Yet no one thought he could win.
A decade after his Montgomery victory, and spiraling successes throughout the South, nigh Hegelian in the mysterious way the Movement kept changing as he chased it, and changing him, pushing him higher and higher, beyond anything he’d dreamed possible in college, from local bus boycotts to unqualified calls for integration, and finally to grander dreams of global peace and equality — a decade after his finest triumphs for nonviolence, the press, and even people who’d joined hands with him singing “We Shall Overcome,” now saw his methods as outmoded, his insistence on loving one’s enemies as lunacy, his opposition to Black Power as outright betrayal. Oh, he needed a victory here. The Chicago crusade was costing as much as $10,000 some months. In the spirit of Martin Luther four centuries earlier, he taped his demands for the poor on the door of City Hall after marching three miles with five thousand men and women of goodwill from Soldier Field; but despite money spent and speeches delivered, the mayor’s office maneuvered, matching his call for jobs and open housing with promises and claims for progress that his critics dismissed as smoke and mirrors, mere Band-Aids aimed at making the problem (and him) go away. Never a day passed when he did not read that his stature was diminished, his day of leadership done, and he could not ignore his critics if he was, as he so often claimed, committed to the truth. Twelve times he’d been imprisoned in Alabama and Georgia jails, stabbed once, spat upon, and targeted for death so many times he could say, like the Apostle Paul, “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord.” Yet for all his sojourning on the Jericho Road, his long journey through the valley of the shadow of death, his deeper, esoteric message about freedom had barely been heard. The gleaming keys he offered to the Kingdom made men and women who accepted his exoteric, surface-skimming political speeches shrink back once they saw the long-sealed door he was asking them to enter, they could not pass through that portal and remain as they were: white and black, male and female, Jew and Gentile, rich and poor — these were ephemeral garments, he knew, and could no more clear that entrance than a camel through a needle’s eye. To gain the dizzying heights of the mountaintop the self’s baggage had to be abandoned in the valley. Little wonder, then, that so few grasped the goal he pointed to, or that on the Mississippi march and then in Chicago he was booed, and would have wept over this but instead thought back with thanksgiving (and was not all thought, as Heidegger pointed out, a form of thanksgiving?) to his professor at Morehouse, Benjamin Mays, who impressed upon him the importance of learning Henley’s poem “Invictus” (It matters not how strait the gate …). After his twelve years of sacrifice, the young people in the Mississippi crowd called him a traitor, an Uncle Tom (How charged with punishments the scroll …). In the cities, they sang “We Shall Over-Run.” (I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.)
But somehow their rejection and resistance to his vision fit well into the way he then understood the world. He was a tightrope walker straddling two worlds. One of matter. One of spirit. Every social evil he could think of, and every “ontological fear,” as he was fond of saying lately, arose from that mysterious dichotomy inscribed at the heart of things: self and other, I and Thou, inner and outer, perceiver and perceived. It was a schism that, if not healed, would consume the entire world. Martyrdom held no appeal for him, but for every sorcerer named Jesus there was a Judas; for every bodhisattva called Gandhi, a Poona Brahmin named Nathuram Godse. The way to the crown was, now and forever, the cross. And it made no sense to carry the cross unless one was prepared to be crucified.
He sensed how close he was to the end, this Christian boy from Atlanta, this product of three generations of black preachers, this theistic idealist, and sometimes he wished he was two people, or perhaps three. One to co-pastor each Sunday beside his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Another to spend more time with his family, especially with his children; catch up on his reading (especially Tillich, Fromm, and Buber, who interested him more now than when he was in college); listen to opera, take his wife dancing, play basketball with the Southern Christian Leadership Council’s staff, leave his blue suits in the closet, dress more casually, and perhaps one day pursue a simple, ascetic life similar to that of Thich Nhat Hanh, the poet, Zen master, and chairman of the Vietnamese peace delegation whom he was currently promoting as a candidate for the Nobel. As he’d told his Montgomery congregation the day he resigned as pastor in 1959, he longed to escape “the strain of being known … I’ve been faced with the responsibility of trying to do as one man what five or six people ought to be doing … What I have been doing is giving, giving, giving, and not stopping to retreat and meditate like I should — to come back. If the situation is not changed, I will be a physical and emotional wreck. I have to reorganize my personality and reorient my life. I have been too long in the crowd, too long in the forest …”
And a third person to direct the Chicago campaign from the foul-smelling flat the SCLC and the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations leased at 1550 South Hamlin Street in the heart of “Slumdale.” From a security standpoint its location was a nightmare. The neighborhood was notorious for crime. Saturday-night shootings and streetwalkers. Establishing a perimeter was impossible. Any rooftop across the street would tempt a rifleman. Noises from downstairs, loud, braying conversations from other apartments, could not be kept out. When a sanitation truck rolled by, the floor shuddered and pictures fell off the wall. Even so, he insisted that not a blessed thing in this soulless place be changed. They had come to Chicago to dramatize the fact that for $90 per month slumlords gave poor blacks — who on the average earned $4,700 yearly — the opportunity to dwell, some families packed ten to a flat, in wretched dumps of such advanced rot and decay that each crumbling unpainted wall, each untiled floor, each brokendown radiator, each crisp roach egg in the cabinets, each dishrag curtain on the windows, and each rusted faucet reinforced the free-floating despair that if you lived here, where every particle of your physical surroundings induced shame and was one step up from trash, was a throwaway, was substandard, then the country must regard you as a throwaway too.
The hallway leading to his third-floor rooms was black-dark. The stairs trembled under his feet. He couldn’t lock the front door, so winos were free to piss in the entryway. In other words, the place where he’d brought his family was a urinal. And he, even he, hated the climb up the rickety steps to the top of the stairs. High above his door a single tungsten bulb buzzed in a halo of swirling dust motes the last few seconds before its filament flimmered out. Inside, their four rooms — hollow rinds filled with secondhand furniture — were arranged boxcar style (one for sitting, two for sleeping, and a miserable little kitchen) and were blisteringly hot and claustrophobic in the summer of 1966, even when his wife threw open the windows, for whatever breezes came through the rooms earned as well petroleum fumes and loud conversations and the roar of traffic from the streets below. Was this worth ninety dollars a month? Moreover, was proving his point by living here worth the toll he saw it taking on his family? The drain, the darkening of their spirits. “There’s nothing green in sight,” Coretta said, and for a moment he’d felt panicky, afraid, wondering if his work for his people, which he knew would kill him (“This is what is going to happen to me,” he’d told her as they sat solemnly watching the news of John Kennedy’s murder) — wondering if it would destroy his beautiful wife and four children as well.