King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

King and others in the meeting—including Ralph Abernathy and Jo Ann Robinson—realized they might have to prepare for a longer boycott. They organized another mass meeting and passed around sign-up sheets, asking for volunteers to drive the bus boycotters to and from work.

The next week, when MIA and city officials met again, King agreed to drop the request for the immediate hiring of Black bus drivers. The city still wouldn’t budge. “What they are after is the destruction of our social fabric,” said the mayor, Tacky Gayle.

King stood up to them, in what the Black journalist Louis E. Lomax called “the moment of umbilical severance.” Said King: “It would be the height of cowardice for me to stay away. I would rather be in jail for ten years than desert my people.”

In Lomax’s view, King almost certainly would have quit his job at Dexter Avenue church for a college job after a few years had he not been thrust into a position of leadership. But now he had made a commitment to the movement.

Montgomery officials had hoped to squash the rebellion by indicting protesters, but the move backfired. An ind...

“The experience in Montgomery did more to clarify my thinking on the question of nonviolence than all of the books that I had read,” King wrote a few years later. “Living through the actual experience of the protest, nonviolence became more than a method to which I gave intellectual assent; it became a commitment to a way of life.”

Coretta filled in for her husband, along with the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham, as the first meeting of the new organization continued. Meanwhile, King learned of more explosions in Montgomery, four at churches and two at residences. At the home of a sympathetic white minister, twelve sticks of dynamite had failed to explode.

But even when the bombs failed to kill, they never failed to terrorize. No one knew when the next bomb would explode, and even the bombers did not know how big the blast would be.

noteworthy precedent had been set: white people had been arrested and tried for crimes against Black people. The wave of bomb blasts ended, and the buses rolled again.

Black Americans had always understood the power of segregation, but they were only now beginning to fully comprehend its intransigence, the way it wove through hearts, minds, laws, and economic systems, and how difficult it would be to remove, as the historian J. Mills Thornton III wrote.

Four days later, at a meeting in New Orleans, King and dozens of other ministers officially launched the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), with King as president and Abernathy as treasurer.

“To Redeem the Soul of America” became the group’s motto, embracing Christianity and nonviolence, and borrowing a phrase that Benjamin Mays

often quoted from Walter Rau...

Planning for the pilgrimage to Washington continued, despite a cool reaction from NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, who expressed concern about how the SCLC’s emergence might affect support for the NAACP’s southern branches.

Wilkins contended that protests such as the one in Montgomery might work in solving local disputes, but the NAACP’s legal challenges would prove most effective in ushering nationwide change.

Rustin was impressed but also puzzled. There was nothing extraordinary in the text of the speech, and yet King had moved his listeners to rapture—Black and white listeners.

He controlled his tempo, picking up speed in a way that made his audience feel as if they were moving with him, as if they wanted to sing along. He used harmonics, varying his pitch, to make his speech melodic and never monotonous. And he controlled his rhythm masterfully, pausing when he wanted his audience to contemplate his words and repeating phrases without pause when he wanted listeners to feel those same words.

“traveling toward the promised land of social integration, of freedom and justice.”

King, like a lot of Baptist preachers, was good at preaching but not organizing, said Ella Baker, who was hired to temporarily run the SCLC’s Atlanta headquarters.

Citizenship, determined to double Black voter registration within two years, but rallies fizzled for lack of publicity and grassroots support.

King also wasn’t seasoned to accept women in positions of authority.

Rustin and Levison had to prevail upon King to hire Baker as executive director, even temporarily, and she never got the financial or administrative support she needed to succeed in the job. Coretta Scott King later wrote that she felt Baker was mistreated because of her gender.

On June 23, King, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Lester B. Granger of the National Urban League met with President Eisenhower to press for stronger civil rights laws.

King was among the disapproving. If Eisenhower had come out strongly in support of civil rights sooner, King said, “much of the tension in the South … could have been avoided.” Eisenhower had taken a circumspect approach since Brown v. Board of Education, and he did the same in his Oval Office meeting with King and the others, saying he would not comment on their proposals but would “be glad to consider them.”

Baldwin found in King no trace of self-importance, no “hideous piety,” no chauvinism, no tendency to say one thing to whites and another to Blacks.

“The joy which filled this church, therefore, was the joy achieved by people who have ceased to delude themselves about an intolerable situation,

Levison became not only King’s most important ghostwriter but also a key adviser and his closest white friend. Levison, forty-six years old, was a Jewish lawyer and businessman from New York and an active sponsor of the group called In Friendship, which offered financial help

to southern Black causes. His parents were Yiddish-speaking Russian immigrants. His father had managed a children’s clothing store in Queens, New York. At Far Rockaway High School, Levison had been voted “wittiest boy.” After college and law school, he’d gone on to make money in real estate. He owned a car dealership in New Jersey and lived in Manhattan.

served as one of the top financiers for the Communist Party USA.

He had been under federal surveillance since 1952.

By 1955, Levison’s role in Communist Party finances had diminished. It was Bayard Rustin who introduced Levison to King.

Now he saw that nonviolent movements grew stronger when they came under attack. Violent assaults on the determinedly nonviolent aroused sympathy and attracted support for the cause. It was a lesson that would shape the last ten years of his life.

them talk now,” she recalled, “they all loved Martin Luther King. But they didn’t all love Martin Luther King, and … they wished that he would get out of town with his mess.”

In reaction to the settlement, one white man told a radio reporter: “It upset me pretty highly, to give you my honest viewpoint of it. I didn’t take to the idea too much, because, myself, I just can’t hardly see a Negro using the same restroom that I use, not that I think that I’m the Almighty or better than he is, it’s not that, it’s just that, it’s just a little matter of the cleanliness and the morals and everything else.”

How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

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.”

met in the Monroe Room at the Palmer House Hotel,

West Side Organization, it looked like the city’s

The Yale historian C. Vann Woodward wrote in Harper’s Magazine that the civil rights movement seemed to be following the same course as Reconstruction: “a rising tide of indignation against an ancient wrong, the slow crumbling of stubborn resistance, the sudden rush and elation of victory—and then … the onset of reaction and the fading of high hopes.”

He read with a sense of deliberateness, one that suggested that he had come not to lift members of his audience but to push them.

“What about Vietnam?” If America can use violence to solve its problems, they asked, why shouldn’t we?

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.

recognize that the peasant’s life held as much meaning and value as their own.

ALMOST OVERNIGHT, KING became the nation’s most famous opponent of a war that had the approval of an overwhelming majority of Americans. Newspaper editorials questioned not only his patriotism but even his commitment to civil rights.

Spring Mobilization Committee’s massive march in New York City, one of the biggest antiwar protests the nation had seen.

Where Do We Go from Here, Kopkind wrote, sounded as if it were meant to be “read aloud in suburban synagogues.” That was meant as the ultimate insult.

Soon after that conversation, King told his staff that these troubled times called for a new kind of civil disobedience. He proposed a direct confrontation with the federal government, a massive occupation of Washington, one that would “cripple the operations of an oppressive society.” It was a radical, militant plan, but it was also a plan that broke from the confines of Black versus white, Black power versus Freedom Now. It was a plan that reflected King’s refusal to accept limits in his quest for community. But he offered no details on how such a protest might work.

The Supreme Court denied King a new hearing on a 1963 contempt charge from Birmingham, which meant he would soon have to spend another five days in jail.

She tried to boost his spirits. “You mustn’t believe that people are losing faith in you,” she said. “There are millions of people who have faith in you and believe in you and feel that you are our best hope.” She added: “I believe in you, if that means anything.” “Yes,” he said. “That means a great deal.” “Somehow, you’ve got to pull yourself out of this and go on,” she said. “I don’t have any answers,” he said. “Well,” she said, “somehow the answers will come. I’m sure they will.”

The attorney general, Ramsey Clark, rejected the request.