centered and profit-centered.… Let us therefore not think of our movement as one that seeks to integrate the Negro into all the existing values of American society,” but as one that would alter those basic values. As Andrew Young noted, “Even if you’re a winner in a rat race, you’re still a rat.”11
“He criticized himself more severely than anyone else ever did,” Coretta remembered. “He was always the first one to say, ‘Maybe I was wrong, maybe I made a mistake.… He would go through this agonizing process of self-analysis many times.”
“He never felt that he deserved all the accolades,” Cotton recalled. “He almost felt guilty that he got all of that praise and publicity and honor. He was guilty because—for whatever reason one feels that one doesn’t deserve some praise.… If I had to, I could document it, but I wouldn’t want to.” Coretta felt similarly, calling her husband “a guilt-ridden man” who “never felt he was adequate to his positions.”
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. But when you don’t feel you’re worthy of it and you’re an honest, principled man, it tortures you.
Martin was always very aware that he was privileged … and this troubled him. He felt he didn’t deserve this. One of the reasons that he was so determined to be of service was to justify the privileged position he’d been born into … [he felt] he had never deserved and earned what he had, and now he didn’t deserve nor had he earned in his own mind the acclaim that he was receiving.
Speaking to the Breadbasket staff, King “asked us to turn off the tape recorder,” one participant recalled. “He talked about what he called democratic socialism, and he said, ‘I can’t say this publicly, and if you say I said it I’m not gonna admit to it.’ … and he talked about the fact that he didn’t believe that capitalism as it was constructed could meet the needs of poor people, and that what we might need to look at was a kind of socialism, but a democratic form of socialism.”
“We have permitted the Stokely Carmichaels, the Rap Browns, and the Martin Luther Kings to cloak themselves in an aura of respectability to which they are not entitled,” assistant Larry Temple said in a memo to the president. “When Martin Luther King talks about violating the law by obstructing the flow of traffic in Washington or stopping the operations of this government, he is talking about criminal disobedience.… ‘Civil disobedience’ is a complete misnomer. There is no such thing.… As the time nears for Dr. King’s April activities, I hope the President will publicly unmask this type of
...more
“He was very unhappy,” she recalled. “He was depressed, because he was … very tired. He was dark, gaunt, and tired. He felt that his time was up.… He said that he knew that they were going to get him.”
Bill Rutherford held a similar view. “I think he was exhausted, physically and probably more so spiritually.… I think he was worn out,” and “really asking himself, ‘Can it really work, will we really succeed, is nonviolence the real way?’ I think he was in very serious self-doubt, self-questioning.”
“That whole last year I felt his weariness, just weariness of the struggle, that he had done all that he could do.”
Jesse Jackson later understood King’s feelings quite well. “In our low moments, when the pressures build, you look for a graceful way out, you have periods when you feel overwhelmed and want to retreat.… You are restless unless you are operating at your highest and your best; when you feel that you’re doing less than your best, there’s always the hound of guilt and anxiety biting away at you.”
“He was relaxed, easy. There are people who are number one who don’t let you forget it for one second; he would let you forget it as long as you wanted to.”
Bill Rutherford remembered an occasion when King arrived thirty minutes late for a crucial SCLC meeting at Ebenezer church. “We walked in, and there was the janitor of the church, pushing his broom, and Martin said, ‘How’s your wife?’ He said, ‘Well, she ain’t doing too well. Her back’s bothering her …’ Martin said, ‘Really? It didn’t get any better from the medicine?’ Anyway, I stood there; there are three hundred people sitting in that church, waiting on the leader, and he’s inquiring about the janitor’s wife’s back.… I was so impressed.”
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 a staff meeting; another remarked that Hispanic leader Reies Lopez Tijerina “didn’t understand that we were the parents and he was the child.”
King told Abernathy, “Maybe we just have to admit that the day of violence is here, and maybe we have to just give up and let violence take its course. The nation won’t listen to our voice—maybe it’ll heed the voice of violence.” Abernathy tried to reassure King and lift his spirits, but made little headway. “Ralph, we live in a sick nation.… Maybe we will just have to let violence run its course.”
“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.”
“Had the man lived, the marriage wouldn’t have survived, and everybody feels that way,” one staffer observed.
“Coretta King was most certainly a widow long before Dr. King died.” Her resentment of that made for unpleasantness all around. As Rutherford noted, “That again was why he couldn’t go home.”
He recounted his stabbing in the Harlem department store ten years earlier, how the letter-opener’s blade had come so close to killing him that the doctors had said even a sneeze might have been fatal,
Hosea Williams says it bluntly: “There is a definite effort on the part of America to change Martin Luther King, Jr., from what he really was all about—to make him the Uncle Tom of the century. In my mind, he was the militant of the century.”
