And I submit this afternoon that we can end poverty in the United States. Our nation has the resources to do it.
—MLK, speech at Stanford University, April 14, 1967
KING MIGHT HAVE returned to Memphis earlier in his quest to save his reputation. But a critical speaking obligation stood in the way. On March 31, three days before leaving for Memphis, he was in Washington, DC, delivering the Sunday sermon at the Washington National Cathedral. His remarks centered on the Vietnam War and the Poor People’s Campaign, though the crisis in Memphis must have been weighing heavily on him.
The storied cathedral offered him a platform for reaching the political elite of the nation’s capital. It was an occasion to build support for his stands against the war and for far-reaching federal antipoverty legislation. Sunday sermons, of course, were routine for King. So was the mixing of religion and politics whenever he preached themes of social justice.
But this time he was mixing two causes, both hurtling him deeply into two bitter national debates and blurring his image as the nation’s foremost champion of racial desegregation. His high visibility as a zealous foe of the US policy in Vietnam exposed him to attacks on grounds that he had no business expounding on military matters. The plan to besiege the nation’s capital in the name of ending poverty was causing even many of his supporters to reassess their opinions of him.
The Poor People’s Campaign would be like no other he had undertaken. A legion of volunteers would stage weeks, possibly months, of “militant” demonstrations in Washington until lawmakers enacted far-reaching programs for the poor. He was threatening epic disruption of the federal government. The massive civil disobedience King envisioned was bound to lead to scuffles with police at the least, and possibly violent confrontation, along with the almost certain arrest of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people.
The siege of Washington by hordes of poor people would intensify the heat in a political climate already at the boiling point because of the Vietnam War. Multitudes of demonstrators against the war were taking to the streets of Washington and other cities around the country chanting, “Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?” Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota was drawing widespread support in his bid to unseat President Johnson by running for the Democratic presidential nomination on an antiwar platform. In the New Hampshire primary McCarthy won more than two-fifths of the vote against an incumbent president in his own party. Johnson was under intense pressure to withdraw US troops from Vietnam or resign. Johnson buckled, announcing on March 31 he would not seek reelection as president in 1968.
Earlier on that day, an overflow crowd had gathered in the neo-Gothic splendor of the National Cathedral to hear King speak. He must have sensed that many of his listeners in that Episcopal sanctum lived apart from America’s poor and knew little of them. He beseeched them to consider the plight of America’s forty million “poverty stricken” people, who, he said, were “invisible” in a country that is “so rich” that many “don’t see the poor.”1 Within a few miles of Congress and the White House, his booming voice ringing with indignation, he demanded urgent federal action against poverty.
Turning to Vietnam, he decried it as one of the most “unjust wars” ever.2 Eloquent, emotional, and powerful, the sermon evoked King’s passion for the antipoverty and antiwar causes that he had made his own by the spring of 1964.
On the road when he was in Washington and elsewhere he carried a well-stuffed briefcase, which served him as a kind of traveling file cabinet containing materials to inform him on war, poverty, and other issues. It was a rectangular briefcase, emblazoned with the initials MLK in gold above the latch. It included a few personal effects: a tin of aspirin, a bottle of Alka Seltzer, and a can of shaving powder. It was crammed with papers and two books written by him.
Among the papers were at least two items that indicated the breadth of his curiosity. One was a speech by ecologist Hugo Boyko evaluating the potential for Israeli-Arab cooperation in food production. Another was a newspaper article about Florida governor Claude Kirk Jr.’s private police force. The oldest papers dated back to 1966. The Vietnam War figures in several newspaper articles from that year.3
A six-page statement that King released to the public in October 1966 set forth his view of Black Power, the slogan adopted by young militants such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown to dramatize their call for aggressive methods to advance civil rights. The statement reflected the fine line that King was walking on the subject. It disavowed the slogan Black Power for its “connotations of violence and separatism.” But it sympathized with the “unendurable frustrations” of people of his race who were “taunted by empty promises, humiliated and deprived by the filth and decay” of America’s slums.4
Buried in his traveling case was a two-year-old article from the Wall Street Journal about a federal study warning of potential “Watts-type violence” in twenty-one cities. (The 1965 riot in the Watts section of Los Angeles had left 34 dead, 947 injured, and $45 million in property damage.5 More civil unrest had flared up in dozens of cities over the next two years. Some of the worst rioting was in the slums of Newark and Detroit. Whole neighborhoods were devastated by widespread looting and violence that left scores dead and many hundreds injured during the summer of 1967.)
Also tucked into the briefcase was a book of King’s sermons, Strength to Love, and his fifth and last book, Where Do We Go from Here. The last book ponders the state of the movement (“Negroes have established a foothold, no more”) and appeals for a great federal commitment to end poverty.6 King devoted a fifty-eight-page chapter of the book, the longest, to the subject of Black Power. In the second-longest chapter, he examined the related development of “white backlash,” the reaction of white people so alarmed by the urban violence that they were demanding harsh law-and-order measures. King was unsympathetic. He wrote that the backlash sprang either from whites’ racism or a lack of empathy for the “ache and anguish” of daily life in the ghetto.7
Tellingly, King had in his traveling file pages 179 and 180 of Where Do We Go from Here, printed out on separate sheets of paper. On those pages he discusses two parallel “revolutions.” One is in technology, the other in the civil rights and anticolonial movements sweeping the globe. Both revolutions King sees as progressing with inevitability. In reflecting about that point later on, he must have mused about how to make the issue of poverty relevant to all people. In the margin of page 180, he had scribbled in blue ink, “The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich. The betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother. Whatever affects one affects all.”
That he was carrying a copy of Where Do We Go from Here with him, along with his markup of pages from the book, seems to underscore how intensely he had turned to poverty as a transcendent issue. His pivot from the decade-long pursuit of racial progress to the larger issues of poverty and war marked his most dramatic turning point as a national leader.
Some papers in the briefcase harked back to important public pronouncements of the mid-sixties. On April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York he had delivered a speech on Vietnam that had attracted wide public attention. He meant the speech to be a definitive statement of his views on the subject. He denounced Lyndon Johnson’s policy as morally unjust and strategically flawed. He said the war was draining the US treasury of money that could have funded antipoverty programs and that it was impressing black soldiers into Vietnam service in disproportionate numbers. He deplored the death and destruction it was inflicting on Vietnam and its people. No one concerned about “the integrity and life of America today,” he thundered, “can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam.”8
As for the rioting in Watts and other cities, King looked at the urban strife as a product of poverty and the associated ills of unemployment, blighted housing, and shoddy public education. To respond to Black Power, King was rolling out the Poor People’s Campaign as a massive, militant, though nonviolent, alternative.
Even King’s support of the strike in Memphis, a labor dispute between the city and municipal employees, was supposed to advance the Poor People’s Campaign. As King noted when he addressed the pro-strike rally in Memphis on March 18, the paycheck of the garbage workers was so paltry that some had turned to food stamps to feed their families. Linking their plight to the wider issue of American poverty would dramatize his case for the Washington protest.
King envisioned Memphis as a springboard to Washington. Instead, the woeful turn of events—the rioting that marred his pro-strike march of March 28 and the imperative to recover by staging a nonviolent march on April 6—was having the opposite effect. Returning to Memphis now would be a costly detour. It would bog King and his staff down for at least five days in a city roiled by racial conflict. They would be stuck there until at least the day of the redemptive march, set for Monday, April 8.
The timing could hardly have been worse. King and his aides were in the final stage of recruiting volunteers for the Poor People’s Campaign. They had a monumental task ahead of them. They were seeking an ethnically diverse cross section of poor people from ten cities in the Northeast and Midwest and from small towns and rural areas in five southern states. The African American preacher who grew up in middle-class circumstances in Atlanta was summoning poor people from across America. He was calling to Washington—in his terminology—not only Negroes but also Appalachian whites, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and American Indians.
He was promising a “massive mobilization.” It would mean flooding Washington with protesters, settling them in makeshift tent cities on the grounds of the Washington Monument or Lincoln Memorial. If their extensive demands for antipoverty legislation were not met, he would dispatch the protesters en masse into streets, parks, and office buildings. The protesters would jam the halls of Congress and offices of executive departments, swarm into hospital emergency rooms, and quite possibly tie up the vehicular traffic of central Washington. When asked by a reporter about the latter tactic, King was evasive. But he was clear about his intentions: the protesters would “plague” Washington as long as necessary to achieve their goals.9
To prepare for an operation of that scale, King was shifting the Southern Christian Leadership Conference onto a different track. He had founded the SCLC, in 1957, in alliance with a regional network of mostly Baptist ministers, to struggle against racial segregation in the South. Now the emphasis would fall squarely on economic justice. He reassigned his staff to concentrate on the profuse details of the antipoverty drive. They would help recruit and train the thousands of people in the discipline of nonviolence. They would plan and execute the complex logistics to transport, house, feed, and manage the great mass of protesters.
That was the plan before the debacle in Memphis. Diverting to Memphis for damage control was throwing the Poor People’s Campaign off schedule. As originally conceived, the plan was to enlist a first wave of three thousand poor people to converge on Washington in early April. Thousands more would follow in later months. Hastily revised because of the detour to Memphis, the plan was now for the campaign to begin on April 22. The aim was to draw not thousands but only a “symbolic delegation” to Washington at that time, as the Commercial Appeal reported on March 30.
Recruiting volunteers, whose bodies and honor would be on the line in Washington, would have been hard enough if the Memphis riot had not undercut King’s image as an apostle of nonviolence. Now he believed he had to restore his credibility in order to reassure volunteers. If not, he feared few people would follow him to the nation’s capital.
King’s powerful oratory, his iconic stature as the personification of the civil rights movement, the respect and awe with which millions of disadvantaged Americans regarded him—they were the engine behind the Poor People’s Campaign. On his personal magnetism hinged the success of his appeal for volunteers as he traveled around the country to build support. Without that central pillar of his credibility solidly in place, King acknowledged that the Washington campaign was “doomed.”10
His breakneck schedule in March 1968 allowed him to stump from town to town, city to city, pleading for volunteers. During the eight days that ended March 18, he delivered thirty-five speeches at stops from Michigan to California. The schedule for a single day, March 19, sounded like the bookings of a week or two for gospel singers on a Delta tour. Starting in the early morning, he crisscrossed a large swath of Mississippi. He spoke at small African American churches in Batesville, Marks, Clarksdale, Greenwood, Grenada, and Laurel, finally reaching Hattiesburg and a bed close to midnight.
Marks, Mississippi, would play a special role. It was to be the jumping-off point for a mule train that would plod the one thousand miles to Washington as a sort of moving billboard to promote the antipoverty cause. In his sermon at the National Cathedral he singled out Marks as an example of the privation that had inspired him to launch the Washington campaign. It was a backwater Delta town of twenty-six hundred inhabitants in Quitman County, one of the poorest counties in the United States. At the edge of cotton fields, he said, he had seen “hundreds of little black boys and girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear” and heard stories from jobless mothers and fathers about times when they could survive only if they would “go around to the neighbors and ask them for a little something.”11
In his travels to rally poor people to Washington, King barnstormed from one small airport to another in a chartered, twin-engine Cessna 40. King and a few aides then would rush to a nearby African American church where he would speak. Even with the benefit of a private plane, they sometimes arrived hours behind schedule.
After Mississippi they moved on to Alabama and Georgia. He would talk to whatever crowd waited long enough to hear him. King would call on the people who turned out, as he did in Waycross, Georgia, on March 22, to join the “powerful and meaningful” Washington campaign that, he promised, would cause the “walls of injustice to come tumbling down.” His voice would resound with emotional fervor, attuned to the religious convictions of his listeners. In Waycross he hit that pious note, saying that poor people, as God’s children, were no less deserving than other Americans of jobs and income.12
If it had not been for the quagmire of Memphis, King’s schedule would have had him presiding over a meeting of the national steering committee of the Poor People’s Campaign in Atlanta on April 1.13
That meeting had been called off. Further, he would have been in Chicago on April 3, the day he was now flying to Tennessee instead, and in Detroit the next day. Now he would have to scrub travel to both cities. The detour to Memphis was bleeding time and energy that King and his staff had intended to devote to the antipoverty drive at a critical stage.
The top echelon of his staff flying with him that morning from Atlanta to Memphis had major assignments as area managers of the Poor People’s Campaign. Abernathy had three cities under his watch, Washington, Baltimore, and Newark, New Jersey, Young had New York City and Philadelphia, and Cotton had North Carolina and Virginia.
Other key aides—Jesse Jackson, James Bevel, James Orange, and Hosea Williams—were already in Memphis, having arrived earlier in the week. All would have to suspend their work on the antipoverty campaign. Williams had a particularly vital role as the national field director overseeing the entire campaign. King’s aides did not want to pause the antipoverty campaign and come to Memphis. They relented only at King’s insistence. Ordinarily they would have held workshops and planning sessions for many weeks, if not months, to pull off a protest of that magnitude. Preparing for the Birmingham campaign had consumed three months of planning and training. In Memphis they would have five days.
King disregarded not just his aides’ advice but also the pleadings of Marian Logan, a trusted SCLC board member on whom he relied for counsel and emotional support. On the night of March 28, still reeling from the day’s riot, King had called Logan at her apartment in New York City. When she heard that he was stranded in Memphis, she winced. She told him bluntly, as she would recall, “You ought to get your ass out of Memphis.”
King replied, “Darling, we can’t turn around now. We have to keep going.”14