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May 14 - August 24, 2019
Andrew Young summoned Baez early the next morning to a local minister’s home. He said King refused to get out of bed, and asked her to sing. Extreme rousting measures for exhaustion had failed, which meant King was despondent beyond tired, and Young pushed Baez past an anxious household to be a siren of revival. She sang “Pilgrim of Sorrow” in a cappella soprano until King smiled faintly by the second or third verse.
“Don’t you find,” asked correspondent Mike Wallace, “that the American people are getting a little bit tired, truly, of the whole civil rights struggle?”
“We cannot be expected any longer to march and have our heads broken in order to say to whites: come on, you’re nice guys,” he wrote in the September 22 issue of The New York Review of Books. “For you are not nice guys. We have found you out.”
“The seal of the great state of Georgia lies tarnished”—which only sweetened Maddox’s claim to represent the unrepentant common citizen. “Georgians are determined to turn back the trend of socialism,” he declared in victory,
PULL THE LEVER for the BLACK PANTHER and go on HOME!”—but
“We will pull that lever to stop the beating of Negroes by whites! We will pull that lever for all the black people who have been killed! We are going to resurrect them tomorrow! We will pull that lever so that our children will never go through what we have gone through…. We are pulling the lever so people can live in some fine brick homes! We are going to say good-bye to shacks! Dirt roads! Poor schools!”
The sensation all but expunged real antecedents that were sound and contrary in every respect—ballot struggles by patriot sharecroppers, quilting women, and priestly martyrs—just as fascination with black power eclipsed Stokely Carmichael’s six prior years in the nonviolent movement.
Privately, however, Johnson saw an adverse trend instead of a fluke. He predicted that most of the new Republicans in Congress would vote with the Southern Democrats while seeking colleagues to replace them. This was the backlash he feared. “It’ll move beyond George Wallace and become respectable,” he told Bill Moyers.
His press secretary later confided that Daley’s “idea of affirmative action was nine Irishmen and a Swede.”
Elements of reaction in both political parties worried Johnson more than his liberal critics. They pressed for all-out war in Vietnam and attacked the anti-poverty agency as a utopian dream tinged with black power subversion.
“While this period represented a frontal assault on the doctrine and practice of white supremacy,” he said, “it did not defeat the monster of racism…. And we must never forget that the roots of racism are very deep in America.”
“And the fact is that the ultimate logic of racism is genocide,” he asserted. “If you say that I am not good enough to live next door to you…because of the color of my skin or my ethnic origins, then you are saying in substance that I do not deserve to exist. And this is what we see when we see that [form of] racism still hovering over our nation.”
“All that I have said boils down to the conclusion that man’s survival is dependent upon man’s ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty, and war.”
To him, the decline of nonviolence magnified compound dangers inherited from “enemy thinking”—the tendency to wall off groups of people by category. In religion, enemy psychology could invert the entire moral code to make violence a holy cause. In politics, enemy psychology could subvert the promise of democracy with a hierarchy of fear, secrecy, and arbitrary command for war.
The realignment of 1966 was at once blatant and subliminal, symbolic and momentous. Its backlash feature first appeared to be no more than a balancing correction for the near extinction since 1964 of the Goldwater Republicans, the last defenders of legal segregation outside the South, but observers in subsequent decades looked on the normally obscure midterm year as a fulcrum of more lasting change
“At each male birth, my father in his wisdom/Prepared his sons for their envisaged greatness…/Our pulpy human hearts were cut away/And in their place precision apparatus/Of steel and plastic tubing was inserted.”
Abraham Heschel exhorted the assembly to make witness through the corridors against complacency about violence: “In a free society, some are guilty but all are responsible.”
“Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence,” declared the Post. “He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people.” Editors at the Times pronounced race relations difficult enough without his “wasteful and self-defeating” diversions into foreign affairs. In “Dr. King’s Error,” they summarized the Riverside speech as “a fusing of two public problems that are distinct and separate,” and predicted that his initiative “could very well be disastrous for both causes.”
American phenomenon in the mold of Malcolm X, built on the sensational illusion that violence alone measures power and that menacing language accordingly registers heroic strength rather than noise.
He acknowledged resentment that history’s victims remained so accountable for the overall state of race relations, still obliged to catalyze progress by further suffering and improvisation, and he bridled like Malcolm X that America admired nonviolence mostly when practiced by blacks for the comfort of whites. “They applauded us on the freedom rides when we accepted blows without retaliation,”
A warrior’s exultation hardened the awakening of Jewish spirit. “We grew so fast into a visible central power that the seeds of arrogance as well came in,” observed David Hartman.
Writer Jonathan Kaufman later analyzed a new strain of “muscular Judaism” that sprouted beside cultured moralism built through many centuries of Diaspora, when scattered communities had relied on Jewish teaching to promote tolerance and social justice in host countries. Immediately after the Six Day War, the American gadfly I. F. Stone charged that the intoxicating rebirth of mighty Samson actually reduced Israel into the clench of her enemies. “Both Israelis and Arabs in other words feel that only force can assure justice,” he wrote. “A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric
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A seminal essay of estrangement appeared just before Birmingham in 1963, when Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz wrote that although he had grown up paying lip service to civil rights, “I was still afraid of Negroes. And I still hated them with all my heart.” Dismissing integration and democracy as false hopes for “the Negro problem in this country,” Podhoretz saw no solution until “skin color does in fact disappear,” and confessed a desperate fantasy: “it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation.”
A parallel line of influential Jewish thought followed the extraordinary arc of Max Shactman, the Polish-born party leader who on a starry-eyed 1925 delegation to Moscow had hailed the Communist International as “a brilliant red light in the darkness of capitalistic gloom.”
Unlike Rustin, socialist leader Michael Harrington split with Shactman over Vietnam, and he coined the word “neoconservative” for Shactman’s coalition thrust. As the term gained currency in the intellectual beehive of Manhattan, it suggested strong military purpose with a utopian residue focused on Israel. The powerful neoconservative school in American politics would grow from a merger of labor-wing Shactmanites into the larger movement associated with Irving Kristol.
Meanwhile, Rabbi Heschel endured mounting criticism on the same point. Israeli emissaries warned that his Vietnam protest threatened vital American protection, and colleagues at the Jewish Theological Seminary further ostracized Heschel in their zeal for both wars. Movement leaders compressed decades of agonizing reappraisal into the short week of battle. Andrew Young told King he feared Israel would not compromise on its conquest of Jerusalem. Levison and Harry Wachtel said the great powers should impose a comprehensive peace—but would not do so. By June 11, one day after the cease-fire, King
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“Now even the Supreme Court has turned against us,” King lamented in private. A New York Times editorial, while opining that retroactive jail for King “is profoundly embarrassing to the good name of the United States,” rejected Chief Justice Warren’s dissent: “The majority held—we think rightly—that obedience to the law and to the normal procedures set forth in the law has to be paramount.”
He proposed also a “Marshall Plan” to relieve desperate poverty among the mass of Arab citizens and refugees. “So long as they find themselves on the outskirts of hope,” he said, “they are going to make intemperate remarks. They are going to keep the war psychosis alive.”
King argued from the book that white supremacy was an ever-present force in history, making it a cause rather than a result of black frustration and violence.
“There were dark days before,” King told a conference call of advisers that night, “but this is the darkest.” He approved Stanley Levison’s doleful statement warning that any nation failing to provide jobs ultimately cannot govern. He would remind people that a prostrate, Depression-era America had treated employment conditions no worse than those in black Newark and Detroit as a national emergency, but he knew most Americans heard him only when he dutifully denounced violent crime and supported federal intervention to restore order.
magnified suspicion. John Hersey, author of Hiroshima, was asked to investigate riot mysteries for the Kerner Commission and became transfixed by the case of police officers who had rounded up ten unarmed black men and two young white prostitutes for interrogation in a motel, after which all suspects emerged beaten, unclothed, and terrified except for three found executed on the floor.
Brown coined in the same pulpit speech an epigram that gripped the country as truism or demonic slander: “Violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.”
King explained to a heritage workshop that the convention’s “Black Is Beautiful” posters signaled a drive to upgrade negative connotations buried deep in the English language.* “They even tell us that a white lie is better than a black one,” he said.
I am trying to get you to see this morning is that a man may be self-centered in his self-denial and self-righteous in his self-sacrifice,” King declared. “His generosity may feed his ego and his piety may feed his pride. So, without love, benevolence becomes egotism and martyrdom becomes spiritual pride.”
When two women moved that half the delegates should be female, men drove them from the microphone with catcalls and wolf whistles.
Republican U.S. Representative George Bush pronounced himself satisfied that seven new microscopes in his Houston district were academic and benign, not rifle scopes secretly retooled for insurrection as he had suggested in a speech about miscellaneous purchases under the federal anti-poverty program.
Newsweek’s task force recognized that the most immediate obstacle to its uphill agenda “is obviously Vietnam,” but nothing made the war an exclusive or supreme priority. Indeed, for King, the cognitive force of Newsweek solidified two reasons behind his instinctive preference for a poor people’s campaign. Whereas Vietnam protest strongly implied a negative or limited purpose to desist from war, the poverty crusade sought constructive change grounded in civil rights exhortations for America to “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.”
“Violence has been the inseparable twin of materialism, the hallmark of its grandeur,”
When Rutherford confessed discomfort to see his revered chief executive sit through blistering criticism from subordinates, King replied that movements ran on tempered lunacy, which demanded respect for anyone who inspired others to risk nonviolence.
