When Harlem Nearly Killed King (6 page)

Yet perhaps it was Micheaux’s reputation for militancy that caused King to avoid signing books at his store. This was the man who featured on his bookshelves not only titles with verifiable facts
about the Negro but also those making dubious romantic claims about black African history that any person who thought hard about the Negro predicament would find understandable. You shove an entire people off into a corner with nothing more to glue them together as a group than just one detectable drop of ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa—ancestry from a multitude of West African ethnicities, no matter how much ancestry they harbor from elsewhere (the equivalent of defining as Caucasian anyone with one drop of ancestry from Western Europe, meaning that under such a definition the vast majority of American Negroes would then become Caucasian)—it only made sense that the said people would feel compelled to find any means they could to be proud of what glued them together. Michaeux’s bookstore was the epicenter of not only respected Negro scholars researching their work but also those who still upheld the ideals of Marcus Garvey (Michaeux himself was still a Garveyite), and those who followed the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam. These facts indicate the complexities of Lewis Michaeux.

One year he featured in the window of his store a large sign about a new book entitled
The Goddamn White Man
. He received a lot of complaints about the sign. Caucasians began writing him, the local police began bugging him. A Caucasian officer said, “Now, look, you have an institute of learning here, and this is a bad thing for young folks to be seeing—you cursing the white man.”

“Well, I’m going to sell the book as long as the publisher is publishing it,” replied Michaeux. “You see the publisher and stop them, then I won’t sell the book.”

Due to his refusal to stop advertising the book in the window, the police department sent him a summons to show cause for not removing the sign. Michaeux showed up in court with a Webster’s Dictionary picking out various words to define the meaning of freedom of speech, successfully demonstrating why he had a right to feature the sign and sell the book.

It was easy to understand why association with such a controversial man would be a potential problem for an emerging leader like King, who preached nonviolence and echoed Jesus’s teaching to love your enemy, to turn the other cheek. The powers-that-be were already watching King closely for potential Communist infiltration among his ranks. Did it make sense to help launch his book at a Harlem bookstore that might add fuel to their suspicions?

Micheaux didn’t see things this way. He felt that his bookstore was a natural setting for a book signing by King. So he put in a call to Montgomery inquiring if King wanted to have one. But to his surprise no one called him back. He put in calls to the appropriate people in New York City. Again, there was no response.

That’s strange, thought Michaeux. Surely this young product of Morehouse College, of the educated Negro middle class, was aware of who he was. And if he wasn’t, certainly there were enough people around him who could have enlightened him. As time passed and each day he heard nothing from King, King’s publisher, or any of King’s emissaries, Lewis Micheaux grew increasingly perplexed, increasingly miffed, increasingly angry. The political rally featuring King, Rockefeller, Harriman, and a host of other notables was going to take place catty-corner from his
bookstore, but there would be no signing? And other events were planned for King elsewhere in Harlem. The day before the rally, he was scheduled to sign books at a new establishment in the community called the Empire State Bookstore, operated by the Empire State Baptist Missionary Convention. He would also appear at a Harlem church. Then the day after the rally he would sign copies at Blumstein’s, a Jewish-owned department store around the corner that didn’t even sell books. Upon pondering this obvious snub, Michaeux’s anger became a boiling cauldron.

Though King had experienced a meteoric rise in popularity among Negroes across the country, he was coming into the community that had set the pace for theorizing on how the collective future of Negroes should proceed, and snubbing the very epicenter for such activity, which was owned by a seventy-four-year-old man who had been fighting for racial justice in his own way a lot longer than King had been. Thus Micheaux felt no qualms about embarrassing King as he visited the community. He felt no qualms about challenging King on why his bookstore was being overlooked. As it became clear that he wouldn’t be hearing from King or anyone connected with him, that’s precisely what Lewis Micheaux prepared to do.

SIX
not quite in touch with reality

AS LEADERS OF
the NAACP knew only too well, the other issue turning the minds of the American people upside down in those days was Communism. Communists enjoyed popularity in the country during the Great Depression. Americans of all colors who had been rendered destitute searched for the ultimate safety net. Young idealists in academia, the labor movement, and the arts turned to Karl Marx as the savior. After World War II came, postwar prosperity followed for the victorious United States. At the same time, citizens witnessed the brutal manner in which Communist Russia took over Eastern Europe. The result was a national fear of Communism. Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) dominated the news. From 1951 to 1954, HUAC destroyed the careers of numerous former young idealists now repentant and eager to enjoy
postwar prosperity. By 1958, McCarthy’s witch-hunt was dead, yet America was still obsessed with the Red Scare. And since both Socialists and Communists preached institutionalized equality, it was only natural for critics of the civil rights movement to equate civil rights with Socialism and Communism. And just as natural for Socialists and Communists to gravitate toward the civil rights movement.

As Wilkins and Spingarn knew only too well, civil rights leaders were always being called Communist agents. Hence, Thurgood Marshall’s willingness to spy for the FBI, assuring J. Edgar Hoover of the NAACP’s bona fides. Distinguished Negroes eager to prove they were good Americans were always being forced to straddle the need to assure the powers-that-be that they were good capitalists with their passion for racial equality. There had long been the need to reconcile the theory that private businesses had a right to serve whoever they pleased, with the conviction that no one should be excluded from such service due to race or gender. King’s agenda during the Montgomery bus boycott and the theory under which
Brown v. The Board of Education
had been won, of course, fell outside of this purview since they both dealt not with private enterprise but with public services. Yet on the horizon for the movement was the issue of Negro treatment by private businesses as well (by 1960 the lunch counter sit-ins at five-and-dime department stores would be launched by Negro college students in North Carolina). As the movement continued to gain momentum, the most respected Negro leaders distanced themselves from known Communists. People like King adviser Stanley Levison did their best to conceal their Communist backgrounds from the general public.

Simultaneously, paranoids came out of the woodwork to hound leaders of the movement. One was a tall, large-boned, dark-skinned forty-two-year-old Negro woman with a restless nature named Izola Curry. Born near the tiny hamlet of Adrian, Georgia, to a mother and father who were sharecroppers, the grown-up Curry, now residing in New York City, had a taste for baubly earrings and expensive eyeglasses. For that day and age, she was a fashion plate. Izola had been one of five children (three boys and two girls), and attended elementary school in nearby Savannah until the third grade. In 1937 she married. But six months later she left her husband, fled to New York City, and kept the last name Curry. She began dating a man named Leroy Weekes, who eventually asked her to marry him. She refused. Apparently Weekes had become involved to some extent in the NAACP.

Like plenty of others in those days, Curry believed the NAACP was controlled by Communists. But in her increasingly deranged state of mind, unlike paranoids such as J. Edgar Hoover, she sought no evidence of such a connection. She simply assumed as much. She assumed that Communists were running things in every civil rights organization.

By 1956 paranoia had gotten the best of her. She began writing the FBI claiming that Communist agents were out to get her. She fled numerous cities, living for a time in Cleveland; St. Louis; Charleston, West Virginia; back again in Savannah; then West Palm Beach, Florida; Lexington, Kentucky; Columbia, South Carolina; Miami; Daytona Beach, and back again to New York City. By September 1958, she was renting a room in a
brownstone at 121 West 122nd Street in Harlem, which she paid for by working at various places when she could as a temp maid. And when not working, she continued to express extreme bitterness about two things: Communism and the Negro Church. She especially detested Negro preachers. Curry felt that they were flimflam artists who pimped the community. She believed that boycotts and protests led by Negro ministers were a sham and that rather than follow them into protests, Negroes should appeal directly to Congress to change the racial laws. Thus in Curry’s mind, Martin Luther King, Jr., was a young minister pimping the community for the benefit of Communists.

To her neighbors she was a very antisocial woman. Curry spoke with a distinct Southern accent, but her words were often unintelligible and ungrammatical. When Curry could be understood, she was often heard expressing not only hatred for Negro preachers and Communists but for “whites,” too. Those around her simply wrote her off as one of the eccentric types. It was hardly unusual to run into her kind in a city the size of New York. She just happened to be Harlem’s contribution.

Perusing the newspapers, Curry found out about the upcoming trip King was to make to the city and his scheduled appearance at a political rally very near where she lived. She made note of it and decided to attend so that she could give King a piece of her mind. She decided to tail him as much as she could as he toured the community. Izola Curry decided to settle once and for all what she viewed as the silly business of Communist-influenced protests being led by a licentious Negro preacher intent on ruining the country.

SEVEN
stride toward critical acclaim

THE NEW YORKERS
King encountered on September 15, 1958, upon arriving in the city were eager to embrace the nascent civil rights movement. As he traveled the city, King would be greeted by predominantly Negro crowds ready to denounce his recent arrest in Montgomery, ready to support the integration of public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, ready to grant points to gubernatorial opponents Averell Harriman and Nelson Rockefeller for taking positions in support of the movement as they squared off against each other. Caucasian New Yorkers, on the other hand, were less enthusiastic, yet not hostile. For the most part they paid lip service to the notion that Negroes were true equals. Outside of the Deep South, where de facto rather than de jure segregation was the rule, even among liberal Caucasians, slow, primarily symbolic progress was
as far as they were willing to take things. Most residents, for example, were just getting used to the type of progress made by New York—based Mohawk Airlines in hiring the first Negro flight attendant in the entire airline industry to serve passengers on its DC-3 flights from New York City to Buffalo. This didn’t mean that major airlines intended to make a concerted effort to hire many more Negro flight attendants (there was no such thing as affirmative action back then). It merely meant that a beachhead of slow progress had been established, and for now that was enough.

By contrast, in much of the America of 1958 beyond the boundaries of New York City and the rest of the East Coast, espousing a belief in Negro equality automatically aroused suspicion that you were a member of the same Communist party that J. Edgar Hoover and Izola Curry worried about night and day. Negroes were still
them;
something akin to aliens, due to their dark skin (darkness, it was stated throughout Judeo-Christian theology, was the mark of evil, of doom), kinky hair, broad noses, thick lips. Thus even when the typical Caucasian saw a person whose features were similar to his but who shared just one physical characteristic with a Negro, that person was deemed a Negro. And, the thinking went, if anyone needed any further evidence to back up the assertion of Negro inferiority, they need only witness the backwardness of Negroes on the continent they originated from: Africa. Where was Negro civilization? Who was the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Albert Einstein? The Leonardo Da Vinci? The Louis Pasteur?