King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

Here’s what King actually said. PLAYBOY: Dr. King, what is your opinion of Negro extremists who advocate armed violence and sabotage? DR. KING: Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettoes, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence can achieve nothing but negative results. Those who are fired up in the audiences go home and face the same unchanged conditions; what is left but for them to become bitter, disillusioned and cynical. The extremist leaders who offer a call to arms are invariably unwilling to lead what they themselves know would certainly end in bloody, chaotic total failure. The struggle of the Negro in America, to be successful, must be waged with positive efforts that are kept strictly within the framework of our democratic society. This means reaching and moving the large groups of people necessary—of both races—to activate sufficiently the conscience of a nation. It is this effort that the S.C.L.C. attempts to achieve through the program which we call creative non-violent direct-action.

In 1965, King was much more humble and uncertain about Malcolm than the magazine made it appear. He remained critical of the Nation of Islam, but more open-minded with regard to Malcolm X. King and Malcolm had discovered common ground in their attacks on racism and inequality. In death, Malcolm would become a “cultural folk hero,” as the historian Peniel E. Joseph put it, a symbol of defiance. “But his greatest impact,” Joseph writes, “may have been on Martin Luther King Jr.”

The troopers and police pushed the protesters back toward Brown Chapel, back into Selma’s predominantly Black neighborhood. Bottles and bricks flew. More than seventy people were hospitalized. That night, ABC interrupted its broadcast of the movie Judgment at Nuremberg to show television viewers what racial hatred looked like in America. All over the country, people responded with spontaneous protests. Two days later, Detroit mayor Jerome Cavanagh and Michigan governor George Romney led ten thousand people in a demonstration of solidarity with the Selma marchers. In Chicago, demonstrators shut down the Loop during rush hour.

King directed his words at both Black and white Americans, reminding them of all they had in common. He cited the historian C. Vann Woodward’s 1955 book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, saying segregation in the South had been employed not merely to express and maintain white supremacy but also as a “political stratagem” to hold down the wages of Black and white workers. The white elite used race to keep workers from uniting in an interracial populist movement.

Now the activists in Chicago challenged King to do something about it—to build a movement in Chicago as he had in Birmingham and Selma. King might have said no. He might have listened to the advice of aides such as Andrew Young, who said the SCLC lacked the necessary funding and manpower for a campaign in the North. He might have justified a sabbatical. After a decade of activism, he had earned a break. He had inspired Black southerners to stand up and fight against staggering odds, and he had led them to victories. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the soon-to-be-passed Voting Rights Act of 1965 marked historic achievements, validation of what he had been telling people since the first day of the Montgomery boycott: that God and the Constitution were on their side, that the long arc of history bent toward justice.

When he had begun preaching in Montgomery, King recalled in one interview, he thought he would lead his church for a few years and then become a college professor. He still thought about it. “I dream of the day,” he told the interviewer Alex Haley, “when the demands presently cast upon me will be greatly diminished.” But he didn’t see that happening anytime soon—at least not for five years. For now, he said, he subjected himself to “endless self-analysis … to be as certain as I can that I am fulfilling the true meaning of my work, that I am maintaining my sense of purpose, that I am holding fast to my ideals, that I am guiding my people in the right direction. But whatever my doubts, however heavy the burden, I feel that I must accept the task of helping to make this nation and this world a better place to live in—for all men, Black and white alike.” He was still an optimist, he said—enough so to believe that America might yet find “the high road to the fulfillment of the Founding Fathers’ dream, when they wrote, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident…’”

“Racism is genocide,” King said at his first press conference in Chicago, on July 23, 1965. “When a man cannot get a good job and good wages, he is a slave. When he cannot get good, substantial housing, he is a slave. When a man cannot get integrated education, he is a slave. Before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave. We are eternally through with racial segregation.”

Chicago wasn’t Birmingham, and neither Willis nor Mayor Richard J. Daley was Bull Connor. But racism permeated Chicago life. In the years following World War I, as Black families migrated from the South and a growing number of Black families moved into white neighborhoods, twenty-six Black homes were bombed. In 1919, a race riot left thirty-eight people dead, twenty-five of them Black. Rioters burned the homes of more than one thousand Black people. In response, city officials committed more deeply to segregation. Realtors used contracts that forbade property owners from selling or renting their properties to Black people, as they did in other cities. Chicago and other city governments marked Black neighborhoods as areas of an impending decline in property value—redlining those parts of town, as the process became known, and making it difficult for families there to qualify for bank mortgages. When Black families did move into white neighborhoods, white families often moved out.

In Alabama, Black voters began registering in unprecedented numbers—numbers so impressive that Jim Clark not only removed his “NEVER” button but also hosted a barbeque for Black voters in his campaign for reelection. The voters were not fooled, however; they put him out of office.

The novelist Walter Mosley, who was thirteen years old and living in Watts at the time, would later write, in the voice of his fictional character Easy Rawlins: But if you come from down in Watts or Fifth Ward or Harlem, every soul you come upon has been threatened and beaten and jailed. If you have kids they will be beaten. And no matter how far back you remember, there’s a beatin’ there waiting for you. And you see some man stopped by cops and some poor mother cryin’ for his release it speaks to you. You don’t know that woman, you don’t know if the man bein’ arrested has done something wrong. But it doesn’t matter. Because you been there before. And it’s hot, and you’re broke, and people have been doin’ this to you because of your skin for more years than your mother’s mother can remember.

King responded in his own syndicated newspaper column, which ran in multiple Black papers, writing that a lot of white people were wondering when he would stop demonstrating and boycotting; when he would stop speaking out against war, poverty, and racism; when things in America could go back to normal. His answer was simple, he said. So long as war, poverty, and racism remain part of “normal” America, he wrote, “then I prefer to be maladjusted.”

And it was Coretta, not Martin, who was quoted the next day in The Washington Post. “When you feel what you are doing is right,” she said, “you are ready for the tough times when they come, and you face them and accept them. You learn, too, that the bad times do not last forever, and you know that they are part of the price you must pay for the privilege of standing by your convictions.”

“I’m not interested in power for power’s sake,” he said, “but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right, and that is good.” Black people comprised 10 percent of the nation’s population, not enough to stand or fight alone. “There’s going to have to be a coalition of conscience, and we aren’t going to be free here in Mississippi and anywhere else in the United States until there is a committed empathy on the part of the white man.” He also reminded his audience that white people such as Viola Liuzzo, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman had sacrificed their lives in the struggle for civil rights, that he would never cast white people as the enemy. Black people were going to win their rights, win their freedom, he said—but not through violence and not through hate.

“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” he said. “I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.”

King’s critics at the time didn’t understand one important thing, according to Jesse Jackson. They didn’t understand that King was not merely fighting for desegregation; he was fighting for integration in the broadest sense, which meant the voluntary and intentional sharing of power. Full integration, said Jackson, means an opening of hearts and minds, an awakening to the true meaning of equality. It was the logical conclusion of a lifetime of work. If humans are made in God’s image, all humans ought to come together, regardless of race of nationality.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois all but crushed hopes of passing the fair-housing provision of the president’s new civil rights bill, telling a group of religious leaders from Chicago that he deemed a ban on racial discrimination in housing unconstitutional because it interfered with the rights of property owners. “You wouldn’t want me to throw my conscience in the Potomac River, would you?” Dirksen asked.

In the history of the United States, no protest leader had enjoyed as much access to the president of the United States as King had to Johnson. But King and Johnson hadn’t met in almost a year. King had passed on two invitations, perhaps because of his disdain for confrontation, but also perhaps because his conscience would not allow him to cooperate with an advocate and purveyor of war.

“I was telling Andy [Young] tonight that at times you do things to satisfy your conscience and they may be altogether unrealistic or wrong tactically, but you feel better,” King told Levison. “I just know, on the war in Vietnam, I will get a lot of criticism and I know I can hurt SCLC. But I feel better, and I think that is the most important thing.” If he didn’t feel good about himself, he told Levison, he would be no good to the SCLC or any other cause. His whole identity was wrapped up in his work and in his beliefs. There could be no moral compromises. “I feel so deep in my heart that we are so wrong in this country,” he explained, “and the time has come for a real prophecy, and I am willing to go that road.”

Halberstam asked if King had moved closer to the philosophy of Malcolm X. Though King said he would never embrace Black separatism, he acknowledged that his approach had changed. “For years, I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the society, a little change here, a little change there,” he said. “Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.” Specifically, King said, that might mean the nationalization of certain industries, a massive campaign of urban economic revitalization, and a guaranteed income. King also said his view of white Americans had changed. After his experience in Chicago, after seeing how white people in the North resisted appeals to integrate their schools and neighborhoods, he had concluded that only a small part of white America supported racial justice. “Most Americans,” he said, “are unconscious racists.”

After the riot, police had escorted King to the white-owned Holiday Inn Rivermont in Memphis, and the FBI had alerted friendly reporters to the fact that King had spent two nights there, as if to suggest he had abandoned the Black community. Now, as he arrived again in Memphis, King returned to his usual choice of lodging: the Lorraine Motel. Television and newspaper reporters not only identified his motel but also gave the exact room. It was room 306, located on the second floor, with a sweeping view of the motel’s grease-stained parking lot and empty swimming pool.

“I hope the son of a bitch doesn’t die,” J. Edgar Hoover said when he got the news. “If he does, they’ll make a martyr out of him.” At 6:16, eleven minutes after he was shot, King was wheeled into the emergency room at St. Joseph’s Hospital. His eyes were closed. He died there at 7:05 p.m. on April 4, 1968.

“Every racist in the country has killed Dr. King,” the activist James Farmer told a reporter. “Evil societies always destroy their consciences.”

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill marking the third Monday of each January as Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Reagan, whose policies were disastrous for many Black Americans, had long opposed the move. “On the national holiday you mentioned, I have the reservations you have,” he wrote to one elected official at the time, “but here the perception of too many people is based on image, not reality.”

Our simplified celebration of King comes at a cost. It saps the strength of his philosophical and intellectual contributions. It undercuts his power to inspire change. Even after Americans elected a Black man as president and after that president, Barack Obama, placed a bust of King in the Oval Office, the nation remains racked with racism, ethno-nationalism, cultural division, residential and educational segregation, economic inequality, violence, and a fading sense of hope that government, or anyone, will ever fix those problems.

“What makes Martin Luther King different from Jesus?” I thought it was a joke at first. It was the morning of June 17, 2015, and I was eating breakfast with Dick Gregory, the legendary activist and comedian, in a Washington, D.C., hotel restaurant. Gregory didn’t wait for me to answer his question. “What makes King different from Jesus? Jesus is hearsay. Don’t mean it didn’t happen, but there’s film of King. Can’t nobody change nothing. Who would ever believe? When King was shot, he was the most hated man on the planet … Now he’s the most beloved!” Who would ever believe?