Between You and Me (11 page)

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mation was an executive order, as well as ending segregation in the army, and there are many, many areas where the president can end segregation in this way.

W A L L A C E : You’ve even talked about a secretary of integration.

K I N G : Yes.

W A L L A C E : Did you make that suggestion seriously?

K I N G : I certainly did. I think this is vital. I think this is necessary. . . .

Another subject on King’s mind that evening was the recent marriage of Sammy Davis, Jr., to the Swedish actress May Britt. Our viewers didn’t hear his concerns about that, because he and I talked about it only off-camera. He was intrigued by the high-profile inter-racial marriage, if more than a little apprehensive about how it would be exploited by “our enemies.” It was, after all, no secret that one of the segregationists’ favorite assertions (often expressed in rants of apocalyptic frenzy) was that integration would inevitably lead to miscegenation—or “mongrelization,” as Eldon Edwards chose to phrase it. Yet I had the distinct feeling that for all his misgivings, King was personally impressed by Davis’s boldness and success at romanc-ing such a glamorous blonde.

In 1961, Martin Luther King, Jr., was already a deeply revered figure. When I introduced him on our broadcast, I noted that as a moral leader, he had been compared to Gandhi and Thoreau and even to Christ. The crowning achievements of his crusade were still to come. In 1963 he and his fellow demonstrators resisted Bull Connor’s police dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, Alabama, and at the march on Washington later that summer, King delivered his famous

“I Have a Dream” speech. His critical role in those two events provided much of the impetus that persuaded President Kennedy and

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his successor, Lyndon Johnson, to embrace a full-scale commitment to legislation banning segregation in all public facilities, and in 1964

the sweeping Civil Rights Act was passed. That was also the year King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The following year he led an extensive campaign to get Negro voters registered, and Congress responded to that with another strong civil rights measure, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Although he was then at the height of his prestige, King and his followers would soon be moving into waters more troubled and treacherous than those they had been navigating. Over the past decade, the civil rights demonstrators had concentrated their fire on the walls of legal segregation that stretched across the South. But with the passage of the two anti-segregation bills by Congress, those walls came tumbling down. So in 1966, King shifted his battleground to communities in the North where social and economic structures were built on the rock of de facto segregation, separation of the races by custom and covert manipulation rather than by law. The primary targets of this new offensive were jobs and housing, and those areas of dispute were far more complex and elusive than the lunch counters and bus terminals and other public places that had been the sites of the protests in the South.

Along with the geography, the racial climate had also changed considerably. In the summers of 1965 and ’66, riots broke out in the black ghettos of several northern cities. One effect of all that mayhem was to disenchant many white Americans who had been sympathetic to the civil rights movement. To make matters even more difficult, King’s authority within his own sphere was being challenged by younger and more militant black activists. They approved of his commitment to action, but they had become impatient with the nonviolent methods he so firmly espoused.

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The leader of the new militancy was a young radical named Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). To many white Americans, the shrill demand of Carmichael and his cohorts for what they called “black power” was nothing less than a call to arms, a summons to incite angry Negroes to commit more acts of violence. The predictable response to that perceived threat was to strengthen the bonds of white resistance all across America.

It was against this volatile background that King took his campaign for integrated housing to the town of Cicero, a working-class suburb of Chicago. Four decades earlier, Cicero had acquired a certain notoriety as the home of Mob king Al Capone and the center of his bootlegging operation. The town’s reputation received another setback in the summer of 1966, when an unruly crowd of white residents greeted King’s demonstration with bricks and bottles, along with racist taunts and catcalls.

I had gone to work for CBS in 1963, and for most of the next three years, I anchored the Morning News there. From my anchor desk, I reported regularly on King’s activities and other developments in the fight to overcome segregation. In 1966, I left that post to cover civil rights stories in the field, and one of my first major assignments was as correspondent on a CBS Reports documentary that we called

“Black Power, White Backlash.”

In putting together that hour-long report on the turbulent changes in the civil rights movement, I interviewed numerous participants and observers, both black and white, and one of them inevitably was King, who was still engaged in the open-housing drive in Cicero and other white neighborhoods in the Chicago area. When my camera crew and I arrived at his motel at the agreed-upon hour for our morning interview, in response to my knock, he opened the

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door to his room slightly and stuck out his head. He explained that he had overslept. He asked us to wait a few minutes while he got dressed.

In our interview, I brought up a speech King had recently given in which he reaffirmed his commitment to nonviolence: “I would like for all of us to believe in nonviolence,” he declared. “But I’m here to say tonight that if every Negro in the United States turns against nonviolence, I’m going to stand up as a lone voice and say, ‘This is the wrong way!’ ”

In his conversation with me, he elaborated on that point.

K I N G : I will never change in my basic idea that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom and justice. I think for the Negro to turn to violence would be both impractical and immoral.

W A L L A C E : There’s an increasingly vocal minority who disagree totally with your tactics, Dr. King.

K I N G : There’s no doubt about that. I will agree that there is a group in the Negro community advocating violence now. I happen to feel that this group represents a numerical minority. Surveys have revealed this. The vast majority of Negroes still feel that the best way to deal with the dilemma that we face in this country is through nonviolent resistance. . . . An d I contend that the cry of “black power” is at bottom a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro. I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro has worsened over the last few years.

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The “economic plight of the Negro” was a relatively new theme for King, and it would soon become his top priority. During the last two years of his life, the focus of his quest for equality and justice shifted more and more from racial matters to economic issues. Those were the concerns that brought him to Memphis in the spring of 1968. That city’s striking sanitation workers had reached out to King for support, and he had responded. It was there that he was shot and killed while leaving his motel for an early dinner. Given all that he accomplished, I’ve always found it hard to believe that at the time of his death, he was only thirty-nine years old.

I’ve had the privilege of interviewing many public figures over the years, and on more than one occasion, I’ve been asked which one I admired the most. The first time that question was put to me, I gave it considerable thought, because several worthy candidates came to mind. The answer I eventually settled on was Martin Luther King, Jr.

Some of my reasons for citing King were predictable enough. He was a man who devoted his life to making America live up to its heritage as the land of the free, a country where “liberty and justice for all”

was not just an empty slogan. He had the courage of his convictions, and he acted on them. From the bus boycott in Montgomery, where it all began, to the last demonstrations on the streets of Memphis, King not only preached nonviolence, he practiced it, even though the protests he led frequently put him in harm’s path. Given all the risks he took, it’s hardly surprising that his life came to a violent end.

But for me, King’s most impressive moment came about a year before he was killed, when he took a controversial stand on an issue that was not directly related to civil rights. In early 1967, he spoke out publicly against President Johnson’s war policies in Vietnam. He condemned the U.S. presence there as immoral and argued vigorously that the resources being used to fight that war should be chan-

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neled into the social goals of the Great Society programs. King’s decision to break with Johnson on the war was made with considerable anguish, for no one had a more profound appreciation than King of all that LBJ had done to advance the cause of civil rights. King’s public opposition to the war was another sign that he was determined to expand his leadership beyond the sphere of the civil rights movement, and more than anything else, that heroic stand crystallized my immense regard for Martin Luther King, Jr.

In 1994, I was the correspondent on a profile of King that was part of the 20th Century series that CBS News produced for A&E. In my close to that broadcast, I offered this tribute to the man I continue to admire more than any other public figure who rose to prominence during my lifetime:

“Martin Luther King’s moral passion and his ability to inspire others with his extraordinary eloquence left an indelible mark on America. And his premature death left a void in our history that has never really been filled. Like Washington and Lincoln, he was one of the very few Americans who, in the context of his time, could truly be called the indispensable man.”

M a l c o l m X

T H E C A L L F O R B L A C K P O W E R and other militant battle cries that swept across the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s startled and frightened many white Americans. If some of us were less alarmed, it was probably because we recognized that the outburst of black rage was not a new phenomenon. In many ways, it echoed the harsh and inflammatory rhetoric I first encountered back in 1959.

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At that time, America’s racial climate was still fairly placid. Yes, the civil rights movement was under way, but it was just gathering steam for the major offensives to come. In addition to my interview show on Channel 13, I anchored a broadcast called News Beat, which had the distinction of being New York’s first half-hour evening news program. All the other nightly newscasts, local and network, were still locked into the fifteen-minute format that had been in effect throughout the 1950s.

So that was my professional domain in the spring of 1959, when I met with a black reporter named Louis Lomax. He had come to my office with a proposal that began with a question: “Mike, what do you know about the Black Muslims?”

I told him I had never even heard the term. Nor, I felt certain, had any of my white colleagues and acquaintances. Remember, in those days most blacks still preferred to be called Negroes, and Moslems—

spelled with anO, not a U—were Arabs who lived mainly inthe Middle East. Lomax promptly enlightened me: “The Black Muslims are black separatists. They’re a hate group. They hate white people.”

He went on to say that the Black Muslims were “totally opposed to integration” and therefore had nothing but contempt for the civil rights movement. He described them as a rapidly growing army that already had recruited more than two hundred thousand African-Americans into its ranks. I scoffed at that claim, insisting that such a visibly large and angry force would have attracted some attention from the press. I had not seen one story about the so-called Black Muslims in any major newspaper or magazine.

“That’s right!” Lomax declared. “The white press isn’t covering this story because the white press can’t get near these people. And that’s what I want to talk to you about.”

He proposed that we collaborate on a documentary about the

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Black Muslims, and it led to one of the most explosive pieces I’ve ever been involved in. Lomax did most of the reporting, and I anchored the Channel 13 broadcast, which we called “The Hate That Hate Produced.” The title sounds like tabloid hype, but the story more than lived up to its billing. Our report included film coverage of a Muslim rally steeped in an atmosphere of pure venom. One speaker after another condemned Caucasians as “white devils” who, down through the centuries, had committed every crime imaginable against black men and women. There were also interviews with the leader of the movement, Elijah Muhammad, and its New York minister, Malcolm X, who told Lomax that “the white man was the serpent in the Garden of Eden. By nature he is evil.” Moreover, in his interview with Lomax, Muhammad predicted that within a decade a “general insurrection” of black Americans would erupt and inflict “plenty of bloodshed.”

Nothing quite like it had ever been broadcast or published (at least not in the mainstream press), and when we aired “The Hate That Hate Produced,” we struck more than a few nerves. Moderate Negro leaders, like my friend Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, charged that we had grossly exaggerated the size and significance of the Black Muslims. Even more censorious were most of the reviewers, who accused us of sensationalism and fearmongering. Our response to these criticisms from the power centers of the white media was a de-fiant challenge: “All right, don’t take our word for it. Go see for your-selves.” And they did. Over the next few months, The New York Times, Newsweek magazine, and other influential voices in American journalism published reports on the Black Muslims that verified the essence of what we had aired.