King: A Biography

10. The Fire Next Time

10 The Fire Next TIme Negroes sweet and gentle, Meek, humble and kind, Beware the day They change their minds. LANGSTON HUGHES THE PERIOD BETWEEN THE SELMA and the Chicago campaigns is an amorphous one. SCLC Newsletter reported a Midwestern People-to-People tour, an appearance at the White House, an SCLC plenary convention, European awards and speaking engagements, rallies-a maelstrom of activity for which not even the excitement of Martin's rhetoric would overcome the tedium of narration. Beneath this explosive activity was that impregnable region of Martin's psyche that brooded, pondered, and conceived in isolation. Now that the lunch-counter era was closing, he was feeling his way to new positions. There were four issues that he needed to consider carefully: (1) the growing conviction among whites that the blacks, with federal backing, were moving too rapidly; (2) the fierce expostulations of black militants that racial progress had not only been too slow but was being subtly manipulated by powerful whites; (3) practical programs to deal with urban and, largely, Northern black poverty; and (4) the extent to which the nexus between federal assistance to the poor and spending for the Vietnam war could profitably be exposed, 297 King Each offered dangerously unfamiliar terrain for the SCLC, and, in the interest of dealing effectively with the three other dilemmas, most of his advisers argued that Martin ought to forego the role-advisable ideally for a Nobel laureate but disastrous practically-of spokesman for peace in Southeast Asia. It was true, certainly, Martin knew, that most middleclass blacks showed little inclination to criticize the war at that time. He continued to explore this fourfold challenge in the months ahead. In April, 1965, he addressed the New York Bar Association, forcefully defending the right of the oppressed to disobey "unjust" laws. The predicate of law in a democracy, he reminded the audience, was that of representative sanction of legal obligations. Black Americans had not been asked their opinions of voting restrictions or restrictive covenants. They had the right, therefore, to withhold their obedience. Martin reminded the temperamentally conservative lawyers of their historic origins as advocates of justice, dwelt on his own "maladjustment" to segregation, religious bigotry, and the "madness of militarism," and, in a half-serious vein, urged the formation of an "International Association for the Ad· vancement of Creative Maladjustment." In Boston, he deplored the living conditions of the black poor in the Roxbury ghetto, warned of the seething discontent in America's enclaves of urban poverty, and condemned nuclear atmospheric contamination. Time gleefullv seized upon this anachronism to point out that, had Dr. King kept abreast of the news, he would have known that the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty had long since anticipated his alarms. Governor Volpe of Massachusetts was obviously anxious to acquit himself faultlessly during Martin's visit, and, in addition to proposing a Martin Luther King Day, he invited his prickly guest to address the state legislature. "\Vell, it may be that you cannot legislate morality," Martin drawled to the legislators, aware of the incipient Northern resistance to further civil The Fire Next Time 299 rights legislation, "but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrict him from lynching me, and I think that is pretty important also." Before leaving Massachusetts, he led eighteen thousand people to Boston Common in a driving rain to deliver a forty-minute speech on racial injustice. Attacks upon Martin and the SCLC were not new. Success invited dissension, and Selma, like St. Augustine, was a success of perspective only. For those to whom parades in the name of dignity and the meliorism of federal assistance were contemptuously pithy achievements, Selma was a cruel hoax. Pettus Bridge maddened them, and the helicopter-escorted march to Montgomery demeaned the Movement, they believed . The benefit of the doubt, which they had allowed Martin before Selma (influenced, certainly, by the financial power of the SCLC), was rapidly reaching its term. Time, Progressive, and the SNCC-influenced Atlanta Enquirer suggested , with varying degrees of malice and certainty, that the militants and the SCLC were verging on an irreparable rift. SNCC and the SCLC made an announcement on April 30 that was an obvious attempt to quash such rumors. \Vith Harry Belafonte, Jim Forman and Martin called a press conference in Atlanta to announce that their two organizations...