"'I have a dream!' M. L. said again and behind us, his voice lost to all but those close to him, a man screamed, "Fuck that dream. Martin! Now, goddammit, NOW!'".
Despite King's political and organizational failings, he was unquestionably successful in putting black people into the now. That his success in this role was partially a product of his other failures is a given, for King was too prone towards dealing in futures. Nevertheless, it was this power to put people into the now by attraction or repulsion that made him a genuine threat with which the system had to deal.
1963 was also the year the FBI began its surveillance of Martin King.
THE epigraph to The King God Didn't Save is a quote from Richard Wright's 1954 book, Black Power. It reads in part: "Make no mistake... they are going to come at you with words about democracy; you are going to be pinned to the wall and warned about decency... in short, a barrage of concentrated arguments will be hurled at you to temper the pace and drive of your movement..."
The most devastating shell of the barrage was delivered by J. Edgar Hoover. In 1964, just before King left for Oslo to accept the Nobel, he met with Hoover. Williams says, "What really transpired may never be known," but he assumes that it was during this meeting that King was informed that the FBI had compiled a dossier of tapes and pictures on King. The dossier included no evidence of any communist infiltration of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or control of King, the suspicion of which had prompted Robert F. Kennedy, then the Attorney General, to allow Hoover to conduct King's surveillance; but it did contain detailed information concerning Martin King's extra-marital sex life. "Pinned to the wall and warned about decency." King left Hoover's office and delivered a statement which, in effect, retracted an earlier accusation that FBI agents were unsympathetic to the civil rights movement. Adding, as Williams records, "There must be no misunderstanding between the FBI and civil rights leaders."
Again from the epigraph: "Plump-face men will mumble academic phrases... gentlemen of the cloth will speak unctuously of values and standards." One can easily picture the set of Hoover's bulldog jowls and imagine his inflection, particularly on the word "peace," when he suggested that King's behavior was hardly befitting the standards expected of a Nobel Prize winner. Equally conceivable is the overwhelming sense of dislocation and betrayal that must have hit King like the hot and hard wind of a desert sand storm. The camera and the microphone, which had been his two biggest weapons from the beginning, were now the nails with which he was being crucified for having practiced the love he preached.
IV
In another country, responsible to a different constituency, Martin King perhaps would have been less vulnerable to Hoover's ploy, but he was in puritan America, and was responsible to the puritans-at first, the black, but now, the white. Their press had made him. Their financial support had underwritten his activities. Their power protected him from acts of Gothic violence like those that had cancelled the lives of Emmet Till, Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner, and the four girls in the bombed church at Birmingham. Made myopic by his ego and his mendacious assumptions about the nature of America, King had not yet perceived the motivation that had caused this support to be accorded him, nor the conditions under which it was given. Instead, he regarded it as a spontaneous outpouring of moral sentiment, dictated by the Zeitgeist. His forensic imagery revolved around the vision of butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, bankers and welfare mothers forming an ecstatic muster and marching like faceless Johnnies to a nonviolent holy war for justice, dignity and the dream. In this vision, which was the underpinning of his famous "A Preacher Leading His Flock" speech given exactly two months before his death. King saw himself as a "drum major for justice." walking the point alone.
To walk the point is to be the most exposed man in the column. In spite of his failure to take full advantage of the situation, King had been on the point at Montgomery. The eight bombings testify to that. After Montgomery, perhaps out of fear or a sense of self importance, King began to retreat from his position in the vanguard. As early as 1963, his presence in the front line was irregular, and his last arrest was even before the Hoover confrontation. However, just as the bombings indicate that King was out there and was dangerous, the confrontation with Hoover is proof that King's power potential had grown. As Williams says, "there was always the change-growing with every campaign-that King could wind up with a genuine power to couple with his prestige." In a sense, King already had a power, derived from that international prestige, for it gave him the power to be heard, the power to expose the very forces that had created his public image and protected his life while simultaneously continuing to oppress the people he was credited with leading and poor people every-where. Thus, King was faced with a choice. He could obey Hoover's directive and "temper the pace and drive of your movement," or he could go back on the point and try again to incarnate his dream.
Williams-feels that King, faced with the choice, initially "copped out." Exemplary of this compliance was King's conduct at Selma, which many black people consider the sell-out of the century because King failed to appear at a march he himself called. The march ended in the notorious bloodbath at Pettus Bridge. "King's response to the clubbing at Pettus Bridge was, 'If I had known it was going to be like that I'd have gone myself.' Which was what the people from SNCC had been driving at all along." King's collapse at Selma was so unrestricted that the word does not appear in a prizewinning biography of him. Yet, "The criticism and name-calling (that King received after Selma' jarred him." That, along with the impact of the carnage itself forced King "to question his rightful role of leader of black people; he could not remain compromised. At stake was more than his personal reputation and that of his family. The stake was the success of the movement and all it meant not only to black Americans, but to all Americans.
"It seems to me that King broke with whatever compromise he might have made when he jumped into the Vietnam war protest, determined to sock it to those who would have restrained him. And when he made his decision, he must have known that his life, although he had been threatened time and time again, was now measured."
Threatened by the effect the exposure of the FBI information would have had upon his career, the Martin Luther King of Montgomery, the 26-year-old pastor of Dexter, would unquestionably have kept his compromise with the system. He would have opted for protecting his name and that of his family in the eyes of the black puritans of his congregation and his class. But in the years that had passed, he had collected more than merely a Nobel and nine arrests. He had acquired a sense of responsibility to a greater constituency, one unbounded by color, class, or nationality. In part this change was due to the traveling King had done, for it had given him the type of global perspective he had previously lacked. He was a man now capable of writing, "These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression... The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before." Martin King wanted to be a part of that number.
By moving toward the Vietnam protest, King. as Malcolm X had done before him, became international in his focus. "It will not go unobserved," says Williams, "that both Malcolm and King died as they attempted to mount programs involving not only blacks, but the oppressed of every race and kind."' King was now living up to the true standards of a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
However, just at the time King was evolving into a great leader, his public following and press coverage were flagging. The media had been given the FBI tapes, and although "it is true that it did not record stories about the tapes or photographs while King lived. It only know about them-which was enough-for they backed away from him, turned the glare of their annihilating publicity on others." But, by maintaining this policy of silence, the press "became partners in both the breaking of King and the attempted destruction of a movement for which they once seemed to hold great esteem."