King: A Life

On a march in support of Meredith, King noticed that the crowd seemed disinclined toward nonviolence or interracial reconciliation. After police forced them to march on the side of the road, King had to prevent Stokely Carmichael, now head of SNCC, from striking an officer. Carmichael was publicly rejecting nonviolence as essentially “giving [white people] a free license to shoot us at will” (488). On the march, Carmichael tested a new slogan, “Black Power,” which the crowd embraced. Carmichael rejected King’s requests to use “black consciousness” or “black equality” instead, but still respected King for his ability to move people. The march was attacked in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. King attempted a nonviolent confrontation, and even after a white mob continued to attack, spraying the town’s Black neighborhood with indiscriminate gunfire, King rejected the call for Black Power in favor of a “coalition of conscience” (491). State troopers brutalized the marchers the following day, but the march continued to the state capital. King hoped that this would vindicate his nonviolent methods, but the violence increased the calls for more militancy among activists. As dismayed as he was, he gradually shifted his tone to meet the grievances of younger and more radical activists, concerned that his “radiant promises of progress” were about to prove hollow (496).

In July 1966, King gave a speech in Chicago denouncing Black supremacy as no better than white supremacy, and led a march to City Hall, calling for an end to housing discrimination and civilian oversight of police. Mayor Daley insisted he was doing everything he could. Shortly thereafter, riots broke out after police arrested several Black children for using fire hydrants to cool down in the summer heat—Black people had little access to swimming pools. Mayor Daley did not blame the violence on King directly, but insinuated that his presence attracted a less desirable contingent of outsiders. King pled with local youth to refrain from violence, but in a phone call with Johnson, Daley denounced King as “the most dangerous thing we have facing our country” (500).

Leading another protest against housing discrimination, King once again encountered jeers and violence, and while his group restrained themselves, King reflected that “the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate” (502). While King had won great victories in the fight for desegregation, the pursuit of active integration in places like Chicago was meeting with little progress. King and Daley reached a truce whereby King would cease demonstrations in exchange for a plan to address housing discrimination, but this would require the collaboration of private business and the federal government, neither of which was forthcoming. In response, King shifted to a broader critique of capitalism and militarism, both of which were swallowing up the poor.

By the fall of 1966, King was dealing with declining popularity, the failure of another civil rights bill in Congress, and disorganization among civil rights groups. Black activists were drawing inspiration from anticolonial struggles around the world. To the extent that white and Black people were working together, it was mainly in protest of the ever-escalating Vietnam War, although King and his fellow clergymen were loath to align themselves with the countercultural aspects of the antiwar movement. In his speeches, King warned that white America would have to make more sacrifices than the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act had demanded of them, a message Johnson feared would push more white voters to the Republicans. The New York Times broke the story of the FBI surveilling King, although the next day at a Senate subcommittee King refrained from comment, instead criticizing the war in Vietnam for distracting from projects of internal improvement for America’s poor. King was moving toward a more decisive, public stand on the Vietnam War, hoping “that his antiwar activity might unite peace activists and civil rights activists in a larger movement that pressed the government to end racism, poverty, and war” (514).

Knowing that it would weaken his relationship with Johnson, King joined an antiwar rally in Chicago, alienating many of his journalist allies and even his fellow activists. King met with heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, who at the time was loathed by much of white America for his refusal to enter the draft. Despite King’s urging, the SCLC refused to make a formal statement against the war, but on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, King decided to make his definitive statement against the war. Speaking at the Riverside Church in New York, he made an explicit connection between Vietnam and the lack of progress on civil rights, saying that at home and abroad “the nation found itself in the business of squashing revolution and crushing freedom” (521). He called not only for love among Black and white Americans, but also for love of all humanity, including the Vietnamese peasants taking up arms against American forces to defend their homeland.

King’s speech on Vietnam drew widespread condemnation, including from the NAACP and many major newspapers, which had generally been supportive. President Johnson was furious, using allies in the press to suggest that King had become egomaniacal or was under communist influences. Undeterred, King led another protest to the United Nations headquarters in New York City, where protestors denounced Johnson by name and burned draft cards. In subtle ways, King found himself drifting closer to Malcolm X’s position on certain issues, telling journalist David Halberstam that “only a small part of white America supported racial justice” (525). Militancy became more popular across the country, as evidenced by the rise of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California, and Representative Adam Clayton Powell calling violence “a necessary phrase of the black revolution” (526). In this fervid atmosphere, King often appeared as naive and out of his time, and Johnson was no longer willing to speak with him. Attempts to launch a massive civil disobedience campaign in Washington went nowhere, leaving King despondent and desperate for a renewed sense of purpose.

As 1967 ended and the FBI developed plans to widen fissures between civil rights groups, King launched a new initiative called the Poor People’s Campaign, a long-term protest staged near the White House and US Capitol building. The FBI took this as a plot “to incite another summer of riots, in Washington and beyond” (535). Telling his Ebenezer congregation that he feared his dream was becoming a nightmare, he resolved to forward, even as many of his allies declined to support him on the Poor People’s Campaign. Increasingly agitated, sleep deprived, and fixated on death, King delivered a sermon that reckoned with his own legacy, with the strong implication that he had reached the end of the road.

In the spring of 1968, King came to Memphis to join a strike by sanitation workers, after two were killed due to poor safety conditions. King called for new leadership in the White House, and then proceeded to travel to and from Memphis to help turn the strike into the first phase of the Poor People’s Campaign, but violence broke out in Memphis, and the media eagerly seized upon this as evidence that King was no longer an effective leader of a nonviolent movement. He flew back to Memphis one more time on April 3, kissing Coretta goodbye for what would be the last time. In a speech at the Mason Temple, he compared himself to Moses, who led the Israelites to the Promised Land but could not go there himself: “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!” (548).

On the evening of April 4, 1968, King was chatting with friends on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel when a bullet struck him in the face. When J. Edgar Hoover heard the news, he said, “I hope the son of a bitch doesn’t die […] if he does, they’ll make a martyr out of him” (551). King was pronounced dead almost exactly an hour later, and riots erupted across the country.

President Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act two days after King’s funeral, which he did not attend. A month later, Coretta launched the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, DC, facing days of torrential rain. In June, Robert Kennedy was assassinated shortly after winning the California Democratic primary. Three days after that, James Earl Ray was arrested in London and confessed to King’s murder. The police stamped out the protest camps in Washington, DC, by late June, and the next year, King’s brother A. D. was found dead in his swimming pool. In 1974, King’s mother was murdered at the Ebenezer church. In 1983, President Reagan made the third Monday of each January Martin Luther King Jr. Day, even though he privately opposed the move. Coretta continued her own activism, expanding into fields such as gay rights, AIDS awareness, and nuclear disarmament, before her death in 2006. Over 1,000 streets and 100 schools bear King’s name, as well as a memorial on the Washington mall, “but in hallowing King we have hollowed him” (556), Eig argues. To the present day, streets named after King record much higher levels of poverty and segregation, and the gift shop at King’s memorial does not even sell any of his own books. It is important to revive the real legacy of King if there is to be a real reckoning with the malignant social forces he dedicated his life to fighting.