An American Requiem by James Carroll

Author:James Carroll [Carroll, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In the beginning, one half of all people eligible to vote in Dallas County, Alabama, were black, but only one percent of them were registered. Fifteen thousand eligible blacks lived in Selma, the county seat, but only 156 of them were registered.

For the last six months of 1964, the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee had been leading an effort to get the black citizens of Selma on the voting rolls. Among the obstacles to overcome were arcane literacy tests, poll taxes, the hostility of a registrar whose office was rarely open, a court order forbidding demonstrations and, most difficult of all, the dogs and electric cattle prods of a posse led by Sheriff Jim Clark. In January 1965, shortly after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Martin Luther King went to Selma too, seeking, as he put it, "to arouse the federal government."

King's presence drew the attention of the nation to Selma. In a courthouse confrontation, dozens of demonstrators were brutally arrested. "I hope the newspapers see you," one demonstrator said to Sheriff Clark, who answered, "Dammit, I hope they do." Photographs of Clark wielding his stick appeared all over the country. But then, as Juan Williams writes in Eyes on the Prize, "With speaking engagements elsewhere, King had to leave town for a while." It seems an odd moment for King's departure, and it prompts a digression from the narrative of Selma to consider what, besides speaking engagements, might have drawn King away at such a crucial time.

In October of 1963, within weeks of my first conversation with my father about Martin Luther King, Attorney General Robert Kennedy approved an FBI request to tap King's phone lines and place listening devices in his offices and hotel rooms. Rebutting common accusations and my own long-held conclusions that the request was part of a personal, essentially racist vendetta designed to punish a Bureau critic, David J. Garrow writes, "The origins of the King investigation lay in an honestly held FBI belief that Stanley Levison was a conscious and active agent of the Soviet Union, and that Levison's friendship with King was motivated by something other than a desire to advance the cause of civil rights in America."

But the effect of the bugs on King, especially of his hotel rooms, was to shift the FBI's preoccupation away from a perceived Communist threat and toward a puritanical repugnance at the perceived hypocrisy implied by his sexual behavior. For more than a year, FBI microphones gathered graphic information on King's secret life. Garrow states that Hoover, to the consternation of Bobby Kennedy when he learned of it, dispatched transcripts of tapes to the Pentagon—no doubt to my father. A puritanical, but also prurient, obsession with King's sexual restlessness fed Bureau rage, and when the civil rights leader won the Nobel Prize, Hoover decided to launch a covert campaign to discredit him.

Hoover recruited Cardinal Spellman, for one, to intervene with the Vatican, to head off King's meeting with Pope Paul VI. Spellman tried, but it is a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.