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consulted with every U.S. president on the issue of civil rights, and knew that Eisenhower was only doing the bareminimum required by the recent decisions of the Supreme Court. He claimed that once, during an audience with the president, in which he asked for a civil rights favor, Eisenhower replied, “I haven’t got the time to do it. I’m too tired. Now today I had to sign fifteen important matters and only had five minutes to make a decision on the fifteenth. I ought to have had two weeks on each.” To Spingarn, this reply indicated that Eisenhower didn’t really know what he was doing as he performed his duties.
    As for the phenomenon of King, Spingarn took the long view. He realized that the NAACP’s expenses had increased tremendously as a result of aiding the budding activism in the Deep South. And he also worried about the activists King was bringing into the movement, fearful that Communists were slipping through. They had long been a problem at certain NAACP local chapter meetings, making outlandish motions while genuine members were present. Then they’d wait until the genuine members left, make the motions again, and get them passed, after which national headquarters would have to send someone down to straighten everything out.
    But this wasn’t the issue at the moment for eighty-year-old Spingarn. The issue now was how to make it clear to the public and press that there was no friction between the NAACP and King since Wilkins wasn’t going to be on the dais at Friday’s Harlem rally. The solution lay in the fact that the following day King was scheduled to sign books right around the corner from where the rally was held: Blumstein’s Department Store on 125th Street. Spingarn, the dean of the NAACP, decided to be there for a publicphoto opportunity with King. For King to have his picture taken next to Spingarn would be like a young Frederick Douglass taking a photograph next to his elder and mentor, William Lloyd Garrison. Little did Spingarn realize that one of the photos taken of him next to King would, indeed, go down in history. But not for the reasons he had hoped.

FIVE
why isn’t king signing books
at my bookstore?
    IN THE EYES of one of Harlem’s legends, it seemed pretty strange and insulting for King to agree to sign books during his visit in a Harlem department store that didn’t even sell books. On top of that, a department store that wasn’t even Negro-owned. And this in a community that was considered the capital of Negro America. When people around the world thought of Negro accomplishment in literature and entertainment, they thought of Harlem. They thought of the names of those who had illuminated it as the shining beacon of what they viewed as best about the Negro—poet Countee Cullen; poet and author Langston Hughes; the author, composer, and lawyer that the Spingarn’s Amenia Conference bought into the NAACP fold, James Weldon Johnson; singer and actor Paul Robeson; author Arna Bontemps; scholar and librarianArthur Schomburg; the composer and bandleader who was to play at the rally in front of the Hotel Teresa, Duke Ellington; jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker; jazz vocalist Sarah Vaughan.… And those
really in the know
when considering Harlem legends also thought of bookstore owner Lewis Michaeux.
    In the 1920s while Arthur Spingarn was still producing, for doubters among his Caucasian contemporaries, books by Negro authors proving Negro intelligence, Lewis Michaeaux was hunting basements in the homes of Harlem friends in search of the same type of books to display on his pushcart and sell to other Negroes. It seemed that pioneering was in his family’s blood. His younger brother, Elder Solomon “Lightfoot” Micheaux, would become known as the “Happy Am I” preacher who allegedly became wealthy from the enthusiastic response to his Radio Church of God, and a real estate empire that included churches worth millions of dollars. Michaeux also happened to be the cousin of a