Now that I want you to come back to Memphis to help me, everyone is too busy.
—MLK, scolding his staff at a meeting in Atlanta, March 30, 1968
IT’S A TWENTY-MINUTE DRIVE from the airport to the Lorraine Motel, where King was staying in Memphis. Arriving close behind the Buick that delivered King to the Lorraine was the police contingent: Inspector Smith’s four-man security detail and the surveillance team of Redditt and Richmond. On Smith’s orders three other officers—Inspector J. S. Gagliano and Lieutenants Jack Hamby and Joe Tucker—arrived at the Lorraine in another patrol car. They were at the motel “to assist in securing the area,” as a police report would note.1
The Lorraine was a rare, if modest, example of urban renewal in a distressed area on the cusp of downtown Memphis. The motel, located at 450 Mulberry Street, looked spiffy next to the surrounding bars, pawnshops, and seedy warehouses located in the underbelly of Beale Street a half dozen blocks away.
The Lorraine had been a sixteen-room hotel that had fallen into disrepair until 1955, when Walter and Lorene Bailey bought it. In earlier years Walter had been a Pullman porter. After an attempt to run a turkey farm hit a dead end, the couple had entered the inn-keeping business. They started humbly, renting rooms out for seventy-five cents a night in a rooming house on nearby Vance Street.2 Having acquired the forlorn, sixteen-room hotel, the Baileys embarked on a plan for improving it. They spruced up the original building and added a freestanding, motel-style structure comprising almost fifty rooms, plus a swimming pool. They renamed the place for Lorene, tweaking the spelling. Motel ownership proved to be a good fit for Walter and Lorene, and they stuck to it.
The most noteworthy feature of the Lorraine was a sign that towered over the parking lot. In a medley of colors the sign seemed to declare that the motel deserved a certain regard. Crowning the top like a rooster’s comb was a red arrowhead-shaped pointer indicating the entrance to the parking lot. Below was the name Lorraine in black script against a yellow background, followed by M-O-T-E-L, each fiery red letter set in a white circle. A massive, turquoise arch supported the whole edifice.
As a black-owned motel located near Beale Street, the Lorraine became known as the place to stay for African American visitors to the city. Among the notables who spent a night there during the Jim Crow era were music greats Ray Charles, Louis Armstrong, and B. B. King. In 1968 King could have opted for recently desegregated hotels, such as the posh Peabody downtown or the Holiday Inn Rivermont, which offered a spectacular view of the Mississippi River. He preferred the Lorraine.
He had stayed at the flat-roofed motel several times, often enough that the Baileys had designated Room 306 on the second floor as his whenever he desired it.3 Though one of the motel’s best, the room was not luxurious. There were two double beds, a rabbit-eared TV perched on a simple wooden dresser, two small table lamps, and a chair with striped upholstery. There was a basic bathroom accessible through a wide opening in a knotty-pine back wall.
When King arrived that Wednesday morning, Walter Bailey and his wife greeted him warmly. “Everywhere were smiles and handshakes,” historian Joan Beifuss would write about the moment.4 The Baileys always bent over backward to please King. The room rate was thirteen dollars a night, but they did not charge him. “We just felt a part of the Lorraine,” Abernathy would say years later. “It is a black motel and, of course, they had a lot of catfish there, and Dr. King and I loved catfish, and they were not strict so far as room service [was] concerned.”5
For all its appeal to King, the Lorraine posed a particular risk for anyone who might fear an assassin’s bullet. There was no elevator. To reach Room 306, a guest had to climb one of two stairways and continue to rooms that opened onto a balcony. The stairways and balcony were nakedly exposed to Mulberry Street. Nothing except an iron railing sheltered the second-story balcony from the parking lot, which faced Mulberry.
The risk to King was obvious to Lieutenant Jerry Williams, an African American police officer on the Memphis force. During one of King’s visits to the city Williams had warned him not to stay at the Lorraine “because of its exposed balconies,” according to historian Michael Honey.6
If the warning stuck with King until April 1968, he did not heed it. Precautions did not interest him because he did not think anything or anybody could protect him against a determined assassin.
With King and almost the entire top echelon of his staff installed at the Lorraine, it became, in short order, the operational headquarters of the SCLC in Memphis. King and Abernathy checked into Room 306, which they were sharing. Andrew Young, Dorothy Cotton, and Bernard Lee fanned out to other rooms. Hosea Williams, Jesse Jackson, and James Orange turned up on Sunday. James Bevel had been in Memphis earlier that week before leaving for Chicago. He was expected back that night.
Also checked into the motel were members of the local Black Power group, the Invaders. They were hanging out at the Lorraine for ready access to King and his staff, with whom they were trying to cut a deal. The Invaders wanted money, financial support for a proposed “Liberation School” where they would teach black history and heighten pride in black identity.
They were not hard to spot. A dozen of them, including cofounders Charles Cabbage and John Burl Smith, were milling around the front door of the office that morning. Dressed in jeans, they wore their hair in Afros. Some wore dark glasses. Several sported amulets dangling from their necks.
Cabbage and Smith identified with the restless Black Power faction of the civil rights movement. In rhetoric, if not action, they rejected King’s nonviolent approach. In the aftermath of the rioting on March 28, Cabbage stated his point of view in advance of King’s return to Memphis. He told a newspaper reporter that whatever belief he might have had in nonviolent protest had “died” that day.7 Presumably he was aggrieved by the aggressive police response to the riot.
Yet King, undeterred by the Invaders’ Black Power rhetoric, intended to recruit them as parade marshals for the march he would lead on Monday. He regarded their cooperation as a key to a violence-free march. To secure the Invaders’ cooperation, he was depending on his aides—especially Bevel, Williams, and Orange—to help win them over.
He would need his aides’ cooperation. Securing their enthusiastic assistance in Memphis was testing his leadership. In Memphis, as elsewhere, King’s charisma was the glue that bound the SCLC together. “We would argue like crazy,” Dorothy Cotton would say of her fellow staff. “He would sit there quietly. When he spoke, we would shut up.”8 It was King who charted their course, mediated disputes, and built morale. Inducing his aides to pull in the same direction was not always easy. As Andrew Young would say, the staff “was a passionate group of wild men that sort of functioned like wild horses.”9 Dorothy Cotton would put it even more bluntly, terming the staff a bunch of “young, self-important egomaniacs.”10
That the staff was headstrong and arrogant was hardly surprising. To join the SCLC staff meant forsaking, or at least delaying, a stable career and comfortable life. It meant running the risk of potential physical harm and possible death. No mild-mannered, submissive person was likely to enlist in the SCLC, and King was savvy enough to know it. He wanted young, ego-driven, risk-taking mavericks, and he had them. At times the infighting turned fierce. Only half-jokingly King and Abernathy “complained about the lack of nonviolence within SCLC,” wrote historian Adam Fairclough.11
As he prepared to return to Memphis, King called an emergency meeting of his executive staff at Ebenezer Church on Saturday, April 30. “Memphis is the Washington campaign in miniature,” he said, rallying his aides behind his audacious plan to stage another march in Tennessee.12
They replied with a barrage of objections. Young, fearing that exhaustion was impairing King’s judgment, pointed to a lack of groundwork for a successful return to Memphis.13 Bevel and Jackson were the most vehement. They denounced not only the Memphis plan but also the whole idea of the Poor People’s Campaign. Bevel argued, instead, that the SCLC ought to devote all its energy to opposing the Vietnam War. “We don’t need to be hanging around Washington,” he barked. “We need to stop this war.” Jackson termed the plan for Memphis “too small” and the one for Washington “too unformed,” wrote historian Taylor Branch. Jackson demanded that King scrap the antipoverty crusade altogether. Jackson desired to replace it with Operation Breadbasket, his pet project in Chicago to improve the economic circumstances of African Americans.14
King’s typical response to outbursts from his staff was to keep his cool. His manner was calm and Socratic. He would listen placidly while his aides fussed at one another or at him. All the while, in the words of historian Stephen Oates, he “would sit there thinking and scratching his whiskers. He would continue raising questions until they had worked through a problem collectively and reached a conclusion.”15
But on this day he did not retain his usual composure and gentle authority. Unnerved by the setback in Memphis, he had no patience for his staff’s carping and haggling. He erupted in rage. He ripped into Bevel and Jackson. He snapped first at Bevel: “You don’t like to work on anything that isn’t your idea.” To Jackson he shouted, “If you want to carve out your own niche in society, go ahead. But for God’s sake, don’t bother me.” King marched out of the meeting and left the staff to sort it all out. By the end of the meeting, which dragged on for six hours, the staff swallowed their objections. King was their leader, and they would follow him to Memphis.16
Dorothy Cotton would remember the tenor of the meeting: “There was a lot of energy. Everybody just arguing and expressing their opinions. But it was clear. We were going to go. When Martin spoke, it was, like, the discussion was over.”17 Abernathy would tell Coretta King, “We are all together now. We are going to Washington by way of Memphis.”18
They were all together in acceding to King’s desire that they go to Memphis. But they were not all together in their desire to go. Tensions between King and the staff were following them to Tennessee. Once he arrived, Jackson called his wife, Jackie, to report that the staff was “not supportive” of King. “They’re rumbling,” Jackson told his wife. “They don’t want to be here, but we’re stuck.”19
King must have sensed that he had not seen the end of Bevel and Jackson’s nettlesome challenge to his leadership. He trusted that they would fall in line behind him in Memphis anyway. Headstrong and defiant, verging on insubordination, they offered something that King’s other aides did not. They were young, hip, and brash. Bevel was thirty-one; Jackson, twenty-six. The gap in years was not that large—King was eight years older than Bevel, thirteen years older than Jackson—yet in movement terms they were separated by a generational chasm.
Bevel and Jackson had come of age in the movement as undergraduate seminary students in the early sixties. They were in the forefront of a more aggressively defiant style of protest. They had been among the first to put their bodies on the line in sit-ins, nonviolent but unyielding, at segregated lunch counters. They had been cursed, beaten, and spit upon, and the experience had toughened them. Theirs was a confidence, a swagger, born of youthful courage.
They did not conform to the tacit SCLC executive dress code of muted dark suits and staid ties. Bearded and gaunt, Bevel dressed in denim overalls, a skullcap over his shaved head. The boyishly handsome Jackson, who had been a football star at North Carolina A&T, often wore jeans, the cuffs turned up high above the ankles.
They could relate more easily to the restless, angry generation of young African Americans, whose allegiance King was eager to earn. Bevel and Jackson might be headache-provoking, but he needed them. What’s more, he had other more pressing matters on his mind than smoothing out relations with Bevel and Jackson.