Evacuations: The King God Didn't Save

( This review is in two parts. The conclusion will appear in tomorrow's CRIMSON, along with an interview with the author, John A. Williams. )

I

TO COME effectively to terms with John A. Williams's most recent book, The King God Didn't Save, "Reflections on the Life and Death of Martin Luther King, Jr.," one must deal with three complex phenomena which-both as individual and collective entities-reveal much of the nature of America today and over the years of King's public prominence.

The first phenomenon is that of Martin King himself, both as a public man and as a private man, and that wasteland where the two identities merge or conflict. The book, which is the second phenomenon, is divided into sections with one focusing upon each identity, and with the area of convergence or conflict. The book, is the second phenomenon, is divided into sections with one focusing upon each identity, and with the area of convergence or conflict acting as a connecting leitmotif. The third phenomenon involved is that of the environment in which both King and the book exist. This environment, which, in simplified terms, can be taken as America, obviously plays a role in the life of every public figure and each book which attempts to analyze him; the role played by America, particularly in terms of the response that has greeted the book since its publication in August of 1970, is of such fundamental importance as to be accorded its own place in the dramatis personae of what threatens to become both the tragedy of Martin King and the tragedy of The King God Didn't Save.

II

THE DEDICATION of the book is "Respectfully... to the memory of the man Martin Luther King could have become, had he lived." This statement is, in effect, a capsulization of Williams's attitude toward King and reveals something of the nature of the imperative which motivated him to write the book. The core of Williams's conception of King is that his ascension to true greatness as a man and as a political force capable of exerting genuine leverage came far later in his life than is generally assumed-if it came at all. Williams believes that King, at the time of his assassination, was only beginning to structure his efforts into forms that could generate the necessary concrete political power and accurately focus it towards the achievement of the survival and self-determination of black people and poor people. The neo-Populism of the Poor People's March and King's activity in the antiwar movement are cited by Williams as indicative of the new directions in which King was moving. Because these new directions posed genuine threats to the institutionalized power of the Church and State in some exercise of white power in America, they provoked "the awe-the United States... that cut King down in conspiracy, and then conspired to plug the memory of the man with putty."

However by examining King's career, Williams demonstrates that these were new directions, collineations not taken or even visible to the man the media credited with having steered black people to their "victories" at Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma, and the other scenes of the black liberation struggle of the '50's and '60's. Thus, crucial to Williams's conception of the King phenomenon is the growth of Martin Luther King's awareness and sense of responsibility which together with his personal courage made him the man and the figure which the white press and his own ego had once convinced him he had been from the beginning.

III

WILLIAMS explores the 26-year-old minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Dexter was King's first pastorate, and at the time, he said with pride that it "was sort of a silk-stocking church catering only to a certain class." King's life-long friend, the late Louis Lomax, put it more bluntly. As Williams quotes him, "King well knew before he assumed the pastorate... that nonprofessional and uneducated Negroes were not welcome at the Dexter Avenue altar."

King's pride in being the pastor of a "big folks church" was the inevitable result of his background. His family was situated in such a position in the hierarchy of black Atlanta as to have indoctrinated him with this naive reverence of people with "all the right things" behind their names and other basic American middle class values, as well as those particular perversions with which blacks have buttressed those values, such as an internal pecking order based on color-the whiter the righter. Williams says that "King himself apparently had some color hang-up... Of King's personal attitude towards women with dark skin, Person B (Williams does not further identify this source) told me: 'Martin often said that he was willing to fight and die for black people, but was damned if he could see anything pretty in a black woman. '"

For some people such a picture of King is difficult to accept or even understand. But, as Williams explains, "King's color consciousness seems to have been a direct throwback to the social values of black Atlanta." In cities like Atlanta and Washington, where there is a sizable black middle class, color did, and to an extent continues to function as a criterion for acceptance into the upper realms of what E. Franklin Frazier, the black sociologist, termed "the society without substance." Cast after the mold of the white power and Puritan classes, the mores and attitudes of the middle class of the black South are "the direct result of national white attitudes toward black people. Because those attitudes were (and continue to be) so pronouncedly racist, it was natural that within the oppressed community there would be reflected caste systems that were also to some degree racist." Internal racism, or more precisely, hueism, was and is only a part of the cultural whitewash of the black bourgeoisie. Robbed of that sense of greater history and of viable alternative social institutions and codes which are the prerequisites of self-determination, the majority of the black middle class had adopted white social forms and had, to some degree, accepted the assumptions in which white middle class behavior is grounded. In effect, this was the program outlined by Booker T. Washington in his Atlanta Compromise speech of 1895, a miasma which had been inured in the black middle class fifty years before King assumed the Dexter pastorate.

"King's presence in Montgomery had been as carefully plotted as the presence of, say, the Kennedys in the U. S. Senate. Dexter Avenue Baptist Church was the place where the coming big men of the black Baptist organization served; it was a step on the escalator... Given King's up-bringing and education, and his father's plans for him, King would very probably have refused to pastor a lesser church." Northern-educated and ambitious, King had gone to Montgomery with a sense of secure possession of a successful future within the structure of the Baptist church and along the lines which success for Southern blacks had been determined since Reconstruction. However, what had not been planned for was the radical change in atmosphere produced by the 1954 Supreme Court decision, the acts of white violence which followed it-in particular, Emmet Till's murder, and the tired feet of Rosa Parks.

These last two factors are of particular importance in terms of King's rise to national prominence. Emmet Till, a 14 year old child from Chicago who had gone South to visit relatives, was kidnapped in August of 1955 by white men who beat his body into mutilation, shot him through the head, and then tied him to the wheel of a cotton gin and dropped him into the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. The two men who were tried testified at the trial-at which black reporters were segregated-that Till had whistled at a white woman. They were acquitted; however neither the symbolism of the murder act itself nor that of the conduct of the trial was lost on the Southern black population, particularly the middle class which had come to believe that the days of such barbarity had passed. Emmet Till's murder was notice served that the children and grandchildren were as expendable as their parents and grandparents had been and still were. The message that the dream was not only to be deferred but dismasted, disregarded and dispensed with provided the black South with fresh and indisputed evidence of the irrationality of its circumstance. A response was inevitable. The investment in the dream had been too heavy for its foreclosure to go unresisted. The response came in Montgomery the day Rose Parks, a respected former secretary of the local NAACP, refused to obey a bus driver's order to yield her seat in the forward part of the jimcrow section of a crowded bus.

She made no attempt to resist arrest for violating city segregation ordinances. Still, in an event which compressed past and future into the liquid nugget of the present, her stand echoed the tradition of subtle resistance that had characterized the efforts black people have made to obtain justice in America-the quiet violence of ground glass in the master's soup-while simultaneously conveying the continuing injustice and simple pain of the present, Rosa Parks had made her point: NO MORE. She would not be moved. It was a supremely tangible expression, as plain and physical as the way in which she described her motivation, "There was no plan at all. I was tired from shopping. My feet hurt."

PERHAPS if Rosa Parks had not been of "impeccable" character but "had just stepped out of a bar.. Williams suggests that "her attempt (with) her stocking seams twisted," to gain redress against the bus company and the Southern system would have first been thwarted by the Negroes in her own community, for not being exactly the right kind of person it was willing to go to bat for." However, as Williams quotes King, "Fortunately, Mrs. Parks was ideal for the role assigned her by history." And that was to focus the attention of black people, the middle class in particular, on the irrationality of their condition.

IV

NEVERTHELESS, the Montgomery movement was at best an accidental and limited political success. As Williams says, "The irony of the Montgomery situation was that the black people there did not ask for much." They planned a one-day protest, and asked that the segregation ordinances governing public transportation be made more rational. The fact that the boycott lasted 382 days was no less of a surprise to the middle class leadership of the Montgomery Improvement Association (of which King was president) than was "the stupidity and short-sightedness of the Montgomery city officials." In retrospect, one of the most surprising recomplished only the desegregation sults of the boycott was that it ac-of the buses; while leaving other public accommodations such as the city's school system and recreational facilities jimcrow. Williams's explanation of this rightfully centers upon the nature of the black South's middle class and its control of the scope and direction of the protest. "The middle class in Montgomery felt it had pushed far enough; that it did not need open schools, parks or playgrounds; that was part of the unwritten contract with the system."

In cities like Montgomery, Atlanta and Washington, the black middle class has always been able to establish institutions of superior education for its own. High schools like Washington's Dunbar and, to a lesser degree, Atlanta's Booker T. Washington, which King attended, and those in other Southern cities where the black middle class had the power to establish them, have produced an array of well-skilled, motivated blacks. Most blacks who attended the better colleges and graduate schools received their early education at these high schools, and the majority of these people either returned with their skills to the community or entered other forms of public service. However, to create an environment capable of producing this elite, which DuBois terms "the talented tenth," whose schools and the quality education they provided were, in a sense, scaled off, both from the whites above and the blacks below. Whites, who would have viewed these schools as threats to their economic and political superiority if they themselves were of the power class, or to their racial superiority if they were not, would have destroyed the schools through political tomfoolery or violence. As it was, the economic policies of white government and educational officials dammed the flow of educational resources, and the trickle that could be tapped was not sufficient for the enactment of mass quality education.

However, the presence of these academic oases, the total internal reflection in which the light of the social concern of much of the Southern black middle class was ensnared, and its contentment with insular success, all tended to reduce the scope of the objectives of the Montgomery move-ment. Moreover, the black middle class in both the North and the South had, in general, failed to form a viable political union with the black masses. Blame for this rests with both parties. During the first half of the century middle class men and women, like William Monroe Trotter of Boston, had given their talents, resources and lives in an effort to form such a union, only to be abandoned by the masses. Such experiences had, created a mistrust of the masses on the part of the middle class which further partitioned the community-in effect, kept it from becoming a community.

As Williams points out, King had neither the organizational dexterity nor the political consciousness to dismantle these class partitions, and as a result failed "to utilize consistently the city's entire black population."

King was never to be an effective organizer. His ego was too large to prevent him from feeling that organization would undermine his authority, and being, at root, the insecure child of a frustrated, demanding father, he lacked the confidence and grace that would have eliminated the need for the yes-men who formed what was always more his court than his kingdom. Finally and most damagingly of all, his grasp of the world beyond the orb of the Southern black middle class was imperfect to the point of terminal misconstruction. Thus as Williams quotes Joanne Grant, a black reporter who covered King closely, "It was very important that he should make the decisions, and yet he really couldn't."

MARTIN KING had made it at Montgomery, out of his father's circumspection and into the public mind. His philosophical explanation for his transportation into public prominence characteristically was rooted in an intangible, "the Zeitgeist-the spirit of the times." Besides being a nifty sublimation of his ego-it wasn't me, but I'm the one who sees and says precisely what it was-his reasoning, if taken loosely, does bear upon the issue. If taken very loosely.

What precisely had made Martin King?

"The bombings had done it; the confrontations with cracker officials had done it; but the press had done most of it." The press had dangled a bait before King that sheerly on the basis of his background was irresistible. At an early age, King had been inoculated with that particular turn of mind that yields easily to the notion of personal destiny. A person who had had a less sophisticated philosophical exposure might have couched this notion into convinced mutterings about the will of God or the whims of Lady Luck-7, 11, or the Second Coming. King, however, spoke of being tracked down by the Zeitgeist, and his diction was a part of his appeal to the white media. His rhetoric, "the soft Georgia cadence" of his voice, and the non-violence of his actions were the stuff of which television specials are made. Entertaining without being threatening.

And why not television specials? King, whose conception of success before Montgomery was that of the insular notoriety of the well-respected minister of a silk-stocking church, discerned within the Zeitgeist the possibility of transcending this notion of success. This idea of becoming a national figure must have played with increasing regularity in King's mind as his press coverage and that of the boycott increased. Having been reared in an environment in which one's social position was, in part, evaluated by the number of one's citations on the society page of the Atlanta Daily World. King was sufficiently media-conscious as to keep a listing of the reporters who came to cover him at Montgomery. However, as Williams cites Lomax who was on the scene, "'What we did not realize was that certain white men and events would make the choice' for King to become as famous as he did."

Driven by an ego which bore the marks of the Hollywood imagination, and blinded by a naivete of fundamental American social and political realities that prevented him from receiving that the media does not give constant attention gratis, King decided that he "could never go back-never go back to being just a minister."

The adverse effects of this decision were immediate-if not immediately understood by King and his associates. "The white press so thoroughly indoctrinated King and his people with the idea that the capitulation (of the Northern-owned Montgomery bus company) was a victory for blacks... (that) they believed it: believed too that other things would fall inevitably like tin soldiers all in a neat line."

This was the tragedy of the movement during the years of blood and dreams at Montgomery, Atlanta, Albany, and Birmingham; this remained the tragedy when the dream was fading at St. Augustine; and would still be the tragedy at bloody, dreamless Selma.

V

THE course which King chose-or more precisely, the press chose-for himself and the movement was set not so much upon a place as a time. That time was 1963. As history bad recorded it up until Williams's book, it all came down on August 28th in Washington. "It was Martin King's day. The march was a pure, unfettered, tasteful triv??h; the I Have a Dream speech is history now, and the dream is dead. But that day, that day..."

Yes, that day. Brotherhood. Innocence. We Shall Overcome. The time slide is swift and easy. So easy that we must question what it is to which we are drawn back, the dream or the reality?

John Williams, who was in the crowd, presents an otherwise unrecorded slice of the reality of the March on Washington.

"When Martin Luther King. Jr., came up to speak, the quarter million were at a fever pitch.

"'I have a dream!' M. L. said.

"'Tell 'em Martin!' Bob shouted. (Bob is Robert Johnson, a college classmate of King's and currently the executive editor of let magazine.)

"'I have a dream!' M. L. said again and behind us, his voice lost to all but those close to him, a man screamed, "Fuck that dream. Martin! Now, goddammit, NOW!'".

Despite King's political and organizational failings, he was unquestionably successful in putting black people into the now. That his success in this role was partially a product of his other failures is a given, for King was too prone towards dealing in futures. Nevertheless, it was this power to put people into the now by attraction or repulsion that made him a genuine threat with which the system had to deal.

1963 was also the year the FBI began its surveillance of Martin King.

THE epigraph to The King God Didn't Save is a quote from Richard Wright's 1954 book, Black Power. It reads in part: "Make no mistake... they are going to come at you with words about democracy; you are going to be pinned to the wall and warned about decency... in short, a barrage of concentrated arguments will be hurled at you to temper the pace and drive of your movement..."

The most devastating shell of the barrage was delivered by J. Edgar Hoover. In 1964, just before King left for Oslo to accept the Nobel, he met with Hoover. Williams says, "What really transpired may never be known," but he assumes that it was during this meeting that King was informed that the FBI had compiled a dossier of tapes and pictures on King. The dossier included no evidence of any communist infiltration of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or control of King, the suspicion of which had prompted Robert F. Kennedy, then the Attorney General, to allow Hoover to conduct King's surveillance; but it did contain detailed information concerning Martin King's extra-marital sex life. "Pinned to the wall and warned about decency." King left Hoover's office and delivered a statement which, in effect, retracted an earlier accusation that FBI agents were unsympathetic to the civil rights movement. Adding, as Williams records, "There must be no misunderstanding between the FBI and civil rights leaders."

Again from the epigraph: "Plump-face men will mumble academic phrases... gentlemen of the cloth will speak unctuously of values and standards." One can easily picture the set of Hoover's bulldog jowls and imagine his inflection, particularly on the word "peace," when he suggested that King's behavior was hardly befitting the standards expected of a Nobel Prize winner. Equally conceivable is the overwhelming sense of dislocation and betrayal that must have hit King like the hot and hard wind of a desert sand storm. The camera and the microphone, which had been his two biggest weapons from the beginning, were now the nails with which he was being crucified for having practiced the love he preached.

IV

In another country, responsible to a different constituency, Martin King perhaps would have been less vulnerable to Hoover's ploy, but he was in puritan America, and was responsible to the puritans-at first, the black, but now, the white. Their press had made him. Their financial support had underwritten his activities. Their power protected him from acts of Gothic violence like those that had cancelled the lives of Emmet Till, Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner, and the four girls in the bombed church at Birmingham. Made myopic by his ego and his mendacious assumptions about the nature of America, King had not yet perceived the motivation that had caused this support to be accorded him, nor the conditions under which it was given. Instead, he regarded it as a spontaneous outpouring of moral sentiment, dictated by the Zeitgeist. His forensic imagery revolved around the vision of butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, bankers and welfare mothers forming an ecstatic muster and marching like faceless Johnnies to a nonviolent holy war for justice, dignity and the dream. In this vision, which was the underpinning of his famous "A Preacher Leading His Flock" speech given exactly two months before his death. King saw himself as a "drum major for justice." walking the point alone.

To walk the point is to be the most exposed man in the column. In spite of his failure to take full advantage of the situation, King had been on the point at Montgomery. The eight bombings testify to that. After Montgomery, perhaps out of fear or a sense of self importance, King began to retreat from his position in the vanguard. As early as 1963, his presence in the front line was irregular, and his last arrest was even before the Hoover confrontation. However, just as the bombings indicate that King was out there and was dangerous, the confrontation with Hoover is proof that King's power potential had grown. As Williams says, "there was always the change-growing with every campaign-that King could wind up with a genuine power to couple with his prestige." In a sense, King already had a power, derived from that international prestige, for it gave him the power to be heard, the power to expose the very forces that had created his public image and protected his life while simultaneously continuing to oppress the people he was credited with leading and poor people every-where. Thus, King was faced with a choice. He could obey Hoover's directive and "temper the pace and drive of your movement," or he could go back on the point and try again to incarnate his dream.

Williams-feels that King, faced with the choice, initially "copped out." Exemplary of this compliance was King's conduct at Selma, which many black people consider the sell-out of the century because King failed to appear at a march he himself called. The march ended in the notorious bloodbath at Pettus Bridge. "King's response to the clubbing at Pettus Bridge was, 'If I had known it was going to be like that I'd have gone myself.' Which was what the people from SNCC had been driving at all along." King's collapse at Selma was so unrestricted that the word does not appear in a prizewinning biography of him. Yet, "The criticism and name-calling (that King received after Selma' jarred him." That, along with the impact of the carnage itself forced King "to question his rightful role of leader of black people; he could not remain compromised. At stake was more than his personal reputation and that of his family. The stake was the success of the movement and all it meant not only to black Americans, but to all Americans.

"It seems to me that King broke with whatever compromise he might have made when he jumped into the Vietnam war protest, determined to sock it to those who would have restrained him. And when he made his decision, he must have known that his life, although he had been threatened time and time again, was now measured."

Threatened by the effect the exposure of the FBI information would have had upon his career, the Martin Luther King of Montgomery, the 26-year-old pastor of Dexter, would unquestionably have kept his compromise with the system. He would have opted for protecting his name and that of his family in the eyes of the black puritans of his congregation and his class. But in the years that had passed, he had collected more than merely a Nobel and nine arrests. He had acquired a sense of responsibility to a greater constituency, one unbounded by color, class, or nationality. In part this change was due to the traveling King had done, for it had given him the type of global perspective he had previously lacked. He was a man now capable of writing, "These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression... The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before." Martin King wanted to be a part of that number.

By moving toward the Vietnam protest, King. as Malcolm X had done before him, became international in his focus. "It will not go unobserved," says Williams, "that both Malcolm and King died as they attempted to mount programs involving not only blacks, but the oppressed of every race and kind."' King was now living up to the true standards of a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

However, just at the time King was evolving into a great leader, his public following and press coverage were flagging. The media had been given the FBI tapes, and although "it is true that it did not record stories about the tapes or photographs while King lived. It only know about them-which was enough-for they backed away from him, turned the glare of their annihilating publicity on others." But, by maintaining this policy of silence, the press "became partners in both the breaking of King and the attempted destruction of a movement for which they once seemed to hold great esteem."