When Harlem Nearly Killed King Read Online Free PDF

spectators gasped in horror, which only encouraged the officers to tighten their grip. The photograph of a young King in a tan suit and Fedora being manhandled as he stands at the front desk of the police station house, with his right arm twisted around his back while his wife looks on in horror, would become one of the most famous of the entire civil rights movement.
    King would be charged with loitering and allowed to post bond. The following day he was tried, convicted, and ordered to pay a fourteen-dollar fine. He refused saying he elected to serve time. But in order to avert further publicity and martyrdom for King, the city’s police commissioner paid his fine instead. Such publicity and martyrdom had come in spades. Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP (who privately had mixed feelings about King’s rise along with so many other prominent Negroes of the era), shot off a telegram to President Eisenhower, admonishing him to make a statement expressing outrage at King’s treatment. Through an aide, Eisenhower refused, reiterating in a carefully worded letter that the entire affair was a state concern (evincing no more sympathy for King than his words to Wilkins: “Your interest and concern in this matter are fully understood”).
    Harriman, by contrast, wouldn’t be so shy. He publicly stated, “The recent arrest and abuse of the Reverend Martin Luther Kingwas an outrage that dealt our national prestige a damaging blow before the peoples of the world.”
    His statement was what one could expect from a patrician governor of a relatively liberal state running scared that he might lose the election, eager to mine Negro votes that could prove to be his margin of victory. The rough manhandling of King took the heat off of Abernathy, shifting attention away from the issue of his adulterous liaison, even causing speculation that the incident may have been engineered by enemies of civil rights. As such, the contretemps was chalked up as one more example of the injustices Negroes had to suffer, and the original confrontation that had precipitated it as the embodiment of how low the authorities will stoop in order to hound a civil rights leader. Shrewdly, in line with this interpretation, Abernathy continued to plead his innocence of the affair with the parishioner. And after his Negro lawyer withdrew from the case, the jealous husband was forced to hire the same Caucasian lawyer who had defended the city of Montgomery’s segregation policies during the bus boycott, which only added fuel to such an interpretation.
    The movement withstood its first major embarrassment. King returned to his hectic schedule, including making preparations for traveling to New York City to promote his book. Little did he know that the shameful scenario of Abernathy and the jilted husband was a mere dress rehearsal for the far more dangerous embarrassment he and the movement would endure in New York City.

FOUR
taking the kid-glove approach
    EXCITEMENT OVER the success of King and the MIA in desegregating Montgomery’s buses had caused plenty of people to forget that not long before, the acronym NAACP stood for the same degree of daring. Just a year prior to the launch of the boycott, everyone had been overjoyed at what the NAACP’s legal defense and educational fund had accomplished in winning
Brown v. The Board of Education
. Despite putting in forty-eight years as the “radical” alternative to the “go slow” gradualist approach pioneered by Booker T. Washington after the advent of Jim Crow in the late 1800s; despite laying the legal foundation for challenging Jim Crow (and offering legal assistance that led to the successful legal challenge of bus segregation); despite the fact that before the Montgomery miracle, in plenty of places in the Deep South aperson caught paying dues to the NAACP risked the loss of his livelihood if not his life; at this point the organization looked conservative. For nearly two years now King had been under