At Canaan's Edge (106 page)

Levison groped for triage with four succinct points. First, acute fatigue made King's depression unduly grim. Second, King should stay positive about nonviolence and maintain that the riot came from interlopers. Third, the Washington campaign would be different because of direct training and supervision by the SCLC staff. Fourth, King should postpone an emergency conclave until Saturday in Atlanta, so he could recuperate.

King approved the delay and the evaluation, but they brought no sleep. He howled at Abernathy and Lee until nearly dawn. “Maybe we just have to admit that the day of violence is here,” said King. “And maybe we just have to give up and let violence take its course.”

“T
HE VIOLENCE
in Memphis was a godsend to the FBI,” wrote King scholar Adam Fairclough. Until then, under intense pressure from headquarters, the field offices churned out operations against King mostly aimed for harassment or sabotage. When SCLC sent out fund-raising letters to seventy thousand supporters late in March, headquarters approved a fictitious news leak to Northern newspapers that King did not need contributions because Washington churches and synagogues already had agreed to support the poverty marchers. Headquarters simultaneously authorized anonymous letters to selected black outlets in the South stating just the opposite—there was “no provision to house or feed marchers” in a Washington campaign geared for “King's personal aggrandizement.” (Director Hoover issued the usual security instructions: “Prepare the letters on commercially purchased stationery and take all necessary precautions to insure they cannot be traced to the Bureau.”) Otherwise, the schemes ran to lame propaganda. Headquarters subsidized the lecture tour of a cranky black woman from the early HUAC era, who said she had infiltrated civil rights groups for the FBI and found them subversive. Marlin Johnson, head of the Chicago FBI office, bravely cautioned against one plan to embarrass King as a hate partner of the “anti-white” Nation of Islam. The target black audience knew better, he objected, and the parallel idea to smear King as an associate of Muslim boxer Muhammad Ali might backfire, because Ali was widely considered “a black folk hero.” Nevertheless, Hoover ordered Chicago to implement the attack.

FBI headquarters seized upon the Memphis upheaval within hours. Top officials disseminated to “cooperative news sources” a blind memorandum stating that “the result of King's famous espousal of nonviolence was vandalism, looting, and riot.” The lapse from nonviolent discipline freed the FBI from inhibitions due to public respect for King's conduct, if not his message, which opened character assassination on all fronts, and by the next day, March 29, Hoover approved a second effort “to publicize hypocrisy on the part of Martin Luther King.” The document whiplashed him as cowardly and violent, servile and uppity. “Like Judas leading lambs to slaughter,” Hoover confidentially advised news contacts, “King led the marchers to violence, and when the violence broke out, King disappeared.” A gossipy addition highlighted the place of refuge. “The fine Hotel Lorraine in Memphis is owned and patronized exclusively by Negroes,” stated the propaganda sheet, but King had chosen instead “the plush Holiday Inn Motel, white owned, operated, and almost exclusively white patronized.” This petty account twisted every motive and circumstance to release torrents of FBI contempt. By April 2, Hoover formally requested permission to reinstall wiretaps at SCLC. Two days later, the Mississippi FBI office sent headquarters a two-pronged COINTELPRO proposal, first, to breed confusion and resentment on King's poverty tours by spreading false information about whether he or surrogates would appear at scheduled rallies, and second, to distribute leaflets skewering King as a fancy dresser who deserted his people. The combination would “discredit King and his aides with poor Negroes who he is seeking support from,” argued Mississippi, but the Bureau would not have time to act on the plan. At a far pole from accountable public trust, or constitutional duty, Hoover corrupted the FBI to wage political war.

At the White House, by contrast, President Johnson wrenched slowly from the grip of enemies. On Wednesday, one day after the stunning shift by the Wise Men, he asked who would get the Democratic nomination if he decided not to run for another term. One aide said Kennedy, and braced for a Johnsonian tirade against the Harvard tormentor and sniveling runt, or worse, but the President asked benignly instead, “What's wrong with Bobby?” A new President Kennedy would have a grace period with Congress to work on his major liability, Johnson observed. “He doesn't know how to deal with people on the Hill, and a lot of them don't like him, but he'll try.”

Such dispassion baffled wary aides. They had no way to guess how the storied Kennedy-Johnson animus might fare if detached from the rivalry for the White House, nor could they picture Johnson relinquishing power. Defense Secretary Clifford scowled down one whisper about possible abdication as juvenile lunacy. Still, the President received a private tabulation that Kennedy had voted with him on three-quarters of key Senate decisions, and he wrestled alone with contingent issues of political survival, honor, and Vietnam.

On Thursday morning of the ill-fated Memphis march, top foreign policy officials reviewed the presidential address for Sunday evening. Secretary Clifford roundly criticized an eighth draft presented by counselor Harry McPherson, which announced a modest troop increase with resolve. Clifford said it was all war, therefore out of step with the mood of the country, and the administration's Vietnam policy softly collapsed. Secretary of State Rusk, the war's steadiest defender, conceded without objections on precedent or authority, and National Security Adviser Rostow, the war's most unshakable optimist, gave no rebuttal. Instead, the three-hour meeting simply drifted into preparations for a unilateral bombing halt above North Vietnam's 20th parallel. The watershed was tacit—without calculations of battlefield attrition, political settlement, or personal consequence—and floated on an unspoken amazement that survived into memoirs by McPherson and Clifford. Rusk would remember suggesting that the President deserved an alternative, and McPherson delivered to the White House residence before midnight a companion draft with a new tone from its first sentence: “Tonight I want to speak to you of the prospects for peace in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.”

Johnson decried the Memphis riot in two speeches and a statement on Friday, pledging to “stand behind local law enforcement agencies to the full extent of our Constitutional authority.” He called the events a reminder that “violence and repression can only divide our people.” In the Rose Garden that morning, the President spoke to young people from the Philadelphia Police Athletic League about vital civic lessons—respect for others, the rules of fair play—and quoted Lincoln that no grievance was fit for “redress by mob law.” He broke away at ten o'clock to dictate changes by telephone for Sunday's Vietnam speech. Again, perhaps inevitably, not a word acknowledged painful and momentous choice. McPherson scribbled notes blindly until he realized Johnson was working from the peace draft.

K
ING WOKE
groggy for the aftermath. Memphis television showed littered but deserted streets patrolled by National Guard vehicles with mounted machine guns, and Hambone's cartoon meditation in the Friday morning
Commercial Appeal
offered dubious cheer: “Don' mak no diff'unce whut kin' o' face you's got, hit look mo' bettuh
smilin'!!”
At ten o'clock, Abernathy answered sharp knocks at the Rivermont suite to find three young men from the local Black Organizing Project, closely watched by an encamped white reporter. When he ducked back into King's bedroom to say strangers had come with apologies—apologies for all the rumors that they had started yesterday's riot through their affiliated youth gang called the Invaders—King asked Abernathy to receive them because he was already late for a press conference. While getting dressed, he heard introductory disputes over basic terms. Rather than a gang, insisted the Black Organizing Project leaders, the Invaders was a political awareness and fitness group for students, modeled on Elijah Muhammad's Fruit of Islam.

“We aren't saying that you caused the trouble,” Abernathy conceded. “But everybody else is saying so. If you didn't do it, who did?”

“The people,” replied one of the BOP leaders. He said local preachers had led the march into a trap by concealing the leadership struggles within the black community, and that King would fare worse next time if he blamed the Invaders. King emerged just then buttoning his shirt. He exchanged pleasant greetings that briefly stilled the room, and returned fully dressed to lament that he had not known of such friction. “Cabbage, why didn't you tell me?” he asked spokesman Charles Cabbage, “if for no other reason than you're a Morehouse man. We are brothers.” He flattered the new graduate of his alma mater partly for exceptional height—a foot taller than he—and recalled him as a campus activist who had applied for an SCLC job under Hosea Williams.

Cabbage brightened. “Dr. King, I tried to get to you to tell you, but they wouldn't let me,” he replied, adding that Lawson in particular had belittled and excluded the youth representatives on the strike council. King said this was news to him. Abernathy said he had heard from the other side that the Invaders had scattered through the pre-march crowd to make incendiary speeches before melting away on King's approach. The Invaders hotly rebutted him with professions of good faith.

Yesterday's violence was gone, King interrupted quietly, and blame mattered less than preventing another riot. Extraneously, as though puzzled, he asked why any leader would resort to violence anyway, since riots never lasted more than two or three days of destruction that fell heavily on bystanders and other black people. When he asked what the BOP leaders could do to ensure a badly needed peaceful march now, Cabbage ran down a list of transportation needs and unmet budgets for up to two thousand members from local colleges and high schools. King carefully replied that his staff would review the list to put them in touch with potential supporters, and he made only one comment. You can't hold yourself out as leaders of these young people and then hide behind random violence, he warned. You have influence—that's why you are in this room.

On their way out, the BOP trio soared with relief. “We are going to get our program going,” Cabbage confided, “because that man is good for his word.” One of his colleagues was elated but dazed, sensing that King saw through their contrivance with a strange absence of reproach. “Nobody could be as peaceful as that man,” he would recall. “It was one of the few times in my life when I wasn't actually fighting something.” King, for his part, sent Abernathy and Lee downstairs to the press conference while he composed himself, and his resilient bravado startled them a few minutes later. Without waiting for an introduction, King told assembled reporters that yesterday's violence was at least partly planned. He said greater preparation was required to safeguard peaceful protest with the sanitation strikers, but it could and should be done. “Nonviolence can be as contagious as violence,” he declared, and dismissed suggestions that failure obliged him to cancel the larger anti-poverty campaign. “We are fully determined to go to Washington,” said King. Violence permeated American society, he declared, and he could not promise a summer free of riots. “I can only guarantee that our demonstrations will not be violent.”

Back upstairs, King called Stanley Levison with thanks for encouragement on points that had sustained him through the press conference, then relapsed into fears of ruin. He said influential black critics scented his weakness over this—Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin, Adam Clayton Powell—and would reinforce the public damage. “You know, their point is, ‘Martin Luther King is dead, he's finished,'” King complained. “‘His nonviolence is nothing. No one is listening to it.' Let's face it. We do have a great public relations setback.”

“That is only if you accept their definition,” Levison replied, “and this, I think, is a profound error you are making.”

No, King insisted. The problem was widespread eagerness to see things that way. “I talked to the fellows who organized the violence business this morning in my room,” he said. “They came to me. I didn't even call for them. They came up here—they love me. They were fighting the leadership of Memphis. They were fighting Jim Lawson…. They were too sick to see that what they were doing yesterday was hurting me much more than it could hurt the local preachers. But it is out now. What do we do?” He said he was thinking of extremes such as one of Gandhi's long fasts for penance.

“Martin, I'm not just talking about this march,” Levison persisted. “I'm talking in general about what seems to me the box or the trap that you are placing nonviolence in. The other side can always find a few provocateurs to start violence no matter what you do.” King would be paralyzed unless he could “hypnotize every single Negro alive,” said Levison. “That's too much to ask.”

King, like James Lawson, said the movement was distorted by unstable myths in the press. For years, stories suggested that most American black people accepted nonviolence, when in fact only a tiny fraction practiced its severe leadership discipline. Then stories perceived a massive shift from the presumed weakness of “Negro nonviolence” to the projected virility of black power, although even tinier numbers accepted political violence. Still, King told Levison he was in no position to correct false impressions now that a riot “broke out right in the ranks of our march.” He could not go to Washington promising only one percent violence, and therefore he must seek rehabilitation in Memphis. “So I've got to do something that becomes a kind of powerful act,” he said. Until then, he would be dismissed.