In reply, Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him….”
—Luke 10:25–37
ON SUNDAY, MARCH 31, MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., MADE a powerful moral appeal for justice and peace to an overflowing crowd of more than 4,000 people at the National Cathedral in the nation’s capital. Saying, “We must learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools,” King beseeched his audience to support his crusade to end poverty, racism, and war. His prayer seemed to be partly answered that very night, as President Lyndon Johnson bowed out of the presidential race, vowing to spend the rest of his time in office avoiding partisan politics and trying to end the Vietnam War. Johnson’s top advisers agreed that no path to military victory existed, and increasing numbers of Democrats supported Eugene McCarthy’s antiwar campaign within the Democratic Party for withdrawal from Vietnam.
Hoping there might also be a way out of his planned confrontation with the federal government, King told reporters in Washington that he would meet with the president or anyone else in his administration or in Congress who would be willing to implement the Kerner Commission’s proposals. “We cannot stand two more summers like last summer without leading inevitably to a rightwing takeover and a fascist state,” he warned. In an article slated for publication in Look magazine, he used similar language and argued that Americans ignored—at great peril to the nation—the explosive conditions caused by slavery and segregation’s legacy of poverty, ill health, and unemployment. In return for positive government action, King seemed willing to call off the Poor People’s Campaign. A. Philip Randolph had once won an executive order from President Franklin Roosevelt to stop federal employment discrimination in return for calling off mass demonstrations—an outcome that King might have relished. No one, however, responded to his appeal.
That weekend, Reverend James Jordan, whose historic Beale Street Baptist Church lay right in the middle of the March 28 riot zone, awoke crying in the middle of the night. He went back to sleep but awoke crying again. This time, “Dr. King’s picture came before me…. And so I saw the Lord had shown me Dr. King’s death.” He went to the next meeting of the strike strategy committee, pleading with other black clergy not to bring King back to Memphis. One of them retorted, although not reassuringly, “You don’t have to worry about any white people doing something to Dr. King. That cat’s safe around them. When he gets it, it’ll be from some black!” James Lawson said King never let threats stop him; others said the Memphis movement had to march, no matter what. “He was bluntly answered and I felt a little sorry for him,” said Maxine Smith. The consensus in Memphis was to push on.
On Monday, April 1, back at home in Atlanta, King wearily asked Ralph Abernathy to delay his return to Memphis by a day. When King finally did board an American Airlines plane for Memphis on Wednesday, April 3, the pilot announced that someone had called in a threat to kill him, and airline employees searched the plane for a bomb for more than an hour. King joked to Abernathy, “Well, it looks like they won’t kill me this flight, not after telling me all that.” “Nobody is going to kill you, Martin,” Abernathy tried to reassure him.
DEATH THREATS AGAINST King, Lawson, and strike leaders came in to the Memphis Police Department in increasing numbers. On April 1, American Airlines reported to the police that someone who seemed to be white and seemed to be located in Memphis phoned in to say, “Your airlines brought KING to Memphis, and when he comes again a bomb will go off and he will be assassinated.” The airline later called again to give the police the exact time of King’s arrival. On April 2, a white businessman called from Ohio to pass on a rumor from a business friend who “stated that if KING returned to Memphis Airport for his March, he would be killed by a Negro and that a Memphis Policeman would be blamed for it.” Jerry Fanion said Fire and Police Director Holloman told him he received many threats on King’s life. Yet neither the Memphis police nor the FBI relayed these death threats to King.
At 10:33 on the morning of Wednesday, April 3, King deplaned at the Memphis airport along with Ralph Abernathy, Bernard Lee, Dorothy Cotton, Andrew Young, and SCLC bookkeeper Jim Harrison, who was secretly passing information to the FBI. Reporters immediately asked King about a statement by NAACP President Roy Wilkins that drew a big headline in the Press-Scimitar: “Wilkins Doubts King Can Control March.” Wilkins warned, “The great danger of Dr. King’s demonstration [in Washington] is that he might not be able to keep control of it…. If a maverick in the rear ranks of the march decides to throw a brick through a window, there’s nothing Dr. King, up there at the front, can do to stop it.” King curtly dismissed the Wilkins comment: “He’s said that before. That’s not new.” King informed them that SCLC had met with the Invaders, and there would be no more violence in Memphis. He added that he would resist any injunction against marching as a violation of First Amendment rights.
As Lawson and about twenty others led King through the lobby of the airport, Tarlese Matthews, one of the Memphis movement’s most ardent black community supporters, spotted the MPD’s black plainclothes officers and warned Ed Redditt, “If I were a man I would kill you.” An MPD squad of four white men also appeared, and when Lieutenant George Kelly Davis asked Matthews about the arrangements to transport King, she retorted, “We have not invited no police if that is what you mean.” Don Smith, a leader of the MPD’s Red squad, turned to Lawson and told him he and his officers had come to protect King; he then asked where they were headed. Lawson responded dismissively, “We have not fully made up our minds,” and kept walking.
Lawson was not oblivious to the need for security, and he had welcomed it in 1966, when then Police and Fire Commissioner Claude Armour had given King complete protection while he was in the city for the Meredith march. Armour had then assigned a squad of about eight black officers to protect King, including Jerry Williams and Redditt. Lawson had trusted this group, which had been in evidence during King’s visit on March 18. But Lawson did not believe the Red squad’s white officers had come to protect King; he felt they were there for surveillance purposes and perhaps to do mischief. King himself did not ask for police protection, which he thought was unfitting for a nonviolent leader. In his speeches and writings, King reiterated, “I’m committed to nonviolence absolutely.”
As Redditt and Willie Richmond followed King’s party by car, an unidentified vehicle seemed to be trying to force them off to the shoulder, but Redditt held to the road. He continued to follow King’s car to a strategy meeting at Lawson’s church, while the white detectives, led by Smith, set up surveillance around the Lorraine Motel. After the meeting, Redditt and Richmond followed King back to the Lorraine, but when they got there, Smith told Redditt, “I’ll take it from here.” But later that afternoon, the white detectives left, claiming that SCLC staff had asked them to leave—although Lawson, Samuel Kyles, and Hosea Williams all denied it. The FBI’s special agent in charge in Memphis, Robert G. Jensen, with obvious antagonism toward Lawson, reported that he had tried to contact the minister about King’s security by phone, but Lawson did not return his call. Perturbed, Jensen did not follow up.
Redditt was disturbed that King seemed to have little or no police protection. He thought it strange: more than anyone in the police department, he knew the characters associated with King and the local movement, but “No one assigned me, no one wanted me around.” He drove to Mulberry Street, parked, and took up his duties on his own, as he typically did, watching the streets. Perhaps, he thought, the police department excluded him from a specific assignment to protect King because he was clearly sympathetic to the strikers and to King. He had served as a police escort and eaten with King during one of his previous visits. Redditt had told King of his trials in trying to “integrate” the MPD, including false accusations made against him by white officers. King had advised him, “Just tell the truth. Just tell the truth.”
On April 3, both the FBI and the Memphis police had every reason to be concerned about King’s safety, yet it appears that neither agency effectively conveyed that concern to King. J. Edgar Hoover had said in 1964 that potential “victims of threatened bodily harm” would be notified by agents about threats, but the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations later censured the FBI for doing virtually nothing to prevent an attack on King. Lawson’s suspicion that police agencies were there for surveillance rather than protection was correct. Lawson felt that former Police and Fire Commissioner Claude Armour had given King real protection, but under Frank Holloman’s control, the MPD seemed interested only in surveillance. Holloman was a protégé of Hoover, and Hoover made a point of not using his powers to protect civil rights workers. Someone told Redditt that Holloman even belonged to the John Birch Society, and Redditt said Holloman refused to answer when he asked him if he did.
Clearly enough, the FBI in Memphis continued the national surveillance policy on King and other civil rights workers such as Lawson. One FBI memo listed twenty-one long-distance calls made by Lawson between January 10 and February 3; the FBI contacted its agents in the various cities, asking them to identify the people he called. FBI agents obviously followed his activities closely, but they never provided any protection or gave him any warnings about threats against his life. Lawson knew from the hateful looks of police and the hate calls in the night that many whites wanted to see him dead. After one late-night bargaining session, he returned to his brightly colored Volkswagen, which he had parked conspicuously under a streetlight. Fearing a bomb could be wired to the ignition switch, he sat in the car sideways, put it in neutral, turned the switch, and leaped out. When it didn’t explode, he felt foolish, but after that, he put tape between his hood and his fender: a broken seal meant someone had tampered under the hood. He learned this trick from labor organizer Alzada Clark, who fought KKK anti-union terrorism against her Mississippi organizing campaign, which occurred at the same time as the Memphis sanitation strike. In a separate incident on February 27, a bomb under the hood had killed in Natchez Wharlest Jackson, a rubber worker who had fought to open skilled jobs in his factory to blacks. Lawson knew of other such bombings.
Neither Lawson nor anyone in King’s organization felt secure or believed that they could go to the Memphis police or the FBI for help. Indeed, unknown to people at the time, the FBI’s counterintelligence program against the New Left and black freedom movements, COINTELPRO, had already hired “ghetto informants” to spy on and disrupt the Movement from within. Such provocateurs frequently served to alienate community supporters, create splits in the Movement, or provoke a pretext for police attacks or arrests. Lawson thought police agents had done all of these things in Memphis already.
Marrell McCullough of the Invaders provided a case in point. One police officer later said that McCullough was so strident in his statements that officers who did not know he was an agent “would have given their eye teeth to have locked him up.” Designated for some reason by the MPD as “Agent 500,” McCullough had previously spent two years in the U.S. Army as a Military Police officer, perhaps as part of an intelligence unit; then he went through Memphis Police Department basic training. The MPD named him Max and put him on the payroll of an electric company, from which he drew paychecks, as a cover. He grew an Afro and adopted Black Power rhetoric, and Orie McKenzie unwittingly signed him up as an Invader, probably in February 1968. McCullough became the Invaders’ “Minister of Transportation,” because he had a car, and he soon got “in with” COME strategy committee leaders Jackson, Middlebrook, Bell, and the “potential rough element of Negroes”—specifically, John Henry Ferguson and Willie Kemp, according to a police report.
Infiltration of political organizations had the purpose and the effect of creating suspicion within groups and setting off internal conflict. An FBI report said that Lawson, for instance, “felt that BOP has been infiltrated” by government agencies, possibly the CIA (indeed, McCullough reportedly later worked for the CIA), “and that for this reason the COME group does not fully trust Cabbage and his group.” Cabbage, too, suspected some of his associates of working for the police, but he didn’t know which ones; he said organizers had little choice but to accept the reality of government snoops or get out of the movement.
As King went about his business on April 3, Richmond watched King’s room at the Lorraine from Fire Station Number Two, across the street, recording the names and license plates of those who went in and out of the motel. Redditt, with no specific assignment from his superiors, roamed between the station and the street. Between five and ten agents dressed in civilian clothes reportedly were roaming the streets and monitoring the strike—members of the 111th Military Intelligence Group of the U.S. Army Military Intelligence, which had an office in the downtown Memphis federal building. Military Intelligence Division (MID) units had been tracking King as he spoke across the country, yet another violation of his First Amendment rights.
Like the MPD and the FBI, the MID regarded labor, civil rights, and antiwar protesters, and King, as all potentially subversive, even Communist. MID members later said their Memphis mission did not include surveillance of King, but investigative journalists using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) discovered that MID units had in fact tracked King since he was a student at Morehouse, and they began associating him with Communists as soon as he spoke at Highlander Folk School in 1957. The army had long ago monitored King’s grandfather, A. D. Williams, founder of Ebenezer Baptist Church, and his father, because of their civil rights activities. Exactly what the army did in Memphis in 1968 may never be known, for it supposedly destroyed its surveillance records, as did the MPD, after revelations of their spying on King.
The U.S. Army’s assistant chief of staff for intelligence, William Pelham Yarborough, who led MID work nationally and had commanded Green Berets training and “counterinsurgency” operations in Vietnam during the early 1960s, explained illegal military spying as a reaction to massive antiwar demonstrations, including one he witnessed personally in Washington in October 1967. “What some people don’t remember was the terror that all this struck into the hearts of the people that thought the empire was coming apart at the seams,” he told a journalist. Army concern focused on King particularly because of his strong antiwar views and an abiding belief within intelligence communities that he was a closet Communist.
The FBI regularly shared its reports with Military Intelligence, the Secret Service and other federal agencies, and the Memphis Police Department, further prejudicing the views of intelligence officials on King. Frank Holloman surely knew of FBI efforts to destroy King, and through its wiretaps on Stanley Levison, the FBI well knew of the great distress that events in Memphis caused him. Assistant FBI Director William Sullivan reveled in it and wanted to play upon King’s anxieties as part of the FBI’s plan to stop the upcoming Poor People’s Campaign, code-named “POCAM.”
One thing is certain: None of this illegal surveillance of King’s political activities improved his personal security, as evidenced by its failure to apprehend an escaped convict named James Earl Ray, who drove into Memphis in a white Ford Mustang on April 3. Ray grew up in miserable circumstances in Missouri, the poorest of poor whites and one of nine children. Ray’s father had a criminal conviction and his mother was an alcoholic; the family grew up during the Depression in complete destitution. Ray was just the sort of poor white to whom King had long tried to reach out—another victim of systemic poverty and injustice. But Ray detested King. He styled himself as a member of George Wallace’s American Independent Party and subscribed to Ku Klux Klan leader J. B. Stoner’s publication, The Thunderbolt, which regularly linked Communism, integration, and King. “Nobody can reason with Jimmy on the two subjects of Niggers and politics,” one of Ray’s brothers later told journalist William Bradford Huie.
“A habitual criminal, at war with society, hopelessly alone,” as Huie described him, Ray escaped from prison in 1967 and survived by his wits and a variety of petty crimes. His brother John ran a tavern in St. Louis, where a “standing offer” of a reward to anyone who would kill King was well known. The offer came from several local businessmen, one of them an associate of the viciously antilabor Southern States Industrial Council (to which Mayor Loeb, like many employers, had belonged), and the American Independent Party. All three of Ray’s brothers, who also held racist views, may have helped him after he escaped from prison. In March 1968, Ray had been in Los Angeles, Selma, Birmingham, and Atlanta during King’s presence in those areas on behalf of his Poor People’s Campaign. According to Huie, Ray had been stalking King.
In Alabama, Ray had bought a Remington Game Master Model 760, “the fastest hand operated big game rifle made”—powerful enough to kill a charging bull, according to its manufacturer. Yet lax federal laws did not even require Ray to register the weapon or be fingerprinted when he purchased it. Ray took it with him to Memphis and stayed at the New Rebel Hotel on the night of April 3. He watched television news as it casually pictured King entering Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel. Ray knew right where to find him.
Intelligence authorities seemed completely unaware of Ray, but Memphis police carefully reviewed a handbill circulating in the black community on April 3 titled, “Yellow Thursday,” which warned of another kind of upheaval. It read:
MARTIN LUTHER KING has proven himself to be a yellow uncle Tom. YELLOW instead of BLACK. Now BLACK POWER will have to finish what the YELLOW KING could not. We are going to find out just how good—How Big and Brave the Police Department Is. Sure they are big enough to beat old people and Brave enough to shotgun innocent kids.—But can they stop a march during the Rich White Man’s Party? Cotton Carnival. A party the negro [sic] has never been invited to. Just told to go on down to Beale Street Boy. You have your party down there.
It threatened to make Memphis “famous the World over—something that your two bit carnival never could, and you will Burn Baby Burn.”
On the day of King’s return to Memphis, MPD intelligence officers noted that Black Power activists had been contacting students in the schools, telling them to boycott classes for another King march. Rumors in the community suggested there might be retaliation against the officer who shot Larry Payne. And FBI and police agents tracked a variety of “black militants” coming into town from Alabama, Louisiana, Detroit, and St. Louis—including, they said, members of the Deacons for Defense and the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM).
White authorities still hoped, however, that internal disunity would unravel the movement. One local black minister had gone on television to say that black religious leaders should take over from “radical elements” and hold a meeting to “lay this problem at the foot of the cross” as an alternative to King’s mass march. White businessman Ned Cook praised him, thinking this “would have been the end of the strike.” Another black minister went to the police to accuse Lawson of being a Communist and said Lawson, Jackson, Maxine and Vasco Smith, and Jesse Turner had all failed the black community. White business leaders welcomed such black leaders to speak out against and split the movement, but most blacks remained united behind the strike. That, more than anything, worried the police.
Police and the FBI also worried that Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America and notorious for bombing civil rights activists in Birmingham, might send people to Memphis to attack King or incite other violence. As evidence of the potential for racial agitation, white supremacists tried to publish a quarter-page ad in the Commercial Appeal for April 4 that showed the infamous, false photo of King “at a Communist training school.” The newspaper, to its credit, refused to run the ad, although it had run the picture as a news item several years earlier. Even without the ad, however, stories about King’s disruptive activities, inner-city riots, and “Communist aggression” in Vietnam constantly ran side by side in the mass print media.
MEMPHIS HAD BECOME one of the most dangerous spots on Martin Luther King’s journey down Jericho Road. Yet when Harold Middlebrook met him at the airport on April 3, he thought King seemed strangely detached from it all. When a reporter gave him a newspaper announcing an impending injunction against him by Judge Bailey Brown in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee, King looked off into space, “just nodding and saying, ‘Oh, yes. Is that so?’” A few moments later, he declared, “We are not going to be stopped by Mace or injunctions…. We stand on the First Amendment. In the past, on the basis of conscience we have had to break injunctions and if necessary we may do it. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
In order to get the power of the federal government on his side against local authorities, King had always avoided defying federal court orders. In Selma, he had even turned around a mass march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge because a federal court order prohibited it, and many in the Movement had excoriated him for doing so. Memphis wanted to put him in a similar bind in order to stop his march entirely or postpone it long enough to kill the strike support momentum. Alternatively, it might be the first city to have King jailed for disobeying a federal court order.
In Judge Brown’s courtroom that morning, Memphis Chief of Police J. C. MacDonald said local organizers had refused to make their march plans available to the police, had marched without a permit on March 28, had instigated school walkouts, and had made “inflammatory statements in advance” of the march, until ultimately “the assembled crowd went berserk.” For his part, King “took no action whatsoever towards the quietening [sic] or control of the mob, and did in fact, after continuing to march in the presence of said wide spread vandalizm [sic], completely disappear from the scene.” Fire and Police Director Holloman accused “negro [sic] leaders” of doing nothing to counter threats by militants “to burn Memphis down.” Assistant Chief Henry Lux said he “did not observe any act of disapproval or censure on the part of said Martin Luther King, Jr., towards the widespread acts of vandalism that were being perpetrated within his presence and within his clear vision.”
The city’s bill of complaint, signed by Henry Loeb, named King, Abernathy, Williams, Bevel, Orange, and Lee and said they should be stopped from crossing state lines to organize another mass march in Memphis. It said that the “defendants knew, or should have known,” that actions in support of the march “were likely to cause violence,” and that “said conspiracies of said defendants have already caused or resulted in serious breaches of peace, violation of laws, disregard for law and contempt of law,” and “defendants threaten through their public announcements to continue to sponsor, foment, encourage and incite riots, mobs, breach of peace and other conduct which is in violation of the laws.”
As another reason to stop a second march, City Attorney Frank Gianotti mentioned death threats against King, saying, “We are fearful that in the turmoil of the moment someone may even harm King’s life, and with all the force of language we can use we want to emphasize that we don’t want that to happen.”
At 12:40 PM, Judge Brown issued a temporary (ten-day) restraining order enjoining King and his lieutenants “from organizing or leading a parade or march in the City of Memphis.” If King did not comply, he would go to jail for contempt of court, but the city had even more heavy penalties in mind. The city’s bill of complaint said “negro” [sic] leaders would be breaking the recently enacted state anti-riot act as well as federal anticonspiracy laws. King could thus be the victim of the kind of “conspiracy” prosecutions used to arrest and jail SNCC’s H. Rap Brown for traveling across state lines to “incite” riots. King seemed unperturbed by such prospects. Jesse Epps said King told him, “Even if violence occurred…whatever the outcome of Memphis [it] is going to be a success for the men.” When some of his staff privately expressed nervousness about the looming confrontation, Abernathy recalled that King said, “There was no more reason to be frightened now than in the past,” he was ready to go to jail, and “I would rather be dead than afraid.”
Attorneys Louis Lucas and Walter Bailey—backed by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York City—represented King in Judge Brown’s court. Bailey noted that King, “of course, had anticipated the injunction…was a man of great humility and he was very professional in his approach to problems…he’d been through this before.” King and Abernathy expected federal marshals to show up at Lawson’s church and serve them with Brown’s injunction, but when no marshals appeared, they went back to the Lorraine Motel to eat lunch. When marshals finally did serve the warrant outside the Lorraine, King and his lieutenants laughed, apparently because it seemed absurd to think a court injunction at this point could stop the huge march being planned for Memphis.
Meanwhile, the ACLU regional office in Atlanta had called Memphis attorney Lucius Burch. A top establishment lawyer and Democratic liberal who had organized Boss Crump’s first political defeat in 1948, Burch had also helped to engineer the new strong-mayor form of city government. He later said, “To be perfectly frank, as I was with Reverend Lawson, I wished at that time he had gone anywhere else in the city of Memphis rather than to call me.” He knew that “a very large and reactionary group” in Memphis would start calling him and threatening his family, and he was also wary of Lawson, knowing “that he’s been to Vietnam…and that the FBI thinks he’s a Communist and all that sort of junk.”
Burch noted that a CBS News poll the previous week had found that 47 percent of white Americans considered blacks genetically inferior to whites, and he believed that Loeb and most of his business friends also held those sentiments. He called Loeb’s handling of the strike “a tragedy of inflexibility.” That afternoon, Burch and other members of his firm—David Caywood, Michael Cody, and Charles Newman—met with King, Lawson, and others at the Lorraine. He had never met King, and “I wanted to be sure myself that these people were what they purported to be.” King told Burch that “his whole future depended on having a non-violent march in Memphis,” while Young “completely assured me that it…was just exactly what it was represented to be—the right of these people to express by assembly and petition and demonstrations what they felt was a just grievance.”
After that reassurance, Burch never hesitated. He went to Brown’s courtroom to get a hearing on the injunction set for the next morning; then he worked all night on a brief to defend King’s right to march, sleeping only briefly in his office. Burch remarked later, “The white community didn’t realize that Martin Luther King was the best friend anybody had. He was the answer to the fire bombing and he was the answer to the looting and he was the answer to Black Power.”
LABOR MEDIATOR FRANK Miles, charged by the City Council to find a resolution to the strike, heard from the U.S. District Attorney and the Community Relations Division of the Justice Department that U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark was in town. Word also came to Miles through the office of Representative Dan Kuykendall and Clark’s deputy, James Laue, that people in touch with King thought he might not march if he could get some kind of concession. An astonished Miles did not think King could back out of Memphis that gracefully, if at all, but several sources said he hoped to do just that.
Reverend Frank McRae on Wednesday met with the mayor at lunch, both of them surrounded by armed guards, saying now was the time to make a deal. “I kept saying, ‘Henry, you’re sitting on a powder keg. Please realize this.’” Loeb remained unconcerned and opposed to compromise.
A disturbed McRae joined other white ministers that afternoon in a meeting with black ministers that had been postponed almost since the beginning of the strike. It began badly when Rabbi Wax opened the meeting by saying, “We ought to limit this discussion to try to find out what the issues are.” Ralph Jackson leapt up, saying everyone knew what the issues were, that the ministers by this time had to take a side, and it was too late to engage in such pointless discussion. “Damn you,” he said, walking toward the door—until someone stopped him. The atmosphere went from bad to worse when an older white man talked about the importance of loving “our nigra brethren.” Zeke Bell retorted, “The word N-E-G-R-O is not nigra. It’s knee-grow.” Bell couldn’t help but point out, “You ministers talk about love, and black people can’t even get in the doors of your churches!”
McRae now surprised the ministers by calling for them to march to the mayor’s office, finally focusing the attention of the group on doing something together. However, “As soon as a march was suggested, some white ministers began leaving the room like rats off a sinking ship,” said Father William Greenspun. Another white minister said it would not be “proper or right” to march without first getting an appointment with the mayor. The meeting dragged on until Wax said he had to leave for an engagement in Arkansas; as he left, at least one black minister muttered that he was a coward. Elsewhere in town, the Chamber of Commerce, Future Memphis, and the Downtown Association jointly issued a call to blacks and whites to unite in support of “law and order” and urged authorities “to prevent and put a stop” to mass demonstrations.
The best the ministers could do was to decide to meet again. The next day, Wax recalled, he frankly told the black ministers, “Many of us who were white found it very difficult to communicate with the Negro leaders…that we were always fearful if we didn’t say exactly what the Negroes wanted us to say, that we would be construed or regarded as their enemies.” He felt, “In a conversation that’s meaningful people should be free to express themselves and not feel compelled to agree.” The ministers made painful, incremental headway in their effort to communicate across the racial chasm. That night, Reverend McRae went to the mayor and asked for an appointment for Friday. Loeb agreed but told him, “You’re going to waste your time and all you’re going to do is get yourselves in trouble with your congregations, and you’re going to be misunderstood. And you’re not going to change my mind one way or another.”
At the Lorraine Motel, King remained on tenuous ground. Early Wednesday afternoon, when he met briefly with Invader leaders, Cabbage complained that King had not yet followed up on his pledge to get funding for BOP’s community organizing. An FBI informant among the city’s civil rights leaders reported, “The BOP group is still uncontrollable, unpredictable, contentious, avaricious and believed to be ‘attempting to con’ COME and SCLC out of operating funds.” King said he expected Cabbage and BOP to provide at least twenty-five marshals for the upcoming march, but they gave few assurances of nonviolence in return for SCLC financial support. The nonviolent Andrew Young nearly came to blows with John Burl Smith over his aggressive demands for money. According to the FBI’s informant, “KING endeavored to convince representatives of BOP that they must assure that they and their followers would create no violence during the scheduled massive march,” but they “refused to agree with this and when this meeting was disbanded no agreement had been reached.”
Discussions with the Invaders became so fractious that the COME strategy committee canceled a march of sanitation workers and a planned workshop on nonviolence scheduled for that afternoon. One of the FBI’s “racial” sources warned, “Unless King spends many hours in direct contact with Memphis Negro youths…he will be unable to predictably control youths in any mass march.” One of King’s lawyers related, “King was very much afraid that if this march went on and there was more violence, that he was going to be irreparably damaged.”
King also began to worry that Memphis might disrupt his larger plans for the Poor People’s Campaign. He feared that some 6,000 outsiders coming in for the march in Memphis “will spend much money, time and effort in the Memphis project which they should be conserving and holding in abeyance for King’s Washington Spring Mobilization Project scheduled to begin April 22,” reported an FBI source. Exhausted and ill with a sore throat and a slight fever, King wanted to stay huddled in his hotel room, so he asked Abernathy to take his place at that night’s scheduled mass meeting. At this point, Memphis looked not like the starting place for the Poor People’s Campaign that King had envisioned, but rather like its graveyard.
WHEN ABERNATHY WALKED into Mason Temple, he realized their mistake: newsmen and television cameras were there, and so were 2,000 to 3,000 Memphians. Sanitation workers probably made up the majority, and they had come at a greater risk to themselves than usual. The air was rent by thunder and lightning, and civil defense sirens wailed across Memphis as a tornado swept through West Tennessee, leveling houses and killing twelve people. The windows at Mason Temple shook from the force of the wind. Workers came out anyway, wanting to hear the power of words that King had and that so many people felt they lacked.
Originally, SCLC had scheduled King to speak the next night, April 4, and Abernathy on April 3, but when Abernathy walked in without King, discernible disappointment rippled through the room, and Abernathy sensed it immediately. Workers had come out in the middle of this storm at great peril to themselves—but not to hear Abernathy. He immediately called King at his hotel and convinced him to come to Mason Temple.
Various people spoke and sang. Lawson made an impassioned indictment of the police for the murder of Larry Payne. Murray Austin Ervin, president of the student body at Northside High School, pledged that students there would take part in King’s march and do it nonviolently. King and his assistant Bernard Lee meanwhile drove through high winds and shattering rain to arrive quite late, at about 9 PM. The crowd gave him a standing ovation as he walked in, and King beamed at the warm reception. Striker Clinton Burrows recalled that King wore a black water-repellent jacket with a red inner lining and, “Wherever he would go, people wanted to touch his coat.” Lawson thought King seemed composed, as he shook hands with the others seated around the podium, but Middlebrook recalled, “I thought he looked harrowed and tired and worn and rushed.”
Abernathy made an unusual move, introducing and lionizing King for twenty-five minutes with anecdotes, jokes, and remembrances. An FBI agent, with some disgust, acidly noted Abernathy’s comment, made only half in jest, that, “despite Dr. King’s honors, he has not yet decided to be President of the United States. But he is the man who tells the President what to do.” After Abernathy sat down, ministers joked with him that it sounded like he had just preached King’s eulogy, and King smiled at the joke. But some people thought he was nervous. During the introduction, high winds kept blowing open the outside shutters covering the church’s ceiling vents, making a banging noise. Each time, the noise caused King to jump. Lawson finally told someone to switch on the ceiling fans to open the shutters to stop them from banging.
King stepped to the podium at 9:30, while the storms outside reached the height of their power. At age thirty-nine, he looked like an older man—his face lined with the burdens of the world—as he struggled to conjure up that hope he’d felt during his first speech in Memphis. He used no notes and felt very much at home with this audience—typical of the black workers, poor people, and church folk who came to see him as he traveled into the most impoverished communities of the Deep South. King’s parents and grandparents came from such folk, and King had known them all his life through the neighborhoods in which he lived as well as his church work. He maintained a visceral kinship with these workers that allowed him to speak to their issues as his own. His audience looked to King for inspiration, and he in turn began emerging from his fear and fatigue.
He thanked them for coming out on such a miserable night, then began quietly by saying, “Something is happening in Memphis, something is happening in our world.” As if he were looking out from the beginnings of time, he took them back to Egypt, to Greece, to the Renaissance, to Martin Luther, to the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln, to the Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Then he brought them back to the present and said that if the Almighty had asked him when he wanted to live, this would be the time. “Now that’s a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around.” But from South Africa to Memphis, “The masses of people are rising up.” And their cry “is always the same—We want to be free.”
Desperation had its advantages: humanity’s problems had accumulated to a point of crisis in which survival required that all problems be solved together. “It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world: it’s nonviolence or nonexistence.” The “human rights revolution” demanded a change “to bring the colored people of the world out of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, [or] the whole world is doomed.”
King painted a picture of despair, yet he said this was the best of all times in which to live. Why? As in Montgomery and at the start of the Poor People’s Campaign, he said the most important change wrought by non-violent struggle was in the minds of those who participated in it. Through the freedom struggle, black people already had changed their internal world. They no longer were “scratching where they didn’t itch, and laughing when they were not tickled” they no longer played the fool for the white man. “That day is over. We are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God’s children. And that we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.”
Just like any Black Power militant, King saw black unity as the first prerequisite for further change and division as the way to failure. Centuries earlier, the Pharaoh had kept slaves fighting among themselves, but “when the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery.” Second, people had to turn away from the violence that had happened in the streets of Memphis. “Let us keep the issues where they are. The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers. Now, we’ve got to keep attention on that.” By focusing on the breaking of windows, the news media had taken the focus off the plight of the workers and a mayor “in dire need of a doctor.” King paused as people broke into guffaws and applause at his reference to Loeb.
King then pledged, “We’ve got to march again, in order to put the issue where it is supposed to be.” He called on people to join the Monday march, to remind the world “that there are 1,300 of God’s children here, suffering,” and only a mass movement could solve their problems. “There is no stopping point short of victory. We aren’t gonna let any mace stop us.” People cheered heartily as he infused his ideology of hope.
King offered hope by using history, which showed that nonviolence had repeatedly overcome oppression. Through picketing, marching, petitioning, mass meetings, community organizing, singing, and going to jail together, the freedom movement in Birmingham had turned Police Commissioner Bull Connor from a bull “into a steer,” King joked. As in Birmingham, the Memphis movement expressed the best in America, because “the greatness of America is the right to protest for right”—embodied in the First Amendment to the Constitution. People cheered him on as he rejected court interference, saying, “We’re going to fight this illegal, unconstitutional injunction. All we say to America is, ‘Be true to what you said on paper.’” In totalitarian countries like China and Russia, such injunctions against protest could be expected, but freedom to speak and organize remained the bedrock of American justice, and King’s whole strategy for change had always depended upon the highest courts in the land ultimately defending that freedom.
King saw the ministers in Memphis doing what he had called for the ministers at the Miami conference to do six weeks earlier. The preacher, he told his audience, “must have a kind of fire shut up in his bones. And whenever injustice is around, he must tell it.” He thanked Lawson especially, “who has been in this struggle for many years” and is “still going on, fighting for the rights of his people,” as well as Kyles, Jackson, and other preachers who had made the Memphis movement possible. “So often, preachers aren’t concerned about anything but themselves,” but Memphis ministers had transcended that. “It’s alright to talk about ‘long white robes over yonder,’ in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here.” His audience laughed and applauded, because they knew just what he meant.
King now moved to his current strategy for attaining economic justice, which included anchoring direct action with “the power of economic withdrawal.” If most black people in America were poor as individuals, “collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine.” The economic boycott in Memphis demonstrated “that’s power right there, if we know how to pool it.” He endorsed Jesse Jackson’s plan to “redistribute the pain” by extending the Memphis boycott to all companies that did not hire blacks or that supported Loeb. Black Memphians should also go further, he said, and trade primarily with black businesses in order to build “a greater economic base.”
Building that base required more than setting up accounts in black banks and insurance companies, which would have been of little help to the working poor. Rather King saw a beginning in Memphis through the movement’s combination of economic leverage with the other methods of protest and the ballot. With such power, “We don’t have to argue with anybody. We don’t have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don’t need any bricks and bottles, we don’t need any Molotov cocktails.” King may have aimed these words especially at Cabbage and his comrades in the audience, but they hardly registered on Cabbage, who remained focused on his organization’s battle for scarce resources and legitimacy.
King had been arguing in the Poor People’s Campaign that all classes in the black community should join together to attack larger issues of racial inequality through a movement to support the poorest of the poor—the unemployed in the backwaters of the plantation economy and the inner cities. That campaign had been faltering, but union organizing by the working poor in Memphis, by contrast, had activated nearly the whole black community into a coalition across classes. COME had also expanded the issues, step by step, from justice on the job to justice in the community as a whole. King said the well-off and the not-so-well-off, those with education and those without, should press forward together to a victory:
Now, let me say as I move to my conclusion, that we’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing could be more tragic than to stop at this point, in Memphis. We’ve got to see it through. And when we have our march, you need to be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together or we go down together.
Perhaps King sensed the hand of destiny that he felt had guided many of his struggles since Montgomery reaching through him again, as he shifted from the specific ways to win in Memphis to a larger spiritual idea at the core of his message: “Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.” King illustrated the concept through one of his favorite lessons from the Bible, in which Jesus recounted the plight of a man who had been robbed and left along the road between Jericho and Jerusalem. Several travelers, including a priest and a member of the Levite tribe, passed by the man beaten and robbed by the side of the road and did nothing for him. Perhaps they had religious duties or worthy and urgent civic goals; perhaps they did not have time to stop, said King.
“But I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It’s possible that these men were afraid. You see the Jericho road is a dangerous road.” King empathized with these men without courage. He and Coretta had driven the Jericho Road—a steep, winding, downhill path that spiraled to the “bloody pass,” a place frighteningly well suited for robbery and crime. Perhaps the man lying on the ground was faking, leading travelers into a trap. “And so the first question that the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”
King, who traveled a dangerous road for most of his adult life, had reflected on this parable a great deal. Authorities had jailed him at least eighteen times, racist whites had bombed his residence. A storm trooper of the American Nazi Party beat King in the face at a mass meeting in Birmingham, and another one punched him in the face in Selma. White supremacists would have killed him in Mississippi or in the suburbs of Chicago in 1966 if they could have reached him. King had always faced the possibility of premature death by violence, but the story of the Good Samaritan helped him to conquer his fears and, in King’s mind, also spoke to the issue of racism. The Samaritan, King emphasized, was of a different race from the Levite and the priest—and perhaps from the unknown victim lying by the road. Yet it was the Good Samaritan who crossed the racial boundary of that era and helped the injured man to an inn, where he was taken care of.
In King’s usual telling of the story, the Samaritan’s simple decision to stop and help the man made him a great person. By the same token, anyone could be great, because anyone could serve others. As he had said many times, on Judgment Day God would not ask how many degrees a person had or how much wealth they owned. He would ask, “What did you do for others?” The essence of his Poor People’s Campaign was to convince the better-off to exercise “dangerous altruism” and “dangerous unselfishness” to aid the poor and oppressed. In Memphis, King had the opportunity to draw the moral of his story directly into the struggle at hand, and he took it: “That’s the question for you tonight…. The question is not, ‘If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?’ ‘If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?’ That’s the question.” Linking Memphis to his larger campaign, King said, “Let us move in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be…. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you.”
Throughout his talk, the audience—Reverend Jackson, especially—had urged King on in the usual way, shouting, “Tell it,” “That’s right,” “Go ahead on,” “Amen, brother.” Others sat in a kind of hushed awe. Reverend Middlebrook wondered, “Where can the man go next to climax this thing?…When he got to a point where he could have climaxed, he didn’t.” King had hit a number of rhetorical high points, but he kept widening out his theme and embracing larger truths. And he was not finished yet.
“You know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written,” when a woman asked if he was Martin Luther King, and he said yes. “And the next minute I felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it, I had been stabbed by this demented woman…. The blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that’s punctured, you drown in your own blood—that’s the end of you.” Had he sneezed, he would have died. As the FBI well knew, Ben Davis, formerly the black Communist councilman from Harlem, had donated blood, and District 65 union members and many others had rallied around him. But what King publicly recalled and most remembered was a white girl who wrote to him, “I’m so happy that you didn’t sneeze.” King said he was happy, too, for if he had sneezed, he would have missed the marvelous black freedom struggle that had taken “the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”
Dripping with sweat, King looked back again to the seemingly impossible victories of the past: how student-led sit-ins in 1960 had given new hope to the promise of equal rights; how blacks in Albany in 1962 had straightened their backs against Jim Crow; how hundreds of black children and adults had stood up to fire hoses and dogs in Birmingham, where he had gone to jail exactly five years earlier, on April 3, 1963; how people in Selma in 1965 had stood up to police on horseback who savagely whipped them and cracked their skulls for the crime of wanting to vote.
Had he died in 1958 in New York City, King would have missed the southern struggles that shattered the moral legitimacy of Jim Crow, giving birth to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made discrimination in public accommodations and employment a crime; he would have missed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which once again made voting a national citizenship right, 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. He also would have missed this climactic moment that broadened the meaning of the freedom struggle to issues of economic justice: “If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been in Memphis to see a community rally around these brothers and sisters who are suffering. I’m so happy that I didn’t sneeze.”
True to form, King electrified and uplifted his audience, overpowering the winds and rain pounding the roof of Mason Temple and the lightning crackling outside. Shouts and applause had continually punctuated his speech as King took himself and his audience beyond the petty tyrannies with which they lived day in and day out. People had been maced by the police, children were hungry, students had walked out of school—but together they formed a vision of a different kind of life and a different relationship among people. People may be poor, they may be tired, King told them, “but whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they’re going somewhere. Because a man can’t ride your back unless it is bent.” That standing up could only be done together.
Lawson had moved off the podium, out into the audience, so that he could better see King do his work. King’s eyes focused somewhere else, as if looking at a skyline in the distance; he was beyond the moment, and great emotion seemed to come welling up through his whole body, expressing his commitment to struggle to the end, wherever the Jericho Road might take him. Nearly exhausted, King revealed his personal fears, telling his audience of the bomb threat that had delayed his plane to Memphis. He asked the question on the minds of so many people: “What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?” His eyes watered, and his expression seemed to reflect the centuries of struggle King had just reviewed as well as the very hard choices before him. His voice trembling, he cocked his head slightly and seemed to confide his innermost thought: “We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop.”
When he struck this note, ecstatic shouts, cheers, and even laughter rocked Mason Temple. Everyone knew just what he meant, for they too faced fear and anxiety every day, and they had faced more of it than ever during this long strike. Few of the people in that room felt any certainty about the future, but now the preacher and his followers moved together beyond the harsh moment of Memphis to some higher, biblical truth. At Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, in January 1957, King had revealed to his followers that during a sleepless, fearful night after whites had bombed his home, he had “been to the mountaintop.” Sensing the power of God supporting the Montgomery movement’s struggle for truth and justice, King had then resolved to face death, happy and unafraid. He was doing the same thing now.
A young girl named Barbara Brown watched in awe, later recalling, “He had a strange look on his face” as his voice trembled and water came to his eyes, revealing not fear but a transcendent hope:
And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve s-e-e-n the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the promised land. And I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man!
As King’s defiant emotions came roaring through him, he abruptly turned away from the audience, shouting a verse from the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “Mine e-y-e-s have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!” He didn’t quite finish his sentence, he didn’t wave or gesture to the crowd. He strode a few quick steps, practically falling into the arms of his comrade Ralph Abernathy and collapsing into his chair. The ministers behind rose up around him, shouting and clapping and waving their hands as King sat frozen, momentarily overwhelmed.
Pandemonium swept Mason Temple as people came to their feet—applauding, cheering, yelling, crying. Just as King appeared to have been transported to some other place, so were they. As Reverend Kyles stood with King on the platform, he saw “ministers who ordinarily would keep their composure just break down.” Reverend Jordan, who so feared for King’s life, said, “You could hear one minister crying all over the building, just at the top of his voice.” Middlebrook looked out to see that the chairman of his church’s board of trustees stood weeping in the audience.
Middlebrook said that King, who had turned directly toward him to come back to his seat, had tears in his eyes. Reverend Jordan, also on the podium, said, “When he sat down, he was just crying. He sure was.” Preachers sometimes cried, he said, but he had never seen King do it. “This time it just seemed like he was just saying, ‘Goodbye, I hate to leave.’”
Said Bill Lucy, “It was one of the most dramatic speeches I’ve ever heard. It was not negative, it was really very, very high. When it ended, the entire church at Mason Temple just went wild with excitement. I mean, he had touched a chord that was so deeply rooted in all of the people—it went far beyond the strikers to community people—and he had shared with them his view of not only himself but of his role in society.”
Beyond that, said Reverend James Smith, who later became director of AFSCME Local 1733, “There was an overcoming mood, an overcoming spirit in that place. When Dr. King spoke that night we knew that we were going to win. There was something about Dr. King. A man who could walk with kings, but he was just as simple when he spoke that all of us understood him. Never met a man like that before.”
Sanitation worker James Robinson said that, sitting in the audience that night, he could actually feel King’s words and see the truth of his vision. Moses had gone up to the mountain and looked over into the promised land, and he knew that he would not get there but that the Hebrew people would. “King was like Moses. A lot of that stuff he was talkin’ about was true. A lot of that stuff was gonna come to pass. You can’t keep treatin’ people wrong, you gotta do right some time.”
Striker Clinton Burrows, like most people there that night, described King’s rhetorical power in religious terms. Burrows had been arrested and his family had suffered privation for two months, but that night, “It was just like Jesus would be coming into my life…. I was full of joy and full of determination. Wherever King was, I wanted to be there.” He said, “It seemed to me from where I was sitting, his eyes glowed.” King’s words quieted his own inner turmoil. “He got up and spoke about the plans to kill him if he came to Memphis. He made it very clear that he didn’t fear any man. That is a good spirit, to not fear any man. If you believe in right, stick with it.”
King’s words that night meant something very special to the sanitation workers, Dorothy Crook, later a president of Local 1733, said. “I’m sure a lot of things have been written about why he came. But to these 1,300 guys, it meant a voice speaking for them.” King “had his heart on the pulse of people, and that is why they were able to listen to him.” As a Baptist preacher, he created a spiritual path they could follow, come what may.
Unlike his famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, broadcast across much of the nation, millions of people did not see King’s “Mountaintop” speech in Memphis. This was almost a private moment, as a beleaguered group of several thousand huddled together in a church meant to hold 10,000 or more, with storms raging outside. That moment burned deeply into the consciousness of most of those present, and many of them would carry King’s words with them for the rest of their lives.
ATTACKED AS EITHER too radical or too moderate, drained by the massive demands upon his time, depressed by violence and threats of death, ill due to his constant travel and lack of sleep, King had looked both backward and forward, and out of a mountain of despair had hewed one more stone of hope. As Reverend Kyles put it, King had “preached the fear out,” of himself and his audience.
Then the moment was over. King briefly stayed at the podium, relaxed, and greeted people. Young Barbara Brown told her babysitter she wanted to shake Dr. King’s hand, and she stood in line until her turn came. “His hands were as soft as cotton but very moist,” and she would remember that touch a few days later when she marched through the streets of Memphis. Many years later, she recalled, “From that day to this day, my life was changed.”
As people walked out of the church, they discovered that the violent storm outside had momentarily passed away.