At Canaan's Edge (84 page)

A few subcommittee members ventured the next day by chartered airplane into the Mississippi Delta, where more than three-quarters of black adults had not finished elementary school. In Greenville, they visited new adult literacy classes sponsored by the federal anti-poverty agency, the Office of Economic Opportunity, under the aegis of the Roman Catholic diocese. They accompanied some parents home to the Delta Ministry's Freedom City, an encampment maintained more than a year now for refugees who had tried to occupy the old Greenville Air Base. Ida Mae Lawrence told senators she had been stripped of her midwife's license for registering to vote. Mothers said they could not afford the $2 per month charge to obtain Food Stamps. “What did you have for breakfast?” Robert Kennedy asked a boy. “Molasses.” “For supper?” “Molasses.” “For lunch?” “Don't have no lunch.” For Marian Wright, who had assumed the senators were jockeying for headlines on the hunger issue, most of the skeptical distance natural to a SNCC founder and Yale lawyer collapsed as Kennedy pushed into places she would never go herself. He sat on primitive cots and dirt floors that smelled of urine, holding nearly naked children with distended bellies and open sores. Badly shaken, he would call the day an epiphany that turned stale all prior achievements of a lifetime, but he recovered enough steely reserve to tell reporters only that he was not sure the poverty programs “have been implemented in the best way.” Republican Senator George Murphy of California said Americans who really saw Mississippi would declare a national emergency. All nine members of the subcommittee signed a letter to President Johnson reporting personal and scientific evidence of famine, and Kennedy was moved to appeal separately across the gap of their contentious personal history. “I cannot agree with you more that something must be done,” he wrote Martin Luther King. “If you have any suggestions, I would appreciate hearing from you.”

K
ING REMAINED
in California for a final bombardment of cross-country advice. Rabbi Heschel, still worried that Bevel would degrade the cause with his marching delegation of Sioux Indians billed to represent the “first victims” of genocide by the United States, sent word that it was not too late for King to pull out of the antiwar Mobilization in New York. King qualified the underlying dispute. “I don't want to be up on that stage debating Bevel,” he told Harry Wachtel, fretting that he “would have to say too much” to distinguish between Bevel's intemperate tone and his racial interpretation of Vietnam. King said he frankly agreed that future wars were likely to target nonwhite people in formerly colonized areas of the world, but he thought Stokely Carmichael's high media profile made him a much bigger tactical liability than Bevel. Andrew Young concurred. NBC News had just broadcast four minutes of the SNCC chairman exhorting black people to resist the “racist war” in Vietnam by any means necessary, he observed on a conference call, “and I know that scared the hell out of white folks.” Harry Belafonte volunteered to host a truce meeting with Carmichael and other fractious civil rights leaders. King predicted that protest numbers would determine the impact more than message—ten thousand or less would be ruinous, a hundred thousand or more would force attention. If there were few black people among them, he expected critics to say he was losing his constituency. If many, it would amplify charges that he was merging incompatible movements. These political landmines helped Stanley Levison persuade King to adjust his Riverside call for unilateral withdrawal. Levison argued that a straightforward campaign to leave Vietnam, no matter how carefully explored or mournfully presented, would make King an “easy mark” for the combined furies of war, defeat, and surrender. His revision sheltered the central message instead among public figures advocating a negotiated settlement.

King flew overnight from a speech at Stanford University to join the April 15 Mobilization in New York's Central Park. As crowds gathered through the morning, a rump group of about seventy Cornell students burned their Selective Service cards in the first large ceremony of its kind, attesting in signed pledges to resist conscription even into prison if their collective number reached five hundred, and onlookers added a hundred more cards to the tiny pyre in a Maxwell House coffee can. FBI surveillance units hovered to record evidence of the federal crime, while police commanders relayed to King intelligence reports of a sniper plot to kill him. SNCC's Ivanhoe Donaldson, repeating the haphazard precautions from Selma two years earlier, helped arrange peace marshals loosely ahead of front ranks that stepped off shortly after noon with Dave Dellinger, Belafonte, Bevel, King, Benjamin Spock, Stokely Carmichael, and student mobilization leader Linda Dannenberg among notables linked arm in arm. A street-wide swath of marchers spilled behind them steadily for four hours, turning south on Madison Avenue and east again on 47th Street into United Nations Plaza. Scattered hecklers threw red paint; a few workers pelted marchers with nails from a construction site on Lexington Avenue. The security threat made it easier for King to stay off the platform except for his own speech, which repeated much of Riverside with a tamer refrain: “Stop the bombing! Stop the bombing!” He remarked privately that the magnitude of the rally exceeded the March on Washington, then navigated a tempestuous summit at Belafonte's apartment late into the night. In the quiet afterward, the singer's assistant expressed chagrin that Carmichael “talked down” to King with measured approval for shifts toward his own “radical” peace position. Levison replied over a wiretapped line that King had calmed him on the same subject with a reminder to look beneath personality fireworks, observing that Belafonte was drawn to the intensity and flair of SNCC protest but would stick with King on the integrity of nonviolence.

Opening words fixed the tone for the next morning's live telecast of
Face the Nation:
“Dr. King, yesterday you led a demonstration here which visibly featured the carrying of Viet Cong flags, a mass burning of draft cards, and one American flag was burned…. How far should this go?” King fended off the half-hour barrage. No, he did not consider Secretary McNamara a racist. Yes, he did think racial factors excluded Adam Clayton Powell from Congress. No, he “would never call the President a fool,” and he had never promised to shun Stokely Carmichael or anyone else. Press disputes clouded the number and character of the April 15 demonstrators. The
New York Times
counted 100,000, which was 25,000 fewer than the police estimate and a fraction of King's insistence on “fully 300,000 and perhaps 400,000 people.” Andrew Young thought there were more than a million. The
Daily News
expressed relief: “CITY SURVIVES PEACE MARCH.”
Time
magazine perceived a motley host: “anarchists under black flags; Vassar girls proving that they are, too, socially conscious; boys wearing beads and old Army jackets; girls in ponchos and serapes, some with babes on their shoulders…many of them carrying posters, all of them out for a spring housecleaning of their passions.” Social critic Marya Mannes of the
Times
considered the protesters strong on courage but short on dignity. One study found that nearly half the 531 people aboard a ten-car train delegation from Cleveland were attending their first demonstration. A high school teacher from Indiana was fired for “bad judgment” when he wrote the
Bloomington Tribune
about why Korean War service compelled him to attend the rally in New York.

President Johnson chose Mobilization Day to announce that FBI director Hoover was sending him regular reports on the antiwar movement. It was a subtle but powerful signal. Johnson stopped short of bellicose language or the full war mobilization urged by hawkish advisers, because he remained worried that uncontrollable national fury could obliterate Vietnam without achieving the political goal of stable free government. Still, his timing alone generated headlines of suspicion—“F.B.I. Is Watching ‘Antiwar' Effort President Says”—that offered more than enough encouragement for Hoover to step up propaganda. The Director had just approved leaks to friendly news sources that “would cause extreme embarrassment to King,” and stories reached even the prestige newspapers. In “The Struggle to Sway King,” the
Washington Post
unearthed internal deliberations from 1965 to Riverside in considerable detail (“Ranged against Bevel and Young on that point were most of Dr. King's older advisers”), and reported the conclusion of “high Administration officials” that King had “leaped headlong into peace campaigns partly in search of money and headlines” and also because “he is just terribly naive.” On April 19, Hoover sent DeLoach to the White House with a top secret summary that collapsed the FBI's own wiretap evidence into stark falsehood about a maleable King pushed into war protest by his inner circle, telling President Johnson that he “is an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our Nation.” War hardened the FBI stereotype of King as a minstrel stooge for evil masters. In his 1995 memoir, written two decades after pained revelations had discredited the FBI's vendetta, DeLoach managed only a barbed concession that King “operated with far less discipline and far less cunning than seasoned communists,” and still blandly alleged that conspirators like Levison “aimed him and pulled his trigger with apparent ease.”

K
ING TESTED
new protest vehicles to escape the polarized rancor. On April 23, he appeared with a youth coalition at Christ Church of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to announce Vietnam Summer, modeled consciously on the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, in which students and other volunteers would knock on doors for peace. “I think the war in Vietnam has strengthened the forces of reaction in our country,” King lamented, “and has excited violence and bigotry.” On April 24, he joined veteran political activists in New York for the founding of Negotiation Now. Civil rights lawyer Joe Rauh, who had criticized King's Riverside speech for fear that its frontal attack would only elect Richard Nixon in 1968, outlined plans to gather a million signatures on peace petitions, but reporters besieged King about news leaks out of Cambridge that he planned to run for President himself. King denied the reports while fuming privately that overbearing peace intellectuals simply publicized as fact what they wanted him to do. (“I begin to see why Spock has difficulty with these people,” Levison told King.)

The next day in Washington, war critics took the Senate floor with arguments for peace negotiations on a fine line between escalation and withdrawal. “No senator is suggesting that we pull out of Vietnam,” stated the forthright dove George McGovern of South Dakota. “Not a single senator has suggested that.” Two days later, in the first address to Congress by a wartime field commander, General William Westmoreland denounced passivity in Vietnam as a formula for retreat. His report stirred ovations with praise for the soldiers. “They believe in what they are doing,” said Westmoreland. “They are determined to provide the shield of security…for the future and freedom of all Southeast Asia.” That same week, George Wallace declared that he would run for President in 1968 as the candidate of victory in Vietnam and backlash at home—not white backlash, he insisted, but “backlash against big government in this country.”

In Cleveland, where King rushed on April 25 to lay ground for a voter registration campaign, Rev. O. M. Hoover regaled a preachers' dinner with stories of the group journey to Oslo for the Nobel Prize, and colleagues leavened apprehension of riot or failure with rounds of fraternal jokes. Reporter David Halberstam preserved a punch line about an old minister wrestling with temptation to seek a new forty-year-old wife: “Lord, would two twenties be all right?” King left for a speech at Berkeley, after which a graduate student blocked his way with a grandiose but piercing request not to dismiss so easily a run for president. “You're the most important man we've got,” the student pleaded on behalf of draft resisters. “So please weigh our jail sentences in the balance when you make your decision.” The appeal flustered King, who composed himself to compliment “a moving and persuasive statement” before flying on to Minnesota and Wisconsin for various engagements. In Chicago, he announced agreement with Jewel food stores to open 512 jobs for black applicants. To mark the promotion of Jesse Jackson into Bevel's vacant post as Chicago director of SCLC, King agreed to a three-hour stopover in Greenville, South Carolina, for a program at the city auditorium after a thorough bomb search, followed by hurried professional photographs at Jackson's family home. Back in Louisville for renewed brinkmanship that spared Proud Clarion to win the Kentucky Derby, he read out loud from the proofs of
Where Do We Go from Here
and took solace in an unguarded remark to Georgia Davis, “I really am a writer.” Both King and his brother A.D. would be hit by rocks during sporadic demonstrations that overlapped the drama about the native celebrity who, accompanied by King's Chicago lawyer, Chauncey Eskridge, quietly fulfilled his public vow to refuse Army induction in Houston on April 28. The boxing world stripped Muhammad Ali of his title and license within an hour, well before indictment or trial, as the cover story in
Sports Illustrated
went from “Champ in the Jug?” to “Taps for the Champ.”

In Atlanta King ran into his neighbor Vincent Harding, the Spelman professor who had drafted most of the Riverside speech, and teased him for causing a month of ceaseless trouble. He complained of having to fight suggestions at every stop that his Vietnam stance merely echoed the vanguard buzz of Stokely Carmichael. Harding sensed Carmichael was swept up by a peculiarly American phenomenon in the mold of Malcolm X, built on the sensational illusion that violence alone measures power and that menacing language accordingly registers heroic strength rather than noise. Having devoted himself to Mennonite peace theology since his own military service in Korea, Harding still believed as a mentor that Carmichael and peers had been not only stronger through SNCC's formative era but also more “radical” in the true sense of going to root causes and solutions for injustice. King kept trying to reach SNCC veterans on precisely this point, stressing the bonds of common experience in the South. He startled Carmichael with a personal call near midnight on April 29, fairly begging him to attend church for once at Ebenezer the next morning.