Posthumous Pillory

No black American was so widely honored in his lifetime; yet segregationists denounced Martin Luther King Jr. as a Communist and worse, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover once publicly branded him a liar, and militant blacks eventually came to see him as a "sellout" to the white Establishment. Now a black writer has added yet another--and unlikely--epithet to those fastened on the assassinated leader. In a new book, The King God Didn't Save (Coward-McCann, Inc.; $5.95), Novelist John Williams (Night Song, The Man Who Cried I Am) calls King a failure.

Full of frustration and seething black anger, Williams' book is both a compassionate catalogue of King's strengths and achievements and an agonizing reappraisal of his weaknesses. Dedicated to the memory of the man Martin Luther King "could have become had he lived," the book argues that King was the complicitous victim of a "white power" plot to manipulate, castrate and ultimately destroy him.

Fatal Inability. Though Williams' work is disorganized and repetitive, its message is clear. Williams believes that white power corrupted and then co-opted King by making him believe that he had power when, in fact, he had none, by granting him minor concessions so that he could not demand major ones. "The white press," Williams says, "so thoroughly indoctrinated King and his people with the idea that the capitulation of the bus company [following the Montgomery, Ala., boycott] was a victory for the blacks that they believed it; believed, too, that other things would inevitably fall like tin soldiers, all in a neat line."

King, says Williams, suffered from a fatal inability to perceive what was happening to him, and believing in himself, continued to lash out at the white power structure. "He did not understand that it had armed him with feather dusters," Williams writes. "He was a black man and therefore always was and always would be naked of power, for he was slow, indeed unable, to perceive the manipulation of white power, and in the end white power killed him."

But not, Williams believes, without some help from King himself, for King suffered from the tragic flaw of hubris. An ambitious, middle-class Christian, he sought success and basked in the public recognition that his efforts brought him, says the author, who interviewed many of King's friends and associates in preparing his book. King gloated over a magazine poll that showed him to be the nation's most respected black leader, savored his meetings with presidents and kings, accepted the Nobel Prize as if it were an inalienable right rather than a cherished award.

But he could not, states Williams, relate to the black underclass or understand its impatience with a system that refused to recognize its legitimate demands. Because of this lack of understanding, the angry Williams charges, King did what no black leader can afford to do if he is really to influence white society: he compromised. Says Williams: "Compromises that seem to favor black people have always turned out to be defeats for them. 'Political expediency' is nonexistent for Negroes. The demands made must be stood by."

The Doctors. Only toward the end of his career, Williams feels, did King fully understand the realities of power ir America and begin to take the steps that would have made him a truly effective leader by seeking to unite the nation's poor across class and color lines against the Viet Nam War. This idea Williams argues, so threatened the hegemony of the white power structure group that it decided that King must be destroyed.

King unwittingly provided the noose. Suspecting that some of his associates had Communist connections, the FBI began tapping King's telephone and bugging his hotel rooms in 1963. From a security viewpoint, the wiretaps uncovered nothing. They established no links between King and the Communists. But, Williams reports, they did turn up an astonishing amount of information about King's extensive and vigorous sexual activities. (According to one of Williams' sources, identified only as Person B, "Martin and the rest of them had a code. A very attractive woman was called 'Doctor.' I forget the other names for women not so attractive." Williams' informant was a "Doctor.")

Private Detail. Most newspapers ignored the rumors and leaks to them of King's extramarital activities, but their existence undermined King's effectiveness just the same. The effect, says Williams, was one of slow political assassination; King was spared it only by the bullet of James Earl Ray.

Williams has the correct outline of the FBI tape story. What he does not have is precisely what happened at the celebrated meeting between FBI Director Hoover and King in 1964. Hoover, TIME learned, explained to King just what damaging private detail he had on the tapes and lectured him that his morals should be those befitting a Nobel prizewinner. He also suggested that King should tone down his criticism of the FBI. King took the advice. His decline in black esteem followed, a decline scathingly narrated by Williams.

Williams' anger over the slow progress of the fight for equality is more understandable than some of his charges. His depiction of "white power" as "a marsh underfoot for anyone not white . . . treacherous and deadly" is, of course, wildly exaggerated. Far more serious, King himself was less a victim than he was a victor. His leadership brought conscience and cohesion to the cause of black equality, while his faith in the tenets upon which the country was founded forced Americans to recognize the equity of his demands and Congress to take action to meet them.

King's compromises were not capitulations, but sane and sound recognition of the way progress historically has been wrung from the American system. He may have failed to reach his ultimate goal. But by serving as the catalyst in the formation of a truly national civil rights movement, he laid the groundwork for its possible success in the future.

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