At Canaan's Edge (82 page)

Stanley Levison flew to Atlanta with an appeal to reconsider the Vietnam thrust altogether. (“I lost,” he reported home over his wiretapped phone line, “and we'll just have to live with the consequences.”) King departed for Chicago behind schedule on March 24, leaving Young only a four-part outline of the Riverside Church address. For an orator trained in synthetic improvisation, who often conceived speeches on a last-minute briefing, the imminent deadline would have been a shock even without extra handicaps. Trusted assistants stalled the project, which obliged Young to farm out the drafting assignment to scattered volunteers, including professors Vincent Harding of Spelman and John Maguire of Wesleyan. King tried to relay comments from the maw of a floundering movement in Chicago, where he apologized for his three-month absence at a rally packed into Liberty Baptist Church. A press conference followed with volleys of skeptical questions about the stalled summit agreement, a “miserably failed” registration drive, the chance of riots, and Mayor Daley's public charges that King's return was a “politically inspired” trespass into the mayoral campaign. “I have made it clear over and over again that the issue in Chicago is injustice,” King replied. “It was injustice before Mayor Daley was elected. If he is re-elected, it will be injustice then.” He punctuated a blur of private councils with a March 25 speech at the Chicago Theological Seminary, praising standout progress in the drive to integrate the workforces of all-white companies under Jesse Jackson, the precocious director of SCLC's local Operation Breadbasket. At noon, King and Dr. Benjamin Spock led five thousand supporters in a Chicago Area Peace Parade from Wacker Drive along State Street through the downtown Loop. A few hecklers seized passing placards—“Draft Beer, Not Boys,” “Would Napalm Convert You to Democracy?”—and threw them in the Chicago River. At the Coliseum on South Wabash, King earned standing ovations with a reprise of his Beverly Hills speech on Vietnam. “This war is a blasphemy against all that America stands for!” he cried.

White House officials noticed the reemergence. “He's canceled two meetings with me, and I don't understand it,” dictated President Johnson, wondering in the midst of greater war travails why his aide Louis Martin did not bring King to see him. The latest Pentagon figures of March 23 put the week's American casualties above two thousand for the first time at 2,092, with 211 killed. Famed British historian Arnold Toynbee declared victory in Vietnam an illusion “unless the American army is prepared to stay there forever.” North Vietnam released worldwide the recent exchange of secret letters in which Johnson's offer of peace talks and a bombing halt, on condition of a military freeze, met plainspoken rejection “Vietnam is thousands of miles from the United States,” wrote Ho Chi Minh. “The Vietnamese people have never done any harm to the United States…. They will never accept talks under the threat of bombs.” Worst for Johnson, General Westmoreland had just contradicted the administration's public assurance of military headway with a classified request for another 200,000 soldiers, which would raise the authorized troop ceiling to 670,000.

Levison, far from reconciled to King's plans, called Chicago after midnight with a new battery of arguments. Contributors would feel betrayed because SCLC's fund-raising letters had never solicited for protest against the war, he said, and King's civil rights currency was so weak that literary agent Joan Daves could not find even a small magazine to publish a promotional excerpt from the new book. Most harshly, Levison reported an angry aside from
Saturday Review
editor Norman Cousins that wrongheadedness on Vietnam would reduce King's reputation to mud. “I anticipated some of this,” King replied, “and it doesn't bother me at all.” He tried to mollify Levison on March 27 with a cheerful report that at least a thousand Negroes joined the Chicago march, easing fears that King would become a token leader for white ideologues. Levison vacillated between approval and despair over King's public emphasis that he was protesting out of love for America. That positive message was a weak candle, Levison feared, against a Vietnam storm darkening right over the stubborn end of segregation, causing anger in young people so intense that it “does boil down” to alienation from the entire country. “You can't be identified with that,” Levison pleaded. “I'm not just talking opportunistically. It's not sound thinking.” He declined King's urging to pursue the issue among the long-winded SCLC preachers assembling in Kentucky.

Muhammad Ali, with improbable assistance from Hosea Williams, had his hometown brewing over race and Vietnam before King reached Louisville late on March 28. In the ninth defense of his heavyweight championship, a frustrated, vengeful Ali toyed with Ernie Terrell through six rounds once the challenger stood woozy and aimless, with Ali shouting “What's my name?” over jabs, punishing the scornful denial of his right to name himself. Purple headlines detected fiendish cruelty in the ring: “Cassius Reveals His Wickedness.” Jimmy Cannon of the
New York World-Journal & Telegram
acidly concluded that “Cassius Clay had a good time beating up another Negro”; Arthur Daley of the
Times
called him “a mean and malicious man.” Ali compounded the press furor by announcing that he would defy on religious grounds his conscription order to report for Army duty in April, and King escaped the tempestuous SCLC board for two hours on March 29 to meet privately with Ali about the likely repercussions—being deprived of his boxing title and sent to prison. Chafing that the sectarian Nation of Islam forbade participation in America's “slavemaster” politics, including war protest, Ali whispered that he might disobey Elijah Muhammad and appear at the April 15 Mobilization. When they emerged, King deflected personal questions into more general controversy. “My position on the draft is very clear,” he said. “I'm against it.”

Irrepressible Ali chided the jostling reporters for getting “shook up” that such diverse black men could talk civilly, “like Kennedy and Khrushchev,” but he revealed one sharp disagreement: he had spurned SCLC's local campaign to break out of segregated neighborhoods. “Black people should seek dignity and self-respect before they seek open housing,” Ali said, and dismissed journalists with Elijah Muhammad's separatist gibe that Negroes still “lost” to self-hatred could turn mansions into slums within a day.

Offsetting Ali's scorn, the local integration drive received a boost in publicity from Hosea Williams, who with a dozen staff aides had mounted a shrewd retreat from Chicago ahead of the SCLC board meeting. Williams vowed in the midst of the demonstrations that unless Louisville broke the racial confinement into city areas called Parkland, Smoketown, and Little Africa, where black families still raised hogs and chickens, SCLC would send pickets and protest dashers into the manicured glory of the May 6 Kentucky Derby. The very thought scandalized Kentuckians, including many civil rights leaders, but it won surprise endorsement from Rev. A. D. King. “We can start by planning to disrupt the horses,” he said, “since white folks think more of horses than of Negroes.”

The younger King, who was hosting the SCLC board sessions at his Zion Baptist Church, carefully picked another moment to extricate his brother for a scripted personal word with Georgia Davis, the candidate soon to be elected Kentucky's only black state senator. “Martin has been thinking about you since you last met,” he told her. “After the meeting tonight, ride with me to the Rodeway Inn and meet him there.”

The stark proposition froze Davis. The elder King studied her and said only, “Yes, I'd like for you to come,” before hurrying on. Davis, who had been on the charter flight that picked up King in Atlanta for the final leg of the Selma march, contemplated her choice with starstruck savvy about the terms of discretion available to black females. Toward midnight, she cringed inwardly as A. D. King vouched for her past a posted police guard she knew by name, and King soon arrived with apologies for the precautionary approach through his brother. “I had no choice,” he said with a sigh, beginning a furtive, occasional affair.

The next day, March 30, some SCLC board members accused King of trying to impose his Vietnam resolution like a bishop. “This is no Methodist Church!” shouted Rev. Roland Smith, proclaiming himself a staunch supporter of his government's anti-Communist crusade. Parliamentarians stalled with quibbles about the composition and voting status of the fifty-seven-member board. Someone complained that lunch was getting cold. Hosea Williams would recall that Daddy King himself helped vote down a resolution that approved SCLC resistance to the war, but a weaker version passed amid calls not to embarrass SCLC's president. King, breaking away for an interview with
New York Times
correspondent John Herbers, confirmed plans to give “a major policy paper” about Vietnam the next Tuesday at Riverside Church.

On April 2, when his interview appeared on the front page of the Sunday
Times,
King preached at Ebenezer while cobbling together speech changes past the deadline crunch. Andrew Young telephoned revisions for three sections submitted from Atlanta, but Al Lowenstein delivered his negotiated draft of a fourth part straight to CALCAV headquarters in New York. Richard Fernandez rushed assembled copies to Rabbi Heschel and Union Seminary president John Bennett, who had agreed to close the eight o'clock Riverside program with commentary on King's speech. A third responder, historian Henry Steele Commager, received his copy on arrival from Cambridge, England. By Tuesday morning, promotional releases drew a full turnout for King's preview reception at New York's Overseas Press Club, where publicist Fred Sontag distributed embargoed speeches and promised “live and remote pickups” for broadcasts.

While busloads of CALCAV supporters converged from Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and other neighboring states, advisers in King's suite at the Americana Hotel fretted all afternoon over their paradoxical success. Their intended buffer of a seminary lecture loomed instead with consequence, and the rumbling signs of a big political event magnified sudden alarm over the neglected speech. Levison and Harry Wachtel, who seldom agreed on political language or style, huddled in the bedroom to draft an emergency substitute for dissent they found too personal and raw. Realizing that noticeable deviation from the press text would be criticized, they collaborated in a futile effort to compress King's Vietnam stance into a poetic but impregnable new introduction. King used the same charged moments to absorb by remarkable shorthand memory an orator's rhythm for words he already found comfortable. He discarded the preface as they rushed uptown to Riverside Church, where a processional march of one hundred clergy gathered in the narthex. All 2,700 pew spaces and 1,200 portable seats were filled, and an overflow line stretched toward 120th Street as in the halcyon 1930s when King's idol Harry Emerson Fosdick first preached at the Gothic cathedral financed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Wachtel squeezed into a VIP room in the Riverside library, but acute foreboding sent Levison straight home to bed.

A
STANDING
ovation died down to cavernous tension before King imposed deeper quiet with a meditation on hesitant voices. “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice,” he said. Paying tribute to the first line of Robert McAfee Brown's CALCAV statement on Vietnam—“A time comes when silence is betrayal”—King confessed that the emotional vortex of war left doubters “mesmerized by uncertainty” and had made his pulpit “a vocation of agony” for the previous two years “as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart.” He still felt the forceful admonishment to leave Vietnam policy alone, King allowed, but it left him “nevertheless greatly saddened” that so many people considered the topic a senseless and disconnected shift from civil rights. That presumption fitted those who “have not really known me” or understood the movement, he lamented. “Indeed,” said King, “their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.”

He undertook to explain “why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church…leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.” Seven reasons began with two lesser ones confined to race. Vietnam had “broken and eviscerated” the historic momentum for justice since the bus boycott, he asserted. Moreover, circumstance compelled poor black soldiers to kill and die at nearly twice their proportion for a stated purpose to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia that remained myths at home, fighting “in brutal solidarity” with white soldiers “for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools.” King derived a third theme from young rioters who had countered his pleas for nonviolence with quips that the nation itself relied on “massive doses of violence” to solve social problems. “Their questions hit home,” he intoned, “and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.”

This naked pronouncement further hushed Riverside as King moved through reasons centered in patriotism, his Nobel Prize commission, and religious imperative. Just as the movement always had adopted America's larger, defining goal of a more perfect democratic union—helping to spread concentric ripples of freedom behind rights for black people, liberating white Southerners themselves from segregation—so King argued by reverse synergy that a hardening climate of war could implode toward fearful subjugation at home. “If America's soul becomes totally poisoned,” he warned, “part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam.'” He marveled that religious leaders so readily evaded their core convictions to excuse violence. “Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them?” he asked. “What then can I say to the Vietcong, or to Castro, or to Mao, as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with them my life?” Finally, he declared for Vietnam an impetus broader than American ideals but short of religious apocalypse or perfection. “We are called upon to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls enemies,” he said. “No document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.”