At Canaan's Edge (186 page)
Authors: Taylor Branch
Among Vietnam protesters jammed outside the White House gates in May 1967, James Bevel, Coretta King (
behind Bevel
), and pediatrician Benjamin Spock (
above Coretta King
) stand vigil to deliver a peace petition.
37
Soldiers in Detroit are deployed to suppress one of several large ghetto race riots in the summer of 1967.
38
Early in 1968, President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara reflect the strain of a government and country divided over the Vietnam War.
39
SNCC founder and NAACP counsel Marian Wright, testifying about acute hunger in Mississippi, urges King to mount a national movement to reduce poverty.
40
King labors to convince skeptical advisers Andrew Young, Stanley Levison, Clarence Jones, Cleveland Robinson, and James Bevel (
clockwise from King
) that an uphill poverty movement offers a more positive emphasis than all-out effort to stop the Vietnam War.
41
On a recruiting drive in March 1968, moved by the extreme hardship of displaced sharecroppers, King pledges to begin a poor people's pilgrimage to Washington from Marks, Mississippi.
42
A movement for the basic dignity of sanitation workers diverts King to Memphis, where supporters collect donations in symbolic garbage cans.
43
In Memphis, after violence breaks out for the first time in a march led by King, sanitation workers maintain a picket line alongside National Guard armored vehicles.
44
On April 3, determined to overcome a court injunction and restore nonviolent discipline for a renewed march, King and James Lawson (
in clerical collar
) follow Abernathy into Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel. King will be assassinated on this balcony the next day.
The barber, Frank Beck, defended segregation during the uproar over Booker T. Washington's dinner invitation from Theodore Roosevelt. By accepting, Beck was quoted to say, Washington flirted with social equality and “let the President tempt him to walk in paths untried. Goodbye, Booker!” A white newspaper defended Beck's last, lone Negro vote as a safe reward, saying he “always votes the Democratic ticket.”
New York governor Nelson Rockefeller replaced his wife of thirty-two years with campaign volunteer Margaretta “Happy” Murphy, which many believed cost him the 1964 Republican presidential nomination.
“Men hate each other because they fear each other,” King had said on September 2, 1957. “They fear each other because they don't know each other. They don't know each other because they can't communicate with each other. They can't communicate with each other because they are separated from each other.” Rosa Parks and Aubrey Williams, Lyndon Johnson's New Deal boss at the National Youth Administration, were among those present for King's speech on the meaning of segregation.
The sanctioned anthology of King's major works (1986) shifts nonviolence to the past tense, from “can transform” in the actual speech to “transformed.” It omits the first and last blocks of the delivered speech advocating nonviolence (“And so I plead with you⦔). Also omitted in the preserved version are King's entire discussion of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, his peroration on normalcy, and his recitals of “Lift Every Voice” and “The Battle of Jericho,” among other passages. Some of the errors and abridgments appeared first in excerpts compiled overnight by the
New York Times.
An FBI agent, not medical examiner Paul E. Shoffeitt, speculated that one glass nick in Liuzzo's arm “was observed as though a needle was recently used.” The toxicology report found no evidence of drugs. Hoover's other slurs were similarly baseless. Against common sense and Moton's testimony, he adopted the Klan informant's stereotype of mixed Selma marchers as a “necking party.”
William Moore, a white Baltimore postman killed on April 23; John Coley, a twenty-year-old shot while standing near Fred Shuttlesworth on September 4, after a bombing at the home of Arthur Shores; Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing on September 15; and Virgil Ware, a thirteen-year-old shot randomly from his bicycle by an Eagle Scout on the same day.
“Even if tomorrow Negroes were to become white, they would still be entrapped in their joblessness,” Rustin declared earlier in March, as founder of the new A. Philip Randolph Institute to combat poverty.
Notably, the police-arranged Klan beating of Freedom Riders on May 14, 1961. A news photograph of Rowe pummeling one victim in the Trailways bus station worried control agents, who nevertheless assured FBI headquarters that their informant engaged in no violence.
The editors of
Sports Illustrated,
having concluded from studying film of the fight that “a stunning right-handed punch” stopped Liston fairly, criticized the press for raging against the bout's perceived brutality and nonbrutality with indiscriminate zeal that “verged on the hysterical.”
Times
reporter Robert Lipsyte was embarrassed that his paper insistently referred to Ali as Cassius Clay, denying him an identity right routinely accorded the users of stage names from Lauren Bacall (Betty Perske) to the Pope.
“Fondly do we hopeâfervently do we prayâthat this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” Lincoln said toward the end of his address on March 4, 1865. “Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, âthe judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.'”