Books : Pillar of Fire : Excerpts

From Chapter 2:Prophets in Chicago

To close the Chicago conference, King brought with him his standard sermon on the complacency of the church. "Eleven o'clock on Sunday morning is still America's most segregated hour," he said, "and the Sunday school is still the most segregated school of the week. The unpardonable sin, thought the poet Milton, was when a man, like Lucifer, so repeatedly says, 'Evil be thou my good,' so consistently lives a lie, that he loses the capacity to distinguish between good and evil. America's segregated churches come dangerously close to being in that position." Behind his placid exterior, King concealed an impatience with religious institutions that far outran his text. In the past few days he had committed himself consciously to a life-threatening, watershed risk in Birmingham that neither relied nor waited upon the cooperation of his fellow clergymen.

Kings resolve to gamble alone was the result of frustrations that had built m phases since the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56. After the boycott's strategy of nonviolent withdrawal proved difficult to transplant or expand, he had followed his trained gifts as a pulpit orator to preach hundreds of sermons against segregation in a touring frenzy modeled on the crusades of Rev. Billy Graham, from whom King received quiet encouragement and occasional advice. Through the late 1950s, this conversion approach had brought King the orator's nectar -- applause, admiration, and credit for quite a few tearful if temporary changes of heart?but in everyday life Negroes remained a segregated people, invisible or menial specimens except for celebrity aberrations such as King himself. When college students pioneered a fresh tactic of nonviolent confrontation in the sit-ins of 1960 and the Freedom Rides of 1961, King had acknowledged their point that race was too intractable to be repaired by the inspiration of any orator. Only by slow, wrenching concession could someone like King admit that eloquence was weak even when buttressed by rank and education. And although he was honest enough to praise the students' courage King repeatedly declined the drumbeat summons -- "Where is your body?" -- by which they made the first test of leadership not statements or seniority but a stark, primitive surrender to public witness.

Instead, King had clung to methods suited to his stature as a prince of the Negro church. While petitioning white leaders for change, he and his allies maneuvered to gain control of the National Baptist Convention. Their dream was to make of this largest voluntary body of Negroes in the world-upward of ten thousand preachers and some five million members -- a ready-made civil rights phalanx that upon command could descend upon segregated targets for protest or Christian revival. The prerequirements were seductively in line with ordinary ambitions in church politics, as King's group aimed to establish a base in the isolated world built by their fathers and grandfathers before seeking any new confrontations with white segregationists. Even so, their plans ran into disaster in the person of the incumbent "Negro Pope," Rev. J. H. Jackson. At two national conventions, the usual spectacle of sermons and massed choirs had descended into something more like soccer riots, in which the Jackson forces outshouted, outshowed, and finally, at Kansas City in 1961, outscrimmaged the forces supporting King's civil rights platform to secure physical control of the podium before the police arrived. Victorious, Jackson had accused King of being responsible for murdering one preacher who had been pushed to his death in a brawl, and excommunicated King from the National Baptist Convention. In what amounted to a major schism, some two thousand pastors, including Rev. Gardner Taylor of Brooklyn and Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse College, resigned with King, but others, including old family friends and eminent preachers such as Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., could not bear to tear away from the one place on the sparse landscape of Negro institutions that had anchored their identities in a national church.

Not until then, stripped of a reform agenda within the Negro church, did King throw himself into the escalating civil disobedience of the movement, most notably in the mass marches to jail at Albany, Georgia, beginning late in 1961. Hard experience there taught him that in any racial conflict large enough to draw the concentrated attention of the press, reporters inevitably would center their stories upon King as the character known to most readers, and generally, the focal issue of their stories would not be the moral worthiness of King's cause but the competitive outcome -- who's winning, King or segregation? Thus pitted against the legal and cultural standard of the entire South, King had left Albany in 1962 branded a loser because segregation still stood, and as an ugly bonus he took the festering resentment of overshadowed colleagues. Then, on January 1, 1963 -- exactly one century after the effective date of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation -- President Kennedy had dodged the last natural deadline for a scheme that King had pushed upon him privately but insistently for two years: a historic Kennedy proclamation to abolish at least some part of segregation by executive order.

Within days, King summoned his ten closest associates to a private retreat near Savannah, Georgia, to tell them in effect that there was no easy button to push, no executive alliance to be made. All the dignified routes had been closed off. The only paths he saw led either to retreat or forward over the cliff, and, haunted by fear that the integrationist mandate of the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision and the energy of the Kennedy years soon would dissipate, King disclosed his resolve to take a calculated leap. Wyatt Walker, his chief assistant, presented a blueprint for a staged, nonviolent assault on Birmingham, the symbolic bastion of segregation -- a city that combined the plantation attitudes of the surrounding Alabama counties with the bare-knuckled politics of its steel mill economy, personified in both aspects by the local police commissioner, Eugene T. "Bull" Connor.

Instead of avoiding risks, or grumbling about moral obtuseness in the press, King's forces would embrace the public drama of a showdown between King and Bull Connor. Above all, King insisted, he would not again be drawn in as a "fireman" after someone else's campaign had gone awry. He would take the initiative for the first time, seeking to apply all the accumulated movement lessons since the bus boycott. One of these was stealth. King did not invite his father, Daddy King, to Savannah or seek the approval of his board at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), knowing that his dear but long-winded elders would filibuster against the idea with consummate skill. He would lay groundwork in stages, move by fiat, spring surprises. The lesson pressed upon him by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was that unmerited suffering was required to supplement reason in a selfish world, that in nonviolent wars no less than shooting ones, dramatic risk and suffering were the surest, swiftest messengers for breaking through to guarded or disinterested strangers. King believed, he warned his friends at the retreat, that "some of the people sitting here today will not come back alive from this campaign." When they accepted the plan nevertheless, he left Savannah for the Conference on Religion and Race.