King: A Life

The FBI sent some of its own surveillance tapes to King and Coretta, and while King had no illusions about the FBI’s hostility toward him, he still did not realize that his home and office were bugged. In January 1965, he traveled to Selma, Alabama, a focus of efforts to register more Black voters. President Johnson was now supportive of another bill to address voting rights after some initial reluctance, and he sought King’s help with no regard for the information the FBI had provided him. A Klansman punched King in a hotel lobby, a shocking but not surprising act in a town that had recently elected a moderate mayor, leaving diehard segregationists anxious to preserve the status quo at all costs. Other white moderates held that election as evidence of progress, which should preclude more radical action by the SCLC or SNCC. King never took to this advance, seeing himself as a “crowbar” to pry open dramatic change at moments of opportunity. Once again, he would stage a dramatic confrontation and force the federal government to enforce its own laws or stand by and reveal its own impotence.

As demonstrations began in Selma, King and Abernathy were again arrested and refused to post bail. Malcolm X arrived and offered surprising words of support for King and met with Coretta. Johnson likewise offered vocal support for the protestors. Protests continued in Selma, but the police proved formidable in putting them down. Only a few weeks later, on February 25, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated by Nation of Islam gunmen targeting their most prominent apostate. King offered kind words to Playboy magazine about Malcolm X while remaining stridently critical of the Nation, although the magazine edited it so as to play up the rivalry of the two men. A week later, speaking at the funeral of a young marcher killed by Selma police, King announced a 50-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, even as he privately doubted its wisdom.

On March 7, 1965, a group of 600 marchers led by John Lewis began the march to Montgomery, but upon crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge out of Selma, they were brutally beaten by the police and the march dispersed. King was in Atlanta at the time, but planned to lead another march two days later. When he arrived in Selma, he was deeply divided as to how to proceed, and after leading the march a short distance, with state troopers clearing a path to Montgomery, he turned around, seeking only “a show of brotherhood, with Black and white ministers walking arm in arm to the bridge and back” (431), rather than a march all the way to Montgomery. It was another compromise that pleased no one, exposing his white allies to violence (with one, James Reeb, dying from his injuries), leaving most Black activists disappointed, and failing to put meaningful pressure on Governor Wallace.

After Johnson delivered a forceful address, ending with the signature phrase “and we shall overcome” (435), King planned another march to Montgomery. The crowd grew with each day, and after four days they arrived at the statehouse. King delivered another thundering address, insisting that a fight against “segregated housing, against poverty, against restrictive voting laws” would not just benefit Black people but would also heal a profoundly divided community (438).

After dropping off fellow marchers in Selma, a white woman named Viola Liuzzo was ambushed and murdered by the Klan. When the FBI apprehended the killers, it was with the help of an informant who had already taken part in assaults and murders. King announced plans to boycott the state of Alabama, while also expressing the desire to expand his focus northward to tackle nationwide problems like poverty. Levison worried that broadening his focus beyond race would rupture his coalition and take his movement from reform to revolution. After a brief vacation, the Kings moved to a new home in a Black, working-class section of Atlanta, and then King was on the move again to shore up his organization and try to revive the movement’s sagging momentum. He also called for the end to the Vietnam War, drawing still more ire from Hoover. With the Civil Rights Act passed and the Voting Rights Act soon to join it, King concluded that the time had come to expand his operation northward, and at the invitation of local activists, he would begin in Chicago.

In 1965, Coretta was attempting to make her own contributions to civil rights, raising money for Rosa Parks (who had been blackballed for her brave act) and speaking at an anti-Vietnam War rally in Madison Square Garden, where she was the only woman speaker. King did not step in to parent when Coretta traveled, instead relying on friends and family to look after his children. Coretta began writing for a magazine called New Lady, championing the work of women in making the civil rights movement possible in the first place. She was inspiring to other women in the SCLC, who likewise felt that their important work was often overlooked by an overwhelmingly male leadership. Yet she asked for no pity and supported her husband’s efforts, often providing resolve when his own began to falter.

King joined a group of Chicago activists in July 1965, seeking to challenge a segregation that was more de facto than de jure due to the ethnic homogeneity of different neighborhoods. King decided to make the city into a test of his challenge to systemic racism that was not necessarily woven into the laws, but Chicago mayor Richard Daley proved a formidable enemy, especially because he had no need to rely on the same brutish tactics that prevailed in the South to maintain segregation. Even as King succumbed to exhaustion, he managed to inspire a large protest before heading back to Washington to commemorate the signing of the Voting Rights Act.

The Voting Rights Act held great promise in addressing the second-class citizenship of Black Americans in the South, but it also threatened to leave the Civil Rights Act without a clear goal moving forward. King’s plans to move northward lacked detail and focus, but one area where King planned to focus was objection to the Vietnam War. This was a controversial position, not least because Johnson was escalating the war even as he drove a civil rights agenda through Congress. While King was on vacation in Puerto Rico, a massive protest against police brutality erupted in the Watts section of Los Angeles, an eruption of long-festering grievances. Riots went on for days, and King arrived to give a speech and consult with the mayor. He also called Johnson for support on an anti-poverty program, seeing the riots as the natural consequence of prolonged desperation. In the same conversation, King deferred to the president’s position on Vietnam, agreeing that it was “just unreasonable to talk about the United States having a unilateral withdrawal” when North Vietnam refused that same condition (466). For the time being, the alliance of King and Johnson would endure.

King warned that the Watts riots showed the limits of civil rights legislation and the lingering problems of structural racism, in the North as well as the South. The SCLC’s specific plans remained obscure, with Rustin arguing for a redoubled focus on voter registration in the South and King insisting on expansion to Chicago, refusing to focus on the particular issues that had won them success in Montgomery and Birmingham. King also made public criticisms of the Vietnam War, which even many of his allies, especially Rustin, criticized as a distraction from civil rights concerns. At a time when “the SCLC was in organizational chaos, and […] about to undertake a mission in a new city where its leader had no experience and no particular plan” (473), Rustin argued that adding another, highly controversial issue would create unnecessary complications. King replied that as a minister, he felt compelled to speak on matters of right and wrong regardless of the consequences.