At Canaan's Edge (90 page)

From a brisk overnight trip for
Meet the Press,
King returned home for the opening SCLC banquet on August 14. Mayor Ivan Allen welcomed 1,400 guests to the ballroom of Atlanta's new Hyatt Regency Hotel. Aretha Franklin performed her hit songs “Respect” and “Baby I Love You,” which shared the top of the current music charts with the Beatles'
Sgt. Pepper
album and Scott McKenzie's rhapsody on a flowering San Francisco youth movement. Actor Sidney Poitier described his pioneer screen roles since being stranded years ago on the “colored” side of the Atlanta bus station, and proclaimed King “a new man in an old world.” Over three more days, Benjamin Spock addressed an overflow session on peace in Vietnam, and 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.
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“They even tell us that a white lie is better than a black one,” he said. Delivering the annual president's report from his own pulpit, King recalled that when a handful of black preachers had gathered there at Ebenezer to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, just after the Montgomery bus boycott, such a glamorous banquet with three hundred white participants was scarcely conceivable. Libraries, white-collar jobs, and “the fresh air of public parks” had been off-limits to black people. Even casual association between races, when not illegal, was suffused with danger. “A decade ago, not a single Negro entered the legislative chambers of the South except as a porter or chauffeur,” he said. To confront poverty and war above the stupendous legal achievements taking hold on the civil rights front, King called for renewed dedication to nonviolence. He waxed philosophical about a narrow path between anemic love and abusive power, preaching as though to himself on the trials of ministry in public service. “What 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.”

King connected these difficult ideas with inspirational oratory on freedom, but his themes lacked practical direction. Priorities scattered under the compound trauma of hardship, fatigue, riots, and foreign war. A delegate from Birmingham complained that he could not understand a word of the seminar on poverty. Former SNCC chairman John Lewis stayed up all night arguing against “the politics of alienation” with Stanley Wise and Willie Ricks, who said black militants should jettison deadweight liberals in favor of political alliances overseas. Personal disputes and alcohol plagued leaders behind the scenes. When Bayard Rustin and Kenneth Clark did not appear for their panel on the urban crisis, King filled in alone. He attacked Congress in unusually strong language for hooting down President Johnson's modest rat-control bill that aimed to reduce the 14,000 bites reported per year, mostly of children: “The tragic truth is that Congress, more than the American people, is now running wild with racism.” Of ghetto conditions, King said it was “purposeless to tell Negroes not to be enraged when they should be,” and he sketched a plan to channel grievances into organized nonviolence. “Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force,” he asserted. Demonstrations could curtail violence “if we set to the task.”

These remarks received an unfriendly reception on front pages everywhere. “Dr. King Planning Protests to ‘Dislocate' Large Cities,” headlined the August 16
New York Times.
In “Formula for Discord,” an editorial the next day said King courted disaster “in the present overheated atmosphere.” The announcement alone had damaged his cause “whether or not Dr. King goes ahead with his perilous project,” the
Times
added, because it strengthened “powerful Congressional elements already convinced that the answer to urban unrest lies in repression.” Similar reactions followed, and King's own staff confessed shock that he laid out such an undigested plan. If the goal of the Chicago movement had to be scaled back from ending slums to denting residential segregation, how could a national drive on cities lead to better results? In the wake of the SCLC convention, Stanley Levison guessed King must see opportunity in a surprisingly mild public reaction to the riots—measured by low constituent mail to Congress and a national poll showing that two-thirds of Americans still favored aggressive steps to eliminate ghettoes. Some aides thought King was laying ground to shift the venue from Northern cities back to Southern ones, or the method from protest to political action, or the issue from poverty to Vietnam. To sort through the options, King scheduled a retreat with key advisers after a Labor Day conference in Chicago.

L
EVISON URGED
King not to attend the National Conference for New Politics at all. Two years in the making, the event brought together nearly three thousand delegates from 372 political reform groups, but ethnic and ideological splits already paralyzed the sponsors. One board member resigned to protest the excesses of black power, and another proposed an internal truce committee to deal with “the ancient corruptions of populism”: white racism and anti-Semitism. Harvard instructor Martin Peretz, the NCNP's principal architect, had expelled young activists from his home for singing anti-Israeli songs about the Six Day War. Peretz wanted King to develop a Vietnam peace constituency for the 1968 presidential election, but others either manipulated King to run himself or called him an Uncle Tom. “What rubs off on you,” Levison warned, “is that you are dealing with people who do not know their politics.” King said it was too late to abandon Spock and William Sloane Coffin, especially since they supported his notion of civil disobedience in distressed cities. Hoping for the best, he gave the kickoff speech on August 31.

Bongo drummers mocked his arrival outside the Chicago Coliseum with a rhythmic chant, “Kill whitey, kill whitey,” and Ralph Abernathy confided that King hesitated to speak because of threats from delegates inside. Pre-set groups heckled King from the perimeter as he presented a new line of advocacy for Vietnam peace. He argued plainly for U.S. military withdrawal, having resolved that calls for negotiations, bombing halts, and deescalation only evaded the necessary hard decisions. To make his case, King wrestled the most compelling justification for the war—democratic solidarity with anti-Communist Vietnamese. (“I do not want to be on any ‘hate Johnson' thing,” he had insisted on a wiretapped phone line.) His restrained political stance only inflamed the confrontational moods in the Coliseum. Pickets carried banners such as “Down with Non-Violence,” and decoys distracted the crowd with shouts of “Make way for Rap Brown!” It was “awful,” King told Levision after woodenly completing the address. “The black nationalists gave me trouble. They kept interrupting me, kept yelling things at me.” A police surveillance report noted that King looked “afraid, worried and tired” as he left the Coliseum. He ducked out of Chicago early the next morning. Foreboding and clashes in the hallways made Julian Bond abandon the conference, too, even though he was its national co-chair.

Chaos reigned for the five-day conference beneath ballroom chandeliers at the Palmer House Hotel, where the Chicago housing summit had concluded the previous summer. Some three hundred black delegates withdrew to the Hyde Park Methodist Church, which they threatened to burn down until the host clergy and all white visitors departed. One speaker proposed to burn the many black churches whose pastors still refused them space. Others suggested thirteen disparate resolutions—“Condemn the imperialistic Israeli government,” and “Demand the immediate re-seating of Adam C. Powell”—that were dispatched to the Palmer House as a nonnegotiable condition for black delegates to rejoin the main conference. A tumultuous vote there to acquiesce prompted a minority lament from NCNP founder Arthur Waskow that “a thousand liberals thought they could become radicals by castrating themselves.” Next the black caucus forwarded a new ultimatum that it would stay in Hyde Park unless granted half the ballots on every formal vote—to redress the legacy of racism—and a Michigan State professor helped persuade the main body to accept the heavily weighted formula. “We are just a little tail on the end of a very powerful black panther,” he said. By then the Palmer House was a maze of caucuses and manifestos. Burly guards admitted only black delegates to Rap Brown's rambling speech: “The only difference between Lyndon Johnson and George Wallace is that one of their wives got cancer…. We should take lessons in violence from the honkies. Lee Harvey Oswald is white. This honky who killed the eight nurses is white…. You see, it's better to be born handicapped in America than to be born black.” In the ballroom, James Forman rammed through resolutions about Africa without bothering to call for the “nays.” When two women moved that half the delegates should be female, men drove them from the microphone with catcalls and wolf whistles. Charles Sherrod, then in his sixth year of SNCC fieldwork in Albany, Georgia, pleaded against posturing games: “I am here to remind you that there are still people in the South fighting to be free.” James Bevel, who later branded the delegates “masochistic fascists,” said he believed the angry men who promised to kill him if he opposed the anti-Israel resolution.

Of the nonsectarian press, only
The New York Review of Books
claimed for the NCNP deliberations a shining political discovery. “The organizers
are
‘the movement,'” wrote Andrew Kopkind. Everyone else saw fiasco and folly.
New Yorker
correspondent Renata Adler, who had been bemused at times but captivated by the long trek from Selma to Montgomery, ridiculed the self-absorption of organizers as a fantasy detachment from the citizenry at large. “Throughout the convention,” she wrote, “delegates seemed constantly to emerge, wet-lipped and trembling, from some crowded elevator, some torrent of abuse, some marathon misrepresentation of fact, some pointless totalitarian maneuver, or some terminal sophistry, to pronounce themselves ‘radicalized.'” Most participants lapsed into delusion or searing regret. “I am afraid that many of our friends are so flipped out that they think events in Chicago were just marvelous,” Martin Peretz wrote Andrew Young. NCNP executive director William Pepper went so far as to extol the convention as “the most significant gathering of Americans since the Declaration of Independence.”

To answer a volley of protest from Jewish political leaders, and at least thirty letters from rabbis, King busily disclaimed the NCNP's unbalanced resolution against Israel.
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Diminishing press coverage relieved the larger embarrassment, as mainstream reporters rapidly lost interest in the squabbling caucuses once delegates dropped any pretext of concerted action on Vietnam or their stated agenda—especially the newsworthy goal to unite behind a presidential candidate or third party for the 1968 election. Still, the unseemly disintegration of a citizens' mass movement was a blow for King. It raised the odds against both alternative new campaigns. It hardened prior resistance to his Riverside speech on Vietnam and his call for nonviolent protest in riot-torn cities. Far more openly than Mississippi Freedom Summer, it revealed the strain of fresh cross-cultural alliances besieged by old habits of race and war. “Coalitions are virtually impossible in this reactionary climate,” Andrew Young wrote the Singer heiress Anne Farnsworth, a large contributor to SCLC with her husband, Martin Peretz. Depression left him on the verge of giving up, Young added on September 6—“about three steps away from ‘the Hippy solution'”—but he recalled the Selma breakthrough and said maybe they could find another one.

K
ING'S FIRST
attempt to set a course for nonviolent struggle collided with his headstrong inner circle. On Wednesday, September 12, when SCLC's executive staff gathered at the Airlie House conference center in rural Virginia, James Bevel enjoyed a prodigal's welcome south after two years in Chicago and the peace movement, but celebrations turned into a strategic dispute. Folksinger Joan Baez favored a coordinated offensive to resist the war in Vietnam. She outlined her own preparations for pacifist demonstrations at military posts and conscription centers, protesting the coercion of young Americans to kill and be killed. In sharp contrast, the young lawyer Marian Wright maintained a priority to uplift the invisible poor. She said that whereas the antiwar movement already had legions of recruits, national attention was turning away from people like her clients in Mississippi. She proposed to transport into Washington a representative host of faces from every region and race—men who never worked, women who could not read, children who seldom ate—for educational witness until Congress provided jobs or income. Wright modeled her notion on the Bonus Army of World War I veterans, who had occupied the capital to seek relief from the Great Depression.

Hosea Williams attacked both ideas. Civil rights had stalled over black power and urban riots beyond its Southern turf, he said, while even Willie Bolden's mother complained that “Dr. King went too far” to question foreign policy in wartime. Williams favored training new voters from the last great success at Selma, and still resented the reduction of his own South-wide staff from 180 fieldworkers to roughly a dozen. Bevel eloquently rebutted Williams, as usual. He argued that peace must be the first priority for any vanguard, prophetic movement, because Vietnam was devouring the spirit and treasure for any other national purpose. Jesse Jackson, Bevel's protégé, opposed either national drive before a catalyzing local success like Birmingham. For him, a move from weakness only invited humiliation. Jackson wanted first to rebuild SCLC's movement in heartland Chicago, where he said abundant numbers could be mobilized either for peace marches or the destitute poor.