My Life, My Love, My Legacy Read online

  EIGHT

  Pushed to the Breaking Point

  VIOLENCE AND OPPRESSION take many forms, and the form that took its toll on me was Martin’s repeated, unwarranted arrests, which reached truly disruptive and dispiriting proportions in 1960, leaving me pushed to the breaking point. I felt so alone and vulnerable. I had tried to control my emotions and tie down my feelings, but I felt I could stomach no more. The feeling of losing my grip on life was not normal for me. As much as my ability to cope with tragedy had surprised me, this sudden sense of weakness startled me even more.

  Overall, Martin’s imprisonments—in which he would be joined by thousands of young people, seniors, colleagues, clergy, blacks and whites—became one of the most effective tools in nonviolent warfare. Martin saw jailing as the ultimate refusal to cooperate with evil and unjust laws; the unwillingness to comply, adjust, or compromise. It meant surrendering your body to be put in chains while allowing your spirit, your soul, and your sense of right to reign free. Gandhi, Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Apostle Paul, and Jesus Christ Himself all surrendered their bodies to their jailers and, in many ways, large and small, forever changed the face of history through their suffering and sacrifices.

  From the lessons of history, I understood how, under the right circumstances, jail going as part of a struggle for freedom can be a positive force for change. I understood this from a historical and intellectual context, but also from a personal standpoint, given my own suffering at seeing Martin alone and in danger behind bars, to the extent that I wondered how much more I could bear.

  Moreover, it was left to me to help our small children counter the teasing from other children who said their daddy was a “jailbird.” I tried to make my children understand that Martin was not behind bars because he had done something wrong, but because he was trying to make things right for others. I said to Yoki, who was then five, and Marty, who was three, “Your daddy went to jail to help people. Some people don’t have enough to eat, nor do they have comfortable homes to live in or enough clothing to wear. He goes to jail to make things better.” I felt it was important for them to see his jail going as a badge of honor.

  To return to the beginning of the story, in January 1960, Martin resigned from Dexter Baptist Church after a momentous ceremony, and we moved from Montgomery to a rented house in Atlanta. There, Martin became copastor with Daddy King at Ebenezer Baptist Church.

  Before we could get settled, though, on February 17, 1960, Martin was charged with falsifying his state income taxes in Alabama. The implication was that he had taken money from the movement and not accounted for it. The auditors said that he had claimed a brand-new station wagon and an air-conditioner for our home, yet we had neither. Rather than detracting from Martin’s character, as intended, the trumped-up charges were correctly viewed by the movement’s supporters as harassment. This lesson was not lost on Martin’s enemies, who understood that if character assassination did not work, other, more lethal weapons were available.

  Although Martin was innocent, the weight of the unwarranted charge sent him into a depression. He confided in me his fear that he would be trying to prove his innocence for the rest of his life.

  Martin and I had little hope of justice, but in a surprising development, on May 28, a southern jury of twelve white men acquitted him. Only then did Martin stop beating himself up about the charges. Shortly afterward, a cross was burned on our front lawn in Atlanta, but even that did not steal our joy or mar our victory.

  We did not have long to celebrate. Five months later, Martin and 280 people were charged with staging a sit-in demonstration to integrate Atlanta lunch counters. The charges were almost immediately dropped for most of the demonstrators, but Martin was detained and indicted for violating probation on an earlier traffic offense. The trouble had started back in May, when he was transporting Lillian Smith, a well-known southern writer, to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, where she was undergoing cancer treatment. A policeman, no doubt noting that the woman was white, pulled Martin over and gave him a summons for driving with an out-of-state license. This happened in DeKalb County, a suburb of Atlanta, which was Klan country.

  When Martin went to court the next day to face the traffic license citation, a judge named Oscar Mitchell fined him twenty-five dollars and, although Martin’s lawyer didn’t disclose this detail to Martin, placed him on probation for six months.

  Later, in October, as Martin was being released from the sit-in charges in Atlanta, DeKalb County officials came and arrested him on the grounds that he had violated his probation from the earlier “traffic license” offense by participating in the sit-in. A hearing was set for three days later, during which time Martin remained behind bars. I attended the hearing at the DeKalb County courthouse, along with Martin’s sister, Christine; his brother, A.D.; and Daddy King. Because the offense was minor, we were dumbfounded when Judge Oscar Mitchell denied bail and sentenced Martin to four months of hard labor on a state road gang at Georgia State Prison, a maximum-security prison in Reidsville.

  It was such a shock that Christine burst into tears. When I saw her crying, I could not hold back my own tears. All through the movement, I had held myself together, but on that day, partially because of the shock of the sentence and the fact that Martin had been in jail for a week prior, I broke down. I was also five months pregnant with our third child, which I am certain aggravated my feelings.

  Daddy King was upset himself, but he scolded me for crying. “You don’t see Daddy crying,” he told me. “I am not taking this lying down. I have to hold up for my wife, hold up for my daughter-in law and my daughter.”

  I felt helpless and alone. I was worried that our baby would be born while Martin was in jail, and I was worried about how Martin would fare without the usual companionship of Ralph Abernathy, who had become his regular cellmate. I was also told that if Martin were made to work on a state chain gang, he would be exposed to anyone who wanted to take a shot at him. In the climate we faced, Martin had to be freed or he would likely face death.

  Try as I might, I could not erase my knowledge of the years of history, of what could happen to black people in the South at the hands of southern whites. It had only been five short years since the brutal murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who was beaten and killed while visiting relatives in Mississippi. The national news coverage of the funeral and the open casket showing Till’s disfigured body added to the fear that no black person was safe in the South, especially one with the notoriety of my husband.

  I watched in horror as Martin was immediately taken from the courtroom, his hands in metal cuffs behind his back. When Daddy King, Christine, A.D., and I were allowed to see him for a few moments, I couldn’t stop the tears from streaming down my face. When Martin saw me crying, he said, “Corrie, I have never seen you like this before. You have to hold up for me.” He asked me for newspapers, magazines, and some money. I tried to pull myself together, to return home and gather his things, and to take care of our children.

  The lawyer filed a writ of habeas corpus, asking the judge to hold a hearing the next day, which would grant bail for Martin instead of sending him to jail. I was getting ready to go to court when I got a call with terrible news: in the middle of the night, several men came to Martin’s cell, shone a flashlight in his face, and ordered him to get up. Martin later told me that the terrors of southern justice, wherein scores of black men were plucked from their cells and never seen again, ran through his mind as the men made him dress, handcuffed him very tightly, and chained him all the way down to his legs. They then placed him the back of a patrol car, along with a large German shepherd. During the 230-mile night ride through rural Georgia, the men didn’t tell Martin where he was going. “That kind of mental anguish is worse than dying,” Martin wrote about the experience. “Riding for mile after mile, hungry and thirsty, bound and helpless, waiting and not knowing what’s going to happen to you. And all for a traffic ticket.”
/>   Exhausted and humiliated, Martin arrived at Reidsville where he was thrown into a narrow cell and made to don a prison uniform. Notes from other prisoners telling him how much they respected him took some of the edge off his confinement and the brutality he was suffering at the hands of the prison guards. In a letter to me about his ordeal, Martin wrote:

  I know this whole experience is very difficult for you to adjust to, especially in your condition of pregnancy, but as I said to you yesterday, this is the cross that we must bear for the freedom of our people. So I urge you to be strong in the faith and that in turn will strengthen me. I have the faith to believe that this excessive suffering that is now coming to our family will in some little way make Atlanta a better city, Georgia a better state and America a better country. Just how I do not yet know, but I have faith to believe it will happen. If I am correct, then our suffering will not be in vain.

  Meanwhile, Daddy King sought legal help. He planned to retain attorney Morris Abram, a well-respected civil rights lawyer, to help Martin get out of jail. But to our delight, the decision was taken out of our hands by a phone call. On the other end of the telephone was Sargent Shriver, the brother-in-law of Sen. John F. Kennedy, who was in the final week of his presidential campaign. “May I speak to Mrs. King?” Sargent Shriver said. “Please hold for Senator Kennedy.”

  After a brief greeting, Senator Kennedy expressed his concern for me and Martin. “I know this must be very hard for you. I understand you are expecting your third child, and I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King. If there is anything I can do to help, please let me know.”

  Of course I told him that I appreciated his concern and would welcome any assistance.

  After the call, things happened fast. I began to hear encouraging news about Martin’s release. Even A.D. said, “I’ll bet you he’ll be out by tomorrow night.”

  A.D. was right. Senator Kennedy’s brother, Robert (aka Bobby), who was also his campaign manager, called Judge Mitchell to learn why Dr. King couldn’t be released on bail pending appeal. That story leaked to the press, and evidently Judge Mitchell had a change of heart: he allowed Martin to be released on bail. I received the news about Martin’s release around noon the next day, and was of course overjoyed. Minister Wyatt Tee Walker chartered a plane to bring me, Yoki, Marty, Mama, Daddy King, Christine, and her husband, Isaac, to meet Martin.

  That night, a mass meeting was held at Ebenezer. A standing-room-only crowd heard Daddy King, a former Nixon man, make the famous statement “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion. But now he can be my president, Catholic or whoever he is.… He has the moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right. I’ve got all my votes and I’ve got a suitcase and I’m going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.”

  The crowd roared its approval when Ralph Abernathy told them it was time to take off their Nixon buttons. The case was clear: Kennedy had responded to King; Nixon had not.

  A few days later, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected president by about a hundred thousand votes. This was a significant election in the shift of black Americans from voting Republican to voting Democrat. Many historians say—and I agree—that black voters, grateful for Kennedy’s intervention on behalf of my husband, made the difference in the 1960 presidential election.

  Ironically, my husband was not allowed to vote because Georgia officials ruled that he hadn’t lived in Atlanta long enough to establish residency, and he had waited too late to obtain an absentee ballot from Montgomery. Nevertheless, in prison stripes from a backwater jail, Martin, with his nonviolent spirit and his defiant yielding to suffering, helped launch, at least for a time, a new covenant of grace into the political world.

  NINE

  I’ve Been Called by God, Too

  IF THE CHILD I was carrying had been born a girl, her name would have been Mahalia. Martin made that promise to Mahalia Jackson after the great gospel diva cooked him a sumptuous chicken dinner smothered in brown mushroom gravy. After such a feast, he was helpless to do anything but promise to honor her request to make her our third child’s namesake. But it was a baby boy who arrived on January 30, 1961, and we named him Dexter, after the first church Martin pastored.

  Having another child, looking into the eyes of my innocent newborn, brought with it the familiar and agonizing questions: Would the change we all wanted and were willing to die for come soon enough so my children could grow up in a world that welcomed them as equals and beloved human beings? I was birthing children that my Bible told me were made in the image of God. Would they be treated as such?

  Our movement was caught up in a whirlwind of change whipping across America. I wish I could say that we knew what the consequences of our actions would be. But all we knew for certain was that the winds of change were blowing, sometimes in our favor and sometimes not.

  Throughout 1960, the year before Dexter was born, the student movement, which staged sit-ins at lunch counters and department stores, had continued to shake the South. Martin and the students were very close. At the sit-ins, many of the young people carried signs reading, “Remember the Teachings of Gandhi and Martin Luther King.” That April, as the protests spread, Martin and the SCLC leadership sent Ella Baker to set up a meeting with the students, to help organize them and set up a presentation on nonviolence. Martin and the SCLC appropriated money to finance the meeting. Martin and James Lawson, then a graduate student in theology, were the keynote speakers. At that meeting, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed. Under Martin’s guidance, the members pledged themselves to nonviolence.

  Later, in December 1960, a U.S. Supreme Court decision extended the prohibition of segregation to all interstate trains and buses and all train stations and bus terminals. Those of us who lived in the South knew that there was no meat on the bone of that new law. Despite the Court rulings, when I traveled from my home in Atlanta to different parts of the South, signs designating “Colored” and “White” were still attached to waiting rooms, restrooms, water fountains, and lunch counters. On trains, blacks were still seated at separate tables and hidden behind a curtain in the dining cars. The symbols as well as the practice of segregation remained. Seeing those signs was humiliating. I dreaded going any long distance except by automobile.

  Then, in March 1961, protests to test the law began: the Freedom Rides. These protests were primarily a project of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which had the backing of the SCLC and SNCC. Martin served as chairman of the Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee, through which CORE, the SCLC, and SNCC strategized a way to keep the rides happening until victory was achieved.

  Nothing had changed, but now, with federal law behind us, with students sitting down at lunch counters, and with whites and blacks alike boarding Greyhound buses, the numbness and the acceptance of segregation were wearing off. We had hope.

  While the sit-ins and protests were taking new forms, my life also was taking a new shape, much like the patterns my mother used to sew in her quilts. While I was happy to be Martin’s wife and the mother of his children, I was more than a wife while he lived and more than a widow after he died. On the one hand, I was a copartner with him, married not only to him but to the movement. Yet, there was also a corner of life that belonged exclusively to me. More and more, I served as public speaker when Martin asked me to stand in for him at certain functions. I continued to perform, giving concerts to raise money for the movement, and I continued my role as a spokeswoman for the peace movement that I had begun through the Quaker groups at Antioch.

  Granted, Martin was always ambivalent about my role out front, which sent me traveling across the country instead of staying at home. I suppose I experienced the personal dilemma that baffles every working woman. What happens when you are expected to be Superwoman, to perform a dozen conflicting tasks at the same time? I was trying to balance my concert career with motherhood and my responsibilities as Martin’s wife and chief
confidante. Most of the time, Martin was very supportive of my work. Once, however, I did have to set the record straight. During one exchange, he told me, “You see, I am called [by God], and you aren’t.”

  I responded, “I have always felt that I have a call on my life, too. I’ve been called by God, too, to do something. You may not understand it, but I have a sense of a calling, too.”

  Still not convinced, Martin turned to me and said, “Well, somebody has to take care of the kids.”

  “No problem,” I said. “I will do that.”

  Looking a bit crushed, he asked, “You aren’t totally happy being my wife and the mother of my children, are you?”

  “I love being your wife and the mother of your children,” I said. “But if that’s all I am to do, I’ll go crazy.”

  Despite his ambivalence, when it was especially important for me to be with him or to advance issues for which I had a special passion, Martin was really encouraging. One such event came in March 1962, when I was invited by the Women Strike for Peace to go as a delegate to Switzerland, to support international efforts to ban atomic testing. When I brought the invitation to Martin, he said, “This is important. You need to do that.”

  With his blessing, I was able to turn my attention to global issues of diplomacy and international peace. Women Strike for Peace was founded in 1961 by Bella Abzug and Dagmar Wilson, and was initially part of the movement to ban nuclear testing and end the Vietnam War. On November 1, 1961, the organization mobilized about fifty thousand women to march and demonstrate against nuclear weapons in sixty U.S. cities. It was the largest national women’s peace protest of the twentieth century. In Washington, DC, about fifteen hundred women, led by Dagmar Wilson, gathered at the foot of the Washington Monument. President John F. Kennedy watched from a window in the White House.