Voices in Our Blood (68 page)

When Dr. King's planned second march took place, four days after his death, men built the speaker's platform inconveniently high up, so Mrs. King would be standing before the city emblem, above the doors of City Hall, when she spoke. It was meant, of course, as a rebuke to the city. But her standing there, with that background, is henceforth the only tradition Memphis has worth saving.

Yet the city keeps telling itself that “relations are good.” If that is so, why was Henry Loeb guarded by special detectives during and after the strike? (One sat in during my session with him; they stash their shotguns under his desk.) Why did some white ministers who supported the strike lose their jobs? Why are black preachers called Communists in anonymous circulars? But the daily papers will continue to blink innocently and boast on the editorial page: “Negro football and basketball players figure prominently in all-star high-school teams selected by our Sports Department.” What
more
do they want?

When dawn came, our buses had reached Georgia, the red clay, the sparse vegetation. By the time we entered Atlanta, it was hot; the funeral service had already begun at Ebenezer Church. The bus emptied its cramped, sleepy load of passengers onto a sidewalk opposite the courthouse (Lester Maddox is hiding in there behind
his
bodyguard, conducting the affairs of office on a desk propped up, symbolically, with shotguns). The garbage men who brought their good clothes have no opportunity to change. The women are especially disappointed; the trip has left everyone rumpled. Men begin to wander off. T. O. does not know what to do. He ends up staying where the bus stopped, to keep track of his flock. Some men get the union's wreath over to the church. Others walk to Morehouse College. But for most, the long ride simply puts them in the crowd that watches, at the Capitol, while celebrities march by.

It was a long ride for this; and the ride back will seem longer. The buses leave Atlanta at eight-thirty on the night of King's burial, and do not reach Memphis until six the next morning. But no one regretted the arduous trip. T. O. told me he
had
to go: “We were very concerned about Dr. King's coming to help us. I talked with the men, and we knew he would be in danger in Memphis. It was such a saddening thing. He was in Memphis for only one reason—the Public Works Department's work stoppage. This is something I lay down with, something I wake up with. I know it will never wear away.”

A week after the funeral, Mayor Loeb finally caved in to massive pressures from the White House. The strike was settled, victoriously. At the announcement, T. O. blubbered without shame before the cameras. It was the culmination of long years—almost ten of them—he had poured into an apparently hopeless task, beginning back in 1959 when he was fired by the city for trying to organize the Public Works Department. After the victory I went with him to an N.A.A.C.P. meeting where he was introduced, to wild applause, by Jesse Turner, head of the local chapter: “Our city fathers tell us the union has been foisted on us by moneygrubbing outsiders. Well, here's the outsider who did it all, Carpetbagger Jones.” The applause almost brought him to tears again: “I was born in Memphis, and went to school here. I haven't been out of the state more than three days in the last ten years. Is that what they mean by an outsider?” A man got up in the audience and said, “When my wife saw you on television, she said ‘I feel sorry for that fat little man crying in public.' But I told her, ‘Don't feel sorry for him. I've seen him for years trying to get something going here, and getting nowhere.
He
just
won.
' ”

When the strike was still on, Henry Loeb, if asked anything about it, liked to whip out his wallet and produce the first telegram he got from the union's national office, listing nine demands. He would tick off what he could and couldn't do under each heading, giving them all equal weight, trying to bury in technicalities the two real issues—union recognition and dues checkoff. When I went to see him after the settlement, he brought out the tired old telegram, now spider-webbed with his arguments and distinctions. Then he searched the grievance-process agreement for one clause that says the final court of appeal is the Mayor (still built on a bluff). He assured me that, no matter how things look,
he
does not make deals. They really settled on
his
terms. But isn't there a dues checkoff? No. The
city
does not subtract union dues before pay reaches the men; their credit union does (a device the union had suggested from the outset). What about recognition of the union; wasn't that guaranteed? No, it was not. There is no contract, only a memorandum signed by the City Council. Well, is that not a binding agreement—i.e., a contract? “No, it is a
memorandum
” (see how useful it is to be an English major?)—“but we have a way of honoring our commitments.” The code. Well, then, didn't the union get a larger raise than the Mayor said it would? Not from the
city.
Until July 1, when all city employees were scheduled for a raise, the extra demands of the union will be met by a contribution of local businessmen.
Noblesse oblige—
see what we have done for our Negroes. Will the Mayor handle promised union agitation by the hospital and school employees in a new way, after the experience of the garbage strike? “No. Nothing has changed.”

Wrong again, Henry. Everything has changed. The union is here to stay, it will spread: Jesse Epps and P. J. Ciampa and T. O. Jones will see to that. The S.C.L.C. is here to stay: Jim Bevel is in charge of Project Memphis. The city is his case now, and he is on it. A coalition of local preachers that backed the strikers has made itself a permanent organization, Community on the Move for Equality; preachers like James Lawson, better educated than some Brown graduates, are convinced that the God of Justice is not dead, not even in Memphis. Most important, Memphis is now the place where Dr. King delivered one of his great speeches—those speeches that will outlive his labored essays.

The excerpt most often published from that last speech told how King had been to the mountaintop. But those who were there at the Mason Temple to hear him, the night before he died, remember another line most vividly.

He almost did not come to that meeting. He was tired; the weather was bad, he hoped not many would show up (his first march had been delayed by late spring
snows
in Tennessee); he sent Ralph Abernathy in his stead. But the same remarkable people who rode twenty hours in a bus to stand on the curb at his funeral came through storm to hear him speak on April 4. Abernathy called the Lorraine and told King he could not disappoint such a crowd. King agreed. He was on his way.

Abernathy filled in the time till he arrived with a long introduction on King's life and career. He spoke for half an hour—and set the mood for King's own reflection on the dangers he had faced. It was a long speech—almost an hour—and his followers had never heard him dwell so long on the previous assassination attempt, when a woman stabbed him near the heart. The papers quoted a doctor as saying that King would have died if he had sneezed. “If I had sneezed,” he said, he would not have been in Birmingham for the marches. “If I had sneezed—” (“Tell it!” He was calling the roll now, talking “and a half,” tolling the old cadences.) He could never, had he sneezed, have gone to Selma; to Washington for the great March of 1963; to Oslo. Or to Memphis.

For the trip to Memphis was an important one. He did not so much climb to the mountaintop there as go back down into the valley of his birth. Some instinct made him return to the South, breathing in strength for his assault on Washington, which he called the very last hope for nonviolence. He was learning, relearning, what had made him great—learning what motels to stay at; what style to use; what were his roots. He was learning, from that first disastrous march, that he could not come in and touch a place with one day's fervor; that he had to
work with
a community to make it respond nonviolently as Montgomery had, and Birmingham, and Selma.

It is ironic that the trouble on that first march broke out on Beale Street, where another man learned what his roots were. W. C. Handy did not come from Memphis, like Bessie Smith; he did not grow up singing the blues. He learned to play the trumpet in Alabama from a traveling bandmaster, a real Professor Harold Hill. Then he went North, to tootle transcribed Beethoven on “classical cornet” afternoons in Chicago. It was only when he came back South, and saw that the native songs
worked
better with audiences, that he began to write down some of those songs and get them published.

King, after largely ineffectual days in Chicago, returned to Memphis, the deracinated Negro coming home. Home to die. His very oratory regained majesty as he moved South. He had to find out all over what his own movement was about—as Marc Connelly's “Lawd” learns from his own creation: “Dey cain't lick you, kin dey Hezdrel?” Bevel said the leader was not Martin King. That was true, too, in several ways. In one sense, Rosa Parks was the true leader. And T. O. Jones. All the unlickable Hezdrels. King did not sing the civil-rights blues from his youth. Like Handy, he got them published. He knew what
worked—
and despite all the charges of the militants, no other leader had his record of success. He was a leader who, when he looked around, had armies behind him.

This does not mean he was not authentic as a leader. On the contrary. His genius lay in his ability to articulate what Rosa Parks and T. O. feel. Mailer asks whether he was great or was hamboning; but King's unique note was precisely his
ham
greatness. That is why men ask, now, whether
his
kind of greatness is obsolete. Even in his short life, King seemed to have outlived his era. He went North again—not to school this time, but to carry his movement out of Baptist-preacher territory—and he failed. The civil-rights movement, when it left the South, turned to militancy and urban riots. Men don't sing the old songs in a new land.

Yet it may be too soon to say that the South's contribution has been made. After all, the first two riots in 1968 were in South Carolina and Tennessee. The garbage strike opens a whole new possibility of labor-racial coalition in those jobs consigned exclusively to Negroes throughout the South. And, more important, the Northern Negro, who has always had a love-hate memory for the South, begins to yearn for his old identity. The name for it is “soul.”

The militant activists insist on tradition (Africa) and religion (Muslimism, black Messianism, etc.) and community (the brothers). Like the young King, many Negroes feel the old Baptist preachers were not dignified. Better exotic headdress and long gowns from Africa than the frock coat of “De Lawd.” But the gowns and headgear
are
exotic—foreign things that men wear stiffly, a public facade. There are more familiar Negro traditions and religion and community. Black graduate students have earned the right to go back to hominy and chitlins and mock anyone who laughs. The growth of “soul” is a spiritual return to the South—but a return with new weapons of dignity and resistance. Religion, the family, the past can be reclaimed now without their demeaning overtones. In this respect, the modern Negro is simply repeating, two decades later, King's brilliant maneuver of escape and reentry. He got the best of both worlds—the dignity that could only be won “outside,” and the more familiar things which that dignity can transform. King was there before them all.

He remained, always, the one convincing preacher. Other civil-rights pioneers were mostly lawyers, teachers, authors. They learned the white man's language almost too well. King learned it, too; but it was always stiff. He belonged in the pulpit, not at the lectern. Bayard Rustin, with his high dry professional voice and trilled r's, cannot wear the S.C.L.C.'s marching coveralls with any credibility. The same is true, in varying measure, of most first-generation “respectable” leaders. Some of them would clearly get indigestion from the thinnest possible slice of watermelon, Adam Powell, of course, can ham it with the best; but his is a raffish rogue-charm, distinguished by its whiff of mischief. King, by contrast, was an Uncle Ben with a degree, a Bill Bailey who came home—and turned the home upside down. That is why he infuriated Southerners more than all the Stokelys and Raps put together. In him, they saw
their
niggers turning a calm new face of power on them.

King had the self-contained dignity of the South without its passivity. His day is not past. It is just coming. He was on his way, when he died, to a feast of “soul food”—a current fad in Negro circles. But King was there before them. He had always loved what his biographer calls, rather nervously, “ethnic delicacies.” He never lost his “soul.” He was never ashamed. His career said many things. That the South cannot be counted out of the struggle yet. That the Negro does not have to go elsewhere to find an identity—he can make his stand on American soil. That even the Baptist preacher's God need not yield, yet, to Allah. God is not dead—though “De Lawd” has died. One of His prophets died.

IV

Twilight

B
y 1968, the “White Only” signs were down, blacks were winning elections, and the battle shifted from fighting segregation to trickier terrain. “Affirmative action” entered the language; the country began to realize that the problem of poverty was more intractable than Jim Crow. King's next great crusade was to have been the Poor People's Campaign, in Washington: a massive demonstration on behalf of economic justice. Pat Watters (1927–1999) journeyed to the Mall after King's assassination. Watters had been a newspaper reporter in the South, but the force of the movement drove him from the ranks of the objective to the staff of the Southern Regional Council, a progressive organization based in Atlanta. His clear-eyed assessment of what he found in Resurrection City (the Poor People's Campaign's main camp in the center of the capital) evokes the profound disappointment of life after King.

As the seventies began, Peter Goldman (1933– ), a
Newsweek
senior editor, summed up a decade of the magazine's groundbreaking coverage of race with a book entitled
Report from Black America
. Beginning in 1963,
Newsweek
launched the first extensive survey of African-American opinion and had, in 1967, published a landmark editorial, “The Negro in America: What Must Be Done.” Goldman's book drew on
Newsweek's
research and reporting; the chapter excerpted here is “ ‘We in a War—Or Haven't Anybody Told You That?' ”

One day in 1970, Tom Wolfe (1931– ), then writing for
New York
magazine, happened to be visiting
Harper's
. Wandering into David Halberstam's office, Wolfe saw an invitation to an event at the conductor Leonard Bernstein's Manhattan apartment in honor of the Black Panthers. Wolfe, who was then thinking of writing a novel about New York society on the scale of Thackeray's
Vanity Fair
, thought the spectacle at the Bernsteins' might make a good chapter. He copied down the reply number on the card and called it. “I'm Tom Wolfe with
New York
magazine and I accept,” he said—and the ploy worked. When Wolfe arrived at the appointed hour, there was a cardboard table outside the apartment and his name was on the list. By the time the evening ended, Wolfe knew he couldn't hold back what he had seen for a novel. The result: “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's,” a brilliant portrait of the liberal elite's fascination with the Black Panthers.

Alice Walker (1944– ) describes her reasons, a decade after the March on Washington, for building a life in the South. In his book
The Rage of a Privileged Class
, Ellis Cose (1951– ) put his finger on an important new phenomenon: that many of the outward trappings of progress and success merely masked inward fury and frustration for professional blacks in the 1980s and 1990s. In the summer of 1985, Cose was running the Institute on Journalism Education, and one of the programs was a training session for middle managers. Fifty percent were people of color, so Cose decided to host an evening seminar on whether management was different for them than for whites. “It was a fascinating night,” Cose recalls, “and soon the participants, particularly the blacks, were finishing each other's sentences. That's where the seed was planted.”

Calvin Trillin (1935– ) had covered the South in the Atlanta bureau of
Time
from 1960 to 1961, but soon left the newsmagazine for
The New Yorker
. There, his first piece was “An Education in Georgia,” an epic 1963 account of the struggle of Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes to integrate the University of Georgia. In the 1995 article collected here, Trillin takes readers inside the files of Mississippi's Sovereignty Commission, an arm of the state government that spied on its own citizens at the height of the movement.

Finally, in a Pulitzer Prize–winning essay, Howell Raines (1943– ) remembers his family's complex relationship with its housekeeper. “I had wanted to find Grady for years but had lost track of her,” Raines says. “Then I was visiting Birmingham one day and my sister had run into a relative of Grady's and had gotten her telephone number. So I called her, and we got back together.” The reunion shed light on the ambiguities that long characterized relations between the races in the South.