The Anatomy of Greatness
Great of History profile
A comfortable preacher's son who expected to become a professor, King was pushed into leadership at twenty-six. He turned his own fear, his gift for words and his willingness to go to jail into the moral engine of a mass movement, and carried to his death a private life that contradicted his preaching, a guilt that the FBI tried to use to destroy him, and a depression that deepened as the movement split around him.
Top traits
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Critical acts
- 1
Taking the Montgomery Presidency and Speaking at Holt Street
The leaders had nearly voted to call the boycott off after one day while it was "still a success," and some wanted to hide the leaders' names from reporters until Nixon shamed them: "We'd better decide now if we are going to be fearless men or scared boys." King went home with twenty minutes to prepare "the most decisive speech of my life."
- 2
Giving Up the Gun and Going Back to Be Indicted
He gave up armed protection: "How could I serve as one of the leaders of a nonviolent movement and at the same time use weapons of violence for my personal protection?" Floodlights and unarmed watchmen took the place of an armed guard. Then he faced down his father in the family kitchen.
- 3
The Faith Act in Birmingham
He went into the bedroom alone and came out in "a work shirt, blue jeans that were crisply new and rolled up at the cuffs, and a new pair of 'clodhopper' walking shoes." In his own account: "I have to make a faith act. I don't know what will happen or what the outcome will be. I don't know where the money will come from."
- 4
Taking the Movement North to Chicago
He went anyway and lived there part of each week. Bernard Lee rented "a four-room, $90-per-month apartment on the third floor of an aging building" in Lawndale, and the landlord sent "a small army of repairmen" once he learned who the tenant was.
- 5
Breaking with the President over Vietnam
On April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York, he gave his fullest statement against the war. He explained why the riots had forced it: "I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government."
- 6
The Poor People's Campaign and the Return to Memphis
He was near despair. In his hotel room he told 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." Then he insisted on a second, peaceful march in Memphis to prove that nonviolence could still hold.
Maxims
Admit the fear, then act as if you had none
At the kitchen table he confessed, "I'm losing my courage." A few nights later he faced an armed crowd on his bombed porch and told them to put their weapons away. See "The Kitchen Table."
Give up the gun before you ask others to
He applied for a pistol permit after the threats and was refused, then decided that a nonviolent leader could not carry "weapons of violence for my personal protection." "I was much more afraid in Montgomery when I had a gun in my house."
Make a faith act when the money runs out
On Good Friday 1963 the bail fund was gone and his advisers, including his father, told him to stay out of jail. He changed into work clothes and went.
Pick one target, not the whole system
In Albany "Our protest was so vague that we got nothing." In Birmingham SCLC aimed at the downtown stores and won.
Don't trust a fine someone else pays
In 1958 Commissioner Sellers paid King's $14 fine to keep him out of jail, and in 1962 Albany's mayor invented an "unidentified, well-dressed Negro man" to do the same. Opponents who understood him robbed him of his martyrdom.
Part IThe Story
The Kitchen Table
By the middle of January 1956 the threatening calls were coming thirty or forty a day, and a white friend had told Martin Luther King Jr. "that plans were being made to take my life." One night toward the end of the month, after Coretta was asleep, the phone rang again. "Listen, nigger, we've taken all we want from you; before next week you'll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery."
He could not sleep. "Finally I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward." Until that winter, he said later, "Life had been wrapped up for me in a Christmas package," and his faith was what his biographer David Garrow calls "a kind of inherited religion." Now "Something said to me, 'You can't call on Daddy now, you can't even call on Mama.'"
He bowed over the table and prayed aloud. "But Lord, I must confess that I'm weak now, I'm faltering. I'm losing my courage." Then, he said, came an inner voice: "Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you. Even until the end of the world." "Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything."
Three nights later his house was bombed, and he took the news "calmly." Garrow counts the kitchen account among "the most remarkable and self-revealing utterances he ever made publicly," and it explains much of what followed. King was a comfortable preacher's son who expected to become a professor, and he was pushed into leadership at twenty-six. He turned his own fear, his gift for words and his willingness to go to jail into the moral engine of a mass movement. He also carried to his death a private life that contradicted his preaching, a guilt that the FBI tried to use to destroy him, and a depression that deepened as the movement split around him. He is one of the lives in The Anatomy of Greatness, and few of them were so openly afraid, or so often brave in spite of it.
By the Numbers
The King Years
26His age when elected to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association, December 1955
20 minutesTime he had to prepare the Holt Street speech, five of them wasted in fear
381 daysLength of the Montgomery bus boycott by his count (Garrow counts 382)
30–40Threatening calls a day by the middle of January 1956
$54,000Nobel Prize money, all of it given to the movement
34 daysDeadline in the anonymous FBI letter inviting him to kill himself
13 yearsTime in the movement when he told Ebenezer, 'I'm really tired'
Tweedie
The darkness started early. Twice as a boy, Taylor Branch reports, King threw himself from an upstairs window, the first time when he thought he had killed his grandmother, the second when she died while he was secretly at a parade.
He grew into a self-conscious young dandy, nicknamed "Tweedie," "in tribute to his penchant for tweed suits," with a habit of "closing his sermon folder just as he stepped into the pulpit—so that everyone would know he was preaching without notes." At Crozer Seminary he "had a tendency to overdress."
He was also a reader. At Morehouse he took from Thoreau the idea that "noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good." At Crozer he worked through Rauschenbusch, Marx, Nietzsche and Niebuhr, and wrote to his mother that "I never go anywhere much but in these books." He rejected communism because it allowed "force, violence, murder, lying" as means to a "millennial" end: "the end is preexistent in the means." When he heard Mordecai Johnson preach on Gandhi, "I left the meeting and bought a half-dozen books on Gandhi's life and works." He answered Niebuhr's attack on pacifism with a distinction that became his creed: "true pacifism is not nonresistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to evil."
He set himself a task that defined his preaching: "I must forever make the complex the simple." But he was honest about how far the books had taken him. At the end of his schooling he had "merely an intellectual understanding and appreciation of the position, with no firm determination to organize it in a socially effective situation." One early sign of the instinct came at Crozer, when a white student threatened him with a pistol and "King declined to bring any charges."
Twenty Minutes at Holt Street
At Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery he ran his congregation like a political machine. He "insisted that every church member become a registered voter and a member of the NAACP," and two members of his Social and Political Action Committee, Jo Ann Robinson and Rufus Lewis, would become leaders of the boycott. But he did not plan to lead anything. By December 1955 he had been in town about fifteen months, had a two-week-old daughter and had just finished his thesis. Three weeks earlier, at Coretta's urging, he had refused to run for president of the local NAACP so that he could give "more attention to my church work."
When Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, E. D. Nixon called King about a boycott, and King offered his church for the meeting. On December 5, Rufus Lewis nominated him to lead the new Montgomery Improvement Association, and "in a matter of minutes I was unanimously elected." King thought "they probably picked me because I had not been in town long enough to be identified with any particular group or clique." Branch gives the cynical reading too: "Cynics would say that the established preachers stepped back for King only because they saw more blame and danger ahead than glory."
The leaders had nearly voted to call the boycott off after one day while it was "still a success," until Nixon shamed them: "We'd better decide now if we are going to be fearless men or scared boys." King went home with twenty minutes to prepare "the most decisive speech of my life." "I became possessed by fear," he admits, and he "wasted five minutes of the original twenty" before he prayed and sketched an outline. His problem was "how could I make a speech that would be militant enough to keep my people aroused to positive action and yet moderate enough to keep this fervor within controllable and Christian bounds?"
At Holt Street, "Without manuscript or notes," he gave the boycott its moral frame. "You know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression." Then he tied the protest to the nation's own authorities.
— Martin Luther King Jr., Holt Street Baptist Church, December 5, 1955If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.
The crowd voted to stay off the buses. "The people had been as enthusiastic when I urged them to love as they were when I urged them to protest." The night taught him something he relied on ever after: "I came to see for the first time what the older preachers meant when they said, 'Open your mouth and God will speak for you.'"
The Gun in the House
The cost began at once. Arrested for speeding in January 1956 and driven in the opposite direction from the jail, "I found myself trembling within and without." Then came the night in the kitchen, and on January 30 a bomb exploded on his porch while Coretta and the baby were inside. He calmed an armed crowd from the wrecked porch, telling them that "if M. L. King had never been born this movement would have taken place. I just happened to be here."
His friends and his father urged him to arm himself, and he had already applied for a pistol permit, which was refused. (The sources disagree on whether there was already a gun in the house; Bayard Rustin, visiting weeks later, had to stop someone "from sitting on a loaded pistol that was lying on the couch.") King decided against it: "How could I serve as one of the leaders of a nonviolent movement and at the same time use weapons of violence for my personal protection?" Floodlights and unarmed watchmen took the place of an armed guard. "I was much more afraid in Montgomery when I had a gun in my house. When I decided that I couldn't keep a gun, I came face-to-face with the question of death and I dealt with it."
Then a grand jury indicted almost a hundred boycott leaders under the state antiboycott law. King was in Nashville. In Atlanta, Daddy King was "more insistent than ever that Martin not return to Montgomery," and gathered the city's black elite in the family home to talk him out of it. When Coretta took the baby upstairs during the argument, "Martin, already angry at his father, became furious with Coretta for leaving his side." He told the room: "I would rather go back and spend ten years in jail than not go back." Benjamin Mays sided with him, and "In tears, Daddy King admitted that his son had to go back," and drove him to Montgomery himself. King was convicted and fined $500 plus $500 in court costs, or 386 days in jail, and appealed.
Military Precision
The boycott ran on organization. King set up committees for transport, finance, programs and strategy, and the mass meetings became the boycott's church. When the police commissioner ended cheap taxi fares, King copied a private car pool from Baton Rouge. Within days there were about three hundred cars and "forty-eight dispatch and the forty-two pick-up stations," and even the White Citizens' Council admitted that the pool "moved with 'military precision.'"
He had first doubted the boycott itself until he saw that "Our concern would not be to put the bus company out of business, but to put justice in business." His first negotiation with the city fathers ended his innocence: "I had believed that the privileged would give up their privileges on request. This experience, however, taught me a lesson. I came to see that no one gives up his privileges without strong resistance." After a bad session he told himself, "You must not harbor anger."
When whites called him the obstacle to a settlement, "I called a meeting of the executive board and offered my resignation." The board answered "With a unanimous vote of confidence." Ralph Abernathy, "my closest associate and most trusted friend," stood by him throughout. After ten bombings in Montgomery King told a crowd at his porch: "We must somehow believe that unearned suffering is redemptive." The protest held until the Supreme Court struck down bus segregation, and on December 21, 1956, King rode the first integrated bus with Glenn Smiley, a white Texan, beside him.
The Machine and the Jail
After Montgomery, Stanley Levison and Rustin drafted the plan that became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It was built around ministers and around King himself. One observer called it "a strategic command" as opposed to SNCC's "ideological army," and SNCC's James Forman put the difference sharply: "We think the people should lead, but SCLC thinks there should be one leader." King depended on Levison, who "refused any compensation" while "preparing King's tax returns, drafting articles and speeches," and on Rustin. Under pressure he gave up both. When Rustin waited for him to decide his fate in 1960, "King procrastinated," then accepted his resignation.
He began to build jail into the method. In 1958 he refused to pay a $14 fine and chose the cell, denying it was "some histrionic gesture or publicity stunt." Commissioner Sellers paid the fine himself to keep him out. In India he was introduced as "a fellow untouchable from the United States of America," was "a bit shocked and peeved," and then decided: "Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable."
From Reidsville State Prison on October 26, 1960, he wrote the line Garrow took as his book's epigraph: "This is the cross that we must bear for the freedom of our people." Senator Kennedy's call to Coretta over the sentence showed what one gesture from the top could do. It turned Daddy King, who had "expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion," into a Kennedy voter with "a suitcase" of votes.
Where Is Your Body?
In 1961 the Freedom Riders, beaten by mobs in Anniston and Montgomery, hid in a Montgomery pharmacist's home. King was there. The students' "standard refrain" was "Where is your body?" Diane Nash "asked King point-blank to go with them." He "replied that he agreed with her. He wanted to go but was not sure." His aides pointed out that he was on probation from a 1960 traffic case and argued that "He was needed for fund-raising speeches, high-level negotiations, and other functions that could not be done from a bus seat." The students laughed: "I'm on probation, and I'm going," said one.
"King withered visibly under the pressure," Branch writes. "In a final, tortured retreat, he said, 'I think I should choose the time and place of my Golgotha.'" "Some of the students recoiled from this naked identification with Christ himself." A Freedom Rider named Paul Brooks "said he wished King had simply acknowledged his fear. 'I would have respected him more.'" Ella Baker was harsher: "Oh, he's just worried about his little group." By the time of Albany, SNCC workers were calling him "De Lawd."
Albany itself was a defeat. King and Abernathy "committed themselves to serve prison terms rather than pay fines," and an "unidentified, well-dressed Negro man" paid them, a benefactor Garrow shows never existed. There "had been no photos of burning buses or beaten protesters," and the Kennedys stayed away. King did not hide the failure: "The mistake I made there was to protest against segregation generally rather than against a single and distinct facet of it. Our protest was so vague that we got nothing, and the people were left very depressed and in despair." "Looking back over it, I'm sorry I was bailed out."
Don't Touch Him
In the autumn of 1962, during the Ole Miss crisis, SCLC held a convention in Birmingham. As King read the closing announcements, "one of the white men in the audience walked to the stage and lashed out with his right fist. The blow made a loud popping sound as it landed on King's left cheek." The man kept hitting him, "on the side of his face from behind, and twice more in the back." "After being knocked backward by one of the last blows, King turned to face him while dropping his hands."
Septima Clark, who "nursed many private complaints about the strutting ways of the SCLC preachers," watched him drop his hands "like a newborn baby," "and from then on she never doubted that his nonviolence was more than the heat of his oratory or the result of his slow calculation."
"Don't touch him!" cried King. "Don't touch him. We have to pray for him." The man was Roy James of the American Nazi Party. King came back holding "an ice-filled handkerchief to his face," Rosa Parks gave him "two aspirin and a Coca-Cola," and he refused to press charges. "His refusal to press charges infuriated the Birmingham police."
Good Friday
After Albany, Fred Shuttlesworth "pleaded with him" to come to Birmingham. At the Dorchester retreat that planned the campaign, "most of the two-day discussions were devoted to analyzing Albany and devising a better strategy," and King warned that "some of the people sitting here today will not come back alive from this campaign." This time the opponent was chosen with care. Levison warned that Bull Connor was "a rough adversary," and that was the point: "The Kennedy brothers, the Dorchester group concluded, would respond if their hand was forced by demonstrations that evoked the true character of southern segregation."
Andrew Young thought King "had no more eagerness to go to Birmingham than he had had to step forward in Montgomery." Young also saw how King handled his fear: "He would always say it in terms of us," joking that Young had better say "what kind of eulogy you want." Young added that "even though he was talking about me, I knew he was talking about himself."
By Good Friday, April 12, 1963, the campaign was failing. In eight days "they had put fewer than 150 people in jail," an injunction forbade marching, and the bail bondsman had reached his credit limit. In Room 30 of the Gaston Motel one adviser argued that "King could not go to jail, because the movement would die without new money." Daddy King "recommended that his son not break the injunction." King went into the bedroom alone and came out in "a work shirt, blue jeans that were crisply new and rolled up at the cuffs, and a new pair of 'clodhopper' walking shoes." "I have to make a faith act. I don't know what will happen or what the outcome will be. I don't know where the money will come from."
In jail he answered eight white clergymen who had called the demonstrations extremist, writing on "the margins of the newspaper in which the statement appeared." The letter defended creative tension, attacked "the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice," and insisted that "freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." It gave the movement its widest claim: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." King later admitted he had "indulged in the author's prerogative of polishing" the letter before publication.
— Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 1963So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?
Harry Belafonte raised bail money, at one point receiving "a small black satchel containing $50,000 in cash." In May the campaign turned on the children. King "was hesitant about unleashing the untrained teenagers," and held back while James Bevel and Wyatt Walker sent wave after wave out of the Sixteenth Street church. Walker, by his own later account, also used tactics "he did not reveal to King," including sending men to "turn in false alarms" to draw off Connor's fire trucks. The pictures of dogs and fire hoses forced a settlement and, in King's words, "brought into being the Civil Rights Bill." But Shuttlesworth, in hospital when King agreed to halt the marches, raged at him: "Now Martin, you're mister big but you're soon to be mister nothing."
That year President Kennedy took King into the Rose Garden to tell him to "get rid of" Levison and Jack O'Dell. King agreed to "stop communicating directly with Stanley Levison," while insisting he had received "no legitimate reason" to do so.
Tell 'Em About the Dream
On August 28, 1963, King was the last speaker at the Lincoln Memorial. Mahalia Jackson had just stirred the crowd. King began with his prepared text, which spoke of a promissory note: "we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check." Partway through, he left it. In his own account, "all of a sudden this thing came to me." He had used the phrase "I have a dream" "many times before, and I just felt that I wanted to use it here. I don't know why. I hadn't thought about it before the speech."
Branch adds a detail King left out: "Mahalia Jackson piped up as though in church, 'Tell 'em about the dream, Martin.' Whether her words reached him is not known." Then came the sequence: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." It rested on the habit learned at Holt Street, trusting the moment and letting the refrain carry the crowd. That September, a bomb at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church killed four girls dressed in white for Youth Day.
Branch's last word on King in 1963 is about the man behind the oratory: "King was personally self-conscious. He worried about his looks, his tough skin, about what people thought of him and whether they might find out that he had ghostwriters for his books." The worry had a basis. Garrow reports that "Ghostwriters Al Duckett and Nat Lamar had written most of the text" of Why We Can't Wait.
The Package
In 1964 King won the Nobel Prize. Newsmen "marveled at the 'spartan-like simplicity' of the rented home," and "the only family car was a 1960 Ford with seventy thousand miles on the odometer." Coretta wanted $5,000 set aside for each child's college education, "but Martin resisted. He felt that the prize was an award to the movement in general." Garrow lists his "insistence on giving away the Nobel money" among the "Serious marital differences."
There were others. Garrow writes that "Many movement activists were aware of his various sexual involvements with a number of different women," including one relationship that "rather than his marriage, increasingly became the emotional centerpiece of King's life." To a friend who raised it, King said he was "away from home twenty-five to twenty-seven days a month" and that sex was "a form of anxiety reduction."
In early January 1965 Coretta opened "a thin box containing a reel of tape that had been received at SCLC headquarters a month earlier." It held "dirty jokes and bawdy remarks King had made a year earlier at Washington's Willard Hotel, plus the sounds of people engaging in sex," and an anonymous letter: "King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what this is." "You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation." Garrow established that the FBI's William Sullivan had ordered the tape and written the letter "just two days after Hoover's public attack on King," in which Hoover had called him the "most notorious liar" in America.
King "became so nervous and upset that he could not sleep." Over a tapped phone he said, "They are out to break me." "What I do is only between me and my God." Coretta dismissed it as "just a lot of mumbo jumbo." Two days after the discovery King preached: "I cannot promise you that if you stand up against the evils of our day, you will not have some dark and agonizing moments." His enemies had found his weak point, and he kept working.
Selma and Chicago
In Selma in 1965 he went to jail and said plainly why: "I must confess this is a deliberate attempt to dramatize conditions in this city, state, and community." After one early confrontation, his staff "celebrated their success in getting Clark to show his true colors." His courage had limits. Amid death threats, and on his aides' advice, he stayed in Atlanta for his Sunday services while the marchers were beaten at the Pettus Bridge. Then came the "Tuesday turnaround." King had privately agreed with LeRoy Collins to lead the marchers to the troopers' line and turn back. SNCC, "not privy" to the talks, "were outraged," and King "waffled and dissembled." Forman called it "a classic example of trickery against the people." Selma still brought SCLC "more than $1.5 million in the preceding ten months."
Chicago had no Bull Connor and no segregation ordinance to defy. Its ghetto was held in place by rents, jobs and schools, and by Mayor Richard Daley, who answered King by announcing his own program "to clean up all of Chicago's slums by the end of 1967." King insisted, "We're fighting the system." He lived part of each week in a Lawndale apartment, paying "$94 for four run-down, shabby rooms" while whites paid "only $78 a month" for better ones, and argued nonviolence for hours with the leaders of the Cobras, the Vice Lords and the Roman Saints.
In August 1966, at Marquette Park, "he was knocked to one knee by a rock that struck him on his right temple." He marched on: "I have to do this—to expose myself—to bring this hate into the open." "I had never seen, even in Mississippi, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as in Chicago." Facing a threatened march into Cicero, the city and the realtors signed a "summit" agreement on open housing, which King called "the most significant and far-reaching victory that has ever come about in a Northern community on the whole question of open housing." Chester Robinson said that "we feel the poor Negro has been sold out by this agreement." King later admitted the city had "reneged on the agreement," and that despite "a marvelous open housing agreement on paper," open housing "was not going to be a reality in Chicago in the next year or two." The narrower weapon worked better: Operation Breadbasket produced "approximately eight hundred new and upgraded jobs for Negro employees" in Chicago.
Politically Unwise, Morally Wise
On April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York, King gave his fullest statement against the Vietnam War, breaking openly with Lyndon B. Johnson's White House. "I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government." His advisers had feared the effects and arranged a "respectable setting." When Levison told him the speech had been "unbalanced and poorly thought out," King answered: "I was politically unwise but morally wise. I think I have a role to play which may be unpopular."
Life called it "a demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The NAACP board called merging the peace and civil rights movements "a serious tactical mistake." Ralph Bunche said King "should 'give up one role or the other.'" King did not retract, and his critique widened from race to economics: "one day, we must ask the question of whether an edifice which produces beggars must not be restructured and refurbished." Dorothy Cotton later dated his final exhaustion to this fight.
I'm Really Tired
"In the later years he was given to a kind of depression that he had not had earlier," Andrew Young said. "He talked about death all the time." A Birmingham friend "had a feeling that Mike had a death wish." To Ebenezer he confessed: "I'm tired now. I've been in this thing thirteen years now and I'm really tired." Friends knew him as "a relentless teaser and 'a perfect mimic,'" but in public he had stopped joking: "I seldom joke in my speeches anymore. I forget to."
Coretta called him "a guilt-ridden man" who "never felt he was adequate to his positions," and Levison said "he was tortured by the great appreciation that the public showed for him." He worked through the guilt in sermons; of one that spoke of "the frittering road of excessive drink and sexual promiscuity," Garrow comments that it was "a more personal revelation than his listeners realized."
By early 1968 he was planning to bring "Waves of the nation's poor and disinherited" to Washington to demand "jobs and income for the poor." As Bill Rutherford saw it, "no one was really enthusiastic about the Poor People's Campaign" except King. He went to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers. On March 28 youths at the back of his march broke windows and began looting, and police shot and killed "a young black man who they believed was looting." The Memphis Commercial Appeal said "King's pose as leader of a nonviolent movement has been shattered."
In his hotel room he told 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." Then he insisted on a second, peaceful march to prove nonviolence could still hold. When his staff resisted, he "erupted," and told Jesse Jackson: "If you want to carve out your own niche in society, go ahead, but for God's sake don't bother me!" He refused to hire a gang leader who accepted violence: "Hosea, no one should be on our payroll that accepts violence as a means of social change."
On April 3 at Mason Temple he told the story of his 1958 stabbing again, the "If I had sneezed" litany, and turned to the Good Samaritan, who "reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?'" Then: "Like anybody, I would like to live a long life—longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will." Abernathy and Young thought the speech "had gone beyond the maudlin to the morbid."
— Martin Luther King Jr., Mason Temple, Memphis, April 3, 1968I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.
The Pillow Fight
The next day he told his aides, "I'd rather be dead than afraid. You've got to get over being afraid of death." He phoned his mother and talked for almost an hour. In the late afternoon Andrew Young came back from court, where a federal judge had agreed to allow the march. Young remembered: "he picked up a pillow and threw it at me. And I threw it back, and we ended up with five or six of us in a pillow fight."
Billy Kyles teased King "about how he was getting fat" as he struggled with a tight collar. King stepped out onto the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. The driver told him to get a topcoat because it was getting chilly. "'O.K.,' King replied." Then came the rifle shot. Abernathy knelt over him: "Martin, Martin, this is Ralph. Do you hear me? This is Ralph."
The man who had predicted his death in every campaign spent his last hour joking with his friends.
The Movement Made Martin
He had asked to be judged by direction, not by lapses: "God does not judge us by the separate incidents or the separate mistakes that we make, but by the total bent of our lives." And he refused the halo in advance: "I'm a sinner like all of God's children. But I want to be a good man."
The record supports the confession. He told an interviewer that "sex must never be abused," and Garrow concludes that "King's sexual behavior stood at great distance from his professed beliefs about sexuality, and the contradictions created painful and at times overwhelming guilt." His views on women were conventional. Bernard Lee: "Martin … was absolutely a male chauvinist." Dorothy Cotton: "I'm always asked to take the notes, I'm always asked to go fix Dr. King some coffee." James Lawson traced Ella Baker's break with SCLC to the same source: "Martin had real problems with having a woman in a high position." Rutherford summed up the man: "He was vain, he was a very brave man, but he knew fear, he had lusts."
King saw himself as a joining of opposites: "You are both militant and moderate; you are both idealistic and realistic." Christ "furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method." Where Nelson Mandela treated nonviolence as a strategy, King claimed it as more: "nonviolence is ultimately a way of life."
The verdicts of those closest to him pull in different directions. Ella Baker's is the most important: "The movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement." His sister Christine said he was "an average and ordinary man." Hosea Williams warned against the comfortable memory: "In my mind, he was the militant of the century." King would probably have accepted all three. He had said as much on the night his house was bombed: "I just happened to be here."
Part IIThe Playbook
King held no office, commanded no army and owned almost nothing. He moved a nation with a church network, a jail cell and a voice. The principles below come from his methods. Several carry costs he admitted from the pulpit, and some carry costs he never admitted at all.
The principles
- 1.Admit the fear, then act as if you had none.
- 2.Disarm yourself before you ask others to.
- 3.Hold the militant and the moderate in one sentence.
- 4.Aim at one target, not the whole system.
- 5.Choose the opponent who will show his violence.
- 6.Make a faith act when the money runs out.
- 7.Tell your allies about the deal before the press does.
- 8.Say what is right when it is not popular.
- 9.Live the code you preach, or your enemies will use the gap.
Principle 1
Admit the fear, then act as if you had none
King was often afraid and said so. "I became possessed by fear," he admitted of the twenty minutes before Holt Street, and at the kitchen table he prayed, "I'm losing my courage." His method was to act out a courage he did not feel, because "if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak." He displaced the fear with jokes about Andrew Young's eulogy, and Young understood exactly whom the jokes were about.
The failure case matters as much. When he declined the Freedom Ride he dressed the refusal in scripture instead of naming the fear, and Paul Brooks said what many felt: "I would have respected him more."
Tactic: Name your fear to yourself and the people closest to you, then behave in public as the situation requires. When you decline a risk, give the real reason, not a grand one.
Principle 2
Disarm yourself before you ask others to
After the bombing, everyone King trusted told him to carry a gun. He gave up armed protection because a nonviolent leader could not carry "weapons of violence for my personal protection." He applied the same rule to his payroll in his last days, and to his own reflexes. When Roy James beat him on a Birmingham stage, he dropped his hands and shouted, "Don't touch him." Septima Clark, no admirer of the SCLC preachers, never again doubted that his nonviolence was more than oratory.
Tactic: Whatever discipline you ask of your followers, adopt it first and visibly, at personal cost. People follow the sacrifice they can see.
Principle 3
Hold the militant and the moderate in one sentence
At Holt Street King needed a speech "militant enough to keep my people aroused to positive action and yet moderate enough to keep this fervor within controllable and Christian bounds." He solved it by tying protest to the country's own authorities: if we are wrong, the Supreme Court, the Constitution and God Almighty are wrong. The aim of pressure was a settlement, never ruin: "to put justice in business." In Birmingham he took the charge of extremism and turned it into a choice between hate and love.
He built his speeches on refrains a crowd could carry: "If we are wrong," "I have a dream," "If I had sneezed." "I must forever make the complex the simple."
Tactic: Frame a demand so that agreeing with you means agreeing with principles your opponent already claims. Pair the pressure with a limited goal the other side can accept without being destroyed.
Principle 4
Aim at one target, not the whole system
Albany taught King the cost of a broad front: "Our protest was so vague that we got nothing." In Birmingham SCLC aimed at the downtown stores and won. In Chicago, "fighting the system," he got an agreement on paper. His own conclusion was that "One victory of this kind would have been symbolic, would have galvanized support and boosted morale."
✦
Four Campaigns, One Lesson
How the choice of target shaped the result.
| Campaign | Target | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Montgomery, 1955–56 | Segregated city buses | Supreme Court ruling; integrated buses, December 1956 |
| Albany | Segregation generally | "we got nothing" |
| Birmingham, 1963 | Downtown stores, under Bull Connor | A settlement that "brought into being the Civil Rights Bill" |
| Chicago, 1966 | "the system" | An agreement the city "reneged on" |
Tactic: Pick one specific, winnable target that stands for the larger injustice. One clear victory does more for morale than a broad campaign that ends with nothing.
Principle 5
Choose the opponent who will show his violence
In Albany there were no photographs of beaten protesters, and Washington stayed away. For Birmingham the Dorchester group chose Bull Connor because he was "a rough adversary," reasoning that the Kennedys "would respond if their hand was forced." King stated the logic: "To cure injustices," you must "expose them before the light of human conscience and the bar of public opinion, regardless of whatever tensions that exposure generates." The lever was federal power: "The key to everything is federal commitment."
The method had a hard edge. In Birmingham it put children in front of dogs and fire hoses, and his lieutenants used tactics he was not told about.
Tactic: When you lack power, make the hidden cost of the status quo visible to those who have it. Choose the arena where your opponent's conduct makes your argument, and be honest about who bears the risk.
Principle 6
Make a faith act when the money runs out
On Good Friday 1963 every prudent voice, including his father's, said stay out of jail. The bail money was gone and the campaign was failing. King changed into work clothes and went: "I have to make a faith act." The money came, and so did the letter from the cell. He had done the same in 1956: "I would rather go back and spend ten years in jail than not go back."
He also learned that smart opponents would deny him the martyrdom. Sellers paid his 1958 fine; Albany invented a benefactor. "I'm sorry I was bailed out."
Tactic: When a campaign stalls, ask whether your own visible risk is the missing resource. Expect a shrewd opponent to deny you the sacrifice, and plan for that too.
Principle 7
Tell your allies about the deal before the press does
King made defensible bargains in indefensible ways. In Birmingham he halted the marches on a promise Shuttlesworth, lying in hospital, had not approved. At Selma he privately agreed to turn the march back, then "waffled and dissembled" about it, and Forman called it "trickery against the people." He let Rustin go in 1960 and agreed to stop speaking directly with Levison in 1963.
Tactic: If you must compromise, tell the people who carry the risk before anyone else. A settlement your allies learn about secondhand costs more trust than it buys.
Principle 8
Say what is right when it is not popular
Over one speech at Riverside King lost the NAACP, Life, Ralph Bunche and the White House, to the alarm of his own advisers. The reason was consistency: he could not condemn "the violence of the oppressed" without condemning his own government's. His principle was old: "Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' And Vanity comes along and asks the question, 'Is it popular?' But Conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?'"
Tactic: Decide in advance which positions you will hold regardless of the cost to your coalition, and when the moment comes, take them in full view. Count the cost honestly, because it will be real.
Principle 9
Live the code you preach, or your enemies will use the gap
King preached against "sexual promiscuity" and lived otherwise. The FBI found the gap, recorded it, and mailed it to his home with an invitation to kill himself. "They are out to break me," he said. He survived it, but the gap cost him sleep and peace, strained his marriage, and gave his most dangerous enemy a weapon.
Tactic: The larger your public moral claims, the narrower the distance you can afford between them and your private conduct. Assume every gap will be found by the people who most want to use it.
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Part IIIMaxims
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Admit the fear, then act as if you had none. "I'm losing my courage," he prayed at midnight; three nights later he calmed a crowd from a bombed porch.
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Give up the gun before you ask others to. "I was much more afraid in Montgomery when I had a gun in my house."
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Put justice in business, not the opponent out of it. Pressure is for a settlement, not for ruin.
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Pick one target, not the whole system. In Albany "Our protest was so vague that we got nothing."
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Don't trust a fine someone else pays. Opponents who understood him robbed him of his martyrdom.
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"Wait" usually means never. "This 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.'"
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Choose your Golgotha, but expect to be judged for it. The refusal was defensible; the justification cost him the students' respect.
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A paper victory is not a won city. Chicago gave him an agreement and very little change.
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Say what is right when it is not popular. "I was politically unwise but morally wise."
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Let the movement be bigger than you. "I want it known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped this movement will not stop."
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Ask what happens to him if you don't stop. The Good Samaritan reversed the question, and King went back to Memphis on it.
