The God King Didn't Save-

( This is the conclusion of the review of The King God Didn't Save which began in yesterday's CRIMSON.)

INDICATIVE of the policy adopted by the press toward Martin Luther King is the fact that King's antiwar speech given at the Riverside Church in New York exactly one year before his murder, was virtually ignored by the media. In this speech, King said that "the cruel irony" of Vietnam was that "black young men who had been crippled by our society" were then sent "8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlom." Abandoned by his fair-weather friends and sunshine press agents, King did discover a way to get his message across and help lead black people, who had at best been tepid about the antiwar movement, into the protest. He reestablished his credibility with black people by going back on the streets of Chicago, and later, the backroads of Mississippi during the Meredith March, and retaking his position on the point.

Last summer, while I was in Chicago, I talked with a black housepainter who had been in the march through Cicero in which King was hit by a brick. He told me about the firecrackers that sounded so much like gunshots and the rocks and the eggs and the fear. Then he said, "You know man, with all that shit flying around, I wondered what the devil I was doing out there. Then I looked at Martin, marching like he had everything under control, and I kept walking. There was no way you couldn't believe the man."

A black man with this power, who with every speech and campaign threatened to extend it over more different types of people dissatisfied with the condition of America, such a man could not be tolerated by the money, power and hate which control America. So they cut him down "in a conspiracy that may never be proved.

. . . A conspiracy of this kind could involve almost anyone, but surely Martin King, for all his weaknesses, was killed because behind those weaknesses lay profound strengths. . . He lived in his time and by design and accident made himself a force beyond it."

The central political question raised by The King God Didn't Save is now that King is dead who will control the force that his life, particularly the last years of it, generated? Will the truth of this man's life, his growth and struggle, even be available to the public? For unless this truth is available, other Martin Kings will be sacrificed-this time senselessly, out of our ignorance of the mechanism that both created and killed King.

LAST AUGUST, before the book had even been released, Time magazine published an article. "Posthumous Pillory," a preview of The King God Didn't Save, in an "Opinion" section of its August 17th issue. The lead paragraph of the piece concluded, "Now a black writer has added yet another-and unlikely-epithet to those (commie, liar, ad sellout) already fastened to the assassinated leader. . . Williams calls King a failure."

In a tone suggesting fierce disagreement with this conclusion, Time presented its view of Williams' analysis of the career of its 1963 "Man of the Year," highlighting the "information about King's extensive and vigorous sexual activities" revealed in Williams' book and his "agonizing appraisal of his [King's] weaknesses."

Time acknowledged that "Williams has the correct outline of the FBI tape story. What he does not have is precisely what happened at the celebrated meeting . . . Hoover, Time learned . . . 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." Besides the obvious attempt to undermine Williams' credibility, Time makes no mention of King's role in the aceldama at Pettus Bridge, or of any other event that might have motivated him to strike out in new directions.

After commenting that "Williams' anger over the slow progress of the fight for equality is more understandable than some of his charges. His depiction of 'white power' a 'a marsh underfoot for anyone not white . . . treacherous and deadly' is, of course, wildly exaggerated," Time concluded its article with a forceful defense of King. "King's compromises were not capitulation, but sane and sound recognition of the way progress historically has been wrung from the American system."

Swing slow, sweet Cadillac.

THE PURPOSE of "Posthumous Pillory" was the premature internment of The King God Didn't Save. to bury the book, like its subject, before its time.

To a large degree, this purpose has been accomplished, for Time has been aided by people who should know better. The black press has often out-Timed Time in lapidating the book and in denouncing its author as a traitor to the cause and as a CIA dupe/agent. Williams has been portrayed as a money-motivated ghoul robbing the defenseless grave of King. Certain members of the black intelligentsia have even threatened to dig their cherished amulet, legal action, out of mothballs and employ it as a crucifix against this new vampire.

The result has been that after the initial controversy that Time inaugurated, the book and its accurate and compassionate analysis of a figure of enduring importance to black people and all Americans has drifted swiftly towards oblivion.

A writer of Williams' understanding of the nature of power in America would have foreseen the reaction that has been given this book as strongly probable if not inevitable. Still, he has made the effort to deliver King from that place in the public mind, landscaped in huge mockups of magazine covers and television screens, in which King was imprisoned; because King himself attempted to make an exit from this cerebral desert, but was cut down for his courage and vision.

It would be revolutionary if we did not allow The King God Didn't Save and its author to be cut down too.