Parting the Waters (47 page)

 

King himself was discouraged after the Institute on Nonviolence. At the SCLC's annual convention, he went before his board with a straightforward admission that the Crusade for Citizenship had failed. Fund-raising and registration totals fell dismally short of the goals announced at the outset, eighteen months earlier. “Honesty impels us to admit that we have not really scratched the surface in this area,” said King. His diagnosis was that the SCLC and the NAACP had paralyzed each other; his remedy was to call a regional meeting in the hope of reaching cooperative agreements with the South's NAACP chapters and other local groups in voter registration. In effect, he wanted to bypass the NAACP national office, but realists at the meeting pointed out that the plan would never escape Wilkins' attention.

In desperation, King looked to public relations. Complaining that “the SCLC has not been publicized through the press or otherwise,” he recommended hiring a professional publicist for a minimum period of six months. The person he had in mind was Bayard Rustin, but he did not mention Rustin's name at first, for fear of rekindling the sort of controversy that had driven Rustin out of Montgomery during the boycott. King knew well that it would be difficult to sell a homosexual ex-Communist to a group of Baptist preachers, and he wanted first to win approval of the idea itself. The assembled ministers voted to begin the search for a publicity assistant, and otherwise they respectfully discussed King's ideas into limbo. Not long afterward,
Jet
magazine published an unsigned gossip item saying that “the clergy-based Dixie vote campaign has almost come to a halt.” It mentioned the departure of Tilley, the pitiful registration totals as measured against the SCLC's announced goals, and other signs of failure that King himself had just acknowledged to his colleagues. “Meanwhile,” concluded
Jet
, “the NAACP quietly has expanded its southern vote registration force and is marking up gains in many states. The moral: headlines won't do it.”

Here was the Wilkins line on King in concentrated form, made public. The words stung King so sharply that he called
Jet
's Washington bureau chief to register a strong protest. A week later, he steamed into an SCLC meeting with a list of proposals designed to “counteract some false ideas that have been disseminated.” Nearly all of them looked to the field of public relations. He called for a press release stating that the SCLC was “expanding its activities,” a newsletter “mailed to at least five thousand persons” that would say the same thing and appeal for funds, and, “after prayerful and serious consideration,” he recommended Bayard Rustin by name for the public relations job. The crisis at the SCLC was so pressing that King dispensed with the usual politesse and bluntly urged his colleagues to take “the risk.” Recognizing the “possible perils involved,” he assured them that Rustin would “quietly resign” in the event of embarrassing public reaction.

In addition, King recommended that yet another SCLC peace-seeking mission be dispatched to NAACP headquarters in New York to “clear up what appears to be seeds of dissention [
sic
] being sown by persons in the top echelon in the NAACP.” King wanted to bargain with Wilkins, but the SCLC preachers were quick to point out that he would reduce his leverage if he hired Rustin, whose background was well known to Wilkins. As always, it seemed, one of King's goals was hostage to another. The recommendations were postponed indefinitely—at least until Rustin returned from his latest excursion, a political caravan deep into French colonial Africa.

 

Limits finally overtook King at the end of the decade. He decided to apply himself directly to strengthening the SCLC, which had been floundering for nearly three years. Almost inevitably, the decision required him to move to SCLC headquarters in Atlanta. This meant the elimination of months of aggregate time spent waiting at the Atlanta airport during layovers. Almost anything moving in or out of the South had to go through Atlanta, and King was no exception. Of course, Atlanta also meant Ebenezer and Daddy King. The elder King, just now turning sixty, had never ceased to remind his son that he looked forward to his return to the pulpit that had been in the family throughout the twentieth century.

King knew that to return to Atlanta without returning to Ebenezer would grieve his father beyond repair. He also knew that Ebenezer's membership was falling off—partly, he suspected, because Daddy King was getting tired and was taking the congregation for granted, often preparing his sermons on the church platform during the services. King's younger brother was just leaving a stint as assistant pastor there, having grown out of his rebellion enough to enter the ministry but not enough to tolerate the daily supervision of Daddy King. King believed that he, unlike A.D., could make a symbiotic co-pastorate work. Daddy King could continue to manage the church; King could draw large new crowds. Indeed, the greater part of the family burden caused by a move to Atlanta would seem to fall on Coretta. She would become co-First Lady of Ebenezer with her mother-in-law, and would live in dependence on Daddy King, who had vociferously opposed King's marriage to her.

For some months, King had been cajoling Abernathy to go with him to Atlanta to become the SCLC's full-time executive director. Abernathy resisted. He loved his job at historic First Baptist, and he liked the prospect of succeeding King in Montgomery as president of the MIA. Most of all, he could not bear to face life in Atlanta without a pulpit. No matter how many times King guaranteed that he could preach somewhere in Atlanta every Sunday—and might even make more money in guest fees than as a permanent pastor—Abernathy protested that it would never be the same. He wanted to follow King almost anywhere, he said, if he could figure out a way to remain captain of a ship.

King finally lost patience. “Make up your mind,” he said sharply. “I can't wait on you forever.”

Abernathy was hurt. “You've never talked to me that way before, Michael,” he said. (He and King had fallen into a habit of calling each other by their “real” first names in private matters.) It was unfair, Abernathy complained, to expect him to leave the pulpit when King himself was planning to move to Ebenezer.

King seemed to be overcome at once by remorse. After a long silence he said, “David, I told you that I remember watching my daddy walk the benches when I was a little boy.”

“I know,” Abernathy said quietly. “Walking the benches” referred to ministers who leaped from the pulpit in mid-sermon to preach ecstatically as they danced up and down the pews, literally stepping over the swooning bodies in the congregation. Abernathy knew that King considered it the most vaudevillian, primitive aspect of his heritage.

“He walked the benches,” King repeated, in humiliation and wonder. “He did it to feed and educate his family. Now I've got to help him. Don't you see that?”

“I know, Michael, I know,” said Abernathy. He protested no more, but neither did he agree to go to Atlanta. When the difficulty passed and they regained their humor, King gave him two weeks to decide.

King's own decision, while wrenching in its formation, was carried out with the utmost formality. He called R. D. Nesbitt, the deacon who first had found him as a student six years earlier, eating a plate of pork chops at Daddy King's house. The two of them sat on the front porch of the Dexter parsonage as King told Nesbitt he would resign on the last Sunday of November, effective the last Sunday in January, 1960. In making the announcement from the Dexter pulpit on Sunday, November 29, King tried first to heap upon himself all the burdens of fame and responsibility, saying that he had been doing the work of “five or six people,” traveling, speaking, laboring under the demands not only of Montgomery but of the entire nation, suffering “the general strain of being known.” By always “giving, giving, giving, and not stopping to retreat,” he said, he had reduced himself almost to a “physical and psychological wreck.” King exposed in himself all the grand, raw self-pity of the unpolished martyr. Two days later, he revealed the flip side of his mood in an expansive declaration for the press. “The time has come for a broad, bold advance of the southern campaign for equality,” he said. “…I am convinced that the psychological moment has arrived…. We must train our youth and adult leaders in the techniques of social change through nonviolent resistance. We must employ new methods of struggle involving the masses of the people.”

That same Tuesday, Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver responded publicly to reports that King was moving to Atlanta. “Wherever M. L. King, Jr., has been there has followed in his wake a wave of crimes including stabbing, bombings, and inciting of riots, barratry, destruction of property and many others,” Vandiver declared. “For these reasons, he is not welcome to Georgia. Until now, we have had good relations between the races.”

King worried about the diplomacy of his return to Atlanta, the South's most visible and self-conscious city. Atlanta was perhaps the only metropolis in America where the members of an enlightened white oligarchy spoke frankly and easily of themselves as “the power structure.” The Negro leaders did pretty much the same in their own sphere. Consequently, King knew that his every move was under close scrutiny.
Constitution
editor Ralph McGill said that Atlanta whites were on guard, like “citizens of medieval walled cities who heard that the great plague was coming.” King was returning to the city of “Sweet Auburn” Avenue, Negro banks, and the comfortable homes spreading out through the West Side beyond the Atlanta University complex. His parents had made the move to the West Side, and were now enduring the long commutes across town to and from Ebenezer, but King decided to move his family into a small rented home on the less fashionable East Side, not far from the church. This raised some eyebrows, as did his old 1954 Pontiac, and when word spread through Negro Atlanta that King was thinking of buying a house in the barely respectable Vine City area, which was dotted with slum housing, there was talk that the Kings were too conspicuously humble. They did no lavish entertaining. King drew a token salary of only $1 a year from the SCLC and a middling $6,000 from Ebenezer. His standard of living was perceived to be jarringly beneath his stature in the world.

King told Negro reporters that he was not coming to take over the Negro leadership but to “render any assistance” he could. In this and other ways, he downplayed his homecoming in order to placate Atlanta's established Negro leaders, most of whom had known him as a small boy. “I grew up with those people,” he told an SCLC colleague. “They'll eat me alive if I make a mistake.” But his sensitivities about what he called bourgeois living standards ran deep. The toddler who wanted to “get me some big words” was the same one whose earliest memories were of bread lines in the Depression. He was ambivalent—a humble prince. He stopped to chat amiably with the poorest people he encountered on the street, but he had the SCLC issue a special press release announcing that he had been invited to speak in the chapel of Harvard University. Coretta shared his political values, but she brought her cook with her from Montgomery, and her early moves in the new city established her as adept in the way of the Atlanta aristocracy. To find a babysitter and errand-runner in the new town, she called the wife of the Spelman College president and asked her to send over a suitable student.

King's shift back home to Atlanta marked a transition between decades. In Nashville, on successive Saturdays, James Lawson sent a dozen of his most disciplined student Gandhians, John Lewis among them, into the segregated areas of downtown department stores. Their refusal to move on as ordered caused some disruption, but their unfailing politeness and the novelty of their method reduced the tension to about the level of a party-crashing. The students returned to Lawson's workshops for evaluations of their test demonstrations.

In San Francisco, at the annual convention of the AFL-CIO, A. Philip Randolph spoke from the floor three times in a single day, each time seeking action against official segregation within member unions. This was one time too many for AFL-CIO president George Meany. “Who the hell appointed you the guardian of all the Negroes in America?” he shouted from the podium. The affront stimulated Randolph to organize a Negro labor federation outside the AFL-CIO in order to bring pressure on Meany.

At the White House, President Eisenhower brooded about the property confiscations and other anti-American actions taken by the revolutionary government in Cuba. “Castro begins to look like a madman,” he fumed to his aides, and he briefly entertained a plan to strangle Cuba with a naval blockade. As always, however, Eisenhower kept his alarm to himself. Having used his avuncular patience and his military steadiness many times over the past decade to muffle crises that threatened renewed world war, he was not about to change over a small island. Similarly, he restrained his burning fury against those he considered responsible for creating an atmosphere of feverish demand to spend more money on weapons. The demand had more to do with greed and anxiety than with military judgment, he believed, and was subverting both politics and military professionalism. Entering his last year as President, he denounced as “damn near treason” the behavior of military officers who lobbied through politicians and reporters for weapons that had been rejected with the government.

With Stanley Levison, King confronted the last hurdles blocking the move to Atlanta: nettlesome tax audits by both the IRS and the state of Alabama. An auditor ordered King to prove that the money that passed through his bank account in excess of his declared income was not taxable—a challenge that hit King's weak spot. Having routed all expense monies and donations through his own accounts, he found it almost impossible to substantiate those sums as legitimate deductions. He was especially hard pressed to satisfy the Alabama auditor, who refused to accept donations to the SCLC or the MIA as nontaxable contributions. King found it easier to pay under protest than to fight. He settled with the IRS for nearly $500 in back taxes, and his parting gift to Alabama was a check for $1,667.83.