America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (21 page)

7

THE ALPHA

the
FAILED ATTEMPTS
to
ASSASSINATE MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., 1958–1967

O
n March 31, 1968, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and the Reverend Wesley Albert Swift each delivered a sermon about the future of America, but rooted in very different ideas about God's design for humanity.

Dr. King spoke to an audience at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., in an oration entitled “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution.” King had delivered the speech before, at a commencement at Oberlin College, in Ohio, in 1965. But the civil rights movement and King's mission had undergone many changes in the intervening three years. At Oberlin, King spoke mainly to the socioeconomic challenges still facing the black underclass. “Remaining awake” in 1965 meant recognizing the need to expand one's conception of social justice in a world that demanded more compassion with greater urgency. “To rise to our full moral maturity as a nation, we must get rid of segregation whether it is in housing, whether it is a de facto segregation in the public schools, whether it is segregation in public accommodations, or whether it is segregation in the church,” King urged the Oberlin graduates.
¹

But by 1968, King's speech had evolved to fit the changing dynamics of a nation in upheaval over economic and racial inequality, a country bitterly divided over the Vietnam War (that King hinted at in 1965 but did not mention by name). In the nation's capital, King assumed the role of an Old Testament prophet, warning America about God's judgment if it maintained its current course. “One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we've done,” King told the crowd at the National Cathedral. “It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, ‘That was not enough . . . you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness.'” King remained convinced that the world would change, quoting, at
the beginning of his sermon, from the book of Revelations, Chapter 16: “Behold I make all things new; former things are passed away.” But now he saw “the Great Revolution” as three interlocking revolutions—economic, moral, and military—happening at once. The dangers posed by automation to the working poor, the moral decay stemming from racism, the threat of nuclear conflict as a result of the cold war: They could destroy a nation that, in a metaphor King used to great effect, chose to sleep through these times like Rip Van Winkle. But, King argued, if a courageous people managed the situation correctly, these seemingly intractable developments would finally convince a slumbering society of the promise of a “new day of justice and brotherhood and peace.” King, as was his custom, struck an optimistic note: “We're going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands.”
²

But for all his faith in God's benevolence, King nonetheless ended his sermon with an explication for divine guidance and with a conditional assertion about the future, in lines not found in the 1965 commencement address: “God grant that we will be participants in this newness and this magnificent development. If we will but do it, we will bring about a new day of justice and brotherhood and peace.”
³

If the Reverend King lacked a degree of certainty in the future in 1968, it was not simply because he recognized, like a good student of the book of Genesis, the problems that human free will and temptation presented even to God's grand designs. As far back as 1965, the growing schism inside the United States and within the civil rights movement had worried King. The nation's continued unraveling from 1967 through 1968 chastened his expectations for the country even further.

Urban and racial rioting continued to plague the nation in the summer of 1967, a level of domestic disorder not seen since post–Civil War Reconstruction. In Newark, New Jersey, false rumors that a black cab driver had died in police custody sparked four days of rioting from July 12 to July 17, requiring massive intervention by local and state police as well as by the National Guard. The urban combat that commenced resulted in twenty-three dead and 750 injured. Follow-up studies indicated that law enforcement, including
the National Guard, had expended 13,319 rounds of ammunition in pursuit of snipers who may not have actually existed.
⁴
A week later, Detroit, Michigan, experienced the single worst urban riot in the history of the nation: After five days of rioting, 43 people were dead, 1,189 were injured, and over 7,000 were arrested. Sandra West, a UPI reporter who had lived her whole life in Detroit, described the chaos:

Sunday I saw sights I never dreamed possible. . . . Raging fires burned out of control for blocks and blocks. Thick black smoke and cinders rained down at times so heavily they blocked out homes as close as 20 feet away.

Looters drove pickup trucks loaded with everything from floor mops to new furniture. Price tags still dangled from the merchandise.
⁵

Riots also struck Birmingham, Chicago, and Milwaukee, among other major cities. In sum, during the “long hot summer” of 1967, the United States experienced 158 different riots, resulting in eighty-three deaths, 2,801 injuries, and 4,627 incidents of arson.
⁶

With national press reports that “guns—hand guns, rifles, shotguns—are selling as though they were about to close down the gun factories,”
⁷
King continued to insist on nonviolence. But in August of 1967, he told a crowd of frustrated young civil rights activists that blacks “still live in the basement of the Great Society.” He observed some months later that a “riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”
⁸

In December 1967, with a renewed sense of purpose, King launched what would be his final mission, the Poor People's Campaign (PPC): a proposed march of several thousand members of America's underclass from America's poorest state (Mississippi) to the nation's capital. The protestors would camp out on the National
Mall. King hoped that if they were arrested, waves of new people would take their place, as they had in Birmingham in the spring of 1963. The goal of this campaign was to scandalize President Lyndon Johnson and the American government into a massive investment in social services, way beyond anything implemented in LBJ's War on Poverty. King had already burned his bridges with his onetime White House ally, and with the liberal political establishment in general, by openly opposing the Vietnam War, calling America the world's “greatest purveyor of violence” in 1967.

King's public opposition to the Vietnam War and his focus on economic justice also alienated him from a large swath of the general public that had openly supported his fight for legal equality in the South prior to 1966. In 1965, when he spoke at Oberlin, King found himself in fourth place on Gallup's poll of America's most admired people. But as soon as he began to focus on socioeconomic conditions in northern cities, starting in 1966, public opinion began to shift against him. By the time he gave the sermon at the National Cathedral in March 1968, a majority of white Americans—more than 70 percent—held an unfavorable opinion of Dr. King. More alarming, perhaps to King, was the fact that 57 percent of black Americans considered him to be irrelevant.
⁹
Groups like the Black Panthers and the more radicalized version of SNCC increasingly captured the imagination of a frustrated African American community.

Even King's longtime nemesis J. Edgar Hoover began to question the civil rights leader's prominence given the growing influence of black nationalism. Hoover continued to leak negative rumors and innuendo about Dr. King in 1968, but internal documents show that Hoover's concerns increasingly began to focus on militant black nationalist groups and leaders. A memo dated March 4, 1968, from the director to every FBI field office, raised alarm at the growing civil disorder in America and spoke to the need to “neutralize” a potential black “Messiah” who could trigger “a true black revolution” inside the nation. The document offered three potential candidates: Martin Luther King, Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, and Stokely Carmichael. But King was not seen as a threat as long as he retained his “‘obedience' to ‘white liberal doctrines' (non-violence).” The FBI instead focused its attention on Carmichael as the real danger.
¹⁰

King spoke to his predicament, a result of taking bold but unpopular stances, in his sermon at the National Cathedral.

On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?

There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.
¹¹

Like his reference to God's judgment, these words had been absent from the 1965 Oberlin commencement speech. In 1968 King knew the price he had paid for challenging “white liberal doctrines.” Indeed, when he preached at the National Cathedral, the potential efficacy of the Poor People's Campaign looked very much in doubt even as it was set to begin later in April. Financial support remained low, and skepticism persisted about whether or not the march would have the manpower it needed. Dr. King had just visited Mississippi to enlist leaders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the political group that had emerged as a result of Mississippi Freedom Summer's 1964 voting drive, for help with grassroots mobilization. Some questioned whether or not the Reverend King, with his waning influence, could hold marchers to a standard of disciplined nonviolence. Would the émigrés to the Mall, they wondered, respond to police coercion in the same way that residents of Detroit and Newark had responded?

In the last week of March 1968, concerns of nonviolence occupied Martin Luther King's attention above all other matters. At the urging of his friend, the Reverend James Lawson, Dr. King agreed to lend support to the Memphis sanitation workers strike, a labor protest that had been gaining momentum since February. The predominantly black sanitation force in Memphis worked under terrible conditions for low wages. They were expected to dispose of trash in any and all weather conditions. Matters came to a head when two sanitation workers, seeking shelter from the severe weather in their truck, were crushed by its compactor.

King agreed to lead a protest march in support of the laborers, but snow delayed the demonstration until March 28. Events did not go according to plan. Violence erupted, and shops were looted. Police shot and killed a sixteen-year-old protester. Tennessee governor Buford Ellington ordered National Guardsmen to pacify Memphis, and at the urging of his advisors, the Reverend King was forced to leave Memphis unceremoniously. On his own initiative, Dr. King insisted that he had to return to Memphis to lead a peaceful strike, to calm the nation (and supporters) about the prospects of the forthcoming Poor People's Campaign, and to convince campaign participants that nonviolence was still feasible and desirable. Not long after speaking at the National Cathedral, King returned to Atlanta. He announced on April 1 his plans to return to Memphis. King made his way by plane to Memphis on April 3, but not before a bomb threat delayed his departure.
¹²

No one listening in California to the Reverend Wesley Swift's sermon on March 31 would have detected that he too had plans for Memphis. In his speech “Power in the Word,” Swift simply echoed themes familiar to his Christian Identity flock. The focus was on the sustenance provided by faith. The end-times, as always, became a major motif. Swift asserted:

We find that in our intelligence and purpose, we have accepted a plan that is in the word of God and we are participating in it. You are not only participating in it, but you accept it and you are working to bring in the kingdom, and these prophecies of God.
¹³

Cycling through several books of the Bible, Swift ended where King began his March 31 oration, with the book of Revelations:

This word of God is for your protection in the hour of emergency. The word of God shall see America thru. And not only is this true, but the children of America have the Faith to believe every word that comes out of the mouth of God. And they believe that it will be fulfilled. This does not eliminate you from defending your home and battling the enemy. But it gives you the capacity to know that those of your household with you will come thru this
battle. . . . And we thus understand that the world was made by the Word of God. And we also understand that the new world will also be made by the Words of your mouth. And the children—you and I—shall participate. And we shall have absolute victory.
¹⁴

The evidence strongly suggests that when the Reverend Wesley Swift assured his followers that the word of God promised them victory in the upcoming battle with the enemy, he knew about and likely endorsed a conspiracy to assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, in Memphis. In many ways, such a plot was only the final iteration of a much broader effort to murder the civil rights leader, one that persisted, through many failures, for more than a decade.