CHAPTER 6
Let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth.
—FRANTZ FANON, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961
1968 WAS SUPPOSED TO BE Johnson’s year. As winter thawed toward spring, every one of the numerous men who were dreaming of the White House was calculating his chances of beating the incumbent president. And in every one of those hypothetical contests, Johnson was favored to win. But even those not running for president were running against Johnson. Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference announced a plan to have hundreds of thousands of poor people, white and black, march on Washington in the spring. Poverty, instead of being hidden, would be displayed openly and put on television. The Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the number two leader in the movement, said, “We’re going up there to talk to LBJ, and if LBJ doesn’t do something about what we tell him, we’re going to put him down and get us another one who will.”
But by March 12, 1968 was no longer necessarily Johnson’s year. That day Johnson won his first primary, an easy contest in New Hampshire in which the incumbent was opposed only by the improbable senator Eugene McCarthy, the candidate Life magazine one month earlier had labeled “a conundrum.” The shock was that the president on that snowy New Hampshire day had defeated the conundrum by a mere 230 votes. Around the world, the news was reported as though the unknown senator had just been elected president, or at the very least had defeated Johnson. While Warsaw students were fighting police in the streets and Czechs were drifting ever further from Soviet control, the Soviet Party newspaper, Pravda, said that the primary results showed that the Vietnam War “has become the main and decisive question of the 1968 presidential election.” In Spain, where the University of Madrid was closed, the Catholic newspaper Ya predicted that the November elections would “turn upside down for Johnson.” In Rome, where students had shut down the university, the left-wing press was declaring a victory for the antiwar movement.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, last campaign, 1968
(Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture)
Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York, who was not on the Republican ballot in New Hampshire, conducted a disappointing write-in campaign in which he garnered only 10 percent of the vote. After the primary, he announced his decision not to run, leaving the Republican field open to what to many was the unthinkable: another Nixon nomination. Nixon had little time to gloat, because Robert Kennedy announced that he too was a candidate, raising the terrifying specter in Nixon’s mind of a rerun of the campaign that had almost ended his career—another Nixon-Kennedy showdown. But first Kennedy would have to unseat the incumbent. On March 31 came the bombshell: President Johnson went on television and announced, “I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party as your president.”
Suddenly the front-running Democratic incumbent was out of the race, and no one was sure what would happen next. “It was America that was on a trip; we were just standing still,” said Abbie Hoffman. “How could we pull our pants down? America was already naked. What could we disrupt? America was falling apart at the seams.”
Historians have debated Johnson’s reasons ever since. McCarthy supporters and antiwar activists claimed victory—that they had convinced the president he could not win. In subsequent years, it has been revealed that Johnson’s hawkish cabinet had advised him that escalation of the war was politically impossible and the war was militarily unwinnable. Johnson did, along with his resignation, announce a limited halt to bombing and the intention to seek peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese. But the president was not acting like the well-known LBJ. There had been good reasons to believe he might have won reelection. It could have been that the snowstorm had kept overconfident Johnson supporters home the day of the primary and the narrowness of his victory was only a fluke. Even if New Hampshire did mean real trouble ahead, Johnson did not usually avoid tough political contests. After the New Hampshire primary, The Times of London predicted the result would “anger” Johnson and “should activate the politician within him.” Some have said that his wife urged him not to run. The New York Times speculated that the primary inducement was that the war was going badly.
From March 8 to 14, the world experienced yet another international debacle caused by the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The war was costing the United States about $30 billion annually. And the $3.6 billion balance of payments deficit was considered so enormous that such measures as travel curbs were viewed as pointless Band-Aids. The United States was financing the war with gold reserves, which were now at only half of their post–World War II high of $24.6 billion. The value of the dollar was fixed to gold, and speculators looking at these figures concluded that the United States would not be able to maintain the fixed price of gold at $35 an ounce. The United States, according to the theory, would not have sufficient reserves to sell at $35 to all buyers, which would force up the price of gold. Those who held gold would make enormous profits. The same thing had happened to sterling in November 1967 when the British devalued the pound. Gold speculators went on a buying spree that set off a panic that the press called “the biggest gold rush in history.” More than two hundred tons of gold worth $220 million changed hands on the London gold market, setting a new single-day record. So much gold was going into Switzerland that one bank had to reinforce its vaults for the added weight. Economists around the world were predicting disaster. “We’re in the first act of a world depression,” said British economist John Vaizey.
While the world angrily watched America’s Vietnam spending destabilize the global economy, the war itself ground on uglier than ever. On March 14 the U.S. command reported that 509 American servicemen were killed and 2,766 had been wounded in the past week, bringing total casualties since January 1, 1961, to 139,801, of whom 19,670 had been killed. This did not approach the 33,000 dead in three years of fighting in Korea. But for the first time the total casualties, including wounded, was higher in Vietnam than in Korea.
On March 16 the 23rd Infantry Division, the so-called Americal Division, was fighting in central Vietnam along the murky brown South China Sea in the village of Son My, where they slaughtered close to five hundred unarmed civilians that day. Much of the killing was in one hamlet called My Lai, but the action took place throughout the area. Elderly people, women, young boys and girls, and babies were systematically shot while some of the troops refused to participate. One soldier missed a baby on the ground in front of him two times with a .45-caliber pistol before he finally hit his target, while his comrades laughed at what a bad shot he was. Women were beaten with rifle butts, some raped, some sodomized. The Americans killed the livestock and threw it in the wells to poison the water. They threw explosives into the bomb shelters under the houses where villagers had tried to escape. Those who ran out to avoid the explosives were shot. The houses were all burned. Tom Glen, a soldier in the 11th Brigade, wrote a letter to division headquarters reporting the crimes and waited for a response.
Whatever the reason for Johnson’s withdrawal from the presidential race, it created a strange political reality. The Democrats had Minnesota’s Eugene McCarthy, the peace candidate who had barely bothered to articulate any program beyond the single issue, and New York senator Robert Kennedy, who, according to the February issue of Fortune magazine, was more disliked by business leaders than any other candidate since the 1930s. The youth of 1968, famously alienated and removed from conventional politics, suddenly had two candidates they admired vying for the nomination of the ruling party. The fact that these two politicians, both from the traditional political establishment, had managed to earn the faith and respect of young people who scoffed at the labels “Democrat” and “liberal” was remarkable. No one believed they would have the field to themselves for long. The political establishment would run its own candidate, no doubt Vice President Hubert Humphrey, but for the moment it was exhilarating. A McCarthy ad showing the senator surrounded by youth carried the headline OUR CHILDREN HAVE COME HOME.
Suddenly there’s hope among our voting people.
Suddenly they’ve come back into the mainstream of American life. And it’s a different country.
Suddenly the kids have thrown themselves into politics, with all their fabulous intelligence and energy. And it’s a new election.
When the following year Henry Kissinger became Nixon’s security adviser, he gave an interview to Look magazine in which he demonstrated his extraordinary ability to speak with authority while being completely wrong.
I can understand the anguish of the younger generation. They lack models and they have no heroes, they see no great purpose in the world. But conscientious objection is destructive of a society. The imperatives of the individual are always in conflict with the organization of society. Conscientious objection must be reserved for only the greatest moral issue, and Vietnam is not of this magnitude.
It was clear that Kissinger was incapable of understanding “the anguish of the younger generation.” To begin with, this was a generation with a long list of heroes, though neither Kissinger nor those he admired were to be found on this list. For the most part, the list did not include politicians, generals, or leaders of state. Young people all over the world had these heroes in common, and there was an excitement about the discovery that like-minded people could be found all over the world. For Americans, this was an unusually international perspective. It could be argued that because of the birth of satellite communications and television, this was the first global generation. But subsequent generations have not been this cosmopolitan.
What was also unusual for Americans was that so many of the revered figures were writers and intellectuals. This is perhaps because to a very large extent theirs was a movement from the universities. Perhaps the single most influential writer for young people in the sixties was Algerian-born French Nobel Prize laureate Albert Camus, who died in 1960 in an automobile crash at age forty-seven, just as what should have been his best decade was beginning. Because of his 1942 essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in which he argued that the human condition was fundamentally absurd, he was often associated with the existential movement. But he refused to consider himself part of that group. He was not a joiner, which is one of the reasons he was more revered than the existentialist and communist Jean-Paul Sartre, even though Sartre lived through and even participated in the sixties student movements. Camus, who worked with the Resistance against the Nazi occupiers of France editing an underground newspaper, Le Combat,often wrote from the perspective of a moral imperative to act. His 1948 novel, The Plague, is about a doctor who risks his life and family to rid his community of a sickness he discovers. In the 1960s, students all over the world read The Plague and interpreted it as a call to activism. Mario Savio’s famous 1964 speech, “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious . . . you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears . . . and you’ve got to make it stop,” sounds like a line from The Plague. “There are times when the only feeling I have is one of mad revolt,” Camus wrote. American civil rights workers read Camus. His books were passed from one volunteer to the next in SNCC. Tom Hayden wrote that he considered Camus to be one of the great influences in his decision to leave journalism and become a student activist. Abbie Hoffman used Camus to explain in part the Yippie! movement, referring to Camus’s words in Notebooks: “The revolution as myth is the definitive revolution.”
By 1968 there was another intellectual it seemed everybody wanted to quote: Marxist-Hegelian revisionist revolutionary Herbert Marcuse. His most appealing idea was what he called “the great refusal,” the time to say “No, this is not acceptable”—another idea that was expressed in Savio’s “odious machine” speech. Marcuse, a naturalized American citizen who had fled the Nazis, was on the faculty of Brandeis when Abbie Hoffman had been a student there, and Hoffman was enormously influenced by him, especially by his book Eros and Civilization, which talked about guilt-free physical pleasure and warned about “false fathers, teachers, and heroes.” The most talked-about Marcuse book of the late sixties, One-Dimensional Man, was published in 1964. It denounced technological society as shallow and conformist and put into the carefully orchestrated discipline of German philosophy all of the sentiments of the 1950s James Dean–style rebels and the 1960s student revolutionaries. The New York Times called Marcuse “the most important philosopher alive.”
In 1968, at the age of seventy, Marcuse taught at San Diego State, where he could be seen fussing over his rust-colored cat and enjoying the hippos at the zoo, an avuncular white-haired figure whose impact was felt across the globe. The students who forced the University of Rome to close in March of that year carried a banner with three Ms that stood for Marx, Mao, and Marcuse.
While more conventional thinkers insisted that technology would create more leisure time, Marcuse warned that it would instead imprison people in unoriginal lives devoid of creative thinking. He warned that though technology appeared to help the dissenter, it would actually be used to muffle protest. People were being anesthetized into a complacency that was mistaken for happiness. Goods and services were rendering mankind useless and incapable of real thought. There was an increase in media, but it espoused less and less variety of ideas. People in today’s world who “surf” through eighty or more television stations, only to find less there than when they had only four choices, might be beginning to grasp Marcuse’s vision for a technological age in which people think they have more choices but the choices lack significant differences. In an age of abundance, when technology has made individuals extraordinarily efficient, why do people spend even more time working, and why is so much work mindless instead of stimulating? One of the first Marxists to lose faith in the Soviet system, Marcuse saw the West as also in a state of “unfreedom” and often suggested that revolution may be the only path to true freedom.
Marcuse, the aging professor, seemed to warm to the role of guru to the student radicals. He frequently discussed their movements. He warned Abbie Hoffman on “flower power” that “flowers have no power” other than the force of the people who cultivate them—one of the few occasions on which Hoffman had no reply. But as Marcuse freely admitted, many of the young rebels who talked about his ideas had never read him. His work is written in the German dialectic tradition. Marcuse achieved popularity without ever developing an accessible writing style. Luis Gonzalez de Alba, one of the student leaders in Mexico, described finally settling down to read some Marcuse simply because President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz had accused the movement of being influenced by the philosopher.
I opened One-Dimensional Man and got as far as page five. Eros and Civilization had been a terrible bore. And now I had to read another of Marcuse’s books, all because Díaz Ordaz had happened to mention “the philosophers of destruction.”
A Martinique-born psychiatrist named Frantz Fanon became an international figure after he wrote a book in 1961 called Les damnés de la terre. Translated into twenty-five languages, the book was read by U.S. college students under the title The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon had finished his French medical studies in Algeria in 1953, where he joined the Algerian National Front and became a leader in the fight for Algerian independence. This alone was credentials enough in the French youth movement that began in the late fifties by opposing French policy in Algeria. Independent Algeria, like Cuba, came to be regarded as a symbol of resistance to the established order of the world. Not a predictable anticolonialist tirade, Wretched of the Earth examines the psychology not only of colonialism, but of overthrowing colonialism and the kind of new man that is required to build a postcolonial society.
By explaining the complexity of the inner struggle to break with colonialism, Wretched of the Earth wielded an important influence in the United States on the American civil rights movement, where it helped make the connection between oppressed American blacks trying to rise up from white rule and oppressed African Muslims trying to free themselves from Europeans. This was the theme of the Black Muslim movement, especially under Malcolm X, who like Fanon was born in 1925, but in 1965 had been murdered, it appeared, by fellow Black Muslims, though this was never proven. Black Muslim boxer Muhammad Ali, as he defied the white establishment, was often seen as a standard-bearer for emerging poor nations. Eldridge Cleaver called Ali “the black Fidel Castro of boxing.”
Even Martin Luther King, Jr., identified the civil rights movement with the struggle of underdeveloped nations. In 1955 he said of the Montgomery boycott, “It is part of a world-wide movement. Look at just about any place in the world and the exploited people are rising against their exploiters. This seems to be the outstanding characteristic of our generation.”
Eldridge Cleaver became a sixties icon largely through his literary ability. Cleaver first went to prison at the age of eighteen for smoking marijuana. He later went back for rape. Released from prison in 1966, he joined the staff of the counterculture magazine Ramparts—famous for being charged with a crime for its 1968 cover of burning draft cards. The magazine staff encouraged him to publish the essays he had written while in prison, essays that expressed harsh self-criticism along with harsh criticism of the world that created him. Cleaver was virtually unknown until 1968, when his book of essays, Soul on Ice, was published and he was credited by critics, including in The New York Times Book Review, with a brash but articulate voice. His timing was perfect: In 1968, what was wrong with American society was a leading question in America. A June Gallup poll showed that white people by a ratio of three to two did not believe America was “sick,” but black people by a ratio of eight to seven did. Soul on Ice was published at almost the exact same moment as the Kerner Report on racial violence and, as The New York Times review pointed out, confirmed its findings. “Look into a mirror,” wrote Cleaver. “The cause is you, Mr. and Mrs. Yesterday, you, with your forked tongues.”
Shortly before the publication of his book, Cleaver had brokered an important black-white alliance in California. The New Left there had formed a political party, the Peace and Freedom Party, which had gathered one hundred thousand signatures to put its candidates on the California ballot. Through Cleaver, the party was able to establish a coalition with the Black Panthers, by agreeing to the Panther platform of exempting blacks from the military, freeing all blacks from prison, and demanding that all future trials of blacks be held with an all-black jury. Cleaver was to be nominated as the party’s presidential candidate, with Jerry Rubin as his running mate. Cleaver’s new wife, Kathleen, a SNCC worker, was to be a state assembly candidate, as was Black Panther Bobby Seale. It was during Cleaver’s campaign that he called for “pussy power” at an event he labeled “Pre-erection Day” and an alliance with “Machine Gun Kellys”—that is, anyone with firearms who was willing to use them. In October he received loud applause from a packed theater with an overflowing crowd at Stanford University, when he said of the governor of California, “Ronald Reagan is a punk, a sissy, and a coward, and I challenge him to a duel to the death or until he says Uncle Eldridge. I give him a choice of weapons—a gun, a knife, a baseball bat, or marshmallows.”
1968 was the best year Eldridge Cleaver had. The following year, accused of involvement in a Black Panther shoot-out in Oakland, he fled to Cuba and then to Algeria. By the time he finally returned to the United States in 1975, he had no following left.
If the truth be told, which it rarely was except in private, most of the white Left found the Black Panthers a little bit scary. While most of the New Left whites were from the comfortable middle class, and most of the civil rights blacks such as Bob Moses and Martin Luther King were well educated, the Black Panthers were mostly street people from tough neighborhoods, often with prison records. Dressing in black with black berets and posing for photos with weapons, they intended to be scary. They preached violence and urged blacks to arm themselves for a coming violent revolution. They might have gotten little sympathy and few admirers except for two things. By 1968 it was becoming clear that the political establishment, especially in certain fiefdoms such as Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago and Governor Ronald Reagan’s California, was prepared to use armed warfare against unarmed demonstrators. In April Daley announced that he had given his police force orders to “shoot to kill” any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail and “shoot to maim” any looters, a license to open fire on any civil disturbance. Once Reagan became governor in 1967, along with cutting the state budget for medical care and education, he initiated a policy of brutalizing demonstrators. Following an October 16, 1967, attack on antiwar demonstrators in Oakland that was so barbarous it was dubbed “bloody Tuesday,” he commended the Oakland Police Department for “their exceptional ability and great professional skill.” Young, privileged white people were starting to be treated by police the way black people had been for a long time.
In January 1968, after an attack on seven hundred antiwar activists picketing Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s speech in San Francisco, one of the jailed victims, a Berkeley student, said of the attacking police, “They wanted to kill and would have if they could have gotten away with it. I know now that they were out to put Huey away, except Huey had the good sense to defend himself.”
The reference was to Huey Newton, who founded the Black Panthers in California in 1966 and became the Peace and Freedom Party candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from the Berkeley-Oakland district in 1968 while in prison awaiting trial in connection with the death of one and wounding of another Oakland policeman in a 1966 shoot-out. The first trial, in the summer of 1968, ended in a mistrial, as did two subsequent ones. Almost all of the major trials of Black Panthers ended in mistrials, acquittals, or convictions overturned on appeal, further fueling the suspicion that they were being persecuted by the police. In the course of the trials, plausible evidence of police brutality turned up, including in one case, allegedly murdering two suspects in their beds. The Black Panthers were increasingly being seen as victims of violence, martyrs who courageously stood up to the police.
It was a time of great strife within the black community, as former Negroes struggled to define the new black. By 1968 many of the greats of black culture were being regularly attacked by blacks. In Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver savagely turned on James Baldwin, arguably the most respected black writer of the first half of the 1960s. After admitting how he thrilled to find a black writer of Baldwin’s skill, Cleaver concludes that Baldwin had “the most grueling, agonizing, total hatred of the blacks, particularly of himself, and the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of the whites that one can find in the writing of any black American writer of note in our time.” Cleaver, who accused other blacks of hating blacks, managed in his one small book to denounce not only Baldwin, but Floyd Patterson, Louis Armstrong, Joe Louis, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and Martin Luther King. Jazz star Louis Armstrong was an “Uncle Tom,” according to Cleaver, a black man who pandered to the white racist population with his big eyes and big teeth.
Basically, Cleaver saw blacks who succeeded as sellouts. Malcolm X, who had been murdered, Muhammad Ali, stripped of his boxing title, Paul Robeson, forced into exile—these were all authentic black heroes, whereas Martin Luther King was to be scorned for his Nobel Prize. Cleaver wrote, “The award of a Nobel Prize to Martin Luther King, and the inflation of his image to that of an international hero, bear witness to the historical fact that the only Negro Americans allowed to attain national or international fame have been the puppets and the lackeys of the power structure.” Once that is concluded, it is an easy step to the litmus test: If a black person achieves recognition, is he or she not thus proven to be a lackey?
Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, more popularly known as Stepin Fetchit, age seventy-six, struck back angrily in 1968 when a CBS television special entitled Black History—Lost, Stolen, or Strayed, narrated by black comedian Bill Cosby, presented Stepin Fetchit as an early racist stereotype. Stepin Fetchit, a friend of boxer Muhammad Ali, said, “It was not Martin Luther King that emancipated the modern Negro. It was Stepin Fetchit.” He contended that it was his imitators but not he who did the eye-rolling, foot-shuffling kind of performance. “I was the first Negro to stay in a hotel in the South,” he said angrily. “I was the first Negro to fly coast to coast on an airliner. I wiped away the image of rape from the Negro, made household work, somebody it was all right to associate with.” Then he attacked some of the new movies, such as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in which Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn’s daughter brings home to dinner her fiancé, played by Sidney Poitier, who is a handsome, wonderfully articulate, brilliant young doctor. The white dad, Tracy, struggles with the idea without ever expressing a racist thought and in the end gives in, apparently proving that intermarriage is okay if the black man is one of the leading citizens in America. Stepin Fetchit said that the film “did more to stop intermarriage than to help it,” asserting that at no point in the film did Poitier actually touch the woman playing his fiancée. The comedian said Poitier and other contemporary black stars “are tools. Like in a bank. You put one Negro up front, but you won’t find any other in the place.”
New black heroes were made and old ones dropped every day. By 1968 Muhammad Ali was one of the few black heroes who were unassailable from the Left. Youth and blacks had admired him when in 1967 he was stripped of his boxing license for refusing the draft. The play The Great White Hope starred James Earl Jones as the newly discovered black hero, the first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson. Johnson had been unapologetic, or in 1968 terms a black champ, not a Negro, and the way he was driven from boxing seemed to parallel Muhammad Ali’s own story.
In these hard times for black heroes, not surprisingly, Martin Luther King was frequently criticized. Many civil rights activists, especially those in SNCC, used to jokingly refer to him as “de Lawd.” Beginning in 1966, King would occasionally be booed by SNCC activists while speaking or shouted down with cries of “Black Power!” King once responded, “Whenever Pharaoh wanted to keep the slaves in slavery, he kept them fighting among themselves.”
He had often been accused of stealing more media attention than he deserved. This might have been true. He was a media natural; that was how he had become a leader. He sometimes reflected on what a good life he could have had if he had not gotten involved in civil rights. He was the privileged son of a distinguished Atlanta clergyman. He had not been born into the poverty and discrimination he was trying to end. He wasn’t even aware that racism existed until the sixth grade, when his white friend stopped playing with him because they had gone off to different schools.
As a doctoral student at Boston University, he impressed young women with his care and clothes, unusually well outfitted for a graduate student. Coretta Scott, his future wife, recalled, “He had quite a line.” She termed it “intellectual jive.” He was a small, unimpressive-looking man until he began to speak. From the beginning he was picked for leadership roles because of his speaking abilities and because he seemed to the press to be much older and more mature than he was. He was only twenty-six years old and a newcomer to Alabama when he became leader of the Montgomery bus boycott.
He often spoke of his own life as something he had no choice in. “As I became involved and as people began to derive inspiration from their involvement, I realized that the choice leaves your own hands. The people expect you to give them leadership.”
Although born in 1929, a decade before the older sixties leaders such as Tom Hayden, King thought like a sixties activist—dreaming of something bigger than just the South and an issue larger than segregation. He felt part of an international movement toward freedom.
The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, whom Eldridge Cleaver called “America’s flattest foot,” pursued King relentlessly. It spied on him, photographed him, planted informants around him, recorded his conversations. Ostensibly, Hoover was searching for a communist link and convinced Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who committed most of his worst decisions in the service of the cold war, that there was enough cause for concern for Kennedy to okay the wiretaps. King, who clearly saw the failings of capitalism and on rare occasions expressed admiration for Marx, was careful to avoid too much of this type of rhetoric. As far as formal communist ties, all that could be shown is that he knew one or two people who may have at an earlier date had communist connections.
What the FBI turned up was merely very solid evidence that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., had constant sexual relations with a long list of women. Close associates occasionally warned him that the movement might be hurt if stories got out. King once said, “Fucking’s a form of anxiety reduction.” And few people in the movement could criticize him, since most of them were indulging on occasion as well. “Everybody was out getting laid,” said political activist Michael Harrington. But King did it more often—not by chasing women: They pursued him everywhere he went.
The FBI presented photographs and other evidence to select journalists. But no one wanted to report this story. In the 1960s such a story was considered beneath the dignity and ethics of journalists. In 1965 the FBI went so far as to send taped proof of sexual affairs to King and his wife along with a note suggesting that the only solution was for him to take his own life.
But these attacks were not nearly as disturbing to King as the sense that his day was over, that no one really believed in nonviolence anymore. In 1967 he said, “I’ll still preach nonviolence with all my might, but I’m afraid it will fall on deaf ears.” By 1968 he was clearly depressed, talking constantly about death, and growing fat from compulsive eating. A Nobel Peace Prize did little to cheer him. He told Ralph Abernathy, “Maybe we just have to admit that the day of violence is here, and maybe we have to just give up and let violence take its course. The nation won’t listen to our voice. Maybe it will heed the voice of violence.”
He said that he was living in a “sick nation.” His speeches became morbidly focused on death. He compared himself to Moses, who led his people out of slavery but died on a mountaintop in Jordan in view of the promised land.
In the spring he was periodically spending time in Memphis to support a garbage workers’ strike. These segregated jobs for blacks paid only slightly above minimum wage, with no vacation or pensions—an example of how black people were kept from the prosperity of America. An attempted demonstration on March 28 was a disaster for King, with marchers turning to violence, battling police, and demolishing storefronts. On April 3 King returned to Memphis to try again and was greeted by a sarcastic and ridiculing press corps. On the evening of April 4 he was resting in his hotel, preparing his next week’s sermon at his church in Atlanta where his father had preached before him, a sermon titled “America May Go to Hell,” when he was shot in the right side of the face. He died minutes later.
April 7, 1968, in Washington, D.C., after the riots following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, assassination
(Photo by Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos)
The day of violence was indeed at hand, as King had predicted. As news spread that King had been killed by an escaped white convict named James Earl Ray, violence spread in the black sections of 120 American cities, with rioting reported in 40. The National Guard moved into many cities that were being burned and looted. That was when Chicago’s mayor Richard Daley gave his infamous “shoot to kill” order. Millions of dollars of property was destroyed in black neighborhoods, and black people were killed—twelve in Washington, D.C., alone. King, no longer a suspected Uncle Tom with a Nobel Prize, was dead, not yet forty, killed by a white man, at last an authentic black martyr. Stokely Carmichael said, “Now that they’ve taken Dr. King off, it’s time to end this nonviolence bullshit.”