Northwest Defender_1964-01-09

MAN OF THE YEAR Never Again Where He Was The jetliner left Atlanta and raced through the night toward Los Angeles. From his window seat, the black man gazed down at the shadowed outlines of the Appalachians, then leaned back against a white pillow. In the dimmed cabin light, his dark, impassive face seemed enlivened only by his big, shiny, compelling eyes. Suddenly, the plane shuddered in a pocket of severe turbu– lence. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. turned a wisp of a smile to his. com– panion and said: "I guess that\ Bir– mingham down below." It was, and the reminder of Vulcan's city set King to talking quietly of the ~vents of 1963. "In 1963," he said, there arose a great Negro disappoint– ment and disillusionment and discon– tent. It was the year of Birmingham, when the civil rights issue was im– pres~ed on the nation in a way that nothmg else before had been able to do. It was the most decisive year in the Negro's fight for equality. Never before had there been such a coalition of con– science on this issue." Symbol of Revolution. In 1963 the centennial of the Emancipation Pr~cla­ mation, that coalition of conscience in– eradicably changed the course of U .S. life. Nineteen million Negro citizens forced the nation to take stock of itself :-in the Congress as in the corporation, m factory and field and pulpit and play– ground , in kitchen and classroom. The U.S. Negro, shedding the thousand fears that have encumbered his generations, made. 1963 the year of his outcry for equality, of massive demonstrations of sit-ins and speeches and street fighting , of soul searching in the suburbs and psalm singing in the jail cells. And there was Birmingham with its bomb? and snarling dogs; its shots in the ntght and death in the streets and in the churches; its lashing tire hoses that washed hun~an beings along slip– per~ ave?ue~ wtthout washing away thetr dtgntty; tts men and women pinned to the ground by officers of the law. . All this was the Negro revolution. Bmnmgham was its main battleground, and Martm Luther King Jr., the leader of th~ ~egroes in Birmingham, became to m tlhons, black and white, in South a.nd North, the symbol of that revolu– tion -and the Man of the Year. King is in many ways the unlike– ly leader of an unlikely organization -the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a loose alliance of I00 or so. church-oriented groups. King has netther the quiet brilliance nor the sharp administrative capabilities of the N .A.A.C.P.'s Roy Wilkins. He has none of the sophistication of the National Urban League's Whitney Young Jr., la~ks .Young's experience in dealing wtth htgh echelons of the U.S. business Y. A. Tittle or George Shearing, but he can dtscourse by the hour about Thoreau, Hegel, Kant and Gandhi. King preaches endlessly about non– violence, but his protest movements of– ten lead to violence. He himself has been stabbed in the chest, and physical– ly attacked three more times; his home has been bombed three times, and he has been pitched into jail 14 times. His mail. bring? him a. daily dosage of opin– ton 111 whtch he IS by turn vilified and community. He has neither the inven– tiveness of CORE's James Farmer nor the raw militancy of SNICK's John Lewis nor the bristling wit of Author James Baldwin. He did · not make his mark in the entertainment field, where talented Negroes have long been prom– inent, or in the sciences and profes– siOI~s where Negroes .have, almost un– nottced, been coming into their own (see color pages). He earns no more money than some plumbers ($1 0,000 a year), and possesses little in the way of material things. . He presents an unimposing figure: he ts 5 ft. 7 in., weighs a heavy-chested 17 3 lbs., dresses with funereal conserva– tism (five of six suits are black as are most of his neckties). He has v~ry little sense of humor. He never heard of glorified. One letter says: 'This isn't ~ threat but a promise-your head will be blown off as sure as Christ made green apples." But another ecstatically calls htm a "Moses, sent to lead his people . ~o the. Promised Land of first– class ctttzenshtp." . Ca~,ence. Some cynics call King "De Lawd. ~e does have an upper-air way about htm, and, for a man who has earned tame wtth speeches, his meta– phors can be downright embarrassing. For Negroes, he says, "the word 'wait' has been a tranquilizing Thalidomide" giving "birth to an ill-formed infa~t of frustration ." Only by "following the cause of tender-tieartedness" can man ··matriculate into the university of eter– nal lif~.''. ~e~regation is "the adultery of an tlhctt mtercourse between injus- tice and immorality," and it "ca.nnot be cured by the Vaseline of gradualism." Y~t when he mounts the platform or pulptt, the actual words seem unim– portant. And King, by some quality of that limpid voice or by some secret of cadence, exercises control as can few oth.ers over his audiences, black or whtte. He has .proved this ability on countless occastons, ranging from the Negr~es' huge summer March on Washmg.ton to .a little meeting one re– cent Fnday mght in Gadsden, Ala. Ther.e, the exchange went like this: Kmg: I hear they are beating you! Response: Yes, yes. King: I hear they are cursino Response: Yes, yes. · 0 King: I hear they are going you~ homes and doing nasty things and beatmg you! Respome: Yes, yes. King: Some of you have knives, and I ask you to put them up. Some of you may have arms, and I ask you to put them up. Get the weapon of nonvio– lence, the breastplate of righteousness, the armor of truth, and just keep marchtng. .Few ca~ explain the extraordinary Kt~g mysttque. Yet he has an inde– scnbable capacity for empathy that is the touchstone of leadership. By deed a~d by preachment, he has stirred in hts P.eople a Christian forbearance that nounshes hope and smothers injustice. Says Atlanta's Negro Minister Ralph D. Abernathy, whom Kin" calls ·'my dearest friend ~~d cellmate;;: ·The peo– ple make Dr. Kmg great. He articulates the longings. the hopes, the aspirations of his people in a most earnest and profound manner. He is a .humble man, down to earth, honest. He has proved his commitment to Judaeo-Christian ideals. He seeks to save the nation and its soul, not just the Negro." . Angry Memories. Whatever greatness, it was thrust upon him. He was born on Jan. 15 nearly 35 years ago. at a time when the myth of the subhuman Negro flourished, and when as cultivated an observer as H. L. Mencken could write that '"the edu– cated Negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficul– ties in life, but because he is a Negro. His brain is not fitted for the higher forms of mental effort; his ideals, no matter how laboriously he is trained and sheltered, remain those of a clown." IV!encken had never met the King famtly of Atlanta. King's maternal grandfather, the Rev. A. D. Williams of Georgia's first N.A.A.c.P: lea~ers, helped organize a boycott a?amst an Atlanta newspaper that had dtsparaged Negro voters. His preacher father was in the forefront of civil rights battles aimed at securing equal salaries for Negro teachers and the abolition of Jim Crow elevators in the Atlanta courthouse. As a boy, Martin Luther King Jr. suffe~ed. t~ose. cumulative experiences m dtscnmmatton that demoralize and outrage human dignity. He still recalls the curtains that were used on the din– ing cars of trains to separate white from black. "I was very young when I .had my first experience in sitting be– hm? the cur!ain," he says. "I felt just as tf a curiam had come down across my whole life. The insult of it J will never _forget." On another occasion, he and hts schoolteacher were riding a bus from Macon to Atlanta when the driver ord.ered them to give up their seats to whtte passengers. "When we didn't mov.e right away, the driver started curs!ng us out and calling us black sons of bttches. J decided not to move at all hut my teacher pointed out that w~ must ~hey the .law. So we got up and stood m the atsle the whole 90 miles to Atlanta. It was a night I'll never forget. I don't think J have ever been so deeply angry in my life." Ideals & Technique. Raised in the warmth of a tightly knit family. King developed from his earliest years a raw– nerved sensitivity that bordered on self– destruction. Twice, before he was 13. he tried to commit suicide. Once his brother, "A. D.," accidentally knocked his grandmother unconscious when he slid down a banister. Martin thought she was dead, and in despair ran to a second-floor window and jumped out -only to land unhurt. He did the same thing, with the same result, on the day his grandmother died. A bright student, he skipped through high school and at 15 entered Atlanta's Negro Morehouse College. His father wanted him to study for the ministry. King himself thought he wanted medi– cine or the law. "I had doubts that religion was intellectually respectable. I revolted against the emotionalism of Negro religion, the shouting and the stamping. I didn't understand it and it embarrassed me." At Morehouse, King searched for "some intellectual basis for a social philosophy." He read and reread Thoreau's essay, Civil Disobe– dience, concluded that the ministry was the only framework in which he could properly position his growing ideas on social protest. At Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa., King built the underpin– nings of his philosophy.· Hegel and Kant impressed him, but a lecture on Gandhi transported him, sent him foraging insa– tiably into Gandhi's books. "From my background," he says, "I gained my reg– ulating Christian ideals. From Gandhi I learned my operational technique." Montgomery. The first big test King's philosophy-or of his operating technique-came in 1955, after he had married a talented young named Coretta Scott and ~N •an.ta -1 pastorate of the Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery, Ala. On Dec. 1 of that year, a seamstress named Rosa Parks boarded a Mont– gomery bus and took a seat. As the bus continued along its route, picking up more passengers, the Negroes aboard rose on the driver's orders to give their seats to white people. When the driver told Mrs. Parks to get up, she refused. "I don't really know why I wouldn't move," she said later. "There ~asl no plot o~ plan at all. I was just ttred from shopping. My feet hurt." She was arrested and fined $10. For some reason, that small incident triggered the frustrations of Montgom– ery's Negroes, who for years had bent subserviently beneath the prejudices of the white community. Within hours. the Negroes were embarked upon a bus boycott that was more than 99% ef– fectiv.e, almost ruined Montgomery's bus lme. The boycott committee soon beca~e .the IV!ontgomery Improvement Assocta.twn, wtt~ Martin Luther King Jr. as ~res!dent. Hts leadership was more tnsptratwnal than administrative; he is, as. an observer says, "more at home wtth. a co~ception than he is with the details of tis application." King's home was bombed, and when his enraged people seemed ready to take to the streets in a riot of protest, he con– trolled t~em with his calm preaching <;Jf nonvwlence. King became world– famous (TIME cover, Feb. 18, 1957) and in less than a year the Suprem~ Court upheld an earlier order forbidding J tm Crow seating in Alabama buses." Albany. Montgomery was one of the first great battles won by the Negro in the South, and for a while after it was won everything seemed anticlimactic to Ktng. When the sit-ins and freedom– n~le , movements gained momentum, Ktng s S.C.L.C. helped organize and support them. But King somehow did not se<:n: very ef~kient, and his apparent l~ck of tmagmatwn was to bring him to hts lowest ebb in the Negro movement. In December 1961, King joined a mass protest demonstration in Albany, Ga., was arrested, and dramatically declared that he would stay in jail until Albany consented to. desegregate its public fa– ctltttes.. But JUSt two days after his ar– res t, Ktng cam e out on bail. The Alba– ny moveme.nt collapsed, and King was · btt terly cnttctz ed for helping to kill it. To,~ay h~ admits mistakes in Albany. Lookmg back over it," he says, ''I'm sorry I was bailed out. I didn't under– stancl at the time what was happening. We thought that the victory had been won. When we got out, we discovered tt was all a hoax. We had lost a real op– portuntty. to redo Albany, and we lost an tntttattve that we never regained." But Kmg also learned a lesson in Al– bany. "We attacked the political power structure mstead of the economic pow– structure," he says. "You don't win agatnst a political power structure ~here you don't have the votes. But you can wm agamst an economic power structure when you have the economic power to make the difference between a merchant's profit and loss." Birmingham. It was while he was in his p~st-Albany eclipse that King began lannmg for hts most massive assault on barricades of segregation. The tar- ''' The desegregation order still holds, but der Montgomery Negroes have since re– to a .somewhat loose pattern of seg– . seatmg, rarely, for example, will a nder and a Negro sit beside each other. get: Birmingham, citadel of blind, die– hard segregation. King's lieutenant, Wyatt Tee Walker, has .explained the theory that governs King's planning: "We've got to have a crisis to bargain wit~. To take a. moderate approach, hopmg to get white help, doesn't work. They nail you to the cross, and it saps the enthusiasm of the followers. You've got to have a crisis." The Negroes made their crisis but it was no spur-of-the-moment m~tter. King himself went to Birmingham to conduct workshops in nonviolent tech– niques. He recruited 200 people who were willing to go to jail for the cause, caref.ully pl~nned his strategy in ten meetmgs wtth local Negro leaders. Then, declaring that Birmingham is the "most thoroughly segregated big city in the U.S.," he announced early in 1963 that he would lead demonstrations there until "~~araoh lets .God's people go." Awattlng Kmg m Birmingham was Publtc Safety Commissioner Theophilus Eugene ("Bull") Connor, a man who was to become a symbol of police bru– tality yet. who, in fa<;t, merely reflected the ~eethmg hatreds in a city where acts of viOlence were as common as chitlins and ham hocks. As it happened , Bull Connor was running for mayor against a relative moderate, Albert Boutwell. To avoid giving campaign fuel to Con– nor, King waited until after the April 2 election. Between Jan. 16 and March 29, he launched himself into a whirlwind SJ?:aking tour, made 28 speeches in 16 ctttes across the nation. Moving into Birmingham in the first week of April, King and his group be– gan putting their plans to work. Bull Connor, who had lost the election but to relinquish power sent his spies into the Negro community to seek information. Fearing that their phones were tapped, King and his friends worked up a code. He became "J.F.K.," Ralph Abernathy "Dean Rusk," Bir– mingham Preacher Fred Shuttlesworth "Bull," and Negro Businessman John Drew "Pope John." Demonstrators were called "baptismal candidates," and the whole operation was labeled "Proj– ect C"-for "Confrontation." . The protest began. Day after day, Negro men, women and children in their Sunday best paraded cheerfully downtown to be hauled off to jail for demonstrating. The sight and sound of so many people filling his jail so tri– umphantly made Bull Connor nearly apoplectic. He arrested them at lunch counters and in the streets, wherever they gathered. Still they came, rank on rank. At length, on Tuesday, May 7, 2,500 Negroes poured out of church, surged through the police lines and swarmed downtown. Connor furiously ordered the fire hoses turned on. Armed with clubs, cops beat their way into the crowds. An armored car menacingly bulldozed the milling throngs. Fire hoses swept them down the streets. In all the Birmingham demonstrations result~d in the jailing of more than 3,300 Negroes, including King himself. The Response. The Negroes had cre– ated their crisis-and Connor had made it a success. "The civil rights movement," said President Kennedy in a meeting later with King, "owes Bull Connor as much as it owes Abra– ham Lincoln." That was at best an oversimplification; nevertheless, be– cause of Conr.or, the riots seared the front pages of the world press, out– raged millions of people. Everywhere, King's presence, in the pulpit or at rallies, was demanded. But while he preached nonviolence, violence spread. "Freedom Walker" William Moore was shot and killed in Alabama. Mississippi's N.A.A.C.P. Leader Medgar Evers was assassmated outside his home. There was violence in Jackson, Miss., in Cam– bridge, Md., in Danville, Va. In Bir– mingham, later in the year a church bombing killed four Negr~ Sunday– school children, while two other young– sters were shot and killed the same day. ~hose events awakened long-slum– benng Negro resentments, from which a fresh Negro urgency drew strength. For the first time. a unanimity of pur- rontinuerl