When Harlem Nearly Killed King Read Online Free PDF Page B

tremendous pressure to take the movement to its next level. Yet in the midst of the insistent defiance of the school desegregation ruling by Orvall Faubus, and, by comparison, the obedience of the city of Montgomery to a ruling prompted by the bus boycott, he was still treated as the most promising leader. King and his entourage were being counseled by visitors from around the world eager to ally themselves with American Negroes in a struggle that they viewed on an international level; a struggle of non-Caucasian peoples against Western imperialism.
    This continuing popularity for King, and the outdated manner in which the NAACP was now painted, was a tough pill to swallow for NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins. His organization had long preached that activism through the courts—not boycotts, or any other type of civil disobedience—was the only way to topple Jim Crow. Publicly, Wilkins was very careful in dealing with King. Prior to rallying to support King in the embarrassing Abernathy adultery imbroglio, the two had been in frequent contact. Many of the important people eager to visit King in Montgomery first approached the NAACP in New York. And as SCLC got off the ground and the media began reporting stories of competition between the NAACP and SCLC for membership and dues, both strove to refute the stories. They were lying. As soon as the SCLC was formed, Wilkins set to work calling his NAACP field secretaries in the Deep South, to get them to persuade local Negro leadersnot to cooperate with King (which may have been one of the reasons SCLC’s Crusade for Citizenship voter registration drive was such a disappointment). He was especially in touch with his Mississippi Field Secretary Medgar Evers, who busily obeyed his directive. And that King was so young compared to Wilkins (who was fifty-one) didn’t help matters any. Neither did the fact that after so many years of working hard to expunge the NAACP of any hint of association with Communists (even NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Director Thurgood Marshall served as an informant for the FBI), King was introducing people into the movement who made Wilkins nervous (long after the movement was over it would be revealed that King’s most important non Afro-American adviser, Stanley Levison, was indeed a Communist at the time he aided King).
    Nevertheless, it would look quite bad if, while King was in New York City, someone from the NAACP didn’t demonstrate some modicum of public cordiality. Wilkins decided not to join the list of notables who would sit on the dais of the rally to be held in front of the Hotel Teresa in Harlem on Friday, September 19. Besides Harriman and Rockefeller, joining King would be baseball great Jackie Robinson; A. Phillip Randolph; Duke Ellington, whose band would provide music for the rally; Manhattan Borough President Hulan Jack; and Reverend Gardner Taylor, pastor of Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn. Conspicuously absent would be Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. And none of the heavyweights from the NAACP would be there. Other officers in the organization realized it would look very badif someone didn’t make a public gesture of some kind. One such person was Arthur Spingarn, the organization’s eighty-year-old Jewish president.
    Spingarn and his brother, Joel, were so important to the early days of the NAACP and the early fight for racial justice that they deserved to be considered as integral to laying the groundwork as A. Phillip Randolph, W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter White, James Weldon Johnson, Ida B. Wells, and all the other men and women who carried the torch prior to the rise of King. The NAACP’s highest award, the Spingarn Medal—which would become the equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize in the Negro world—would be named for Joel. Both brothers joined not long after the organization was formed in 1910, primarily by a coalition of Caucasians alarmed at the racial atrocities taking place in the early