Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 by Taylor Branch

Author:Taylor Branch
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2007-04-16T07:00:00+00:00

During the six-week gestation of the Albany Movement, King unwittingly approached the Albany jail on an airborne path of exhaustion. He arrived home from London just as the November 1 ICC ruling went into effect. There seemed to be a bus crisis in nearly every Southern city that day, including Atlanta. In Tennessee, state auctioneers were selling off Highlander’s land, buildings, and all confiscated property, including the books from Myles Horton’s library. King, leaving the protest telegrams to Wyatt Walker, stayed mostly in transit between airport and rostrum. He returned to Montgomery as a surprise guest speaker at a huge “Testimonial Service of Loyalty and Devotion,” marking Ralph Abernathy’s departure from the First Baptist Church there. He went to Seattle, Portland, to Mankato College in Minnesota, to Cleveland, and shortly after that into a hospital for tests and two days of rest. From there he went to California for three days and then on to address the Fourth Constitutional Convention of the AFL-CIO in Bal Harbour, Florida.

The speech before the enormous assembly of AFL-CIO delegates fulfilled several complementary objectives of King’s recent past. It was a coup for him—an honored forum at the pinnacle of the labor movement—and a welcome sign of recovery from his private disaster at Kansas City. The Alabama libel case against the SCLC and The New York Times lent an urgent practicality to King’s speeches to organized labor. Having spent more than $27,000 in the early appeals stage of that case, with much larger expenses ahead, he stressed to labor groups that a loss in the Supreme Court would threaten to cripple union organizing as well as civil rights. If the judgment was sustained, he warned, no union leaflet or fund-raising appeal would be safe from a libel suit, especially in the hostile South. Using this theme of common defense, King had recruited a group of labor specialists headed by New York lawyer Theodore Kheel. Stanley Levison, who hoped that King could begin to join the power of a rejuvenated labor movement to the cause of civil rights, was excited enough to write King’s speech for him and then follow him to Miami to witness the result.

“Negroes are almost entirely a working people,” King said. “There are pitifully few Negro millionaires and few Negro employers.” He likened the sit-ins to the pioneer sit-down strikes of the 1930s. Chiding the labor delegates gently for their persecution of Randolph, he summoned them to “admit these shameful conditions” of segregation within unions and to “root out vigorously every manifestation of discrimination…. I am aware that this is not easy nor popular,” he conceded, “but the eight-hour day was not popular nor easy to achieve” either. Nor were child labor acts or minimum wage laws. “Out of such struggle for democratic rights you own both economic gains and the respect of the country,” said King, “and you will win both again if you make Negro rights a great crusade.”

It was a “white” speech, restrained and formal, but by then he had long since disarmed a skeptical, even hostile audience.

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