I can’t take it anymore. I’m going to the country to stay with one of my members. I need to go to the farm, and I’m going down there.
—MLK, comment to Ralph Abernathy, as he contemplated returning to Memphis, March 30, 1968
THE SURVEILLANCE DETAIL of officers Ed Redditt and Willie Richmond was on the King watch for a second day. They were still entrenched in their observation post in the back of Fire Station #2 across Mulberry Street from the Lorraine Motel. They had observed members of the Invaders and the SCLC staff buzzing from room to room of the motel as they gathered for meetings.1 They would report no sightings of King all morning or afternoon.
King remained in Room 306 for much of the morning, leaving only to confront Dorothy Cotton and eat lunch in the motel dining room. Once he and Abernathy had finished their catfish, they returned to the room. They were hoping for word from Andrew Young about the outcome of the hearing in Judge Brown’s courtroom.
They had heard nothing from Young all morning. They feared that a prolonged hearing meant bad news, that the judge would not vacate the injunction.2 If Young had called, he could have informed them that the testimony by three Memphis police officials had lasted all morning and that Young and Lawson were to testify after a lunch break.
While waiting for word from the courthouse, King busied himself on the phone. He telephoned SCLC headquarters in Atlanta, asking his secretary, Dora McDonald, for messages. He called Harry Wachtel, a back-channel lawyer and confidante of King, at his New York law firm.3 He called Ebenezer to notify church officials about the theme and title of his Sunday sermon. It would reflect his somber mood at the time. The title was: “Why America May Go to Hell.” King had found time to plan the sermon even as he grappled with the crisis in Memphis. He was able to convey a point-by-point preview to McDonald.4
With still no word from Young, King went downstairs to Georgia Davis’s Room 201. His brother, A.D., was already in the room, along with Lukey Ward and Davis. It did not surprise Davis that King preferred her room to his. King was well aware that the FBI had been bugging his hotel rooms, among other places. He was constantly suspicious of possible FBI eavesdropping.5 To prevent government monitoring of their conversation, he and Coretta sometimes even went so far as to talk in code.6
Not that King and A.D. discussed anything all that sensitive while they were in Room 201. Giddy to be together again and seized by an adolescent impulse, the brothers telephoned their mother in Atlanta. They talked to her for almost an hour. Indulging an urge for boyish mischief, they teased her. Alberta, whom everyone called Mama King, did not seem like a mother who would have had much tolerance for her sons’ foolishness. A short, stocky woman who dressed meticulously, an accomplished church organist, she had an air of formality about her. She did not call her husband, Martin Sr., by his first name. To her he was always Reverend King.7 But according to Coretta, her dignified mother-in-law actually had a “keen sense of humor.”8
Taking turns on the phone, King and A.D. pretended to be the other. That kept their mother guessing which was which. The more they confounded her, the more they laughed. Whoops and hoots filled the room. Turning serious, Mrs. King expressed her distress about the rioting in Memphis the week before. She handed the phone to Daddy King.9 He expressed his concern as well. To relieve his parents of worry, King said that everything was fine in Memphis. Back on the phone, Alberta gushed about how happy she was that her sons were together.
The warmth and cheer from his parents buoyed King. Once he was off the phone, however, his mood darkened. He seemed pensive, distracted. King remained flat on his back in bed for much of the afternoon, awake, saying little, staring blankly at the ceiling, lost in his thoughts. “Most of the day, he was just resting and relaxing,” Davis would recall.10
He had much to mull over, moments fresh on his mind. The bomb threat to his plane from Atlanta, the outpouring of mournful emotions in his speech at Mason Temple, Dorothy Cotton’s angry departure from the Lorraine, the futility of his attempt to enlist the Invaders as parade marshals—they were all unsettling events in his life since the morning before.
As he struggled with the Memphis crisis, he was still hearing a drumbeat of criticism against him for his stand against the Vietnam War. Top union leaders were continuing to object, as were some prominent civil rights leaders.11 Among the union leaders continuing to take issue with him over Vietnam were longtime friends and allies such as Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young. The criticism grated on him. Close friend Marian Logan would tell of his acute anguish because of his friends’ disagreement with him over Vietnam. She would recall: “I don’t think it was because he doubted the position he had taken, that it was wrong. I think he felt badly that a lot of people didn’t agree with him or couldn’t understand his reason for taking a stand. It depressed him terribly.”12
He could hardly have been happy, moreover, about being trapped another day in the city where rioting had so subverted his reputation. Critics from all sides were questioning his relevance as a nonviolent leader. Even he was losing hope. In the article for the issue of Look magazine slated for April 16, 1968, he wrote: “As committed as I am to nonviolence, I have to face this fact: If we do not get a positive response in Washington, many more Negroes will begin to think and act in violent terms.”13
Very likely nothing troubled King more, as he stared at the ceiling of Room 201, than the fading prospects of the Poor People’s Campaign. As a consequence of the rioting in Memphis, he was stranded in a motel room rather than on the move to recruit and organize for the antipoverty drive set to begin in just eighteen days.
Even before the crisis in Memphis, the mobilization of King’s army of poor people was lagging. Then, with five weeks to go before the scheduled kickoff of the Washington campaign, Hosea Williams was lamenting the slow pace of recruitment. In a memo to SCLC staff, Williams, the campaign’s field director, wrote: “Yes, many meetings are being held, some money is being raised, but hardly anyone is being recruited for the long, hard drive in Washington.” Williams added that he was “very much disturbed” by the lack of progress.14
Money was being raised, but it was far from enough to meet the heavy costs they expected to incur in Washington. At the SCLC money had always been tight. In 1965, when its staff roster totaled 150 people, the budget was shy of a million dollars.15 To cover its expenses, the SCLC relied on the uneven flow of direct-mail appeals and King’s income as a writer and speaker. At times only emergency bailouts from labor unions or fund-raising performances by celebrities such as Harry Belafonte and Aretha Franklin kept the SCLC afloat.16
King was counting on the pastors of African American churches to promote the Washington campaign. Some were proving to be less supportive than he had expected. As the FBI would note in field reports, a group of 150 pastors King had convened in Miami to enlist as boosters in the antipoverty drive “had remained noncommittal” despite his impassioned plea for help.17
Even some of King’s long-devoted benefactors were abandoning him. Labor union dollars were barely trickling in, and King seemed at a loss what to do about it.18 The reasons varied: a shift of liberals’ attention from civil rights to Vietnam, a backlash against inner-city rioting, and doubts about the Poor People’s Campaign.19 So little money was coming in during February that William Rutherford, the executive director of the SCLC, wrote an urgent plea to Marlon Brando. Rutherford said that the SCLC’s needs were great, and he appealed to the celebrated actor to sponsor a “fundraising soiree” in Hollywood to support the antipoverty campaign.20 Years later, reflecting on the state of the SCLC’s finances in the spring of 1968, Ralph Abernathy would say, “We were getting ready to launch the largest campaign that ever had taken place within this country, the Poor People’s Campaign, and we just didn’t have the money.”21
The SCLC treasury had been far short of the needed sums in late February when King agreed to speak at a rally in Memphis for the striking garbage workers. The timing suggested that he might have scheduled the speech to prop up the SCLC’s finances as it embarked on the Poor People’s Campaign. Dramatizing the impoverished plight of the garbage workers could have inspired support for the campaign in the form of money and volunteers.
The budgetary picture brightened somewhat the next month. A fervent direct mail letter signed by King yielded a $15,000 cascade of checks in a single day.22 Volunteers were signing on in numbers that promised to exceed the minimum target of two hundred persons per city or state in some locations.23
But by the end of March, as the FBI recorded in a wiretap, Rutherford was warning about an alarming shortfall between receipts and the extraordinary expense to transport, feed, and shelter three thousand volunteers for weeks, perhaps months.24 What’s more, according to Rutherford, King was so concerned about the lack of progress in recruiting volunteers that he was reassigning Hosea Williams, Bernard Lafayette, James Bevel, and Andrew Young to devote themselves to that priority.
As King brooded about the deficit of money and volunteers, another question was nagging at him. How would the American public respond to the massive civil disobedience that he was planning? He knew it would not be easy to build the groundswell of public support that would cause Washington lawmakers to approve the multibillion-dollar antipoverty programs he was demanding. He would succeed only if he could win broad popular support for his sweeping plan to end poverty. At a retreat for SCLC staff at Ebenezer Church on King’s thirty-ninth birthday, January 15, 1968, he conceded that taxpayers might recoil against his plan. He said, “It’s really going to cost billions of dollars, and, as a result of that, many people find themselves resisting.”25
King knew too that powerful forces were already converging to oppose the Poor People’s Campaign. Out of public view President Johnson was demanding that King call the whole thing off. Publicly, referring obliquely to the expected protests in Washington, Johnson vowed that he would oppose lawlessness “in whatever form and in whatever guise.”26
In the article for Look magazine King acknowledged the roadblock that his legislative agenda would encounter in Congress. Calling it a “coalition-dominated, rural-dominated, basically Southern Congress,” he wrote, “There are Southerners there with committee chairmanships, and they are going to stand in the way of progress as long as they can.”27 The US Supreme Court, which had vindicated the movement’s right to free speech and assembly in a string of First Amendment cases, seemed to be tilting the other way. In Walker v. Birmingham, the high court upheld, on June 5, 1967, King’s conviction for violating an Alabama judge’s injunction barring him from leading a march.
Not known to King were the dirty tricks being readied by J. Edgar Hoover to thwart the Poor People’s Campaign. Hoover was intensifying the smear campaign against King that had been ongoing for years. He was ordering FBI agents around the country to cook up various schemes. One would falsely link King to the highly controversial Nation of Islam in order to derail fund-raising. Another would spread disinformation to muddle King’s speaking schedule and frustrate prospective volunteers. Yet a third would falsely warn that participants in the antipoverty mobilization would lose their welfare checks. A special agent pretending to be a businessman already had called the SCLC office in Detroit offering buses to transport volunteers to Washington. The FBI had no intention of providing buses. It was a ruse that would dishearten volunteers and might deter them from going to Washington altogether.28
Despite the melancholy that seemed to engulf King that Thursday afternoon, he emerged from his lethargy for brief spells of conversation and laughter. He turned chatty when lawyer Chauncey Eskridge and an SCLC aide stopped by. But King did not leave the room. He did not join his friend Billy Kyles and aide Jesse Jackson elsewhere at the Lorraine to sing along with bandleader Ben Branch. The band, an arm of Operation Breadbasket, had flown in from Chicago to play at the pro-strike rally scheduled for that night at Mason Temple. At the Lorraine the band was rehearsing gospel hymns. One of them was entitled “I’m So Glad Trouble Don’t Always Last,” which seemed aptly chosen as a tonic for the troubles in Memphis.”29
Abernathy, who had returned to Room 306 for a nap, rejoined King downstairs at about four o’clock. Not long after, Andrew Young knocked at the door. Davis opened, and Young bounded in. Davis would recount what happened next.
Young turned to King. “The judge says you better not march,” Young said. “They gonna lock you up if you march.”
Everyone laughed, except King. He said, tersely, “We’ll go on and march regardless of what they say.” He did not seem amused.
“Nah,” Young said. “We can march as long as it’s peaceful.”
In a flash King grabbed a pillow and pitched it at Young, who lobbed it back to him. Peals of laughter filled the room.
Young briefed King on the day’s events in court. A march, Lucius Burch had told Judge Brown, was certain to occur with or without King at the head of it. In crafty cross-examination, Burch had then maneuvered Police Director Holloman into conceding a central point. Holloman had admitted that he would prefer a march under King’s leadership committed to nonviolence than a march that proceeded without him. That line of argument had carried the day. Brown had said he would allow King to march provided he agreed to certain safeguards: there must be enough trained marshals on hand, and the organizers of the march must coordinate their plans with the police. Lawson and Young had assured the judge that King would abide by those terms.
It was about 5:30 when King told the people gathered in Room 201 of the Lorraine, “I want to go upstairs and freshen up.” He wanted time to dress before he left for dinner. King and the whole SCLC staff in Memphis were invited to the house of Billy Kyles and his wife, Gwen, for soul food. The dinner would precede the night’s rally at Mason Temple.
Back in their room, King and Abernathy had visions of soul food dancing in their heads. They knew Gwen Kyles to be an excellent cook. Imagining what food she might serve that night had King and Abernathy salivating. King said to Abernathy, “Ralph, call her up and ask her what she’s having.”30
“You’re not kidding, are you?” Abernathy replied.
“No,” King said. “Call her.”
Abernathy called Mrs. Kyles. She ticked off the menu: roast beef, asparagus, cauliflower, candied yams, pigs’ feet, and chitlins. Delighted by the menu, King went into the bathroom to shave. In King’s case shaving was a particularly onerous chore. In deference to his tender skin, he shaved not with a razor but a depilatory powder called “Magic Shave.” He had to plaster it on and wait for it to erode the hair.
While King was waiting for the laborious shaving procedure to run its course, Abernathy mentioned a scheduling conflict. On days Abernathy was scheduled to be in Washington, he had to preach at the weeklong revival of the West Hunter Street Baptist Church in Atlanta. Turning to Abernathy, King said, “Ralph, I would never think of going to Washington without you. West Hunter is the best church in the world. They’ll do anything for you. You go tell them you’re going to have a different kind of revival, one in which we are going to review the soul of this nation. Will you do it?” Sighing, Abernathy promised.
Billy Kyles knocked on the door to tell King that dinner was at six and to please hurry along. It was 5:55 p.m. King splashed some cologne on his face. He told Abernathy, “I’ll wait on the balcony,” and he exited the room.