At Canaan's Edge (59 page)

“Yes.”

“And then not supporting, doing this. That's my big problem in the morning. I don't know how much longer I can wait, number one. And number two, what in the hell am I waiting on?”

“Well, that's right,” said Fortas.

“They've given me my answer loud and clear.”

“Yes.”

“What—, I don't—, I just hesitate to mash the button that says to the world, ‘He's off again.'”

President Johnson broke away from Fortas to deliver televised remarks for a major initiative long in gestation. “Nineteen sixty-six can be the year of rebirth for American cities,” he began. His Model Cities message to Congress proposed to test renovation blueprints for urban systems from parks and schools to sewers across sixty metropolitan areas. “If we become two people, the suburban affluent and urban poor, each filled with mistrust and fear for the other,” he warned, “if this is our desire and policy as a people, then we shall effectively cripple each generation to come.” News outlets generally praised the comprehensive experiment, because or in spite of its modest cost of $2.6 billion over six years. When the
Washington Post
computed that only $5 million was to be invested in the first budget year, 1967, White House aides would scramble with hopeful bromides to allay an “extremely unfair” but persistent guess that Vietnam already had pinched the bud from Johnson's lofty plan.

K
ING BEGAN
weekly slum residence that Wednesday afternoon. From the Chicago airport, he was whisked secretly to mediate the lingering frictions over his proposed location. A few leaders from Al Raby's coalition considered it belittling to their hopes that a renowned international figure would advertise black Chicago's most extreme degradation. Some argued that there were plenty of distinguished homes and hovels alike in historic South Side “Bronzeville.” Others objected that James Bevel had ignored neighborhood partners in an awkward search for the most symbolic site on the lowly West Side. Word surfaced that traveling aide Bernard Lee had pronounced eight vacancies “unlivable,” and landlords recoiled from King's name on the lease, so Lee was obliged to conceal the intended occupant by signing himself. Newspapers discovered the ruse. Their emphasis on last-minute refurbishment by the panicked landlord—“King Picks ‘Typical' Flat/8 Men Repair It,” reported the
Chicago Tribune
—projected an air of fiasco and false humility for the Chicago campaign.

King appraised the sniping as normal. “I can learn more about the situation by being here with those who live and suffer here,” he insisted, then proceeded by caravan into the West Side ghetto of North Lawndale, nicknamed “Slumdale” by residents. A crowd of several hundred waited numbly in the cold to observe the entourage enter a third-floor walk-up at 1550 South Hamlin Avenue. Coretta, looking ahead to the small comfort of promised improvements upstairs, stepped first into the shock of a lock-less ground-floor entry with a bare dirt floor. “The smell of urine was overpowering,” she recalled. “We were told that this was because the door was always open, and drunks came in off the street to use the hallway as a toilet.” Above, fresh coats of gray and yellow paint did cover the empty apartment of four narrow rooms and “a bath of sorts,” lined single-file from the street to overlook a back alley. “You had to go through the bedrooms to get to the kitchen,” Coretta noted. They broke away from unpacking for King to deliver an evening speech at Chicago Theological Seminary, where new SCLC staff member Jesse Jackson was a student, then returned to a steady stream of first-night neighbors, including children who darted in to gawk. Bob Black of the
Chicago Defender
photographed eight-year-old Roy Williams sitting shyly on King's lap. Six curious members of the local Vice Lords gang stayed late in discussion with King about their turf battles and his concept of nonviolence.

As he first walked the streets to sample Lawndale and nearby East Garfield, trailing reporters noticed faces peering at the phenomenon from open windows even in zero-degree weather. One old man nearly collapsed when he recognized the famous preacher, and mumbled, “Great God a'mighty, I didn't ever think this day would come.” Many in the path remained skeptical about change, however, saying the black people who had made it to Chicago were divided and reluctant to risk what little they had. “It's bad enough to be at the top of nothing,” said one mother, “but to be at the
bottom
of nothing?” On Thursday, Al Raby guided King's party from a bustling soul food lunch at Belinda's Pit to a courtesy tour of police headquarters. Press interest fluttered to every hint of future conflict, as when King assured Chief Orlando Wilson that he would give ample notice before marches or civil disobedience. Wilson tried to be gracious by confirming his surprise discovery of some Irish ancestry in King (pretty far back, on Daddy King's side), which he said never hurt in shamrock Chicago.

In another balancing foray to the South Side, King lectured on race and family life that night at the University of Chicago. “Family life not only educates in general,” he began, “but its quality ultimately determines the individual's capacity to love.” He sketched conditions from the time of his slave great-grandfather on the plantation, when “the institution of legal marriage did not exist.” Some Negroes had murdered their own young to spare them, he said bluntly, and “after liberation countless mothers wandered over roadless states looking for the children who had been taken from them and sold.” He said city adjustment was often ruinous for ex-slaves, as for other migrant groups of peasant stock. Without mentioning Moynihan by name, he presented alarming statistics from “a recent study” that found 25 percent of Negro women in cities to be divorced. It was triple the rate for white women, said King, though the latter was rising more rapidly, and similar gaps prevailed for illegitimacy, unemployment, and welfare. He warned of the twin danger posed by “historical facts” of stubborn cruelty, seduction, and sorrow. America might mold a new pretext “to justify neglect and rationalize oppression,” he said, and Negroes could give in to rage or surrender. King lifted up a narrow alternative for common hope. “What man has torn down,” he asserted, “he can rebuild.” Negroes in American cities must seize every opportunity “to grow from within,” while others must cooperate “from the outside” to remove invisible barriers of jolting strength. “This is what we intend to fight for in Chicago,” he concluded. “A fair chance.” In haste, he scrawled an instruction to himself at the end of the surviving text: “Ad lib we shall overcome!”

After a second night on Hamlin Avenue, King left Friday for registration rallies in Birmingham and weekend commitments in New York. His advisers expressed mild optimism about Chicago. Bayard Rustin, who still opposed the Northern campaign, passed along rumors that the city was preparing significant concessions for the spring. Mayor Daley already had beamed back an interview from his Caribbean vacation, promising full repair for every residence classified dilapidated (40 percent of Negro dwellings citywide) within two years. “All of us, like Dr. King, are trying to eliminate slums,” Daley announced. As always, King's inner circle salved movement hardship with running tales of mirth. They speculated about the finer appointments Daley might select for King's tenement, and Abernathy, who demanded road perquisites to match his putative co-partner, magnified every palatial detail still lacking from his duplicate apartment one floor below, which retained all its rust and debris without new paint or heat. Blaming his wife's sensitivity, he resolved to bequeath the space to the staff and duck out to a hotel.

King headed back to tenement rounds in a kind of throwback to his quixotic movement years after the bus boycott. He was isolated from a national government rumbling to war. For all the sinews of his experience in heartland Chicago—battling J. H. Jackson there in the stronghold of church culture, addressing its elite Sunday Evening radio forum, sharing Bronzeville galas with Mahalia Jackson and a lawyer with Muhammad Ali—King blew words at a galaxy of strangers. There were fifty square miles of black people concentrated apart from scattered white allies in a vast mosaic of neighborhoods. He began anew as one waif seeking others. Among papers stuffed in his flight bag was a Friday memo urging him to pay a call in Chicago on the parish priest Richard Morrisroe, who was still hospitalized and said to be neglected five months after being shotgunned near the Lowndes County Jail. Stokely Carmichael had been among his few movement visitors.

S
ECRETARY OF
State Rusk testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Friday morning, January 27, in an atmosphere of palpable tension. Front-page headlines suggested irresistible war pressures—“A Lonely Johnson Weighs Bombing”—and fifteen senators had released a joint letter pleading with President Johnson to delay. When Rusk explained again the steps necessary to guarantee an independent South Vietnam against Communist aggression, Chairman Fulbright dropped the courtly veneer of Senate discourse to question every premise, especially Rusk's assertion that Congress already had authorized a war of unlimited scale by its 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. “This was a fire fight, angry, bitter, and hostile,” wrote David Halberstam. “Fulbright lost his temper, and he made no attempt to conceal it.” He asked whether Rusk believed South Vietnam could be independent “with two hundred or four hundred thousand” American soldiers running its war. Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon brusquely refused to ask questions until the administration agreed to a full inquiry on Vietnam. The normally avuncular Republican George Aiken of Vermont demanded to know if Rusk seriously meant that Ho Chi Minh alone “will determine then whether we send four hundred thousand or two million men into Southeast Asia.” Cameras recorded so much sizzling footage that Walter Cronkite would use three full minutes on the half-hour
CBS Evening News
—an eternity by television standards—only to find out that NBC used five full minutes and wanted more. The public sensation touched off heated debate inside the three broadcast networks—consequential for the future of television news—about whether to preempt daytime shows for live coverage of the hearings on the war.

In Vietnam, four thousand U.S. Marines completed the largest amphibious landing since Inchon in the Korean War and pushed south from Quang Nai to trap North Vietnamese regiments against twenty thousand U.S. Army infantry headed north in Operation Masher. While the infantry pushed up the central coastline, repairing all seventy-two bridges destroyed by foes along the forty-five-mile path from An Khe, Lieutenant Colonel Harold Moore landed Friday morning with his 7th Cavalry Battalion in a forward helicopter assault on the target area of Bong Son, and charged first into a thatched hut filled with peasants wounded and terrified from advance artillery fire, including a bloodied six-year-old girl “the same age as my daughter Cecile, back home,” he recorded. “I summoned the medics, but I left there heartsick.”

In Atlanta, Julian Bond sat quietly that afternoon as three federal judges heard arguments on his lawsuit challenging the refusal to seat him by the Georgia House of Representatives. Lawyers for co-plaintiff King had submitted a brief of unusually petulant fervor, arguing that segregationists still were “cheered” when
they
defied federal policy, and that Bond might have been seated “had he recanted, begged, or crawled…. No free man should.” Against Bond, Judge Griffin Bell cast the swing vote in a 2–1 ruling “that the judgment of this court is not to be substituted for that of the House.” All three judges, citing the acceptance of other newly elected Negroes, agreed from the bench that the evidence excluded race as a motivating factor for the House, which mooted Bond's contention that his civil rights were abridged. On the contrary, their ruling managed torturously to find that Bond himself had introduced improper racial considerations through comments aligned with critics of U.S. war policy “in the Dominican Republic, the Congo, South Africa, Rhodesia,” and other foreign nations. The SNCC action he endorsed was “a call to action based on race…alien to the pluralistic society which makes this nation,” declared the court, ruling that Bond had shifted the “balancing test” against his claim to free speech under the First Amendment.

In Washington, Dean Rusk left the explosive Fulbright hearing for a final war review that included civilians officially labeled “THE WISE MEN” on the confidential White House log. Only one hard-liner now recommended a defensive military posture to encourage the gradualist faction in Hanoi, based on his experience fighting the Chinese Communists. “If you just sit tight there, in six months or a year that will convince them,” the Pakistani dictator Ayub Khan predicted by secret cable. “Your enemies expect you to be impatient, to commit more and more forces, and finally to weaken your resolve in the face of unsatisfactory military results and your own democratic pressures.” For Americans in the Cabinet Room, however, the most divisive question was whether renewed bombing was a military or political necessity. The Joint Chiefs testily conceded McNamara's evidence that no air campaign could interdict more than half the supplies moving down the Ho Chi Minh Trail—and the Vietnamese would “probably use human backs,” he said, if they needed to make up for lost trucks—but they insisted that heavy bombardment must gain some military advantage. To McNamara, bombs in mountainous jungle were largely noise but politically vital nonetheless, because he doubted “the American people will long support a government” that failed to throw every resource behind its soldiers.