Martin Luther King's America

UNITED STATES MURRAY KEMPTON

New York—Martin Luther King was an am- bassador—a reproach, indeed—from the older America of country churches and of poor people so imbedded in our history that they could enter and leave its great stages entirely unselfconscious and always saying just the right thing.

He belonged to the maids and the porters, the people who worked in kitchens to send their sons to college and saw them come out porters too and then commenced to dream for their grandchildren. He came to them after long years reading Hegel in Boston, different from them in every way except the essential one.

We saw him first in a church in Montgomery when he was only twenty-six; he looked at first sight surprisingly like Charley Parker, the saxo- phonist, the least appropriate of semblances. But, if he semed in any way unusual to his congregation, it was as embodiment of all they had dreamed their children might become, the son who went off to study, who had the whole world before him, and who had still come back home to be with them. Those nights he never talked to us but only to them, working the old ritual of his affirmation and their response; he did not speak for them but with them; if we wanted to listen to him, we had to listen to them too; they accompanied him into history.

Of all the memories of so many brief encounters with him, the best is of an after- noon sitting on a porch in Montgomery, Ala., seven years ago in May.

The Freedom Ride to integrate the interstate buses had come to its crash there. The riders had been bombed in Anniston and set upon and beaten in Montgomery; now they had stopped to wonder whether they should continue on to Jackson, Miss., and jail if they were lucky. Mar- tin King had not been on the ride; he had come after the trouble, as he always did in trouble, to draw fire. He and his friend, Ralph Abernathy, talked for a long time about whether they should allow their children to go on to Jackson. There was the assumption that to go there might mean to be killed.

His friend, the Attorney-General of the United States, was terribly anxious that the riders stop where they were with their wounds; the majesty of the United States could not pro- tect them in Jackson; and the reputation of the United States would suffer if the worst hap- pened. But Martin King did not think about that. He turned to Wyatt Walker, his executive assistant. 'Wyatt,' he said, 'Go back and tell those young people that I don't want them to go. I'll go, and Ralph will go. But I was not put here to send children to get hurt.'

His children tricked him, of course, going down one by one to buy bus tickets in the night. And, when he and the adults got up the next morning to go to the terminal and Jack- son, those children were there waiting for him and, off into the unknown, they went together, as they always did, since in those days, they would do anything he asked except turn back from sharing the risks he wanted to take all by himself. We did not need the Nobel Prize or the flag at halfmast over the Capitol to remem- her that Martin Luther King was a great man. A great man is one who knows that he was not put on earth to be part of a process through which a child might be hurt.

He died asserting the dignity of garbage col- lectors. And he died at a moment when his ideas seemed more unfashionable than ever. A country is very sick when the second thought in everyone's mind, with the news that a Nobel Peace laureate has been murdered, can be the fear that his death is the signal for violence and arson and that his first memorial must be children fleeing from a burning tenement.

And yet, at the very moment when the irony of his failure was being marked in smoke and fire, there arose the sense that he might have won after all. He had proved the uselessness of violence and the emptiness of riot. Men do not mourn nor do they make revolutions breaking into liquor stores. Never before as in these spectacles had quiet people been so recognisable as the only people who count. Martin Luther King had lived to teach us; in death he had taught us too. Suddenly in the shock of what we had lost, we had the sudden feeling that we commence to heal. Martin King may have been buried with the coming of spring.

Perhaps, we could begin to believe, a whole dreadful period of our history had begun with one awful murder and had ended with another.

The murder of John F. Kennedy had hurled us back, not as we had thought for a desolate, decorous trip to the funeral of Abraham Lin- coln, but for a wild journey, its end yet un- known, to the revolutionary Europe of 1848 and a politics without pity or mercy, where men do not plan but plot. A coup d'etat by the un- known gods had made everything of Lyndon Johnson who had been almost nothing and nothing of Robert Kennedy who had been almost everything.

Any history changed by coup d'etat becomes a history whose actors can think only of coups d'etat, being either winners who used to be losers or losers who used to be winners. Some of the spiteful nature of the struggle for the immense, although leaky, empire of the Demo- cratic party comes from the condition that President Johnson and Senator Kennedy are men whose characters have been afflicted by the experience of being political exiles or political prisoners or both. Their sudden change in for- tunes made Senator Kennedy a Bonapartist adventurer as it left the President an internally- insecure Orleans citizen king. Their private interviews seem always to have had the atmo- sphere of those confrontations where the Minister of State Security warns the political suspect of high social station that, even for him, amnesty depends on at least the show of good conduct.

The relationship between our two most powerful politicians brought something quite poisonous even to the more civilised quarters of a political arena already infected by the dreadful national habit of violence.

Senator Kennedy searched, vaguely as royal pretenders do, for signs of revolutionary change in the clangour of the New Left and the black militants. All the while, without his noticing, the revolution had been growing instead in that white, suburban middle class, which had been the object of his utmost contempt.

It broke, of course, when the Vietcong January offensive destroyed the notion that we were winning the war; but it was coming even if that business had gone on just as before, be- cause the clock had been wound; Senator McCarthy need only to arrive to hear it strike.

It had not occurred to McCarthy's detractors that the initial force of a revolutionary leader is in what he avoids being rather than in what he is. When people are- exhausted with being shouted at, the only way to reach their ears is not to shout. Revolutions, when their time comes, belong to men who have no complicity with the past. You do not damage a candidate by complaining that he does not care about restoring America's power in the world to people affronted by what America does with the power still left to it; by suggesting that he does not love his government to people deeply ashamed of their government; by dismissing him as lazy to people reminded every day of the disasters inflicted by politicians unsleepingly active.

Senator McCarthy fell like a blessing upon voters who were sure of very little except that they did not want what they had seen lately. His students could bring down the president's mercenaries in New Hampshire just by crying out.

Whatever his own fate, he announced the revolution of the quiet people. We commence to heal. Mr Johnson, exhausted, has begun to search for peace; he brings to the search the hesitations of a man who does not trust his way and knows he brings very little with him to bargain. But a settlement is no longer unthink- able to him, and, with that hurdle overcome, he or someone will bring the war to an end some day. In the long slow beautiful afternoon of Martin King's funeral, you could feel a country that had begun to learn that power is sinful and spite and violence exhausting.