King: A Life

In October 1957, the Kings welcomed their first son, Martin Luther King III (called Marty). Their family embodied the rise of a new Black professional class, although Coretta appeared to have regrets about how motherhood was limiting her own career options. King drew the attention of the Nation of Islam, the Black nationalist organization, which, without naming King specifically, excoriated his Christianity only a few weeks after he gave a speech near their Chicago headquarters. In June 1958, King and other leaders met with President Eisenhower to press for more federal action to enforce the Brown decision, albeit with little success. After a brief vacation, King met the writer James Baldwin, who upon hearing him preach marveled at the “joy achieved by people who have ceased to delude themselves about an intolerable situation […] and who now know that they can change their situation, if they will” (200).

For help writing a book about the Montgomery boycotts, King enlisted the help of Stanley Levison, who had been previously active with the American Communist Party. He was open to King about his past, and King assured him that he now believed in God. Their friendship notwithstanding, Levison was a harsh critic, and so King again plagiarized from other theologians. King also starred in a comic book called Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story (which would inspire many young activists, including John Lewis). In September 1958, King attended court to support an assault charge filed by Ralph Abernathy, but was denied entry and then arrested. Two weeks later, he was signing copies of his book in Harlem when a Black woman with a history of mental illness approached him and stabbed him with a letter opener. Surviving by sheer luck, he received an outpouring of support, including from a white woman who said “I’m glad you didn’t sneeze” (206), referring to the fact that sneezing would have caused more damage to his aorta and likely killed him. The failure of violence to stop him further strengthened his commitment to nonviolence.

Recovered from the attempted assassination, King and Coretta prepared for a six-week tour abroad culminating in India, where he hoped to learn more about Gandhi and “gain a perspective on how nonviolent tactics could help America avoid the monumental failure” of failing to reckon with its own racist history (209). He further hoped that building international support, particularly among non-white people, could strengthen the civil rights movement at home. While startled by India’s urban poverty, he was heartened by its program of reparations for the so-called untouchables of India’s caste system, and this would inspire his idea for a similar program in the United States. On their way back from India, they stopped in the Holy Land, and King was deeply moved by seeing the purported site of Christ’s crucifixion. In his absence, the SCLC organization was struggling, and despite his typical reluctance to appoint female leadership, King made Ella Baker the new executive director. Yet the more fundamental problem was that King’s insistence on the inherent goodness of the American project was constantly belied by violence against Black Americans. If King failed, more radical and pessimistic voices like the Nation of Islam would step into the void.

By fall 1959, King decided that his nationwide responsibilities required him to leave Montgomery, even as these duties were leaving him visibly exhausted and tense. He still had not built anything close to a mass movement outside Montgomery, although new activists were entering the fore, most notably four students in Greensboro, North Carolina, who refused to leave a Woolworth’s after being refused service. King quickly endorsed the sit-ins and their strategy of “fill[ing] up the jailhouses” to put maximum strain on the institutions of segregation (221). The Kings settled back in Atlanta, a better organizational headquarters for the SCLC, although shortly after the move the state of Alabama issued an arrest warrant against King for allegedly falsifying tax returns. He continued to contribute to magazines, including a piece where he announced that war was never justified—a controversial stance at a tense period in US-Soviet relations.

A meeting of student activists in Raleigh, North Carolina, voted to form their own organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The SCLC provided guidance and support but largely let them run independently as they inspired similar protests across the country. King was found not guilty in his tax trial, but found another source of trouble when the Black New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell threatened to spread an allegation that King and Rustin were lovers if they did not halt a plan to picket the 1960 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. King not only backed down but accepted Rustin’s resignation from the SCLC. When sit-ins occurred at segregated lunch counters in Atlanta, he ultimately sided with the protestors and was arrested alongside them. King was convicted of violating his parole and sentenced to four months of hard labor.

King was sent to prison shortly before the 1960 election, creating an issue for both Richard Nixon and John Kennedy. Nixon refused to intervene, while Kennedy sought favors for his campaign in exchange for intervening on King’s behalf, and called Coretta to explore possibilities. This was enough for Martin Sr., who publicly endorsed Kennedy, and after Kennedy’s brother Robert called the judge, King was released on bail. King made favorable remarks about Kennedy, who then won the election by a narrow margin—King himself could not vote in the election for not paying the Georgia poll tax. In 1961, the third King child was born, named Dexter in honor of the Montgomery church. King was an affectionate father, although he was rarely home for long stretches of time. When he was gone, he frequently pursued extramarital affairs, and was particularly fond of Dorothy Cotton, a married woman who also played an important role in the SCLC. Meanwhile the organization had turned its attention to educating adults on voter registration, tapping Andrew Young to lead the effort.

King’s message remained as religious as it was political, and he insisted that his mission “was not simply to change the laws and values of America but to redeem the nation’s soul” (244). Yet while King was the most famous civil rights leader, other organizations and movements were gaining publicity, most notably the Freedom Riders of 1961, who traveled interracially on interstate buses, testing a recent Supreme Court decision ordering the desegregation of interstate travel. Their efforts gained widespread attention, especially after one bus was attacked outside Montgomery by a huge mob. Supporters congregated in Ralph Abernathy’s church, where federal marshals arrived just in time to protect them from another mob gathering outside. King refrained from direct participation in the freedom rides to avoid violating his parole again. His decision threatened to create a rupture between himself and a younger and increasingly impatient group of activists.

King’s responsibilities came to define more and more of his life, dismaying his father and leaving Coretta to raise the children mostly on her own. King struggled to balance the task of fundraising and maintaining a public persona with the nuts-and-bolts work of organizing, often in conjunction with other groups. King and others were making more direct demands on President Kennedy, and the two finally met, although the president was cool to King’s suggestion of a “second emancipation proclamation, one declaring all segregation illegal under the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment” (255). The SCLC then turned its focus to Albany, Georgia, where an effort by two men to spur voter registration had burgeoned into a mass movement. King led a procession to City Hall as people sang “We Shall Overcome” until the police shut down the march. A truce and promises to integrate followed, but these promptly fell through, and with King’s efforts also calling him elsewhere, the movement sputtered. King worked with Robert Kennedy, attorney general in his brother’s administration, to help voter registration in the South, but FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was profoundly suspicious of King’s ties to communists (namely Stanley Levison) and soon began to treat King himself as “a threat to national security” (262).

In Albany, King was jailed for his role in the march but then quickly bailed out by white authorities fearful that time in jail would enhance King’s status. He was arrested again and served two weeks in jail, while having little to show for his efforts in Albany. King concluded that his mistake was “to protest against segregation generally rather than against a single and distinct facet of it” (265). However, the effort was still useful in forging the ties between the SCLC and other organizations. The SCLC held its annual convention in Birmingham, where King promised to make more frequent appearances. While King was giving a speech, a white man stormed the stage and punched him, and King’s refusal to defend himself or press charges against his attacker gave powerful proof of his commitment to nonviolence.

King found relief from his many worries in a busy nightlife and romantic entanglements, even as he worried that exposure would ruin his public persona. At King’s urging, Ralph Abernathy moved from his Montgomery church to Atlanta, and he proved a vital companion, in some respects more valuable to King even than Coretta. Yet Coretta also saw herself as part of the movement, not just someone “who stayed home to make her husband’s work possible” (275). Toward the end of 1962, King began to complain about FBI interference in his activities, and it was true that the overwhelmingly white law enforcement agency, under the leadership of the fanatically anti-communist Hoover, was surveilling King. When one of his chief lieutenants called for a meeting with King, King refused, angering Hoover and spurring still move aggressive monitoring of his activities.

King’s commitment to pacifism was leading to frustration as progress stalled and violent reactions continued unchecked, with King’s own son Marty being denied entry to an Episcopal kindergarten. King decided to shift his efforts to Birmingham, “the nation’s most determinedly and viciously segregated” city (280). Birmingham would prove an even more difficult test with newly elected governor George Wallace, a staunch segregationist. Furthermore, Birmingham’s police department was in the hands of Eugene “Bull” Connor, who would make no apologies about using force to maintain segregation. Connor’s police would find plenty of auxiliaries among the town’s steel workers, many of whom overlapped with the Klan and White Citizens’ Councils. King hoped to “hit the city’s economic power structure, force concessions from politicians, unite the Black community, and use the news media to compel others across the country to join the struggle” (285).

The Birmingham movement kicked off in April 1963 with a sit-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter (just as in Greensboro three years earlier). King and Abernathy promptly arrived in the city, along with fiery activist Fred Shuttlesworth. They failed to attract the desired crowd, and Black community leaders proved reluctant to lend support. All of that changed when King’s brother A. D., a minister at Birmingham’s First Baptist Church, led a peaceful protest that provoked a brutal police response, including the use of attack dogs. This helped spark support among the city’s Black churches. King and Abernathy then dressed in work clothes, more appropriate for a jail cell, and led a crowd out into the street, until they were promptly arrested and placed in solitary confinement.

In jail, King received news of local white clergy who had pled for King and others to be patient and not pursue rash action. Deeply frustrated, he started to write a letter, first on the margins of the newspaper and then on napkins and toilet paper. Through a friend, he snuck the letter out of jail. In the letter he excoriated his fellow clergymen for clinging to moderation in the face of a grievous injustice. He held the “white moderate” to be even more dangerous than the White Citizens’ Council or Ku Klux Klan, as they were “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice” (296), and proclaimed, following St. Augustine, that “an unjust law is no law at all” (296). The letter would prove a pivotal document in the history of civil rights, but at the moment King’s strategy of filling the jails seemed to exhaust his supporters.

Released after a week in jail, King lent his support to a plan by James Bevel and Isaac Reynolds to encourage schoolchildren to join the boycott—over 1,000 were arrested on the first day. The next day, the marching children encountered overwhelming police violence, including the use of dogs and fire hoses. Photographs appeared on the cover of The New York Times the following day. Kennedy immediately dispatched the Justice Department’s head of civil rights to Birmingham, and after another round of violent clashes, they reached a tentative agreement for phased desegregation and release of demonstrators. King insisted on holding onto this compromise even after a bomb targeted his brother A. D. Birmingham lit a fire of resistance to segregation and discrimination, and not just in the Jim Crow South. King was in position to put immense pressure on the Kennedy administration to sponsor some kind of civil rights legislation. After Governor Wallace personally barred the door to keep the University of Alabama from integrating, Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard to ensure the students’ access, then made a nationwide address against discrimination. One week later, he called for a civil rights bill. Days later, Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary for Mississippi, was cut down by a sniper’s bullet in front of his family in Jackson.