When Harlem Nearly Killed King (5 page)

This continuing popularity for King, and the outdated manner in which the NAACP was now painted, was a tough pill to swallow for NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins. His organization had long preached that activism through the courts—not boycotts, or any other type of civil disobedience—was the only way to topple Jim Crow. Publicly, Wilkins was very careful in dealing with King. Prior to rallying to support King in the embarrassing Abernathy adultery imbroglio, the two had been in frequent contact. Many of the important people eager to visit King in Montgomery first approached the NAACP in New York. And as SCLC got off the ground and the media began reporting stories of competition between the NAACP and SCLC for membership and dues, both strove to refute the stories. They were lying. As soon as the SCLC was formed, Wilkins set to work calling his NAACP field secretaries in the Deep South, to get them to persuade local Negro leaders
not to cooperate with King (which may have been one of the reasons SCLC’s Crusade for Citizenship voter registration drive was such a disappointment). He was especially in touch with his Mississippi Field Secretary Medgar Evers, who busily obeyed his directive. And that King was so young compared to Wilkins (who was fifty-one) didn’t help matters any. Neither did the fact that after so many years of working hard to expunge the NAACP of any hint of association with Communists (even NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Director Thurgood Marshall served as an informant for the FBI), King was introducing people into the movement who made Wilkins nervous (long after the movement was over it would be revealed that King’s most important non Afro-American adviser, Stanley Levison, was indeed a Communist at the time he aided King).

Nevertheless, it would look quite bad if, while King was in New York City, someone from the NAACP didn’t demonstrate some modicum of public cordiality. Wilkins decided not to join the list of notables who would sit on the dais of the rally to be held in front of the Hotel Teresa in Harlem on Friday, September 19. Besides Harriman and Rockefeller, joining King would be baseball great Jackie Robinson; A. Phillip Randolph; Duke Ellington, whose band would provide music for the rally; Manhattan Borough President Hulan Jack; and Reverend Gardner Taylor, pastor of Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn. Conspicuously absent would be Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. And none of the heavyweights from the NAACP would be there. Other officers in the organization realized it would look very bad
if someone didn’t make a public gesture of some kind. One such person was Arthur Spingarn, the organization’s eighty-year-old Jewish president.

Spingarn and his brother, Joel, were so important to the early days of the NAACP and the early fight for racial justice that they deserved to be considered as integral to laying the groundwork as A. Phillip Randolph, W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter White, James Weldon Johnson, Ida B. Wells, and all the other men and women who carried the torch prior to the rise of King. The NAACP’s highest award, the Spingarn Medal—which would become the equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize in the Negro world—would be named for Joel. Both brothers joined not long after the organization was formed in 1910, primarily by a coalition of Caucasians alarmed at the racial atrocities taking place in the early twentieth century. (Though this coalition included Du Bois, he came along shortly after the first meetings were held and, of course, played a defining role upon joining.) Among the founders was Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of the famed pre–Civil War abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (who was instrumental in launching the career of Frederick Douglass). Villard was publisher of
The Nation
magazine and the
New York Evening Post
. In the early days of the NAACP, he provided free rent to the organization in the same Fifth Avenue building that housed
The Nation
. While suffering through the boredom of working for a private law firm on, of all issues (in light of the source of wealth for Averell Harriman’s family), the reorganization of railroads, Arthur was approached by Villard to take a civil rights case. Upon
doing so, he caught the civil rights bug and ended up chairing the NAACP’s legal committee (precursor to its Legal Defense and Educational Fund) shortly after its formation, serving in that capacity for twenty-seven years, winning eleven cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Then in 1940, Arthur became president of the organization.

At the beginning of their involvement, the Spingarns often encountered people who were amazed at their commitment. During debates on the subject of Negro intelligence, Caucasian acquaintances would say to the younger Spingarn, “You say the Negro has the same capabilities as the white. What books has he written?” In response to this, Arthur started collecting books by Negro authors. (By 1966 his collection of 3,000 would be donated to UCLA.) Through most of the first half of the 20th century, the Greenwich Village home he shared with his wife (they’d have no children) was a stopover for notable New York intellectuals, writers, and artists such as Eugene O’Neill and John Sloan. After the death of Booker T. Washington in 1915, Arthur and his brother (with heavy influence from Du Bois) organized a famous civil rights conclave for notable Negro activists and intellectuals on the grounds of Joel’s Amenia, New York, residence. To be known as the Amenia Conference, virtually everyone of consequence on the race issue in those days was present, representing the full spectrum of opinions on the subject. Designed to bring the Bookerite faction of the movement together with those who believed in agitating for immediate rights, in the end the conference didn’t bring many of the
Bookerites into the fold. Except for one key man. Not long after it ended, poet, composer, lawyer, author, and diplomat James Weldon Johnson would join the NAACP, assuming the newly created office of national field secretary, which eventually became the office of executive secretary, a position held next by an insurance salesman from Atlanta named Walter White; then after White, a journalist from Kansas City by the name of Roy Wilkins. The same man who now nervously contemplated the phenomenon of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Under the constitution of the NAACP, the president had very little power. Most authority resided with the executive secretary. Ever since the days of Johnson it had been up to the executive secretary to serve as the principal face of the organization, dealing with the myriad matters his role required him to address: fund-raising, speaking engagements, traveling to the latest racial hotspots, keeping local chapters in line with national policy, and now, with the rise of King and his followers and allies, serving as informal envoy between such “hotheads” and high government officials who might listen to the head of the NAACP before they would leaders of other Negro organizations.

As far as King’s recent arrest was concerned, both Wilkins and Spingarn no doubt knew that a telegram to President Eisenhower hoping he would express outrage was merely a cosmetic gesture, intended more to cover their own tracks when someone asked what they had done than anything else. For three decades, Spingarn had consulted with every U.S. president on the issue of civil rights, and knew that Eisenhower was only doing the bare
minimum required by the recent decisions of the Supreme Court. He claimed that once, during an audience with the president, in which he asked for a civil rights favor, Eisenhower replied, “I haven’t got the time to do it. I’m too tired. Now today I had to sign fifteen important matters and only had five minutes to make a decision on the fifteenth. I ought to have had two weeks on each.” To Spingarn, this reply indicated that Eisenhower didn’t really know what he was doing as he performed his duties.

As for the phenomenon of King, Spingarn took the long view. He realized that the NAACP’s expenses had increased tremendously as a result of aiding the budding activism in the Deep South. And he also worried about the activists King was bringing into the movement, fearful that Communists were slipping through. They had long been a problem at certain NAACP local chapter meetings, making outlandish motions while genuine members were present. Then they’d wait until the genuine members left, make the motions again, and get them passed, after which national headquarters would have to send someone down to straighten everything out.

But this wasn’t the issue at the moment for eighty-year-old Spingarn. The issue now was how to make it clear to the public and press that there was no friction between the NAACP and King since Wilkins wasn’t going to be on the dais at Friday’s Harlem rally. The solution lay in the fact that the following day King was scheduled to sign books right around the corner from where the rally was held: Blumstein’s Department Store on 125th Street. Spingarn, the dean of the NAACP, decided to be there for a public
photo opportunity with King. For King to have his picture taken next to Spingarn would be like a young Frederick Douglass taking a photograph next to his elder and mentor, William Lloyd Garrison. Little did Spingarn realize that one of the photos taken of him next to King would, indeed, go down in history. But not for the reasons he had hoped.

FIVE
why isn’t king signing books
at my bookstore?

IN THE EYES
of one of Harlem’s legends, it seemed pretty strange and insulting for King to agree to sign books during his visit in a Harlem department store that didn’t even sell books. On top of that, a department store that wasn’t even Negro-owned. And this in a community that was considered the capital of Negro America. When people around the world thought of Negro accomplishment in literature and entertainment, they thought of Harlem. They thought of the names of those who had illuminated it as the shining beacon of what they viewed as best about the Negro—poet Countee Cullen; poet and author Langston Hughes; the author, composer, and lawyer that the Spingarn’s Amenia Conference bought into the NAACP fold, James Weldon Johnson; singer and actor Paul Robeson; author Arna Bontemps; scholar and librarian
Arthur Schomburg; the composer and bandleader who was to play at the rally in front of the Hotel Teresa, Duke Ellington; jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker; jazz vocalist Sarah Vaughan.… And those
really in the know
when considering Harlem legends also thought of bookstore owner Lewis Michaeux.

In the 1920s while Arthur Spingarn was still producing, for doubters among his Caucasian contemporaries, books by Negro authors proving Negro intelligence, Lewis Michaeaux was hunting basements in the homes of Harlem friends in search of the same type of books to display on his pushcart and sell to other Negroes. It seemed that pioneering was in his family’s blood. His younger brother, Elder Solomon “Lightfoot” Micheaux, would become known as the “Happy Am I” preacher who allegedly became wealthy from the enthusiastic response to his Radio Church of God, and a real estate empire that included churches worth millions of dollars. Michaeux also happened to be the cousin of a Michaeux who had pioneered in the world of film. Oscar Michaeux’s name would go down in history for his early films about Negro cowboys; domestic bliss and tragedy amongst Negroes; historical films about Negro accomplishment, and so on; before finally succumbing to the monopolistic ways of Hollywood. Had this other Micheaux not been cruelly crushed, had he found the financial and behind-the-scenes support obtained by men with last names like Cohn, Goldwyn, Mayer, and so on, whose studios became Hollywood legends, there is no telling how far Negro achievement in a variety of arenas might have spread. The same could have been said during the height of the Harlem Renaissance
for gangsters squeezed out of the clandestine activities they pioneered. In the numbers racket, for example, Bumpy Johnson was replaced by the likes of Mafiosi such as Lucky Luciano, who, in turn, helped finance posh entertainment outlets like the Cotton Club, which featured the music of Duke Ellington and the hedonistic shimmying of the cafe-au-lait Cotton Club dancers for the pleasure of prosperous Caucasians only, eagerly “slumming” up in Harlem. Johnson, too, might have plowed clandestine wealth into the entertainment industry. There were all kinds of “what ifs” to consider when one really stopped to think about things. And Lewis Michaeux, to the consternation of plenty of Negroes considered more pragmatic, was always stopping to think about things and doing something in protest after thinking as long and hard as he thought necessary.

Born near Newport News, Virginia, in 1884, Micheaux migrated to New York City in his early twenties. After saving enough money from selling books from his Harlem pushcart, in 1930 he opened a bookstore on Seventh Avenue, near the corner of 125th Street, catty-corner from where King was to speak twenty-eight years later at the September 19th rally; the spot became known as Harlem Square due to the constant political activity that took place there. Through the years activists of all kinds harangued passersby with their political agendas (beginning in the 1940s, when 125th Street stores were integrated and the center of Negro Harlem moved from 135th Street and Lenox Avenue to 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, the political street activists moving with the tide). Michaeux called his bookstore the National
Memorial African Bookstore and, in the beginning, slept in the back and washed windows for people when proceeds from selling his books couldn’t make ends meet. Eventually, proceeds did make ends meet and he maintained what for most of the next twenty-eight years was the only bookstore in Harlem. During Christmas season, the bookstore would sell as many as five hundred Bibles to the community. It would also earn a reputation as the most comprehensive bookshop on Negroes in the world. Over time it would earn the informal name of “The House of Common Sense and Proper Propaganda”—the words displayed on a sign Michaeux placed in the front window. The National Memorial African Bookstore became a meeting place for students, scholars, African diplomats, and politicians. All kinds of books about Negroes were stacked up to its high ceiling. And there were portraits of famed Negro men and women, too. Harlem Square street activists often stopped in to check historical claims about the Negro before mounting their ladders and haranguing the crowds of pedestrians. Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen often stopped by to discuss with the small, wiry bespectacled Michaeux the hardships of being a Negro writer; others who stopped by included Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson; Louis Armstrong; W.E.B. Du Bois (when he was still living in America before moving to Ghana); and the irascible Harlem congressman and pastor of historic Abyssinian Baptist Church, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.