At Canaan's Edge (88 page)

T
HE FABLED
summer of 1967 jumbled extremes of hope and horror, many of which penetrated King's life with special force. On Monday, June 12, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws against interracial marriage in sixteen states through the landmark case
Loving et Ux. v. Virginia,
which grew from a bedroom police raid and the subsequent conviction of Richard and Mildred Loving for cohabitation under pretense of wedlock. Until then, Virginia declared void any marriage with only one partner classified white by its written legal standard: “such person as has no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian.” Mildred Loving's ancestry blended Europe, Africa, and Cherokee Indian. Against Virginia's appellate courts, which found in the antimiscegenation statute a legitimate state purpose to prevent “the corruption of blood,” “a mongrel breed of citizens,” and “the obliteration of racial pride,” the Justices ruled that a racial definition of crime violated Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of equal protection under law. Their decision confronted sexual taboos long at the heart of violent white supremacy. Most Americans within a generation would find it quaint or fantastic that three-quarters of citizens in 1967 opposed interracial marriage, and not even the wildest imagination on record from the 1960s predicted that turn-of-the-century politics would divide closely on the rights of same-sex couples.

That same Monday, ending their annual term, the Justices narrowly sided with a legal quest from Alabama to reimprison King and seven fellow ministers for violating a court injunction against protest. The 5–4 decision in
Walker v. City of Birmingham
grew from the pivotal Good Friday decision early in the 1963 Birmingham campaign, and carried implications far graver than the remaining contempt sentence of only five days. Andrew Young noted on the first shocked conference call that much longer sentences trailed in cases on appeal. Stanley Levison said the ruling could cripple any movement. In vigorous dissent, Chief Justice Earl Warren scolded colleagues for holding that although the Birmingham injunction did unlawfully abridge the right of protest, it should have been obeyed through the four years of litigation on its validity, remaining “entirely superior in the meantime even to the United States Constitution.”

“Now even the Supreme Court has turned against us,” King lamented in private. A
New York Times
editorial, while opining that retroactive jail for King “is profoundly embarrassing to the good name of the United States,” rejected Chief Justice Warren's dissent: “The majority held—we think rightly—that obedience to the law and to the normal procedures set forth in the law has to be paramount.”

News coverage of demonstrations heightened weariness and fear of disorder. Stokely Carmichael, who no longer bothered to declare that he had submitted to nonviolence for five harrowing years, learned of Monday's Supreme Court decisions in the Prattville, Alabama, jail, under arrest for incitement to riot. Police officers confiscated a news photographer's film showing that he had addressed a Sunday afternoon workshop of twenty young women on folding chairs in the shade outside a Baptist church. His sharp remarks about persistent surveillance—shouting “black power” at police patrols, demanding to be called “Mr. Carmichael”—led to his arrest followed by a night of marauding gunshots in and out of the black neighborhood and rumors that he had been lynched. John Hulett arrived from adjacent Lowndes County to investigate, only to be beaten early Monday near the Autauga County courthouse. SNCC chairman Rap Brown issued a press statement from Atlanta: “We feel that this is a part of America's Gestapo tactics to destroy SNCC and to commit genocide against black people. We are calling for full retaliation from the black community across America. We blame Lyndon Johnson.” By Monday afternoon, when Brown posted bond for Carmichael, they walked from jail through two platoons of young Alabama National Guardsmen lined stiffly with fixed bayonets. Federal Judge Frank Johnson would sort through competing charges for the balance of the year to conclude, “Fault is on both sides.”

On Tuesday, June 13, President Johnson informed his black assistants Louis Martin and Clifford Alexander that he was about to integrate the Supreme Court. “You know, this is not going to do me a bit of good politically,” he told them, grousing for effect with a host of reasons. When Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall arrived, concealed from the press by elaborate stealth, the President fretted in jest that he was fated to ruin a good friendship just as President Truman had broken with the retiring Justice Tom Clark over an adverse legal opinion. Marshall said the President might be correct if he expected a yes-man on the Court, which made Johnson beam that he was appointing a man of common sense much like himself. “He doesn't have a Harvard degree like you, Cliff,” he told Alexander in a customary dig. Johnson announced Marshall from the Rose Garden at noon, and news stories flashed about jubilation among civil rights leaders that the great-grandson of a slave would become the first of any minority to occupy a top rank in one of the three constitutional branches of government. Nearly all the other questions were about world stability after the Six Day War.

King appeared for a relatively evenhanded interview on the nationwide Sunday broadcast
Issues and Answers
about race relations in the midst of two difficult wars. On the Middle East, King thought a complex peace required security for Israel and development for the Arab nations. “The whole world and all people of good will must respect the territorial integrity of Israel,” he said, listing the vital ports and trade routes. He proposed also a “Marshall Plan” to relieve desperate poverty among the mass of Arab citizens and refugees. “So long as they find themselves on the outskirts of hope,” he said, “they are going to make intemperate remarks. They are going to keep the war psychosis alive.” King sparred with the correspondents over assertions that civil rights leaders cared mostly for black soldiers in Vietnam, and bristled at charges that he foolishly targeted President Johnson for insult. “I have never called President Johnson's name in dissenting on the war in Vietnam,” King said firmly. He insisted on collective error through four Presidents, beginning with Harry Truman's decision not to recognize Vietnamese independence in 1945. This was a point of common emphasis with Coretta, who had drawn a mixed response at a San Francisco Mobilization rally by calling Johnson an “uncertain president” torn over conflicting advice.

President Johnson sent again for Senator Russell on Monday evening, June 19. He sought advice about whether to pursue a summit meeting when Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin visited the United Nations, but Russell, “knowing his abhorrence for being alone,” confided to his diary that he thought the President simply needed company. The Georgia senator took the chance to bemoan the choice of Thurgood Marshall without expecting to derail his Senate confirmation, pining for a Supreme Court Justice who could quote something “other than the 14th Amendment, which is used solely now to excuse striking down the rest of the Constitution.” Russell thought he made some small impression with his proverb that a loss of tradition kills “at least one half of patriotism.” The President maneuvered afterward to meet the Soviet Premier for three days at Glassboro, New Jersey, halfway between Washington and the United Nations, on a calculated hunch that the Soviet disaster in the Middle East might induce the colorless Soviet bureaucrat to engineer a settlement with North Vietnam. Kosygin, however, talked secretly to Johnson like an exasperated uncle. He said he knew from direct reports that American soldiers were fighting well—in fact, as bravely as he could wish for his own soldiers—but he could not understand what Johnson hoped to accomplish except to maim young Americans for a decade or more. U.S. battle deaths exceeded 1,000 for June and averaged 770 per month throughout 1967, up from 412 in 1966. The joint statement from Glassboro reported frank discussion and little progress.

O
N
J
UNE
24, during the Johnson-Kosygin talks, King called Stanley Levison from California about the poor reception for his new book,
Where Do We Go from Here, Chaos or Community?
Levison offered a practical suggestion to boost sales by sending a promotional copy to all 18,000 SCLC contributors of $20 or more, but King was more distressed about the slight interest he encountered while “running all over the country, Cleveland and Chicago, back and forth.” The
New York Times Magazine
had published an excerpt about the Meredith march and black power, which proved to be a stale controversy. Harry Belafonte added star power by joining King for a network television interview about the book, but the material was inherently difficult. “I am opposed to violence,” Belafonte told viewers. “I really am, whether it is in the black hand or in the white hand.” He said he believed that although a significant percentage of black people would endure committed nonviolent struggle against the most intractable problems, “it is the resistance on the part of the white community to respond that is indeed the Achilles heel of the democratic process in America.” King argued from the book that white supremacy was an ever-present force in history, making it a cause rather than a result of black frustration and violence. On the other hand, he warned that courageous all-black politics in isolated Lowndes County “cannot be made a measuring rod for the whole of America.” He challenged violence across the board. A member of the television audience sharply objected that Communists were a national enemy and therefore anyone who shirked the fight in Vietnam was a traitor. “And what would you say to that, sir?” he asked King.

Reviews of the book were slow to come and tepid at best. Eliot Fremont-Smith of the
Times
said a “return to nonviolence” was no more wistful than other miracles King had championed, and “perhaps one shouldn't despair until he does.” Several critics thought the author seemed bewildered by the range of attack since the triumphs of a simpler time. One said his method was being treated “like a pre-historic relic,” and another gave faint credit for “standing up strongly now in opposition to the use of riots and violence in pursuit of racial change.” Nearly all reviewers assessed King's argument for nonviolent politics by its suitability to others, especially to black people in cities. “The Negro male, too, is now bent upon proving his manhood,” observed a New York reviewer, “and many—particularly the young—appear to see violence as a more valid sort of proof than nonviolence.” The most scathing white critics rebuked King for “irrelevancy” to black people. “It is as if he is misdefining black power in order to make it easier to reject,” wrote David Steinberg for
Commonweal.
“He had simply, and disastrously, arrived at the wrong conclusions about the world,” charged Andrew Kopkind in
The New York Review of Books.
“Whites have ceased to believe him, or really to care; the blacks hardly listen.” Kopkind listed many insights King “could have seen” or “might have understood” had he not been so credulous, ending with a bedrock assertion—“Morality, like politics, starts at the barrel of a gun”—on which he dismissed King's promise from the left before anyone condescended so boldly from the right. Vietnam and black rebellion “have contrived this summer to murder liberalism—in its official robes,” Kopkind concluded. “There are few mourners.”

Young people dominated mass culture in the crossover summer when baby boom Americans under eighteen peaked at seventy million. On June 25, the first full television program ever beamed by satellite to most of the world featured the Beatles from London with a new song, “All You Need Is Love.” A music festival from Monterey, California, flashed into icon status along with its pop discoveries from Janis Joplin to Jimi Hendrix, and the show trials of June showcased young defendants. A jury convicted Richard Speck in the mass murder of eight Chicago nurses. A court-martial sentenced Captain Howard Levy to three years at hard labor, rejecting his defense that medical duty in Vietnam would implicate him in atrocities suggested by the casually graphic testimony of
Green Berets
author Robin Moore about bounties paid for severed ears (“Brutality is a way of life over there”). Attorney Charles Morgan represented Levy as well as Muhammad Ali, who on June 20 received the maximum sentence of five years for draft evasion. Two years later, Morgan's questions of an FBI witness would elicit the first official revelation of government surveillance directed at civil rights leaders, when Special Agent R. R. Nichols acknowledged in appeals court that he once overheard Ali over a wiretapped phone line, talking with Martin Luther King, in his capacity as manager of the King wiretap unit in Atlanta. Director Hoover banished Nichols to Oklahoma City for a candor that began to pry open the FBI's clandestine political machinery.

Hoover stood unchallenged through King's lifetime. A
Life
magazine story aborted the fitful, anemic Senate investigation into wiretap and bugging practices by charging that corrupt senators only sought to weaken the FBI in order to protect Teamster boss James Hoffa. Hoover's letter of congratulation to committee chairman Edward Long goaded the
New York Times
into a plaintive editorial: “There is—or should be—something extraordinary about a career civil servant like Mr. Hoover patting a member of the United States Senate on the head in this fashion.” The result hovered in the news background with stodgy adult politics. A Mississippi jury acquitted the eight defendants charged with beating Grenada children on the first day of school. Of the major religious denominations in convention that June, Southern Baptists reserved judgment on any withdrawal from Vietnam “apart from an honorable and just peace,” and Southern Presbyterians voted to end separate racial jurisdictions despite objections from Mississippi and Alabama. In Portland, Oregon, Northern Presbyterians completed an eight-year saga to adopt the first belief statement since the Westminster Confession of 1647, narrowly defeating an overture from Washington, D.C., and elder Robert McNamara, to delete a phrase some feared would bar Presbyterians from sensitive positions in government: “The church, in its own life, is called to practice the forgiveness of enemies and to commend to the nations as practical politics the search for cooperation and peace. This search requires that the nations pursue fresh and responsible relations across every line of conflict,
even at risk to national security.
”