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<text>
<title>
Man of the Year 1963: Martin Luther King Jr.
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--Man of the Year
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
January 3, 1964
Man of the Year
Martin Luther King Jr.: Never Again Where He Was
</hdr>
<body>
<p> The jetliner left Atlanta and raced through the night toward
Los Angeles. From his window seat, the black man gazed down at
the shadowed outlines of the Appalachians, then leaned back
against a white pillow. In the dimmed cabin light, his dark,
impassive face seemed enlivened only by his big, shiny,
compelling eyes. Suddenly, the plane spuddered in a pocket of
severe turbulence. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. turned a wisp
of a smile to his companion and said: "I guess that's Birmingham
down below."
</p>
<p> It was, and the reminder of Vulcan's city set King to
talking quietly of the events of 1963. "In 1963," he said, there
arose a great Negro disappointment and disillusionment and
discontent. It was the year of Birmingham, when the civil rights
issue was impressed on the nation in a way that nothing else
before had been able to do. It was the most decisive year in the
Negro's fight for equality. Never before had there been such a
coalition of conscience on this issue."
</p>
<p> Symbol of Revolution. In 1963, the centennial of the
Emancipation Proclamation, that coalition of conscience
insatiably changed the course of U.S. life. Nineteen million
Negro citizens forced the nation to take stock of itself in the
Congress as in the corporation, in factory and field and pulpit
and playground, in kitchen and classroom. The U.S. Negro,
shedding the thousand fears that have encumbered his generations,
made 1963 the year of his outcry for quality, of massive
demonstrations, of wins and speeches and street fighting, of soul
searching in the suburbs and psalm singing in the jail cells.
</p>
<p> And there was Birmingham with its bombs and snarling dogs;
its shots in the night and death in the streets and in the
churches; its lashing fire hoses at washed human beings along
slippery avenues without washing away the dignity; its men and
women pinned to the ground by officers of the law...this was
the Negro revolution. Birmingham was its main battleground, and
Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of the Negroes in Birmingham,
became millions, black and white, in South and North, the symbol
of that revolution--and the Man of the Year.
</p>
<p> King is in many ways the unlikely leader of an unlikely
organization--the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a
loose alliance of 100 or so church-oriented groups. King has
neither the quiet brilliance nor the sharp administrative
capabilities of the N.A.A.C.P.'s Roy Wilkins. He has none of the
sophistication of the National Urban League's Whitney Young Jr.,
lacks Young's experience in dealing with high echelons of the
U.S. business community. He has neither the inventiveness of
CORE's James Farmer nor the raw militancy of SNICK's John Lewis
nor the bristling wit of Author James Baldwin. He did not make
his mark in the entertainment field, where talented Negroes have
long been prominent, or in the sciences and professions where
Negroes have, almost unnoticed, been coming into their own. He
earns no more money than some plumbers ($10,000 a year), and
possesses little in the way of material things.
</p>
<p> He presents an unimposing figure: he is 5 ft. 7 in., weighs
a heavy-chested 173 lbs., dresses with funereal conservatism
(five of six suits are black, as are most of his neckties). He
has very little sense of humor. He never heard of Y.A. Tittle or
George Shearing, but he can discourse by the hour about Thoreau,
Hegel, Kant and Gandhi.
</p>
<p> King preaches endlessly about nonviolence, but his protest
movements often lead to violence. He himself has been stabbed in
the chest, and physically attacked three more times; his home has
been bombed three times, and he has been pitched into jail 14
times. His mail brings him a daily dosage of opinion in which he
is by turn vilified and glorified. One letter says: "This isn't a
threat but a promise--your head will be blown off as sure as
Christ made green apples." But another ecstatically calls him a
"Moses, sent to lead his people to the Promised Land of first-
class citizenship."
</p>
<p> Cadence. Some cynics call King "De Lawd." He does have an
upper-air way about him, and, for a man who has earned fame with
speeches, his metaphors can be downright embarrassing. For
Negroes, he says, "the word `wait' has been a tranquilizing
Thalidomide," giving "birth to an ill-formed infant of
frustration." Only by "following the cause of tender-heartedness"
can man "matriculate into the university of eternal life."
Segregation is "the adultery of an illicit intercourse between
injustice and immorality," and it "cannot be cured by the
Vaseline of gradualism."
</p>
<p> Yet when he mounts the platform or pulpit, the actual words
seem unimportant. And King, by some quality of that limpid voice
or by some secret of cadence, exercises control as can few others
over his audiences, black or white. He has proved this ability on
countless occasions, ranging from the Negroes' huge summer March
on Washington to a little meeting one recent Friday night in
Gadsden, Ala. There, the exchange went like this:
</p>
<p> King: I hear they are beating you!
</p>
<p> Response: Yes, yes.
</p>
<p> King: I hear they are cursing you.
</p>
<p> Response: Yes, yes.
</p>
<p> King: I hear they are going into your homes and doing nasty
things and beating you!
</p>
<p> Response: Yes, yes.
</p>
<p> King: Some of you have knives, and I ask you to put them up.
Some of you may have arms, and I ask you to put them up. Get the
weapon of nonviolence, the breastplate of righteousness, the
armor of truth, and just keep marching.
</p>
<p> Few can explain the extraordinary King mystique. Yet he has
an indescribable capacity for empathy that is the touchstone of
leadership. By deed and by preachment, he has stirred in his
people a Christian forbearance that nourishes hope and smothers
injustice. Says Atlanta's Negro Minister Ralph D. Abernathy, whom
King calls "my dearest friend and cellmate": "The people make Dr.
King great. He articulates the longings, the hopes, the
aspirations of his people in a most earnest and profound manner.
He is a humble man, down to earth, honest. He has proved his
commitment to Judaeo-Christian ideals. He seeks to save the
nation and its soul, not just the Negro."
</p>
<p> Angry Memories. Whatever his greatness, it was thrust upon
him. He was born on Jan. 15 nearly 35 years ago, at a time when
the myth of the subhuman Negro flourished, and when as cultivated
an observer as H.L. Mencken could write that "the educated Negro
of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable
difficulties in life, but because he is a Negro. His brain is not
fitted for the higher forms of mental effort; his ideals, no
matter how laboriously he is trained and sheltered, remain those
of a clown."
</p>
<p> Mencken had never met the King family of Atlanta. King's
maternal grandfather, the Rev. A.D. Williams, was one of Georgia's
first N.A.A.C.P. leaders, helped organize a boycott against an
Atlanta newspaper that had disparaged Negro voters. His preacher
father was in the forefront of civil rights battles aimed at
securing equal salaries for Negro teachers and the abolition of
Jim Crow elevators in the Atlanta courthouse.
</p>
<p> As a boy, Martin Luther King Jr. suffered those cumulative
experiences in discrimination that demoralize and outrage human
dignity. He still recalls the curtains that were used on the
dining cars of trains to separate white from black. "I was very
young when I had my first experience in sitting behind the
curtain," he says. "I felt just as if a curtain had come down
across my whole life. The insult of it I will never forget." On
another occasion, he and his schoolteacher were riding a bus from
Macon to Atlanta when the driver ordered them to give up their
seats to white passengers. "When we didn't move right away, the
driver started cursing us out and calling us black sons of
bitches. I decided not to move at all, but my teacher pointed out
that we must obey the law. So we got up and stood in the aisle
the whole 90 miles to Atlanta. It was a night I'll never forget.
I don't think I have ever been so deeply angry in my life."
</p>
<p> Ideals & Technique. Raised in the warmth of a tightly knit
family, King developed from his earliest years a raw-nerved
sensitivity that bordered on self-destruction. Twice, before he
was 13, he tried to commit suicide. Once his brother, "A.D.,"
accidentally knocked his grandmother unconscious when he slid
down a banister. Martin thought she was dead, and in despair ran
to a second-floor window and jumped out--only to land unhurt. He
did the same thing, with the same result, on the day his
grandmother died.
</p>
<p> A bright student, he skipped through high school and at 15
entered Atlanta's Negro Morehouse College. His father wanted him
to study for the ministry. King himself thought he wanted
medicine or the law. "I had doubts that religion was
intellectually respectable. I revolted against the emotionalism
of Negro religion, the shouting and the stamping. I didn't
understand it and it embarrassed me." At Morehouse, King searched
for "some intellectual basis for a social philosophy." He read
and reread Thoreau's essay, "Civil Disobedience," concluded that
the ministry was the only framework in which he could properly
position his growing ideas on social protest.
</p>
<p> At Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa., King built
the underpinnings of his philosophy. Hegel and Kant impressed
him, but a lecture on Gandhi transported him, sent him foraging
insatiably into Gandhi's books. "From my background," he says, "I
gained my regulating Christian ideals. From Gandhi I learned my
operational technique."
</p>
<p> Montgomery. The first big test of King's philosophy--or of
his operating technique--came in 1955, after he had married a
talented young soprano named Coretta Scott and accepted the
pastorate of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala.
</p>
<p> On Dec. 1 of that year, a seamstress named Rosa Parks
boarded a Montgomery bus and took a seat. As the bus continued
along its route, picking up more passengers, the Negroes aboard
rose on the driver's orders to give their seats to white people.
When the driver told Mrs. Parks to get up, she refused. "I don't
really know why I wouldn't move," she said later. "There was no
plot or plan at all. I was just tired from shopping. My feet
hurt." She was arrested and fined $10.
</p>
<p> For some reason, that small incident triggered the
frustrations of Montgomery's Negroes, who for years had bent
subserviently beneath the prejudices of the white community.
Within hours, the Negroes were embarked upon a bus boycott that
was more than 99% effective, almost ruined Montgomery's bus line.
The boycott committee soon became the Montgomery Improvement
Association, with Martin Luther King Jr. as president. His
leadership was more inspirational than administrative; he is, as
an observer says, "more at home with a conception than he is with
the details of its application." King's home was bombed, and when
his enraged people seemed ready to take to the streets in a riot
of protest, he controlled them with is calm preaching of
nonviolence. King became world famous and in less than a year the
Supreme Court upheld an earlier order forbidding Jim Crow seating
in Alabama buses.
</p>
<p> Albany. Montgomery was one of the first great battles won by
the Negro in the South, and for a while after it was won
everything seemed anticlimactic to King. When the sit-ins and
freedom-ride movements gained momentum, King's S.C.L.C. helped
organize and support them. But King somehow did not seem very
efficient, and his apparent luck of imagination was to bring him
to his lowest ebb in the Negro movement.
</p>
<p> In December 1961, King joined a mass protest demonstration
in Albany, Ga., was arrested, and dramatically declared that he
would stay in jail until Albany consented to desegregate its
public facilities. But just two days after his arrest, King came
out on bail. The Albany movement collapsed, and King was bitterly
criticized for helping to kill it. Today he admits mistakes in
Albany.
</p>
<p> "Looking back over it," he says, "I'm sorry I was bailed
out. I didn't understand at the time what was happening. We
though that the victory had been won. When we got out, we
discovered it was all a hoax. We had lost a real opportunity to
redo Albany, and we lost an initiative that we never regained."
</p>
<p> But King also learned a lesson in Albany. "We attacked the
political power structure instead of the economic power
structure," he says. "You don't win against a political power
structure where you don't have the votes. But you can win against
an economic power structure when you have the economic power to
make the difference between a merchant's profit and loss."
</p>
<p> Birmingham. It was while he was in his post-Albany eclipse
that King began planning for his most massive assault on the
barricades of segregation. The target: Birmingham, citadel of
blind, die-hard segregation. King's lieutenant, Wyatt Tee Walker,
has explained the theory that governs King's planning: "We've got
to have a crisis to bargain with. To take a moderate approach,
hoping to get white help, doesn't work. They nail you to the
cross, and it saps the enthusiasm of the followers. You've got to
have a crisis."
</p>
<p> The Negroes made their crisis, but it was no spur-of-the-
moment matter. King himself went to Birmingham to conduct
workshops in nonviolent techniques. he recruited 200 people who
were willing to go to jail for the cause, carefully planned his
strategy in ten meetings with local Negro leaders. Then,
declaring that Birmingham is the "most thoroughly segregated big
city in the U.S.," he announced early in 1963 that he would lead
demonstrations there until "Pharaoh lets God's People go."
</p>
<p> Awaiting King in Birmingham was Public Safety Commissioner
Theophilus Eugene ("Bull") Connor, a man who was to become a
symbol of police brutality yet who, in fact, merely reflected the
seething hatreds in a city where acts of violence were as common
as chitlins and ham hocks. As it happened, Bull Connor was
running for mayor against a relative moderate, Albert Boutwell.
To avoid giving campaign fuel to connor, King waited until after
the April 2 election. Between Jan. 16 and March 29, he launched
himself into a whirlwind speaking tour, made 28 speeches in 16
cities across the nation.
</p>
<p> Moving into Birmingham in the first week of April, King and
his group began putting their plans to work. Bull Connor, who had
lost the election but refused to relinquish power, sent his spies
into the Negro community to seek information. Fearing that their
phones were tapped, King and his friends worked up a code. he
became "J.F.K.," Ralph Abernathy "Dean Rusk," Birmingham Preacher
Fred Shuttlesworth "Bull," and Negro Businessman John Drew "Pope
John." Demonstrators were called "baptismal candidates," and the
whole operation was labeled "Project C"--for "Confrontation."
</p>
<p> The protest began. Day after day, Negro men, women and
children in their Sunday best paraded cheerfully downtown to be
hauled off to jail for demonstrating. The sight and sound of so
many people filling his jail so triumphantly made Bull Connor
nearly apoplectic. he arrested them at lunch counters and in the
streets, wherever they gathered. Still they cam, rank on rank. At
length, on Tuesday, May 7, 2,500 Negroes poured out of church,
surged through the police lines and swarmed downtown. Connor
furiously ordered the fire hoses turned on. Armed with clubs,
cops beat their way into the crowds. An armored car menacingly
bulldozed the milling throngs. Fire hoses swept them down the
streets. In all, the Birmingham demonstrations resulted in the
jailing of more than 3,300 Negroes, including King himself.
</p>
<p> The Response. The Negroes had created their crisis--and
Connor had made it a success. "The civil rights movement," said
President Kennedy in a meeting later with King, "owes Bull Connor
as much as it owes Abraham Lincoln." that was a best an
oversimplification; nevertheless, because of Connor, the riots
seared the front pages of the world press, outraged millions of
people. Everywhere, King's presence, in the pulpit or at rallies,
was demanded. But while he preached nonviolence, violence spread.
"Freedom Walker" William Moore was shot and killed in Alabama.
Mississippi's N.A.A.C.P. Leader Medgar Evers was assassinated
outside his home. There was violence in Jackson, Miss., in
Cambridge, Md., in Danville, Va. In Birmingham, later in the
year, a church bombing killed four Negro Sunday-school children,
while two other youngsters were shot and killed the same day.
</p>
<p> Those events awakened long-slumbering Negro resentments,
from which a fresh Negro urgency drew strength. For the first
time, a unanimity of purpose slammed into the Negro consciousness
with the force of a fire hose. Class lines began to shatter.
Middle-class Negroes, who were aspiring for acceptance by the
white community, suddenly found a point of identity with Negroes
at the bottom of the economic heap. Many wealthy Negroes, once
reluctant to join the fight, pitched in.
</p>
<p> Now sit-in campaigns and demonstrations erupted like
machine-gun fire in every major city in the North, as well as in
hundreds of new places in the South. Negroes demanded better job
opportunities, an end to the de facto school segregation that
ghetto life had forced upon them. The N.A.A.C.P.'s Roy Wilkins,
a calm, cool civil rights leader, lost some of his calmness and
coolness. Said he: "My objectivity went out the window when I saw
the picture of those cops sitting on that woman and holding her
down by the throat." Wilkins promptly joined a street
demonstration, got himself arrested.
</p>
<p> "Free at Last." Many whites also began to participate,
particularly the white clergy, which cast off its lethargy as
ministers, priests and rabbis tucked the Scriptures under their
arms and marched to jails with Negroes whom they had never seen
before. The Rev. Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, executive head of the
United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., declared: "Some time or
other, we are all going to have to stand and be on the receiving
end of a fire hose." Blake thereupon joined two dozen other
clergymen in a protest march--and was arrested.
</p>
<p> In the months following Birmingham, Negroes paraded,
demonstrated, sat in, stormed and fought through civil rights
sorties in 800 cities and towns in the land. The revolt's basic
and startling new assumption--that the black man can read and
understand the Constitution, and can demand his equal rights
without fear--was not lost on Washington. President Kennedy, who
had been in no great hurry to produce a civil rights bill, now
moved swiftly. The Justice Department drew up a tight and tough
bill, aimed particularly at voting rights, employment, and the
end of segregation in public facilities.
</p>
<p> To cap the summer's great storm of protest, the Negro
leaders sponsored the now famous March on Washington. It was a
remarkable spectacle, one of disorganized order, with a
stateliness that no amount of planning could have produced. Some
200,000 strong, whites and blacks of all ages walked from the
Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. There, the Negro
leaders spoke--Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, Young and SNICK's
Lewis.
</p>
<p> But it was King who most dramatically articulated the
Negro's grievances, and it was he whom those present, as well as
millions who watched on television, would remember longest. "When
we let freedom ring," he cried, "when we let it ring from every
village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we ill
be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black
men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics,
will be able to join hands and sing, in the words of the old
Negro spiritual,
</p>
<p> Even the Unions. The march made irreversible all that had
gone before in the year of the Negro revolution. In that year,
the Negroes made more gains than they had achieved in any year
since the end of the Civil War. A speedup in school integration
in the South brought to 1,141 the number of desegregated school
districts. In the North, city after city re-examined de facto
school segregation and set up plans to redress the balance. In
300 cities in the South, public facilities--from swimming pools
to restaurants--were integrated, and in scores of cities across
the nation, leaders established biracial committees as a start
toward resolving local inequities.
</p>
<p> New job opportunities opened nearly everywhere, as the
nation's businesses sent out calls for qualified Negro help--and,
finding a shortage, began training programs for unskilled
Negroes. Banks, supermarkets, hotels and department stores
upgraded Negro employees. In Philadelphia, Cleveland and New
York, pressure on the A.F.L.-C.I.O construction unions--the most
notorious Jim Crow organizations in the North--produced progress
toward training of Negro apprentices. San Francisco's tile
setters, memphis' rubber workers and St. Louis' bricklayers
opened their union rolls to willing beginners. Television and
Madison Avenue blossomed with Negro actors and ad models in "non-
Negro" roles. In Denver, Sears, Roebuck & Co., which hitherto had
had one Negro employee (dusting shelves), hired 19 more Negroes
for a variety of jobs. To varying degrees it was the same way in
Houston, at Grant's five and ten, and in San Francisco, where
Tidewater Oil took on a Negro for executive training. Even in the
South, the job situation improved. Negroes began moving into
professional positions in North Carolina's state government.
Three Nashville banks agreed to hire Negroes in clerical
positions, and some white-collar jobs opened in South Carolina.
</p>
<p> Still, for every tortuous inch gained, there are miles of
progress left to be covered. There remain 1,888 Southern school
districts where segregation is the rule--and scores of other
districts where desegregation sits uneasily in token form.
Though Montgomery buses are technically integrated, the city's
other public facilities still are not. Team sports are still
carefully segregated in a large number of Southern institutions;
the NBC television network recently canceled coverage of the
annual Blue-Gray football game because Negroes are not eligible
to participate. Only 22 states have enforceable fair-employment
laws on the books. And not counting Mississippi, where there is a
total absence of integrated public facilities, those in other
Southern states are so spotty and inconsistent (a downtown lunch
counter, yes; the city swimming pool, no) that it is hard for a
Negro nowadays to know where he may go and where he may not.
</p>
<p> Backlash. In general, housing is still the Negro's toughest
barrier. Here and there--for example, in Denver's Park Hill
residential section, where Negro home buying at first created
flurries of panic--colored families have been able to move into
white sections with little trouble. But the major metropolitan
areas of Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Los
Angeles continue to fill up at the heart with Negroes while
whites from a suburban collar on the outside. California used to
pride itself on its progressive attitude, and boasts a fair-
housing law on the books to prove it. Now it has been struck with
a campaign by the 40,000-member California Real Estate
Association to nullify the law.
</p>
<p> The white counterattack in California reflects one natural
consequence of the Negro's militant position: a backlash
reaction, derived from the notion that "the Negro is pushing too
far, too fast," and that he is also threatening the unskilled
white man's job security. James P. Mitchell, Eisenhower's onetime
Labor Secretary, now San Francisco's human-relations coordinator
and a friend of the Negro feels that "militancy could quite
easily antagonize important people who are now prepared or
preparing to do something. What Negroes have to remember is
something they tend to forget: that they are a minority, and that
they can only achieve what they want with the support of the
majority." Says Los Angeles Housewife Maureen Hartman: "I don't
see why the Negroes are weeping and wailing. This is not
Birmingham. They can go anywhere. They can vote, hold good jobs,
eat in the best restaurants. Just what do they expect from us?"
</p>
<p> Re-examination. What the Negroes expect, and what they are
getting to a degree that would have been astonishing at the start
of 1963, is a change of attitude. "A lot of people," says
Chicago's Negro Baptist Minister Arthur Brazier, "are
re-examining their motives. Even if this means that a lot of
hidden prejudices have been uncovered in Northerners, good will
be gained from the fact that Americans have been forced to act on
days other than Brotherhood Days and Weeks."
</p>
<p> Often the changes in attitudes are tiny in scope but broad
in meaning. No longer do the starters at Miami's municipal golf
courses ask a trio of white men if they will accept a Negro
fourth; they merely assign the Negro, and foursome heads onto the
course. A New York adoption agency is asking white families to
take Negro children. Louise Morgan, a former Chicago advertising
executive, says: "I had conned myself into thinking I was a
liberal. The rude awakening occurred less than a year ago, when a
Negro writer and his family sought an apartment in my building
and were turned down. I had met him. He was bright and a
gentleman. Yet I didn't lift a finger to help him. That's all
changed now." In California, Real Estate Dealer Richard S.
Hallmark quit his job in protest over the commonly accepted
methods of restricting Negro house buying. "I had never sold to a
Negro family in my life, but it grated on my conscience," he
says. "I'm tired of people telling me they don't give a goddam
about the law and that they're just not going to sell or rent to
`niggers.' I'm not a martyr or a crusader, but they made me
ashamed. The colored people are here to stay, so we might as well
get used to it."
</p>
<p> In addition to marching in demonstrations, clergymen are
welcoming Negroes to their all-white congregations in many
places, and are mounting mail campaigns to Congress in support of
the civil rights bill. Several Roman Catholic archdioceses now
require a specific number of sermons on race relations. The
National Council of Churches has budgeted $300,000 to support
civil rights activities.
</p>
<p> A Different Image. The most striking aspect of the revolt,
however, is the change in Negroes themselves. The Invisible Man
has now become plainly visible--in bars, restaurants, boards of
education, city commissions, civic committees, theaters and mixed
social activities, as well as in jobs. Says Mississippi's
N.A.A.C.P. President Aaron Henry: "There has been a re-evaluation
of our slave philosophy that permitted us to be satisfied with
the leftovers at the back door rather than demand a full serving
at the family dinner table." With this has come a new pride in
race. Explains Dr. John R. Larkins, a Negro consultant in North
Carolina's Department of Public Welfare: "Negroes have a feeling
of self-respect that I've never seen in all my life. They are
more sophisticated now. They have begun to think, to form
positive opinions of themselves. There's none of that defeatism.
the American Negro has a different image of himself." Moreover,
says U.C.L.A.'s Negro Psychiatrist J. Alfred Cannon, "We've got
to look within ourselves for some of the answers. We must be able
to identify with ourselves as Negroes. Most Negro crimes of
violence are directed against other Negroes; it's a way of
expressing the Negro's self-hatred. Nonviolent demonstrations are
a healthy way of channeling these feelings. But they won't be
effective unless the Negro accepts his own identity."
</p>
<p> Where most Negroes once deliberately ignored their African
beginnings and looked down on the blacks of that continent, many
now identify strongly with Africa--though not to the point where
they would repudiate their American loyalties--and take pride in
the emergence of the new nations there. Some Negro women are
affecting African-style hairdos; Negroes are decorating their
homes with paintings and sculpture that reflect interest in
African culture. There has been a decline in sales of "whitening"
creams, hair straighteners and pomades, which for years found a
big market among Negroes obsessed with ridding themselves of
their racial identity.
</p>
<p> The Lull. There has been an inevitable lull in visible civil
rights activity since the March on Washington, and this has
disheartened some Negroes. Says Richard L. Banks, secretary of
the Governor's advisory committee on civil rights in
Massachusetts: "When the Negroes are not in the streets any more,
I'm awfully afraid that some of the people who responded will
forget it." But the lull is deceptive, and it is probably best
described by James Baldwin. Says he, "This lull is like a
football huddle. People are reassessing. They are planning. We
will flush the villain out."
</p>
<p> In fact, most Negro leaders are waiting for the outcome of
the civil rights still in Congress, and are counseling patience
until at least the end of this month. They are also carefully
gauging the position of Lyndon Johnson. So far, the President's
resolute support of the civil rights bill has been encouraging.
Says the Rev. L. Sylvester Odom of Denver's African Methodist
Episcopal Church: "Personally I wouldn't be surprised if
President Johnson gets more out of Congress than President
Kennedy could have. He may not get as deeply into the hearts of
the people, but he may do pretty well with the Congress, and
after all that is what counts." Degrees Virginia-born Social
Psychologist Thomas Pettigrew: "Johnson will be tougher with the
South. He knows them. Kennedy treated the South as if it were
Boston. As a Southerner, I know damn well you don't treat the
South that way. Johnson won't play patty-cake with them."
</p>
<p> Martin Luther King Jr. has already met with President
Johnson, and he is similarly optimistic. "I've had a good deal of
contact with him in the past several years," says King. "He means
business. I think we can expect even more from him than we have
had up to now. I have implicit confidence in the man, and unless
he betrays his past actions, we will proceed on the basis that we
have in the White House a man who is deeply committed to help
us."
</p>
<p> Thus the support of the President for strong civil rights
bill provides a basis for high Negro hopes. Though Negro leaders
acknowledge that laws do not change people's hearts, they want
the satisfaction of knowing that a federal law support them in,
for example, their demands for equal voting rights and the right
to share public accommodations with white men. If the civil
rights bill circumvents these specifics, or if it should fail to
pass altogether, the leaders are determined to push their
revolution all the more strongly in 1964.
</p>
<p> The Year Ahead. Some believe that demonstrations may have
passed their peak of effectiveness. Says Boston N.A.A.C.P. Leader
Tom Atkins: "One of the problems with these damn demonstrations
is that you have to keep making them more exciting." But among
those who do not agree is martin Luther King Jr., and his
preparations for 1964 are well under way. "More and more," he
says, "I have come to feel that our next attack will have to be
more than just getting a lunch counter integrated or a department
store to take down discriminatory signs. I feel we will have to
assault the whole system of segregation in a community."
</p>
<p> King's most intensive efforts will be entered on Alabama and
Mississippi, because there the problem is greatest. The Negro
suffers more and more. How to deliver an all-out attack? This is
what we have to think about. I'm thinking now in terms of
thousands and thousands of people. They would have to be
students, mainly because, for financial reasons, working adults
find it difficult to remain in jail." Very soon King may press an
offensive in Danville, Va., which, he says, is "the most
difficult immediate situation we face. The town has a notorious
record of police brutality. I don't agree that there has to be
violence in the future, but this will depend on events. For
instance, if a filibuster in Congress stands in the way of
meaningful legislation, the Negro could be driven to despair and
violence."
</p>
<p> King's mission is to turn that potential for violence into
successful, direct, nonviolent action, and he works at the job 20
hours a day. He has moved back with his wife and four children to
Atlanta, where he shares the pulpit of the Ebenezer Baptist
Church with is father. His house, near the church, is an old,
two-story, four-bedroom place. Paintings with African themes and
a photograph of Gandhi hand on the walls. There is a threadbare
scatter rug in the living room, two chairs protected with
plastic, and a couch in need of a new slip cover. One of the keys
is missing on the old grand piano. King likes to play the piano,
although, as his wife says, "he starts off the `Moonlight Sonata'
as if you're really going to hear something, but he fades out."
</p>
<p> King rises at 6:30 a.m. and goes to his study for 45 minutes
of reading. Then he has fruit juice and coffee for breakfast, and
at 9 o'clock drives to his office in one of his two cars (a 1960
Ford and a 1963 Rambler). There he goes to work in a 16-ft.-
square room filled with perhaps 200 volumes on Negro and
religious subjects; he checks his mail (about 70 letters a day),
writes his speeches and sermons, confers with aides and, by
telephone, with civil rights leaders around the country. He
usually eats lunch at his desk, then continues working often
until 2 or 3 o'clock the next morning.
</p>
<p> Redemption. More and more, King spends his time in
airplanes, journeying to the far corners of the U.S. to speak and
preach to huge audiences. He traveled about 275,000 miles in 1963
and made more than 350 speeches. Wherever he goes, the threat of
death hovers in the form of crackpots. "I just don't worry about
things like this," he says. "If I did, I just couldn't get
anything done. One time I did have a gun in Montgomery. I don't
know why I got it in the first place. I sat down with Coretta one
night and we talked about it. I pointed out that as a leader of
a nonviolent movement, I had no right to have a gun, so I got rid
of it. The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is
important. If you are cut down in a movement that is designed to
save the soul of a nation, then no other death could be more
redemptive."
</p>
<p> It is with this inner strength, tenaciously rooted in
Christian concepts, that King has made himself the unchallenged
voice of the Negro people--and the disquieting conscience of the
whites. That voice in turn has infused the Negroes themselves
with the fiber that gives their revolution its true stature. In
Los Angeles recently, King finished a talk by saying: "I say good
night to you by quoting the words of an old Negro slave preacher,
who said, `We ain't what we ought to be and we ain't what we're
going to be. But thank God, we ain't what we was.'"
</p>
<p> After 1963, with the help of Martin Luther King Jr., the
Negro will never again be where he was.
</p>
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