Let The Trumpet Sound: A Life Of Martin Luther King Jr

Stephen Oates

Description

On April 4th, 1968 a shot rang out in the Memphis sky bringing to a close the life of the last great American hero, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jnr. Although known to most for the delivery of his "I Have a Dream" address, which followed the peaceful march on Washington DC of 250,000 people, and as the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (at age thirty-five), King in his eleven years as elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organisation formed to provide new leadership to the then burgeoning civil rights movement, travelled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action. Let the Trumpet Sound is the detailed examination of this life, written by Stephen B Oates, winner of the Robert E Kennedy Memorial Book Award and the Christopher Award.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique
• USA
• Human rights
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 23 mars 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781847677419
• Langue: English

Extrait

To the memory of


Addie Mae Collins Denise McNair Carol Robertson and Cynthia Wesley

For it was to restore the beloved community, so that the children of the world might inherit a legacy of peace, that he came down out of the academy, down from his pulpit, and marched his way to glory.
For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.


I C ORINTHIANS 15:52
CONTENTS

Prologue to the HarperPerennial Edition
PART ONE Odyssey
PART TWO On the Stage of History
PART THREE Freedom Is Never Free
PART FOUR Seasons of Sorrow
PART FIVE The Dreamer Cometh
PART SIX Life’s Restless Sea
PART SEVEN Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around
PART EIGHT The Road to Jericho
PART NINE The Hour of Reckoning
PART TEN Free at Last
Acknowledgments
References
Index
PROLOGUE TO THE HARPERPERENNIAL EDITION
The Story Behind the Biography
I
I first thought about writing a life of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the spring of 1977. My biography of Lincoln had appeared that February, and I had been searching in vain for another subject. When I mentioned King as a possibility, some of my colleagues and friends expressed concern. I was known as a biographer of the Civil War era. Why would I want to risk my reputation by writing about a controversial subject who had died just nine years before?
I had considered other figures as possible subjects. But none of them was as demanding as Lincoln. If I was to grow as a writer, I had to take a risk, do something even more challenging than my previous biography. And King was certainly that.
There seemed valid reasons for me to undertake a life of King. I was an experienced biographer who had studied and taught the art of life-writing; perhaps I could bring some expertise to bear in resurrecting King. While I had never met him, I had been active in the civil-rights movement in Austin, Texas, and had long admired him as the spiritual leader of the movement and the trumpet voice of America’s anguish and aspirations in the matter of racial justice. I hoped that my respect for him would lead to empathy, the biographer’s requisite quality.
A life of King also seemed consistent with the themes of my previous work. In addition to my life of Lincoln, I had written biographies of the slave rebel Nat Turner and the revolutionary abolitionist John Brown. All three had been profoundly affected by the moral paradox of slavery and racial oppression in a land based on enlightened ideals of liberty, and all had devised their own solutions to that problem. King, though struggling in a subsequent century, was both historically and symbolically linked to these figures of the Civil War era. Driven, visionary, and spiritual like them, King perceived that the civil-rights movement was an extension of the Civil War, that he and his followers were striving to realize the promise of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. In fact, King gave his most famous speech, "I Have a Dream," at the Lincoln Memorial. In the end, King too was assassinated, a victim of the same conflict over racial tensions and national destiny that had claimed Lincoln’s life in another April long before and that had claimed the lives of John Brown and Nat Turner, too. It seemed to me that a life of King would add significantly to the biographical tapestry I was creating.
Finally, in reading King’s own books, I experienced that phenomenon biographers often feel when searching for a subject I felt a tapping on the shoulder, a beckoning from the mist. It was a strange, almost spiritual, sensation of being called.
Still, I was apprehensive. It remained to be seen whether I could pull together a book that would satisfy me. As far as I could tell, Boston University had the only collection of King papers then open to the public. Another collection, owned by King’s widow, Coretta, was reportedly uncatalogued and gathering dust in the basement of her Atlanta headquarters. There were archives in the presidential libraries of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson that bore on the King story, and several collateral manuscript collections that might be useful. But could a successful biography be fashioned from such disparate and elusive sources? For me to try would require a leap faith. of faith. With ith considerable trepidation, I made the leap.
II
Fortunately for me, Harper & Row, my publisher, came through with a contract and an advance against royalties that made my leap more tolerable. Then I sent Coretta King my prospectus and my credentials for undertaking a life of her husband and asked if I might meet with her. An intermediary informed me that Mrs. King could not see me, but that Stanley Levison, her New York lawyer and a friend and adviser of her husband’s, would talk to me in her behalf.
The meeting took place that June in Levison’s New York apartment. It was a disaster. Levison made it clear that he and Mrs. King would cooperate with me on one condition: that we enter into a contract giving both of them the right of "script approval" a euphemism for censorship without which my book could not be published.
In all my years as a biographer and historian, I had never encountered such a proposal, and it got my professional hackles up. As the price I had to pay for utilizing Mrs. King’s archives, I would have to submit my work to two people who had no training in history or biography. I told Levison that what he and Coretta could tell me about King would be invaluable and that I would welcome their critical responses to whatever I should write. But I could not submit to censorship. That would compromise my integrity, my quest for the truth. Should I produce one of those sanitized "authorized" lives, it would ruin my reputation as a serious biographer.
Levison was adamant. Without script approval, neither he nor Mrs. King would cooperate, which meant that I could not see her documents or interview a single member of the King family. To compound my misery, I learned that the King collection in Atlanta was much larger than that at Boston University and included King’s private and official correspondence, not to mention the papers of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), from about 1962 to 1968. How could I do an acceptable biography without seeing these materials?
From that point on, Levison and Coretta King were hostile to me and my project. Once, during a conference in Atlanta, a mutual friend tried to introduce me to Mrs. King in the hope that we might reach an understanding if we talked without intermediaries. But she would have nothing to do with me "Mr. Oates and I have a real problem," she snapped, and walked abruptly away.
I was learning a painful lesson that surviving family members can be a biographer’s worst enemies, especially when they control access to crucial manuscripts. Still, I could understand Mrs. King’s position. She was afraid that, unless she controlled matters, an irresponsible biographer would produce a vulgar book that sensationalized her husband’s shortcomings, defamed his character, and besmirched the family name. Yet I was hurt. I had a reputation for writing compassionate books. Levison had read my biography of Lincoln, and Mrs. King had been sent a copy; that book showed I was no character assassin. If I uncovered human frailties in King and how could I not? I would try to understand them, not use them to invite readers to an execution.
In Levison’s case, I did not know then what would surface later: he had once been a secret benefactor of the American Communist Party. * Evidently King himself had never known about that, even though Levison had been his close friend and adviser. In short, Levison had something to conceal in his own background, and he clearly did not want that discovered and made public lest it somehow tarnish King’s reputation. I am convinced that this is why he wanted to control my work, and, failing that, to knock me off the project entirely.
III
So I was off to a perilous start. Yet I did make fascinating discoveries in the resources available to me. I gained a three-dimensional sense of my subject from Eli Landau’s incomparable King, A Filmed Record and other audio-visual materials I came across. Among these was a remarkable collection in the National Archives, which included tapes of King’s speeches, newsreels of his campaigns, and film copies of his television appearances. One film, The Negro and the American Promise , was a real find; produced in 1963 for National Educational Television, it featured separate interviews with King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. The interviews had been published in a book version which, I now discovered, had been edited to tone down Malcolm’s and King’s language. The film revealed how much more passionately, angrily, the two black leaders had disagreed at that time in their approaches to white America and racial change. Malcolm’s denunciations of King were stunning; so was King’s criticism of Malcolm. I copied quotations directly from the film copy, hoping that the authentic version would make a dramatic and significant scene in my story.
The film records relating to King revealed telling details I might not have found in traditional written and printed documents: the tilt of King’s head in conversation, the little gestures he made with his fingers to stress a point in oratory, the way he said "Birmin-ham" for Birmingham and "a- gain " for again, the ineradicable sadness of his eyes. Those eyes betrayed a vulnerability that gave me a fleeting glimpse into his inner self. Later I would find evidence of that vulnerability in unpublished sermons, letters, and other documents.
More archival material was available to me than I had expected. King’s former literary agent, a kindly woman who supported my project, opened her files to me without restriction. Here I discovered the hell King went through trying to write his many books while being constantly on the go as a civil-