We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.
—MLK, “I Have a Dream” speech, August 28, 1963
THE FEDERAL INJUNCTION threatened to derail the march on Monday, but that was not King’s only worry. If he did lead the march, with or without the court’s blessing, there was the alarming possibility that rowdies would replay the violence of March 28.
King was pursuing a strategy to avoid that outcome. He intended to recruit the Invaders as parade marshals. He reasoned that if the Black Power group marched under his banner, younger and more disaffected members in the African American community would take their cues from the Invaders and not cause trouble during the march.
King believed that a similar strategy had worked for him in Chicago in 1966, when he had been pursuing a campaign to improve the deplorable state of the city’s slum housing. To build grassroots support, he sought the cooperation of ghetto residents. Recruiting large numbers of them to put their bodies on the line in marches and protests became an overriding goal. But his efforts to mobilize support in the slums stalled without the involvement of an inner-city power broker: the street gangs of Chicago.
So King met with the gangs—the Vice Lords, Cobras, and Blackstone Rangers—seeking their support. It did not go well. He was stunned by their belligerence, their angry tirades, and coarse language. All the same, King did not stop talking with them. The sessions stretched late into many a night. He tried reasoning with them in a kind of tutorial, pointing out why they should trust him, why they should cooperate with him, why they ought to believe in nonviolence. Historian Stephen Oates described the tenor of the talkathons: “Gently, with great sincerity, King would explain the nature and purpose of nonviolence, asking them to try it as an experiment and put away their guns and knives.”1
Against all odds, his words struck a responsive chord with some gang members. According to one estimate, two hundred of them pledged themselves to nonviolent marches following King through the streets of Chicago. From the experience of Chicago he drew a lesson. As he wrote in his 1967 book, The Trumpet of Conscience, “I am convinced that even very violent temperaments can be channeled through nonviolent discipline.”2
What worked in Chicago, he concluded, could serve as a model for defusing the Black Power militancy that he feared might disrupt the Washington campaign. At a news conference on February 16, 1968, he had unveiled details of the antipoverty push. On the question of how he would counter Black Power–inspired violence, he cited his success with the gangs in Chicago. “We’ve worked in communities before where nationalists existed, where persons who believe in violence have existed,” he said, “and yet we’ve been able to discipline them.” He cited his experience with the Blackstone Rangers, terming them “the worst gang in Chicago,” but said they had “marched in the demonstrations with us, and they never retaliated with a single act of violence.”3
In Memphis the Invaders were eager to talk to King. About a dozen of them were checked into Rooms 315 and 316 of the Lorraine. That morning they had met with King’s aides. Next they were to meet with him. Early in the afternoon, Charles Cabbage led his group to the dining room on the second floor of the motel to wait for him.
It would not be the first time that King had met with Cabbage. He and two other Invaders had turned up at King’s room in the Holiday Inn Rivermont on the morning after the riot. (When the rioting broke out, King had taken refuge at the Holiday Inn in accord with a policeman’s instructions. The officer had warned that the mayhem in the streets would block the route to the Lorraine, and he had escorted King to the Holiday Inn, where he stayed the night.)
According to one unofficial report that circulated immediately after the riot, it was the Invaders who were responsible for the looting and vandalism or at least had provoked youths to violence. King was aware of the report and believed it to be true. His despair over the rioting had not eased. He was profoundly depressed. Even so, he greeted Cabbage and his companions courteously. King wanted to know: would the Invaders help him stage a peaceful march?
Cabbage would remember how much at ease he felt in King’s company. He would say that he could feel “peace around that man. It was one of the few times in my life when I wasn’t actually fighting something.”4 In just a few moments, it seemed that they had a deal. The Invaders would have a voice in planning the march. In exchange, King would help them secure funds to support their community-outreach programs in the inner city.
To nail down the agreement, King had assigned James Orange, Hosea Williams, and James Bevel to continue the discussions with the Invaders. On the evening of April 1, the Invaders and aides had gathered at the Lorraine.
Facing off against the trio of Orange, Williams, and Bevel required a certain daring. All three were hardened paladins of the civil rights struggle. Orange, a giant of a man, had been on the receiving end of police assaults during SCLC demonstrations in Birmingham. Williams, a heavily bearded Korean War veteran, had been savagely beaten at a bus station for drinking from a water fountain for whites only. He had been in the thick of the SCLC campaign in St. Augustine, Florida, and had been teargassed and beaten horribly during the storied voting-rights march at Selma, Alabama. According to Dorothy Cotton, he especially among the SCLC staff had the chops to deal with “street dudes.”5 Bevel, a fast-talking ordained Baptist pastor, had shown his fearlessness facing vicious mobs during protests to desegregate lunch counters in Nashville and at bus stops during the 1961 Freedom Rides. He was on the front lines during protests in Birmingham, Selma, and Chicago.
If Orange, Williams, and Bevel presented a formidable front, they would nonetheless meet stubborn resistance from the Invaders. From the outset of the negotiations Cabbage and his group had relentlessly demanded money from the SCLC—lots of it. The talks had continued late into Monday night. By the end of the jawboning marathon Orange had all but pledged that the SCLC would satisfy the Invaders’ demands. But he cautioned: the final say would be up to King.
Cabbage, John Burl Smith, and the third Invaders cofounder, Coby Smith (no relation to John Burl), were part of a young, restless, disaffected generation of African Americans for whom the siren of Black Power resonated powerfully. In 1968, Cabbage was twenty-three, Coby Smith a year younger. Racial bigotry had shaped their early years. As a child in Memphis, Coby Smith had no illusions about the second-class status of African Americans. He would remember: “They used to have an old saying when I was a kid, ‘Dogs that chase cars and niggers that chase white women do not last long.’”6
Blacks of Smith and Cabbage’s generation, however, had seen some racial barriers fall. Emboldened by the progress, they were impatiently demanding the removal of those that remained. Not coincidentally, their generation of blacks was developing a growing sense of self-worth and empowerment. Nothing summed it up better than James Brown’s song, “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” that rocketed to the hit parade after its release in 1968.
Cabbage and Coby Smith had been standouts at Memphis’s all-black schools. Cabbage had starred on the football and basketball teams at Carver High. Smith had been the student body president at Manassas High. He was one of the first black students admitted to prestigious Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis. Cabbage went on to Morehouse College, where he was student government president.
Both Cabbage and Coby Smith had their baptism in Black Power while they were living in Atlanta. Cabbage was finishing his studies at Morehouse. Smith was dabbling in civil rights work, hanging out with Stokely Carmichael and other activists who identified with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
SNCC had emerged in the early sixties as a youthful counterpoint to the SCLC. By the mid-sixties Carmichael was at the peak of his political influence as the chairman of SNCC. Under his leadership, the group embraced a black-nationalist agenda and demanded greater political and economic power for African Americans.
SNCC scorned King’s bedrock principles of integration and nonviolence as too conservative to advance the movement further. It took on a more belligerent tone in May 1967 when H. Rap Brown replaced Stokely Carmichael as chairman. Brown escalated Black Power rhetoric by famously declaring that violence was “as American as cherry pie.” He threatened that “if American cities don’t come around . . . they should be burned down.”7
Inspired by the call of Black Power, Cabbage and Coby Smith conceived a mini version of SNCC for Memphis that they named the Black Organizing Project. It would be a “liberation school” for youths, teaching black history and building racial pride.
Upon their return to Memphis, they roamed inner-city streets recruiting “brothers” to join their group. From the title of a popular TV show about hostile aliens descending upon Earth, they borrowed a new, more muscular name for themselves, the Invaders. Their network of activists was a loose-knit collection of people linked to what an FBI report termed Black Power “cells” of students at LeMoyne and Owen Colleges, Memphis State University, and local high schools, plus graduates and dropouts. All told, they totaled about seventy-five people, according to an FBI estimate.8
When the garbage workers’ strike began, the Invaders saw an opportunity. By identifying with the goal of economic justice, they aimed to widen their influence. By 1968, another member of the Invaders, John Burl Smith, had emerged as a leader of the group. John Burl Smith, back in Memphis after a stint in the air force, seemed to borrow from H. Rap Brown’s rhetoric. He developed what he called an “armed wing” of the Invaders and implied that they ought to equip themselves with guns.9
The Invaders turned up at meetings of the Community on the Move for Equality, known as COME, the strike-support group led by Reverend Jim Lawson. In the early days of the strike, Cabbage and several other Invaders were involved in COME’s deliberations. At a meeting of COME on March 5, Cabbage defied the organization’s principle of nonviolent protest by circulating a flyer by H. Rap Brown that included instructions for making a Molotov cocktail.10 John Burl Smith rattled another COME meeting by scorning it as nothing more than a group of “ministers praying.” If the ministers meant business, Smith went on, they had to “do some fighting.”11 Lawson soon lost patience with the Invaders and paid them little mind at meetings.12 Feeling slighted and resentful, Cabbage stopped attending.
Lawson privately expressed his disgust with the Invaders as a “divergent, dissident, belligerent group” that did nothing except “beg money without offering anything constructive.”13 Lawson’s low opinion of the Invaders did not bode well for King’s effort to recruit them. Lawson nonetheless suspended his disbelief that the Invaders would fall in line behind King. If King was determined to recruit the Invaders as part of a united community front behind the upcoming march, Lawson said he would go along with it.
King supposed that he could win the allegiance of Black Power militants by the force of his arguments for nonviolence. First, he portrayed his brand of massive civil disobedience as radical in its own way. It was not passive. It relied on massive “militant” (his word) confrontation and protest. Second, he dismissed as fantasy the idea of armed revolution that some Black Power extremists were envisioning in their rhetoric. He would test the strategy in Memphis.
If the strategy worked in Memphis, King might conclude that it would work with Black Power militants who might otherwise disrupt the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington. Heading off a threat to the Poor People’s Campaign was not the only reason that King sought to bring Black Power militants under his wing. Black Power was commanding the media spotlight. Its energy, fueled by anger and revolutionary zeal, was captivating and radicalizing black youth.
His strategy rested on the premise that he could repeat elsewhere what he had achieved in Chicago. How complete a conversion of the gangs he had achieved in Chicago, however, was never clear. Years later, Ralph Abernathy would look back on King’s earnest efforts as having been largely a bust. Abernathy’s recollection was very different from King’s: “Martin had encountered for the first time a crowd of blacks that he could neither reason with nor overpower with his philosophy.”14
In Abernathy’s telling, King’s approach to the gangs was doomed from the start because the gang members were devoid of “respect for anything or anybody, most especially for preachers.” Historian Fairclough agrees, saying that many of the gang members with whom King rapped for hours remained “cynically aloof.”15
Now in Memphis, applying the lesson of Chicago, he courted the Invaders. But the Invaders differed from the Blackstone Rangers. The Invaders were not poorly educated, ghettoized toughs engaged in drug trafficking or other criminal enterprise. Cabbage’s group had no criminal intent. The Invaders were led by college students or graduates steeped in SNCC rhetoric. Their motivation was Black Power ideology.
In recruiting the Invaders, King would not be filling an ideological void, as he had with the Chicago gangs. He would have to confront the Invaders’ radicalism head-on and rebut their conviction that King’s nonviolence was feckless, that its time was past. To dissuade them was to dispute the idea at the crux of Black Power. In Chicago, King and his aides had spent much of one summer working to gain the gangs’ allegiance. In Memphis they had less than a week.
At 3:17 p.m., Monday, April 3, King left the meeting with Lucius Burch. He headed to the motel’s dining room, where he found Cabbage, John Burl Smith, and about fifteen other Invaders seated in chairs.16 King sat down facing them. Even sitting, the lanky Cabbage loomed over King. Cabbage was wearing blue jeans, a sweatshirt, and sandals. The same clothes had served as his virtual uniform for the preceding year. He owned just one pair of blue jeans, and he and other Invaders were struggling to feed themselves for lack of money.17
King asked Cabbage’s group if they could agree to a pledge of nonviolence.18 The Invaders evaded the question but portrayed themselves as the key to a peaceful march in Memphis. They argued that King ought to work with them because they had grassroots support in the African American community. They faulted Jim Lawson for not including them in COME’s planning before the march of March 28. As one Invader recounted years later, they said that, if King had met with the Invaders early on, the march would have been “free of violence.”19 On the strength of that claim, the Invaders repeated their demand for money to fund their Black Organizing Project. King seemed sympathetic. Emboldened, Cabbage asked for $2 million, according to an account of an FBI informant.20 The sum far exceeded the SCLC’s total annual budget.
King did not promise to tap SCLC’s treasury to fund any of the Invaders’ programs. He said, however, that he would try to find other sources of money. He mentioned a coalition of black churches that had established a fund-raising arm to aid militant black groups. To show that he meant business, King picked up the telephone right then and called a number in New York. “Okay,” he told Cabbage a moment later, “we have a commitment to partially fund your program.”21
For his part King asked the Invaders to make the rounds of the city’s black high schools and urge the students’ cooperation to keep Monday’s march peaceful.22 He asked that the Invaders provide at least twenty-five of their members to serve as parade marshals.23 When King again demanded a pledge of nonviolence, Cabbage hedged. “We told him, okay, we will try to do our best,” Cabbage would recall. “We will try to do this, even though we can’t guarantee that violence will not break out.”24 On that note the meeting with the Invaders ended at about 4:30 p.m.