Of Movements and a Man.

By David Chalmers

Vol. 9, No. 3, 1987, pp. 20-22

Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. By David J. Garrow. (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986. $800 pp. 19.96 [sic] )

Society castrates its saints and turns them into idealized plaster-cast statuary. In order to live with them, we trivialize their lives and dilute their message to the point that they no longer make us uncomfortable. St. Francis, whose radical poverty challenged the wealth and power of the Church, became the kindly friend of the birds and animals, and the Martin Luther King of memorial orations and student papers offers an unthreatening message of love and non-violence. In the Epilogue to his Pulitzer-prize winning account of King and the civil rights struggle, David Garrow approvingly quotes Vincent Harding’s complaint that King is being turned into a “rather smoothed-off respectable national hero.” However, if anything threatens to crack the plaster of that respectability, it is not King’s radicalism, but his humanity. As the recent struggles of presidential candidates, TV evangelists, the United States Marines, and the Roman Catholic Church remind us, there are no easy answers to coming to terms with human sexuality, and there is always the danger of discrediting information falling into unfriendly hands, in King’s case, the FBI which set out to destroy him.

At the core of western Christianity is the Jesus who is both suffering human and son of God, and a deep religious conviction was the mainstay of King’s thirteen-year public ministry. King was twenty-six in 1955 when he was called to lead the bus boycott in Montgomery; when he was killed in Memphis, he was thirty-nine. It was in Montgomery, sitting alone in prayer at his kitchen table, that he found himself in the voice of Jesus which told him to fight on and promised “never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone.” From that vision, which echoed through the rest of his life, he came to accept the role from which he realized he could never escape and that he foresaw would lead to his death. This acceptance is central to his life and the account of that ministry which David Garrow appropriately entitles, Bearing the Cross. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

It is a monumental piece of research, based on more than seven hundred interviews (over two hundred conducted by Garrow himself), tens of thousands of pages of material obtained from the government under the Freedom of Information Act (including hundreds of King’s tapped phone conversations), and the careful search of archival and secondary sources. For years, David Garrow, an associate professor of political science at the City University of New York, has been the best-informed and most thoughtful historian of the Southern civil rights movement, freely sharing his work with other interested students. His previous studies on Protest at Selma (1978) and The FBl and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1981) also helped prepare the ground for Bearing the Cross.

Although the Pulitzer award was for biography rather than in the history category, a shift made by the governing board, Garrow is basically interested only in King’s life in the civil rights movement. Until his death, first the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and then the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were his life, and his, theirs. What was going on in Washington, Mississippi, Chicago, in the King family, and elsewhere, are presented only from the angle of his participation; the rest simply lies outside of the scope of Garrow’s book.

From this “movement book,” much can be learned about movements for social change. Overshadowing everything else is how difficult it was to keep going. Unlike a corporation, political party, or government, it did not sell a product candidate, or the exercise of public power. There was no

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firmly institutionalized structure and source of income. The SCLC was essentially one man; King was its policy, image, and, often, funding. He had to make the decisions, give the word on the strategy of the campaigns and the tactics in the streets, reconcile the conflicts within SCLC and between it and SNCC, the NAACP, and the power structures of Birmingham, Chicago, and Washington. Often the fees for his speeches were SCLC’s major source of income. As a result, he was continuously in motion, not just in the South but across the country, speaking, preaching, fund raising, planning, conferring, negotiating, persuading. Mixed in with these were marches, court appearances, jail time, and violence. He was the recipient of blows, missiles, and a stab wound close to the heart, death threats, and pressure from the FBI. The combination of all of these repeatedly brought him to the point of physical and emotional exhaustion.

The civil rights movement was threatening not only to white supremacy, but to black arrangements as well. This meant the hostility of the NAACPs Roy Wilkins as well as the National Baptist Convention’s Joseph Jackson. Cooperation often proved difficult for black ministers more accustomed to domination over their own congregations. The jealousy of Ralph Abernathy, the prickly independence of Fred Shuttlesworth, the imperiousness of Wyatt Walker, the uncertainty about Jesse Jackson’s motives, the alienation of E.D. Nixon and Rosa Parks, and the hostility of Ella Baker produced problems, and there was always conflict between top staffers to be addressed. In his emotionally demanding world, King was closest to his old Montgomery friend Abernathy and particularly came to depend on Andrew Young and Stanley Levison.

Levison’s recent ties with the Communist Party were the occasion for FBI surveillance that wrapped itself around and sought to destroy King’s life. Despite warnings from the Justice Department and the White House, King maintained his relationship with Levison. By Garrow’s account, Levison served King well as editor, advisor, and friend, showing no signs of a separate agenda.

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After Selma, Levison summed up for King the limitations that the civil rights movement faced. The American people were “not ready for a radical restructuring of the economic order.” While they would react strongly against “shocking violence and gross injustice,” they were not prepared to make deep changes in order to free the Negro, and the movement had to act within this limit. It was King who was becoming more radical than Levison, but the question was always how to proceed. He never deviated from his commitment to non-violence, but he came to realize that it had to be a political strategy as well as moral persuasion. By the mid-sixties, no one any longer talked about “redeeming the soul” of the South or of America. The concern was with the power to make changes.

The failure of the Albany campaign in 1962 had been a particularly instructive experience. The key to change was “federal commitment” and provoking violence was the essential way to force its hand. A “Bull” Connor or a Sheriff Jim Clark was necessary to dramatize the situation, bring tensions to the surface, reach a national government that placed “order” above social justice. Action had to be focused. Specific targets were necessary. Attacking segregation in general was too broad. Where voting strength was lacking, it was a mistake to go after the politicians. The economic power structure was more crucial and the local business community could be frightened by the threat of black disorder. Not only were school children used as demonstrators in Birmingham, but crowds of black spectators were liable to erupt into brick and bottle throwing when the police used dogs and firehoses on demonstrators. This and masses of unrestrained black teenagers downtown had more of an impact on businessmen than peaceful picketing and sit-ins.

Coming off of the failure in Albany, the lessons of Birmingham were those of better planning and preparation, the importance of selecting specific goals, and the power of economic boycott, youthful protest, and spontaneous participants. Both King and the Kennedys became convinced that legislation was necessary. The murder of Medgar Evers, on the night of the President’s television address against segregation, surely underlined that persuasion alone was not enough. Protest tactics alone were not enough. Political action and coalitions were necessary for change.

Although the crucial audience had become national, the battle for that attention had to be fought locally. This meant local people, local organizations, and local goals. Despite appearances, local unity was often fragile or lacking; middle-class black people and college students were often hesitant to take part. One of the real achievements in Selma was the participation of the school teachers. Local campaigns could not be sustained for very long periods. There had to be a way to convince local people that it had all been worthwhile. Focus on two or three points could produce a sense of victory, so the campaign could wind up and move on elsewhere. It was sometimes difficult for local people to understand the broader symbolic consequences of small, tangible gains. The irresolvable conflict between King and SNCC was that SCLC was using local turf to fight national battles within the system, while SNCC’s young activists sought to develop grassroots organization and power. SCLC’s strength was the person of Martin Luther King, Jr., not participatory democracy, and King’s jail time was a strategic resource, not an everyday tactic.

Like everything else, the role of the press was ambiguous. Its coverage was the essential gateway to the national scene, but it fed on conflict, praised Albany Police Chief Laurie Prichett for “remarkable restraint” when he didn’t produce any, and undercut civil rights strategy by sharing their inside information with him. The agendas of the press were not always favorable; when King committed himself against the Vietnam War, it was not only Life Magazine but also the New York Times and the Washington Post that denounced him.

For King and SCLC, the problem was always “What next?” As he went north to Chicago to agitate about jobs, housing, and education, he was increasingly concerned about the problems of wealth and class in American society. By failing to speak out against the Vietnam War, he believed that he was shirking his responsibility. Racism, militarism, and economic exploitation were all tied in together. His radicalism and his pessimism grew together. The civil rights movement was too middle class and America as a nation had never committed itself to economic justice. The leaders who preached non-violence through the democratic system were “not given enough victories,” but still within its context he searched for a new strategy. Although no one was really enthusiastic over it, he decided on a “poor people’s campaign.” Waves of the “poor and disinherited” would descend on Washington, practice civil disobedience in the streets, and lobby and pressure Congress. Tired, drained, increasingly melancholy, he more and more referred back to his kitchen vision in Montgomery, and talked of his own death. A march in support of striking garbagemen in Memphis broke down into a riot, so King went back again to Memphis, to Golgotha, to show that it could be carried off nonviolently.

David Chalmers is Distinguished Alumni Professor at the University of Florida and is author of Hooded Americanism, The History of the Ku Klux Klan. He is at work on a history of social change in the 1960s.

The Organization Behind the Man.

David Chalmers

Vol. 9, No. 3, 1987, p. 21

To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. By Adam Fairclough. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. 505 pp. Paper, $17.95. Cloth, $35.)

Arriving coincidentally with David Garrow’s overwhelming work on the same topic, this thoroughly researched, thoughtful, and well-written study by a British historian is likely to life under the shadow of being “the other book,” yet there is much that can be learned from it. Fairclough uses Garrow’s earlier writing, expresses appreciation for personal sharing, and does not basically disagree with his interpretation of King and what happened in and to the movement. The difference in emphasis is indicated by the ordering of the sub-titles. Garrow names King first, and Fairclough, the SCLC. Both authors are in agreement on King’s achievements, on the centrality of religion and non-violence in King’s life and King’s centrality in the SCLC, the collapse of the civil rights movement after the Voting Rights Act, and King’s growing radicalism, but Fairclough is writing organizational history, not biography.

Although recognizing housing as the “bedrock” of school and job segregation, neither author has much favorable to say about King’s 1966 campaign in Chicago, which may underline how difficult the basic problem was. In the face of white backlash, a hostile coalition in Congress, black nationalism, urban rioting, the Vietnam war, and the loss of presidential backing, there was little hope for new gains. Fairclough seems to suggest that King and the SCLC might have fared better by concentrating on voter registration and political organization, but the “movement phase” of change was probably over. Movements are hard to organize and difficult to maintain. It is not easy to repeatedly face possible injury, arrest and job loss, particularly when one has a family to support. People have other personal priorities and lives to live. Problems beyond the defeat of legal segregation were too deep to be touched by non-violent demonstration in the streets. Coalitions were fragile, and maintaining unity was difficult. Even during the “great days” in Birmingham, only about ten percent of the city’s black ministers actively supported the campaign.

Fairclough gives less importance to Birmingham than Garrow does and offers a more favorable picture of Birmingham minister Fred Shuttlesworth. He particularly admires the political sophistication of the older left activists Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, and Stanley Levison, but even they had no real path to offer after the middle sixties.

Because of his focus on the organization, rather than King, Fairclough often gives a much broader picture of what was going on. He begins with a brief description of the bus boycotts in Baton Rouge and Tallahassee which set the scene for Montgomery and explains what went on during the fatal Memphis garbage strike in 1968. He offers useful thumbnail biographical sketches of James Bevel, Wyatt Walker, Harry Wachtel, James Lawson, Andrew Young, Hosea Williams, C.T. Vivian and other movement leaders, and he carries the story through the Abernathy years after King’s death. In summing up, Fairclough comes back to King again. Desegregation and the ballot did not end discrimination and poverty, but it did knock away major props of institutionalized white supremacy and helped black people achieve dignity. With idealism, dedication, and courage, Martin Luther King, Jr., understood the history and culture, and expressed the aspirations of black Southerners. “SCLC itself was far more than King,” Fairclough concludes, “but his death revealed how completely he dominated it through intellect, personality, moral example, and organizational skill.”

Black Mayors

Reviewed by David Chalmers

Vol. 24, No. 3-4, 2002 pp. 19-22

David R. Colburn and Jeffrey S. Adler, editors, African American Mayors: Race, Politics, and the American City, Urbana; University of Illinois Press, 2001.

The breakthrough came in 1967 when Richard Hatcher was elected mayor of Gary, Indiana, and Carl Stokes was elected mayor of Cleveland, Ohio. Over the next thirty years, voters, elected African-American mayors in more than 300 cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Birmingham, and Dallas. Washington, D.C. and others were black majority cities, but Denver, Ann Arbor, and Spokane, which have negligible black populations, also elected black mayors. University of Florida historians, David Colburn and Jeffrey Adler have summed up the electoral experience of sixty-seven cities with populations over 50,000. In addition to Hatcher and Stokes, they have gathered essays on Harold Washington in Chicago and “Dutch” Morial in New Orleans, David Dinkins in New York, Tom Bradley in Los Angeles, Marion Barry in the District of Columbia, Coleman Young in Detroit, and Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young in Atlanta.

By the end of the 1960s, urban political campaigns took over from civil rights protest in the streets as the big show in black America. In the South. the struggle for power replaced the struggle for participation. Among the mayors profiled, only Hatcher, Andrew Young, and Marion Barry came out of the Civil Rights Movement. Coleman Young had been a labor organizer for the UAW, but the others were middle class professionals, educated in law and graduate schools, military service, and in local and state politics.

White resistance was more bitter and longer lasting in the big cities of the North and Midwest. The police were particularly hostile and Democratic Party organizations often worked for white Republican candidates. The race issue was less overt and lingering in the newer, more prosperous cities of the West and South, such as Raleigh, Charlotte, Dallas, Denver, Spokane, Seattle, San Francisco, and Houston.

In most cities, black mayors got elected by sweeping energized black electorates, combined with a sufficient portion, depending on local composition, of liberal white, Jewish, gay, and Latino voters. Race remained a persistent factor, but performance in office and political alliances became more important. In the 1980s and 1990s, voters became more accustomed to black candidates, and white support grew.

The revolution in black political participation has not been matched by a social revolution that many black people hopefully anticipated and whites feared. The resources and political power were not there. As the poor crowded into the cities, white out-migration was taking jobs and the tax base to the suburbs. Manufacturing was going overseas, the economy slowed in the 80s, and state governments and President Reagan’s Washington were less interested in helping.

Mayors faced structural limits on their powers. Vital boards, commissions, and agencies were beyond their reach, controlled by the county or state, or, in the District of Columbia, by the Congress. Almost a century before, the New Orleans commercial community had shifted power out of city hail as a protection against the Irish emergence. Within the black communities black mayors faced opposition from black nationalists and patronage-oriented black politicians.

Struggling with the problems of race and poverty,

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issues which counted to African Americans were crime and police treatment, jobs and minority hiring, inadequate schools and social services, neglected neighborhoods, the need for low-income housing, and recreation.

There were important gains. Institutional racism declined. Police behavior improved. There was minority hiring and promotion, affirmative action programs and minority set-asides, summer jobs for young people, and housing rehabilitation. Successful black mayors struggled to reform politics, city government, and social conditions, built machines, and made alliances and compromises. Often their successors became traditional patronage politicians. Of the mayors studies, Richard Hatcher, “Dutch” Morial, and Harold Washington were given credit for the strongest leadership in office.

Relations with the business community were crucial. His focus on the needs of long neglected black neighborhoods led the white business community and the press to batter Maynard Jackson’s administration in Atlanta. Peacemaking brought a shift in priorities, co-opting black business and political elites who hoped that private sector growth would benefit all. Priorities shifted from low-income neighborhoods and housing to downtown revitalization and tax benefits. Stadium building aided tourism at the expense of neighborhoods.

Both historians have studied business community history. In an earlier edited collection with Elizabeth Jacoway, Southern Businessmen and Desegregation (LSU Press, 1982) Colburn showed the role of the business community reaction to the 1964 Public Accommodation Law in fourteen Southern cities. Although politicians called for Resistance’ wiser businessmen counted the costs of social disruption. In Tampa, Columbia, Dallas, and Atlanta they took leadership in the necessary steps to avoid becoming another Little Rock. In non-growth cities like Louisville, Augusta, Memphis, and St. Augustine where they held back, conflict took to the streets.

In his book on the civil rights conflict in St. Augustine, Florida, Racial Change and Community Crisis (Columbia University Press, 1985). Colburn recorded the opposition of the business community to racial accommodation, led by the major bankers and John Birch Society elites, which opened up the city to Klan violence.

The coming to political power of African Americans in the nation’s cities has been a political, but not a social or economic revolution. Now, with its fourth black mayor, Atlanta has undergone a rapid evolution. Maynard Jackson came over time to “embrace the priorities” of the business community. His successor, Andrew Young, told the business leadership “I didn’t get elected with your help, but I can’t govern without you,” and was even more business-minded. His successor, Bill Campbell, who served after the study’s time-line, primarily contented himself with exploiting Georgia’s great cash-cow, Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport complex. In 2001, Atlantans elected the highly capable Shirley Franklin, who had run the city for Andrew Young while he was representing Atlanta to the world. Perhaps, in time, Colburn and Adler will find reason to write about a new kind of African-American mayors.

Over the thirty-five years since the election of the first African-American mayors, a rapid evolution has taken place with as yet unrecognized psychological consequences. In a heavily urban United States, most white Americans have a close awareness and interactive relationship with a powerful, well-educated, sophisticated black man or woman–their mayor.

David Colburn is Provost of the University of Florida. David Chalmers is Distinguished Service Professor of History, Emeritus of the University of Florida, and is author of a forthcoming book, BACKFIRE: How the Ku Klux Klan helped the Civil Rights Movement.

Sidebar: African-American Mayors in Cities with Populations above 50,000

• Floyd Adams, Jr., Savannah, GA 131,510 Population (57.1% Black)
• James M. Baker, Wilmington, DE 72,664 Population (56.4% Black)
• William V. Bell, Durham, NC 187,035 Population (43.8% Black)
• Robert Bowser, East Orange, NJ 69,824 Population (89.5% Black)
• Charles Box, Rockford, IL 150,115 Population (17.4% Black)
• Lee Brown, Houston, TX 1,953,631 Population (25.3 % Black)
• Willie Brown, Jr., San Francisco, CA 776,733 Population (7.8% Black)
• Josathat “Joe” Celestin, North Miami, FL 59,880 Population (54.9% Black)
• Michael B. Coleman, Columbus, OH 711,470 Population (24.5% Black)
• Glenn D. Cunningham, Jersey City, NJ 240,055 Population (28.3% Black)
• Preston Daniels, Des Moines, IA 198,862 Population (8.1% Black)
• Ernest D. Davis, Mount Vernon, NY 68,381 Population (59.6% Black)
• Roosevelt F. Dorn, Inglewood, CA 112,580 Population (47.1% Black)
• Jack Ellis, Macon, GA 97,255 Population (62.5% Black)
• Gwendolyn A. Faison, Camden, NJ 79,904 Population (53.3% Black)
• Jack Ford, Toledo, OH 313,619 Population (23.5% Black)
• Shirley Franklin, Atlanta, GA 416,474 Population (61.4% Black)
• Willie W. Herenton, Memphis, TN 650,100 Population (61.4% Black)
• James Halley, Portsmouth, VA 100,565 Population (50.6% Black)
• Sharpe James, Newark, NJ 273,546 Population (53.5% Black)
• Robert Jones, Kalamazoo, MI 77,145 Population (20.6% Black)
• Wilmer Jones-Ham, Saginaw, MI 61,799 Population (43.3% Black)
• Harvey Johnson, Jr., Jackson, MS 184,256 Population (70.6% Black)
• Terry Johnson, Oceanside, CA 161,029 Population (7.4% Black)
• William A. Johnson, Rochester, NY 219,773 Population (38.5% Black)
• Kwame Kilpatrick, Detroit, MI 951,270 Population (81.6% Black)
• Bernard Kincaid, Birmingham, AL 242,820 Population (73.5% Black)..
• Brenda L. Lawrence, Southfield, MI 78,296 Population (54.2% Black)
• Mamie E. Locke, Hampton, VA 146,437 Population (44.7% Black)
• James Mayo, Monroe, LA 53,107 Population (61.1% Black)
• Rudolph C. McCollum Jr., Richmond, VA 197,790 Population (57.2% Black)
• Lorraine Morton, Evanston, IL 74,239 Population (22.5% Black)
• C. Ray Nagin, New Orleans, LA 484,674 Population (67.3% Black)
• Elzie Odom, Arlington, TX 332,969 Population (14.5% Black)
• Douglas Palmer, Trenton, NJ 85,403 Population (52.1% Black)
• Willie Payne, Pontiac, MI 66,337 Population (47.9% Black)
• Eric Perrodin, Compton, CA 93,493 Population (40.3% Black)
• Paul Richards, Lynwood, CA 69,845 Population (13.5% Black)
• Wayne Smith, Irvington, NJ 60,695 Population (81.7% Black)
• Woodrow Stanley, Flint, MI 124,943 Population (53.3% Black)
• John F. Street, Philadelphia, PA 1,517,550 Population (43.2% Black)
• William E. Ward, Chesapeake, VA 199,184 Population (28.5% Black)
• Wellington E. Webb, Denver, CO 554,636 Population (11.1% Black)
• Anthony A. Williams, Washington, DC 572,059 Population (60% Black)

Source: 2002, National Conference for Black Mayors, Inc. For a full list of the 465 African American mayors, visit www.blackmayors.org.