Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, JR., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

essence of nonviolence was a refusal to retaliate against evil, a refusal based on the realization that “the law of retaliation is the law of the multiplication of evil.

the Negro must come to the point of refusing to cooperate with evil,” but without ever hating the evildoers. “I have no malice toward anyone, not even the white policeman who almost broke my arm, who choked and kicked me. Let there be no malice among you.

Mass action by everyday black people was just as powerful a tool for social change as the lawsuit, and maybe more so. If

The real goal, however, was not to defeat the white man, but “to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor and challenge his false sense of superiority.… The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community” where all men would treat each other as brothers and equals. “There are great resources of goodwill in the southern white man that we must somehow tap,

We must understand,” Rustin wrote, “that our refusal to accept jim crow in specific areas challenges the entire social, political and economic order that has kept us second class citizens.… Those who oppose us, understand this.

King spoke of how the Pilgrimage would be an appeal to the nation, and the Congress, to pass a civil rights bill that would give the Justice Department the power to file law suits against discriminatory registration and voting practices anywhere in the South.

King’s primary responsibility, though, was to issue a call for action, and stress the need to expand the struggle on all fronts. Up to now we have thought of the color question as something which could be solved in and of itself. We know now that while it [is] necessary to say ‘No’ to racial injustice, this must be followed by a positive program of action: the struggle for the right to vote, for economic uplift of the people. A part of this is the realization that men are truly brothers, that the Negro cannot be free so long as there are poor and underprivileged white people.… Equality for Negroes is related to the greater problem of economic uplift for Negroes and poor white men. They share a common problem and have a common interest in working together for economic and social uplift. They can and must work together.

What is new in your fight is the fact that it was initiated, fed, and sustained by students.

King remarked, thinking back to Montgomery four years earlier. “If there is one lesson experience has taught us … it is that when you have found by the help of God a correct course, a morally sound objective, you do not equivocate, you do not retreat—you struggle to win a victory.

Coretta told Daddy King of Kennedy’s phone call as they prepared to see Morris Abram. King, Sr., was ecstatic, and said that this was enough to shift his traditionally Republican presidential preference and vote instead for Kennedy, the man who had called his daughter-in-law.

on November 1 he issued a statement that stopped just short of an endorsement. “I want to make it palpably clear,” King said, “that I am deeply grateful to Senator Kennedy for the genuine concern he expressed.… [He] exhibited moral courage of a high order.” In private, he added that the contrast between Kennedy’s call and Nixon’s inaction was very real to him. Even though Nixon had known him longer, he had done nothing. “I really considered him a moral coward,” King remarked.

Several weeks later, President Eisenhower complained to reporters that Nixon had lost simply because of a “couple of phone calls.

I think I received a new understanding of the meaning of suffering,” he wrote Harold DeWolf, “and I came away more convinced than ever before that unearned suffering is redemptive.” The imprisonment had not been pleasant, but he did feel that his faith had benefited from the experience.20

how valuable mass nonviolent resistance could be. The real goal, however, was not to defeat the white man, but “to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor and challenge his false sense of superiority.… The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community” where all men would treat each other as brothers and equals. “There are great resources of goodwill in the southern white man that we must somehow tap,” King asserted, and we must work to “speed up the coming of the inevitable.

The time had come, King said, to “move from protest to reconciliation.

King told the student leaders not to forget that the struggle was justice versus injustice, not black versus white, and reminded them always to be open to compromise with local whites.

first two days of Montgomery’s integrated bus service were without incident. Then, at 1:30 A.M. on Sunday morning, December 23, a shotgun blast ripped through the front door of King’s home. The floodlights were on, but no watchman was present. King, Coretta, and Yoki were asleep, and no one was injured. King chose not to call the police, but he did announce the incident to his Dexter congregation later that morning. “It may be that some of us may have to die,” he solemnly remarked. That evening, at a mass meeting, he declared that “I would like to tell whoever did it that it won’t do any good to kill me

Tell Montgomery they can keep shooting and I’m going to stand up to them; tell Montgomery they can keep bombing and I’m going to stand up to them. If I had to die tomorrow morning I would die happy because I’ve been to the mountaintop and I’ve seen the promised land and it’s going to be here in Montgomery.