In a brief essay in Sunday’s (January 19) Washington Post, Jonathan Eig, author of “King: A Life,” winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for biography, writes:
“We can begin by remembering that, until his death in 1968, King had never gained the approval of most White Americans. In 1966, even after he had won the Nobel Peace Prize, a Gallup survey showed that 63 percent of Americans viewed him negatively. Just prior to his assassination, 3 out of every 4 White Americans disapproved of him. After the assassination, a shocking 31 percent of Americans, according to one survey, believed that King ‘brought it on himself.’
“At the time, some members of the Black community turned on King, criticizing him for being too accommodating to White people. He further alienated key allies (most notably President Lyndon B. Johnson) by his high-profile opposition to the Vietnam War.”
In some ways, it’s a fairytale view we have of Martin Luther King today. The great entertainer and relentless civil rights activist and friend of King, Harry Belafonte, wonders whether the holiday does more harm than good, distorting, as it does, the perception and the times of King’s life and work. I disagree, because the holiday and Eig’s essay make me remember the small but direct part Martin Luther King played in my life.
It was 1968, and I was on the Peace Corps staff in Washington D. C. I’d walked away from a job interview at the US Agency for International Development (an agency I had admired while serving in the Peace Corps in Turkey) when I was challenged for my beliefs on the Vietnam War. I had been out of the country, I argued, and was only beginning to assess my thoughts on the War. I’d left a State Department interview for a job in the Foreign Service with the vague promise that I might come back to the oral interview—without taking the written test again—after a hitch on Peace Corps staff. It was common knowledge that the first posting in the Foreign Service was likely Vietnam, and my knowledge of what that War was and meant was growing.
The ten months I spent in Washington D.C., from September of 1967 until June of 1968, was the time of the first big anti-war march on the Pentagon in October of 1967. In January of 1968 the Tet Offensive in Vietnam drove the importance of the War in Vietnam into the national consciousness. This was followed by the assassination of Martin Luther King, the riots in its wake, and then the withdrawal of Lyndon Johnson from the presidential race, the rise of Eugene McCarthy, the entrance into the race by Robert Kennedy, who was then assassinated.
King had come to Washington to organize a “Poor People’s Campaign,” and I, along with a number of former Peace Corps Volunteers, had joined his army. Our task was to allay fears of violence to the comfortable citizens of D. C.’s suburbs—while the chain of events listed above rumbled in background and foreground. I remember speaking at a church in Virginia, my skinny, blond-mustached 25-year-old-self telling well-dressed and older Presbyterians that we young people believed in a more just world, that we believed in the recently passed Civil Rights Act, the rights of Brown people and Black people and poor people of all colors to vote—and to have access to education, health care, and decent housing.
After King’s assassination, we went back to those suburban churches and asked for donations of food to take to housebound, fearful Black Americans in an inner city gripped by post-assassination rioting. We took groceries there in cars and station wagons, stopping at National Guard checkpoints and, crawling through silent streets, walked up to houses and second floor apartments with sacks of groceries, knocked and said we were there with help, to not be afraid. Doors creaked open, and fearful older Black women opened them enough to quickly take our sacks and close their doors.
In the days and weeks that followed, we went to workshops, put on by Quakers as I recall, to learn how to silently and passively protest if we were stopped or arrested during the upcoming “Poor People’s March.” I remember that we were not to wear jewelry that could be tugged and tear skin.
Once, I went with a Black friend from the Peace Corps, a young man from Watts, who had escaped the 1965 riots there while serving in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia, to a church service in a large, largely Black church in the city but out towards the suburbs. It might have been on 14th Street or 18th. There must have been a thousand people in that church, only a handful of Whites. Coretta Scott King, who had come to town to lead the first group of protestors, talked. And I think James Farmer and Jesse Jackson, two younger members of the Southern Christian Leadership Council and Congress of Racial Equality, spoke. For sure Ralph Abernathy, who had taken over the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on King’s death, who said that “people say I look like a bulldog; well I am a bulldog, and am in this fight till the end.”
A large white woman from the South who rose to say that she had always been taught that black people were inferior, and that she, often described as “poor white trash,” could and should look down on them. “Now we know that we are n…..s too,” she said. King had made the PP Campaign multi-ethnic from the start. We linked arms and sang “We Shall Overcome.”
To the consternation of many of the liberals of the day, still tentatively hanging on to Lyndon Johnson and General Westmoreland’s insistence that we were in Vietnam for the right reasons and seeing the “end of the tunnel,” King had spoken out against the Vietnam War. So had boxing champion Muhammed Ali: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong”
I went back to Turkey on Peace Corps staff before the actual Poor People’s March.
We had a good year there—we thought—until Johnson appointed an old friend, Robert Komer, to be the ambassador to the country. The newspapers, from right to left, soon heralded the coming of the “American butcher from Vietnam”—Komer had been head of the “Phoenix” program in Vietnam, credited with killing thousands of Vietcong and innocent villagers in a pacification program. The Peace Corps was eventually asked to leave Vietnam.
Martin Luther King’s life—and death—were not easy, and it is easy to remember the fine words he spoke and the progress made in extending civil rights to Black Americans due in part to his efforts. We forget that he was not always a popular man, especially with America’s white population, but also with some Black Americans. There were great divisions within the Civil Rights Movement, and there was violence across the country. But in that time in the country and its stretch across the world into an Asian war and politics, Martin Luther King stood up for justice and peace for all people.
It was brave, and it got him killed. But that is what I honor and remember on this day of remembrance.
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