At Canaan's Edge (99 page)

While Johnson toured, Hosea Williams barnstormed the South in a twin-engine Cessna 406, whose pilots were most unsettled to see that Martin Luther King was an unnamed passenger on the charter contract fobbed off by another company. A writer for the
New York Times Magazine
probed King in transit on press themes. Had he abandoned moral issues for class struggle? Did he know black militants were scoffing at nonviolence? Landing in Jackson on February 15, they drove to the first mass meeting at the Mt. Beulah Center of Edwards, Mississippi. FBI agents and state “sovereignty” investigators followed as King detoured past an all-black junior high school where squealing students waited outside to see him. Williams and Andrew Young sometimes fanned out to separate caucuses of poor people undecided about the new campaign. The Cessna reached Birmingham Thursday night for King to salute veterans from the breakthrough freedom marches of 1963. “I'm here to solicit your support!” he cried. “I want to know if you're going to Washington.” The next morning, King told a packed house at Selma's Tabernacle Baptist what a blessing it was to be met at the tiny airport by a black deputy sheriff instead of Jim Clark's posse. He greeted Amelia Boynton, “mother” of the local voting rights movement, and Marie Foster, who still taught literacy for citizenship—also Rev. Lorenzo Harrison, who had fled the Lowndes County Klan into Brown Chapel a week before Bloody Sunday. “Believe in your heart that you are God's children,” King told the crowd. “And if you are a child of God, you aren't supposed to live in any shack.” Offstage, Rev. M. C. Cleveland discreetly presented a bill for three-year-old damages to First Baptist Church, including windows smashed by the posse and eight chairs ($36) broken by the voting rights pilgrims.

Young pulled at King to leave, and they flew over the Highway 80 march route from Selma to Montgomery. From the pulpit of Maggie Street Baptist Church, King introduced Mrs. Johnnie Carr, who headed the improvement association formed during the bus boycott, and acknowledged Rev. A. W. Wilson of Holt Street Baptist, “who pastors the church where we had our first big mass meeting,” said King, “and I see Brother Marlow and Brother James and Brother Tom…” He reviewed a dozen years from the stirring of Rosa Parks through the glory of civil rights into riot and war. “I've agonized over it, and I'm trying to save America,” he said. “And that's what you're trying to do if you will join this movement.” He exhorted the middle-class crowd to organize contributions through their churches, which added a tone of reproach to his favorite ecumenical parable from Luke. “Dives didn't go to hell because he was rich,” said King. “Dives went to hell because he passed by [the beggar] Lazarus every day but never really saw him. Dives went to hell because he allowed Lazarus to become invisible…. And I'll tell you, if America doesn't use its vast resources and wealth to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor nations, and between the rich and poor in this nation, it too is going to hell.”

He lingered briefly with deacon R. D. Nesbitt, who had hired him for Dexter Avenue Baptist in 1954. During the Cessna flight home, when the magazine writer asked on camera about the constant threats of jail and ambush, King described his two scariest memories—one from the march “through that narrow street” in Chicago as thousands of screaming people threw rocks even from the trees, when his police guards themselves ducked at once, the other from the commemorative march to the Neshoba County courthouse in Mississippi, when voices growled that the killers of the three young civil rights workers were standing close behind. “I just gave up,” said King, but his talk of surrender to death turned playful. “Well, it came time to pray,” he intoned, “and I sure did not want to close my eyes. Ralph said he prayed with his eyes open.” In Atlanta, King switched to commercial flights for hurried engagements in Detroit before preaching at Ebenezer February 18 on a theme for the poverty campaign—the familiar parable of the Good Samaritan. King confessed that fear had made him bypass needy strangers on dangerous roads in modern Atlanta, falling short of the Samaritan's example. “And until mankind rises above race and class and nations,” he told the congregation, “we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own power and instruments.” Observers noted an air of frantic melancholy about King, who rushed on to Miami Sunday night.

J. Edgar Hoover secretly notified the White House that King was hosting black preachers from major cities at Miami's “plush new Sheraton-Four Ambassadors Hotel,” courtesy of the Ford Foundation. Prompted by President Johnson, National Security Adviser Walt Rostow asked McGeorge Bundy if he realized he was sponsoring a weeklong event likely to promote attacks on Vietnam policy along with “massive civil disobedience” in Washington. By coincidence, the front page of Sunday's
New York Times
broke news of a major shift by the Ford Foundation to fund programs on race. “The first conclusion I offer is that the most deep-seated and destructive of all the causes of the Negro problem is still the prejudice of the white man,” wrote Bundy in a lofty but introspective president's report. “Prejudice is a subtle and insidious vice. It can consume those who think themselves immune to it. It can masquerade as kindness, sympathy, and even support.” The
Times
story did not mention specific initiatives such as the leadership conference in Miami, where King somberly welcomed 150 ministers on Monday, February 19. “The problem is that the rising expectations for freedom and democracy have not been met,” he said. “And interestingly enough, in a revolution when hope diminishes, the bitterness is often turned toward those who originally built up the hope.” Death threats were so specific—a bomb warning into the Miami FBI office, a sniper boast from a caller who asked the hotel for King's room number—that police security officers convinced King to miss two days of the proceedings under guard.

J
AMES
L
AWSON
declined the trip to Miami, leaving him and King mildly disappointed in each other. King had hoped the preachers gathered by the Ford Foundation would take workshops from the movement's most gifted teacher of nonviolent theory and tactics, and he still wanted to pursue with Lawson a job to rebuild the SCLC staff. Lawson, for his part, doubted from prior assignments that King really could bring himself to address battle fatigue and dissipation among his young aides, or correct the bullying of underlings by Hosea Williams. He remained a loner within SCLC's prevailing Baptist culture, whose freelance pastors lacked patience for Lawson's delicate side negotiations with the United Methodist bishop in charge of his job placement. So Lawson stayed home to monitor the sanitation strike in Memphis.

The aspiring union workers had suffered badly in public relations. Local editorials rallied behind the city government against the effrontery of the strikers and the health hazard of garbage piles on the streets. News broadcasts made permanent replacement collectors seem swift and inevitable: “The city hired 47 new sanitation workers today, turned down an estimated 30 other applicants, and is expecting ‘many, many more' to apply tomorrow.” Bumper stickers appeared on Memphis cars—“CIAMPA GO HOME”—after AFSCME's site representative spoke sharply in televised negotiations. (“Oh, put your halo in your pocket and let's get realistic!” he told Mayor Loeb.) Union officials made an emergency decision that the gruff son of a Pennsylvania coal miner was culturally unsuited to a Southern campaign, and Jerry Wurf, AFSCME's international president, assumed command in the strike's second week. Mayor Loeb promptly escorted Wurf to the annual Memphis banquet for the National Conference of Christians and Jews, where Loeb drew thunderous ovations above barely polite reception for the union executive. To Wurf, Loeb's intended lesson was to demonstrate that he had no exploitable weakness among prominent citizens as a converted Jew, recently confirmed into the Episcopal Church, and that Wurf of New York could expect little rebound sympathy from fellow Jews in Memphis. At six feet five inches, Loeb stood a head taller than Wurf. A graduate of elite schools—Andover Academy and Brown University—Loeb had commanded a PT boat in the Navy, then inherited a chain of businesses from a father he said would turn over in his grave if he recognized a union. When Wurf asked in private what made sanitation workers different from bus drivers, teachers, and police officers with local unions, Loeb vowed to protect his workers from outside exploitation. When Wurf offered to donate the first year's dues to Loeb's favorite charity, the mayor replied that the strike was illegal and defeated already. He would discuss issues only after the men went back to work.

Lawson met Wurf at the first public forum, on Thursday, February 22. Prodded by intermediaries from all sides, City Council members sought a face-saving compromise between Loeb's demand for surrender and the union's package of reforms, but their hearing stalled over recognition to speak. One by one, striking workers deferred to union officials, each of whom was gaveled to silence. “We insist on hearing from the men themselves!” said the chairman, and the standoff grew raucous until the union side pretended to capitulate. From their daily rally at the United Rubber Workers Hall, more than seven hundred strikers soon entered the ornate council chamber of rosewood panel and scarlet carpet. They shouted assent when leaders asked if they wanted the union. From the floor, Lawson and other local preachers sparred with council members about whether they could hear the men now. “I have to walk both sides of the street,” declared the exasperated committee chairman, Fred Davis, one of three black members on the City Council of thirteen, hinting plaintively that he must lean far toward Mayor Loeb's requirements to get votes for any resolution. Davis tried vainly to thin the crowd by half to meet fire codes, then to adjourn the deadlocked hearing, but the strikers broke defiantly into the movement song: “We shall not be moved!” They sang “God Bless America,” and preachers interspersed prayers with impromptu sermons all afternoon in what became a mass meeting of occupation. A white man from the Tennessee Council on Human Relations sent out for a hundred loaves of bread and thirty pounds of bologna. Rev. Ezekiel Bell, the only black pastor in the Memphis Presbytery, called his church kitchen for mustard and utensils. Eight women used the city attorney's table to make sandwiches they wrapped ceremoniously in paper napkins for dispersal by hand. “We cast our bread upon the water!” called out William Lucy, a black deputy to Wurf.

Some 150 officers surrounded the muffled noise of City Hall in police cruisers, waiting for orders as messengers shuttled between caucuses and the Davis committee, which remained besieged on the council platform. Ten days into the strike, only twenty of two hundred sanitation trucks were in service. Replacement workers were proving difficult to find or keep, despite the city's influx of sharecroppers displaced by the nearly total mechanization of cotton farms. Boy Scout troops spearheaded civic drives of curbside cooperation to help the overmatched replacement crews, but they stopped short of removing trash themselves. With backlogged piles in front of some downtown businesses, voices at the Memphis Country Club were muttering that public unions were a minor cost of business, and the embattled Public Works Committee resolved to propose its bare-bones settlement without a hearing. Chairman Davis completed less than two sentences of the announcement at 5:38
P.M.

“The men were on their feet cheering,” wrote Memphis historian Joan Beifuss. “Jubilantly they thronged the aisles.” Leaders handed out chunks of leftover food as mementos, and cleanup crews busily swept up crumbs behind a happy departure. On Friday, overflow crowds forced a shift into Ellis Auditorium for a vote by the full City Council, and more than a thousand sanitation workers arrived in their best clothes—suits and baseball hats, starched shirts and fedoras, Sunday shoes and tan raincoats. Dignitaries and curious newcomers came, too, but the prospects for a settlement had chilled overnight. The front page of the
Memphis Commercial Appeal
emblazoned incendiary headlines: “Committee Surrenders but Loeb Holds Firm/ Strike Boosters Hold Picnic in Chambers of City Council.” Stories described the event “as if it were a raid by barbaric Visigoths,” a critic would write. The editorial cartoon presented a fat Sambo caricature of T. O. Jones perched on a garbage can labeled “City Hall Sit-In,” with fumes curling upward to spell a message: “Threat of Anarchy.”

Council members entered long enough to pass a resolution delegating “sole authority” in sanitation matters to Mayor Loeb, then filed out by a rear exit under police escort. They left a stunned silence behind, followed by puzzled questions and scattered boos. Wurf came forward with groping explanations that the promised settlement vote must have been aborted, but the public address system went dead before he or local leaders could respond. In confusion, James Lawson noticed white councilman Jerred Blanchard peek back into the auditorium. “Jerry,” he pleaded, “could you give us a microphone?” Blanchard had voted for the substitute resolution, angry over yesterday's abuse of Fred Davis, but he regretted skulking out the back door. From a law student's memory of one courtroom argument in the 1940s by the legendary NAACP attorney Charles Houston, Blanchard retained a stab of conscience about the attitudes toward nearly half the city population. Now he rushed off to say the public address system should be restored, if only to prevent pandemonium. (For such gestures, Blanchard said, he became known as the council's “fourth nigger.”) Loeb refused on the ground that the sanitation workers should leave, not talk. A white lawyer bolted in to warn that it was going too far for police units to attack the workers in retreat. When Loeb denied any such plan, the lawyer cited his own eyes—“Well, the police have their gas masks on”—and the mayor confirmed quickly by radio that masked units indeed had formed several rows deep across Main Street, linked arm-in-arm. Lawson and Jerry Wurf were imploring the police commanders to let the angry, devastated men walk together to a church.