And so I call upon labor as the historic ally of the underprivileged and oppressed to join with us in this present struggle to redeem the soul of America.
—MLK, speaking to the Illinois State AFL-CIO, Springfield, Illinois, October 7, 1965
WHILE JAMES EARL RAY was holed up in the New Rebel Motel and a thunderstorm was raging outside, hundreds of strikers and their supporters were filtering into Mason Temple to hear King speak. They clustered in the front section, shedding their rain-spattered jackets as they took their seats. Looming above them was a raised platform from which King would speak. All eyes were turned expectantly toward the front. King was not yet there.
Almost lost in the overwhelmingly African American crowd was a sprinkling of white faces. Mike Cody, the young white lawyer assisting Lucius Burch to fight the federal injunction against King, was in the central, main-floor section near the podium. That section of the auditorium was packed with people. Cody would remember the air feeling stuffy, a sense magnified by the fury of the storm outside, its thunder and lightning stifling the crowd’s murmuring to speakers’ remarks from the podium.1
On this Wednesday night, though, the crowd filled at most half the seats in the vastness of Mason Temple. Estimates of the turnout would range from two thousand to four thousand.2 In its edition the following morning the Commercial Appeal would term the audience “disappointingly small.”
The sparse turnout was a setback for the garbage workers, who had little reason to believe that their strike would end with a favorable outcome anytime soon. If they were losing heart, they were not without hope. They had faith that the man they knew reverently as Dr. King might somehow shift the momentum of the strike to save the day. (The honorific recognized the doctorate in systematic theology King earned at Boston University in 1955.)
Union leader Joe Warren would say: “We ain’t never had a man, black or white [who was the equal of Dr. King].”3 Taylor Rogers, another garbage worker in the crowd, would remember waiting eagerly to hear King speak again. Rogers had thrilled to King’s speech on March 18. “It had ignited a much needed spark,” he would later recall.4
The March 18 speech had boosted the strikers’ spirits at a critical moment. Some workers who were initially on strike but who had returned to their jobs were so stirred by King’s words that they had rejoined the strikers’ ranks. Now Rogers was expecting another speech packed with power and emotion. He was praying that King’s return to Memphis marked a turning point that would lead to victory for the strikers.
As the rally was getting under way, the storm bearing down on Memphis was lashing King’s motel room with torrents of rain. He could hear the roar of thunder and see fearsome lightning strikes through the motel window. Worse, the scream of sirens continued to warn of tornadoes (which would strike nearby areas in Arkansas and West Tennessee, destroying houses and leaving two people dead and many injured).
Some Memphians were hunkered down at home. There were reasons other than the storm to stay put. For one, at 7:30 p.m., a revue of the talent acts in the upcoming Miss Memphis Pageant would be on television.
Mayor Loeb too was at home that night. Frank McRae telephoned him to tell his pal that he ought to expect a visit on Friday morning from a biracial delegation of Memphis pastors. The clergymen would be coming to city hall to question the mayor’s unyielding attitude toward the strike. McRae asked if the mayor would receive the clergymen. “Fine,” Loeb replied. “Be glad to see you, Frank. But you’re going to waste your time, and all you’re going to do is get yourselves in trouble with your congregations, and you’re going to be misunderstood. You’re not going to change my mind one way or another.”5
Compared to many houses, Mason Temple offered a safe haven from tornadoes. But behind its brick facade it was nothing fancy. The seats were hard, straight-back, wooden chairs arrayed in semicircular rows under a lattice of steel girders. The official capacity was seventy-five hundred. Two or three thousand more, some standing, had somehow crammed into its two levels, a ground floor and balcony, for King’s speech on March 18.
Entering the thick of a bitter labor strike like the one in Memphis was a rare, almost unprecedented step for King to take. Once, in 1964, he had briefly joined a picket line of workers on strike against a Scripto, Inc., facility in his hometown of Atlanta.6 For years he had courted unions in other ways. In a landmark pro-labor speech at the National AFL-CIO Convention at Bal Harbour, Florida, in 1961, King had proclaimed common cause between the labor and civil rights movements. On that occasion, he heralded the potential for unions to improve the wages and working conditions of African Americans. “If the Negro Wins, Labor Wins” was the title of the speech.7
A few unions with large black memberships had supported the SCLC financially. The United Packinghouse Workers of America had been a steady source of funds for the organization’s often-depleted coffers. Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers was a fervent backer, and his union had been a major benefactor.8
But King’s gratitude toward the labor movement had its limits. Many unions, particularly in the South, excluded blacks from membership and denied them apprenticeship training and vocational education.9 King deplored union racism, and he condemned it in no uncertain terms. In his 1958 book Stride Toward Freedom, King faulted those unions for having contributed to blacks’ “degraded” economic circumstances.10
By 1968, however, as he looked for support in his fight against poverty, King seemed far more intent on promoting common cause with unions than decrying the racism that pervaded many of them. In Where Do We Go from Here, his blueprint for the Poor People’s Campaign published in January 1968, King saluted unions for their increasing inclusion of African Americans.11
The turn of events in Memphis was drawing him into a closer embrace with the labor movement. If Memphis was risky for King, at least it offered a potential benefit. The more he advanced the unions’ cause, the more likely they were to support his.
Now, at the rally in Mason Temple, King had the opportunity to lift the morale of one union, Local 1733 of AFSCME. With still no sight of King, other speakers bided time by warming up the crowd. They led them in prayer and song. They solicited strike-support donations. Jim Lawson took the podium and denounced the pending injunction against King, declaring, “Mace cannot stop us, gas cannot stop us, and we are going to march.”12
Lawson reprised strike-related events of the previous few days. He denounced the police for employing what he regarded as brutally excessive force to quell the rioting on March 28. His voice ringing with indignation, Lawson accused one police officer of having fatally shot sixteen-year-old Larry Payne in cold blood.13 Payne allegedly had looted a television from a Sears, Roebuck store before fleeing. A police department review would conclude later that in the aftermath of the riot Payne had pulled a knife on the patrolman, who shot in self-defense. The officer was exonerated. A number of witnesses, however, disputed the department’s account.14 According to historian Michael Honey, a dozen eyewitnesses said Payne had no knife but had his hands up and was killed by a blast from a shotgun poked into his stomach.15
Lawson was still addressing the crowd when Abernathy, Jackson, and Young entered through a side door of the temple. At the sight of them there was a great eruption of cheers and applause. They might have been rock stars leaping onto a stage. But as soon as it dawned on the crowd that King was not among them, the uproar fizzled as abruptly as it had begun. The crowd’s message was unmistakable. “We said, ‘It’s not us they’re cheering for.’ We laughed about it, and we said he had to come,” Jackson would recall.16
Years later, Abernathy would recap his thoughts at that moment. He would write in his memoir that the people “who had driven through rainy, windswept streets” to Mason Temple “had done so because they expected to see Martin Luther King, Jr., not Ralph D. Abernathy. I knew that better than anybody, and I was overwhelmed by the fact as I walked down the aisle and onto the stage. Nobody shouted or applauded. Clearly they were all waiting for the evening’s attraction.”17
With their cameras, tripods, and lights set up in front of the podium, seven or eight TV film crews were waiting in anticipation of King’s arrival. Several were covering the event for the major television networks. As Abernathy would recollect: “That meant the audience would be national, so the event was much more important than a poorly attended local rally.”18 Abernathy told Jackson that he intended to telephone King and urge him to come to Mason Temple at once to speak. According to Abernathy, Jackson replied, “Don’t call him. If you don’t want to speak, then I’ll speak.”
Ignoring Jackson, Abernathy hurried to the temple vestibule where there was a telephone and called the Lorraine. King answered.
“Martin,” Abernathy said, “all the television networks are lined up waiting for you. This speech will be broadcast nationwide. You need to deliver it. Besides, the people who are here want you. Not me.”
“I’ll do whatever you say. If you say come, I’ll be there,” King said.
Abernathy replied, “Come.”19
Moments later, King left the motel. He arrived at Mason Temple about nine o’clock. The crowd had been waiting an hour and a half for King. The sight of him striding toward the podium set off another deafening cacophony of shouts and applause. As the crowd’s excitement washed over him, King grinned widely and took a seat on the podium.
Abernathy was no longer the main event. But he was wound up to talk. He would recall feeling an impulse, a powerful desire to exalt King’s greatness to this audience on this night.20 Abernathy offered to introduce his friend.
King and Abernathy had a friendship like no other. They had stood shoulder to shoulder during King’s civil rights campaigns since the earliest days of the Montgomery bus boycott. With Abernathy bravely accompanying King as moral support and for the safety of numbers, they had gone to jail together time and again. More weeks than not, they were on the road together. They had preached in each other’s churches, vacationed together, eaten in each other’s homes on countless occasions, and become enmeshed in the lives of each other’s families.
King’s other aides, no matter how close their relationship with him, called him Martin or “Doc.” Not Abernathy. For Abernathy the name was Michael. Nor did King call his friend Ralph, as others did. To each other they were Michael and David. Those were their boyhood names. Using them was a private compact between best friends, a sign of the special bond between them.
That night, during his address to the garbage workers in Mason Temple, King would express his feelings publicly for Abernathy. Once Abernathy had finished the introduction and yielded the rostrum to him, King would say: “Ralph Abernathy is the best friend that I have in the world.”21
They were not obviously cut out to be best friends. King was the heir to the ministerial crown of his father, one of Atlanta’s most esteemed African American ministers. The younger King was a highly educated scholar of theology. Abernathy was one of twelve children born to a poor cotton farmer in Marengo County, Alabama. Though he had a master’s degree in sociology from Atlanta University, Abernathy, a self-described “country preacher,” was not known for his erudition. As historian David Lewis summed it up, Abernathy’s “intellectual pretensions were modest.”22
That said, both were Southern-born Baptist preachers. They were roughly the same age, Abernathy being three years older. Called to serve in pulpits at two leading African American churches in Montgomery, they seemed destined either for friendship or crosstown rivalry. Close friends they became. They enjoyed each other’s company and a common sense of humor. They shared a profound commitment to work together and face constant danger during their years of struggle for racial justice.
It did not seem to undercut their friendship that the chunky, sluggish Abernathy was a favorite butt of King’s pranks and ribbing. King would josh him about how snoring kept him awake all night when they were in a jail cell together.23 Once, according to an account in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, King ushered Abernathy into a car that had a rusted-out floorboard with only a gaping hole for his friend’s feet. Sometimes the teasing had an edge. The only organization that Ralph could lead was the “National Association for the Advancement of Eating Chicken,” King once ridiculed his buddy, according to Andrew Young.24
If Abernathy seemed good-natured about jokes at his expense, he had his pride. At times he exhibited jealousy at all the attention showered on King. In Oslo for the Nobel Prize ceremony in King’s honor, Abernathy had demanded that his wife, Juanita, and he ride in a limousine carrying Nobel Committee chairman Gunnar Jahn, King, and King’s wife, Coretta. The request was denied, but Abernathy protested. According to historian Taylor Branch’s account: “Abernathy appealed to King, who stood frozen with embarrassment, then tried to push his way past the security officers.” Abernathy finally relented and resigned himself to riding in a car apart from Jahn and the Kings.25
On this night in Memphis, however, Abernathy betrayed no trace of jealousy. On the contrary, he launched into a glowing, twenty-five-minute tribute. “Brothers and sisters, ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “too often we take our leaders for granted. We think we know them, but they are really strangers to us. So tonight I would like to take a little time to introduce you to our leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”26
He went on to recite highlights of King’s biography: his birth, early schooling, college years, deep involvement in the civil rights movement, and finally his plunge into the Memphis crisis on behalf of the garbage workers. “Now all you know that Martin Luther King Jr. is a great preacher,” he said. “But I want you to know that he was prepared by God to be a great preacher.”
Warming to the theme, Abernathy continued, “His great granddaddy was a preacher. His granddaddy was a preacher. His daddy is a preacher. His brother is a preacher, and, of course, his dearest friend and other brother . . .”—here Abernathy gestured toward himself—“is one of the world’s greatest preachers. So Martin Luther King Jr. is not only a great preacher but a great leader who has the courage and ability to translate the Sermon on the Mount into lessons for our times. He’s giving Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas new life.”27
In a final gush of praise that the Commercial Appeal would quote the next day, he said that, despite King’s many honors, he was not yet seeking to be president of the United States, but “he is the man who tells the president what to do.”
With applause rippling through the auditorium Abernathy paused. Then he said, “Let’s give Martin Luther King a warm welcome back to Memphis.” And the crowd lurched to its feet in a standing ovation.
Abernathy would say later that he had been “trying to sum up the greatness of the man in a way I had never done before.”28 After Abernathy sat down, a minister on the podium whispered to King that the introduction could have been a eulogy. King welcomed the joke with a smile.29