From "Nixonland": The Santa Clausification of Martin Luther King

Since Spencer Ackerman [1] and Henry Farrell [2] so generously bring it up, here are some portions of NIXONLAND [3] that push back against the conservatives' excrescent Santa Clausification [4] of Martin Luther King.

Here we are in spring of 1967. I try to put the reader in the mind of a terrified official worrying in which city the next horrific race riot might break out.

[Perhaps] Louisville, where the governor called out the National Guard and the mayor defiantly pronounced that "The Kentucky Derby will be run," despite threats by militants to shut it down if an open housing law wasn't passed. Martin Luther King arrived. Heckled by a mob of whites, he had his driver pull to the curb for an impromptu sermon. "God has given us an opportunity," he began--and was interrupted with the interjection "God has put a curse on the Negroes!" then saw his car slammed with a rock.

Here we are about about ten months later, in March:

Martin Luther King was shuttling in and out of Memphis in support of striking garbage workers. Or, as Governor Buford Ellington put it, "training 3,000 people to start riots." 500 Tennessee citizens signed a complaint asking a U.S. district judge to suspend Governor Ellington's frightening plans for National Guard training exercises that would simulate riots in black neighborhoods. Ellington huffed in return: "When we say we are going to train the guard to protect the lives of people and their property, there is a big hullabaloo about it" from "people who would like to see riots." A third of the New York Times's dispatch on the controversy focused on the fact that one of the 500 petitioners had been arrested for possession of marijuana.

The 1968 civil rights bill moved to the House. Minority leader Gerald Ford announced he would fight the open housing provision. Southern governors, ignoring outright a 1967 decision of the Fifth Circuit articulating an "affirmative duty...to bring about an integrated, unitary school system in which there are no Negro schools and no white schools--just schools," were served a deadline by the dreaded Harold Howe II: comply by September of 1969, or else. The California Democratic Council adopted a pro-Gene McCarthy resolution at their annual convention. The keynote speaker--Martin Luther King--refused to indicate a preference for McCarthy or RFK, but made it clear he opposed the incumbent: "Flame throwers in Vietnam fan the flames in our cities--I don't think the two matters can be separated."

The next morning, a Saturday, the President popped around to the Sheraton Park Hotel for a breakfast speech to the National Alliance of Businessmen that all but accused his critics [like King] of being against the troops:

"Earlier this week in the East Room of the White House, I awarded the Medal of Honor to two of our bravest fighting Marines....

"As your President, I want to say this to you today: We must meet our commitments in the world and in Vietnam. We shall and we are going to win.

"To meet the needs of these fighting men, we shall do whatever is required."

And here we lead up to the fateful April:

...The President's Gallup approval rating was 35 percent. And that was before the riot that accompanied Martin Luther King to Tennessee.

King had been reluctant to involve himself in the sanitation workers' labor grievances in Memphis. He was planning the campaign of his life and was frazzled beyond recognition. He'd first thought of the idea in the autumn after the agonizing 1966 Chicago campaign: a general strike of the poor in the nation's capital. "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." What his exertions had already won--the right to vote; the right to a lunch counter hamburger--had long ago begun to feel to him a mockery. Americans still remained indifferent, perhaps even more than before, to the abject racialized privation in their midst. He said the Kerner Report showed how "the lives, the incomes, the well-being of poor people everywhere in America are plundered by our economic system." He now frankly called himself a socialist.
The plan, as it shaped up through early '68, was for the initial assault on D.C. to come on Eastertide: one hundred leaders lobbying for a government jobs or guaranteed income program. That failing, 3,000 destitute Americans would "tent in" on the Mall. If that didn't get results King imagined a "massive outpouring of hundreds of thousands of persons" the weekend of June 15. Civil disobedience had never been attempted on such a scale. To transform what he now called "a sick, neurotic nation" would require disruption "as dramatic, as dislocative, as attention-getting as the riots without destroying life or property." "The city will not function," he'd told reporters after his testimony to the Kerner Commission. He spoke of similar demonstrations nationwide: "We got to go for broke this time."

The notion that Martin Luther King might be seeding violent insurrection became an conservative article of faith. And in Memphis, where garbage piled up in the streets, talk of anarchy was the city's daily bread.

The striking garbage workers were all Negro. Mayor Henry Loeb referred to them as "my Negroes." He spoke pridefully of his city's "plantation" race relations. During one of the garbagemen's first marches conservative black ministers, the kind who'd been scorning Martin Luther King ever since Montgomery in 1956, were among those tear gassed. Now, they were ready to fight, begging Dr. King to come. He squeezed in an appearance March 18 between recruiting stops for the Poor People's Campaign. He was discouraged, tired, despairing, facing indifference and open avowals of violence everywhere he turned: his life's work, adding up to shambles. The thought of further riots terrified him: "They'll treat us like they did our Japanese brothers and sisters in World War II. They'll throw us into concentration camps." But the energy of this little movement in Memphis inspirited him. He decided to come to lead a mass march there ten days later, March 28.

He was an hour late to the point of disembarkation. The crowd was restless: the rumor was that the Memphis cops had killed a high school student. Everyone knew the police were eager to keep youngsters out of the march; a gang of young militants that went by the pacific name of the "Invaders" had been trying to seize control of the local movement.

The march stepped off, King in the lead, arm in arm with two other ministers.

The procession snaked from Beale Street onto Main. A commotion developed. Those heavy wooden pikes that held protest signs, like the ones New Left militants used to battle MPs at the Pentagon in 1967, were being used to stove in Beale Street shop windows. Street people started looting. What had been rumor became a fact: police shot a 16-year-old boy, claiming he'd attacked them with a knife.

What happened next was the lead story in the next day's New York Times. "Dr. King was whisked away from the march.... He was reportedly taken to a motel and could not be reached immediately. His office in Atlanta also declined to comment.... The destruction that broke out at various points along the march is expected to raise more questions about Dr. King's projected crusade in Washington next week." This was all the proof some needed: the appearance of Dr. Martin Luther King brought forth riots. Or, at least, couldn't stop them.

He led another procession the next day. It was ringed this time by 4,000 National Guardsmen. The garbagemen known locally on their rounds as "walking buzzards" marched wearing placards reading "I Am A Man." For each one, a helmeted guardmsan stood planted a yard or so away, rifle pointed at the ready at their heads.

King insisted, "We are fully determined to go to Washington. We feel it is an absolute necessity.... Riots are here. Riots are part of the ugly atmosphere. I cannot guarantee that riots will not take place this summer. I can only guarantee that our demonstration will not be violent." Senator Byrd, chair of the D.C. subcommittee, called for a court order to stop him: "If this self-seeking rabble-rouser is allowed to go through with his plans here, Washington may well be treated to the same kind of violence, destruction, looting, and bloodshed." Edward Brooke, the Negro Senator, agreed. "How do you avoid assembling that many people under the inflammable conditions that exist today where one little spark--some irresponsible kid--could set it off?"

As for the President, he wondered if he was equal to history's demands. He gave a speech to to Philadelphia schoolchildren: "If our country is to survive, Lincoln said, we must realize that 'there is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.'"

The next morning, a Saturday, Johnson announced that the next night he'd give a national television address on Vietnam. Nixon's speechwriters sighed with relief: their candidate couldn't give his scheduled Vietnam speech Saturday, if the President was speaking on the war the very next day.

Sunday morning Dr. King preached at National Cathedral: "I don't like to predict violence, but if nothing is done between now and June to raise ghetto hope I feel that this summer will not only be as bad but worse than last year." Then he gave a press conference to send a chill down the President's spine: if he got no results in his Poor People's Campaign by August, he said, Democrats "will have a real awakening in Chicago"--where they would be holding their national convention to renominate Lyndon Baines Johnson. The Chicago Tribune editorialized that King claimed to be for nonviolence "while clandestinely conspiring with the most violent revolutionaries in the country." They quoted J. Edgar Hoover: King was "the most notorious liar in the country." ...

And then came...April 4. Forty years ago today.

For over a decade now Martin Luther King faced the risk of violent death every day of his life. The threats had now become so serious that the plane that bore him on his next trip to Memphis, a seething city rotting beneath fifty-days of uncollected garbage, had to be guarded overnight. The takeoff had to be delayed an extra hour nonetheless, for one more search of the baggage compartment. More people bore a murderous hatred toward him than toward any other single American. After all, hadn't the governor of Tennessee just said he was "training 3,000 people to start riots"? But this was the same man, simultaneously, towards whom more Americans bore such a love that they'd be willing to lay down their life for him. Here was a symbol of how divided the nation had become.

King spoke often of his own death, more and more often as 1968 advanced. He never did so more eloquently than the night of April 3, 1968. It was a rainy night, Biblically rainy. (Elsewhere in Tennessee, tornadoes caused five deaths.) Memphis's giant Mason Temple held two thousand people waiting eagerly to hear him speak, to hear him stir them for a planned "redemption" march five days later, to hear his guidance about what to do about the city's attempt to enjoin it. But the last time he had spoken there 14,000 had heard him, so it hardly seemed worth the candle this time. He hung back at the Lorraine Motel, where black celebrities stayed when they were in Memphis, and told his associate, Ralph Abernathy, to speak in his stead. But when Abernathy arrived at the hall the disappointment of the crowd was too palpable for him to bear. These humble garbage men were risking their lives for justice, and had practically risked their lives in a calamitous thunderstorm to get the Masonic Temple. He called Dr. King and begged him not to let them down, so King ventured forth into that awful black night, and told the rapt audience of the time he had been nearly stabbed to death in 1958, and of the flight he had just taken from Atlanta to Memphis, and how the pilot had announced for the entire plane to hear that the reason for their delayed departure was the bomb threat against the most famous passenger.

"And then I got into Memphis," he said. "And some began to say the threats—or talk about the threats—that were out, what would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers.

(What threats? Well, for one, a black merchant later testified that he heard a white businessman bark into a phone, "shoot the son of a bitch on the balcony," and mention $5000.)

"Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now.

"Because I've been to the mountaintop," he said, and the two thousand communicants clustered at the front of the cavernous hall began cheering, to the relief of King's associates, because the speech heretofore had not been up to his standards.

"And I don't mind," he said, as people started rising and shouting in waves, which upon their abeyance brought a quiet reflection.

"Like anybody I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will."

And the energy in the room began once more to crescendo, as a great preacher led his flock to transcendence.
"And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain.

"And I've looked over, and I have s-e-e-e-e-e-n, the promised land.

"And I may not get there with you, but I want you to know, tonight, that we as a people will get to the promised land! So I'm happy tonight! I'm not worried about any-thing! I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glor-y of the coming of the Lord."

He stumbled, spent, into Abernathy's embrace. This movement would make a way where there had been no way. They would march; they would win. The party repaired to the Lorraine Motel for the next day's work of planning, negotiating, exhorting, organizing, shuttling back and forth from each others' rooms. Here was a strange American thing: that the most distinguished Memphis hostelry for visiting Negroes—Count Basie; Martin Luther King—was a humble motel, but such were the wages of segregation, and so it was that, every time he wanted to go from one from one room to another, the most hunted man in America had to do so traversing the rain-slicked outdoor motel catwalks.

Across the street in a flophouse next to a fire station, a two-bit drifter and petty criminal named James Earl Ray thrust his .30-06 Remington through a bathroom window. King emerged from his room for dinner, chatted up some of his associates, hangers-on, admirers, made the acquaintance of a member of the band that was to play for them that night. The shot rang out....

I'm so, so proud to be a historian today, and to be able to do my own little part to wrench Martin Luther King's awesome radicalism out of the the blood-crusted arms of grubby clowns like David Brooks [5] who dare try to embrace him.