Martin Luther King

Sunday, at lunch, Dr. King dropped a couple of casual remarks about discussing this or that with the President. I mentioned this to a friend last night; he laughed and told me I had it all wrong. "When Lyndon Johnson says he talked with Martin Luther King--that's name-dropping." Which underlined for me how far our Nobel Laureate, natty as a J. Press ad in his three-piece continental suit--(no cuffs, laceless black shoes), is from the scarred and faceless Negro worker who's getting the hell beat out of him in Mississippi. It was Martin King's face, not this worker's that politely accused America from the cover of Time. Everybody knows his name.

If King has never been beaten, if he went to jail in St. Augustine with silk pajamas and a toothbrush--and departed abruptly to take and honorary degree at Yale--he exerts, nonetheless, unparallelled charisma in the black ghettos of the South, where his personal style is a measure of what a Negro may become.

Style. That is what characterizes King best. Not the elemental, visceral appeal of a roughed-up revolutionary, but the smooth polish of a movie star, an haute politician, a foreign car salesman. He is a handsome, clear-eyed man with an air of good living, almost of opulence. Instinctively, he pauses in his speech and turns to the cameras. When fiery, his invective directs itself to abstract sin, acknowledged evils--never to individuals ("I'm sure Mr. Hoover would not have said what he said if he'd thought it through more carefully") or to organizations (except perhaps the Klan or White Citizens Council).

A reporter, even one lucky enough to unhook him from beneath Burt Ross' protective arm, can't get a rise out of him. Unlike most Negroes struggling for "the cause," King keeps himself non-controversial by never saying anything anyone but the most rabid White Supremicist doesn't want to hear. Yet below his gentleness, below his slickness, one senses enormous restraint. "Yes . . . yes, of course" he drawls when introduced to a SNCC worker, as though he had followed the boy's courageous exploits all summer.

Gestures like this are less than half public relations. Steering away from areas of disagreement, also, with King, cannot be viewed simply as playing footsie with White power structures. His caution is also tranquility, his humility real, his belief in non-violence ethical rather than strategic, his motivation tactical only in the sense that he seeks "what is best for the move--but". In a struggle that so often meets hatred in kind, Dr. King is rare in ever, and I think genuinely, going on the human however much he deplores his deed.

Few speakers know how to talk to a Harvard audience, and it is no deprecation of Dr. King to acknowledge that three standing ovations were meant for what he is, not for what he had said.

But all the while he was sayings things that didn't need to be said to Harvard, telling us about the bad and sinful people and the Godly, Loving people, you could feel how immensely stirring he could be in another setting, with a different audience. You could hear his basso "m's" fading out, and "r's" rolling over shouting policemen and barking dogs, over the sounds of men being beaten, still singing of the ultimate "overcoming," over the weeping of a huge-bosomed Negro lady in a faded print dress, with hair tied up in a bun.

Martin King hears "the clock of destiny ticking out," recognizes his own historical moment, breathes confidence in his ultimate triumph. Never does he place himself on the defensive, acknowledge that there are those who see him standing in the doorway he himself has opened, and old champion become an obstruction. Those who, while he stands solidifying old gains, want to push through the doorway and move on.

Dr. King sees four plateaus within a skyward spiral of interracial progress. Down at the bottom is slavery, initiated in 1619 with the first shipment of African captives to the New World. Next comes segregation, a phase begun with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863--"slavery obscured by the niceties of complexity." In the third stage, which includes the Supreme Court decision of 1954 and the Civil Rights Act of '64, segregation becomes illegal. That's where we are now. Legislation can't change the heart, but it can "restrain the heartless. It can't make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me--and that's pretty important too." (King understands there's a sort of sub-stage in here, a "de facto" stage in which civil rights pressure groups employ non-violent methods to make laws into realities.) The final plateau ushers in "the new Jerusalem ascending out of heaven from God."

As far as I can tell, it takes quite an optimist not to see an awesome chasm between stages three and four. How does King envision bridging it? The answer was implicit in his reply to a student teacher who wanted to know what he could do about five white children who keep tormenting a little Negro girl in his class. His assumption is that when the legal and extra-legal barriers to communication between races are hewn down, people will begin to see that they're all brothers under the skin, that the same things make them laugh and cry and bleed. Agape will take over. Then Americans may know the "majestic heights of being obedient to the unenforceable."

Sadly, even if the theory is a reasonable one, it's liable to take a while. And a whole lot of people in the Negro struggle today don't feel like waiting around. If King doesn't produce the social revolution he talks about in a hurry, he can become obsolescent.

There is a certain tragedy, though, in prophesying the failure of King's vision and leadership. For if he cannot hold together his massive "coalition of conscience," his "grand alliance," then the whole movement is in trouble from within. His revolution will never work if Negroes cry "Communist!" and "Uncle Tom!" at one another.

The "coalition" with which King hopes to work includes a hefty measure of what his more radical adversaries within the movement damn as "establishment groups": The churches, the unions, the NAACP, the Liberal Democrats. In fact, the coalition is so broad that it can seek gradual reform, but hardly social revolution. If the reforms come thick and fast enough, King may hold most of the Negro leaders in line behind him. But the signs aren't hopeful. Revolutions have a momentum of their own, and a way of passing old leaders by.

King said Sunday night that the immediate battle-ground must be Mississippi, that she must be the test of "massive political action," that in bringing her around we will bring all America around. Focussing on Mississippi, one can see what may divide King's establishment coalition from its reluctant colleagues. Is Mississippi a grotesque, diseased abberation? Or is she only an exaggerated extension of American society itself?

Before long, those who take the second view will not "sell out" by working with Establishment forces like the Democratic Party. They will work alone rather than "work into" a sick, hate-ridden White society. They will reject the serpent's advice of most Whites, reject a broad-based coalition, and manifest indifferences to any progress less than radical social upheaval. They will resist what they feel are King's efforts to support a new status quo.

A henchman of King's spoke recently at a rally composed largely of more militant Negroes. When he had finished, one of the audience strode to the podium and shook a fist in his face. "You Tom. All you want to do is make Mississippi like North Carolina!" "What the Hell do you mean--"the speaker shouted back. And then he stopped. He knew the man was right. That's exactly what he wanted to do.

He wanted to make Mississippi like North Carolina and North Carolina like New York and New York like the New Jerusalem. How long? asks the militant, almost glancing at his watch. How long?