Voices in Our Blood (67 page)

The young King wanted to study medicine. He majored in sociology at Morehouse College. He thought preachers not quite intellectually respectable, though his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had all been preachers. Even when he accepted ordination, he thought he should become a theologian-minister, perhaps a professor, rather than a mere preacher. He took his first parish—in Montgomery—to get “pastoring background” before accepting a teaching post. To the end of his life he talked of turning to an academic career.

But he was never convincing as a scholar. An account of his own intellectual development reads as if it were lifted from a college catalog: “My intellectual journey carried me through new and sometimes complex doctrinal lands, but the pilgrimage was always stimulating, gave me a new appreciation for objective appraisal and critical analysis, and knocked me out of my dogmatic slumber.” He was not even a very perceptive commentator on the men who created his doctrine of civil disobedience—Thoreau and Gandhi. When he began the Montgomery boycott, he liked to refer vaguely to Hegel as the prophet of “creative tensions.” It was not till someone suggested more likely patrons of nonviolent rebellion that he began referring to Gandhi and Gandhi's American forerunner
—referring
to them—as saints. He never really discusses their philosophy. And his most ambitious defense of civil disobedience—the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, written eight years after the Montgomery boycott—does not even
refer
to Gandhi or Thoreau. Instead, King uses tags from Augustine and Aquinas (hardly anti-authoritarians). Nor does the Letter deserve high marks for logic. It offers as the model of civil disobedience, not Gandhi, but Socrates, the stock Platonic figure suborned for all noble causes, but something of an embarrassment in this context, since Plato makes him preach history's most rigorous sermon against civil disobedience in the
Crito.
The Letter gives three qualifications for a valid act of civil disobedience: 1) that it be open, 2) that it be loving (nonviolent), and 3) that those engaged in it accept their punishment willingly. Then he gives as a historical example of this the Boston Tea Party, whose perpetrators: 1) were clandestine (they disguised themselves as Indians), 2) were armed for violence (they forced wharf guards away and were ready to repel any interruption), and 3) evaded all punishment (Sam Adams and his Committee of Correspondence
dared
England to attempt punishment). Indeed, none of the historical examples of civil disobedience given in King's Letter meets the three requirements he had just set up.

Like Moses, he was not “de brainiest.” He only knew one book well—the Bible. It was enough. All the other tags and quotes are meant to give respectability to those citations that count—the phrases sludged up in his head from earliest days like a rich alluvial soil. He could not use these with the kind of dignity he aspired to unless he were more than “just a preacher.” Yet the effect of that
more
was to give him authority
as
a preacher. By trying to run away from his destiny, he equipped himself for it. He became a preacher better educated than any white sheriff; more traveled, experienced, poised. He was a Hambone who could say “no” and make it sound like a cannon shot.

It is interesting to contrast him with another preacher's son—James Baldwin. Baldwin became a boy preacher himself as a way of getting out into the secular world. King became a student as a way of getting into a larger world of
religion,
where the term “preacher” would not be a reproach. He needed a weightiness in his work which only that “Doctor” could give him. He needed it for personal reasons—yes, he had all along aspired to be “De Lawd”—and in order to make Southern religion relevant. That is why King was at the center of it all: he was after
dignity,
which is the whole point of the Negro rebellion. His talent, his abilities as a “quick study,” his versatility, his years studying philosophy and theology (for which he had no real natural bent) were means of achieving power. His books and degrees were all tools, all weapons. He had to put that “Doctor” before his name in order to win a “Mister” for every Southern Negro. They understood that. They rejoiced in his dignities as theirs. The Nobel Prize
didn't
matter except as it helped them. As T. O. Jones put it, “There can never be another leader we'll have the feeling for that we had for him.”

Our three buses had a long ride ahead of them—ten hours, an all-night run, through parts of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. They were not luxury buses, with plenty of room; the Greyhound company had run out of vehicles and leased these from a local firm. One could not even stretch one's legs in the aisle; the folding chairs prevented that. Ten hours there. Ten hours back.

Minutes after our departure, the man behind me said, “We're in Mississippi now.” “Oh no!” his wife groaned. It is well to be reminded that our citizens are afraid to enter certain states. The man most frightened was T. O. Jones. He knows what risks an “uppity” Negro takes in the South. He does not give out his address or phone number. The phone is changed automatically every six months to avoid harassment. He has lived in a hotel room ever since the beginning of his union's strike, so his wife and two girls will not be endangered by his presence in the house. “This is risky country,” he told me. “And it gets more dangerous as you go down the road. That Mississippi!” We were going down the road.

The lead bus had no toilet, and the chairs in the aisle effectively barricaded it from anyone's use in the other buses. The technique for “rest stops” was for all three buses to pull off into a darkened parking lot; the chairs were folded; then people lined up at the two toilets (one bus for men, one for women). At our first stop, some men began to wander off into the trees, but T. O., sweating in the cool night, churning all around the buses to keep his flock together, warned them back. “Better not leave the bus.” I asked him if he expected trouble. “Well, we're in Mississippi, and folk tend to get flustered at—” He let it hang. He meant at the sight of a hundred and forty Negroes pouring out of buses in the middle of the night. “You didn't see that man over there, did you—in the house by the gas station? There was a man at the door.” Some had tried to go near the dark station, to get Cokes from an outdoor vending machine. T. O. pulled them back to the buses. He carries his responsibility very self-consciously.

Back in the bus, there was a spasm of talk and wakefulness after our stop. The deep rumbling voice from the rear got chuckles and approval as he mused on the chances of a strike settlement. “We got Henry Loeb on the run now.” (“Yeah!” “Sure do!”) “He don't know what hit him.” Fear is not surprising in the South. This new confidence is the surprising thing. I had talked to a watery little man, back in the church, who seemed to swim in his loose secondhand clothes—a part-time preacher who had been collecting Memphis' garbage for many years. What did he think of the Mayor? “Mr. Loeb doesn't seem to do much thinking. He just doesn't
understand.
Maybe he can't. The poor man is just, y'know—kinda
—sick.
” It is King's word for our society, a word one hears everywhere among the garbage men; a word of great power in the Negro community—perhaps the key word of our decade. It is no longer a question of courage or fear, men tell each other; of facing superior white power or brains or resources. It is just a matter of understanding, of pity. One must be patient with the sick.

Henry Loeb does not look sick. He is vigorous, athletic, bushy-browed, handsome in the scowling-cowboy mold of William S. Hart and Randolph Scott. And he has a cowboy way of framing everything as part of his personal code: “
I
don't make deals
. . . . I
don't believe in reprisals
. . . . I
like to conduct business in the open.” There is an implicit contrast, in that repeatedly emphasized pronoun, with all the other shifty characters in this here saloon. He even has a cowboy's fondness for his mount”—the P.T. boat he rode during the war, a loving if unskilled portrait of which hangs behind his desk. (His office biography makes the inevitable reference to John F. Kennedy.)

Loeb is an odd mixture of the local and the cosmopolitan. He comes from a family of Memphis millionaires; he married the Cotton Carnival Queen. Yet as a Jew he could not belong to the Memphis Country Club (he has become an Episcopalian since his election as Mayor); and he went East for his education. A newsman who knows him made a bet with me: “When he hears you are from a national magazine he will not let five minutes go by without a reference to Andover or Brown.” When I went into his office, he asked for my credentials before talking to me (he would later boast that he talks to anyone who wants to come see him). Then he asked where I live. Baltimore. “Oh, do you know so-and-so?” No. Why? “He was in my class at Andover, and came from Baltimore.” That newsman could clean up if he made his bets for money.

Loeb did not mention Brown. But he did not need to. As I waited for him in his office, his secretary took the Dictaphone plug out of her ear and began flipping through her dictionary, and confided to me, as she did so, “The Mayor was an English major at Brown University, and he uses words so big I can't even find them.” Later, his executive assistant found occasion to let me know that his boss was “an English major at Brown University.”

But the Mayor also plays the role of local boy protecting his citizens from carpetbaggers out of the North. He has the disconcerting habit of leaving his telephone amplifier on, so that visitors can hear both ends of a conversation; and when a newspaperman with a pronounced Eastern accent called him for some information, he amused local journalists, who happened to be in his office, by mimicking the foreigner in his responses. When a group of white suburban wives went to his office to protest his treatment of the garbage strikers, he listened to them, then slyly asked the five who had done most of the talking where they were from; and his ear had not betrayed him—not one was a native “Memphian.” He has a good ear for classes, accent, background. He wanted to know where I had gone to college. The South is very big on “society.”

But Loeb has no ear at all for one accent—the thick, slow drawl of men like T. O. Jones. He knows they haven't been to college. I asked him whether he thought he could restore good relations with the Negro community after the sanitation workers settlement. “There is good understanding now. I have Negroes come to me to firm up communications—I won't say to reestablish them, because they had not lapsed.” I told him I attended a mass rally at Mason Temple, where more than five thousand Negroes cheered as preacher after preacher attacked him. “Well, you just heard from a segment of the community whose personal interests were involved. Why, I have open house every Thursday, and just yesterday I had many Negroes come in to see me about different things.” Imagine! And Massah even talked to them! And they came right in the front door, too! It is the conviction of all Henry Loebs that the great secret of the South, carefully hidden but bound to surface in the long run, is the Negro's profound devotion to Henry Loeb. After all, look at everything he has done for them. “
I
took the responsibility of spending fifteen thousand dollars of city money—multiplied many times over by federal food stamps—to feed the strikers.”
Noblesse oblige.

The odd thing is that white Memphis really
does
think that—as citizen after citizen tells you—“race relations are good.” Its spokesman cannot stop saying, “How much we have done for the Negro” (the Southern bigot is nothing but the Northern liberal caricatured—we have
all
done so much for the Negro). A journalist on the
Press-Scimitar,
the supposedly “liberal” paper in town, says, “We have been giving Negroes the courtesy title” (that is, calling Mr. and Mrs. Jones
Mr.
and
Mrs.
Jones) “ever since the Korean War.” (It embarrassed even the South to call the parents of a boy killed in action
John
and
Jane
Jones.) But the executive secretary of the local N.A.A.C.P. was considered a troublemaker when, arrested in a demonstration supporting the strikers, she held up the booking process time after time by refusing to answer the officer's call for “Maxine” instead of Mrs. Smith. (“Why,
isn't
your name Maxine?” one honestly befuddled cop asked her.)

Mrs. Smith is one of the many Negroes who protested the morning paper's use of the “Hambone” cartoon. But she ran up against the typical, infuriating response: “Hambone” was actually the white man's way of saying how much he
loves
the Negro. It was begun in 1916 by J. P. Alley, who—this is meant to settle the question once for all—won a Pulitzer Prize for attacking the Klan. It was kept up by the Alley family (one of whom is married to the morning paper's editor), and Memphis felt it would lose a precious “tradition” if their favorite darkie disappeared from their favorite newspaper—as, at last, a month after King's death, he did; with this final salute from the paper: “Hambone's nobility conferred a nobility upon all who knew him.”

Nowhere is the South's sad talk of “tradition” more pitiful than in Memphis. The city was founded as part of a land deal that brought Andrew Jackson a fortune for getting Indians to give up their claims to the site. The city's great Civil War hero—to whom Forrest Park is dedicated—could not belong to the antebellum equivalent of the Memphis Country Club because he was not a “gentleman”—that is, he was not a slave
owner
but a slave
trader.
After the war, however, he took command of the Ku Klux Klan, which made him “society.” The Memphis Klan no doubt boasted of all the things it did for the Negro, since it
was
more selective and restrained than the Irish police force, which slaughtered forty-six Negroes in as many hours during 1866. Later in the century, yellow fever drove the cotton traders out of town; and Irish riffraff took over; the municipality went broke, surrendered its charter, and ceased to exist as a city for a dozen years. Then, just as Memphis regained its right of self-government, a small-town boy from Mississippi, Ed Crump, came up the pike and founded the longest-lasting city “machine” of this century. The main social event for the town's “aristocracy”—the Cotton Carnival—goes back only as far as 1931, when it was begun as a gesture of defiance to the Depression: the city is built on a bluff, and run on the same principle.