CHAPTER 38

Memphis

February–April 1968

GULLY-WASHER storms plagued Elvis Presley’s escape on February 1. In poor visibility, the decoy limousine roared out of his Graceland mansion too fast to draw pursuit, but fans and reporters on stakeout scrambled in time to follow a crowded blue Cadillac that hid the singer and expectant Priscilla within his rowdy entourage called the Guys. Conflicting shouts urged driver Charlie Hodge to outrun labor pains and the chase caravan but not to risk the baby on slick roads. By afternoon, word of the impending delivery drew a hundred Elvis calls per hour through the switchboard at Baptist Hospital, some noting with delight that it was precisely nine months since the Las Vegas wedding. The Guys took over the physicians’ lounge to wait, and Assistant Police Chief Henry Lux announced that Elvis would be billed for two officers guarding a maternity suite on the fifth floor. One reporter found a patient who vacated the room next door to give the Presley clan extra space. “Tell him I moved for him,” said the mother of newborn Deena Castinelli, “and I wouldn’t mind him stopping by and saying hello before I leave.”

Elsewhere in Memphis, three men opened talks on the trouble in the city’s sewer and drains division. When P. J. Ciampa flew in for a stopover, T. O. Jones introduced himself with a retinue of union supporters, then escorted Ciampa downtown to show that a fired trash man could produce the national field director of the fast-growing American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Charles Blackburn explained to Ciampa that he had been director of public works less than two weeks after a career in the insurance business, but he thought there was a fair way to distribute the rainy day layoffs. Blackburn politely withheld from his job briefing a hard-nosed assessment that of several hundred trash collectors Jones claimed would support a union, only about thirty paid regular dues, and that the city would refuse to recognize a sanitation union regardless. He did say that overall labor policy was reserved for his friend, Mayor Henry Loeb, who preferred to handle such matters personally in open forum every Thursday. (Loeb answered all fifty-four citizens in line that afternoon, telling one delegation that the city garage could not afford to repair vehicles for the Shelby County Rescue Squad.) Ciampa offered to compose a letter about how other cities had established more efficient personnel agreements with AFSCME locals, which Blackburn agreed to receive, then excused himself. On the drive to catch a flight back to Washington, Ciampa confided to Jones why he thought this was enough for a first session. Moments later, two Public Works vans startled Jones by barreling across his path well above ambulance speed, their emergency flashers engaged. He tore after them to a scene of wailing disaster near the corner of Colonial and Quince.

Foreman Willie Crain’s five-man crew had headed for the dump in one of the early pushbutton compressor trucks that replaced the old flatbeds starting in 1957. Only two of the four collectors could squeeze into the driver’s cab after hauling their tubs on foot, and the two junior men normally jockeyed from handholds and footrests on the outside. They faced a hard choice in bad weather because city rules barred shelter stops in residential neighborhoods—after citizen complaints about unsightly “picnics” by the Negro sanitation workers—and torrential cloudbursts late Thursday drove them through side-loading slits into the huge storage cylinder itself, where a tight mound of garbage left only a small gap behind the pistonlike compacting plate. When Crain heard screams, he could not slam on the brakes, jump out, and disengage the pushbutton compressor fast enough. Investigators would conclude that a freak shift by an onboard shovel may have shorted wet wires to the separate motor. A witness looking through her kitchen window said she saw one man struggle almost out before his raincoat or something grabbed and pulled him back down head first, leaving parts of both legs exposed.

It was a gruesome chore to retrieve the two crushed bodies from the garbage packer and pronounce them dead at John Gaston Hospital. Echol Cole and Robert Walker soon became the anonymous cause that diverted Martin Luther King to Memphis for his last march. City flags flew at half-mast for them, but they never were public figures like Lisa Marie Presley, whose birth at 5:01 P.M. was being announced by her grandparents Gladys and Vernon. Cole and Walker would not be listed among civil rights martyrs, nor studied like Rosa Parks as the catalyst for a new movement. Their fate was perhaps too lowly and pathetic. Television newscasts ignored them, and the local black newspaper tried to ignite a more dignified scandal by branding the Memphis post office a “fortress of discrimination” that kept Negro employees beneath clerk posts in which they would handle money. Across town, the leading white newspaper emphasized technical efforts to prevent another truck malfunction. Its popular feature about the human dimensions of race—“Hambone’s Meditations”—remained a sore point with the NAACP but was widely defended as harmless and folk-wise. On February 2, the Commercial Appeal offered a minstrel cartoon with Hambone’s daily proverb: “Tom’s boy mus’ be one dem brain workers—he stan’ roun’ wid he han’s in he pocket all de time!!” Privately, T. O. Jones reminded his stunned members that city policy left the families of “unclassified workers” with no death or survivors’ benefits. Mayor Loeb bestowed $500 by special decree, but the pregnant widow Earline Walker made her mark to sign over one of Robert’s last two paychecks for cheap burial across the Mississippi line in Tallahatchie County, where they had been sharecroppers.

KING PREACHED “The Drum Major Instinct” at Ebenezer that Sunday, February 4. He freely adapted a sermon published under that title during his seminary years by evangelist Wallace Hamilton, based on the biblical story of two disciples who beseech Jesus for the most prominent eternal seats in heaven. Their desire springs from a universal impulse for distinction, said King—“this quest for recognition…this drum major instinct.” He pictured an itch to lead parades in everything from Freud’s ego theories to modern ads for whiskey and perfume. An extreme drum major “ends by trying to push others down to push himself up,” he warned, driving racism in culture and arrogance in nations. Yet Jesus in the Bible account does not rebuke James and John for their ambition itself, but teaches instead that true reward follows humble service. Here King’s message turned. “And the great issue of life,” he declared, “is to harness the drum major instinct.” He sketched the biography of supreme Christian sacrifice with clear echoes of his own turmoil, noting that “the tide of public opinion turned” against Jesus when he was still young. “They said he was an agitator,” said King. “He practiced civil disobedience. He broke injunctions.” Jesus was betrayed by friends, cursed, killed, and buried penniless in a borrowed tomb—but now after nineteen centuries “stands as the most influential figure that ever entered human history.” For all the worldly gloss about a “lord of lords,” King found nothing royal about Jesus: “He just went around serving.”

This was hardly the first time King flirted with martyrdom in a speech. One of the first profiles written about him during the bus boycott noted “a conspicuous thread of thanatopsis” in his private conversation as well. What emerged this Sunday was a brooding reverie on external and internal burdens from the drum major instinct. “And every now and then I think about my own death,” he told his congregation. He gave fitful instructions for the service—“tell them not to talk too long”—hoping someone would mention “that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to give his life serving others.” The eulogist should omit all his honors and attainments simply to testify perhaps that King tried to love enemies, comfort prisoners, “be right on the war question,” and feed the hungry. “Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major,” he cried, “say that I was a drum for justice! Say that I was a drum major for peace—I was a drum major for righteousness—and all of the other shallow things will not matter.” In thunderclap rhythm, with his distinctive voice blending ecstasy and despair, King finished the oration soon to become famous by the disembodied recording played at his funeral.

For the moment, King labored at close quarters to harness drum major instincts. He sent Ralph Abernathy, who was back from Asia, on a mission with his gift for blandishment. Abernathy pretended to confide in Hosea Williams that he had convinced King the only way to pull off the Washington poverty campaign was to “bring back Hosea Williams.” They collaborated on a new master plan for leadership in staggered phases, designating Williams the high-energy recruitment chief for rural areas, which eventually placated the first of SCLC’s three disaffected staff lieutenants.

King himself flew north on February 5 to parlay for support, but ran into what his hosts consciously prepared as “a grand piece of psychological warfare.” Thirty welfare mothers waited in the Chicago YMCA behind name placards that isolated King next to a woman with a grandchild in her lap. Beulah Sanders of New York interrupted King’s appeal by asking where he stood on the Kennedy amendments to H.R. 12080, and his mumbled responses brought specialized questions about welfare issues until King agreed meekly to listen. From one far corner, Andrew Young winced as the women “jumped on Martin like no one ever had before,” with lectures of extra impact, Young thought, because King was always subject to his mother’s natural authority more than the bluster of Daddy King. From another far corner, Bernard Lafayette rebelled to ask how anyone could accuse King of shirking the struggle of a group less than six months old. George Wiley, founder and executive director of the National Welfare Rights Organization, was the first black scholar to earn an Ivy League doctorate in chemistry. Squeezed out of CORE, he had considered a position with SCLC before launching NWRO with foundation grants, and Lafayette knew Wiley orchestrated this confrontation to promote his grassroots constituency of welfare recipients. Lafayette accosted each woman who scolded King, demanding to know where she had been when his home was bombed in Montgomery or his marches stoned there in Chicago. King kept quiet, but later teased the angel of mercy who had curtailed his whipping, and Wiley soon wrote Young with bargaining terms for a few NWRO women to join the camp-in against poverty.

King’s party flew into overlapping crises the same night in Washington, where the second nationwide mobilization of clergy gathered to oppose the war in Vietnam. A newly released CALCAV-sponsored book, In the Name of America, analyzed more than a thousand news reports indicating that U.S. war practice routinely violated international law in sixteen areas, including defoliation, aerial bombardment of civilians, and forced relocation of villagers. Its allegations of war crimes, which the State Department branded “absolutely unsupportable,” made front-page news against the shock from the continuing bloodshed of the Tet offensive. On sidewalks three blocks from the White House, a pro-war religious group protested the CALCAV mass meeting at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, and a minister among the hundred pickets said nuclear weapons would be justified “to preserve freedom and lessen the loss of lives.” Inside, by contrast, Rabbi Abraham Heschel asserted that “hardening of the heart is the suspension of freedom.” There would be greatness in common confession that Vietnam was wrong, Heschel pleaded, as “God Himself admitted that He made a mistake.” Last among the speakers, Andrew Young lamented a permeating mood of violence. “Guerilla warfare in the ghettos is a day-to-day conversation,” he said. Young urged the CALCAV audience not to blame circumstances or Lyndon Johnson for the poison of Vietnam. “Why is it that we want to lay it all on one poor Texas school teacher?” he asked. Every citizen has an ownership share in democracy, and must emulate the marching children who acted to redress its faults in Birmingham and Selma even as underage victims of segregation. “Ours has been the mildest and most respectable dissent,” said Young. “When are we really going to stand up and challenge the values of this country?”

Legal maneuvers intensified through the night over CALCAV’s plan to conduct a one-hour service for war dead at Arlington National Cemetery the next morning, February 6. Moments before the scheduled start, an emergency injunction from the U.S. Court of Appeals sustained a government petition to ban such “partisan” use of patriotic ground. Two rabbis rushed off to find a ceremonial Torah while Richard Fernandez and others gave modified instructions to 2,500 CALCAV members willing to cross the Potomac River on buses at noon. The rabbis joined the head of a wordless procession of eight abreast, hoisting their Torah scroll despite Jewish custom against bearing scripture into graveyards. When they halted before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, King shouted: “In this period of absolute silence, let us pray.” Reporters measured ensuing stillness in suspense to learn how far the clergy would push their risk of contempt of court; one described an eerie clicking of heels as soldiers changed the honor guard nearby. After six minutes, Heschel called out—“Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani?”—and a Catholic bishop gave a terse benediction for silent departure: “Let us go in peace. Amen.” News stories translated Heschel into English—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—pointing out that the Aramaic cry of Jesus in Mark’s Crucifixion story was in turn a quote from King David’s Book of Psalms.

King shuttled between the mobilization and the Presbyterian Church of the Redeemer, where his SCLC board was debating approval for the poverty campaign. In the car, he scanned last-minute dictation from Stanford theologian Robert McAfee Brown, then laid aside the drafted speech already released to the press. “I have to give it my own way,” he said, and he told CALCAV’s final plenary that the Vietnam intervention “has played havoc with the destiny of the whole world.” King spoke extemporaneously to returned marchers who overflowed New York Avenue Presbyterian: “I said some time ago—and the press jumped on me about it, but I want to say it today one more time, and I am sad to say it—we live in a nation that is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” His speech drifted into underlying unity between causes of peace and humanity—“When I say poor people, I am not only talking about black people”—then stopped abruptly. Newsweek said King “seemed preoccupied with plans for his ‘poor people’s mobilization.’” William Sloane Coffin closed the CALCAV protest with a sermon from Ezekiel: “You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor.”

The evening recess for SCLC’s board spared a convoy to negotiate privately with Washington’s Black United Front, a pilot group just created by Stokely Carmichael after his five-month tour of Third World countries. (U.S. intelligence agencies sent the White House a digest of his strident comments from Algeria to North Vietnam; the FBI compiled an alarmist secret dossier called “SNCC/Black Power”; lawyers wrangled over his confiscated passport.) Public silence since his return in December gave Carmichael an aura of mystery like Malcolm X, magnified by the spread of black power culture. Members of King’s entourage met hostile passage at the perimeter of the church summit, which one aide called “commandos occupying the place with walkie-talkies and bodyguards.” A white SCLC worker was rudely expelled along with reporters. Preachers were harassed as Uncle Toms, and Rutherford’s secretary left in tears from more personal disparagement. Seconds jousted informally. Hosea Williams renewed antagonisms from the Meredith march, saying SNCC leaders had accomplished nothing with black power except to feed off King’s reputation. A female SNCC veteran accused King of selling out the Selma movement when he turned around the second attempt to march beyond Pettus Bridge, which King hotly denied. He and Carmichael occupied a goodwill zone where they shrugged off the trappings of competition to reminisce about the movement. When King pitched the spring campaign, Carmichael applauded its focus on grassroots poverty but detected “serious tactical error.” By his analysis, the proposed multi-racial coalition missed a correct move toward black solidarity. Also, camp-in boldness risked trapping the poor without honorable retreat, and the underlying hope for national politics was misguided within a system he called fixed upon exploitation. After some debate, King appealed for a benevolent truce. “Well, if you are against this,” he said, “will you let us try?”

Carmichael postponed judgment while King wrestled his peers. A few SCLC board members worried that the poverty campaign would fail if perceived as an antidote to black power. Walter Fauntroy, the local SCLC representative, was himself a leader in Carmichael’s Black United Front. Rev. Jefferson Rogers, who hosted the board meeting, reconciled new trends of militant thought with his lifelong devotion to the mystical theologian Howard Thurman, and King’s approach seemed dated when the Amsterdam News of Harlem had just banished the word “Negro” for “black.” Other board members supported the Rustin position that demonstrations in Washington would only exacerbate public backlash and enrage the best civil rights President in history. The crossfire left King raw by the time Carmichael came to declare neutrality on Wednesday, February 7. The Black United Front would neither support nor oppose the Poor People’s Campaign, he said, and Carmichael vowed on principle not to criticize fellow black leaders in public. This was the best outcome King’s staff had hoped for, and they were nonplussed when he erupted against their satisfaction.

King berated them for agreeing glibly that Carmichael could ridicule nonviolence so long as he did not attack King. He said the priority should be to protect nonviolence—not him—with a vehemence that shook Bill Rutherford enough to seek advice. “Martin got very upset with me,” he complained over Stanley Levison’s wiretapped phone line, “and started shouting and cussing me out.” Rutherford fumbled to discern what made King so unhappy. “He said to me, ‘the enemy is violence, violence begets violence,’” Rutherford told Levison, “and he went into one of these preaching things. I didn’t react at all. I’m really pretty quiet.” He found the sudden fury both unnerving and peculiar, because to him the American Revolution and other wars so clearly proved good, and Levison offered comforting reasons why King was wrong. “The enemy are the forces keeping us from getting rights, and violence is one of their methods,” he explained. “So we try to develop a counterpoint to violence. But violence is not the enemy. What if they could keep everybody in servitude without using violence? Would Martin be for servitude?”

These were shadings of conviction at the heart of politics. Consensus among his bosom advisers left King isolated with his obsessive belief that nonviolence remained a force for freedom stronger than all the powers of subjugation. Late Wednesday, to a mass meeting of civil rights dignitaries at the Vermont Avenue Baptist Church, he preached against the grip of despair. “And if I can leave you with any message tonight,” said King, “I would say don’t lose hope…. It may look like we can’t get out of this thing now. It may appear that nonviolence has failed, and the nation will not respond to it. But don’t give up yet. Wait until the next morning.” He stayed overnight to address Washington’s Chamber of Commerce, arguing that the self-interest of wealthy Americans required opportunity among the poor, and fell so far behind schedule to New York that he nearly missed his national appearance on NBC’s Tonight Show. Harry Belafonte extended the film session at Rockefeller Center to include King in a broadcast that marked sensitive transitions in media history. King mixed small talk about his family and frantic schedule with frank thoughts on martyrdom and Vietnam. Belafonte, while holding superior ratings through the week as the spotlighted black substitute for entertainment icon Johnny Carson, survived a primitive scandal elsewhere in network television. When British singer Petula Clark placed a hand on Belafonte’s wrist to close a duet, representatives of the sponsoring Chrysler Corporation mounted a hushed campaign to snip her interracial touch from the finished broadcast.

King’s Tonight Show moment coincided with a signal tragedy in Orangeburg, South Carolina. All Star Bowling Lanes, a prime recreational facility for the rural town of twenty thousand, still maintained strict segregation despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and when students from Orangeburg’s two black colleges belatedly demanded service—eight years after the sit-ins of 1960—owner Harry Floyd successfully appealed for some five hundred troopers and National Guard soldiers to help police defend his property rights under state law. They repulsed would-be bowlers with some violence on February 6, then deployed two nights later to seal off the South Carolina State campus as students rallied outside behind a bonfire—some singing “We Shall Overcome,” others chanting “Your mama is a whore,” a few throwing projectiles. Loud volleys killed three students and sent twenty-seven others into the segregated emergency ward of Orangeburg Hospital, but public reaction stayed mute from the first AP bulletins that students had been hit “during a heavy exchange of gunfire.” The AP wire omitted subsequent corrections that no students fired weapons, and that nearly half the victims were shot in the back or the soles of their feet. Two reporters would write a haunted book about why the massacre story disappeared for lack of interest—or never registered—without even a mention in Time magazine. Quietly, Justice Department lawyers intervened to end the laggard segregation at the hospital, and they secured an order that made protest survivors the first black customers at All Star Bowling Lanes. Meanwhile, news followed a melodramatic theme of riot and retribution to South Carolina’s death row, where SNCC leader Cleveland Sellers was transferred with a bullet wound in the left shoulder. The governor’s spokesman pronounced him the outside agitator behind a black power insurrection in Orangeburg—“the biggest nigger in the crowd”—even though Sellers had retreated to his parents’ nearby home before his federal trial, becoming a peripheral adviser in the student bowling crisis, which he found anachronistic. In March, Sellers would draw the five-year maximum sentence for draft resistance, with another year added on state conviction for unspecified criminal activity at Orangeburg. By his final release in September of 1974, he had a new family, a Harvard master’s degree, and a laconic sense of recovery. “Being locked up for something I hadn’t done when my first child was born was frustrating,” he recalled in a 1990 memoir.

King sent a lonely Orangeburg appeal to U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark: “We demand that you act now to bring to justice the perpetrators of the largest armed assault undertaken under color of law in recent Southern history.” He relied on private reports from college administrators who had opposed the student demonstrations, but three FBI agents hamstrung any federal investigation with false statements that they did not witness the incident personally. King moved on to recruit poverty volunteers Saturday in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he fell briefly ill from exhaustion, and summoned seventeen top staff people to Atlanta for a rare Sunday showdown on February 11, one week after his “Drum Major” sermon. He listed the blunt failures of preparation: lackadaisical staff work, negligible progress, weak recruits. He wanted a legion of hard-core poor for Washington, but saw only a few half-committed middle-class young people. “I throw this out to get us shocked enough to start doing the job,” King said, adding that he would rather cancel the April campaign than launch a halfhearted effort. Staff members vowed to do better. Bernard Lafayette raised the fallback option of delay.

In Memphis, public works director Charles Blackburn promised to review a $6.97 payroll deduction for the replacement rain gear of sanitation worker Gene Falkner, but he saw no room to bargain on the larger items, including pay raises, union recognition, safety equipment, rainy days, or health benefits. “Well, the men want an answer,” said a union steward who invited city officials along to explain their stance to the men. This gave Blackburn his first inkling that sanitation workers were assembled and waiting on a Sunday night. He saw no reason to repeat himself, nor any pressing danger, but the stewards’ report touched off floor speeches about the lessons of Echol Cole and Robert Walker. “This was a strike that we called,” a veteran trash collector would remember. “Labor didn’t call it. We called it.” On Monday morning, 930 of the 1,100 sanitation workers walked off the job with 214 of the 230 affiliated men in the sewer and drains division. From AFSCME headquarters in Washington, P. J. Ciampa dampened the euphoria of local leader T. O. Jones by chewing him out for basic errors: a wildcat action without a treasury or plan, begun in winter when garbage does not stink, against a mayor too new to have many enemies. Still, Ciampa flew in with union supporters by afternoon, when Mayor Loeb pronounced the strike illegal and vowed to hire replacements if necessary. “Let no one make a mistake about it,” Loeb declared. “The garbage is going to be picked up in Memphis.”

PRESIDENT JOHNSON convened his own Sunday night council in the White House residence. Like most Americans, his advisers scarcely noticed news squibs about Orangeburg or Memphis labor trouble, but the second week of Tet rattled experts no less than average citizens—perhaps more so—beneath a careful public posture of control. Officials of divergent views swayed daily to the point of vertigo inside a shifting government. Senator Robert Byrd, a staunch supporter, had alarmed the White House with forceful reasons why Tet proved everything in Vietnam was wrong. “I do not want to argue with the president,” Byrd privately told Johnson, “but I am going to stick with my convictions.” On Friday, when General Westmoreland had cabled secretly for “reinforcements at any time they can be made available,” Clark Clifford, the incoming Secretary of Defense, questioned the “strange contradiction” of sending more troops to answer an enemy offensive already pronounced a catastrophic failure. The Sunday war council puzzled over the wording of Westmoreland’s cable that he would “welcome” reinforcements. How badly did he need them?

On Monday morning, February 12, after back-channel exchanges with the Pentagon, Westmoreland declared his need “desperate” and the time window small. “We are now in a new ball game,” he cabled Washington, “where we face a determined, highly disciplined enemy, fully mobilized to achieve a quick victory.” President Johnson regathered his advisers to ask what could have changed so drastically since Friday. He said the two Westmoreland cables did not seem written by the same person. Some military leaders supported Johnson’s nagging worry that Tet was a diversion for the real target at Khe Sanh. Others thought the enemy was prolonging suicidal losses to cripple the “badly mauled” South Vietnamese army, which made White House advisers fret more about Americanized war. But they approved the immediate call for six new battalions, and Johnson sent his top general to assess Westmoreland’s further requests in person. News of the surprise escalation paralleled the renewal of the siege at Khe Sanh. “More exploding rockets sent showers of hot fragments zinging,” said the AP dispatch. “The Americans dove for cover…. One prayed, a few cried, some were unconscious.” General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, generated more front-page headlines before leaving for Vietnam: “Wheeler Doubts Khesanh Will Need Atom Weapons.” Johnson himself sought counsel from former President Eisenhower, who urged deference to Westmoreland as the general carrying the gravest responsibility in American history. Johnson asked how that could be, given that Eisenhower once commanded ten times as many soldiers, and Eisenhower replied that World War II was different. “Westmoreland doesn’t know who the enemy is,” he said, “and there is not any clearly defined front.” The President also toured military installations in that third week of the Tet offensive, when American casualties set a new weekly high of 543 killed and 2,547 wounded. He reported back to his foreign policy team that talks with departing paratroopers in North Carolina “really melted me and brought me to my knees.” He described a miserable Saturday night of insomnia aboard a Vietnam-bound troopship off California. “About three o’clock, and every hour after, I went to the door and saw this big hulk of a Marine,” said Johnson. “I kept telling him, ‘I am freezing.’ He kept saying, ‘Yes, sir,’ but he never moved.”

While Johnson toured, Hosea Williams barnstormed the South in a twin-engine Cessna 406, whose pilots were most unsettled to see that Martin Luther King was an unnamed passenger on the charter contract fobbed off by another company. A writer for the New York Times Magazine probed King in transit on press themes. Had he abandoned moral issues for class struggle? Did he know black militants were scoffing at nonviolence? Landing in Jackson on February 15, they drove to the first mass meeting at the Mt. Beulah Center of Edwards, Mississippi. FBI agents and state “sovereignty” investigators followed as King detoured past an all-black junior high school where squealing students waited outside to see him. Williams and Andrew Young sometimes fanned out to separate caucuses of poor people undecided about the new campaign. The Cessna reached Birmingham Thursday night for King to salute veterans from the breakthrough freedom marches of 1963. “I’m here to solicit your support!” he cried. “I want to know if you’re going to Washington.” The next morning, King told a packed house at Selma’s Tabernacle Baptist what a blessing it was to be met at the tiny airport by a black deputy sheriff instead of Jim Clark’s posse. He greeted Amelia Boynton, “mother” of the local voting rights movement, and Marie Foster, who still taught literacy for citizenship—also Rev. Lorenzo Harrison, who had fled the Lowndes County Klan into Brown Chapel a week before Bloody Sunday. “Believe in your heart that you are God’s children,” King told the crowd. “And if you are a child of God, you aren’t supposed to live in any shack.” Offstage, Rev. M. C. Cleveland discreetly presented a bill for three-year-old damages to First Baptist Church, including windows smashed by the posse and eight chairs ($36) broken by the voting rights pilgrims.

Young pulled at King to leave, and they flew over the Highway 80 march route from Selma to Montgomery. From the pulpit of Maggie Street Baptist Church, King introduced Mrs. Johnnie Carr, who headed the improvement association formed during the bus boycott, and acknowledged Rev. A. W. Wilson of Holt Street Baptist, “who pastors the church where we had our first big mass meeting,” said King, “and I see Brother Marlow and Brother James and Brother Tom…” He reviewed a dozen years from the stirring of Rosa Parks through the glory of civil rights into riot and war. “I’ve agonized over it, and I’m trying to save America,” he said. “And that’s what you’re trying to do if you will join this movement.” He exhorted the middle-class crowd to organize contributions through their churches, which added a tone of reproach to his favorite ecumenical parable from Luke. “Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich,” said King. “Dives went to hell because he passed by [the beggar] Lazarus every day but never really saw him. Dives went to hell because he allowed Lazarus to become invisible…. And I’ll tell you, if America doesn’t use its vast resources and wealth to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor nations, and between the rich and poor in this nation, it too is going to hell.”

He lingered briefly with deacon R. D. Nesbitt, who had hired him for Dexter Avenue Baptist in 1954. During the Cessna flight home, when the magazine writer asked on camera about the constant threats of jail and ambush, King described his two scariest memories—one from the march “through that narrow street” in Chicago as thousands of screaming people threw rocks even from the trees, when his police guards themselves ducked at once, the other from the commemorative march to the Neshoba County courthouse in Mississippi, when voices growled that the killers of the three young civil rights workers were standing close behind. “I just gave up,” said King, but his talk of surrender to death turned playful. “Well, it came time to pray,” he intoned, “and I sure did not want to close my eyes. Ralph said he prayed with his eyes open.” In Atlanta, King switched to commercial flights for hurried engagements in Detroit before preaching at Ebenezer February 18 on a theme for the poverty campaign—the familiar parable of the Good Samaritan. King confessed that fear had made him bypass needy strangers on dangerous roads in modern Atlanta, falling short of the Samaritan’s example. “And until mankind rises above race and class and nations,” he told the congregation, “we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own power and instruments.” Observers noted an air of frantic melancholy about King, who rushed on to Miami Sunday night.

J. Edgar Hoover secretly notified the White House that King was hosting black preachers from major cities at Miami’s “plush new Sheraton-Four Ambassadors Hotel,” courtesy of the Ford Foundation. Prompted by President Johnson, National Security Adviser Walt Rostow asked McGeorge Bundy if he realized he was sponsoring a weeklong event likely to promote attacks on Vietnam policy along with “massive civil disobedience” in Washington. By coincidence, the front page of Sunday’s New York Times broke news of a major shift by the Ford Foundation to fund programs on race. “The first conclusion I offer is that the most deep-seated and destructive of all the causes of the Negro problem is still the prejudice of the white man,” wrote Bundy in a lofty but introspective president’s report. “Prejudice is a subtle and insidious vice. It can consume those who think themselves immune to it. It can masquerade as kindness, sympathy, and even support.” The Times story did not mention specific initiatives such as the leadership conference in Miami, where King somberly welcomed 150 ministers on Monday, February 19. “The problem is that the rising expectations for freedom and democracy have not been met,” he said. “And interestingly enough, in a revolution when hope diminishes, the bitterness is often turned toward those who originally built up the hope.” Death threats were so specific—a bomb warning into the Miami FBI office, a sniper boast from a caller who asked the hotel for King’s room number—that police security officers convinced King to miss two days of the proceedings under guard.

JAMES LAWSON declined the trip to Miami, leaving him and King mildly disappointed in each other. King had hoped the preachers gathered by the Ford Foundation would take workshops from the movement’s most gifted teacher of nonviolent theory and tactics, and he still wanted to pursue with Lawson a job to rebuild the SCLC staff. Lawson, for his part, doubted from prior assignments that King really could bring himself to address battle fatigue and dissipation among his young aides, or correct the bullying of underlings by Hosea Williams. He remained a loner within SCLC’s prevailing Baptist culture, whose freelance pastors lacked patience for Lawson’s delicate side negotiations with the United Methodist bishop in charge of his job placement. So Lawson stayed home to monitor the sanitation strike in Memphis.

The aspiring union workers had suffered badly in public relations. Local editorials rallied behind the city government against the effrontery of the strikers and the health hazard of garbage piles on the streets. News broadcasts made permanent replacement collectors seem swift and inevitable: “The city hired 47 new sanitation workers today, turned down an estimated 30 other applicants, and is expecting ‘many, many more’ to apply tomorrow.” Bumper stickers appeared on Memphis cars—“CIAMPA GO HOME”—after AFSCME’s site representative spoke sharply in televised negotiations. (“Oh, put your halo in your pocket and let’s get realistic!” he told Mayor Loeb.) Union officials made an emergency decision that the gruff son of a Pennsylvania coal miner was culturally unsuited to a Southern campaign, and Jerry Wurf, AFSCME’s international president, assumed command in the strike’s second week. Mayor Loeb promptly escorted Wurf to the annual Memphis banquet for the National Conference of Christians and Jews, where Loeb drew thunderous ovations above barely polite reception for the union executive. To Wurf, Loeb’s intended lesson was to demonstrate that he had no exploitable weakness among prominent citizens as a converted Jew, recently confirmed into the Episcopal Church, and that Wurf of New York could expect little rebound sympathy from fellow Jews in Memphis. At six feet five inches, Loeb stood a head taller than Wurf. A graduate of elite schools—Andover Academy and Brown University—Loeb had commanded a PT boat in the Navy, then inherited a chain of businesses from a father he said would turn over in his grave if he recognized a union. When Wurf asked in private what made sanitation workers different from bus drivers, teachers, and police officers with local unions, Loeb vowed to protect his workers from outside exploitation. When Wurf offered to donate the first year’s dues to Loeb’s favorite charity, the mayor replied that the strike was illegal and defeated already. He would discuss issues only after the men went back to work.

Lawson met Wurf at the first public forum, on Thursday, February 22. Prodded by intermediaries from all sides, City Council members sought a face-saving compromise between Loeb’s demand for surrender and the union’s package of reforms, but their hearing stalled over recognition to speak. One by one, striking workers deferred to union officials, each of whom was gaveled to silence. “We insist on hearing from the men themselves!” said the chairman, and the standoff grew raucous until the union side pretended to capitulate. From their daily rally at the United Rubber Workers Hall, more than seven hundred strikers soon entered the ornate council chamber of rosewood panel and scarlet carpet. They shouted assent when leaders asked if they wanted the union. From the floor, Lawson and other local preachers sparred with council members about whether they could hear the men now. “I have to walk both sides of the street,” declared the exasperated committee chairman, Fred Davis, one of three black members on the City Council of thirteen, hinting plaintively that he must lean far toward Mayor Loeb’s requirements to get votes for any resolution. Davis tried vainly to thin the crowd by half to meet fire codes, then to adjourn the deadlocked hearing, but the strikers broke defiantly into the movement song: “We shall not be moved!” They sang “God Bless America,” and preachers interspersed prayers with impromptu sermons all afternoon in what became a mass meeting of occupation. A white man from the Tennessee Council on Human Relations sent out for a hundred loaves of bread and thirty pounds of bologna. Rev. Ezekiel Bell, the only black pastor in the Memphis Presbytery, called his church kitchen for mustard and utensils. Eight women used the city attorney’s table to make sandwiches they wrapped ceremoniously in paper napkins for dispersal by hand. “We cast our bread upon the water!” called out William Lucy, a black deputy to Wurf.

Some 150 officers surrounded the muffled noise of City Hall in police cruisers, waiting for orders as messengers shuttled between caucuses and the Davis committee, which remained besieged on the council platform. Ten days into the strike, only twenty of two hundred sanitation trucks were in service. Replacement workers were proving difficult to find or keep, despite the city’s influx of sharecroppers displaced by the nearly total mechanization of cotton farms. Boy Scout troops spearheaded civic drives of curbside cooperation to help the overmatched replacement crews, but they stopped short of removing trash themselves. With backlogged piles in front of some downtown businesses, voices at the Memphis Country Club were muttering that public unions were a minor cost of business, and the embattled Public Works Committee resolved to propose its bare-bones settlement without a hearing. Chairman Davis completed less than two sentences of the announcement at 5:38 P.M.

“The men were on their feet cheering,” wrote Memphis historian Joan Beifuss. “Jubilantly they thronged the aisles.” Leaders handed out chunks of leftover food as mementos, and cleanup crews busily swept up crumbs behind a happy departure. On Friday, overflow crowds forced a shift into Ellis Auditorium for a vote by the full City Council, and more than a thousand sanitation workers arrived in their best clothes—suits and baseball hats, starched shirts and fedoras, Sunday shoes and tan raincoats. Dignitaries and curious newcomers came, too, but the prospects for a settlement had chilled overnight. The front page of the Memphis Commercial Appeal emblazoned incendiary headlines: “Committee Surrenders but Loeb Holds Firm/ Strike Boosters Hold Picnic in Chambers of City Council.” Stories described the event “as if it were a raid by barbaric Visigoths,” a critic would write. The editorial cartoon presented a fat Sambo caricature of T. O. Jones perched on a garbage can labeled “City Hall Sit-In,” with fumes curling upward to spell a message: “Threat of Anarchy.”

Council members entered long enough to pass a resolution delegating “sole authority” in sanitation matters to Mayor Loeb, then filed out by a rear exit under police escort. They left a stunned silence behind, followed by puzzled questions and scattered boos. Wurf came forward with groping explanations that the promised settlement vote must have been aborted, but the public address system went dead before he or local leaders could respond. In confusion, James Lawson noticed white councilman Jerred Blanchard peek back into the auditorium. “Jerry,” he pleaded, “could you give us a microphone?” Blanchard had voted for the substitute resolution, angry over yesterday’s abuse of Fred Davis, but he regretted skulking out the back door. From a law student’s memory of one courtroom argument in the 1940s by the legendary NAACP attorney Charles Houston, Blanchard retained a stab of conscience about the attitudes toward nearly half the city population. Now he rushed off to say the public address system should be restored, if only to prevent pandemonium. (For such gestures, Blanchard said, he became known as the council’s “fourth nigger.”) Loeb refused on the ground that the sanitation workers should leave, not talk. A white lawyer bolted in to warn that it was going too far for police units to attack the workers in retreat. When Loeb denied any such plan, the lawyer cited his own eyes—“Well, the police have their gas masks on”—and the mayor confirmed quickly by radio that masked units indeed had formed several rows deep across Main Street, linked arm-in-arm. Lawson and Jerry Wurf were imploring the police commanders to let the angry, devastated men walk together to a church.

New police instructions allowed the marchers to move out four abreast in the right lane. Cruisers rolled slowly beside the front ranks to make sure no strays crossed the center line, while foot patrols stretched parallel to the marchers behind. The police formation, which magnified the tension, conflicted with the stated goal to keep northbound Main Street open for traffic. Toward Gayoso Avenue, two blocks before a turn into Beale Street’s famous blues corridor, cruisers angled rightward to pinch marchers toward the curb, and a piercing shriek emitted from Gladys Carpenter, a City Council employee known for her journeys to march in Selma and Mississippi. When sanitation workers jumped to lift a car tire off her foot, officers jumped from the rocking cruiser to spray incapacitating Mace. Within seconds, radio reports triggered general mayhem from an order to disperse the procession. Seventy-two-year-old O. B. Hicks crumpled to the sidewalk from a “blinding chemical.” Jacques Wilmore, who begged an officer to stop hitting the bloodied Hicks, flashed credentials as regional director for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, only to be Maced himself, and Hicks would be hospitalized under arrest for night-riding. Hundreds of strikers fled in panic, but some were dragged toward jail on their bellies. James Lawson looked back in time to see a solid line of officers charging behind truncheons and spray cans of Mace, then choked from several doses at close range. He recovered enough to lead a remnant of the marchers nearly three miles to safety in the [Bishop Charles] Mason Temple, the mother congregation for the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ.

P. J. Ciampa came there late. After stragglers pulled him semiconscious from the sidewalk gutter, they found water to rinse Mace from his eyes, then flagged down a passing sedan. Hustled into the back seat, Ciampa blinked at the strange sight of polished spats on an imposing black preacher who moaned in the throes of conversion. For Rev. H. Ralph Jackson, it became his mantra that a lifetime of dutiful trust “went down the drain” the instant police officers gassed him like others in clerical garb. He had avoided “race trouble” always to climb the hierarchy of the AME church. No fewer than nine AME bishops had just witnessed Mayor Henry Loeb dedicate the grand new headquarters building for the AME Minimum Salary Division to support needy ministers, with effusive praise for its national director, and Jackson burst into Mason Temple to say Memphis police never would attack white preachers like that, without even speaking. “This happened to me because I was black,” he proclaimed. Astonished wags quipped that the foremost Uncle Tom of Memphis was reborn a lion of protest. He joined leaders Ezekiel Bell and James Lawson to tell counterparts in the white clergy that the labor struggle was now a test of civil rights. A lone white minister was whisked forward to read scripture when he ventured by surprise into the next mass meeting. Inspired by the martyred German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rev. Bill Aldridge tried to articulate why Christian obligation must override passions of race or class, but exposure first made him shiver in every culture. (“Goodness knows why I was there,” he recalled.) Distressed members of his prestigious Presbyterian congregation circulated letters stipulating that their assistant pastor’s sojourn among the garbage workers “does not represent the majority of people at Idlewild Church.”

IN MIAMI, a Ford Foundation observer reported confidentially to McGeorge Bundy that SCLC’s conference on urban ministry subsided from chaos into lessons led by the spirit. He said young James Bevel, “who breathes fire and smoke,” preached early in the week on the structure of slums “like a man unprepared to accept any shred of the present American system,” and Daniel Moynihan had the misfortune to follow “in an atmosphere of almost total hostility” toward his famous report on pathology in Negro families. Moynihan became “unusually timid,” added the observer, taking refuge in abstractions that worsened his reception, “but he did make a speech before a group of black ministers and got out alive.”* Subsequent presentations—notably by Alvin Pitcher of Chicago and Virgil Wood of Boston—challenged the preachers with rare models of church-based mobilization for education and employment. Rev. C. T. Vivian quoted one voice from a survey of attitudes toward the evangelical slum church: “I have shouted until my garter-holders have come loose…but it didn’t change the conditions under which I live, so I don’t shout no more.” On Friday, February 23, King reprised his determination late in 1964 to leave the Nobel Prize mountaintop for the valley of Selma. “And the valley calls us,” he said. “We will be returning to valleys filled with men and women who know the ache and anguish of poverty…filled with thousands and thousands of young people who’ve lost faith in America.” He preached again on Lazarus and Dives. (“Hell is the pain you inflict upon yourself for refusing God’s grace.”) “I want you to go back and tell our brothers and sisters to wait until the next morning—don’t give up too early,” he said. “Tell the black nationalists, who want to give up on nonviolence, don’t give up yet.” He exhorted the preachers “as we leave Miami to go out and prophesy,” then ducked away to New York for an evening speech.

Managers at the Four Ambassadors advanced numerous polite reasons to head off a songfest of farewell hymns by their SCLC guests, but skeptics sensed corporate nerves badly frayed by the thought of black preachers massed in the new cathedral lobby. During delicate negotiations, a check-in telephone call brought emergency news of the Mace riot on Main Street—“Oh Lord, all hell’s broke out here”—which caused ministers Samuel “Billy” Kyles and Benjamin Hooks of Memphis to cancel family trips and book the next flight home. They had time to join about fifty remaining colleagues around the Sheraton’s piano for movement songs and spirituals in harmony, closing with “We Shall Overcome,” and tension dissipated to the point that one hotel patron inquired about hiring the ensemble to sing on the beach.

King reached Carnegie Hall to address a hundredth-birthday celebration for the late scholar W. E. B. Du Bois. Ossie Davis presided. Pete Seeger sang in appreciation, and King sketched a life that had spanned nearly a century of upheaval, starting in 1868 just as Congress impeached Abraham Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson. Among luminous books by DuBois, King cited Black Reconstruction in America for puncturing the hoary myth that “civilization virtually collapsed” while ex-slaves could vote and hold office, by chronicling the introduction of public schools among many institutions sturdy enough to survive white supremacy’s restoration by force. DuBois proved, he said, “that far from being the tragic era white historians described, it was the only period in which democracy existed in the South.” King’s tribute covered DuBois the NAACP founder and early crusader against segregation, down to the defiant expatriate whose death was announced during the 1963 March on Washington. “We cannot talk of Dr. DuBois without recognizing that he was a radical all of his life,” said King. “Some people would like to ignore the fact that he was a Communist in his later years.”

Stanley Levison candidly bemoaned King’s Carnegie Hall performance. “I’ve never heard Martin read anything as badly,” he told friends over his wiretapped phone. He said King had used a prepared text, strayed from proven oratorical themes, and matched rather than elevated the tone of “the deadest meeting I’ve ever seen.” For Levison, the DuBois event was emblematic of despair in progressive circles. “The people are depressed,” he said. “They feel that nobody has answers to riots in the streets. They feel frustrated about Vietnam.” Levison thought the depression was unwarranted but real, like the paradox of DuBois, who could be recognized either for a long arc of achievement or his bitter, halfhearted flight into Communist ideology.

Levison groped for bearings when radicals and rulers alike boiled over in every direction about race, violence, and democracy. In Oakland, California, Stokely Carmichael, after a sensational “Free Huey” speech on the birthday of Huey Newton, had just been named “Prime Minister of the Black Nation” in a fantasy merger between remnants of SNCC and the Black Panther Party. Carmichael had turned hard against his own years of creative privation in the voting rights movement. “The vote in this country is, has been, and always will be irrelevant to the lives of black people!” he told the Oakland rally for Newton. He posed for photographs with sunglasses and a rifle, calling for solidarity with Cuba and North Vietnam, but he turned also against any “white” Marxist anchor for political thought, in part because Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh had rejected his request for separate black leadership. “Communism is not an ideology suited for black people, period, period, period,” Carmichael declared. “Socialism is not an ideology fitted for black people.” He embraced color—“Black nationalism must be our ideology”—with little but militant rhetoric to govern internecine competition. His SNCC rival James Forman became “Foreign Minister” by vowing personal retribution against whites on an enormous scale—“The sky is the limit if you kill Huey Newton!”—but soon wound up menaced himself by Black Panthers with pistols. From jail, after a gun battle with police, Newton wanted Carmichael to wear Panther leather instead of African robes, and Eldridge Cleaver sneered at Carmichael as a pretender with a “suitcase full of African souvenirs.” Willie Ricks sighed: “SNCC people were the bad niggers in town, and then the Panthers jumped up and started saying, ‘We are badding you out.’”

In Washington, the nation’s leaders fragmented over real violence. On Tuesday, February 27, they gathered secretly in shock over a cable from Vietnam requesting 205,179 more U.S. soldiers above the current ceiling of 535,000. “This is unbelievable and futile,” numbly observed White House counselor Harry McPherson, who rarely spoke in military meetings. New Defense Secretary Clifford feared popular revolt against pouring troops down a rat hole. That same evening, CBS News televised the respected anchor Walter Cronkite from the rubble of the formerly serene Vietnamese imperial capital of Hue, which Tet attackers had held for twenty-six days under massive U.S. bombardment. “What about those fourteen Vietcong we found in the courtyard behind the post office?” Cronkite asked his viewers, doubting that civilian or military casualties could ever be tabulated. “They certainly hadn’t been buried,” he said. Cronkite glumly announced a “speculative, personal, subjective” judgment from his inspection tour of the war zone: “To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory, conclusion.”

President Johnson returned from his Texas ranch after midnight, doubly shaken. Cronkite’s broadcast assured a drop in war support among moderate Americans, and the giant troop request risked defection even by war hawks in Congress. Early Wednesday morning, General Wheeler of the Joint Chiefs rushed straight from his transpacific flight to the White House, where he told Johnson’s war cabinet that the battle initiative was conceded to the enemy in the Vietnamese countryside, and that Westmoreland lacked the reserves to hold cities unless he abandoned several provinces. Wheeler’s manner was graver still than the cable he had sent ahead from Vietnam, which drove the President to exaggerated caution. “Buzz, we are very thankful that you are back,” he said gently. Johnson commanded strict secrecy while he thrashed for options, but the search for new solutions collided with war weariness. Mendel Rivers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, irascibly said the administration should authorize nuclear weapons or withdraw. Among key senators, Henry “Scoop” Jackson warned that he would balk at any troop shipment big enough to require new taxes or a call-up of the Reserves, and the President stooped to subtle provocation with his powerful friend Richard Russell of Georgia—saying war critic William Fulbright now put Russell among his converted Vietnam doves.

“Well, did he call my name?” asked the prickly Russell, who denounced the war in private but scarcely spoke to Fulbright, whom he regarded as a prima donna.

“It was just enough, like an old cow if you ever milked in the country days,” Johnson coyly replied. “Just as you get the bucket full, she dragged her tail through the top of it and leaves a little streak. That is the way he dragged your name through it.”

Hard upon Cronkite and the Wheeler crisis came the report of the Kerner Commission on riots, which paralyzed even Johnson’s guile. He seethed first that news outlets jumped the release date with feverish headlines on March 1: “Panel on Civil Disorders Calls for Drastic Action to Avoid 2-Society Nation/ Whites Criticized/ Vast Aid to Negroes Urged, with New Taxes if Needed.” The President steadfastly ignored an avalanche of publicity about the Kerner Commission, which found no political conspiracy behind the urban riots of 1967, and traced them primarily to racial deprivation. “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto,” declared the report. “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it…. White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.” Aides bravely warned the President that refusal to acknowledge his own commission was a publicity blunder, especially since the Kerner recommendations so closely paralleled his “racial redress” speech at Howard University in 1965. But it was too painful for Johnson to rationalize or deny that his domestic agenda was lost to a Vietnam budget more than three times what his commission urged for investment in cities. Instead, he escaped Washington with a stealthy new travel regimen to avoid hordes of antiwar protesters—no advance schedule for reporters, short notice to intended hosts—and turned away from questions about the riots.

The Kerner Commission enjoyed a record burst of popular interest—with 740,000 paperback copies sold in the first eleven days of March—then vanished without official notice. Potentates in Congress dismissed the idea of helping cities when they could not even pass a small surtax to pay for Vietnam, and one television network soon broadcast a prime-time news special, What Happened to the Riot Report? From the opening fanfare, what galled President Johnson most was the Kerner report’s signature sentence: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” History had reversed course! The report baldly stated that American race relations were growing more segregated and stratified, which to Johnson was catchy but insidious slander. If the civil rights era was counterproductive, then historic commitments since Brown v. Board of Education were empty and liberal democracy itself futile. Together with Tet, the report left in near ruins both his war and his peace paths to advance freedom. Johnson’s fury was so strong that he could not bring himself to sign routine thank-you letters for the eleven Kerner Commission members, including stalwart friends Roy Wilkins and I. W. Abel, president of the United Steelworkers. “I’d be a hypocrite,” said Johnson. He ordered his staff to hide or destroy the unsigned drafts.

JAMES LAWSON made King laugh with calculations that Roy Wilkins’s ego would not allow him to follow King into Memphis, because the inevitable fall-off in audience would reflect poorly on him, but Lawson thought he could persuade Wilkins to be the first national speaker. Memphis was an NAACP town, and the local NAACP leaders had endorsed the fundamental cause of the garbage strikers before the Mace attacks of February 23. For ten days since, more than a hundred local black preachers organized to join strikers in protest marches to City Hall every morning and afternoon, with nightly mass meetings in churches across the city. It was the broadest coalition ever in Memphis, Lawson reported by telephone, with the energy of movements they had experienced together from Nashville and Albany to Selma, but all he wanted now was permission to say he had invited King. This would help lure Wilkins.

King seized the reprieve, pleading exhaustion from his own labors. Only a handful of reporters turned out in Atlanta on Monday, March 4, to hear him postpone the starting date for SCLC’s “nonviolent poor people’s march on Washington.” Leaders would begin “a lobby-in against Congress” on April 22, King disclosed, when a simultaneous “mule train” of three thousand pilgrims would set out from Mississippi to reinforce them. Details remained vague, as there might be more than one mule train, and King promised only that the legislative agenda would resemble the new Kerner Commission proposals. “It may be,” he said, “that in one or two instances we are stronger than they are.” King seemed unfazed by reports that federal authorities were mobilizing a backup force of ten thousand MPs to contain him, but he escaped to Mexico on Tuesday for a rest. In Memphis, that afternoon’s march to City Hall ended with the first planned sit-in against the suspended negotiations. Fearing Mace, first-time demonstrators weakly chanted, “We want arrest,” and managed to sing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” Officers hauled off NAACP leader Maxine Smith, possessor of degrees from Spelman and Middlebury colleges, along with several preachers and more than a hundred sanitation workers. On the way to jail, Lawson told reporters he had invited King to Memphis.

King’s gloomy distraction pushed friends to the brink of alarm. He preached at Ebenezer on “Unfulfilled Dreams,” clinging to the Bible’s message of consolation when King David of Israel realized he would never live to see a temple built in Jerusalem: “You did well that it was in your heart.” King identified with crushed hopes. Bullets had ended Gandhi’s hope to witness independent India, he said, and “Paul never got to Spain.” People constantly fell short both on great dreams for the world and intimate promises to redeem their character. “You don’t need to go out this morning saying that Martin Luther King is a saint,” he cried. “Oh, no. I want you to know this morning that I am a sinner like all of God’s children.” He longed from the pulpit to hear the comfort of David: “It is well that it is within thine heart. It’s well that you are trying. You may not see it. The dream may not be fulfilled, but…thank God this morning that we do have hearts to put something meaningful in.”

The flight to Acapulco was so sudden that no hotel could be reserved, and King complained oddly and persistently that he did not get into the Las Brisas resort where Luci Johnson had spent her honeymoon. Ralph Abernathy soon wangled rooms there by invoking King’s Nobel celebrity, whereupon King refused to leave El Presidente because the staff workers had made such a fuss over him. Abernathy kept rooms in both hotels, but King slept little in either. He stared alone from a high balcony until nearly dawn and evaded Abernathy’s questions about what was wrong—pointing enigmatically to a rock in Acapulco harbor, then singing “Rock of Ages.” His conduct alarmed Abernathy enough to make discreet inquiries about whether the FBI may have threatened King directly again, but he found no such reports.

In Washington, Director Hoover clamped down when a single hint of FBI surveillance surfaced publicly. Late in February, five days after Hoover circulated another secret report within the government, Richard Harwood disclosed in the Washington Post that FBI officials had offered to reporters tape-recorded evidence of “moral turpitude” on King’s part. No other news outlet would touch the cryptic revelation, which Harwood buried among equally sensitive suggestions that Hoover had become a pampered tyrant with homosexual leanings. Over the next decade, a few journalists would regret their failure to expose firsthand evidence of Hoover’s penchant for spy vendettas above public service. (“I didn’t do my job,” recalled David Kraslow of the Los Angeles Times. “I should have blown the thing sky high, but I didn’t.”) At the other extreme, the editors of Parade magazine asked permission to print the following answer to a fake question about the extent of the FBI’s sex dossier: “Not a complete file, but it has a great deal of titillating information about his sexual activities.” When Bureau officials sternly refused, “because it clearly intimates that the FBI is furnishing information to the public concerning Martin Luther King,” the editors canceled the item. Publications avoided the controversy to preserve the prime FBI news source.

Internally, Hoover emphasized his supreme rule that operations must carry “no possibility of embarrassment to the Bureau.” While demanding an invisible hand, he expanded covert, extralegal assignments on March 4 by adding eighteen new FBI field offices to the twenty-three largest ones already tasked for the COINTELPRO campaign against black groups. Two days later, Hoover approved parallel instructions against the SCLC poverty campaign in Washington, declaring it “a grave threat to peace and order in this city.” The goals were to discredit black groups and “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement.” Hoover targeted King, Stokely Carmichael, and Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad as potential messiahs, twisting the religious word into something alien and violent. “King would be a very real contender for his position,” he wrote, “should he abandon his supposed ‘obedience’ to ‘white liberal doctrines’ (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism.” There were grumbles in the field about the draconian schedule for submission of counterintelligence ideas “to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence.” What did Hoover’s nobly dramatic words really mean? Most offices lacked a dark face to help infiltrate civil rights groups, as the integrated FBI still employed only forty black rookies among six thousand agents. Some veterans considered political chores inherently childish, or thought militants needed no help to discredit themselves.

The approved COINTELPRO actions ran heavily to propaganda and petty sabotage. Detroit was the first office to volunteer nonexistent transportation and lodging for SCLC’s anti-poverty volunteers. Miami recruited and paid the producer for a local NBC television special on young black leaders made to appear especially fearful, angry, and incoherent on screen. (Hoover himself praised the skillful use of hard chairs, lights, and slow camera techniques showing “each movement as they squirmed about in their chairs, resembling rats trapped under scientific observation.”) Savannah said Hosea Williams lost two hundred poverty recruits because of planted news stories that he would strand them sick and penniless in Washington. Several offices sowed bitter discord with forged tips that black leaders were spies for the CIA or the Bureau itself—a tactic borrowed from the wars against the Communist Party. New York falsely warned May Charles Carmichael that the Black Panthers were on the way to shoot her son, which would cause him to leave for Africa the next day. (“Mrs. Carmichael appeared shocked upon hearing the news,” reported the FBI supervisor, “and stated she would tell Stokely when he came home.”) The Jackson, Mississippi, office pioneered leaflets to peddle rumors that King wanted the poverty campaign for money and aggrandizement. Headquarters updated a secret, twenty-page monograph on King, which appended to the usual sinister interpretation of his career a partial list of recent SCLC contributors: New York governor Nelson Rockefeller ($25,000), Harry Belafonte ($10,000), Anne Farnsworth ($150,000), the Ford Foundation ($230,000), Merrill Lynch ($15,000), and the U.S. Department of Labor ($61,000 for job training). The last figure caused President Johnson to scribble a note: “Show this to [Labor Secretary] Bill Wirtz.”

A grim omen transformed official Washington. On Saturday night of the Gridiron Club’s satirical revue, shock passed visibly through the ballroom behind whispers and advance copies of a headline in the March 10 New York Times: “Westmoreland Requests 206,000 More Men, Stirring Debate in Administration.” Reporters ambushed White House press secretary George Christian at his table, and speechless senators excused themselves. The next day, President Johnson issued a furious but technical denial, which served to confirm the hotly debated secret while eroding his credibility. On Monday, television entertainer Jack Paar endorsed Eugene McCarthy in a network interview that broke his career pattern of lampooning all politicians and the vote itself; Paar told viewers he had been converted by his college daughter in “this children’s crusade” for McCarthy. On Tuesday, McCarthy confounded political observers by winning 42 percent of the vote against an incumbent President in New Hampshire’s first primary test, despite a late blitz of LBJ ads calling McCarthy the champion of draft dodgers and surrender. On Wednesday, ABC News anchor Howard K. Smith broadcast a passionate editorial for war mobilization “on an overwhelming scale,” far beyond the pending troop request. On Thursday, Pentagon officials said the week’s 509 combat deaths pushed the running total to 139,801 American casualties (19,670 killed and 120,131 wounded), which surpassed Korea to make Vietnam the fourth bloodiest war in American history. That afternoon, with President Johnson listening on a telephone extension, intermediaries deadlocked over Robert Kennedy’s tormented new offer to stay out of the presidential race in exchange for public steps to change Vietnam policy. By Saturday, March 16, when Kennedy formally challenged both Johnson and McCarthy for the Democratic nomination, political warriors from the White House scrambled to lock down “blood oath” commitments.

The President took soundings among bellwether politicians such as Senator Russell and Mayor Daley of Chicago, who knew how to shift ground skillfully. Russell already was touting more bombs instead of soldiers, though doubting victory through airpower. “I can’t afford to lose Russell,” Johnson confided. “Now if I lose him, we’ve got nothing.” Johnson feared that approving the latest troop escalation would isolate him as the candidate of all-out war. “We can’t take it and hold,” he warned Defense Secretary Clifford, “because people like Daley and them are not going to hold.”

“They won’t hold,” Clifford repeated. Following the President’s lead, he suggested a slogan that would stall disengagement politics for seven more years: “We are not out to win the war—we are out to win the peace.”

“That is right,” Johnson replied. Through Clifford, he embraced an offer from McGeorge Bundy to reconvene the bipartisan advisers called the Wise Men, who had approved the course of the war as recently as November of 1967. Now the President hoped to regain political and military initiative short of Westmoreland’s escalation. “We’re not going to get these doves,” he told Clifford, “but we can neutralize the country to where it won’t follow them, if we can come up with something.”

THE GLARE of Vietnam overshadowed contemporary landmarks. Even as their rivalry boiled into open warfare for the presidency, Johnson and Robert Kennedy collaborated to gain a Senate vote at last on the civil rights bill from 1966. The lynch-murders of Freedom Summer had inspired its federal protections for the exercise of basic political rights, while Alabama’s travesty trials for the killers of Viola Liuzzo and Jonathan Daniels generated the provisions for integrated juries. Despite two intervening years of backlash and division, the civil rights coalition pushed tenaciously on fundamental points to invoke cloture for the eighth time in history. Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois once again claimed credit for “pulling it out of the fire,” with timely compromise on the historic open housing provisions. Only three Republican senators joined the old segregationist core of seventeen Southern Democrats to oppose final passage, 71–20, nearly duplicating the tally on the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Celebrations were subdued because prospects remained uncertain in the House.

Empirical results from the freedom movement advanced quietly by inertia. On March 11, in Washington v. Lee, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the wholesale segregation of state prisons and local jails by race. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission resolved after two years to challenge industry rules requiring flight attendants to be single young women, but it would take another five months to ban the separate “Girl Friday” want-ad sections. In Memphis, where the sanitation strike entered its second month, more than a thousand black students now integrated Memphis State University, but school officials, still worried that Tiger fans would not accept any change in their Saturday spectacle, pressured the athletic department to defend the all-white football team on competitive grounds. “We would like to recruit Negro players in Memphis, if they can play,” the head coach announced before spring practice. Such contortion seemed antiquated already, which united all sides in belittlement of strained or outdated racial news. White students made front pages with a hippie “be-in” at New York’s Grand Central Station in March, but it was a tiny squib that the South African government introduced three measures to “complete” the apartheid system, including abolition of the four seats in the National Assembly for which mixed-race Coloreds had been allowed to elect white representatives. Only a small movement journal recorded the brazen clash at Tuskegee Institute when student followers of Stokely Carmichael pelted four State Department visitors with eggs, calling themselves a simulated “Vietcong air force” to show the panel of experts what it felt like to be bombed in their own country. The same journal headlined the plea from a rural rally outside Tuskegee, where no utility service reached farmhouses or the Negro school: “‘A Phone Before I Die.’”

On March 15, a dozen white men returned a guilty verdict for the 1966 firebomb attack on Vernon Dahmer. “It was the first time a state jury in the South has convicted anyone for murder in a civil rights case,” reported the Los Angeles Times. Judge Stanton Hall, who whittled on the bench with a confiscated razor, sentenced Klansman Cecil Sessum to life. District Attorney James Finch, always proclaiming that he never voted for LBJ but considered the Negro victim one of the hardest-working farmers in Hattiesburg, prosecuted and convicted three more Klansmen with an emotional summary: “You twelve men represent Forrest County to the world when it comes to justice.” Star witness Billy Roy Pitts testified each time that he had dropped his gun in the Klan posse’s wild flight after their bullets pinned Dahmer in the firebombed home to suffer mortal burns, and had confessed since “because I done what I done and the Lord wouldn’t let me go on livin’ that kind of life.” The four trials exhausted the pioneer courage in the local courts, leaving eleven indictments unresolved, and the story lapsed nearly thirty years before reporter Jerry Mitchell noticed that Mississippi had neglected to have Billy Roy Pitts serve even a day of his life sentence. This invisible dereliction—a wonder in the annals of jurisprudence—made news until Pitts surrendered from Louisiana. His testimony then buttressed one of the atonement prosecutions revived by a new generation of elected Southerners, aimed at surviving figures long admired, forgotten, or excused. On August 21, 1998, Mississippi peers convicted Sam Bowers of ordering the Dahmer murder, among others, and sent the former Imperial Wizard to prison at seventy-three.

BLIND VIOLENCE alone could seal a more dogmatic estrangement than race. Earlier in March, toward the end of the Tet offensive, one wounded medic from the 101st Airborne Division whispered a prayer from the evacuation helicopter: “God help you guys for what you did.” His elite Tiger Force platoon had been detached into central Vietnam with orders to drive the inhabitants of selected villages into refugee camps, thereby depriving enemy soldiers of food and shelter. Isolated, victimized by snipers and booby traps on patrol, platoon leaders surrendered the unit to sporadic but indiscriminate revenge. Twenty-seven of its forty-five soldiers later told Army investigators that it was routine to wear shoelace necklaces of human ears. Private Sam Ybarra, who had joined the Army on the day of his release from an Arizona jail, pushed ahead in pathological displays. He scalped “gooks,” shot a boy for his shoes, and decapitated a Vietnamese infant to remove the “Buddha band” from its neck. At least one fellow soldier pondered killing Ybarra, but pulled back to “creepy” fatalism. “The way to live is to kill,” said Sergeant William Doyle, “because you don’t have to worry about anybody who’s dead.” Ybarra stood three courts-martial in Vietnam for drug abuse, and would drink himself to death from nightmares on his mother’s couch. So many soldiers filed complaints, and even confessions, that the Pentagon’s longest war crimes investigation waited years at the threshold of White House authority to prosecute, until the cases were dropped with quiet relief at the war’s end. Official aversion to the anticipated publicity proved stronger than distaste for the alleged crimes, and the Tiger Force history would not surface until a 2003 newspaper series in the Toledo, Ohio, Blade, full of haunted, cathartic recollections from aging veterans.

On March 16, while Robert Kennedy’s campaign announcement jolted American politics from the room where his late brother had announced for President in 1960, a fresh unit of the Army’s Americal Division raided a remote cluster of hamlets in Quang Nai Province, which was base area also for the Tiger Force. Since arriving in February, soldiers from Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 11th Brigade, had endured losses without seeing an enemy to fight—six killed and twelve wounded in a minefield, a sergeant killed two days previously when he picked up a disguised bomb that cost others an arm, two legs, and an eye. On their traumatized march back to camp, the head of the column had come across a lone farmer in a rice field. “They shot and wounded her,” Private Greg Olson wrote home just before the raid. “Then they kicked her to death and emptied their magazines in her head. They slugged every little kid they came across. Why in God’s name does this have to happen?…This isn’t the first time, Dad…. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this; I guess I just wanted to get it off my chest.” Olson, a Mormon from Oregon, rushed early into the reported enemy stronghold of My Lai, with commanders from other outfits poised to reinforce the only major thrust in the region.

From above, pilot Hugh Thompson of Georgia first puzzled that his three-man scout helicopter drew no fire for the hovering big gunships to suppress. Not a hostile shot was reported, nor a weapon captured all day. He dropped green (meaning safe) smoke flares near an alarming number of killed and wounded civilians around the village perimeter, marking them for assistance by the ground troops—only to fly over again and find the wounded all dead. Mounting horror drove Thompson to land three times. At a drainage ditch filled with casualties, a Charlie Company sergeant said the only way to help was to put them out of their misery. Back in the air, Thompson’s crew frantically debated whether an artillery accident, enemy atrocity, or any logical military action could explain the methodical rifle fire into stacks of bodies. Groups of soldiers across the scattered hamlets pushed families and isolated peasants into dugout cellars or water wells, then dropped grenades in after them. Several groups of sixty or more were herded into open spaces and mowed down. Some soldiers balked. Some made light of it and paused for lunch. Some sobbed and shot at the same time. Thompson next landed ahead of a pursuit squad from Charlie Company, shouting orders for eighteen-year-old gunner Larry Colburn to shoot his fellow Americans if they fired at him or the ten villagers huddled ahead. Colburn was as stunned as Private Olson, who, from the refuge of his nearby machine gun post, watched the strange pilot interpose himself on the verge of an enraged fight with the 2nd platoon’s lieutenant, until unprecedented SOS landings by two gunships evacuated the Vietnamese to safety. Thompson flew back to the drainage ditch to check for survivors and his own sanity. His crew chief waded hip-deep in the carnage to pry from a mother’s corpse one silent but squirming small boy, so covered in blood and filth that they were well into the escape flight before they decided he was not hit.

At brigade headquarters, the three helicopter soldiers filed complaints about a massacre of civilians, and South Vietnamese district officials compiled a secret burial list of some five hundred My Lai villagers, including more than a hundred children younger than six. However, only the authorized account of My Lai reached front pages like Sunday’s New York Times: “American troops caught a North Vietnamese force in a pincer movement on the central coastal plain yesterday, killing 128 enemy soldiers in day-long fighting.” This version remained intact until a young draftee returned home in 1969 with notes of terrible witness unburdened on him by training buddies assigned to Charlie Company. Ron Ridenhour, who inspired confidence in his citizen’s gumption, sent thirty registered letters to generals, Cabinet officers, members of Congress, and the new President, Richard Nixon. Eight months later, news tips about a simmering military investigation led to publication in Life magazine of graphic My Lai photographs taken by an Army photographer, which triggered a national scandal of colliding emotions: denial, outrage, dogged pride, and wrath against war or disclosure. Nixon freed the one lieutenant convicted by court-martial, of twenty-two My Lai murders, and it took decades to open perspective across enemy lines. In 1998, the Army gave the Soldier’s Medal for Gallantry to former pilot Thompson, gunner Colburn, and posthumously to the crew chief, Glenn Andreotta, long since killed in combat. In 2001, returning to Vietnam for dedication of My Lai Peace Park, Colburn was dumbfounded to compare life stories with forty-one-year-old Do Hao, who remembered vividly the day he was yanked into the sky from a ditch full of silent relatives.

IN TUMULTUOUS mid-March 1968, Martin Luther King quietly tested strategies to overcome social barriers by nonviolence, being far from sure they would work. He closed to reporters his anxious summit meeting with seventy-eight “non-black” minority leaders on Thursday, March 14. Mostly unknown to each other, let alone to King, they ventured by invitation from across the United States to Paschal’s Motor Lodge in the heart of black Atlanta. Wallace Mad Bear Anderson spoke for a poor Iroquois confederation of upstate New York. A deputy came from the bedside of César Chávez, who had barely survived a twenty-five-day fast in penance for violent lapses by striking California farmworkers. Tillie Walker and Rose Crow Flies High represented plains tribes from North Dakota, while Dennis Banks led a delegation of Anishinabes. During introductions, Bernard Lafayette whispered to King what he had gleaned about basic differences among Puerto Ricans, as distinct from Mexicans (Chicanos), or the defining cause of the Assiniboin/Lakota leader Hank Adams, who spearheaded a drive for Northwestern salmon fishing rights under the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek. Lafayette had checked repeatedly to make sure King wanted the hardscrabble white groups, and the answer was always simple: “Are they poor?” Paschal’s was dotted with coal miners, some of whom braved fierce criticism from Appalachian rivals, and Peggy Terry admitted being raised in a Kentucky Klan family. After moving to Montgomery during the bus boycott, she had gone once on a lark to see “that smart aleck nigger come out of jail,” and the actual sight of King buffeted by a mob churned into her independent nature. Now Terry kept a few black friends in the Jobs Or Income Now (JOIN) group from uptown Chicago’s poor white district, and she wowed movement crowds by asking where else a hillbilly housewife could trade ideas or jail cells with a Nobel Prize winner.

Hosea Williams made no secret of his wish for the nonblack summit to fail. With several other SCLC staff leaders, he mercilessly ribbed young Tom Houck, who had come into the St. Augustine movement as an orphaned high school dropout from Massachusetts, then stayed on to chauffeur the Kings, and since had developed enough grit to scour the country for nonblack leaders under tutelage from Lafayette and Bill Rutherford. “First he was Coretta’s boy,” groused Williams. “Now he’s taking our money and giving it to Indians.” Internal staff resistance complained that these strangers would slow them down, ruin cohesion, and make it even tougher to compete with the black power trend. Lafayette fretted constantly over the risk of insult to, from, and between the guests. Leaders did rise from the floor to complain of exclusion, but they also acknowledged initiatives adapted from the black movement. Since the bus boycott, said several Native Americans, the model tribal leader no longer was an “Uncle Tomahawk” angling for token promotion. Others questioned nonviolence with doubtful respect. Vincent Harding, who had drafted most of the Riverside Vietnam speech, came late to observe and made note of hushed deliberation on assorted faces contemplating whether to recommend the experimental coalition under King.

In an aside, King first asked, “Tijerina who?” He absorbed a fiery speech about regaining communal lands stolen by noncompliance with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which the United States had acquired the territory that became seven Southwestern states to end the Mexican-American War of 1848. Lafayette cautioned that Reies López Tijerina was a charismatic, chronic fugitive—hailed as a Chicano Malcolm X, disparaged as a “wetback” Don Quixote—best known for leading an armed protest posse that briefly occupied a New Mexico courthouse on June 5, 1967. At Paschal’s, Tijerina asked what mention of land issues would be offered in return for nonviolent discipline, and King said the answer flowed from the movement’s nature: a common willingness to sacrifice put all their grievances on equal footing. On reflection, Tijerina proposed that particular stories from Native American groups be dramatized first in Washington, followed by black people second and his own Spanish-speaking groups last. His offer, which deferred both to historical order and the spirit of King’s presentation, received acclamation that extended to Chicano leaders sometimes at odds with Tijerina, such as Corky González of Denver. The summit closed on a wave of immense relief. Myles Horton, who helped recruit the white Appalachians, expressed euphoria after nearly four decades of cross-cultural isolation at his Highlander Center. “I believe we caught a glimpse of the future,” he told Andrew Young.

King broke away to give a Thursday evening speech to nearly three thousand cheering supporters in the wealthy Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe. Some of the two hundred pickets on the sidewalk crashed inside with shouts of “Commie!” and “Traitor!” until officers ejected them to end heckling that King called the most intense yet during a speech, and tremors from national politics followed him. Robert Kennedy left a message for King at the SCLC office. Burke Marshall persisted until he reached King late Friday, saying Kennedy knew the California Democratic Council endorsed Senator McCarthy that night—amid rumors that King would do the same when he addressed the group at noon—and he hoped King at least could refrain from political commitments until they talked. King did stay noncommittal to reporters who intercepted him at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, where his speech earned cheers without preferring a candidate or attacking President Johnson by name. “The government is emotionally committed to the war,” King charged that Saturday, March 16. “It is emotionally hostile to the needs of the poor.” Kennedy’s delayed entry and McCarthy’s shortcomings roiled voter loyalties from the first weekend of a bitter three-way contest, when the President issued his most bellicose call for “total national effort” to win in Vietnam. “We love nothing more than peace,” Johnson told the National Farmers Union, “but we hate nothing worse than surrender and cowardice.”

King withdrew in Los Angeles to manage the aftermath of his non-black summit. He sent a telegram to César Chávez (“We are together with you”), knowing Robert Kennedy had just visited Chávez dramatically at the end of his fast. He resolved to change Michael Harrington’s draft call to Washington with broader emphasis on all the invisible sub-nations of American poverty. He promised to squeeze in personal visits to Indian reservations and migrant labor camps from California and Appalachia to Massachusetts. With his schedule already jammed, and the start date looming in April, these extra commitments sorely distressed King’s aides even before James Lawson tracked him down by telephone in Los Angeles through the leaders of Holman United Methodist Church—where King would preach the first of several sermons on Sunday, and where Lawson already had designs to become pastor. Lawson could hear Andrew Young and Bernard Lee remonstrating in the background. Any thought of going to Memphis was preposterous, they said, because King would get snared and bogged down as always, then have to postpone Washington again. To counter, Lawson told King why he would find no more potent juncture of poverty and race than the month-long garbage strike. He played to an orator’s vanity with glowing accounts that Wilkins and Bayard Rustin had just drawn upward of seven thousand people, then closed with a practical argument that King’s upcoming poverty tour of Mississippi could begin from Memphis, like the Meredith march.

A flurry of logistical changes began with flight detours out of New Orleans from Los Angeles on Monday, March 18. Lawson met King’s plane that evening with Jesse Epps, an AFSCME representative known for volunteer work in SCLC’s Grenada, Mississippi, movement. When Epps apologized that the crowd waiting was not the ten thousand Lawson had promised, King looked so crestfallen that Lawson quickly waved off the ruse. “Jim was wrong,” Epps corrected, beaming. There were fifteen thousand at least, he said. “No one else can get in the house.”

It took a flying wedge of preachers and sanitation workers to guide King’s party into the cavernous Mason Temple through crowded aisles and a pulsing crescendo of cheers. Against all fire codes, some spectators climbed high into rafters that suspended a giant white banner with a Bible quote from Zechariah: “NOT BY MIGHT, NOT BY POWER, SAITH THE LORD OF HOSTS, BUT BY MY SPIRIT.” The platform below teemed with dignitaries, from AFSCME president Jerry Wurf to Rev. H. Ralph Jackson in his spats, plus three stately new garbage cans filled with donations. When King in his blue suit reached the bank of microphones, the noise receded no lower than a constant hum, and applause erupted again each time he paid tribute to their unity and purpose. “You are demanding that this city will respect the dignity of labor,” he said.

They clapped when he asked if they knew most poor people worked every day, and even cheered most sentences of his exegesis on the parable of Lazarus and Dives. “You are here to demand that Memphis will see the poor,” King cried. Energy in the hall brimmed so close to the surface that he backed off to summarize the previous decade. “Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality,” he resumed. There was no need to build or persuade by the rules of oratory, as a feeder line in rhythm easily rekindled the crowd. “We are tired,” said King. “We are tired of being at the bottom. [“Yes!”] We are tired…. We are tired of our men being emasculated so that our wives and our daughters have to go out and work in the white lady’s kitchen.” He used old riffs—“Now is the time…”—and improvised new ones on staying together and the nature of power. “Power is the ability to achieve purpose,” said King, to applause. “Power is the ability to effect change…and I want you to stick it out so that you will be able to make Mayor Loeb and others say ‘Yes’ even when they want to say ‘No.’” He paused through the next ovations with a quizzical look.

“Now you know what?” he asked. “You may have to escalate the struggle a bit.” His conversational tone for once hushed the crowd. “If they keep refusing, and they will not recognize the union,” said King, “I tell you what you ought to do. And you are together here enough to do it. In a few days you ought to get together and just have a general work stoppage in the city of Memphis.”

This time cheers rose into sustained, foot-stomping bedlam, which drowned out further words, and King stepped back into the embrace of colleagues already in furious consultation. With Lawson, Andrew Young passed King a note that perhaps he could swing back through Memphis. Temporarily at least, the rejuvenating clamor made the garbage strike seem the heart of a poverty movement instead of a foolish diversion from the Washington goal. Abernathy tried to hold the departing crowd until King returned to the podium. “I want to tell you that I am coming back to Memphis on Friday,” he said, “to lead you in a march through the center of Memphis.”

Walter Bailey welcomed his guests when the excitement was over. He had bought the old Melba Inn in 1945, when he could still raise turkeys in the back, and meant to name it for his wife, Lorene, before the sign came out Lorraine Motel “some kinda way.” Bailey enjoyed the SCLC preachers above Count Basie and many celebrities, because King was approachable enough to let people slap him on the back. “You could touch him,” said Bailey, who remembered the thick shoulders. “He was hard as a brick.”

Into the night, King coldly appraised the strike with his friends Benjamin Hooks and Billy Kyles. A shopping boycott hurt downtown merchants, but AFSCME sustenance for families ran low. Garbage piles grew slowly because the city found emergency crews for nearly half its trucks. Mayor Loeb’s majority held solid. Later, eager students in bathrobes and slippers intruded with a command invitation to the Lorraine conference room, where the traveling women’s choir from a Texas college serenaded King with a midnight medley on the theme “Hallelujah.”

KING’S BARNSTORMING caravan descended from Memphis into the wonder and strain of Mississippi. With Bevel and Dorothy Cotton, he appealed for poverty recruits Tuesday morning in Batesville, then pushed west into Marks, where a small crowd waited in a flimsy board church with old funeral parlor calendars for interior walls. “Statistics reveal that you live in the poorest county in the United States,” King told them. “Now this isn’t right.” He was describing the “great movement” ahead in Washington when a white man wobbled through the door and reached furtively in his pocket. The man pulled out a hundred-dollar bill for the collection plate, turning panic to awe, then introduced himself as a Mr. Mobley with a slurred speech to the effect that they were all going to the same place and should mind their own business. “But let me say this,” he added. “There ain’t nobody hungry here in Mississippi. Old Kennedy got up here the other day and said folks are starving to death.”

“All right, all right,” King said carefully. “Thank you so much, brother Mobley. Thank you.”

“Wait a minute here,” said Mobley. “I ain’t just exactly through.” In fits and starts, he said an old colored preacher was supposed to come with him but could not make it. That was all.

“Well, we want to thank you so much, brother Mobley,” King said, beckoning Abernathy and Hosea Williams to escort the troubled donor outside, and there was no way to tell how much the odd exchange put King off balance for the subsequent presentations. On invitation, local residents came forward in a stream. One mother said her children ate pinto beans “morning noon and night.” Another said hers stayed home from school because they had no clothes. Both Abernathy and Andrew Young were surprised to see tears roll down King’s face from the plainspoken eloquence about hurt and disease. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I’ve listened to your problems, and it is—it has touched me,” said King. As he fumbled for words, Nina Evans walked up to say she had no food and no way to get any. King asked Hosea Williams to take down her name.

Right then, on the drive to Clarksdale, King resolved that the mule train for Washington would leave from Marks. He delivered an inspired pitch for volunteers to six hundred people waiting in Chapel Hill Baptist Church, but only two tentative hands went up to show interest in the long journey. They moved on to Greenwood two hours behind schedule, touching off shouts of joy—“He’s here! He’s here!”—as two local ministers virtually lifted King through the crowd at Jennings Temple Church. Praising Greenwood as “a real movement town,” he spoke nakedly of the testimony about Delta conditions in nearby Marks. “I wept with them as I heard numerous women stand up on their feet,” said King. “I heard them talking about the fact that they didn’t even have any blankets to cover their children up on a cold night. And I said to myself, ‘God doesn’t like this.’ And we are going to say in no uncertain terms that we aren’t going to accept it any longer. We’ve got to go to Washington in big numbers.”

He pleaded for lone grandparents or whole families alike, saying food and shelter would be provided. “Now we just want you to sign up and go,” King exhorted. “Don’t have to worry about anything. Just have the will to go to Washington.” He promised freedom schools and music festivals along with demonstrations every day. He said they were going to put real sharecropper huts on trucks and present them to the Smithsonian as relics of modern poverty. “We’re not playing about this thing,” cried King. “We’re going to have a time in Washington. We’re going to make this nation move again, and we’re going to make America see poor people.”

Once again, King’s call for volunteers turned cheers into fearful silence. Switching to the chartered Cessna, he flew to the same result at packed churches in Grenada and Laurel. Nearly eight hundred people still waited at St. Paul Methodist when the Cessna landed after midnight in Hattiesburg—four hours late—and the Mississippi marathon ended toward dawn in a Jackson motel. Though back up early, they were still six hours late to the last stop Wednesday night in Bessemer, Alabama, outside Birmingham. Crowds waited endlessly to press around King. Pleading hoarseness, he left most of the speaking to Hosea Williams, who announced another delay until April 27 on the start date for the mule train to Washington. Behind the scenes, recruitment troubles in rural areas stiffened resentment of Indian and Hispanic groups scheduled to join the Southeastern pilgrimage in Jackson. One of Williams’s deputies grumbled that the newcomers failed to understand they were mere children within the freedom movement. In public, Williams pointed to three white observers with tape recorders in the balcony. “You can pass all the riot laws you want,” he shouted, “but you cannot suppress the dignity of man!” Bad weather mercifully allowed King to cancel several Alabama stops on Thursday, March 21, for sleep at home before the flight back to Memphis.

Crises converged for nonviolence and violence alike. In Washington, J. Edgar Hoover reported secretly to President Johnson that King had raised only $1,000 from eight Mississippi rallies and was discouraged by a lack of response to his anti-poverty drive. The President was consumed by his forthcoming speech on the big Vietnam troop request. To clear the way, he decided to relieve General Westmoreland from battlefield command with a promotion to Army chief of staff. He complained to Senator Russell that Robert Kennedy already was “storming these states and those governors and switching the bosses all over the country.” Of the Wise Men summoned for final advice the next Monday, only Justice Fortas of Memphis pushed in advance to send all the soldiers, telling Johnson that anything less would advertise weakness with “our own sensitivity to criticism, our own dislike of bloodshed.”

From Memphis, an amazed James Lawson called King before dawn on Friday, March 22. A rare dusting of snow in the Mississippi Delta had become a freak blizzard of sixteen inches on the first day of spring. The march would have to wait a few days, Lawson said wryly, but King could claim delivery of a work stoppage beyond dreams. Nothing moved at all, and interpretations of providential wonder circulated through silent, blanketed Memphis. “Well, the Lord has done it again,” H. Ralph Jackson mordantly declared. “It’s a white world.” A church woman in white Memphis claimed to receive a sobering command for charity toward the strike: “The Lord sent the snow to give us another chance.”