King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

The FBI had found nothing to indicate that Levison had ongoing communist ties, but the agency nonetheless continued to eavesdrop and file reports to Robert Kennedy, eager to perpetuate the narrative that the Reds were using King to “destabilize American society,” as the FBI’s Deke DeLoach put it.

“Florestine,” Francine said, “this is what heaven’s gonna be like when we get there.” That feeling of heaven, or racial utopia, is what King, Bayard Rustin, and other organizers of the march had wished and worked for.

Years later, after she herself had become a pastor in the American Baptist ministry and after she had had children and grandchildren and retired with her husband to Merrillville, Indiana, Francine would remember three things from the train ride home that night: the steel mills of Pittsburgh lighting the night sky in shades of orange, purple, and red; the joyous songs of her fellow passengers; and the oath she took with Florestine that they would work and sacrifice and carry King’s dream of justice with them forever.

A week before the march, the bureau’s domestic intelligence division had produced a sixty-eight-page report stating that the Communist Party of America—a tiny organization with only about four thousand members by that time—exerted little or no influence on the civil rights movement.

On September 13, after a fiery speech by a segregationist, more than a hundred white student protesters stormed city hall. One student stood on Albert Boutwell’s desk, waving a Confederate flag, while others dropped burning cigarettes on the carpet.

Feelings of grief and bitterness flooded him. He thought about the fact that the face of Jesus Christ had been, literally, blown from a stained-glass window and wondered if it was a sign that evil had shattered the message of Christ. He asked himself, he said, “if men were this bestial, was it all worth it? Was there any hope? Was there any way out?”

Johnson used his first major address as president to declare his commitment to Kennedy’s civil rights bill.

On December 29, 1963, Time named King its Man of the Year, the first Black person ever selected for the honor.

King saw Black reparations as a form of social atonement, a way to heal, to restore bonds shattered by slavery and racism. That’s why he focused on “the forgotten white poor” as well as the mistreated Black.

In New York City, a majority of white people surveyed by The New York Times said the civil rights movement had gone too far. The white people surveyed “spoke of Negroes’ receiving ‘everything on a silver platter’ and of ‘reverse discrimination’ against whites,” the Times reported.

When asked how America ought to prevent race riots, King gave a simple reply: Integrate faster. If violence erupted, it would be the fault of the white people in power who failed to solve the problem, not the Black people who demanded change.

Barry Goldwater, in his bid for the presidency, appealed to many white Americans who yearned for a return to what they considered simpler times. Goldwater vowed that as president he would leave civil rights issues to the states, a threat so profound that it moved King to abandon his policy of electoral neutrality,

at age thirty-five, King returned to Washington, D.C., to watch President Johnson sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964, considered one of most important pieces of legislation passed by Congress in the twentieth century.

Journalists noted that Johnson was the first southerner to serve as president since Woodrow Wilson, and that the Civil Rights Act might prove to be one of Johnson’s pinnacle achievements.

What more will the Negro want? What will it take to make these demonstrations end? Well, I would like to reply with another rhetorical question: Why do white people seem to find it so difficult to understand that the Negro is sick and tired of having reluctantly parceled out to him those rights and privileges which all others receive upon birth or entry in America?

A young white man with a conservative haircut and a thick southern accent sat across the aisle from King. He leaned over and asked, “Excuse me … Are you Martin Luther King?” “Yes, I am.” “I wonder if I could ask you two questions.”

I’d like to be loved by everyone, but we can’t always wait for love.

By 1964, Mississippi remained the only state in the union where no Black children attended school with white children.

Many of the young activists also came away more frustrated than ever with King, saying that he had done President Johnson’s bidding.

At age thirty-five, he was the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, the first American southerner, and the second African American.

Despite winning handily, Johnson had lost Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, states that had been longtime Democratic bastions.

when it came to J. Edgar Hoover, his most dangerous nemesis, King reverted to conflict avoidance and paid a price for it.

After graduation from an all-white high school, Hoover enrolled at the all-white George Washington University, where he joined the Kappa Alpha fraternity, which, according to Hoover’s biographer Beverly Gage, celebrated the defeated slaveholding culture of the South.

Hoover revolutionized American law enforcement. Prohibition fueled an era of brazen criminality, and local police officials and business executives turned to the federal government for help.

All these things, to Hoover, threatened America and its Christian foundations. He expected ministers to help the FBI “preserve the dignity of man as the image of God and to mold the individual to be a worthy citizen in a democracy.” But King, in Hoover’s view, represented a threat to the nation’s spiritual and political well-being.

There is no way to measure the impact of the bureau’s campaign on King’s organizational efforts, his fundraising abilities, or his psychological health. But the surveillance clearly damaged King’s relationship with the president.

By 1964, Hoover was a sixty-nine-year-old man who had devoted his life to maintaining a carefully constructed sense of order. He saw King as the ultimate disrupter of societal norms. In a way, Hoover read King correctly at a time when few others did. While Malcolm X and others criticized King for being too conservative, and high-ranking officials in the Justice Department saw King as a reasonable reformer, Hoover recognized King for the radical he was and the radicalism he would inspire, especially when he began to work beyond the American South and take on issues bigger and broader in scope than integration.

For his formal lecture the next day at Oslo University, King signaled his growing ambition to build a movement that would work to end not only racial discrimination but poverty and warfare, too. At a moment when he might have felt fatigued, besieged, and tempted to retreat, when he might have accepted his Nobel Prize as a reward for a job well done, he chose instead to commit more determinedly than ever to his work, to describe his vision for a better, more ethical world, and to express his resolve to do the work required to make it a reality.

In Abernathy’s view, the arrival of the tape signaled the opening of a “second front” in the fight for civil rights: “For the FBI had become our enemy just as surely as the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations that were waiting for us in Selma.”

Selma was the birthplace of Bull Connor; the city that the historian J. Mills Thornton III called “the single most inflexibly and fervently segregationist” in Alabama; a city of twenty-eight thousand in which Black people made up slightly more than 50 percent of the population but only about 1 percent of the voters.

“We must be willing to go to jail by the thousands,” he announced on his first day in Selma. “We are not asking, we are demanding the ballot.”

King faced growing hostility. In Alabama, one writer called him “the prophet from Oslo,” adding that the prophet was more interested in winning headlines than winning reform. Hadn’t Selma integrated its restaurants? Hadn’t the city followed the federal judge’s order by extending the hours for voter registration? When the history of Selma is presented in fifty or one hundred years, wrote Don W. Wasson, managing editor of The Montgomery Advertiser, it might read: “In one city in Alabama, Selma in Dallas County, the white people tried to meet the demands of the times as dictated by the federal courts with reasonableness, but it was not allowed by the racial agitators.”

Malcolm had gradually moved away from the Nation of Islam’s beliefs on race and religion, and toward what the theologian James H. Cone called a universal perspective on humanity “centered on his commitment to the black liberation struggle in America.”

King could have announced his intentions before the march. He could have made clear that his goal that day was not a march to Montgomery but a show of brotherhood, with Black and white ministers walking arm in arm to the bridge and back, in support of voting rights. Instead, his fudging brought more criticism. Clergymen who had traveled to Selma from distant cities complained that their efforts had been wasted.

Militant activists said King had blown an opportunity to put pressure on Governor Wallace. To James Forman of SNCC, it was worse than that. In his view, King had formed a de facto partnership with the federal government, serving as a “safety valve for the American system by taking the pressure off”—the same pressure that SNCC and others were trying to create.

In April, she traveled to Detroit for a dinner honoring and raising money for Rosa Parks, who had struggled to find work, first in Montgomery and later in Detroit, and who had suffered deteriorating health. Parks had spent a decade in “deep economic insecurity,” as the scholar Jeanne Theoharis writes, in part because others in the movement had resented the attention showered on her.

protests went nowhere. As King could plainly see, even in his first extended tour of the city, Chicago wasn’t Birmingham, and neither Willis nor Mayor Richard J. Daley was Bull Connor. But racism permeated Chicago life.

Daley didn’t demand or enforce segregated schools in Chicago. He didn’t have to. The schools were segregated because the city’s neighborhoods were segregated. People called it de facto segregation, meaning that it was a fact, a given, a natural outcome of private individuals’ choices, in contrast to de jure segregation, which was required by law.

Skeptics deemed King naïve. They said he didn’t understand urban poverty or northern politics. But the issue was not new to him. He’d been traveling all over the country, learning and speaking out about conditions in the North since the 1950s, as the historian Jeanne Theoharis has documented. But King’s comments on northern racism were either dismissed or overlooked by white reporters and readers in the North.

King wasn’t coming north because he’d suddenly discovered the issues of urban poverty, police brutality, and slum housing. He was coming north because he had been saying all along that the North, that the whole country, had a problem.

If northern racism was more subtle, if the political landscape was more complicated, and if the solutions were less obvious, those were not reasons to abandon hope. By confronting the problem and generating a sense of crisis, he wrote, protesters would force the establishment to negotiate.

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.

King told reporters after the meeting that he and other civil rights leaders shared blame for the riots. Over the years, he said, he had seen the conditions in the nation’s big cities that had built toward this violence but had not addressed them: “We as Negro leaders … have failed to take the civil rights movement to the masses of the people.”

In Birmingham and Selma, the SCLC had learned to simplify its goals, in part to make it easier for the public and the press to understand the protesters’ demands. But he didn’t do that for Chicago, and the decision was intentional. James Bevel had been arguing that problems in Chicago—and throughout the North—had to be defined broadly. Economic exploitation was at the root of every issue, as King argued with increasing frequency, including inferior education, discriminatory employment practices, and segregated housing. “We’re going to create a new city,” Bevel bragged. “Nobody will stop us.”

I really don’t have the strength to fight this issue and keep my civil rights fight going … The other thing is the deeper you get involved the deeper you have to go and take stands and make speeches and appearances and I’m already overloaded and almost emotionally fatigued.”

So long as war, poverty, and racism remain part of “normal” America, he wrote, “then I prefer to be maladjusted.”

King and Mann were discussing the broad outline of their potential movie on King’s life. Mann asked, somewhat in jest, how the movie should end. “It ends with me getting killed,” King said. “He smiled,” Mann later recalled, “but he wasn’t joking.”

Carmichael hoped to drive away the others, but he believed he could work with King—and pull him to the left. The more miles the men trekked that week, the more King began using the word “Black,” SNCC’s preferred term, rather than “Negro.”

“We want Black power!” he shouted, and the crowd took up the chant: “We want Black power! We want Black power!” Newspaper headlines nationwide heralded Carmichael’s demand, some of them using capital letters for the phrase as it entered the mainstream: “Black Power!”

King and Carmichael met that day for five hours, along with members of their staffs, at a small Catholic parish house in Yazoo City. King explained his concerns about “Black power.” Carmichael dismissed them. “Black power” didn’t mean violence, he said; it meant strength, self-determination. “Why not use the slogan ‘black consciousness’ or ‘black equality’?” King asked. Those expressions were soft, Carmichael said. They didn’t inspire action or courage.