When Harlem Nearly Killed King (3 page)

King’s book described how the following week, the Montgomery Improvement Association was formed and King was voted president. Then, later in the book, King described how the Dexter Avenue parsonage was bombed during the boycott:

No one was injured in the blast, and the boycott continued. Yet King detailed his fears that when the mass arrests began three weeks later, the boycott, indeed, would come to an end:

He ended the book with a forecast of what would come next:

Levison and Rustin polished these passages to a sheen (but asked that their names be left out of the book’s acknowledgments due to their controversial status as alleged “Communist agitators”). And within nine months the manuscript was ready. Harper and Brothers scheduled publication for September 17, 1958.

Now the challenge was, how to kick off the publicity campaign for the book. The answer: Bring King to New York City to appear on national TV. All King had to do was show up in the section of Manhattan famous for developing or showcasing national Negro leaders. For this occasion his most prominent rivals would feel compelled to muzzle their jealousies. They would feel obligated to publicly support all that King represented because they were eager to bask in his glory, anxious to capitalize on his appearances in Harlem churches, bookstores, a department store, and at a scheduled political rally. What King didn’t know at the time was that upon heading to New York City, he personally would experience his own ordeal, testing the metal and strength that he suggested at the end of his book Negroes would need in the future. And the person who instigated this crisis wouldn’t be any of the VIPs eager
for photo opportunities with him. It wouldn’t be an assassin hired by angry racists. The person he should have been warned against on his trip to New York City was someone else altogether, the last individual anyone would have dreamed had anything against Martin Luther King, Jr.

TWO
a tight race

BY SEPTEMBER 1958
, New York governor W. Averell Harriman, scion of one of the most prominent and wealthy families in the nation, was locked in a tight gubernatorial battle with another scion of wealth—the charismatic, womanizing grandson of the most feared, reviled, and wealthy pioneer of America’s Gilded Age. His opponent’s grandfather, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., had virtually single-handedly caused lawmakers in Washington, D.C., to pass the nation’s antitrust laws, forcing the breakup of his Standard Oil Trust, a behemoth that controlled the sale of 90 percent of the nation’s oil. But by the time they got around to doing so, it was already too late to prevent Rockefeller from amassing the largest personal fortune of any man on earth.

At age sixteen, patriarch John D. Rockefeller, Sr., took a job as a bookkeeper. By the age of thirty-one, with three partners he founded his oil company, eventually buying them out and parlaying his net worth to close to a billion dollars. At the age of fifty-seven, he created the Rockefeller Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropic organization, and through it, gave away $530 million, setting up his only son, John junior, and family to create a reputation of family beneficence that would gloss over all he had done to amass the fortune and assuage any feelings of guilt they might have. Of the six children John junior and his wife had, five were boys. And of those five, all but Nelson and Winthrop would do their best to stay out of the limelight and quietly lead lives of discreet wealth and charity (reluctantly tolerating the exposure of the family caused by the political ambitions of their two brothers).

It was Nelson who challenged Harriman in 1958 for the governorship of New York. Extremely extroverted, he combined a hunger for womanizing with a hunger to climb whatever career mountains he wanted to, in the most public of manners. In September 1958, at the age of fifty, Nelson felt qualified to challenge Harriman because his record of philanthropic and appointive positions was an impressive one. In the midst of the Great Depression he had presided over the creation and construction of Rockefeller Center, that collection of majestic skyscrapers in midtown Manhattan, replete with a golden Zeus presiding over an open-air plaza. After that he had involved himself in a vast array of public initiatives, and had been appointed to
a variety of posts by U.S. presidents. Nelson had helped found the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in the Bronx section of New York City. He helped cajole Congress into earmarking six million dollars in new construction for predominantly Negro Howard University, presided over by the same Mordecai Johnson who flew with King to the new nation of Ghana. He had directed the revitalization of Gallaudet College in Washington, D.C., the world’s only college for the deaf and training center for teachers of the deaf. He had engaged in an array of do-good projects in Latin America (to make up for the capitalist machinations fostered by his family’s economic interests in that region), bringing supermarkets, mechanized farming, and low-cost housing to Puerto Rico, Brazil, Peru, El Salvador, and Guatemala. He was chosen assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs by President Roosevelt, and coordinated Inter-American Affairs during World War II; was assigned to the founding conference of the United Nations by President Truman; then was chosen by the next president, Dwight Eisenhower, as Undersecretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Besides his support for Howard University, Nelson consistently donated to the National Urban League and other human rights organizations. And he could boast that Spelman College, perhaps the finest college in the nation for Negro women, was endowed with his family’s wealth and named after his paternal grandmother, Laura Spelman Rockefeller.

The record of his opponent, the incumbent governor, was impressive as well. And Harriman had the implied benefit of maturity (at the age of sixty-six he was sixteen years Nelson’s senior)
as well as incumbency in elective (rather than appointive office) on his side. The founder of the fortune Averell lived off of hadn’t been his grandfather. Rather, it had been his father. Edward H. Harriman (known as E. H.) had been a shrewd, hated, and feared railroad industry manipulator. Born in 1848 the son of an Episcopalian preacher and raised on Long Island, he quit school at fourteen and, by the age of twenty-two, founded his own Wall Street brokerage firm. Nine years later he married a woman whose father owned a small railroad, and from there the rest, as they say, was history. E. H. Harriman shrewdly took control of the Illinois Central Railroad, bought the bankrupt Union Pacific Railroad, squared off with J. P. Morgan for control of Northern Pacific Railroad, fighting him to a draw. By the time he died in 1909, E. H. Harriman left his family with a $100 million fortune. Averell was just seventeen years old.

With wealth to cushion him, the tall, handsome Averell was educated at Yale. After graduation he presided over the family business interests. Then, foreseeing a worldwide depression, in 1928 he voted for Democrat Al Smith for president (who, of course, would lose to Republican Herbert Hoover). Soon thereafter, he effectively left the business world. During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt appointed Harriman to the National Relief Administration (NRA). With the coming of World War II, he served as Roosevelt’s envoy to England prior to American entry into the war. From there he would be appointed by Roosevelt and then Truman to a succession of posts: director of the lend-lease program to England; ambassador to Russia and
England; a field captain of the Marshall Plan; director of the Mutual Security Administration. Then in 1954, he decided to take the plunge into elective politics by running for governor of New York. He won the general election contest against Republican opponent Irving Ives by a mere 11,625 votes and began establishing the record with which he’d run for reelection four years later against Nelson Rockefeller.

That record included accomplishments designed to placate upstate New York at the expense of the New York City metropolitan area, causing the growth of animus for Harriman among New York City Democrats. To the consternation of Tammany Hall, Harriman built roads and schools for upstaters and developed resorts in the Adirondacks. Yet he also instituted benefits that all New Yorkers could enjoy, increasing overall state aid for education by 78 percent; increasing benefits for the unemployed and those disabled on the job; increasing the minimum wage. In essence, in 1958, both parties had put up for governor opponents who balanced each other out by appealing to constituencies their parties traditionally didn’t appeal to, and who harbored so much family wealth that no one could accuse them of engaging in graft while in office. Yet as the gubernatorial race entered its final months, Harriman also had to put out a major internal party brushfire.

As a result of what he had done for upstate New York, and because of his aloof, patrician bearing, Harriman was forced to compete with legendary New York City Tammany Hall boss Carmine De Sapio for control of the state party. And the manner
in which they squared off revolved around the tug-of-war over who would be the party’s nominee that year for U.S. senator. Initially, De Sapio’s faction wanted New York City Mayor Robert Wagner. But Harriman, with an eye toward the future, had no intention of backing Wagner because he viewed him as a potential rival for a slot in a Democratic presidential administration should the party prevail in 1960. After Harriman turned down Wagner, De Sapio’s faction backed Manhattan district attorney Frank Hogan. But the liberal faction of the party didn’t want Hogan. Thus the
battle royale
commenced. Harriman sifted through a variety of possibilities, circling back to New York City Mayor Robert Wagner. But Wagner, angry at the initial rebuff, turned Harriman down. And with no decent alternative, Hogan won the nomination, registering a symbolic “rat fuck,” (in the words of Harriman’s mince-no-words wife), of Harriman on the part of De Sapio, after which the Democratic Party had to heal itself going into the election’s final stretch, in order to rebuff the Rockefeller challenge to the governor.

The strategy on the part of the Republicans was to paint Harriman as not in control of his own party, while that of the Democrats was to try to paint Rockefeller as beholden, when push came to shove, to traditional Republican interests and values. Both candidates had to secure their bases while appealing to enough undecided voters to win the election. And no constituency was more up for grabs than Afro-American voters. In 1958, the nation’s civil rights agenda was front and center in the news. Besides the 1954
Brown v. the Board of Education
decision outlawing
school segregation and the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott victory, the previous fall there had been the school desegregation battle in Little Rock, Arkansas, which had captivated the nation. A year later it was still holding everyone in thrall, because Arkansas governor Orvall Faubus closed the state’s public schools rather than obey the Supreme Court’s order to integrate them. Elected officials everywhere were taking stands. In the South, support for Faubus became the litmus test of loyalty to “traditional Southern values,” while among politicians in large Northern urban areas, opposition to what Faubus stood for became the litmus test for whether or not traditional liberals were up-to-date on the latest position liberals were supposed to take on the race issue. On this subject, both Harriman and Rockefeller could afford to embrace liberalism.