We are now saying to the city, will you please listen? Will you please recognize that in the heart of our city there is massive cruelty and poverty and indignity, and that only if you remove it can we have order.
—James Lawson
AT THE HOLIDAY INN RIVERMONT, KING HUDDLED UNDER HIS bedcovers. In the middle of a sunny day, Memphis seemed to him as black as night. He had told everyone for the last two months that nonviolence remained the only effective weapon of struggle. He had assured the media and elected officials of his ability, even in a time of riots, to lead a nonviolent march through the streets of the nation’s overwhelmingly black and poor capital. He thought Memphis would be the beginning of the Poor People’s Campaign, but instead, on the morning of March 28, a trap door opened and King and his movement seemed to be in free-fall.
Secluded in his room, away from reporters’ questions, wondering what to do next, King felt deeply hurt and betrayed by what had happened. He listened to and watched news reports, despairing to learn that the police had killed sixteen-year-old Larry Payne, others had been shot, hundreds had been arrested, and scores had been taken to hospitals. The height of the police violence had passed by about 2 PM, but the south and central portions of black Memphis remained a battle zone, and more people poured into the hospital again that night as the police enforced a city curfew by beating people’s heads.
From King’s room, Abernathy and Lee called back to Hosea Williams at SCLC headquarters in Atlanta, as SCLC’s bookkeeper and controller, James Harrison, who was secretly on the FBI payroll, listened in. Atlanta FBI agents, informed by Harrison, described King as “extremely dejected,” and possibly giving in to fears for his personal safety. Agents wrote to J. Edgar Hoover that Williams, Abernathy, and Lee “strongly feel some elements which caused disturbance in Memphis…may cause personal harm to King,” and King also believed “the violence was caused by a Negro group who dislike him.” Black Power advocates had verbally thrashed King more than once, but he had never feared them. Now he didn’t know what to think.
Very shortly, Samuel (better known as Billy) Kyles came in and sat at the foot of King’s bed. He said King “really didn’t have any idea of what had happened,” and he “was very disturbed.” Lawson soon arrived, and he and Kyles both said that the Invaders had instigated the riot. King had numerous times faced young people who wanted to fight the police; he immediately said that the Memphis movement would have to make some accommodation with them. Lawson vowed to hold a nonviolent march the following day to prove it could still be done, but Abernathy and Lee said they would not participate in another march until they were sure there was better planning. Their confidence in Lawson and the Memphis movement had been badly shaken.
King felt mounting anxiety about what the day’s events meant. He knew the FBI followed his every step and tapped his advisors’ phones, and that Hoover wanted nothing more than to destroy him and his movement. James Orange and a number of King’s aides, as well as Bill Lucy, believed police agents initiated the riot to destroy King’s leadership—and a congressional investigating committee later concluded that it might have been true. While King and his aides worried, Memphis FBI agents reported to Hoover in Washington every few hours. Assistant FBI Director William Sullivan, Hoover’s man in charge of the campaign to destroy King, sent a memo back to them early that afternoon, asking the Memphis bureau for answers to a number of questions: “Did MARTIN LUTHER KING [caps in original] do anything to trigger the violence; what part did he play in the march; how much of the violence is attributable to KING; did he make any statements on joining the march which could have had an effect on the crowd toward violence?” Perhaps he was considering King as a target for a federal anti-riot prosecution. And to make the FBI’s line of attack perfectly clear, the memo concluded, “Mr. SULLIVAN has indicated that although MARTIN LUTHER KING preaches non-violence, violence occurs just about everywhere he goes.”
The FBI had already formulated its propaganda line on the Memphis march. As part of its COINTELPRO (counterintelligence) actions against “black hate” groups, the FBI’s “Racial Intelligence Section” authored two blind memos and sent them out to press contacts on March 28 and 29. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, some of its language identical to the FBI memos, depicted King as a “Judas goat leading lambs to slaughter,” who ran away as soon as trouble broke out; it said Memphis would be a “prelude to civil strife,” and King’s “non-violent masquerade” would lead to a bloodbath in the nation’s capital. The U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations later documented that the Globe-Democrat and probably other newspapers, including the Commercial Appeal, formulated their anti-King editorials based in part on FBI memos on the “hypocrite” King, which the FBI also forwarded to members of Congress, the White House, the Justice Department, to military intelligence, the attorney general, and various other agencies of government.
In a phone call the morning after the riot, Sullivan again urged Memphis agents to “get everything possible on KING and…stay on him until he leaves Memphis.” The Memphis FBI field office confirmed, “All racial sources have been alerted to immediately advise of any pertinent info developed by them.” Sullivan wanted the identities of the two women who rescued King from Beale Street, but no one discovered who they were.
It seems the best the FBI could come up with was a supplementary memo on another element of King’s “hypocrisy”: King had urged blacks to boycott white-owned businesses, but he avoided the “fine Hotel [sic] Lorraine…owned and patronized exclusively by Negroes,” in order to stay at the “plush” and “white-owned, operated and almost exclusively white patronized” Holiday Inn Rivermont. “There will be no boycott of white merchants for King, only for his followers.” King had stayed at the dilapidated Lorraine Motel or held meetings there a number of times during visits to Memphis, but the MPD’s black Lieutenant Jerry Williams warned him away from it because of its exposed balconies. On March 18, he did not stay there, and on March 28, AFSCME had rented King a room at the Peabody Hotel. Patrolman Nichols had said the riot blocked King’s way to either hotel, so he routed him to the Rivermont. The word of King’s “hypocrisy” in not going to the Lorraine was soon aired in the media, more or less forcing King to go to the Lorraine the next time he came to Memphis.
At the Rivermont, King had an inkling of this invective being stirred up against him. He canceled his scheduled flight out of Memphis and began to make various calls around the country, not quite sure of what to do next. Reporters discovered his location, and at 5 PM, he felt compelled to hold a press conference, including Lawson and other local leaders. None of King’s emotions—despair, fear, anxiety, and an urgent desire to leave—appeared on his face. Instead, he projected the calm, reasonable, soft but determined demeanor that had always made him so acceptable to the white press. In far worse situations, King had been able to steady his nerves. When a raging mob had trapped him and hundreds of others in Brown’s Chapel in Selma, threatening to burn it down, King projected a perfect calm and faith that the Movement would prevail, even as tear gas wafted through the church.
THE STORY OF the violence of March 28 was really not about King, no matter what the FBI said. Reverend Starks, Lawson, Jackson, Abernathy, Epps, Baxton Bryant, Ciampa, and Cornelia Crenshaw—all members of the COME strategy committee—attended King’s news conference in an attempt to bring the media’s focus back to the strike and the root causes of violence. Said Lawson:
The issue is not a question of the violence of today, or of Dr. King’s presence. The issue is the same as it was a week ago, namely justice, fairness for the sanitation workers and a new sense of dignity and justice for poor people in this community. We will not let any incident turn us aside from this fundamental issue…. Young people who committed violence are excellent students of this very sick society of ours, who have been taught extremely well by this society, and who therefore cannot hear the message of nonviolence, the message of love and reconciliation that many of us have been insisting upon. We do not condone their violence as we do not condone the history of violence of this society of ours.
Lawson ominously voiced the fear “that if violence continues in our city it will become an excuse for the wholesale massacre of innocent people in our midst, including recognizable leadership people of our city and our nation.” Nonetheless, the Memphis movement would continue with another march the next day and keep on until the city settled the strike: “We don’t intend to let the sanitation workers be sold out under any circumstances.” King largely deferred to Lawson, adding, “I thought the march itself was basically a very dignified one,” that people on the sidelines, not marchers, had instigated window breaking, and that there would be another nonviolent mass march. Abernathy did his best to correct statements being circulated that King had “fled,” saying simply that King left the march because “we won’t be a part of violent demonstrations.”
City and state authorities held their own “law and order” press conference of white men, featuring Claude Armour representing the governor, Fire and Police Director Holloman, and Shelby County Sheriff William Morris, all of whom stood behind Loeb. The mayor called a curfew, said the march had been “abandoned by its leaders,” and vowed that police and National Guard units would “restore law and order”—a theme that quickly dominated media accounts.
King found it all very depressing. With the FBI recording every word, he spoke on the telephone to his longtime adviser Stanley Levison, who urged King to remember that the marchers themselves had not rioted, said that his campaign in Washington would have SCLC staff and marshals to keep things under control, and told him he should get some rest before drawing too many conclusions about the viability of the Poor People’s Campaign. King also spoke to SCLC board member Marion Logan, who feared for King when she saw his dazed expression during the march, on national television news, and urged him to “get your ass out of Memphis.” Coretta Scott King also spoke to her husband, trying to calm him by saying, “You mustn’t hold yourself responsible, because you know you aren’t.”
Reassurances did not work. Abernathy recalled that night as a “terrible and horrible experience for him. I had never seen him in all my life so upset and so troubled. I couldn’t get him to sleep that night. He was worried, worried. He didn’t know what to do, and he didn’t know what the press was going to say.” Finally, King fell fast asleep. But when he awoke on March 29, reading the morning Commercial Appeal must have been a nauseating experience: neither Lawson’s comments nor King’s reached the public. The commander of the Tennessee National Guard, Brigadier General R. W. Akin, warned that all his men were armed and ready to shoot. Memphis Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Faires called King’s role “deplorable,” and former Mayor Edmund Orgill demanded that sanitation workers go back to work.
That morning, President Johnson appeared on national television; he denounced “mindless violence,” declared “order must be preserved,” decried “the tragic events in Memphis,” offered federal military assistance to local authorities, and asked them to act firmly and fairly. He also offered to send in a labor mediator, an offer Mayor Loeb declined. The Washington Post headline read, “Johnson Warns on Rioting: U.S. Support Is Pledged for Law and Order.” The New York Times, usually sympathetic to King, called Memphis “a powerful embarrassment to Dr. King” and editorialized that he should call off the Poor People’s Campaign because no one could guarantee that another Memphis would not happen in the nation’s capital. Only AFL-CIO President George Meany urged Mayor Loeb to recognize the workers’ demands, and he offered AFL-CIO assistance to bring about a settlement—an offer Loeb curtly rejected.
For the next several days, the local white media condemned King unequivocally. The Commercial Appeal editorial on March 29, “Moment of Truth,” said police had contained “the anarchy that was threatened yesterday,” and “what could have turned into a full-scale riot was nipped in the bud.” It praised the police, who had “exercised restraint,” and also the ministers, who had turned the march around. A day later, it accused King of instigating the riot in his March 18 speech, when he urged students to boycott school and said, “We may have to escalate this struggle a bit”—and then, “Having fled the melee, King later issued statements attempting to disassociate himself from the violence that he had instigated.” As a result, “Dr. King’s pose as a leader of a non-violent movement has been shattered. He now has the entire nation doubting his word when he insists his…shanty-town sit-in in the nation’s capital…can be peaceful.” Next to the editorial, a cartoon showed a slightly dopey-looking King, who shrugged his shoulders and said, “Who, me?” In the background, Beale Street was in tatters.
Another editorial backed Loeb’s rejection of AFL-CIO offers to help mediate, writing, “Memphis has had enough of Dr. King’s help. It can do without George Meany’s intrusion.” Its editorial cartoon depicted the bandaged white hand of Memphis, slamming the door on the foot of someone trying to get in the door; the foot was marked, “intrusions from outside.” On March 31, the Appeal ran a short article headlined, “Chicken a La King,” painting King as a coward whose “efforts to climb aboard a meat truck were rebuffed” as he tried to leave the riot (a story with no basis in fact). On April 2, it reprinted a Dallas Morning News column calling King “the headline-hunting high priest of nonviolent violence,” whose staff was willing to “wreck everything for a spot on the evening newscast for the peripatetic preacher.” It blamed Black Power militants for turning a strike into a racial confrontation, and King, who, “like a torchbearer sprinting into a powder-house,” had brought his “road show” to Memphis. Once the explosion began, he “sprinted down a side street, leaped into an old model car and sped away.”
Memphis intelligence officials noted with satisfaction the several days of negative media treatment of King. A nationally published photo in the Los Angeles Times was captioned: “Young militants jostled and pushed Dr. King, whose face clouded with apparent fear.” The Providence Sunday Journal called King “reckless and irresponsible,” saying he “scurried to safety” and “took swift refuge in a motel.” The Jackson (Mississippi) Clarion-Ledger ran a front-page photo of King in the Memphis march titled, “King Before Disappearing Act.” The paper recently had “exposed” King’s ties to Jack O’Dell and “Communism,” and now it contrasted American troops fighting at the Battle of Khe Sanh in Vietnam with a photo of army tanks in Memphis next to an article titled, “King Vows to Press Attack on Memphis.” Natchez Democrat cartoons linked King and Carmichael as militant minstrels and also linked King to Fidel Castro, who supposedly was funding America’s domestic upheaval. It ran a big story on King’s March 23 speech on “noted Communist Negro Educator” W. E. B. Du Bois and exposed a “Kennedy–King Alliance” subverting the country through their appeals to end poverty. Many white southern editors hated Robert Kennedy as much as they hated King.
This nearly unified view of King as a coward, subversive, and hypocrite was not new: the Memphis press and other southern media regularly vilified King as a purveyor of trickery, a meddler in foreign affairs, a man “inflated by ambition,” an instigator of mob rule and ghetto violence, an ally of Communists. Lawson and King had explained in their press conference that problems of poverty and racism had given rise to the conflict in Memphis and other cities. But it became standard fare in the mainstream media that King had come in, stirred up trouble, and, coward that he was, fled. As the Commercial Appeal put it, King’s nonviolent philosophy was merely an excuse “to break laws in the name of a cause.” All of these statements echoed FBI Director Hoover’s longtime propaganda campaign against King.
Politicians likewise said that Memphis proved King could not lead a peaceful national march on Washington. Tennessee’s Republican Senator Howard Baker declared that the Poor People’s Campaign march would be “like striking a match to look in your gas tank to see if you’re out of gas” West Virginia’s Democratic Senator Robert Byrd called King a “self-seeking rabble-rouser” Mississippi’s Democratic Senator John Stennis called for an injunction to stop the march; Arkansas Democratic Senator John McClellan promised to begin hearings on King’s Poor People’s Campaign. Even West Tennessee’s liberal Democratic Congressman Ray Blanton blamed King for having “contributed to the violence.”
Republican Congressman Dan Kuykendall of Memphis denounced King to an all-white audience at East High School the night after the riot and, in a speech before Congress, accused him of “agitating destruction, violence and hatred.” He concluded, “I hope this exposure will wake up people to the evil results of his activities before it is too late and freedom is destroyed in America for all, whatever their color.” Only Democratic presidential candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy pointed out that the urban crisis and war policies caused racial violence; others simply blamed King. Whites wrote in to the Memphis newspapers, protesting that “white people have civil rights too” and that blacks should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and decrying “black hoodlums.”
The one local account sympathetic to King came from the Tri-State Defender—although it did not appear in print until April 6. The black newsweekly editorially condemned the police for acting like Nazi storm troopers and called Frank Holloman one of “the advocators of genocide of black people.” It condemned National Guardsmen and police as “trigger happy cowboys” and described them riding “through peaceful communities, five and six in a car, waving their shotguns out the window and rudely spitting tobacco on streets where Negro women are standing.” Its editorial cartoon depicted Holloman firing away with his pistol under the shelter of hooded Klansmen who were labeled “Loeb’s Vigilantes.” Another editorial, headlined “Memphis on Fire,” concluded: “The march was purely incidental to the uprising. A disturbance was bound to occur sooner or later” because of explosive conditions in black Memphis. The authorities—not King or even the Invaders—made the “fatal choice”: “Between settling the strike and clubbing the marchers into submission, they chose the latter.” The Defender said Holloman and other whites, even liberals, ignored the sources of problems in Memphis and instead blamed their effects.
But Defender columnist Nat D. Williams also suggested that some in the black middle class saw King as an incendiary figure. Williams described him as “the bomb”—a man “who seemingly came to town reluctantly on invitation” but then “threw the missile” into an explosive situation by calling for a work stoppage and student strike. “His ‘call’ struck the town like dynamite,” setting off “emotionally immature and excitable” high school kids whose teachers “fell back into shaky silence,” afraid to moderate them.
The Invaders took great exception to this view of King as a militant leader. On March 29, in front of a deserted downtown lot, NBC-TV reporter Carl Stern interviewed Coby Smith, speaking for the Invaders. Wearing dark sunglasses and a blue work shirt, Smith exuded cool confidence and quiet anger. He blamed the riot on black frustrations over outmoded Movement tactics—namely, “a march, which would have probably been very fruitless,” and on police brutality. Smith toyed with the question of whether the Invaders started it, smiling, “We don’t organize burnings, we organize people. If people burn, they burn.” Nonviolent mass marches were no longer relevant to the temper of the times: “King’s attitude has failed. This is a last ditch effort, the Washington march, to get us back to the early sixties and the late fifties I suppose…. The people of Memphis have said no to him.” If King did not analyze the needs and desires of the people, “He will be faced with this same situation everywhere he goes…. Dr. King will have to come over, and if he doesn’t, then he is dead…in terms of the movement.”
King may have been more concerned about his own image than about the plight of blacks, Smith suggested, but an increasingly agitated Stern grew more persistent in questioning him about the damage the riot had done to King. Smith responded, “I don’t know why you persist in saying Dr. King. This is Memphis. This city belongs to people here. The black people here have to set the temper of the times. Dr. King is going to have to come in and meet the needs of people here…. If he doesn’t, the same thing will happen to him everywhere he goes that happened to him here in Memphis.” Stern asked, Was this the first outbreak of summer riots? Smith answered, “Of course…. People have had it. If that strike lasts any longer, we can look forward to this city going up…. We don’t have to organize. The police beat heads—they organize for us.”
Smith did not see the riot as a setback for the Movement, but rather a promising sign that black people would resist. Stern asked if black youth had a paramilitary-style organization, and Smith frankly responded, “Well, we should.” He said 109 Memphians had been killed in Vietnam, probably 75 percent of them blacks, and when those who survived came home with military training, “We can’t stop people from using it.” NBC’s evening Huntley–Brinkley Report quoted him saying, “If the community can only respond to force by burning and shooting and looting, we’ll do it.” Charles Cabbage gave a separate brief interview to a newspaper reporter, saying, “Young black people want black power and they’re going to get it.” Like Smith, he said people in Memphis should set their own agenda.
A Los Angeles Times reporter found that some established black leaders in Memphis now doubted that King could lead a nonviolent march. “Younger Negroes…say their allegiance has been promised to no one—least of all to Dr. King.” The Times headlined its article, “Once Placid Memphis Now a Racial Cauldron.” The only cheer in the media came from the Hambone cartoon in the Friday Commercial Appeal: “Don’ mak no diff’unce whut kin’ o’ face you got, hit look mo’ bettuh smilin’!!”
AFTER A MISERABLE night of self-doubt, at 10 AM on Friday, March 29, King prepared himself and dressed for a meeting with media representatives. Charles Cabbage, Charles (“Izzy”) Harrington, and Calvin Taylor, representing the Invaders, knocked on his door, and Cabbage recalled being shocked that King seemed to have absolutely no security. Abernathy began to cross-examine them, assuming they had touched off the window breaking and looting, and Taylor said, “Cab and me, we got mad because the man hadn’t heard what we had to say and already was accusing us as having caused the riot.”
When King entered the room, freshly showered and still buttoning his shirt after rising late, the atmosphere changed. Taylor perceived him as not black but brown—or maybe caramel-colored—with soft skin and hands, a gentle man who projected a disarming presence. King said he was surprised to see Cabbage—a “Morehouse man” whom SCLC once had tried to hire for an organizing project in Baltimore—and he sat down with the young men and smoked cigarettes. He told them he had believed there were no Black Power activists in Memphis, and that if he had known this, he would have met with them to agree on a common agenda. Cabbage told King he had tried to send a message to him when he was on the speaker’s platform on March 18, but Lawson and the ministers wouldn’t give him access, and that he had demanded greater youth participation on the COME strategy committee, to no avail. “We have been trying to talk to Lawson—he won’t hear us.” Cabbage also said a man had come to his home warning of a plot to kill King; the SCLC leader blanched, then responded that he heard such threats every day and no one could stop an attempt on his life.
King seemed genuinely depressed by Cabbage’s account of failed communications with Lawson, as he relied heavily on Lawson’s organizing skill and history of building strong relations with young people in the Movement. An observant young writer working as an intern at the Commercial Appeal, of all places, Calvin Taylor described King as genuinely distraught over violence, saying, “Not so much ‘Why did you have a riot with me leading it?’ But, ‘Why would you resort to violence anyway?’ As if to say, ‘You know that violence hasn’t worked for white people. Why would you do that?’ The man actually believed that kind of philosophy…. I say ‘that’ philosophy because I don’t believe in it, you know.” Yet he did believe in King.
Cabbage blamed Lawson for a communications failure, but Taylor felt a bit ashamed during this interchange with King, because he knew there was more to it than that. Cabbage made it appear that the Invaders had done absolutely nothing to set off the street altercations, but “Dr. King wasn’t eating that mess up, you know, like we were totally innocent of the thing. And…we weren’t totally innocent.” Members of the Invaders had indeed encouraged young people to take rocks and sticks in their hands before the March 28 riot, then they stayed out of the march and claimed innocence. “The spirit was there. I mean, we had put it there, although we hadn’t started it.” King now pledged to the Invaders that they would became a part of the COME leadership, but he also wanted to know “what must be done to have a peaceful march, because,” he added firmly, “you know I have got to lead one. There is no other way.”
Here Cabbage and friends faced a contradiction: To the extent that they could give credibility to any nonviolent leader, they gave it to King, but they actually didn’t have much control over their far-flung network in the Memphis youth underground. When King asked for a guarantee of nonviolence, Cabbage laughed and said he had to be kidding. All he could say was that his group would try to keep the next march nonviolent, but his group needed money to be effective. King reassured the trio that they would be involved in planning the next demonstration, and he would help find financial aid, but his demeanor made it clear enough that the Invaders would have to adhere to nonviolent discipline if they wanted to be a part of the Movement.
Calvin Taylor likened this encounter with King to something akin to a “psychotherapy session,” a kind of communication with an adult that he hadn’t experienced before. “It was unbelievable to me. I mean, the man just looked like peace. He didn’t raise his voice…you could feel peace all around that man. One of the few times in my life that I wasn’t actually fighting something.” Even Cabbage, a verbal sharpshooter, “didn’t have no comebacks for him…. I have never seen Cab sitting in a situation where he couldn’t say anything, and he couldn’t say a word.” King told them he would talk to them again before he left town, and as the Invaders trio left the Rivermont, an elated Cabbage exclaimed that they had just talked to “an extraordinary man,” according to Taylor. He had never seen Cabbage give any man the kind of respect he gave King.
Although the Invaders rejected nonviolence as a strategy and a philosophy, King’s presence stayed with them. Many years later, Coby Smith viewed King with greater sympathy, saying he was
a person that was so clear and so committed to the idea that everyone should be involved in his own liberation. That everyone had a right to be involved. And when he talked to you, he talked to you not based on what you had been accused of, but what your reality was…. This man talked about nonviolence, not simply as some kind of static philosophy, but he talked about it so as to show you how to strengthen your position…. Dr. King’s concern was that the community needed all of its resources, especially its young people to be involved.
King went directly from his discussion with the Invaders to an off-the-record media briefing, giving background and analysis that he hoped would lead reporters to more balanced coverage of what had happened. In the same measured, reasonable tones he had used with the Invaders, he explained to reporters that SCLC “had no part in the planning of the march. Our intelligence was totally nil.” When reporters asked him why he didn’t check out Memphis in advance, King said, “I was completely caught with a miscalculation…. I came to speak here two weeks ago where thousands of people assembled inside and outside. Nobody booed, nobody shouted Black Power…. I assumed that some of the ideological struggles that we find in most cities over the nation, particularly in the North, were non-existent here.” Instead, he found that there had been a breakdown in communication between black ministers and black youth, who were “feeling a sense of voicelessness in the larger society and at the same time a sense of voicelessness in the black community.” They “were just angry, and those men were first to say to me that they are willing to engage in a campaign of tactical nonviolence…. If we had known that in advance it would have been a matter of meeting with them and giving them a sense of voice, and they would have been the first ones to be marshals.”
But the reporters seemed to be less receptive to King than the Invaders. Edgy and skeptical, they sharply questioned King about his role, and he responded that he left the march because “I have always said that I will not lead a violent demonstration.” They insisted that he “guarantee” no more violence, but King responded:
I cannot guarantee anybody that Memphis or any other city in this country will not have a riot this summer, if for no other reason than that our government has not done anything…about removing the conditions that brought riots into being last summer. We have an extremely recalcitrant Congress, we have an administration that admits it doesn’t plan to do anything about the recommendations made by the Kerner Commission. It seems to me that these are the forces that are causing violence in our country, not the people who get so angry and disappointed and disgusted and disenchanted that they engage in the process of breaking a few windows.
This last comment set off a storm of further questions, some of them hostile in tone, about whether King could prevent violence. King pleaded with reporters to remember that this incident had specific causes: “We must not overlook the conditions that led up to yesterday. We must not overlook the fact that people, sanitation workers and ministers, marched nonviolently in this city about three weeks ago and they were maced by the policemen. We must not overlook that students left school by the hundreds yesterday to come to join in the march, and policemen were extremely brutal trying to drive them back into school, and they provoked bottle throwing and other things. So we can’t overlook some of what led to what happened yesterday.” King cast doubt on police motives, saying they appeared restrained when he was at the head of the march, in front of the television cameras, but out of the range of the cameras, police had attacked.
King also challenged the way the media pictured poor black communities as almost hopelessly violent. Reporters had polled 400 black participants in the Detroit riots, and 92 percent of them said they thought King’s nonviolent methods would be more effective, he reminded them. “If you look at the record, you will see that rioters have not been violent toward persons. And nobody can tell me that Negroes can’t shoot white people. Some of them are master marksmen, they’ve been hunting enough to know how to shoot people down.” But killings during riots had overwhelmingly been at the hands of police and military units, not ghetto residents. “We haven’t had any real violence in this country yet. We haven’t had any guerrilla warfare yet. The violence has been vented toward property and not towards persons.” King did not see rioters as criminals, and he contradicted Holloman’s inference that guerrilla warfare had started, urging reporters to write about police actions and systemic causes of violence.
But reporters pressed again for a personal guarantee that he could stop violence in the future. “I don’t know what you mean by guarantee,” King said. “I don’t want to put myself in the position of being omniscient.” King and the reporters seemed to talk past each other, as the press conference came to an inconclusive end.
Although King had tried to reassure the press that nonviolence would triumph in the end, he was not so sure of that himself, and the hostile tone of some reporters unsettled him. He again called Stanley Levison, his phone conversation taped by the FBI, and glumly stated, “I think our Washington campaign is doomed,” because, regardless of the facts or anything he or anyone else might say, the media would impose its interpretation on events. Levison told him that people in the Movement shouldn’t accept the media’s version of events or its assumptions, but King said, “You can’t keep them from imposing it…. You watch your newspapers…. I think it will be the most negative thing about Martin Luther King that you have ever seen.” He feared that poor people would not join a campaign that they thought might be taken over by violent people.
He concluded, “Frankly, it was a failure of the leadership here,” that The Invaders “were fighting Jim Lawson and the men who ignored them, who neglected them, who would not hear them, wouldn’t give them any attention…. I know the fellows, and they really do, they love me. They were too sick to see that what they were doing yesterday was hurting me much more than it could hurt the local preachers.”
King also predicted that his civil rights critics, such as Roy Wilkins, Adam Clayton Powell, and even Bayard Rustin, would be heavily “influenced by what they read in newspapers,” and respond accordingly. Indeed, criticism of King came not just from whites but also from blacks in the civil rights movement vying for leadership with King. The controversial New York Congressman Powell had already called him “Martin Loser King,” and others suggested King could not control his own movement. A few days after the Memphis riot, Wilkins warned that Memphis showed the danger of a national march; for good measure, he praised the news media for their handling of civil rights issues. NAACP Treasurer Alfred Baker Lewis told an NAACP membership rally in Lynchburg, Virginia: “The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., must bear the blame for racial rioting in Memphis, Tennessee, because he exerts no discipline over his followers.” A Press-Scimitar story titled, “NAACP Official Blames King,” quoted Lewis as saying that King was “a leader without a plan, and he has no organization, so that when he gets a group, he has no discipline like we do. He also has a lot of troublemakers, and probably juvenile delinquents. This is evident in what happened in Memphis.”
Local organizers might have preferred that King stay for another march planned for Friday afternoon, but a frustrated King asked Ralph Abernathy to “get me out of Memphis” as soon as possible. After his press briefing, King and Abernathy left on the next plane to Atlanta.
The Commercial Appeal the next day covered King’s press briefing by noting that King said he could not guarantee nonviolence, that he said the march had been “poorly planned,” and that there had been a failure of communication with the Invaders. James Lawson held yet another press conference to correct this view, saying, “There had been communication. I don’t accept that.” The Invaders had been involved since the beginning, he said, and COME had brought in King to strengthen the ministers’ campaign of nonviolence, not to start a riot. “We didn’t bring in Rap Brown, we brought in King.”
AFTER LEAVING MEMPHIS, King was plagued by vast doubts and fears about the direction of events and his responsibility for them. He considered going on a fast against violence, as Gandhi had done in his last days, to unify and purify his movement, but King was far from an ascetic and had never fasted. While eating dinner at the Abernathys’ that night in Atlanta, he talked mostly of “the times before the Montgomery bus boycott when we were younger and hadn’t taken on the burdens of the black people,” Abernathy recalled. Seemingly unconcerned about the company of their wives, whom they hadn’t seen for days, both men fell asleep on matching loveseats, and their wives also fell asleep without going to bed. Juanita Abernathy said she had never seen King so depressed. Coretta Scott King said, “He was experiencing a great deal of anxiety.”
It must have intensified on Saturday morning, when Jesse Epps showed up at King’s office as an emissary from the Memphis movement. Lawson was to have gone to Atlanta, too, but in the middle of the night on Friday, the chief steward of his church had died, so Epps alone had to take on the burden of convincing King to return to Memphis. He met privately with King before the staff meeting and argued that, like the Good Samaritan, King had to make a moral choice to stay on the road he was on, despite the dangers ahead. Epps showed King articles in the Memphis newspapers that claimed he had run away and said, “You as much stuck in Memphis as we are, and you can’t leave Memphis no more than we can. And if you do, you’re doing in a sense what the press says, you’re running.” This statement could not have been very welcome to King, disturbed as he already was about this accusation.
King next met with his SCLC executive staff, including Abernathy, Hosea Williams, James Bevel, attorney Chauncey Eskridge, SCLC Executive Director William Rutherford, and SCLC activists Joseph Lowery, Jesse Jackson, James Orange, Dorothy Cotton, and Andrew Young, as well as Epps and SCLC’s Washington representative, Walter Fauntroy, and Stanley Levison, who joined them from New York. They met from about 9 AM to 3 PM, and all their doubts about the Poor People’s Campaign came raging to the surface. Suffering from a continual migraine, King expressed the urge to quit his leadership role because of divisions in the Movement. Discussion quickly turned acrimonious as a number of King’s staff members insisted that he could not afford to get further bogged down in Memphis.
“It was obvious from the beginning that Martin was in an agitated mood,” wrote Young. “Never before had I seen him so aggressive in dealing with us. He wanted everyone to drop what they were doing and return with him to Memphis.” King talked about going on a fast, sending staff into Memphis to prepare another march, and using it as a launching pad for the Poor People’s Campaign—but he did not receive an enthusiastic response. According to Young, King’s staff members all had their own concerns. Bevel wanted SCLC to focus on stopping the war, Williams focused mainly on voter registration, Jesse Jackson focused on Operation Breadbasket, a program to demand that businesses employ more African Americans. King’s fractious staff, all with strong desires and leadership abilities, sometimes “acted as if Martin was just a symbol under which they operated,” wrote Young.
King grew upset with them, “but the staff was upset with him also. There was criticism of his going to Memphis in the first place, and of going ahead with the march when he and Ralph sensed trouble and apparent disorganization.” Young believed King had been exhausted: “He had probably been incapable of making a decision, once there, whether to go ahead or not,” but he also felt that the whole event had been poorly planned and badly timed in the first place. Had Lawson attended this meeting, a lot of the criticisms now directed at King would have been directed at him. “Martin didn’t usually make those decisions anyway, he depended on us to organize demonstrations and make them work. But we weren’t there,” wrote Young.
King’s staff lectured him about mistakes he had made, but he responded that he went to Memphis, just as he went everywhere, because he was asked. In a phone conversation recorded by FBI wiretaps two days after the meeting, Levison said that King “took the position very sharply that he felt we were in serious trouble as the result of Memphis. And he by no means took for granted that Washington had to go on despite what he had said to the press. That he didn’t think we were prepared for it.” And yet, King had concluded, according to Levison, “Memphis is the Washington campaign in miniature,” and SCLC had to see it through. If it couldn’t fight for poor people here, it couldn’t do it anywhere.
However, the staff members played upon his doubts, and when Bevel and Jackson preached back at King, he lost his temper. According to Young, King said he had supported various staff in their projects, but, “Now that there is a movement that originated basically from Mississippi-born folk, not from SCLC leadership, you don’t want to get involved.” In effect, he charged them with putting their interests above that of the Movement. According to Levison, “He did something I’ve never heard him do before. He criticized the members of the staff with his eloquence and believe me that’s murder.” Agitated and angry, King asked Abernathy for his car keys and walked out of the meeting. When Jackson (and others) followed him out into the hallway, trying to smooth things over, King rebuked him as if he had been disloyal. Then he left.
“We had never seen Martin explode that way, not with us,” said Young. “After he left, people were so stunned they finally began to listen.” Young had opposed going to Memphis all along, but now he argued that the Washington campaign was crucial to the war and every other issue, and that the road to Washington led through Memphis. Epps argued that people should see the importance of an alliance with labor, while others, as he recalled, objected that “Labor has always reneged on its promise and haven’t kept its word and so on in many instances where the civil rights movement is concerned.”
James Orange felt perplexed. He had worked with King at various times since the Birmingham movement, when, as a teenager, he had led students out of the schools and into the jail cells of Bull Connor. At six feet three inches tall and 348 pounds, Orange had played football in college and nearly turned professional. Then he became a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War and SCLC’s foremost liaison to gang members in Chicago and Philadelphia. He, too, questioned the wisdom of going to Memphis again, where SCLC had no organized base. He feared “the whole situation was a set up” by the FBI or someone else to discredit King or do something worse. “But Dr. King saw something as far as the coalition with labor and civil rights that a lot of the staff didn’t see,” said Orange. Aware that King had spoken at numerous union conventions and was well acquainted with union issues and tactics, Orange believed he made a convincing case to go back to Memphis to win this strike, and he ultimately agreed with him.
Finally, the staff unanimously decided that it had the means to control black youth and to pull off a massive nonviolent demonstration. Young wrote, “As somberly and seriously as we had ever done anything, we decided we would support Martin in any way he needed us [and] we would all return to Memphis the next week.” Jackson, Orange, Bevel, and Williams would talk to the Invaders and work with ministers to set up the next march.
According to Jesse Epps, “At the conclusion of the staff meeting there was a little prayer meeting in that office. I can never forget that as long as I live. And everybody sort of emerged from the meeting in a very jubilant [mood]—and I came away saying ‘Mission accomplished; he’s coming back.’ And everybody was looking [long sigh], expecting the successful march and we was thinking that this was going to break the camel’s back and we’ll have this behind us.”
EPPS WOULD BE one of those who picked up King when he returned to Memphis on April 3, and he recalled that King told him, “Well, we have come back to Memphis…to straighten out the Mayor and go on to Washington. Either the Movement lives or dies in Memphis.”