At Canaan's Edge (92 page)

On Friday, a day ahead of the Mobilization protests, William Sloane Coffin joined Dr. Spock and nine anxious peace counselors at the Justice Department. They presented statements of their complicity in breaches of the Selective Service Act, along with a briefcase containing 994 draft cards surrendered in ceremonies nationwide—all those from Boston plus 298 from California Resistance, forty-five from Chicago Resistance, and so on. “Dr. Coffin, am I being tendered something?” John McDonough asked blankly. The assistant deputy attorney general recoiled each time the Yale chaplain handed him the briefcase. Coffin tried to make light of the macabre standoff in their attempted surrender for multiple felonies, but Arthur Waskow, who had prepared himself for a life-changing arrest, exclaimed archly that McDonough was abusing his childhood respect for the law. “And you, sir, refuse the evidence?” he cried. “Where, man, is your oath of office?” The counselors left the briefcase untouched.

While demonstrators poured into Washington, the
Meridian Star
perceived a new curse attached to “the Friday after Friday the 13th.” In the first civil rights convictions ever rendered by and against white Mississippians, jurors that morning reached guilty verdicts on seven of eighteen Klansmen, including Deputy Price and Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers. John Doar gave thanks and soon retired from eight arduous years in the Justice Department. King, heading for a Chicago concert with Belafonte, was “pleasantly surprised” by what he called “a first step in a thousand-mile journey.”

Defiantly, the White Knights had intensified terror attacks in the face of the criminal charges. Just before the trial, they destroyed Temple Beth Israel in Jackson and the home of a Tougaloo College dean; afterward, they bombed the homes of a black minister, a rabbi, and a Polish family mistakenly believed to be Jewish. While free pending sentence, Bowers himself turned up once in action when a traffic constable stumbled on him with a .45-caliber submachine gun and a young passenger who later confessed a dozen Klan bombings. Bowers served six years under the weak federal statute that protected the exercise of civil rights, then resumed on parole in 1976 a professed calling as “preacher of Jesus the Galilean.” (His Christian Identity sect held that Jesus was not a Jew but the incarnation of “lost” Aryan tribes.) It would be another twenty-two years before local officials tried and convicted him under state law for ordering the 1966 firebomb murder of Vernon Dahmer. And not until 2005 would the climate and conscience of Mississippi produce the first landmark of local jurisprudence in Neshoba County, with a jury verdict against seventy-nine-year-old Edgar Ray Killen for the three murders more than four decades earlier.

In Washington, during Saturday's speeches at the Lincoln Memorial, reporters observed a “sprinkling of Negroes” reach informal consensus not to join the ensuing confrontation. “We don't want to play Indian outside the white man's fort,” John Lewis informed Mobilization leader David Dellinger, who led nearly fifty thousand remaining marchers across the Potomac to besiege the Pentagon with vigils, skirmishes, and bonfires for thirty-three hours. Demonstrators dropped flowers into the gun barrels of blockading soldiers, and fierce or stealthy forays sometimes breached one of the Pentagon entrances. Abbie Hoffman's hippie troupe failed to “exorcise” the gargantuan building by levitation, as merrily advertised, but they did urinate along its outer walls. Protest factions, though suffering volleys of tear gas and countercharges by club-wielding U.S. marshals, drew attention to themselves rather than government policy in Vietnam. Norman Mailer declared a new literary species for his quick book about the spirited joust, subtitled “History As a Novel, the Novel as History.” Mailer was one of nearly seven hundred arrested, but none of the two hundred Wisconsin students was among them. Freshly traumatized by the bloody shock on their campus, many scorned the constraining faith of “liberals” that they could and should stop the war without violent systemic change, yet could not quite attack “enemy” soldiers so close across the lines. Some shared a premonition with
Times
columnist James Reston that obscene chants and banners vilifying President Johnson—“LBJ the Butcher”—would backfire “almost enough to retrieve his declining fortunes at the polls.” At home in Madison, opposing students flocked to job interviews with Dow Chemical.

A
LMOST UNNOTICED,
King slipped into the aftershock of the Pentagon siege on Monday, October 23. His testimony before the Kerner Commission remained confidential, but it groped for anti-poverty tactics of “escalating nonviolence” somewhere between timid supplication and destructive riots. “Well,” he told reporters outside, “I think that the time has come, if we can't get anything done otherwise, to camp right here in Washington just as they did with the Bonus March—just camp here and stay here by the thousands and thousands.” These remarks, which the
Washington Post
called an “appeal to anarchy,” earned no better public reception than his Washington concert with Belafonte and Aretha Franklin. During final stops that week in Philadelphia and Boston, secretary Dora McDonald asked Levison to console King through a worrisome despondence over the paltry crowds, and lawyer Chauncey Eskridge warned that the entire series “will be lucky to break even.” In Boston, King discovered Bernard Lafayette in the process of taking another job because of SCLC's paperwork delays. “I thought you were coming to Atlanta,” he pleaded, pausing to repair one of several logistical tangles. Helpers feverishly solicited a donated private plane to meet King in rural Iowa so he could honor a promise to address Sunday's fall convocation at tiny Grinnell College, where his mentor Benjamin Mays received an honorary degree, without flouting, hedging, or seeking even routine delay of the final court orders to surrender for jail on Monday.

He rushed home long enough to change into dungarees and return with three fellow defendants for an airport ceremony, on legal advice that they would become muted prisoners the moment they landed on Alabama soil. King told Atlanta reporters the sentence was “a small price to pay for the historic achievement” initiated in 1963 when “thousands of Negro citizens, facing dogs, fire hoses, mass arrests, and other outrages against human dignity, bore dramatic witness to the evils which pervaded in the most segregated city in our nation.” At the same time, he cited the four dissenting Supreme Court Justices to excoriate the majority decision as churlish, vindictive, and dangerous. It was worse than jailing Boston patriots retroactively for dumping tea from Britain, because no theft or vandalism was at issue from the freedom marches. “As we leave for a Birmingham jail today,” said King, “we call out to America: ‘Take heed. Do not allow the Bill of Rights to become a prisoner of war.'” Armed Alabama deputies, who boarded the departing flight with King's party, asserted control on arrival to wave wide-eyed regular passengers out of the airplane through a double line of officers forming in the rain. A hundred movement supporters waited in the Birmingham terminal to greet the four prisoners, only to watch them hauled off by police cars that darted onto the runway. Photographers captured King carrying three books to jail under his arm: the Bible, an economics text, and
The Confessions of Nat Turner.
A rare, two-part review in the
New York Times
had just praised William Styron's historical novel for bringing “coherent voice to a catastrophe we hardly knew had happened,” but black critics faulted the author for projecting too glibly a writer's hold on inner thoughts from the bloody 1831 slave rebellion. “I absorbed by osmosis,” Styron maintained, “a knowledge of what it is to be a Negro.”

Alarm radiated from an empty Birmingham jail Monday night, attracting an agitated crowd of five hundred until Sheriff Melvin Bailey acknowledged that he had diverted King to a facility eighteen miles away. No visitors were permitted there, but Tuesday's vigil outside a county jail in Bessemer featured a man praying as if possessed through a downpour, and by Wednesday the four prisoners were transferred secretly back downtown. With a smuggled camera, cellmate Wyatt Walker took a photograph of King staring through the bars. King complained of flu, and did not fulfill a notion to write a sequel for his Letter from Birmingham Jail. He made only tactical notes—including one for Harry Wachtel to reconvene at Union Seminary the fractious talks comparing Vietnam with the Six Day War in the Middle East—and he sketched a proposed “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged.” His model was the 1944 GI Bill of Rights, and to a lesser degree the Bonus Act of 1936. The latter had passed over President Franklin Roosevelt's veto, reversing more than three years of sporadic government action to rout impoverished World War I veterans encamped in Washington. The GI Bill, which FDR passively and unhappily approved, helped transform the American economy with the offer of college tuition grants for 11 million World War II veterans. In jail, King began an opinion piece for the
New York Times,
arguing by analogy that the nation must take another leap of faith toward redress and opportunity.

Otherwise he sifted prison gossip about Birmingham authorities who, while interpreting the Supreme Court victory to mean that Negroes themselves were to blame for the lingering stigma of dogs and fire hoses, suffered with protesters actually in custody again. Deputies fretted over a prediction by one fortune-teller that buildings would be leveled after King's assassination on their watch. When a local judge obligingly cut short the sentence, a spontaneous Friday night mass meeting celebrated the freed prisoners at Tabernacle Baptist. “This looks like '63!” Rev. Ed Gardner shouted above the music. King's brother A.D. told cellblock stories. Abernathy roasted his lawyers for letting preachers go to jail, joking that he was “off the hook” on a reciprocal pledge to keep the lawyers out of hell. He claimed prison converts for the movement and regaled the crowd with his hardship pitch to white jailers: “Think what we live on—white potatoes, neck bones, pig feet, and hog snoots!” Abernathy's yarns coaxed mirth from King, who covered his mouth behind the pulpit and agreed to speak briefly despite the flu. “Our movement isn't over,” he said. “Some of us are going to have to pack our little [jail] bags and make our way to Washington.”

King returned to Cleveland for the off-year elections. A dozen SCLC staff members had been deployed there since the summer, when King himself averaged roughly two days per week dashing through registration rallies. On election night, November 7, candidate Carl Stokes left King and Abernathy in a hotel suite with a promise to summon them downstairs if he should become the first black mayor of a major city, the nation's seventh largest. They watched late returns gain what reporters called a narrow wonder—“Stokes, the great-grandson of a slave, defeated Seth Taft, the grandson of the 27th President of the United States”—but King slowly deflated when no signal came for him to join the televised victory statements. Andrew Young interpreted the rebuff as cold politics. Having imported allies to turn out an astonishing 75 percent of the isolated black wards, Stokes avoided association with controversial figures who might offend broader support. Stung, King asked Levison to meet him for consultation in Chicago, where he spoke over Veterans Day weekend. Levison had welcomed prior success in the Cleveland primary as a boost for King's public standing, saying progress there might answer critics who “tried to pronounce you dead in Chicago,” just as Birmingham once rebutted claims that segregation had crushed him in Albany. Now Levison was obliged to shore up King's commitment to the role of prophet above politician.

In colonial Williamsburg, ending a 5,100-mile speaking tour on Vietnam, President Johnson was shown on November 12 to George Washington's front pew at the historic Bruton Parish Episcopal Church—organized 1633, completed 1715 in cruciform brick. Rev. Cotesworth Pinckney Lewis, descended from two signers of the Constitution, interrupted an orthodox sermon to address Johnson directly. “I feel presumptuous even in asking questions,” he said. “But since there is a rather general consensus that something is wrong in Vietnam…we wonder if some logical, straightforward explanation might be given without endangering whatever military or political advantages we now enjoy.” Lady Bird Johnson “turned to stone on the outside and boiled on the inside,” she recalled, as Lewis expressed his plainspoken bafflement. He said most of the world considered the American role in distant Vietnam a neocolonial blunder of “appalling” civilian casualties, triple the military toll, while brave commanders felt “inhibited” by constraints they thought prolonged the conflict. “While pledging our loyalty,” Lewis concluded, “we ask respectfully, why?” The Johnsons managed smiles as they shook hands from the postlude into a tempest. Virginia's governor called the sermon an unpardonable lapse of courtesy. Bruton's vestry rebuked its rector, who refused further comment, and members of Congress roundly denounced him for effrontery. Beneath command levels, an avalanche of citizen mail thanked Lewis for his candor, and almost 90 percent of Virginia correspondents scolded their governor for putting social deference above the stakes of war.

King departed for northern England to accept an honorary degree from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, known for Roman antiquities at the far outpost of Emperor Hadrian's stone border. He left his country stirred senseless by upheavals from silly to profound. The
New York State Journal of Medicine
released a scientific study of young people who smoked dried banana peels, finding their craze entirely a “psychologic elaboration” because the chemicals were inert. The editors of
Newsweek,
openly proclaiming an advocacy stance for the first time, published a special issue on the crisis of race—“What Must Be Done”—with stories dissecting massive barriers to keep black people poor and invisible: “The Cold Fact Is That the Negro in America Is Not Really in America.”
Newsweek
's task force recognized that the most immediate obstacle to its uphill agenda “is obviously Vietnam,” but nothing made the war an exclusive or supreme priority. Indeed, for King, the cognitive force of
Newsweek
solidified two reasons behind his instinctive preference for a poor people's campaign. Whereas Vietnam protest strongly implied a negative or limited purpose to desist from war, the poverty crusade sought constructive change grounded in civil rights exhortations for America to “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” Tactically, antiwar protests already teemed with chaotic energy, including groups intoxicated by violence themselves, but the anti-poverty field remained fallow and fertile for movement discipline. King let Stanley Levison draft arguments why black people remained the vanguard of nonviolence, and dropped any pretense of neutrality about his next passion.