Waiting in a phone booth at a rural filling station six hours away from the city, I realized that our weeks downstate, away from newspapers and televisions, had thrown me out of step with the breathless pace of King’s northern campaign. Chicago was still reeling from the riots. The monolith of de facto segregation had barely budged an inch. Blacks were squeezed into ten percent of the city’s area, with only four percent living in the suburbs, where homes ran as high as $15,000. The CCCO, which gave priority to changing inferior education over economic boycotts, was battling to oust despised emblems of segregation in the schools like superintendent Benjamin C. Willis and a high school principal named Miss Chuchut. Yet despite setbacks by Democratic precinct ward-organizers who threatened the poor with loss of their welfare payments if they voted or protested, a degree of progress had been made. Using as their model the tactics of Philadelphia’s Rev. Leon Sullivan, King’s forces created a local chapter of Operation Breadbasket and designated as its director a University of Chicago theology student named Jesse Jackson in a move that ruffled the feathers of more than a few older activists, but the bold young minister did bring home the bacon when a boycott led to better employment for blacks with the Country Delight Dairy chain.
Nevertheless, too little had changed in a campaign that noisily blew into town promising to bring down the walls of economic racism once and for all. Real estate agencies were making a killing off white flight from neighborhoods that in just months turned completely black. Gun sales soared in Slavic districts, and I wondered, as the minister must have wondered, if it was possible to end social evil through actions that did not themselves engender a greater, more devastating evil. Back in 1954, the newspapers had labeled the Montgomery Improvement Association’s nonviolent bus boycott “Gandhian.” The Movement picked up the phrase later, and King was fond of saying Jesus provided the message, Gandhi the method for their social mission. But this was not entirely true. Nor, strictly speaking, faithful to Gandhi, who claimed his greatest ambition was “To make myself zero.” When asked for the secret of his life, the mahatma replied, Tena tyaktena bhunjithah (“Renounce and enjoy”). Howard University activists appropriated the approach of nonviolent civil disobedience in the 1940s, when King was still in college. His version derived from theirs, the Howard leaders who took the body but not necessarily the soul of the mahatma’s method, the surface but not the deepest impulse to renounce materialism and egotism in all their manifestations. Far from being anchored in the dualism of the Christian book, Gandhi’s methods drew from the Bhagavad Gita, which taught him, he insisted, that “those who desire salvation should act like the trustee who, though having control over great possessions, regards not an iota of them as his own.” Selfless, humble, detached, living without privacy so that his life was perfectly transparent, seeking no personal gain or profit, indefatigable, Gandhi could meet any social conflict head-on for those he loved, and his intention was never to humiliate or beat down his opponent. How to end evil without engendering error or evil. The question had apparently slowed down Howard’s activists and the SCLC and the CCCO not at all.
Back on the phone, asking the others in the room to hold the noise down, the minister said, “You can be here then? We need everyone now to help …”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “We’ll be there by morning.”
Although uneventful, the ride north took longer by two hours because the Chevelle blew a fan belt outside Centralia, and I had to hike to a service station, buy a replacement, then walk back to the car. Smith rode in back with Amy, wearing one of the minister’s dark blue suits, his patterned tie, and clockface cufflinks. From head to toe he was as immaculate as the minister himself when he attended Morehouse and was affectionately known as Tweed. As spit-shined as King felt he had to be at Crozer to bury the stereotype of the Negro as slovenly. Just hours earlier, Amy’d packed his hair with Murray’s Pomade so the waves stood out in neat little rows; she’d creamed his face with Nadinola to clear up a few of his pimples, and he’d splashed on some of the minister’s favorite aftershave lotion, Aramis. On the whole, Smith looked uncomfortable in a suit, with a starched white collar squeezing his throat. And perhaps he was nervous, afraid he would fail at this job he’d petitioned for just as he’d failed at everything else. (And no, we could not keep Smith from strapping on his.357 Magnum, despite my telling him that King, while he did not oppose self-defense, felt edgy if anyone around him wore firearms because years before one of his bodyguards in the South had nearly shot a paperboy.) Amy kept inspecting him, pinching lint off his jacket and from his hair, wetting her handkerchief and rubbing at spots of shaving powder still on his jaw. Surely working so closely with him had been as much a trial for her as it was for me. At the Nest, I noticed that whenever Smith spoke disparagingly about other races — Jews, Chinese, or whites — Amy’s eyes glazed over and grew quiet; they became distant, wall-like, and a sadness fell around her like a scrim. It was not in her nature to make sweeping remarks about any race or group. By the time we returned to the city, Smith, knowing he needed our help, and not wishing to displease her, had shed generalizations of that kind, at least when around Amy.
Come eight o’clock we were on Edens Expressway. I stopped by a service station, where I called Doc again. He did not want a double standing in during the march. No, that duty was too important to relegate to others. He only wanted us nearby. King was optimistic, upbeat. But when the hour of the demonstration arrived, as the temperature climbed to the eighties and I pulled in behind other vehicles entering Gage Park, I felt his decision to keep us on the sidelines was a tactical error.
Smith, fingering a carbuncle on his forehead, saw the crowd first and muttered, “Damn! This ain’t no way to wage a fuckin’ war!” Six hundred Negroes and their white supporters from all walks of life, including the clergy, were gathered on the grass, supported by twelve hundred policemen. Over a thousand angry residents waited, itching for trouble, hooting racial insults and waving flags bearing the Nazi swastika and handwritten signs proclaiming THE ONLY WAY TO END NEGROES IS EXTERMINATION. Tension in the air was thick enough to make me short-winded. The mood was carnival-like — but this circus was from Gehenna, with the sort of gaiety you’d expect from townfolk turning out for the year’s biggest lynching, eagerly awaiting more excitement than they could see that summer at a hundred Riverviews. I stepped out of the Chevelle for a moment carrying a two-way radio to keep in contact with Amy, sweat streaming inside my clothes, down my back, and into my shoes. I prayed that King would come to his senses, change his mind, and stay in the white compact car ahead of us. If he’d ever needed conclusive evidence that the SCLC was out of its element, the swelling mob of young, working-class, Nordic-looking white males in sweaty T-shirts, or with their shirts tied around their throats, straining against the police to get their hands on the marchers — he damned well had that proof now. Down South, they were accustomed to crowds of maybe fifty or seventy. Violent whites were few, a minority of rabble-rousers easily rousted by federal troops. But here? Oh, here they came pouring from their homes in waves, the young and the old, healthy and infirm, Polish, Germans, and Italians who fought among themselves constantly but today were bonded by blood against a common foe determined, they believed, to take away their precious homes. The boys had greasy, slicked-back hair and packs of cigarettes rolled up in their T-shirt sleeves at shoulder level like refugees from movies starring Marlon Brando and Sal Mineo. One, with his cap turned backward, could have been Leo Gorcey. Others wore dark sunglasses. Cowboy hats. Handkerchiefs were wrapped as headbands across their brows. Watching them as they poured into the park, some riding on the shoulders of others in order to see and shouting, We want King!, I realized they had come far better prepared than Doc’s people. Cherry bombs, difficult to distinguish from gunfire, exploded around the Chevelle and King’s car as we inched forward into a sea of urban thugs. Rotten eggs splattered the Chevelle’s windshield, coating it so I couldn’t see and started swearing when my wipers failed to work. I turned the car over to Amy and scrambled out into the crowd, hoping to get closer to the minister’s car. On my left, good white Catholics spit in the faces of priests and nuns committed to civil rights. My heart was hammering. Now I knew why Smith had said we — Negroes — were despised worldwide, for we had done nothing to this crowd. Nothing to earn such revulsion and violence. In fact, there was something biblical, mythic, and ritualistic in their hatred of their darker brothers, something in the blood, as if to found and sustain a city, a sacrificial slaughter must take place. Beer-bellied white men, cigars tucked in the corners of their mouths, screamed for King’s appearance and pounded on the park’s grass with baseball bats. Others chanted white power slogans, calling the black marchers (who carried signs that read HOW LONG? and OPEN UP CHICAGO!) monkeys. They shouted, “Where’s Martin Luther Coon!” and “Kill the nigger-lovers!” at cops who to their astonishment found themselves faced off (Matthew 10:34–39) against their own cousins, sisters, and in-laws.