When Harlem Nearly Killed King (2 page)

During the year in which the protesters held out for the victory, King led them across a moral and philosophical watershed. Near the beginning of the boycott, the Caucasian power structure of Montgomery lost patience with a unity enabling them to organize as many as 350 automobiles for carpools. After two months of this, city officials decided to search through the municipal ordinances to find some way to rein in the protest, only to discover a 1921 statute prohibiting boycotts “without just cause or legal excuse.” At that point they convened a grand jury, which soon returned indictments against the boycott leaders, meaning, of
course, that all of them were to be arrested and stand trial (but would be released on bail). Up until then, the thinking among decent, respectable Negro citizens had been, It was one thing to stay off of buses (or anywhere else you were allowed) voluntarily, but quite another to be arrested, and possibly convicted for doing so, ending up with a criminal record. Did they really want to besmirch their reputations and possibly compromise their futures in such a manner?

King was out of town when the indictments were handed out. On his way back to Montgomery through his hometown of Atlanta, he was met by his nervous father (known as Daddy King) who was certain that this was a line his son should not cross. The elder King convened a group of friends, the most prominent Negroes in Atlanta (including the president of King’s alma mater, Morehouse College) to come by his home and help him convince King junior not to return to Montgomery. But the younger King was adamant that he be arrested with the other leaders. Upon hearing this, King senior cried like a baby.

Daddy King sensed the greater implications of what was happening, as did others. At first he predicted disaster for the boycott effort and the possible murder of his son. The entire nation watched in amazement as the determination of the city’s Negro citizens remained high. Elsewhere in the South there had been isolated protests of segregation ordinances. But such protests fizzled. None of them lasted this length of time, or featured unity and resolve in such large numbers. Among those captivated by what was taking place was Bayard Rustin, a forty-six-year-old New York City–based
itinerant activist with pacifist sensibilities. Rustin headed for Montgomery just as the boycott leaders were about to be arrested. With his Gandhian sensibilities, he was destined to become a key aide to King. The first advice he offered was that the boycott leaders not wait for police officers to come and arrest them as if they were common criminals. Rather, they should seize the moral high ground and appear at jail to give themselves up. Their proactive gesture had the effect of shocking the law enforcement officers. As word spread of what they were doing, spectators showed up to cheer them on. The tactic further backfired on the city when the indictments prompted the legal process that eventually led the Supreme Court to outlaw segregation on Montgomery buses.

While he did his best to handle the attention and demands that cascaded upon him due to the boycott’s success, King was introduced to another man who would become very important in defining the direction of future activism. Stanley Levison was a forty-four-year-old independently wealthy New York City–based socialist (his fortune due to wise real estate investments) with a passionate concern for what was taking place in the Deep South. After the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi (the fifteen-year-old who had allegedly wolf-whistled at a Caucasian woman), Levison, who was Jewish, helped launch an emergency organization called In Friendship, to raise money in the North for victims of Southern racial violence. As the Montgomery bus boycott dragged on, In Friendship also raised money to support the boycotters. Up until Rustin introduced him to King, this had been the extent of Levison’s involvement as a facilitator of change in the South.

Boycotting Montgomery’s buses had been relatively easy compared with the other arenas in which Jim Crow existed. Municipal transit systems depended on Negro as well as Caucasian patronage. However, to eradicate the practice among other municipal facilities (to say nothing of privately owned establishments) would require a far more brazen confrontation with Southern authority. Would the protesters go to jail (and suffer even worse consequences) for being somewhere Jim Crow did not allow them? It was far easier for King to accept the constant invitations from across the country to
preach
against the evils of segregation than it was to deal with this conundrum. In the aftermath of the Montgomery victory, he was making as many as four speeches per week (which would work out to approximately two hundred per year), and his powerful oratory was bringing audiences to their feet.

With these difficulties in mind, Levison’s first idea for what the movement should do next was for King to broadcast his own regularly scheduled national television or radio program designed to persuade the nation to stop the practice of segregation. All that was needed was a corporate sponsor. In 1957 this was not a realistic possibility. No major company was about to take such a risk.

Other ideas included tackling segregation city by city, town by town, by holding racially mixed mass meetings in which King would communicate the ideals that formed the basis of the bus boycott, first in the North, then in border states, then in the Deep South. Such a tactic would amount to crusades against segregation modeled off of the religious crusades of evangelist Billy Graham.
In fact, at one point King discussed holding such rallies in tandem with Graham. But the idea foundered on the issue of where the greater stress should be placed—political change or religious transformation. Graham was a moderate and thus believed he couldn’t get too political. He felt he had to walk a fine line so as not to turn off his Caucasian religious supporters. Eventually the crusade idea was modified (Graham had nothing to do with this modification). Instead of pushing for citizens of all persuasions to agitate for desegregation, the Southern Leadership Conference (SCLC)—the new organization King had founded in the aftermath of the Montgomery victory to further civil rights interests across the South—would launch crusades in Southern cities and towns to register Negro citizens to vote. The campaign would be called the Crusade for Citizenship. Yet it, too, would meet with disappointment, as the turnout in places where King was to speak ended up being quite small, and the number of new voters registered, negligible. It appeared that the level of excitement about what the boycott had accomplished still outweighed the risks Negroes in the South were willing to take to abolish discrimination on the next level.

As he tried to figure out what to do next, King also had problems with the leadership of his own religious denomination. After the Montgomery victory, he dreamed of turning the five-million-member National Baptist Convention into a civil rights vehicle by electing a president allied to his interests. The twenty thousand ministers and their congregations for his cause would be a far more potent force to count on than the hundred or so ministers
and congregations who formed SCLC. It would also be far more powerful than the NAACP. But this idea, too, would come to nothing after J. H. Jackson, current president of the Baptist convention, who was not about to be upstaged by King, got his cronies to vote by acclamation to reelect him president in violation of the Baptist convention’s own constitution. Over the years Jackson would consolidate his power and block the denomination from ever formally supporting the civil rights movement.

In the months following the boycott victory, reporters began alleging there were other Negro leaders who were jealous of King. This was an understandable sentiment in light of the manner in which King had rocketed to fame virtually overnight, while so many of them had spent entire careers agitating for civil rights through other channels or otherwise distinguishing themselves. Just a few months after the boycott victory, several American Negro leaders were aboard an airplane heading to the newly formed nation of Ghana, formerly the West African colony known as the Gold Coast, to celebrate its independence. They included Nobel Peace Prize–winner Ralph Bunche (who won the award in 1950 for his role in helping quell the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict); Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., of New York, the most powerful Negro politician in the nation; Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University, the largest Negro university in the country; A. Phillip Randolph, head of the first labor union to organize Negroes and the man responsible for forcing President Franklin Roosevelt to issue an executive order during World War II ensuring Negro employment in wartime industry, the same
man who founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; and Martin Luther King, Jr., recent subject of a cover story in
Time
magazine, due to the Montgomery victory. Of the five leaders only King was invited into the cockpit by the plane’s crew and provided the honorary opportunity of playfully taking the controls.

The following May saw King organize a Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington, D.C., in light of the refusal of President Eisenhower to even listen to Negro grievances at that point. But it took the NAACP working its back channels with the presidential administration to get approval of the Lincoln Memorial as the staging area. While privately consulting with White House aides, the lawyer who successfully argued before the Supreme Court
Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
, which outlawed school segregation, and future Supreme Court justice himself, Thurgood Marshall, repeatedly referred to King as a “first-rate rabble-rouser,” assuring Maxwell Raab, the White House’s designated point man on “Negro issues,” that in exchange for the go-ahead the NAACP would make sure that King’s emotional pulpit style was toned down. With this assurance clearance was received. And the reception given to King at the Pilgrimage prompted the media to further single him out as the titular Negro leader.

While King continued to try to figure out the best direction in which to take the movement, Levison had settled on at least one way he could capitalize on the nationwide interest generated up to that point: write a book describing how tired maids, washwomen, manual laborers, cooks, gardeners, nannies, and chauffeurs had been inspired to stay off of Montgomery buses until the Supreme
Court ruled in their favor. Using his connections in publishing, Levison persuaded Harper and Brothers to sign King to write what was to be called
Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
for an advance against royalties of $3,500.

The goal the editors set for King’s book was to explain the movement to Caucasians. It was to be intellectual, but not too dry. Neither should it come across as “too Negro.” It was designed to promote King as “a leader of his people,” but also to steer clear of anything that could be interpreted as favorable to Communism.
Stride Toward Freedom
would become the first book about a major civil rights event, yet not a vital manifesto in the pantheon of books written on the era, since it was penned at the dawn of the movement.

Though he now had a book contract in hand, King found it difficult to pull himself away from his constant speaking engagements. This caused him to fall behind on the deadline Harper editors had set for receiving the finished manuscript. They were convinced there was a finite window of opportunity for telling the story, after which few Caucasians would be interested. “
To prepare and preach sermons is to use up creative energy that your soul and body wants to use on this book,” wrote one editor in a follow-up letter after flying down to Montgomery to meet with King. King continued preaching. Finally, the Harper editors ordered him to spend $2,000 of his $3,500 advance to pay one of their staffers, Hermine Popper, to coordinate the project, seeing to it that drafts of the book’s chapters circulate between her, King, Levison, Rustin, another adviser named Harris Wofford, and the designated historian for the MIA, L. D. Reddick.

Among the five, Levison served as King’s harshest critic, doing his best to steer him clear of anything that could be interpreted as egocentric. From his perch in New York City, Levison told King that the manuscript needed more about the movement itself, more about the roles of other key players in the drama. He told King that the one chapter it didn’t need was the one he had written about “Negro self-improvement.” Calling for a change in character among Negroes, Levison felt, was out of the question. Never mind that the basis for much of what they were fighting was Caucasian belief in Negro licentiousness, ignorance, and laziness, that in King’s opinion there needed to be a simultaneous attack on these canker sores roosting on the integrity of Negroes as a whole. To Levison, all of that had to be glossed over in favor of maintaining the momentum the boycott victory had generated.

King accepted most of the advice, limiting his criticisms of Negroes as a whole to a few paragraphs in the last chapter of the book. The book began with what had brought him to Montgomery:

Then it detailed how Rosa Parks had been arrested on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat to a Caucasian, and how the idea to boycott the buses as a result of her arrest originated with a pullman porter named E. D. Nixon (in later accounts, a group of middle-class Negro women would be credited with suggesting the idea to Nixon, who allegedly told them that he was thinking along the same lines):