Martin Luther King Jr. has already met with President Johnson, and he is
similarly optimistic. "I've had a good deal of contact with him in the past
several years," says King. "He means business. I think we can expect even more
from him than we have had up to now. I have implicit confidence in the man, and
unless he betrays his past actions, we will proceed on the basis that we have
in the White House a man who is deeply committed to help us."
Thus the support of the President for strong civil rights bill provides a
basis for high Negro hopes. Though Negro leaders acknowledge that laws do not
change people's hearts, they want the satisfaction of knowing that a federal
law support them in, for example, their demands for equal voting rights and the
right to share public accommodations with white men. If the civil rights bill
circumvents these specifics, or if it should fail to pass altogether, the
leaders are determined to push their revolution all the more strongly in 1964.
The Year Ahead. Some believe that demonstrations may have passed their
peak of effectiveness. Says Boston N.A.A.C.P. Leader Tom Atkins: "One of the
problems with these damn demonstrations is that you have to keep making them
more exciting." But among those who do not agree is martin Luther King Jr., and
his preparations for 1964 are well under way. "More and more," he says, "I have
come to feel that our next attack will have to be more than just getting a
lunch counter integrated or a department store to take down discriminatory
signs. I feel we will have to assault the whole system of segregation in a
community."
King's most intensive efforts will be entered on Alabama and Mississippi,
because there the problem is greatest. The Negro suffers more and more. How to
deliver an all-out attack? This is what we have to think about. I'm thinking
now in terms of thousands and thousands of people. They would have to be
students, mainly because, for financial reasons, working adults find it
difficult to remain in jail." Very soon King may press an offensive in
Danville, Va., which, he says, is "the most difficult immediate situation we
face. The town has a notorious record of police brutality. I don't agree that
there has to be violence in the future, but this will depend on events. For
instance, if a filibuster in Congress stands in the way of meaningful
legislation, the Negro could be driven to despair and violence."
King's mission is to turn that potential for violence into successful,
direct, nonviolent action, and he works at the job 20 hours a day. He has moved
back with his wife and four children to Atlanta, where he shares the pulpit of
the Ebenezer Baptist Church with is father. His house, near the church, is an
old, two-story, four-bedroom place. Paintings with African themes and a
photograph of Gandhi hand on the walls. There is a threadbare scatter rug in
the living room, two chairs protected with plastic, and a couch in need of a
new slip cover. One of the keys is missing on the old grand piano. King likes
to play the piano, although, as his wife says, "he starts off the `Moonlight
Sonata' as if you're really going to hear something, but he fades out."
King rises at 6:30 a.m. and goes to his study for 45 minutes of reading.
Then he has fruit juice and coffee for breakfast, and at 9 o'clock drives to
his office in one of his two cars (a 1960 Ford and a 1963 Rambler). There he
goes to work in a 16-ft.- square room filled with perhaps 200 volumes on Negro
and religious subjects; he checks his mail (about 70 letters a day), writes his
speeches and sermons, confers with aides and, by telephone, with civil rights
leaders around the country. He usually eats lunch at his desk, then continues
working often until 2 or 3 o'clock the next morning.
Redemption. More and more, King spends his time in airplanes, journeying
to the far corners of the U.S. to speak and preach to huge audiences. He
traveled about 275,000 miles in 1963 and made more than 350 speeches. Wherever
he goes, the threat of death hovers in the form of crackpots. "I just don't
worry about things like this," he says. "If I did, I just couldn't get anything
done. One time I did have a gun in Montgomery. I don't know why I got it in the
first place. I sat down with Coretta one night and we talked about it. I
pointed out that as a leader of a nonviolent movement, I had no right to have a
gun, so I got rid of it. The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what
is important. If you are cut down in a movement that is designed to save the
soul of a nation, then no other death could be more redemptive."
It is with this inner strength, tenaciously rooted in Christian concepts,
that King has made himself the unchallenged voice of the Negro people--and the
disquieting conscience of the whites. That voice in turn has infused the
Negroes themselves with the fiber that gives their revolution its true stature.
In Los Angeles recently, King finished a talk by saying: "I say good night to
you by quoting the words of an old Negro slave preacher, who said, `We ain't
what we ought to be and we ain't what we're going to be. But thank God, we
ain't what we was.'"
After 1963, with the help of Martin Luther King Jr., the Negro will never
again be where he was.
