24

FRIDAY, MARCH 22, ARRIVED, BRINGING A PARALYZING snowfall. Lawson canceled the march. Heavy snow remained piled on the streets over the weekend, while the FBI scrambled to learn what would happen next.

On Monday night, March 25, a COME meeting set out plans for Dr. King’s return. On March 27 Rev. Ralph Abernathy would come to Mason Temple and reinforce King’s call for a citywide strike of African-American workers and a walkout of black students from city schools the next day. On the morning of March 28, at ten o’clock, King would lead a mass march from Clayborn Temple to City Hall.

Ernest Withers noted the information. Late that night, after the meeting, he told Agent Lawrence of the mass march schedule. The next morning he and Lawrence conferred again. Afterward Lawrence transmitted the schedule for King’s upcoming demonstration to Hoover’s office via “urgent” teletype and a letterhead memo.1

The march schedule Withers provided was a significant piece of information that the bureau previously had wrong. The papers and police sources reflected misinformation and confusion about the time, date, and route of the march.

King, for his part, was now calling the sanitation strike march a dress rehearsal for his forthcoming Poor People’s Campaign in Washington. On the streets of Memphis, he would preview the unity and nonviolent discipline he’d show the world in late April from the nation’s capital.

At FBI headquarters in Washington, King’s plan to bring thousands of poor people from around the United States to the capital vexed his nemesis Hoover. Ten years later, George C. Moore, head of the FBI’s racial intelligence division, would describe the Washington’s power structure’s concerns about the campaign.

[The] Bureau’s attitude toward that proposed march on Washington or poor people’s campaign, Washington spring project, or whatever it might have been called at the time, was that there would be thousands of people coming into Washington and that the situation in the country was becoming quite volatile as far as disturbances and riots were concerned, and the fact that there could be such a mammoth, large march would be a matter of concern from a violence standpoint, and I believe—and it is also my recollection—at the time it was not only the Bureau’s feeling but it was also a feeling of other people, including the Department of Justice as well as—in the back of my mind, I think—the President of the United States was concerned about this sort of thing.2

On March 12 the bureau issued a monograph, “Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Current Analysis,”³ warning that participants in the forthcoming Poor People’s Campaign would “conduct sit-ins, camp-ins, and sleep-ins at every Government facility available including the lawn of the White House.” King’s strategy, according to this document, was not only “massive civil disobedience” but “dramatic confrontation.” It quoted King himself as saying, “To dislocate the function of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot, because it can be longer lasting, costly to society, but not wantonly destructive.”

COINTELPRO had recently formulated the FBI objective of preventing “the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant black-nationalist movement,” and it identified King as “a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed obedience to white, liberal doctrines (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism.” Now “A Current Analysis” suggested that King and Black Power would unite. “King has met with black nationalists and attempted to gain their support,” and had gained the support of Stokely Carmichael. The “danger,” the monograph warned, was that “black nationalist groups . . . plan to attempt to seize the initiative and escalate the nonviolent demonstrations into violence.” King planned to use this potential for violence to press Congress into taking action “favorable to the Negro.”

On March 14, the bureau sent copies of “A Current Analysis” to the president and the attorney general, and within a few days it circulated throughout federal government offices.4

The FBI sought to pressure King to abandon the Poor People’s Campaign and to keep himself and his three thousand demonstrators away from Washington. The task of counteracting King fell to Moore, head of racial intelligence, who devised the bureau’s strategy.

On March 11, at a “racial conference” in Washington, he had introduced a rumor campaign to dissuade potential participants from traveling to Washington. “We could use our informants,” Moore wrote, “without their knowledge, to spread the story about lack of funds and organization.” Other rumors could spread fear of impending violence, or alternatively mislead supporters into believing that if they came to Washington to participate, their names would be taken down and reported to the government, resulting in their welfare funds being discontinued. Finally, “we would point out also that the Project is strictly for Martin Luther King’s benefit which is actually the case.”

The bureau encouraged participating agents to “tie in any rumor of this nature to your local problem. Also think of other counterintelligence methods and secure telephonic approval from the Bureau prior to utilization.”5

On March 26, with King’s campaign less than a month from reaching Washington, Moore proposed planting a misleading editorial in FBI-friendly newspapers, “designed to curtail success of Martin Luther King’s fund raising for the Washington Spring Project.”

In Memphis, during a lull in strike activity around the March 22 snowstorm, Agent Lawrence caught up on his paperwork, probably in response to Director Hoover’s new COINTELPRO directive.

He prepared a lengthy report on Charles Cabbage, summarizing the young Black Power leader’s previous nine months, his rise from nonentity to the FBI Rabble Rouser Index. He catalogued Cab’s comments—“Memphis should burn,” “This city needs a good race riot,” “The black man must overthrow capitalism by any means necessary”—and recalled his draft dodging, his founding of the Invaders, and his distribution of a Molotov cocktail recipe.

Lawrence also typed formal reports on his meetings with Withers from early March, describing the atmosphere of violence that had developed through the Invaders’ growing physical presence and increasingly brash bombast.

The agent would explain, years later, how he and his top informant on this mission worked together to maintain the flow of information amid secrecy. “I would call him if I had occasion to alert him to something,” Lawrence said. “Otherwise I would hope that he would call me, which he frequently did. Then periodically we would meet in person under what we hoped were safe conditions, to personally exchange information, go over descriptions, any photographs, things of that nature.” At his busiest, Withers earned two hundred dollars per week in cash, about $1,500 in current value. This level of income probably made the bureau his top client at the time.

As Memphis thawed and King’s return visit approached, Lawrence felt exhausted, having worked around the clock on the sanitation strike and the Invaders for a month and a half.

He wasn’t the only man in the city with raw nerves. The anticipation for King’s march brought a sense of high-wire suspense. Violence and vandalism peppered the city, especially wherever a sign said Loeb’s. The mayor’s stubbornness toward the strike only made things harder on his brother’s businesses. Every night angry young people hit the laundries and barbecue stands with rocks and Molotov cocktails, shattering windows.

Withers connected the steady increase in tension to Charles Cabbage. “Cabbage said he has a master plan,” Lawrence wrote of Withers’s observations,

namely to quietly but effectively organize a Black Power militancy in Memphis, a sort of para-military party. . . . He hopes that its existence will scare and unnerve the Negro as well as the white community . . . to the point where the political power structure of Memphis will fear possible riots and disruptive tactics on the part of the Black Power movement. Then, Cabbage will step in and convince the power structure that only he, Cabbage, can “keep the lid on” and prevent trouble by controlling the militant Negro groups. He feels that in this manner, he can become funded . . . to organize and direct the young Negro militants into non-violent channels.6

Withers called Cab’s gambit “verbal blackmail,” noting that the leader had set his sights on gaining an annual salary of $12,000 for performing the service of controlling local militants. The streetwise informant felt Cab had based his plan on the principles of a long con—selling a mark on a story to extort him. He was working in the spirit of the Beale underworld rather than racial uplift.

Both Withers and Lieutenant Eli Arkin of the MPD estimated that ten to twenty thousand people would participate in King’s march, based on the huge turnout for King at Mason Temple and the leader’s call for a total strike and school boycott by the city’s African-American citizens. At Mason Temple, King had seen only the dignified workers sitting in the front row for his talk and the thousands of adult supporters who had cheered him. He might not have been aware of the volatility in the street, or the possibility that calling for student participation virtually promised to concentrate the city’s violence and anger near downtown.

As militants raced through the city, Withers noticed an offshoot group, younger than the Invaders, led by eighteen-year-old Willie James Jenkins and twenty-year-old John Henry Ferguson, with maybe a dozen followers. Lawrence wrote that “in [Withers’s] considered opinion from this group will come those who will engage in sporadic acts of vandalism.”

Cab’s plan seemed to be working.

On March 27, the day before King’s appearance, COME sent a letter to business owners who’d supported the strike, touching on the historical drama and tension of the moment.

You already know that Dr. King will return to lead the march on Thursday, March 28, 10:00 A.M. . . . We want you to march with us that day. . . .

While we understand the fear in which some of you approach Thursday, we also know that to be a man or woman means to push through our fears in order to serve our brothers.

The letter closed, “May the grace of God with love and justice be with us during these momentous days.”

COME’s list of instructions for the march began with “Be peaceful and non-violent,” and urged demonstrators to maintain two car lengths between themselves and the marcher in front of them, and to keep the sidewalk clear. The instructions provided telephone numbers one could call if arrested.

A separate Community on the Move handout flooded the housing projects and schools, speaking to the students Dr. King called on to walk out and join him—

Be cool, fool,

Thursday’s march is King’s thing.

If your school is tops, pops, prove it.

Be in the know,

Get on the go,

Thursday at 10.

See you then.

Together we stick.

Divided we are stuck, Baby.

As MPD plainclothes detective Ed Redditt canvassed Beale Street, he heard talk that downtown stores would be looted during the march. He passed this tip along to the head of the MPD’s inspectional bureau, which furnished it to Chief James MacDonald.7 The top-level police brass knew the possibilities the next day held.

That night Dr. King’s second-in-command, Ralph Abernathy, gave a speech at Mason Temple to motivate the people for the mass march. While Abernathy exhorted the crowd, King mingled at a fundraiser for the Poor People’s Campaign in Harry Belafonte’s New York apartment. He drank sherry and padded around in sock feet, talking late into the night.

At the Minimum Salary Building, next door to strike headquarters at Clayborn Temple, Ernest Withers and two other men put together signs for the mass demonstration. “I remember that J. C. Brown and myself and one other fellow named Reverend Grant Harvey were the men that Reverend [H. Ralph] Jackson sent down . . . to rent a saw to cut the sticks for those signs,” Withers recalled. “And J. C. Brown printed those I AM A MAN signs right over there at the Minimum Salary Building. I had a car, so we went and rented the saw and came back that night and cut the sticks. We cut them and nailed those I AM A MAN signs on them.”8

Withers and the two men worked past midnight. The march with Dr. King would mark the first time in the six-week-old sanitation strike that demonstrators would carry mounted picket signs—a minor change that would have dire consequences.

Though Withers knew well the threats and acts of violence soaring through the city, he seems to have missed the potential for mayhem in those sticks. The sight of those garbage men with signs held high would make one hell of a picture, though. As Withers would later explain, he believed at the time that his photographs of the I AM A MAN signs would help people all over the country to understand what was happening in Memphis.⁹