King: A Life

Expecting a crowd of 100,000, the March on Washington may have in fact had as many as a quarter of a million participants, and its leaders were eager to put a dignified face on the day of their movement’s greatest public exposure. The media eagerly covered white faces in the crowd, along with white celebrities such as Bob Dylan, Paul Newman, and Marlon Brando. Not all speakers were on the same page—John Lewis of SNCC delivered a harsh critique of Kennedy’s proposed civil rights bill for not going far enough. Finally King spoke, delivering a speech he had not even started working on until late the night before. At first, the crowd was attentive but not particularly enthusiastic—he was only allotted 10 minutes, and TV networks even cut away early. But he then announced “I still have a dream” (336), building into one of the most famous moments in American rhetoric. At its peroration, he proclaimed, “And […] when we allow freedom to ring […] we will […] speed up that day when all of God’s children […] will […] join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!” (338). Everyone present knew that they were a witness to a major moment in history.

King went directly from the march to the White House, refusing to let Coretta join. Kennedy was still cold, asking if a greater commitment to personal responsibility was just as important to improving the plight of Black people, and Roy Wilkins reminded the president that “built-in discrimination” made such boot-strapping difficult. For all the success of the march, it did nothing to mollify his critics in the government or the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X dismissed the march as a “[f]arce” that did nothing other than appease their white financial backers, and the FBI’s head of intelligence operations labeled King “the most dangerous Negro in the future of this nation” (342). King’s repeated appeals to American ideals and Christian morality did nothing to assuage suspicions that he was opposed to both America and God. Robert Kennedy argued that he authorized wiretaps only under Hoover’s pressure, but it is not clear if he ever attempted to exercise any oversight.

Once again, King’s publicity triggered both support and backlash, including a white mob taking control of Birmingham’s City Hall and waving Confederate flags. Then, on September 15, 1963, a bomb ripped through the 16th Street Baptist church, killing four young girls and injuring 20 more. No city officials attended the funeral, but King did, insisting that “good still has a way of growing out of evil. The blood of these little girls must serve as a revitalizing force to bring light to this dark city” (349). Two months later, King heard the news of Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, and had a premonition that a similar fate awaited him.

After taking over the presidency from his slain predecessor, Lyndon Johnson promised King he would sponsor significant civil rights legislation, and dedicated his first major address to civil rights. At the end of 1963, Time magazine named King “Man of the Year,” the first Black recipient of that honor. The following week, an FBI report described a meeting of ministers that included King, where one minister raped a woman as King looked on and laughed. Given the FBI’s interest in undermining King, the veracity of this report will be difficult to determine until 2027, when the actual tapes are scheduled for declassification. King’s large numbers of consensual extramarital affairs are easier to establish, and the FBI used its firsthand knowledge of these encounters by dropping hints to important sources, while seeking to prop up an alternative leader of the Black community.

Johnson reaffirmed his commitment to civil rights with his 1964 State of the Union address, in which he discussed not only discrimination and voting rights but also poverty and other structural barriers to the advancement of Black people. King accepted this program at the cost of toning down some of his rhetoric concerning reparations for racial oppression. When the Republicans nominated archconservative Barry Goldwater for president, King’s seemingly moderate tone and approach came under fire for not meeting the seriousness of the moment. King insisted that the “‘love ethic’ at the heart of the struggle hardly represented weakness” (361), and he worked to keep the movement active, but its finances were in deep disarray and King’s work pulled him in so many different directions that it was hard to focus on any one effort. Some theorized that King’s base was too firmly located within the Black middle and upper class to build a movement with the working class, among whom Malcolm X was more popular. After the House of Representatives passed a civil rights bill in March 1964, King came to the US capital and had his first and only encounter with Malcolm X, who had just been expelled from the Nation of Islam for challenging its leader, Elijah Muhammad, over his own extramarital affairs. Despite their rivalry, the two seemed to recognize the importance of the other to their own movements.

King next challenged segregation in St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest settled town in America, which was about to celebrate its quadricentennial. White gangs converged on the city to stamp out any activism, while Senator Goldwater promised that as president, he would leave civil rights to the states. Despite violence originating overwhelmingly with white people, King was again arrested and subjected to solitary confinement. He was released after two days, during which Johnson’s civil rights bill had passed in the Senate. Meanwhile violence continued in the city, with baseball legend Jackie Robinson joining the protestors and pleading for restraint. Seeing no room to maneuver, King decamped to focus on the recent disappearance of three civil rights volunteers in Neshoba County, Mississippi. While the search continued, President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which “banned segregation in public accommodations and outlawed discrimination based on race, sex, religion, or national origins in the workplace” (371). It was the most decisive step yet toward federal support for integration, although King bristled at the suggestion that Black people ought to be “grateful” for the concession rather than angry over having waited so long to claim what was theirs as American citizens.

A decade after Brown, Mississippi was the only state in the union still enforcing total segregation in public schools, presenting a daunting challenge for the most intrepid of civil rights activists. For years, Robert Moses had been running “Freedom Schools” to help educate and register Black voters, in the hope of presenting a challenge to the all-white Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention. The three Neshoba men had been part of Moses’s efforts before they went missing. King then went to New York City after police killed a 15-year-old Black boy, although even his friends and allies thought he was being turned into a prop by the New York mayor. King then accepted a moratorium on marches prior to the election, earning the criticism of John Lewis and Malcolm X. The bodies of the slain Neshoba men were found, and after meeting with Pope Paul VI, King campaigned for Lyndon Johnson, trying unsuccessfully to negotiate a compromise where Moses’s Black Mississippi delegation would join the convention without any voting power. Having pleased no one with a failed compromise, King struggled with exhaustion and depression, and pondered whether someone else would be better suited to lead the movement.

In October 1964, King learned that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which upended his plans for retirement. He canvassed for Lyndon Johnson, who won by an overwhelming margin but in the process lost the South, which had been reliably Democratic for over a century. King planned to focus on voting rights, which were conspicuously absent from the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Taking a brief vacation, FBI director Hoover publicly declared that King was the country’s “most notorious liar” (388), a clear reference to his sexual indiscretions. Shocked by the insult, King fired back that the FBI had done nothing to solve the fatal bombing of the 16th Street Church. The FBI escalated even further, sending an anonymous letter to King’s office calling him “a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that” (389), ending with the strong implication that King ought to die by suicide. King met with Hoover in hopes of a truce, only to have Hoover lecture him that any allegations of misconduct on the FBI’s part were harming their very important work. Shortly afterward, other pastors started receiving information from the FBI about King’s extramarital affairs.

King was not one for conflict, and J. Edgar Hoover was a formidable enemy for even the most powerful people in America. One of the most firmly established and consistently popular political figures in the country, he was a DC native who had directed the FBI (originally the Bureau of Investigation) since 1924, turning it into a professionalized and fundamentally conservative agency dedicated to rooting out both crime and subversion, particularly from alleged communists and their fellow travelers. King’s ties to Stanley Levison and criticism of America’s basic social order made him in Hoover’s view “a threat to the nation’s spiritual and political well-being” (395). His sexual liaisons genuinely infuriated certain agents, who then regarded his Christianity as a hypocritical facade. Newspapers generally refused to print any damning information on King, but they similarly refrained from exposing the FBI’s illegal activities against King. Despite President Johnson’s support for civil rights, he also regarded Hoover as a friend (and surely feared his immense power) and so refrained from reining him in.