At Canaan's Edge (78 page)

King used the premise of latent combat identity to analyze the twin obsessions of the political year. He presented black power and the white backlash as independent phenomena, rejecting common theories that one justified or propped up the other. He said backlash was nothing new. It was a vocabulary of denial like the idealized Ku Klux Klan stories that had numbed and distorted the aftermath of the Civil War. He described backlash as coded resistance to structural changes beyond free access to a bus or library. Like the original segregation laws, it served notice that white men were determined to retain tangible privilege from jobs to neighborhoods. By contrast, King defined black power as a cry of pain. “It is in fact a reaction to the failure of white power to deliver the promises and to do it in a hurry,” he said. “Once we recognize this we begin to understand what is happening in this revolution.”

He explored the nature of revolution, speaking from his outline. “Now first, when you look at a revolution,” King ventured, “you must always realize that the line of progress is never a straight line.” There were inevitable counterrevolutions, splits, and convolutions “when you feel like you are going backwards,” he said. “Virtually all revolutions in the past have been based on hope and hate.” Conflict made for tumbling factions even when the revolutionaries were fellow aristocrats like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and King admitted taking extra risks from a submerged minority base. “To fire people and motivate them, get them moving,” he said, civil rights leaders had shouted “All, Here, Now!” for democratic rights long abridged. “We knew that we morally deserved our freedom, and we should have had it now,” he declared, “but deep down within we knew it couldn't come now.”

On top of unmet expectations, the movement carried extra burdens from a nonviolent discipline that embraced punishment without the outlet of rage. “We transform the hate element of the traditional revolution into positive nonviolent power,” King asserted, “and it was precisely this hope and nonviolent power that guided the psychological turning point through all of the victories that we achieved.” Yet these achievements were strained by the very tactics that created them. “The minute hopes were blasted,” he said, “the minute people realized that in spite of all these gains their conditions were still terrible, then violence became a part of the terminology of the movement in some segments. It is in this context that we must see what is happening now.” King called it a harsh truth that it was easier to feed the frustrations of violence with more violence than to soothe the frustrations of nonviolence with more sacrifice and hope. “Interestingly enough, in a revolution when hope diminishes,” he said, “bitter hatred develops toward the very people who build up the hope, because in building up the hope they were not able to deliver the promises.”

His meditation came to a bleak turn. King said the nonviolent movement was menaced on both flanks by the violent tones of white backlash and black power. Then, far from advising a respite to let historic adjustments settle, he pressed the full three-part credo of his Nobel Prize address: “All that I have said boils down to the conclusion that man's survival is dependent upon man's ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty, and war.” At Penn Center, he called them “the inseparable triplets.” No longer could the movement expect to make progress on race in Grenada or Chicago while avoiding the violent propensity of “a sick nation that will brutalize unjustifiably millions of boys and girls, men and women, in Vietnam,” King told the assembly. “And the two issues cannot be separated. They are inextricably bound together.” They were chambers of collateral refuge for hostility. So was poverty. He said violence of spirit infected the economic system.

King smiled at Williams: “Now, Hosea, I want you to hear this because you are a capitalist.” Just as they must “not be intimidated” to speak out against the war in Vietnam, he said, they could not let charges of Communism silence misgivings about the capitalist distribution of wealth. “Maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism,” King bluntly suggested, and the movement must consider economic critiques by taboo thinkers such as Karl Marx. “If you read him, you can see that this man had a great passion for social justice,” he said. “You know Karl Marx was born a Jew, had a rabbinic background.” The early Marx was clearly influenced by Amos and other Hebrew prophets, King asserted, but fell prey to economic determinism that justified “cutting off individual liberties” in a proletarian dictatorship. “The great weakness of Karl Marx is right here,” he said, “that he did not recognize that the means and ends must cohere…. Now this is where I leave brother Marx and move on toward the kingdom.”

To do so, King said they must set aside the triumphant celebrations of 1965, regird themselves for protracted labor, and deepen their commitment to nonviolence. “We have a method,” he declared, “and we must develop it.” Their method may be only an experiment, but war-hungry critics must understand that violence was uncertain, too. “Violence may murder the liar,” said King, “but it doesn't murder the lie. It doesn't establish truth…. Violence may go to the point of murdering the hater, but it doesn't murder hate. It may increase hate.” The reflex to violence divided mankind into warring tribes, subverting the essential promise of democracy and religion alike. “I still want SCLC to be that lamp of hope, that light in a very dark situation,” he said. “We must still believe that we are going to deal with this problem by enlisting consciences” rather than particular racial groups. “For there is no salvation through isolation.”

King closed with meditations on history. His small band of cohorts, many of them barely calmed from their internal feuds, absorbed a call to take on nothing less than the global cousins of segregation. He presented a radical leap in the language of steadfast commitment. Far from a plan, it was a raw summons to witness, and King broke off with an awkward new metaphor instead of his polished oratory. The landmarks of 1964 and 1965 had advanced “the football of civil rights” to “about the 50-yard line,” he declared. Now they faced diehard resistance in opposition territory. “As we move on, sometimes we may even fumble the ball,” said King, “but for God's sake, recover it. And then we will move on down the field.”

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returned on November 30 from his twelve-day mission to Jordan and Israel. The foreign ministries of both countries eagerly sought an ecumenical pilgrimage, he reported, and were making arrangements for King to preach to as many as five thousand travelers from a boat just offshore on the Sea of Galilee. Young hoped to create a peace headquarters at either Hadassah Hospital or the old Hebrew University, which still sat vacant in Jordanian territory, but cooperating officials were “scared to death” that hostilities would shut off desperately needed foreign revenue. The Young visit coincided with riots over Operation Shredder, a quick predawn raid on Palestinian militia near Hebron that turned into a pitched battle with the unexpected arrival of a Jordanian army patrol. The Israeli commander and fifteen Jordanian legionnaires were killed, with many soldiers wounded and more than a hundred homes destroyed. Undersecretary of State Katzenbach scolded Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban for a bungled cross-border provocation against the most moderate Arab head of state, King Hussein, who had kept his Patton tanks east of the Jordan River to assuage Israeli security concerns but now felt compelled by military leaders to move some of them toward Jerusalem.

King said regretfully that the threat of general war might force him to cancel his visit to the region in 1967. One host government or both would react viscerally to any statement approaching peace politics, and Young's fallback idea to emphasize religious reconciliation seemed lamely unpromising. (Hardly anyone noticed King's public appeals for the relief of Jews persecuted in the Soviet Union.) Stanley Levison thought it would take genius for any outsider to find a constructive position in the cauldron of Middle East politics. He agreed with Young that any trip should be confined to sightseeing, which would put King in the untenable position of ducking urgent problems at home to lead tourists through a war zone.

Levison fretted separately about newly transcribed copies of King's rambling self-examination at Penn Center. King himself worried from hard experience about the passages of internal criticism, and restricted distribution to avoid another round of negative news stories “hammering at black power” on his authority. That would only discredit the civil rights movement again, he figured, advertising divisions against his purpose to shape a positive alternative and let the weaknesses of black power run their natural course. Levison, the chief SCLC fund-raiser and FBI target, highlighted reservations about the transcript's pulpit style and its colloquial reference to the father of Communism. “Martin disagrees with Marx but calls him ‘brother Marx,'” Levison said on his wiretapped phone line. “I don't think that would be good for the contributors.”

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early appraisal of the 1966 Chicago civil rights movement. Bernard Lafayette told veterans they already had met key goals. Their campaign disproved theories that racial grievance in northern cities was “too subtle to dramatize,” he said, and refuted the widespread doubt that fragmented city people could be “mobilized for nonviolent direct action in the face of mass violence.” Scholars who specialized in Chicago history concluded accurately that the open housing settlement, though it put only a small dent in residential segregation, “was certainly far stronger than the settlements that had brought SCLC's Birmingham and St. Augustine campaigns to a close.” The Metropolitan Chicago Leadership Council for Open Housing, created by the agreement, remained over decades a respected coalition for stable neighborhood integration, carrying two of its many lawsuits into the U.S. Supreme Court. Chicago politicians renounced local commitments, just as Birmingham leaders had reneged on promises to integrate department store bathrooms and the police force. What sharply distinguished the movements was the disparity in their wider impact. The weaknesses of the Birmingham settlement disappeared in a rippling tide that dissolved formal segregation by comprehensive national law. The Selma campaign itself never defeated or converted Sheriff Jim Clark, but the nation democratized voting rights to make segregationists such as him relics of the past. No corresponding shift enhanced the Chicago settlement in outcome or reputation, and all its shortcomings remained an eyesore.

To cushion their loss, some movement leaders adopted the conceit that they had once bowled over opposing forces by themselves. “We should have known better,” wrote Ralph Abernathy, “than to believe that we could come to Chicago and right its wrongs with the same tactics we had used in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma.” Bayard Rustin, narrowing his framework to excuse himself along with the rest of the country, turned a jaundiced eye on his bosom friend. “I knew he had to fall on his face,” said Rustin. “Daley cut Martin Luther King's ass off.”

By the cycles of history, a period of letdown and division was perhaps inevitable to let the country absorb enormous changes mandated by the letter and spirit of equal citizenship. Cruel flukes compounded this letdown. The quest for interracial justice came of age just as the national climate turned hostile over the Vietnam War, and the movement's most distinctive tenet—nonviolent witness for democracy—nearly vanished simultaneously from public discourse. Nonviolence became passé across the spectrum. Black people discarded it like training wheels to claim the full belligerent status of regular Americans. Even stalwart practitioners like Diane Nash yearned for something stronger, doubting its reward. White people were eager to dismiss nonviolence as a church notion misplaced in national politics. Hippies made it look selfish. Many thinkers ignored what they considered an outmoded handicap suited to a phase of the race problem. Almost no one honored or analyzed the broader legacy of nonviolent citizens, and King would grow ever more lonely in his conviction that the movement offered superior leadership discipline for the whole country. To him, the decline of nonviolence magnified compound dangers inherited from “enemy thinking”—the tendency to wall off groups of people by category. In religion, enemy psychology could invert the entire moral code to make violence a holy cause. In politics, enemy psychology could subvert the promise of democracy with a hierarchy of fear, secrecy, and arbitrary command for war.

The realignment of 1966 was at once blatant and subliminal, symbolic and momentous. Its backlash feature first appeared to be no more than a balancing correction for the near extinction since 1964 of the Goldwater Republicans, the last defenders of legal segregation outside the South, but observers in subsequent decades looked on the normally obscure midterm year as a fulcrum of more lasting change toward political dominance by the heirs of Goldwater. Political scientists Earl and Merle Black traced a “Great White Switch” in partisan voting patterns across the South. Nicholas Lemann, a student of the black exodus from the South into Chicago, identified a larger reaction of potent, cumulative effect. “The beginning of the modern rise of conservatism coincided exactly with the country's beginning to realize the true magnitude and consequences of the black migration,” he wrote in 1991, adding that the influential neo-conservative movement was founded then “by former liberals who lost faith in large part over the issue of race in the North; in Irving Kristol's famous apothegm, ‘a neo-conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality,' it's not difficult to guess what color the mugger was.” In a mirror thesis, Matthew Dallek concluded his book about the rise of Ronald Reagan with a terse review of his opponent's “one crippling defect” in the 1966 election: “He was a liberal. And when Pat Brown went down, so did the philosophy that he had clung to throughout his adult life. It has never really recovered.”