Opinion: Posthumous Pillory

No black American was so widely honored in his lifetime; yet segregationists denounced Martin Luther King Jr. as a Communist and worse, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover once publicly branded him a liar, and militant blacks eventually came to see him as a "sellout" to the white Establishment. Now a black writer has added yet another—and unlikely—epithet to those fastened on the assassinated leader. In a new book, The King God Didn't Save (Coward-McCann, Inc.; $5.95), Novelist John Williams (Night Song, The Man Who Cried I Am) calls King a failure.

Full of frustration and seething black anger, Williams' book is both a compassionate catalogue of King's strengths and achievements and an agonizing reappraisal of his weaknesses. Dedicated to the memory of the man Martin Luther King "could have become had he lived," the book argues that King was the complicitous victim of a "white power" plot to manipulate, castrate and ultimately destroy him.

Fatal Inability. Though Williams' work is disorganized and repetitive, its message is clear. Williams believes that white power corrupted and then co-opted King by making him believe that he had power when, in fact, he had none, by granting him minor concessions so that he could not demand major ones. "The white press," Williams says, "so thoroughly indoctrinated King and his people with the idea that the capitulation of the bus company [following the Montgomery, Ala., boycott] was a victory for the blacks that they believed it; believed, too, that other things would inevitably fall like tin soldiers, all in a neat line."

King, says Williams, suffered from a fatal inability to perceive what was happening to him, and believing in himself, continued to lash out at the white power structure. "He did not understand that it had armed him with feather dusters," Williams writes. "He was a black man and therefore always was and always would be naked of power, for he was slow, indeed unable, to perceive the manipulation of white power, and in the end white power killed him."

But not, Williams believes, without some help from King himself, for King suffered from the tragic flaw of hubris. An ambitious, middle-class Christian, he sought success and basked in the public recognition that his efforts brought him, says the author, who interviewed many of King's friends and associates in preparing his book. King gloated over a magazine poll that showed him to be the nation's most respected black leader, savored his meetings with presidents and kings, accepted the Nobel Prize as if it were an inalienable right rather than a cherished award.

But he could not, states Williams, relate to the black underclass or understand its impatience with a system that refused to recognize its legitimate demands. Because of this lack of understanding, the angry Williams charges, King did what no black leader can afford to do if he is really to influence white society: he compromised. Says Williams: "Compromises that seem to favor black people have always turned out to be defeats for them. 'Political expediency' is nonexistent for Negroes. The demands made must be stood by."