"I just can't see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, you know, that man's terrible," the former first lady revealed in a series of interviews with historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the months following the 1963 assassination of husband John F. Kennedy.
According to tapes of the interviews--which ABC plans to reveal Sept. 13 during a two-hour special--Kennedy's displeasure with the civil rights leader stemmed from information Hoover gleaned from secret wiretaps and revealed to the Kennedy family.
Hoover reportedly told the president that King attempted to arrange a hotel orgy while in town for his now-famous March on Washington and Hoover told Robert F. Kennedy that King insulted JFK's funeral.
"He made fun of Cardinal [Richard] Cushing [who issued Kennedy's eulogy] and said that he was drunk at it. And things about they almost dropped the coffin and--well, I mean Martin Luther King is really a tricky person," Jacqueline Kennedy reportedly said.
Caroline Kennedy told ABC's Diane Sawyer that her mother's comments are evidence of Hoover's "poisonous" activities and that her mother admired the civil rights leader "tremendously."
Historian Michael Beschloss posited to ABC that Hoover was trying to manipulate the Kennedys to turn against King.
"He said, 'Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?'" Kennedy quoted her husband saying.
Kennedy said that in the months before the assassination, JFK spoke to his brother about how to prevent Johnson from running to succeed him in the 1968 election.
By Adelle M. Banks Religion News Service Posted: 1/11/12 10:13 PM ET
(RNS) At 87, the Rev. C.T. Vivian can still recall the moment, decades after the height of the civil rights movement.
As he stood to conclude a meeting in his Atlanta home, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. joined his activist colleagues in song, his eyes closed, rocking back and forth on his heels.
"There is a balm in Gilead," they sang, "to make the wounded whole."
As the nation pauses Monday (Jan. 16) to mark King's birthday, those who knew him say hymns, spirituals and other religious songs helped carry him through troubled times.
The spiritual fit King's unique circumstances, said Vivian, who recently was named vice president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights organization co-founded by King.
"The average Christian doesn't have to pick up his phone when it rings and think about somebody killing him or his children," said Vivian. "The average Christian didn't have any of that."
Although King had other favorites, his widow, Coretta Scott King, wrote in her autobiography that it was "Balm in Gilead" that "my husband quoted when he needed a lift."
The first stanza she cited in "My Life With Martin Luther King Jr." reads:
Sometimes I feel discouraged And think my work's in vain But then the Holy Spirit Revives my soul again.
King also was comforted by "Precious Lord, Take My Hand," a hymn sung by Mahalia Jackson at his 1968 funeral and by Aretha Franklin at the dedication of the new King memorial in Washington last year. "Through the storm, through the night," it goes, "lead me on to the light."
Accounts of King's life say it was the last song he requested, moments before he was shot on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tenn.
Lewis Baldwin, a religious studies professor at Vanderbilt University who has written on King's cultural roots and prayer life, said the song addressed some of the helplessness the Baptist minister must have felt as he constantly faced threats and attacks.
"I think that song spoke of that," said Baldwin. "Give me courage, give me perseverance."
Beyond music that encouraged him, Baldwin said King particularly appreciated songs such as "If I Can Help Somebody" that moved people toward the goal of creating King's "beloved community."
"He cherished the great hymns of the church, particularly those that spoke to the ethic of service," he said, "and to be involved in changing the quality of life of human beings."
Music such as the movement's iconic theme song, "We Shall Overcome," and others that King favored incorporate timeless values, Lewis said. "Those are not songs that have meaning confined to the 1950s and '60s," he said.
King particularly enjoyed Jackson's rendition of "Amazing Grace," Vivian said. After she sang the spiritual "How I Got Over" at the 1963 March on Washington, Baldwin said, King later wrote her to say she set the tone for his "I Have a Dream" speech.
His love for a range of music was reflected in his sermons, where he sometimes recited lines or whole stanzas of sacred songs. In a 1957 sermon, he said the Easter message was reflected in such hymns as "All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name" and "In Christ There is No East or West" as well as words from the "Hallelujah Chorus" of Handel's "Messiah."
In that way, lyrics became more important than the musical notes that accompanied them, helping King deliver his message, said James Abbington, who teaches church music and worship at Emory University's Candler School of Theology.
"King was a trained theologian," he said. "Music becomes the platter or the handmaiden for theology."
But in a life steeped in hymns, spirituals and other music of black culture, the question remains: Could King sing?
Friends and scholars say he often would sing with a group but seldom as a soloist. In her autobiography, his widow recalled that he once ended up singing "His Eye is on the Sparrow" as an unintentional solo and had to overcome "real stage fright" as he sang the whole song by himself.
"I never really told him he couldn't sing," wrote his widow, a trained classical vocalist, in her 1969 book. "He had a good voice for a choir."
The Rev. Joseph Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King, laughed off the question.
"I refuse to comment on the grounds it might make me sound nasty," he said. "His gift was speaking more than singing, but he loved music."
Below, a collection of MLK's favorite songs and hymns [embedded; 10 total, including the following]:
The Romneys, Whiteness, and "Race Suicide" on MLK's Holiday
Chauncey DeVega JANUARY 16, 2012 4:30PM
The road to the world imagined by Dr. King remains long.
Some four decades after his murder, and the inauguration of the Southern Strategy, the sweet appeals of racial code words, and the succor offered by white racial resentment remain undeniable to the Republican Party. When Santorum, Gingrich, and Romney talk about lazy, parasitic African Americans who should pick up mops to learn about hard work, and where "the blacks'" exalted leader wants to turn America into a "Socialist-Communist-Fascist European welfare state," the signals to white racism are beyond dog whistles. They are blaring air raid sirens.
Dog whistles can also be subtle; they can be visual cues which speak to the faithful.
For example, some Americans see Mitt Romney's much publicized family photo as one of homogeneous whiteness and WASP glory. Whether in rust belt towns, gated communities, poor white rural America, or the nondescript suburbs, this is the America of "Nixonland [ http://www.amazon.com/Nixonland-Rise-President-Fracturing-America/dp/0743243021 ]" that so many yearn for. This is real America; the best of us; a country that they/we should die to protect.
Of course, this is a memory steeped in false nostalgia. It is whiteopian dreaming. Nevertheless, such illusions are both compelling and compulsive to many Americans of a certain age, hue, ideology, and experience.
Other folks see the family photo of Barack Obama and his kin as the future. Americans are a cosmopolitan people. While there exists a deep and historic nativist impulse, as well as a fear of the Other, the country's greatness has been its ability to include all folks that want to belong--what is an all embracing sense of pluralism and "we the people" that is flexible, accommodating, and inclusive.
Citizens use heuristics, memes, cues, and slogans to make sense of politics, and to work through their own political decision-making. As such, for many, the photo of Mitt Romney's family is that of "real America," and to deviate from this approved model is hazardous to the Common Good, a decision that is perverse, and one that is "unAmerican."
Folks like Pat Buchanan are honest enough to voice such sentiments, feelings which are the rotten, beating heart of the Tea Party GOP. Others who share Buchanan's anxieties and loyalties are not as courageous; they play around with his themes while not owning their substance.
Ironically, their need to couch such wickedness in race neutral talk is "progress." However, the concerns of reactionary white populists are centuries-old, near and dear to Whiteness and a country originated as a White Republic. For them the question remains unresolved (even in the year 2012): how much racial equality is "enough?"
The challenge here is that to be wholly inclusive, and to really create a radically democratic society, is to risk the privileges of Whiteness. It is to create a world in keeping with Brother King's vision where white people are forced to compete on an equal playing ground with people of color. Some of us are more than ready for that world.
Others, those White Dreamers, who foreground whiteness as "real" and "idolized" America, are scared to death of a multiracial, multicultural, pluralistic 21st century. Whiteness is such a valuable currency, one whose rewards have been outsized for so long, that to consider further reductions in its returns is terrifying to many White Americans.
On Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's birthday, conservatives will mouth breath about his legacy as they spin an empty story of racial equality, racist Southern Democrats, and white victimhood in the Age of Obama. These contortions are to be expected. The joke is--and has long been--that the real Dr. King, the radical visionary and not the deracialized, apolitical panderer for gross consumerism and empty politics, would be hated by conservatives, Red State America, and many others fearful of his progressive vision, if he lived in the present.
This fact is a signal to Dr. King's greatness.
All Americans should be reflective on this day. Sadly, many conservatives, and others who hold a deep disdain for people of color, the poor, unions, the working class, immigrants, and the disadvantaged, will try to find a way to steal Dr. King's vision. The time is long past for such antics to be made obsolete. In the year 2012, those on the Right who bastardize and rape Dr. King's legacy, should finally stop such foolishness.
Brother Martin does not belong to you. Sorry. He belongs to us. It is about time that his legacy and vision were taken back--without apology--by those who would stand shoulder to shoulder with him in the present, and that are the offspring of his struggle and martyrdom.
And Tea Party U.S.A. is not part of that vision. They never were and could not possibly be today.
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