Parting the Waters (40 page)

Graham, for his part, thought enough of King's purpose to invite him to deliver a prayer during the sixty-eight-night Madison Square Garden Crusade in 1957. The evangelist was acquiring a reputation among Negroes as an enlightened white fundamentalist. During the Little Rock crisis, one of Graham's Negro staff members published an article titled “No Color Line in Heaven,” in which he compiled Graham's views opposing segregationist dogma. Graham held rallies in Harlem, and his crusade committee included Gardner Taylor and Thomas Kilgore of In Friendship, two of King's closest and most influential friends. At their suggestion, Graham held three private strategy meetings with King in New York, after which he became one of the few whites to call King by his birth name, Mike. The two men shared enormous optimism over the potential of serial crusades to advance the power of evangelism through mass organization and communication. On King's side, there were even dreams about a Graham-and-King crusade that would convert racially mixed audiences first in the North, then in border states, and finally in the Deep South. These dreams foundered, however, on the question of emphasis between politics and pure religion. Kilgore and Taylor found Graham increasingly unwilling to talk about the worldly aspects of the race issue, without which the drama of interracial revivals would be lost. Furthermore, racial polarization was making it more difficult for Graham to hold interracial meetings at all. Like countless Southern moderates, he was being forced to choose, and within a year King would be writing to “Brother Graham” pleading with him not to allow segregationist politicians on the platform of the San Antonio Crusade. The two preachers tacitly agreed to confine their cooperation to privacy.

King did not retreat so easily from his plans for the National Baptist Convention. With five million members and more than twenty thousand preachers, it dwarfed the NAACP and made the hundred or so founding preachers of the SCLC seem numerically insignificant. King's goal—to turn the mammoth, unwieldy, politically inert National Baptist Convention into a reform vehicle—was a challenge to the most astute preacher politicians. He discussed it obsessively before the September 1957 convention, when J. H. Jackson had promised to step down. As many preachers suspected, however, Jackson developed second thoughts about his constitutional obligation. When the moment was ripe, a Jackson lieutenant sprang up, called for a suspension of the rules to keep him on as president, and led a great shout of acclamation. It was over more quickly than a Teamsters election. Afterward, Jackson moved steadily to consolidate power against active involvement in civil rights, growing more autocratic and more conservative. The preachers close to King, joking that Billy Graham was more likely to embrace the civil rights cause than was Jackson, drifted toward insurrection within their own church.

King pushed doggedly to concoct the formula for a new movement. On October 18, at the first executive board meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he presented to the assembled preachers detailed plans for a campaign he called the Crusade for Citizenship, a modified version of a Billy Graham crusade to be directed toward the goal of Negro registration. There would be mass meetings, evangelical appeals to the unregistered, then registration classes and support committees for those making the attempt. Acutely aware that nearly all his board members were also NAACP officials, King tried to assure everyone that Roy Wilkins approved of the crusade, but the skeptical preachers told him that, if so, the word was not getting down to the local NAACP chapters.

Almost desperate with haste, King announced plans to begin the Crusade for Citizenship simultaneously in at least ten cities by February. Quite apart from the NAACP's skepticism, such a schedule was ambitious to the point of being foolhardy at a time when the fledgling SCLC consisted of nothing more than the preachers there in the church with King. Those men behaved like a council of barons. They were given to long-winded speeches of cross-pollinated tribute, to deliberative posturing, and to a work process consisting largely of decrees, delegations, and postponements. Recognizing that the SCLC did not even have an office, King appointed a committee (which included Daddy King) to discuss the best city of location. Then, after most of those present spoke of the personal qualities they would most like to see in the SCLC's first paid staff person, King appointed a committee to select a director. After a few motions on minor housekeeping matters, the members moved to adjourn.

Five days later, King presided over the annual business meeting of his Dexter congregation. The occasion marked the third anniversary of the bold coup by which he had first centralized and commanded the proud congregation. In spite of the renown he had brought upon the church since then, he spoke in a tone of apology. Confessing that he had “fallen behind in my church responsibilities,” he reported that only a handful of new members had been added to the congregation. He spoke retrospectively for the most part, recommended no new programs, and established only two new church committees. Amid painful descriptions of “this almost unbearable schedule under which I am forced to live,” he struck a note of pathos as he thanked the congregation for its uncritical, consoling support. “When my critics, both white and Negro, sought to cut me down and lessen my influence,” he said, “you always came to me with the encouraging words: ‘We are with you to the end.'” During his report, a courier brought exciting news from the hospital: Coretta had given birth to their second child, Martin Luther King III. King announced the tidings but cut short the spontaneous celebration to resume the business meeting. A group of the church's most influential women huddled in disapproval. They believed it was unseemly for their pastor not to have gone to the hospital long before, but they could not bring themselves to interrupt. Finally, one of the women called the hospital to say that Dr. King was detained.

King's oratory indicated that he was passing through a spell of melancholy. His sermons were more poignant than usual—personal to the point of self-pity, and yet stubborn, refusing to give in. Early in December, at the Montgomery Improvement Association's second annual Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change, King reminisced about the classless spirit of unity that had strengthened the boycott, and then turned to the greatest obstacle to racial unity—the universal stigma of being branded a Negro. Whites had relied for centuries on a perversion of “Aristotle's logic,” he said. “They would say, now, all men are made in the image of God. That's the major premise. Then comes the minor premise: God, as everyone knows, is not a Negro. Then comes the conclusion: therefore, the Negro is not a man.” King dismissed the syllogism along with the “curse of Ham” argument, pointing out that Noah was drunk when he pronounced the curse, and moved on to what he called the more modern defense of segregation: that the “temporary” inferiority of Negroes was an established fact, from which followed the judgment that commingling of the races would retard the progress of whites. This argument bothered King. While he rejected the notion of justifying future segregation on the basis of its past pernicious effects upon Negroes, he called upon Negroes to improve their conduct. They may not be able to buy perfume in Paris, he said, but they could all afford a nickel bar of soap. He recited statistics on Negro crime, welfare, and illegitimacy. Oppression was no excuse for these, he declared, because “the first thing about life is that any man can be good and honest and ethical in morals, and have character.”

He followed a tirade against the flaws of the Negro underclass with an attack upon the professionals. “I have met more school teachers recently who…wouldn't know a verb if it was as big as that table,” he said. “…For a college graduate to be standing up talking about ‘you is,' there is no excuse for it! And some of these people are teaching our children, and crippling our children.” Shedding all reserve, he shouted, “I'm gonna be a Negro tonight!” and directed a vituperative tongue at his own peers. He told the audience of having attended a convention of his fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, at which it was boastfully announced that the members spent $500,000 for liquor. “A handful of Negroes,” King said acidly, “…spent more money in one week for whiskey than all of the 16 million Negroes spent that whole year for the United Negro College Fund and for the NAACP. Now that was a tragedy. That was a tragedy…. I know this is stinging…”

It was an unsettling, almost unhinged speech, in which the sharp realities that dominated his private struggles for once overwhelmed the diplomacy of his public speech. The war-torn nostalgia of the Institute itself may have dragged down his mood. Historian L. D. Reddick, King's friend and intellectual companion in Montgomery, described the week unsparingly as a “flop” that left King “distraught.” Immediately afterward, the results of his leadership recruitment drive for the Crusade for Citizenship did nothing to improve his state of mind. In carefully drafted letters pointing out that the registration drive was not in conflict with the goals of the NAACP, King invited Nobel laureate Ralph Bunche, J. H. Jackson, and other nationally prominent Negroes to lend their names to the Crusade's national advisory committee. Most of them refused. Bunche told King he did not want to cause any “misunderstanding in the public mind” about his wholehearted support for the NAACP. The Urban League's Lester Granger declined King's invitation with a transparently disingenuous remark about the need to draw the line in giving out his signature—“one more drink pushes the inebriate over the edge.” Roy Wilkins warned King that he planned his own national drive a few days before King's in February, and advised that he had just ordered the NAACP's Southern field secretaries to make voter registration the “number one activity for 1958.” Lacking a ready response to these daunting, disheartening letters, King told a secretary to write Wilkins that he would reply later. On that evasive note, he ended what a college friend called his “year of disagreement.”

 

Early in the new year, Stanley Levison and Bayard Rustin contrived to rescue the Crusade for Citizenship by implanting a very special person as an ad hoc staff commander. They arranged to meet King alone during one of his flight layovers at New York's La Guardia Airport, where they delicately proposed that he authorize them to recruit Ella Baker for the job. Baker, their partner in a working triumvirate at In Friendship, had joined the NAACP in 1940 and become something of a legend for her prowess in organizing youth chapters in the South. After resigning in 1946 as national director of branches, she had served for a time as president of the New York chapter, the first woman to hold such an office. Since then, she had patched together a meager living as a freelance civil rights consultant, on grants from the YWCA and kindred groups.

As Rustin and Levison expected, King balked at their proposition. He was not sure that a woman could be effective. He thought the SCLC board might be more comfortable with a preacher, and in any case he wanted to talk things over with his selection committee. Levison and Rustin brushed aside all such objections. This was an emergency, they said. The crusade was scheduled to open simultaneously in twenty-one Southern cities on February 12, Lincoln's Birthday, but as yet the SCLC had no central office. The plain fact was that the SCLC was muddling toward disaster. Its selection committee had been dancing a roundelay with various preacher candidates for the SCLC job, all of whom wanted to keep their pulpits at least part-time. Baker, by contrast, had no family or job encumbrances. She would cost the SCLC nothing because her living expenses could be raised in New York, and she was much more experienced in the work than anyone the SCLC could hope to find. Levison and Rustin told King that while they were not sure Baker would accept the job, he must let them try to persuade her. King finally agreed, on the condition that Baker be promised no SCLC money and only an “acting” director's title.

Leaving the airport with this limited mandate, Levison and Rustin congratulated themselves for having had the foresight to exclude Baker from the initial presentation. They knew that she would have been put off by all the elliptical talk of church protocol and by King's condescension toward professional women. Baker was sensitive on both issues. Only to close friends did she entrust the confession that long ago she had been married briefly and painfully to a preacher. Now, she said proudly, she belonged to no man. Although a faithful member of Kilgore's church in New York, Baker often expressed herself tartly about the self-preoccupation of preachers, whom she called “glory-seekers.” It was no surprise to Levison or Rustin that she resented news of being “volunteered,” without her knowledge, for an onerous task, and they were obliged to spend many hours lobbying against her misgivings.

Ella Baker flew to Atlanta sooner than she had promised and checked into the Savoy Hotel on Auburn Avenue. She began with nothing—not even a telephone or a typewriter—but by the crusade's opening day a month later she had compiled a list of events in all twenty-one places, produced and distributed literature, collected information on the various states' registration laws, and established herself as a master of stratagems for surmounting the legal obstacles to Negro registration. The events on opening day consisted essentially of church rallies, for which the SCLC's leading preachers swapped pulpits. King himself appeared in Miami, where he announced the crusade's purpose in an impassioned but unusually lean address. “We want the right to vote now,” he said. “We do not want freedom fed to us in teaspoons over another 150 years.”

The simultaneous rallies were generally enthusiastic and well attended, but by the hard measure of registration statistics they led to very little gain. A month later, the Associated Press released a story that the SCLC's crusade had produced negligible increases in Negro registration. Ella Baker, who was staying on in Atlanta, defended the program in a report citing ongoing registration drives in a dozen cities, but privately she agreed with the criticism. The SCLC ministers showed little interest in following up the great exhortations with efforts to identify, instruct, transport, and otherwise support potential registrants, she believed. One SCLC preacher went so far as to tell King that he had “packed the church” on Crusade Day himself and therefore did not need Baker's “superfluous printing.” To Baker, this complaint exemplified the worst of the pulpit mentality. She told King that he needed to work harder to set an example for the other ministers, to convince them that the great emotional events were just the beginning, not the end, of a perilous movement such as voter registration. Baker was careful not to disagree too sharply with King, but subtle sparks flew between them within weeks of her arrival in Atlanta. She had no better luck than anyone else in locating him by telephone, and King's secretary reported that Baker was “a little abrupt” after being told that he was not available to take one of her calls.