Read When Harlem Nearly Killed King for Free Online

twentieth century. (Though this coalition included Du Bois, he came along shortly after the first meetings were held and, of course, played a defining role upon joining.) Among the founders was Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of the famed pre–Civil War abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (who was instrumental in launching the career of Frederick Douglass). Villard was publisher of
The Nation
magazine and the
New York Evening Post
. In the early days of the NAACP, he provided free rent to the organization in the same Fifth Avenue building that housed
The Nation
. While suffering through the boredom of working for a private law firm on, of all issues (in light of the source of wealth for Averell Harriman’s family), the reorganization of railroads, Arthur was approached by Villard to take a civil rights case. Upondoing so, he caught the civil rights bug and ended up chairing the NAACP’s legal committee (precursor to its Legal Defense and Educational Fund) shortly after its formation, serving in that capacity for twenty-seven years, winning eleven cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Then in 1940, Arthur became president of the organization.
    At the beginning of their involvement, the Spingarns often encountered people who were amazed at their commitment. During debates on the subject of Negro intelligence, Caucasian acquaintances would say to the younger Spingarn, “You say the Negro has the same capabilities as the white. What books has he written?” In response to this, Arthur started collecting books by Negro authors. (By 1966 his collection of 3,000 would be donated to UCLA.) Through most of the first half of the 20th century, the Greenwich Village home he shared with his wife (they’d have no children) was a stopover for notable New York intellectuals, writers, and artists such as Eugene O’Neill and John Sloan. After the death of Booker T. Washington in 1915, Arthur and his brother (with heavy influence from Du Bois) organized a famous civil rights conclave for notable Negro activists and intellectuals on the grounds of Joel’s Amenia, New York, residence. To be known as the Amenia Conference, virtually everyone of consequence on the race issue in those days was present, representing the full spectrum of opinions on the subject. Designed to bring the Bookerite faction of the movement together with those who believed in agitating for immediate rights, in the end the conference didn’t bring many of theBookerites into the fold. Except for one key man. Not long after it ended, poet, composer, lawyer, author, and diplomat James Weldon Johnson would join the NAACP, assuming the newly created office of national field secretary, which eventually became the office of executive secretary, a position held next by an insurance salesman from Atlanta named Walter White; then after White, a journalist from Kansas City by the name of Roy Wilkins. The same man who now nervously contemplated the phenomenon of Martin Luther King, Jr.
    Under the constitution of the NAACP, the president had very little power. Most authority resided with the executive secretary. Ever since the days of Johnson it had been up to the executive secretary to serve as the principal face of the organization, dealing with the myriad matters his role required him to address: fund-raising, speaking engagements, traveling to the latest racial hotspots, keeping local chapters in line with national policy, and now, with the rise of King and his followers and allies, serving as informal envoy between such “hotheads” and high government officials who might listen to the head of the NAACP before they would leaders of other Negro organizations.
    As far as King’s recent arrest was concerned, both Wilkins and Spingarn no doubt knew that a telegram to President Eisenhower hoping he would express outrage was merely a cosmetic gesture, intended more to cover their own tracks when someone asked what they had done than anything else. For three decades, Spingarn had