Toward Freedom Land: The Long Struggle for Racial Equality in America

Martin Luther King Jr.: Seeing Lazarus, 1967–1968

197 Martin Luther King Jr. Seeing Lazarus, 1967–1968 I had long thought of writing a biography of Martin Luther King Jr. Friends repeatedly dissuaded me. What civil rights historians favored, in the main, were social rather than political studies, books that focused on ordinary folk, not leaders; women, not men; revolutionaries, not reformers; grassroots organizations, not national ones; “Black Power,” not the “beloved community” of black and white together; and individual or community empowerment, not legal victories from the federal government. Nevertheless, with the advice and encouragement of my friend and publisher Thomas LeBien, I decided to compose a meaningful and readable account of King’s career for this generation. If this meant going against the tide, so be it. I tried to depict the man in all his humanness, not as an icon. I sought, as well, to depict King’s core religious beliefs as the key to his politics, to link his greatness to his rhetoric , to indicate the long-standing radicalism of his calling, and, above all, to emphasize his relevance to today’s world rather than as a dreamer frozen in time at the 1963 March on Washington. The words describing King’s commitment to nonviolence and desegregation just flowed out of me. I had never before written anything so easily or that gave me such pleasure. This essay is excerpted from “Seeing Lazarus, 1967–68,” chapter 8 in Harvard Sitkoff, King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008). Reprinted by permission. Grief would shadow King’s spirit in the last year and a half of his earthly journey. In the fall of 1966, Stokely Carmichael reaped headlines , and political havoc, by increasingly portraying Black Power as a bitter rejection of both white society and King’s nonviolence and by depicting the score of ghetto riots that summer as revolutionary vio- 198 Toward Freedom Land lence to overthrow a reactionary society. Meanwhile, capitalizing on the backlash against racial violence and “crime in the streets,” Republicans , many of them right-wing conservatives, replaced forty-seven Democratic incumbents in the House and three in the Senate. At the same time, King watched the war in Vietnam expand ominously, multiplying the numbers of Americans shipped home in body bags— 16 percent of them blacks in 1966—and causing appropriations for the War on Poverty to be slashed by a third. King despaired of a “white society more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.” As never before, Coretta thought him morose. He smoked constantly and overate heedlessly. His depression, she recalled, was “greater than I had ever seen before.” He brooded that “people expect me to have answers and I don’t have any answers.” Worried that Black Power had made him irrelevant, he feared a looming race war. Unlike most mainstream civil rights leaders, however, King did not jump on the anti–Black Power bandwagon. Instead, he decried the “white backlash” and insisted that “America’s greatest problem and contradiction is that it harbors 35 million poor at a time when its resources are so vast that the existence of poverty is an anachronism.” As no other public figure, black or white, he decried the socioeconomic conditions that underlay the urban riots, insisting on a fundamental restructuring of the American system. He called for mass protests until the government provided a guaranteed annual income of $4,000 to every American adult. He proposed that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organize “the poor in a crusade to reform society in order to realize economic and social justice.” King mused to his aides that the only way to get the nation to address poverty might be to get large numbers of very poor people to march on Washington. “We ought to come in mule carts, in old trucks, any kind of transportation people can get their hands on. People ought to come to Washington, sit down if necessary in the middle of the street and say ‘We are here; we are poor; we don’t have any money; you have made us this way; you keep us down this way; and we’ve come to stay until you do something about it.’” “There are few things more thoroughly sinful than economic injustice,” King thundered to a church convention in Texas. Lay- Martin Luther King Jr. 199 ing bare his troubled soul, he vouched that “Christianity has always insisted...