Smith and I did not say.
“Thing is, me’n Vincent can’t figure how he can be so red when Daddy King is a capitalist. And what about that fellah A. G. Gaston, the black insurance man who paid five thousand to bail King out of jail in Birmingham? Gaston’s worth ten mil. He says the Wall Street Journal is his Bible, and he published a book called Green Power, arguing that money was the key to solving the race problem. You’d think the Reverend woulda noticed how even he depended on creative free enterprise, right?”
“What in God’s name”—Smith squinted at Groat—“do you people want?”
“A li’l cooperation,” said Groat. “For Dr. King’s sake. Anybody can see he’s over the edge. The seeds were in his personality from the beginning. A domineering father. Guilt feelings from his privileged status as a famous preacher’s son. The sense that he had a racial mission — a destiny — to fulfill, that he was personally responsible for eliminating the world’s suffering. Messiah complex. Maybe his being so short figures in too. And there’s hypersensitivity to how others saw him, like at Crozer when he overdressed and wouldn’t go to class unless his clothes were immaculately pressed, his shoes perfectly shined, and he was, he says, morbidly conscious of being a minute late because he felt any lapse in perfection confirmed negative Negro stereotypes. He never fails to check the polls ranking colored leaders to make sure he’s there, preferably in first place. We’re talking about an Alpha male determined to leave his mark on the world, even if it’s a burn mark from scorching a city. Somebody who’d sacrifice children, for God’s sake, on the front lines of a demonstration in order to impose his will on a community. This country deserves a better — a more balanced — black leader than that. Somebody responsible, like Roy Wilkins or that attorney Samuel R. Pierce Jr. Did you see the Time article on King when they selected him as Man of the Year? If you haven’t, you might want to read that. They point out how Wilkins is sharper than King, he’s a better organizer at the NAACP, and that’s one of the minister’s worst problems — organization — which is why he has to keep an old homosexual red like Rustin around. James Farmer at CORE, they said, is more militant, SNCC’s leader John Lewis has King beat for militancy, Whitney Young Jr.’s got it all over him for sophistication, and he’ll never write a line that’d stand beside James Baldwin’s prose. Right about now, I’d say, he’s more of a liability to the civil rights movement than an asset. Truth is, I figure he’s even dangerous to himself. Now, that wasn’t always so. Once upon a time he was a damned good leader. Do you remember that talk he gave on some things colored people should do, oh, back in fifty-eight, I believe. I’ve got a copy of it right here.”
“We don’t need to see that,” Smith said.
And we didn’t.
I remembered it only too well. Few people talked these days about that speech delivered at the Holt Street Baptist Church for the MIA’s Institute on Non-Violence. It had brought the young King great criticism from the black world. He’d said the unspeakable; he’d aired “dirty laundry” and risked, some said, giving ammunition — aid and comfort — to the Movement’s enemies. His intent, of course, had been otherwise. It had been to chase down truth, as he’d always tried to do. The things he assailed that night were, in his view, the products of racism, but that did not mean they could be excused or ignored. Preparing for his trip to India, he asked the gathering at the Holt Street Baptist Church to consider — just consider — the arguments of their worst foes, as Gandhi did those of his adversaries, and if their charges contained any truth, then he urged black people to make sure the race was “ready for integration.” Their enemies in the South said all that Negroes wanted was to marry white women. He dismissed that lunacy with a wave of his hand but then added, “They say that we smell. Well, the fact is some of us do smell. I know most Negroes do not have money to fly to Paris and buy enticing perfumes, but no one is so poor that he can’t buy a five-cent bar of soap.” Then he let go, allowing his blistering sermon to take him where it would, to the things internal to the race that hurt and infuriated him. “We kill each other and cut each other too much!” Our crime and illegitimacy rates, he said, are disproportionately high compared with those of whites. No one, King roared that night, needed to speak good English in order to be good; however, that didn’t excuse schoolteachers who crippled their students with bad grammar. He moved on that evening from target to target, aiming at alcoholism (“The money Negroes spend on liquor in Alabama in one year is enough to endow three or four colleges”); at the conspicuous consumption some blacks saw as “style” (“There are too many Negroes with $2,000 incomes riding around in $5,000 cars”); and even at black physicians more concerned with status symbols than with deepening their knowledge (“Too many Negro doctors have not opened a book since leaving medical school”). Sometimes, he implied, we need to think less about what we should do and more about what we should be. Changing this litany of inherently moral problems, which could not be ignored — and might worsen over time and even threaten the Movement’s progress — was, King said, something within black America’s power then, irrespective of what the federal government did or did not do.
His 1958 sermon had been worthy of Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, or Elijah Muhammad (at his best). Sadly, it brought less praise than scathing condemnation from many black people who called him an Uncle Tom. Understandably, the minister gave fewer and fewer of those speeches after the 1950s, though it was this side of King, I realized, that interested these Wise Guys most.
But Wilkins as a potential replacement? That made sense, I supposed. The executive director of the NAACP deeply envied King, often called him a liar, and met with the Bureau’s Cartha DeLoach to discuss their mutual dissatisfaction with King; Wilkins worried that the minister’s escalating conflicts with Hoover, and King damning the FBI for not protecting civil rights workers, would severely impair the Movement’s progress. In fact, Wilkins along with a few other Negro leaders led the effort three years earlier to get King to accept the presidency of a small college or the position of pastor at a large black church in order to retire him as the foremost Negro leader. No, there was no love lost between Wilkins and King, who’d refused the executive director’s offer by saying he knew only too well “the hypocrisy of adulation.”
“What,” I asked, “do you want with us?”
“Like I said, a li’l cooperation. But you don’t have to do a thing, Matthew. You can rest.” He fanned himself with one of his folders. “We know how well you and the Griffith girl brought along Chaym. Know a li’l about his history too. His kin’s from down here originally. On his mother’s side, we can trace his family tree back to a free woman named Baleka Calhoun. She came over in a slave ship before Surrender. Belonged to an African tribe called the Allmuseri. They’re all dead now, of course, or moved on. He’s pretty much the last of his line. Now, what I been thinking is if Zorro—”
“Who?” I said.
A quick, elastic little grin quivered round Groat’s mouth. “Excuse me, I meant to say if Dr. King was to one day lose his standing as a leader, he’d have to retire, now wouldn’t he? And it’d probably be the best thing for him, and for the country — if we saved him from himself, I mean.”
I asked, “How could that happen?”
“It’s something we’d like to discuss with Chaym … alone, if you wouldn’t mind.”