At Canaan's Edge (98 page)

The evening recess for SCLC's board spared a convoy to negotiate privately with Washington's Black United Front, a pilot group just created by Stokely Carmichael after his five-month tour of Third World countries. (U.S. intelligence agencies sent the White House a digest of his strident comments from Algeria to North Vietnam; the FBI compiled an alarmist secret dossier called “SNCC/Black Power”; lawyers wrangled over his confiscated passport.) Public silence since his return in December gave Carmichael an aura of mystery like Malcolm X, magnified by the spread of black power culture. Members of King's entourage met hostile passage at the perimeter of the church summit, which one aide called “commandos occupying the place with walkie-talkies and bodyguards.” A white SCLC worker was rudely expelled along with reporters. Preachers were harassed as Uncle Toms, and Rutherford's secretary left in tears from more personal disparagement. Seconds jousted informally. Hosea Williams renewed antagonisms from the Meredith march, saying SNCC leaders had accomplished nothing with black power except to feed off King's reputation. A female SNCC veteran accused King of selling out the Selma movement when he turned around the second attempt to march beyond Pettus Bridge, which King hotly denied. He and Carmichael occupied a goodwill zone where they shrugged off the trappings of competition to reminisce about the movement. When King pitched the spring campaign, Carmichael applauded its focus on grassroots poverty but detected “serious tactical error.” By his analysis, the proposed multi-racial coalition missed a correct move toward black solidarity. Also, camp-in boldness risked trapping the poor without honorable retreat, and the underlying hope for national politics was misguided within a system he called fixed upon exploitation. After some debate, King appealed for a benevolent truce. “Well, if you are against this,” he said, “will you let us try?”

Carmichael postponed judgment while King wrestled his peers. A few SCLC board members worried that the poverty campaign would fail if perceived as an antidote to black power. Walter Fauntroy, the local SCLC representative, was himself a leader in Carmichael's Black United Front. Rev. Jefferson Rogers, who hosted the board meeting, reconciled new trends of militant thought with his lifelong devotion to the mystical theologian Howard Thurman, and King's approach seemed dated when the
Amsterdam News
of Harlem had just banished the word “Negro” for “black.” Other board members supported the Rustin position that demonstrations in Washington would only exacerbate public backlash and enrage the best civil rights President in history. The crossfire left King raw by the time Carmichael came to declare neutrality on Wednesday, February 7. The Black United Front would neither support nor oppose the Poor People's Campaign, he said, and Carmichael vowed on principle not to criticize fellow black leaders in public. This was the best outcome King's staff had hoped for, and they were nonplussed when he erupted against their satisfaction.

King berated them for agreeing glibly that Carmichael could ridicule nonviolence so long as he did not attack King. He said the priority should be to protect nonviolence—not him—with a vehemence that shook Bill Rutherford enough to seek advice. “Martin got very upset with me,” he complained over Stanley Levison's wiretapped phone line, “and started shouting and cussing me out.” Rutherford fumbled to discern what made King so unhappy. “He said to me, ‘the enemy is violence, violence begets violence,'” Rutherford told Levison, “and he went into one of these preaching things. I didn't react at all. I'm really pretty quiet.” He found the sudden fury both unnerving and peculiar, because to him the American Revolution and other wars so clearly proved good, and Levison offered comforting reasons why King was wrong. “The enemy are the forces keeping us from getting rights, and violence is one of their methods,” he explained. “So we try to develop a counterpoint to violence. But violence is not the enemy. What if they could keep everybody in servitude without using violence? Would Martin be for servitude?”

These were shadings of conviction at the heart of politics. Consensus among his bosom advisers left King isolated with his obsessive belief that nonviolence remained a force for freedom stronger than all the powers of subjugation. Late Wednesday, to a mass meeting of civil rights dignitaries at the Vermont Avenue Baptist Church, he preached against the grip of despair. “And if I can leave you with any message tonight,” said King, “I would say don't lose hope…. It may look like we can't get out of this thing now. It may appear that nonviolence has failed, and the nation will not respond to it. But don't give up yet. Wait until the next morning.” He stayed overnight to address Washington's Chamber of Commerce, arguing that the self-interest of wealthy Americans required opportunity among the poor, and fell so far behind schedule to New York that he nearly missed his national appearance on NBC's
Tonight Show.
Harry Belafonte extended the film session at Rockefeller Center to include King in a broadcast that marked sensitive transitions in media history. King mixed small talk about his family and frantic schedule with frank thoughts on martyrdom and Vietnam. Belafonte, while holding superior ratings through the week as the spotlighted black substitute for entertainment icon Johnny Carson, survived a primitive scandal elsewhere in network television. When British singer Petula Clark placed a hand on Belafonte's wrist to close a duet, representatives of the sponsoring Chrysler Corporation mounted a hushed campaign to snip her interracial touch from the finished broadcast.

King's
Tonight Show
moment coincided with a signal tragedy in Orangeburg, South Carolina. All Star Bowling Lanes, a prime recreational facility for the rural town of twenty thousand, still maintained strict segregation despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and when students from Orangeburg's two black colleges belatedly demanded service—eight years after the sit-ins of 1960—owner Harry Floyd successfully appealed for some five hundred troopers and National Guard soldiers to help police defend his property rights under state law. They repulsed would-be bowlers with some violence on February 6, then deployed two nights later to seal off the South Carolina State campus as students rallied outside behind a bonfire—some singing “We Shall Overcome,” others chanting “Your mama is a whore,” a few throwing projectiles. Loud volleys killed three students and sent twenty-seven others into the segregated emergency ward of Orangeburg Hospital, but public reaction stayed mute from the first AP bulletins that students had been hit “during a heavy exchange of gunfire.” The AP wire omitted subsequent corrections that no students fired weapons, and that nearly half the victims were shot in the back or the soles of their feet. Two reporters would write a haunted book about why the massacre story disappeared for lack of interest—or never registered—without even a mention in
Time
magazine. Quietly, Justice Department lawyers intervened to end the laggard segregation at the hospital, and they secured an order that made protest survivors the first black customers at All Star Bowling Lanes. Meanwhile, news followed a melodramatic theme of riot and retribution to South Carolina's death row, where SNCC leader Cleveland Sellers was transferred with a bullet wound in the left shoulder. The governor's spokesman pronounced him the outside agitator behind a black power insurrection in Orangeburg—“the biggest nigger in the crowd”—even though Sellers had retreated to his parents' nearby home before his federal trial, becoming a peripheral adviser in the student bowling crisis, which he found anachronistic. In March, Sellers would draw the five-year maximum sentence for draft resistance, with another year added on state conviction for unspecified criminal activity at Orangeburg. By his final release in September of 1974, he had a new family, a Harvard master's degree, and a laconic sense of recovery. “Being locked up for something I hadn't done when my first child was born was frustrating,” he recalled in a 1990 memoir.

King sent a lonely Orangeburg appeal to U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark: “We demand that you act now to bring to justice the perpetrators of the largest armed assault undertaken under color of law in recent Southern history.” He relied on private reports from college administrators who had opposed the student demonstrations, but three FBI agents hamstrung any federal investigation with false statements that they did not witness the incident personally. King moved on to recruit poverty volunteers Saturday in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he fell briefly ill from exhaustion, and summoned seventeen top staff people to Atlanta for a rare Sunday showdown on February 11, one week after his “Drum Major” sermon. He listed the blunt failures of preparation: lackadaisical staff work, negligible progress, weak recruits. He wanted a legion of hard-core poor for Washington, but saw only a few half-committed middle-class young people. “I throw this out to get us shocked enough to start doing the job,” King said, adding that he would rather cancel the April campaign than launch a halfhearted effort. Staff members vowed to do better. Bernard Lafayette raised the fallback option of delay.

In Memphis, public works director Charles Blackburn promised to review a $6.97 payroll deduction for the replacement rain gear of sanitation worker Gene Falkner, but he saw no room to bargain on the larger items, including pay raises, union recognition, safety equipment, rainy days, or health benefits. “Well, the men want an answer,” said a union steward who invited city officials along to explain their stance to the men. This gave Blackburn his first inkling that sanitation workers were assembled and waiting on a Sunday night. He saw no reason to repeat himself, nor any pressing danger, but the stewards' report touched off floor speeches about the lessons of Echol Cole and Robert Walker. “This was a strike that
we
called,” a veteran trash collector would remember. “Labor didn't call it.
We
called it.” On Monday morning, 930 of the 1,100 sanitation workers walked off the job with 214 of the 230 affiliated men in the sewer and drains division. From AFSCME headquarters in Washington, P. J. Ciampa dampened the euphoria of local leader T. O. Jones by chewing him out for basic errors: a wildcat action without a treasury or plan, begun in winter when garbage does not stink, against a mayor too new to have many enemies. Still, Ciampa flew in with union supporters by afternoon, when Mayor Loeb pronounced the strike illegal and vowed to hire replacements if necessary. “Let no one make a mistake about it,” Loeb declared. “The garbage is going to be picked up in Memphis.”

P
RESIDENT
J
OHNSON
convened his own Sunday night council in the White House residence. Like most Americans, his advisers scarcely noticed news squibs about Orangeburg or Memphis labor trouble, but the second week of Tet rattled experts no less than average citizens—perhaps more so—beneath a careful public posture of control. Officials of divergent views swayed daily to the point of vertigo inside a shifting government. Senator Robert Byrd, a staunch supporter, had alarmed the White House with forceful reasons why Tet proved everything in Vietnam was wrong. “I do not want to argue with the president,” Byrd privately told Johnson, “but I am going to stick with my convictions.” On Friday, when General Westmoreland had cabled secretly for “reinforcements at any time they can be made available,” Clark Clifford, the incoming Secretary of Defense, questioned the “strange contradiction” of sending more troops to answer an enemy offensive already pronounced a catastrophic failure. The Sunday war council puzzled over the wording of Westmoreland's cable that he would “welcome” reinforcements. How badly did he need them?

On Monday morning, February 12, after back-channel exchanges with the Pentagon, Westmoreland declared his need “desperate” and the time window small. “We are now in a new ball game,” he cabled Washington, “where we face a determined, highly disciplined enemy, fully mobilized to achieve a quick victory.” President Johnson regathered his advisers to ask what could have changed so drastically since Friday. He said the two Westmoreland cables did not seem written by the same person. Some military leaders supported Johnson's nagging worry that Tet was a diversion for the real target at Khe Sanh. Others thought the enemy was prolonging suicidal losses to cripple the “badly mauled” South Vietnamese army, which made White House advisers fret more about Americanized war. But they approved the immediate call for six new battalions, and Johnson sent his top general to assess Westmoreland's further requests in person. News of the surprise escalation paralleled the renewal of the siege at Khe Sanh. “More exploding rockets sent showers of hot fragments zinging,” said the AP dispatch. “The Americans dove for cover…. One prayed, a few cried, some were unconscious.” General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, generated more front-page headlines before leaving for Vietnam: “Wheeler Doubts Khesanh Will Need Atom Weapons.” Johnson himself sought counsel from former President Eisenhower, who urged deference to Westmoreland as the general carrying the gravest responsibility in American history. Johnson asked how that could be, given that Eisenhower once commanded ten times as many soldiers, and Eisenhower replied that World War II was different. “Westmoreland doesn't know who the enemy is,” he said, “and there is not any clearly defined front.” The President also toured military installations in that third week of the Tet offensive, when American casualties set a new weekly high of 543 killed and 2,547 wounded. He reported back to his foreign policy team that talks with departing paratroopers in North Carolina “really melted me and brought me to my knees.” He described a miserable Saturday night of insomnia aboard a Vietnam-bound troopship off California. “About three o'clock, and every hour after, I went to the door and saw this big hulk of a Marine,” said Johnson. “I kept telling him, ‘I am freezing.' He kept saying, ‘Yes, sir,' but he never moved.”