Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.
by Stephen B. Oates
(Harper & Row, 416 pp., $18.95)
When Robert Kennedy tried to get Dr. King to call off the freedom rides, he appealed to patriotism: "The President is going abroad, and this is embarrassing him." It is hard to remember how unthinkable criticism of America was as the 1960s began. William Buckley said the civil rights movement was de facto pro-Communist, since it gave aid and comfort to the enemy by admitting America was imperfect. People believed that adverting to segregation, not segregation itself, was our national embarrassment. King had to teach America to look at itself before he could begin to change things. Even some black leaders, at the outset, thought he was just causing them more trouble. The man who would seem too moderate, once he had challenged America's moral claims, seemed too radical when it was still un-American to talk of changing America.
It was not a job he asked for. Daddy King had not raised his son to be a radical. The elder King inherited the Ebenezer Baptist Church from his father-in-law. Dr. Adam Daniel Williams (the doctorate was honorary), and earned his own doctor's title at Morris Brown College in Atlanta. Martin Jr. would take the next step—a doctorate from a northern school--and make Ebenezer church even more respectable. Daddy gave him a new Chevrolet when he graduated from Crozer Seminary in Pennsylvania, and King left for Boston University and comparative freedom--from Daddy, from the South, from the local marriage and ministry that had been laid out for him. In graduate school. King became the scholarly ladies' man of a black circle in the Boston-Cambridge area, met Coretta Scott, a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, finished his dissertation (playing Paul Tillich off against Henry Nelson Wieman to reach a synthesis of the two), and hoped to become a professor.
But there were dues to pay. He felt he should spend some time in the South (so long as it was not in Daddy's church), and accepted a call from a church in Montgomery, where the real dues-collector came to him, bearing the unlikely name of Nixon. A tired woman had refused to move to the back of the bus. We do not know how many times that had occurred without anyone hearing of it; but E. D. Nixon, of the porter's union, put Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin King together, and King was forced down a path he had not chosen. He had acquired the right skills without realizing it--an ability to conceive events as moral drama and to convey that conception, along with an academic respect for nonviolent theologies. But he knew that these things were not enough. To employ them all, he would have to accept his own death.
He did not do it all at once; he hoped to slip away from the appointment he had made. But it was soon clear to him, as to others around him, that one could not challenge the entire moral basis of a society's racial arrangements without being jailed, beaten, and (finally) killed. Going to jail meant risking death from inmates as well as guards, and he went to jail nineteen times. By 1958 he was telling his wife,
If anybody had told me a couple of years ago, when I accepted the presidency of the Montgomery Improvement Association, that I would be in this position, I would have avoided it with all my strength. This is not the life I expected to lead. But gradually you take some responsibility, then a little more, until finally you are not in control anymore.
By 1962 a northern editor was instructing his reporter, "Go where the Mahatma goes, he might get killed." By 1968 the Federal Bureau of Investigation had followed up on fifty death threats. He was stabbed; his home was bombed; his church was bombed. His time was running out. Four people had publicly put prices on his head. His wife had recurring nightmares of his murder. An aide remembers that "the strain of wondering when it was coming was almost overpowering."
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