The siege of Washington by hordes of poor people would intensify the heat in a political climate already at the boiling point because of the Vietnam War. Multitudes of demonstrators against the war were taking to the streets of Washington and other cities around the country chanting, “Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?” Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota was drawing widespread support in his bid to unseat President Johnson by running for the Democratic presidential nomination on an antiwar platform. In the New Hampshire primary McCarthy won more than two-fifths of the vote against an incumbent president in his own party. Johnson was under intense pressure to withdraw US troops from Vietnam or resign. Johnson buckled, announcing on March 31 he would not seek reelection as president in 1968.
Earlier on that day, an overflow crowd had gathered in the neo-Gothic splendor of the National Cathedral to hear King speak. He must have sensed that many of his listeners in that Episcopal sanctum lived apart from America’s poor and knew little of them. He beseeched them to consider the plight of America’s forty million “poverty stricken” people, who, he said, were “invisible” in a country that is “so rich” that many “don’t see the poor.”1 Within a few miles of Congress and the White House, his booming voice ringing with indignation, he demanded urgent federal action against poverty.
Turning to Vietnam, he decried it as one of the most “unjust wars” ever.2 Eloquent, emotional, and powerful, the sermon evoked King’s passion for the antipoverty and antiwar causes that he had made his own by the spring of 1964.
On the road when he was in Washington and elsewhere he carried a well-stuffed briefcase, which served him as a kind of traveling file cabinet containing materials to inform him on war, poverty, and other issues. It was a rectangular briefcase, emblazoned with the initials MLK in gold above the latch. It included a few personal effects: a tin of aspirin, a bottle of Alka Seltzer, and a can of shaving powder. It was crammed with papers and two books written by him.
Among the papers were at least two items that indicated the breadth of his curiosity. One was a speech by ecologist Hugo Boyko evaluating the potential for Israeli-Arab cooperation in food production. Another was a newspaper article about Florida governor Claude Kirk Jr.’s private police force. The oldest papers dated back to 1966. The Vietnam War figures in several newspaper articles from that year.3
A six-page statement that King released to the public in October 1966 set forth his view of Black Power, the slogan adopted by young militants such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown to dramatize their call for aggressive methods to advance civil rights. The statement reflected the fine line that King was walking on the subject. It disavowed the slogan Black Power for its “connotations of violence and separatism.” But it sympathized with the “unendurable frustrations” of people of his race who were “taunted by empty promises, humiliated and deprived by the filth and decay” of America’s slums.4
Buried in his traveling case was a two-year-old article from the Wall Street Journal about a federal study warning of potential “Watts-type violence” in twenty-one cities. (The 1965 riot in the Watts section of Los Angeles had left 34 dead, 947 injured, and $45 million in property damage.5 More civil unrest had flared up in dozens of cities over the next two years. Some of the worst rioting was in the slums of Newark and Detroit. Whole neighborhoods were devastated by widespread looting and violence that left scores dead and many hundreds injured during the summer of 1967.)
Also tucked into the briefcase was a book of King’s sermons, Strength to Love, and his fifth and last book, Where Do We Go from Here. The last book ponders the state of the movement (“Negroes have established a foothold, no more”) and appeals for a great federal commitment to end poverty.6 King devoted a fifty-eight-page chapter of the book, the longest, to the subject of Black Power. In the second-longest chapter, he examined the related development of “white backlash,” the reaction of white people so alarmed by the urban violence that they were demanding harsh law-and-order measures. King was unsympathetic. He wrote that the backlash sprang either from whites’ racism or a lack of empathy for the “ache and anguish” of daily life in the ghetto.7
Tellingly, King had in his traveling file pages 179 and 180 of Where Do We Go from Here, printed out on separate sheets of paper. On those pages he discusses two parallel “revolutions.” One is in technology, the other in the civil rights and anticolonial movements sweeping the globe. Both revolutions King sees as progressing with inevitability. In reflecting about that point later on, he must have mused about how to make the issue of poverty relevant to all people. In the margin of page 180, he had scribbled in blue ink, “The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich. The betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother. Whatever affects one affects all.”
That he was carrying a copy of Where Do We Go from Here with him, along with his markup of pages from the book, seems to underscore how intensely he had turned to poverty as a transcendent issue. His pivot from the decade-long pursuit of racial progress to the larger issues of poverty and war marked his most dramatic turning point as a national leader.
Some papers in the briefcase harked back to important public pronouncements of the mid-sixties. On April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York he had delivered a speech on Vietnam that had attracted wide public attention. He meant the speech
