The King God Didn't Save (i)

from journalist John A. Williams at Coward-McCann, Inc.

John A. Williams did not expect a preacher to lead a revolution. No one did. Those who rose after emancipation in 1863 had worked in business and politics.

Their church attracted the go-getters among them only after the Federals agreed in 1877 to withdraw from the defeated states. The rebels began one-party rule at home and white rule over the nation.

Church became resistance in the sense of living to fight another day, and to wear funny hats among your own kind. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Senior was one of those men destined for business and politics who instead built up a congregation into a paying concern, at Atlanta.

The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior, fils à papa, earned a doctorate and went on rather to a salaried position at Birmingham where revolutionaries called upon him to step out front, a figurehead, a stuffed shirt. What do you know, the people rose and walked with him. Praise god.

John A. Williams covered the walking people and their movement as a reporter, following Martin in that sense. He became convinced despite himself that the preacher was growing toward speaking for all the poor of the United States and then for that majority of our race in every nation, like Malcolm X.

Martin did speak for them before all the world at Riverside on April 4, 1967. Someone shot him down that very date one year later, at Memphis where he had rallied to the street cleaners. In no other country in the world has any observer required a conspiracy theory to perceive the message sent.

John A. Williams is a conspiracy theorist. In 1967, between Riverside and Memphis, his novel The Man Who Cried I Am reported a Central Intelligence Agency plan to kill all the black people. It is some of the silly bullshit that people lend credit and pass as currency throughout the poor world for good reason.

No silly bullshit in this book from the reporter John A. Williams. We read his skeptical regard for a contemporary as that man grew into a living saint. John looks ahead to a path cut short when Martin joined the many martyrs for Christ in Viet Nam.