King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

In Montgomery, parks remained closed for more than six years. When Oak Park finally reopened in 1965, a chain-link fence remained around most of its perimeter. The only opening was on the east side, the side that fronted a predominantly white neighborhood. Black Montgomery residents would have to go out of their way and pass through white neighborhoods to gain access. Even then, the swimming pools remained closed, for fear of interracial contact.

On October 23, 1957, Coretta gave birth to a son: Martin Luther King III.

Martin wasn’t well trained, wasn’t seasoned for what he got pulled into,” Baker told the historian David J. Garrow.

Four out of five southern ministers said they supported school integration, according to a 1958 survey by Pulpit Digest, but the survey was conducted anonymously and did not always reflect what the ministers were ready to say publicly. Racism persisted, largely unaddressed and unchecked among whites.

No amount of money could ever compensate for the exploitation and humiliation Black people suffered, King said, but a price could be placed, at the very least, on unpaid wages. It would help the poor. It would help America repent for sins of the past. It would help heal a divided nation.

With no national organization backing them, with no national leader speaking for them, with no overarching set of demands, a new grassroots movement began, aimed at one of the most glaring symbols of segregation, the humble lunch counter. Even the name of the campaign was humble: it came to be called “the sit-in movement.” The sit-in movement was a reaction, in part, to the disappointing pace of school desegregation.

In many small southern towns, where there were no Black colleges and no Black media, protests fizzled.

King embraced them. As in Montgomery, he didn’t start the uprising, and yet, again, he found himself thrust into a position of leadership, improvising all the way.

The younger King also had to be conscious of local politics. Daddy King had long-standing relationships with white political and business leaders in Atlanta. The SCLC would seldom launch protests in Atlanta, Lawson said, to the frustration of some, “because it would be a slap in the face” to Daddy King and other older church leaders.

At the time, the Cold War was viewed as a Manichaean struggle, one that all but shut down debate about America’s use of force. King was one of the few widely known American leaders at the time to address the moral costs of war.

At times I think I’m a pretty unprepared symbol. But people cannot devote themselves to a great cause without finding someone who becomes the personification of the cause.

It was a sign of King’s greatest flaw as a leader, an ironic flaw for a protest leader, Rustin said: he hated conflict.

King walked a fine line in Atlanta. The established Black leadership, which included his father, did not welcome Martin Jr.’s participation. The elders had access to the white power structure and “they didn’t want that undermined,” as Charles Black, one of the student organizers, put it.

The date was October 25, 1960, two weeks before Americans would choose a new president in a close contest between Republican vice president Richard Nixon and Democratic senator John F. Kennedy. Cold War politics, not civil rights, had dominated the candidates’ messages and the mainstream media’s campaign coverage.

Though King was twelve years younger than Kennedy, they both had powerful, domineering fathers. Both men were handsome, charming, ambitious, and intellectually curious. But they had not developed a strong rapport, and Kennedy had not acted on King’s advice to clarify his commitment to Black voters. Nixon and King, on the other hand, had spoken often and had a solid relationship.

The story of King’s release attracted little attention in the white press, as Vandiver had hoped. But the Black press celebrated the call to Coretta: “Kennedy to the Rescue!” read the headline in The Philadelphia Tribune.

In one of the closest elections in American history, Kennedy won by about 100,000 votes. Many political observers said Kennedy owed his election to the Black electorate, as about 70 percent of the Black vote went his way.

Though northerners claimed to be more sympathetic, their behavior all too often revealed the lie. White people in the North, same as in the South, justified segregation by saying Black people couldn’t handle integration, that they would drag down white schools and neighborhoods, that they were not yet qualified for better jobs and higher pay.

There is a pressing need for a liberalism in the North which is truly liberal, a liberalism that firmly believes in integration in its own community as well as in the deep South. There is need for the type of liberal who not only rises up with righteous indignation when a Negro is lynched in Mississippi, but will be equally incensed when a Negro is denied the right to live in his neighborhood, or join his professional association, or secure a top position in his business.

be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. And one day we will win our freedom, but not only will we win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process. And our victory will be a double victory.

Reporters toting portable television news cameras—a new technology—filmed the attacks and beamed the story around the world. Forty million American homes had television sets—exceeding the number of homes that received a daily newspaper for the first time.

King urged the audience to acknowledge the role of government in the fight for justice, and to insist on action from elected officials. “The law may not be able to make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me,” he said. “The fact is that habits, if not the hearts of men, have been, and are being changed every day by federal action.”

In Jackson, police arrested all twenty-seven riders as they tried to enter the whites-only cafeteria and restrooms. The arrests and attacks on the buses were designed to thwart a growing social movement, but they had the opposite effect. The men and women who were arrested turned their jail cells into “universities of nonviolence,” as James Lawson put it, teaching fellow inmates about Gandhi. The Freedom Rides helped CORE expand its membership and influence.

Young Black people had launched “nothing less than a moral revolution,” James Baldwin wrote, and that had created a gap between the revolutionaries and the official leadership.

Rabbi Allen Secher, leading a congregation in New Jersey at the time, said he was drawn to Georgia by King’s powerful message. “I’ll tell you what prepared King to be a leader. It was his kishkes,” the rabbi said, using the Yiddish word for “guts.” “He wasn’t one hundred percent perfect … But what we knew from the depths of his being was that he was what religion was supposed to be. He might have had some of the training, but he had all of the soul.”

For most white Americans, the perception and meaning of the Civil War had not changed since Gone with the Wind. They resisted the notion that the war had been caused by slavery, and they treated both the North and South as noble American combatants.

Before newspapers could publish the letter, though, King and Abernathy were freed, their fines paid by a “mysterious benefactor.” King said he was “very unhappy about the subtle and conniving tactics” that led to the release. Albany’s white leaders, seeking to deny King his prison soapbox, had arranged and paid for King’s freedom. Their strategy worked.

Yoki told her mother that she hoped her father would stay in jail “until he fixes it so I can go to Funtown.”

“The mistake I made there,” King said of Albany, “was to protest against segregation generally rather than against a single and distinct facet of it. Our protest was so vague that we got nothing, and the people were left very depressed.”

while these crises unified the Black community, a second important thing happened: a split developed in the white political establishment. Not all white leaders proved intransigent. Not all white business owners opposed integration. Not all white politicians acted in lockstep to defend segregation. The wall of opposition showed cracks.

In the big picture, the FBI was more focused on exploring King’s ties to alleged communists than on protecting him or any other civil rights leaders from violent threats.

Lawmakers went to great lengths to make sure no cracks appeared in the wall of segregation.

“The American people,” he wrote, “have not abandoned the quest for equal rights; rather, they have been persuaded to accept token victories as indicative of genuine and satisfactory progress.”

Before long, Connor leveraged his radio popularity to launch a political career. Like many office seekers at the time, he assured white voters that he would defend their right to live in a segregated society, but he was hardly more extreme or more vocal than other white Alabama politicians.

In 1948 at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, he waved a Confederate battle flag as he led the so-called Dixiecrat delegation in a walkout to protest the party’s civil rights platform.

some northern white people justified their own racist practices by telling themselves they weren’t as bad as Bull Connor and his ilk. Southern bigots described Black people as genetically inferior, he wrote, while northern segregationists argued that Black people were victims of the culture of poverty who needed better work habits and stronger family values. The results were no less harmful

King recognized his role as a dramatist. Television was the new American stage, and King put on a show with good guys and bad guys.

Newspapers all over the country ran a photo of a police dog tugging its leash and moving in the direction of a prone unidentified Black man, while a uniformed police officer stood over the Black man and prodded him with a stick. The clash made front-page news around the country, largely because of the shocking photographs of the dogs.

“There are some preachers in Birmingham who are not with this movement,” he shouted from the pulpit of his brother’s church on April 11. “I’m tired of preachers riding around in big cars, living in fine homes, but not willing to take part in the fight. He is the freest man in the community. The white man can’t cut off his check. If you can’t stand up with your people, you are not fit to be a leader.”

On the day of King’s arrest, a group of eight white clergymen in Birmingham had issued a statement calling on Black citizens to “withdraw support from these demonstrations, and to unite locally in working peacefully for a better Birmingham.” The statement continued: “We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.” Earlier in the year, most of the same white clergymen had written a statement encouraging white people in Birmingham to obey integration orders, declaring “no person’s freedom is safe unless every person’s freedom is equally protected.”

His letter, written at a decisive moment in his leadership, written without access to his bookshelf and without the help of his frequent collaborators, would become his most passionate and lasting prose.

Many adults in the Black community, and even some of the preachers, were eager to see the movement come to an end and see King depart, said Dorothy Cotton. “If you hear 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 the century since slavery’s end, Black people in America had endured far worse, but most of it had happened without white witnesses in the news media, without widespread photographic evidence. It was the image of this single encounter—a young Black man under attack by a police dog—that appeared the next day on the front page of The New York Times and in other newspapers across the country. The photo shook the world and crystallized the message King and others had been trying for years to express.

the image may have also offered some viewers a comfortable contrast between North and South. A single frame of film, for many white people in the North, became, quite literally, the picture of American racism—their issue, not ours.

As Wyatt Tee Walker later put it: “Bull Connor had something in his mind about not letting these niggers get to City Hall. I prayed that he’d keep trying to stop us … Birmingham would have been lost if Bull had let us go down to the City Hall and pray … There would be no movement, no publicity.”

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.”

When third-world nations and the Soviet Union criticized America for its treatment of Black citizens, Kennedy could blame the moral failure on racist diehards in the South while bragging about his admiration and support for Martin Luther King Jr.

newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann. “The cause of desegregation must cease to be a Negro movement, blessed by white politicians from the Northern states. It must become a national movement to enforce national laws, led and directed by the National Government.”

Two days later, on June 11, Governor Wallace barred the door of the administration building at the University of Alabama to prevent two Black students from enrolling. Wallace stood aside later in the day after President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard. Robert and John Kennedy spent the whole day receiving updates and talking about the situation in Alabama. It was at this moment, according to Harris Wofford, that Kennedy committed to “go all-out” in an effort to pass strong new civil rights legislation and lead a sweeping push for racial justice. Every one of the president’s aides opposed it, fearing it would damage his chances for reelection, said Wofford. Only Bobby Kennedy offered encouragement.

Now King had the dual job of inspiring the protesters and explaining them to white America.