The white man has killed his best friend…. There will be more violence because Martin Luther King’s followers will follow Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown, not because they want to but what else is there to do?
—Middle-aged black man, Memphis
AFTER HIS “MOUNTAINTOP” SPEECH ON APRIL 3, KING’S spirits rose tremendously, and he stayed in a buoyant mood. King went to eat at Reverend Ben Hooks’s house while the COME strategy committee met late into the night at the AME Minimum Salary Building. Reverend Samuel Kyles told Maxine and Vasco Smith what a great speech King had made, but he also said King’s unusual comments about death worried him. Kyles remembered the night when he and the Smiths had bid Medgar Evers good-bye after a rally in 1963. Maxine Smith had kissed Evers on the cheek, and within an hour the white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith had assassinated him.
At 1 AM, King’s brother, A. D., arrived by car at the Lorraine Motel, with Kentucky State Senator Georgia Davis, a SCLC board member, and SCLC administrative aide Lucy Ward, on their way back to Louisville from a meeting in Miami. They stayed up until 4:30 AM, when King, Lee, and Abernathy stepped out of a taxi in the motel courtyard. The King brothers, Davis, and Ward stayed up visiting—until Martin held a brief SCLC strategy meeting with staff members at 8 AM. SCLC was scheduled to go to federal court, but Young took King’s place and King went to bed.
Things were looking up. On Thursday, April 4, in federal district court, Young and Lawson “magnificently” explained to Judge Bailey Brown, according to Lucius Burch, that demonstrations had to continue because poor and minority workers otherwise had “no outlet for expression whatever”—the march was a means of communication, guaranteed by the First Amendment. Police Chief MacDonald counter-argued: “I don’t think anybody can have a march next week without violence,” but Tennessee Civil Rights Commissioner John Spence testified that pent-up anger in the black community had to be channeled: canceling the march could itself set off violence. Frank Holloman admitted he would much rather see King lead a march than someone else, and Young reassured the judge that further violence in Memphis would repudiate King’s whole way of life. Lawson pledged his reputation to keeping Monday’s mass march entirely peaceful. Judge Brown said he might allow a march under strict conditions, and he would rule on Friday.
On another front, things were not going so well. At SCLC’s expense, a group of well-armed Invaders holed up in Room 315 at the Lorraine, still trying to cut a deal. SCLC staff members Hosea Williams, James Orange, and James Bevel met at 10:30 that morning with Charles Cabbage and his brother Richard, John Burl Smith, John Henry Ferguson, Milton Mack, and a newcomer from Detroit named Theodore Manuel. The young militants still mistakenly thought King could come up with tens of thousands of dollars at the drop of a hat. Cabbage still continued to argue that to prevent youth violence, SCLC would have to fund his organization, yet he still would not make a categorical pledge to support nonviolence. King entered the discussion and said he could not continue to dialogue with the Invaders unless they sincerely supported tactical nonviolence. They insisted that Cabbage’s doctrine of “tactical violence” deserved equal respect, but King responded, “I don’t negotiate with brothers.” He made it clear he wanted them to be marshals, but to do it, they had to adopt nonviolent discipline. At an impasse, the Invaders left.
John Burl Smith felt angry and thought he was being used by King’s movement. “I viewed Dr. King much like I saw those around him—not to be trusted.” He felt ministers had sold out the strikers several times, and that King, as a speaker and march leader, had “upstaged a valiant fight being waged by black men stooped by decades of de-facto slavery”—namely, the sanitation workers. “We were not interested in joining a national movement” with King to make the Memphis struggle part of the Poor People’s Campaign.
King later that afternoon challenged Smith to rethink his position. “Placing a hand on my knee, he looked me in the eyes and said, ‘Nobody elected you, so who are you working for? Colored folks need young people willing to lead, and I am offering you that opportunity.’ Sometimes, I think I can still feel his grip on my knee.” Years later, Smith wrote, “I came to understand his plan.”
Meeting with his staff that afternoon, however, King sharply criticized Hosea Williams, who apparently had already proposed to Cabbage and Smith the idea of making them SCLC staff members. Middlebrook said Williams hoped that “exposure to Dr. King and the staff would give them the idea of being nonviolent.” According to Abernathy, when King heard about this, he became “grim and businesslike,” saying Cabbage would have to be dismissed and no one should be on the payroll unless fully committed to at least tactical nonviolence. He “actually got up…and walked around preaching to the staff,” said Middlebrook. King feared some of his own staff—Bevel in particular—did not fully support nonviolence, and he said that if they did not, they should leave SCLC immediately. King also reiterated, “I’d rather be dead than afraid. You’ve got to get over being afraid of death.”
Andrew Young later wrote that SCLC staff members also talked about rumors of informers and infiltrators in the Memphis movement. Young believed, as did Bill Lucy, that the FBI had paid provocateurs to disrupt the recent march. In general, wrote Young, “We tended to assume that the most violent, hostile, and angry people were the plants, so much so that I became automatically suspicious of anyone who was supermilitant and wanted to fight and kill people.” SCLC tried to channel people’s anger into “constructive, nonviolent action,” and “to expose the supermilitants for the windbags they were; otherwise, they would get people stirred up to do stupid things.”
After this somewhat tense discussion, King returned to a jovial mood. Kyles arrived and started singing old church favorites with Jesse Jackson and members of his Breadbasket Band—songs such as “Yield Not to Temptation,” “I’ve Been ’Buked and I’ve Been Scorned,” and “I’m So Glad Trouble Don’t Last Always.” King relaxed with his brother and his guests. Then the two brothers spoke to their mother by phone for nearly an hour. When Young returned from his federal court testimony, King teased him and started a lively pillow fight—the King who liked to joke and fool around was back. After the foolishness ended, King and Abernathy prepared for dinner at the Kyles home.
Beyond the cocoon of fellowship at the Lorraine, the area swarmed with police, FBI, and military intelligence (MID) agents. The Memphis Police and Sheriff’s Department had nine tactical units—each consisting of three cars and twelve officers—sited at key locations around the city. An additional ten regular police cars, with three to four men per car, cruised the downtown area, and the FBI had numerous agents working out of its Memphis office. Robert Jensen directed FBI surveillance, while black MPD detectives Redditt and Richmond kept watch on King all day through a small hole in newspaper plastered over the window of Fire Station Number Two, across from the Lorraine. Not exactly a high-tech surveillance operation, this more closely resembled the old-fashioned work of Boss Crump’s “snitches.”
Two black firemen, Norvell E. Wallace and Floyd E. Newsum, worked at the fire station—a segregated, all-black unit in the heart of black Memphis. The city had a history of refusing to advance black firemen beyond the rank of private, so these two men understood clearly the plight of the sanitation workers, and they strongly supported their strike. At the mass meeting at Mason Temple the previous night, they had told people about the surveillance of King by Redditt and Richmond. Reverend Blackburn had warned the two officers, who were in the audience, that people resented their presence, and Reverend Lawson from the pulpit denounced the police officer who had murdered Larry Payne. Others in the audience stared hard at the two plainclothes police agents, and they promptly left. The next day, Holloman promptly removed Wallace and Newsum from the fire station.
This left Redditt and Richmond alone at the fire station to continue watching King and his party on April 4, but members of the 111th Military Intelligence Group, a unit of the MID based in Georgia, were also scouting Memphis on behalf of the Pentagon for signs of an impending riot. At one point, MID investigators allegedly watched SCLC staff members at the Lorraine with binoculars from the fire station’s rooftop, but then they abandoned the position as too exposed to public view. Unconvincingly, MID agents later claimed that they relied on police informants for their information, not electronic surveillance, and that they were concerned only about riots, not King.
Meanwhile, the police received multiple warnings of impending violence. Unnamed “intelligence sources” from out of state ominously told the MPD that the Ku Klux Klan had forbidden its members to go to Memphis on April 4, “for fear that they might be blamed for anything which might happen” that day. The police also heard multiple false rumors that Stokely Carmichael was in town to stir up trouble. Federal marshals guarded the homes of the U.S. district attorney, Judges McRae and Bailey Brown, and Mayor Loeb, who had long been under police guard. At 12:50 PM, a woman phoned Redditt at the fire station saying that everyone knew he was there and that spying “was an offense against his people.” Philip R. Manuel, from Senator John McClellan’s U.S. Senate subcommittee, who was in town investigating King’s Poor People’s Campaign, also relayed a supposed tip from his Washington office that a black revolutionary from out of state planned to kill Redditt. This threat later proved to be completely erroneous and related not to Redditt but to someone in Knoxville.
Nonetheless, Holloman and Lux removed Redditt from the fire station and told him to take his family into hiding. Redditt protested that if someone was planning to come after him, he would be much safer roaming the streets of Memphis than waiting for them like a sitting duck at home. He did not want to be removed from the area around the Lorraine, feeling that he had some role to play in protecting King. Overruled, he fumed as Lieutenant Ely Arkin drove him home, but Redditt felt so skeptical about the supposed threats that he refused to remove his family from their home. They stayed, but police put them under armed guard for the next several days.
Patrolman Richmond stayed on at the fire station, now apparently the only black officer in the immediate vicinity of the Lorraine Motel. There were no walking police in evidence around the Lorraine, but MPD’s TAC Unit 10, made up of three cars and twelve white men, at 5:50 PM joined Richmond at Fire Station Number Two, as its members got refreshments and took a break from their duties. The police were everywhere, yet they were nowhere visible around King.
INSIDE THE LORRAINE, Cabbage resumed a tight game of brinkmanship. When Hosea Williams told him that only supporters of nonviolence would be tolerated within SCLC, he and the other Invaders concluded that SCLC, like the ministers in COME, did not trust them. But Cabbage had no qualms about insisting that his Black Power group get a quid pro quo for its support for a nonviolent mass demonstration, and, according to him, SCLC finally signed over a $10,000 check as a down payment to his group—although congressional investigators later concluded that SCLC had made no such payment.
Around 5 PM, a car pulled into the courtyard with police informant and Invader “Minister of Transportation” “Max” McCullough at the wheel. He had taken SCLC staff members Orange and Bevel shopping for overalls. Orange said that they had spent most of the day explaining to various members of the Invaders how to “get their mind off of doing violence but [instead] sort of protecting people from violence”—for example, by nonviolently covering up someone about to throw a brick. He suspected that police infiltrators played a major role in the Invaders, but he also believed that SCLC staff could control any provocateurs.
Around 5:50, the Invaders left the Lorraine Motel, after an emissary from Jesse Jackson—who stood looking at them impatiently from the parking lot—told them that SCLC wanted to put up other people in their room. Cabbage felt particularly conspicuous as he walked out to the parking lot with rifles and guns smuggled in a blanket under his arm. John Burl Smith noticed how quiet it was, with no police in sight, and he thought the whole scene seemed “eerie.”
Upstairs, as King and Abernathy prepared to go to dinner, Kyles entered King’s room and exchanged pleasantries with him. King buoyantly said of Memphis, “This is like the old Movement days, isn’t it? That first speech here! When I got to the Temple and saw all those people—you couldn’t have squeezed two more in if you tried. This really is the old Movement spirit.”
From the firehouse, Patrolman Willie Richmond watched King as he stood on the balcony talking to staff members in the courtyard below. King bent over the rail, talking to Solomon Jones, his driver for that night, and then Jesse Jackson, who said from the courtyard, “Hey, you remember Ben Branch?” King knew Branch, the leader of the Breadbasket Band from Chicago, who had been singing in the motel with Kyles and others earlier in the day. He told Branch how much he had enjoyed his version of “Precious Lord,” which Branch had played for him in Chicago, and he asked to hear it again at that night’s rally: “I want you to play it real pretty.”
Abernathy remained inside Room 306, still getting ready to leave for dinner. It was dusk, and time to leave. King had been standing on the balcony for less than five minutes. Orange, Bevel, and Young wrestled around in the parking lot, and King joked to the gentle giant of his staff, “James, don’t hurt Andy and Bevel.” Orange joked back, “‘Dr. King, it’s two of them and one of me, and you should be asking them not to hurt me.’ And before he could respond again, the bullet went off,” said Orange.
Everyone in the courtyard, including Jackson, Bevel, Young, Williams, Lee, and Orange—most of the top staff of SCLC—instinctively ducked or sprawled onto the pavement. King’s attorney, Chauncey Eskridge, black photographers Ernest Withers and Joseph Louw, and Earl Caldwell, a black reporter for the New York Times—all of whom were at the motel—jumped at the sound.
The bullet slammed through King’s jaw on a downward trajectory, ripping through his jugular vein and spinal cord. The force of this powerful rifle shot—coming at a speed of 2,670 feet per second from a distance of about 200 feet—twisted him and threw him flat on his back. A woman in the courtyard cried out, “Oh, Lord, they’ve shot Martin.” Abernathy, Kyles, Jackson, and others rushed to his side. Police agent McCullough bounded up the stairs and applied a towel to stanch the wound, as King’s blood spurted onto the cement deck outside Room 306. Kyles covered him with a blanket to keep him warm, as cries of anguish rose from the courtyard.
Cabbage heard the shot just as he got into his car, and he did not look up or back; he accelerated out of the parking lot and sped toward his mother’s home in South Memphis. Someone had fired a weapon at him in his car earlier in the strike, and he thought the shot was aimed at him. Behind him, Invaders scattered. In the motel, Reverend Kyles could not make a phone call—probably because the co-owner, Lorene Bailey, had gone into shock and wasn’t putting calls through the switchboard. Kyles beat the wall, crying, “Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus!” but Abernathy told him to get a grip on himself. Solomon Jones drove forward and backward in the parking lot, completely disoriented. A. D. King was in the shower and had not heard the rifle shot. When told what had happened, he went into an emotional breakdown—repeating, between sobs, “They got my brother.”
Black patrolman Richmond and a white fireman who had come into the room were horrified at what they had seen through the fire-station peephole. At 6:01, Richmond called the Intelligence Division of the MPD, and within minutes, an order went out to the TAC Unit to close into a ring formation around the Lorraine. TAC Unit 10 members, who had been lounging around the fire station, ran toward the motel. A reporter estimated that some 150 police officers suddenly swarmed around the Lorraine Motel, as King’s aides pointed toward a brick rooming house and told them to go in the opposite direction. Jesse Jackson told the New York Times, “When I turned around I saw police coming from everywhere. They said, ‘Where did it come from?’ And I said, ‘Behind you.’ The police were coming from where the shot came.” With anger and bitterness in his voice, he said, “We didn’t need to call the police. They were all over the place.” He didn’t believe they were there to protect King, either.
Some of the police circled around toward the front and back of a two-story brick rooming house that fronted on Main Street and stood directly across from the Lorraine Motel. By 6:06, a police dispatcher sent out a radio communication that the shot had come from the rooming house, and he ordered officers to seal off the whole area. By 6:07, a rifle had been found in a bundle in front of Canipe’s Amusement Company, next to the rooming house. A witness said a white man had left it there.
By 6:09, an ambulance sped King toward St. Joseph’s Hospital—to the same emergency room where James Meredith had been taken after he was shot in 1966. Reverend Kyles had already seen King’s color change, and he remembered having seen this same change in his father’s face just before he died. By 6:10, a dispatch over police radio identified a white man fleeing the scene in a white Ford Mustang, driving north on Main Street; Memphis police began looking in that area for the killer. Investigators later concluded that a ham radio operator had contrived this entirely erroneous lead, which drew police attention away from southbound routes. Police dispatcher Lieutenant Frank Kallaher failed to alert police across the nearby state lines of Arkansas and Mississippi to look for an escaping killer. Despite scores of police cars patrolling Memphis, the shooter escaped by driving south and west out of the city.
As Charles Cabbage also drove southward, his car radio announced that Dr. King had been shot, and it soon identified the killer’s getaway car as a late-model blue or white Mustang. It sounded too much like Cabbage’s powder-blue Mustang, which he had borrowed from Edwina Harrell. He stepped on the gas. By the time he got to his mother’s house, police helicopters were flying over the black community, on the lookout for potential rioters. Cabbage quickly drove the car into the backyard and camouflaged it with tree limbs and brush.
He went inside the house and stayed there. Later that night, a twitch in his neck turned into a muscle spasm and then a full-blown seizure; he could not move. In the morning, Cabbage went to the hospital with what looked like a nervous breakdown. Doctors gave him a shot of Demerol to put him out of his pain.
AS WORD OF the shooting spread, Memphis movement activists converged on the Lorraine, hoping that King might still be alive. Joe Warren, Robert Beasley, S. T. Thomas, and other strikers who had been at Clayborn Temple, preparing to go to a mass meeting at Mason Temple, ran toward the hotel. They could not get near it, so Warren went back to his car and drove home. Other workers had already left for Mason Temple, still expecting a mass rally with King.
Maxine Smith, late for her dinner with King at the Kyleses’ home, was in her car and trying to drop off two law students who had come into town as civil rights observers for the mass march. When she saw a police car with its siren on and speeding in the direction of the Lorraine, she sped that way too. As she neared the motel, she saw John Henry Ferguson, whom police had attacked or arrested numerous times during the strike, sprinting down the road. He ran so fast that his shoes had come off, and he was carrying them. She stopped and shouted, “‘John Henry, what’s wrong with you?’ And he said, ‘They’ve shot Dr. King.’ So I said, ‘Get in the car, John Henry.’” She thought that if the police caught him, they would beat or kill him.
Police had sealed off the Lorraine, and she couldn’t get past the barricades. Events began to blur: “I remember parking the car and just running. I don’t know where I was running or why I was running.” When she realized that her young son Smitty was at home alone, she turned around and rushed home, fearful of impending riots. Her two young white law students stayed behind, and the police arrested them as their first possible suspects in the shooting. John Henry slipped away.
Jesse Epps and P. J. Ciampa had also sped to the Lorraine, where they watched the ambulance take King away. Jerry Fanion showed up a few minutes later to find King’s bloodstains on the balcony. Bill Lucy and Ralph Jackson rushed to the Lorraine from the Minimum Salary Building, and they stood with others on the perimeter of the parking lot. Lucy and Baxton Bryant quickly obtained passes from Frank Holloman and traveled around the city for the rest of the night, asking people to remain nonviolent. As someone involved in the negotiations, Lucy felt somehow guilty, thinking that perhaps “the adamant position of, maybe both sides of this thing, had caused this to happen.”
T. O. Jones at first did not believe the news reports, but when he verified that King had been shot, he decided that a widespread assassination plot was underway, so he locked himself in his room at the Peabody Hotel. He couldn’t remember anything about how he felt or what he had done after that. His son Jesse stayed with him, saying that his father just went silent, holding his head in his hands: “He didn’t say anything until the rally the next night, and when he did, he began to cry on stage and so did everyone else.”
Reverend James Jordan had just returned from the Lorraine Motel when he heard the news. That day, an African American man who had said he was just back from Germany had gone with him to the motel, hoping to see King. Jordan’s first thought was that perhaps this black man had shot King: “I’m thinking of what his aide [James Bevel] said, ‘When he gets it, it’ll be from some Negro.’” The lack of any security for King had been obvious. Jordan jumped in his car and sped back to the Lorraine, fearing that his worst nightmare had come true. He couldn’t get anywhere near it.
Gwen Kyles, busy at home preparing dinner for King and his colleagues, did not hear the news until her husband phoned home: “I just went numb. I just felt like somebody had knocked all my senses out. I mean, the light just went out…just everything drained out. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t do anything. I just went stiff, and when I finally came to myself, I was just walking the floor and I remember saying, ‘They’ve torn it now.’” White society had crossed a line beyond decency, and someone would have to make a loud, militant protest that white America could not ignore.
Reverend James Lawson heard the news while he was home eating dinner with his wife and two sons. He rushed to WDIA, black Memphis’s main radio station, and taped a recorded message urging calmness, prayers, and dedication to King’s faith in nonviolence. As during the March 28 violence, Lawson’s entreaties played a key role in turning people in black Memphis away from mass violence. He was hoping, however, that King had only been wounded.
“The first tape I had made was playing on the radio when we got over the teletype the news that Dr. King was dead. Since I was in the radio station…I took it calmly.” Lawson made another tape, saying, “It would be a compounding of this death if now Negro people or white people around our country should despair and decide that now is the time to let loose an orgy of violence. It would not be a tribute to Dr. King but a denial of his life and work.” Throughout the evening, the station played his tape urging nonviolence.
Alone in his car, Lawson gripped his steering wheel as waves of grief washed over him, and he nearly broke down. But he knew that tears would not get the job done in the middle of an emergency. King’s prophetic speech of the previous night had not caused him to have premonitions, but neither was King’s death a surprise. He always knew that King could be killed anywhere and at any time, and he also knew that King would want him to do everything he could to help prevent a violent response. Later, he found Judge Benjamin Hooks, and they spent much of the night (with a police pass) moving throughout the city and calling for nonviolence.
Lawson acknowledged, though, that even some of the city’s most prominent African Americans felt, “We should have burned the place down.” Underneath Lawson’s calm exterior, he also had a deep reservoir of anger, and King’s death added immeasurably to it. Better than anyone, Lawson understood the disastrous consequences of King’s death. He saw it as the triumph of the “moral blindness” created by “interdependent cruelty systems” of racism, war, and institutionalized violence—against which he and King had fought together ever since they first met at Oberlin College in 1957.
Jerry Wurf heard the news in Washington, DC, and reacted with panic: “What’s happening to our people in Memphis? Where are they? Are they dead? Are they alive?…I had the same feeling as when John Kennedy was killed. Why? How? What kind of a world are we living in? This whole dreadful feeling. What the hell are we doing?”
Wurf spent the night on the phone, tracking down his staff in Memphis and repeatedly calling the White House. He finally spoke to an assistant to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, telling him that the federal government had to intervene in the strike: “I don’t know what button to press, but, goddammit, Memphis is going to burn!” Only a maniac, he said, would leave Mayor Loeb in control. Wurf took the first plane he could get and arrived in Memphis the next morning.
Mayor Loeb had been driving south to give a talk to University of Mississippi law students when Sheriff Bill Morris drove up beside him to escort him back to the city. By 6:35 PM, Loeb had called in the state police and the National Guard and had issued a curfew making anyone on the street subject to immediate arrest.
At Mason Temple, where people had gathered for the rally with King, an older black woman cried out, “The Lord has deserted us.” Striker Clinton Burrows had first driven to St. Joseph Hospital to find King, but police told him to leave. When he got to Mason Temple and told people King was mortally wounded, “The children began crying and all hell broke loose.”
If the Invaders had a secret network ready to attack the town, as the police thought, they didn’t use it. To the contrary, one of them told people at the temple, “Just respect the man [King] enough not to go out and do it tonight. Wait till he’s buried. Don’t you know the policemen are out there waiting for you?…That’s just what the honkies want us to do. Come right out there like a bunch of wild Indians and they could wipe us out like they did the Indians. Don’t do it.”
It was a moment of truth for those who thought black Memphians should take guns into the streets against white supremacy. This unidentified Invader later reflected, “We used to have a choice. We could wait for Dr. King to carry out his program and if it didn’t work, we could use ours, but now it was as if white people didn’t want any other program but ours.” He feared that black insurrection, as King had always said, would only lead to massive repression against the black community.
AFSCME organizers arrived and told people to get off the streets. “The people were telling us to go to hell, because it’s their night for revenge. And we said, ‘It’s impossible,’” recalled Ciampa. King’s SCLC staff members played the same role, observed ACLU attorney David Caywood: “They were having a terrific argument with a bunch of young Negroes…trying to talk them out of burning the town down…. And they did a fairly good job of it.” Most people went home.
Two white newspaper reporters trying to get to the Lorraine Motel turned back after a group of young blacks broke their car window with bottles and bricks. It was not safe on the streets, and white reporters remained more or less trapped at the city’s newspaper offices and television and radio stations. Frantically, they tried to confirm that King had been shot and to find out his condition.
At St. Joseph’s Hospital, Abernathy, Bernard Lee, Young, and Chauncey Eskridge stood by as a team of doctors tried to save King. By 7:05, doctors pronounced him dead. For the next twenty-four hours, Abernathy and Lee accompanied King’s body through the dreadful process of autopsy and embalming.
Downtown, Frank Miles was meeting with Downing Pryor and other city councilmen, discussing ways to move the mediation forward, when they heard about the shooting. They broke up and went home or to the mayor’s office. At city hall, some of the City Council members met with Loeb. “There was an awful shock in the room,” said Pryor. Jerred Blanchard later saw it as “Memphis and America damned to hell all over the world…. The man who was recognized as the Negro leader of all the leaders, slain, assassinated. Just a modern form of lynching.”
Fred Davis began crying uncontrollably, and so did Reverend J. L. Netters. Even Loeb cried—the only time anyone had seen him lose control of his emotions since the strike began. Netters kept repeating in his mind, “If only they had listened.” Loeb asked Netters to unite them with a prayer, but Netters could not: he held Loeb responsible for King’s death. The mayor moved on and spent the rest of the evening driving around and making statements at television and radio stations to calm people down. Accompanied by a police officer, Loeb carried a pearl-handled revolver in his pocket, supplied by the MPD.
Tommy Powell had been meeting at the Peabody Hotel with businessmen, telling them, “This town is fixin’ to blow up if you don’t tell Henry Loeb to sign this damn contract.” Even Sheriff Morris supported his statement, but these businesspeople weren’t ready to buck Loeb. Frustrated at their failure to take the situation as seriously as it deserved, Powell was walking down the stairs when the sheriff’s driver ran up to say that King had been shot. “I turned around on the steps and, I will never forget this, I said, ‘Laugh now you sons-of-bitches.’” Powell left for the Lorraine Motel.
Rabbi James Wax and friends heard the news at a dinner at the home of Fred and Myra Dreifus. They immediately divided up the food and all went home, believing Memphis was in for another state of siege.
Police reactions to the slaying differed. A black police detective standing outside the Lorraine commented, “Son of a bitch. You remember when they shot Meredith. I’m afraid they’re going to just take this town apart. It isn’t just black power, it’s gonna be everybody—from all over the country.” After Tommy Powell got there, though, he saw several white police officers laughing and joking. One recognized Powell and said, “You nigger-loving son-of-a-bitch, we killed Martin Luther King.” One white officer later allegedly responded to a question about what King looked like after he was shot, by saying, “Like any other dead nigger.”
Someone had shot through Powell’s car window as he was driving earlier in the strike, and Powell decided Memphis was not safe. He sent his wife and family to stay with family members in Chattanooga for the next two weeks. White minister Dick Moon had the same feeling, so he sent his wife and family into hiding with friends. No one who supported the strike, white or black, felt safe.
In Mississippi, Charles Evers, the brother of slain NAACP leader Medgar Evers, answered the phone to hear a man telling him, “We just killed that black S.O.B. Martin Luther King and you’re next.” It was the first of many threats he and other black civil rights advocates throughout the Mississippi Delta would receive that night. The right-wing network of hate callers was activated in Memphis, too. One woman called white attorney Lucius Burch repeatedly, late into the night, asking him why he had agreed to represent “that nigger” King.
Sometime later that evening, Ernest Withers, legendary for his photography of black life and death in Memphis, received police permission to go to the balcony where King was shot. He photographed the pool of blood left behind, which to him looked like a silhouette of King. In King’s room, he found a pill container from the pharmacy of Mississippi civil rights leader Aaron Henry and used it to gather some of King’s blood, which he took back to his studio for safekeeping. The next morning, Withers photographed King lying in his coffin, just as he had photographed civil rights martyrs Emmett Till, George Lee, Herbert Lee, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Larry Payne before him.
AS NEWS OF King’s death flashed across television screens or blared on the radio, sanitation workers and their families suffered through a long, devastating night. Matt Randle, who had been waiting to see King at Mason Temple, recalled, “All of us there went home. It was a death in the family.” He decided that the workers could never back off the strike now; they had to have a victory. Jesse Ryan heard the news while dining with his family: “That stopped everything. When they said he was dead, we all started crying, and for the next few days, we were like that.” Taylor Rogers said, “It was like losing a part of your family…. We all just had a hurt feeling. The man had done so much good for everybody, black and white.” He thought some of the “higher ups” in Memphis had decided, “We don’t need this nigger around. I later explained to my family, someone wanted him out of the way.”
For Walter Bailey, who co-owned the Lorraine Motel with his wife Lorene, King’s death took a heavy personal toll. He and his wife had done everything together to make a living; he had once been a Pullman porter, and they had once tried running a turkey farm. Then they bought a motel and named it after Lorene (though they spelled the name differently), creating an informal, homey atmosphere enjoyed by black entertainers such as B. B. King, the Mighty Clouds of Joy, the Staple Singers, and others. “In your business you gotta be one big family, and a city has gotta be one big family,” he believed. “I don’t think we’ll make it in the world, if we don’t get together and make it one big family.”
King was their pride and joy. They didn’t even charge him for his room, and Bailey said that on April 4, “He just act so different, so happy, than he ever had been before…. Look like they had won the world.” He remembered King as a sturdy man, “hard as a brick,” seemingly indestructible. King’s assassination devastated his fifty-two-year-old wife: “She just started shaking like a leaf after we heard the shot.” She walked around the motel muttering, “Why? Why? Why?” She had taken to her sickbed for a month when the entertainer Sam Cooke had died some years earlier. After the ambulance took King away, Walter went to work at his side job at the Holiday Inn. While he was gone, a blood vessel to her brain burst and Lorene fell to the floor. She went into a coma and died on Tuesday morning, April 9, the day of King’s funeral. Her husband believed the shock of King’s death caused hers.
Despair, grief, rage, frustration, and fear gripped black Memphis, as curfew and riot conditions once again descended on the city. Within minutes of the announcement of King’s death, young black people began pouring into the streets. In the neighborhood around Tillman and Johnson, blacks with guns pinned down police cars and reportedly wounded two officers—one of only a few incidents in which people directed gunfire at the police.
Someone started a huge fire at O. W. Ferrell Lumber Company on North Second, where dry lumber, turpentine, and other flammable materials shot flames 100 feet into the air. Phone threats against Loeb escalated. Speaking of King, a young black man shouted out at a reporter, “He died for us, and we’re going to die for him.” Small groups of roving men threw Molotov cocktails and ransacked stores.
During the first three and half hours after King’s death, more than 30,000 long-distance calls went out of the city. Phone lines jammed; dial tones sometimes did not appear for fifteen minutes or more. The police, trying to stop a potential riot and find a killer at the same time, feared that some whites, who had been buying increasing numbers of weapons as the strike progressed, might start vigilante action. Fire and Police Director Holloman proclaimed, “Rioting and looting is rampant” in the black community. Some 800 policemen, Tennessee highway patrolmen, and sheriff’s deputies tried to take over the streets. By midnight, 3,800 National Guardsmen had joined them.
The news media carried Ralph Abernathy’s warning, “If a riot or violence would erupt in Memphis tonight, Dr. King in Heaven would not be pleased.” African Americans knew that, but they also wanted to impress their sense of rage upon the authorities. One black youth exclaimed, “I wish that Stokely Carmichael and the other Black Power advocates would come and burn Memphis down!” Another recalled, “Truthfully, I wanted to go out and shoot, mangle, or kill every white person I chanced to meet.”
The city pulled Memphis Transit Authority buses off the streets after dark—after rocks and bricks had damaged fifty-six of them. That night, police received 806 emergency phone calls and arrested 245 people, including eighteen women and eleven juveniles. By contrast to the previous weekend, many more of the rioters were adults. Firemen received 229 fire alarms and reported the use of Molotov cocktails in at least seventy-five cases. Several men tried to burn down a Loeb’s Laundry but failed. A number of people successfully firebombed a number of other stores.
While flames and smoke engulfed parts of black Memphis, the destruction remained limited compared with what had occurred the previous weekend. Police and the military, already on high alert when King came to town, quickly sealed off black areas. During the 7-PM-to-5-AM curfew, they subjected blacks to preemptory searches and arrests. Once again, the curfew left the white community largely untouched while creating a military occupation in black areas. Memphis looked a bit like the racial police state that King warned against in his last article, published in Look magazine after his death.
As on the previous weekend, whites remained safely walled off from riots by geography, the military, and the police. Nevertheless, City Council member Wyeth Chandler said, whites in his neighborhood also went on high alert: “Our neighborhood was like a tomb. We were armed, ready for anything. I think this was generally true throughout the community…. If a Negro had stopped to change a tire I don’t know whether he’d be left alive or not.”
AFRICAN AMERICANS EVERYWHERE recognized King’s death as a watershed moment that required a massive response. Riots destroyed black communities most of all, but riots also hurt white owners of capital far more than any economic boycott or nonviolent protest. King’s death burst the dam of whatever patience held back the rage of Black America at Depression-level unemployment; job, housing, and school discrimination; pervasive police brutality; useless deaths of black soldiers in Vietnam; and the plethora of ills that stalked the ghettos. Those who thought ghetto residents no longer cared for King were proven wrong.
In Washington, DC, within two hours of King’s death, riots began. Stokely Carmichael urged young blacks not to commit suicide by confronting the police, but to get guns and prepare themselves methodically for armed conflict: “When white America killed Dr. King…she declared war on us. The rebellions that have been occurring around these cities and this country is just light stuff compared to what is about to happen.”
By Friday afternoon, thousands of white civil servants and congressional staffers jammed the roads out of the capital. From the Pentagon, “You could see the enormous pall of smoke over the District,” recalled a government attorney. Flames and billows of smoke ringed a White House and congressional complex surrounded by acres of poverty-stricken black neighborhoods. Military intelligence agents, police, and firemen could hardly get around as enraged people took over the streets.
President Johnson signed an executive order calling out federal troops. On Friday morning, April 5, he proclaimed, “America shall not be ruled by the bullet but only by the ballot of free and just men,” and he urged Americans to unify in their support of King’s goals. He called on Congress to enact aid to cities, manpower training, laws mandating equal opportunity in housing, and low-income-housing supports. Representative John Conyers from Detroit went further, calling for $80 billion to be spent on a “Marshall Plan” for America’s cities. The president said flags would fly at half staff from Friday until King’s burial on Tuesday, and he proclaimed Sunday, April 7, as a day of national mourning. Mayor Loeb proclaimed three days of mourning.
It was too late, said SNCC leader Julian Bond in Nashville on Friday: “Brotherhood was murdered in Memphis last night. Nonviolence was murdered in Memphis last night. All that is good in America was murdered in Memphis last night.” James Meredith angrily remarked of King’s death, “This is America’s answer to the peaceful, nonviolent way of obtaining rights in this country.” In response, urban riots that King had tried so desperately to prevent now burst forth in Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and other major cities all across the country. Some lasted for the weekend, others for more than a week.
By Monday, April 8, thirty were dead and 2,000 injured in riots in more than eighty cities; by April 11, forty-three were dead and 20,000 arrested in 125 cities. In one case, a black man killed the first white he saw in retaliation for King’s death; otherwise, blacks constituted the vast majority of those killed and hurt. More than $100 million in damages occurred, and the riots forced President Johnson to call off a planned strategic peace conference on Vietnam in Hawaii, as normal life everywhere came to a halt.
Time magazine wrote, “In its sweep and immediacy, the shock wave of looting, arson and outrage that swept the nation’s black ghettos after Martin Luther King’s murder exceeded anything in the American experience.” It tallied 5,117 fires, the wreckage of 1,928 businesses and homes, nearly 24,000 arrests, and a deployment of 72,800 Army and National Guard troops, with 50,000 soldiers standing by at military bases. It was the largest domestic deployment of military forces since the Civil War. The army chief of staff for intelligence told his staff, “We have an insurgency on our hands.” Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered his police to shoot to kill when they encountered looters; other authorities reined in police use of deadly force so as not to spread the conflagration.
Governor Buford Ellington put the entire Tennessee National Guard on alert. Police, sheriff’s deputies, and National Guardsmen patrolled black Memphis (and Nashville, too) with rifles and machine guns, Jeeps, and heavy vehicles; closed down gasoline stations and liquor stores; and put black men up against walls with their arms and legs spread out. Black children, unlike the previous weekend, kept their distance from the military. Following a night of curfew, schools and colleges were closed on Friday morning, while most businesses remained open, many of them surrounded by troops and police.
The courts arraigned nearly 100 people charged with overnight crimes. In addition, the Shelby County grand jury returned its first indictments under the state’s new anti-riot law, passed on March 28. It indicted Willie Henry, striker Willie Kemp, and other movement supporters on a variety of other charges left over from the first riot—as well as Reverend Malcolm Blackburn and five other nonviolent protesters (including Kemp) who had tried to block sanitation trucks with their bodies three weeks earlier.
King’s murder on Thursday night had made him the second person (following Larry Payne on March 28) killed during strike-related actions; on Friday night, Memphis police killed a third. Initial police reports said Ellis Tate, twenty-six, fired at officers who interrupted his looting at a liquor store. Several days later, the story changed: police said they interrupted Tate, age forty, who ran and fired one shot at them, but then his rifle jammed. Both reports agreed that the police had shot him nine times.
Behind a veil of police power, Memphians struggled to understand King’s death, nervously anticipating the kind of massive riots underway in Washington, Chicago, and other major cities. The Commercial Appeal put Calvin Taylor, a closeted member of The Invaders, into the streets as a reporter to assess the situation. Black people expressed a mixture of rage and apprehension: “I’m scared,” “I want them [police] to quit,” “Since when did they start hiring black reporters at the Commercial Appeal? Get away, boy.” One woman said, “I’m 78 years old, and I don’t feel like running.” A black schoolteacher called it a “horror, when with all the advances of modern civilization it can’t solve its problems without killing and rioting.” People greatly feared destruction in their community, but most of all they hated military occupation; it only enflamed people and the troops should go home, many said.
Yet African Americans in Memphis that weekend directed their rage mainly at property, not persons, and even property damage proved small by contrast to what happened in the rest of the country. The full damage only became evident later when a police report to the U.S. attorney general totaled the costs of both the March 28 and April 4 weekends. Over a two-square-mile area, 275 Memphis stores had been looted or attacked; all looters were black, 80 percent of them under age twenty-four; whites composed 95 percent of the affected store owners. The report listed only two verified reports of snipers. For Molotov cocktails, arsonists in Memphis often used coal oil in Coke bottles—one indication of their lack of experience at urban warfare. (Gasoline in more breakable beer bottles worked much better.)
It could have been far worse, for something snapped inside many people when King died. For some thirty years, black worker Clarence Coe had fought discrimination in the industrial unions, supported NAACP legal challenges to segregation, performed community and church service, and strictly adhered to nonviolence while supporting the sanitation workers’ strike. When King died, however, Coe said good-bye to his Firestone workmates—thinking they might never see each other again—got his rifle and some ammunition, and took command of a small hill at a cemetery near his house. “That’s what I thought everybody else was going to do,” he recalled. He was surprised when no large-scale rebellion broke out. “And then, when I found out they [blacks] weren’t going to do nothing, I’m tellin’ you, it took a lot out of me. It took a lot out of me. I just expected to go to war. I mean, that’s what I came home for, that’s what I was planning on. And I thought that would just happen all over the world.”
In a different way, it did happen “all over the world,” as Europeans, Africans, and others across the globe expressed outrage and sorrow by demonstrating in the streets. Even Commercial Appeal editors had to recognize how the world regarded King: “King’s Murder Horrifies World,” and “Dark Continent Weeps for King,” ran the paper’s headlines. In the garment district of New York City, black and white workers on Friday abruptly left their jobs to memorialize King, without employer permission. Union organizers and civil rights advocates continued to hold mass rallies, marches, and memorials to honor King; the movement to declare his birthday a holiday from work had begun.
In Vietnam, many black soldiers, hearing of upheaval back home, lost what little faith they had in the American system. In Memphis, there didn’t seem to be an adequate way to express the full extent of grief and rage felt by African Americans. Many predicted that large-scale, armed rebellion would begin after the city honored King with the nonviolent march still planned for April 8.
ON THE NIGHT of King’s death, Attorney Walter Bailey went down to the police station to retrieve the two white members of the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council whom the police had picked up near the Lorraine Motel after Maxine Smith left them. He thought it ironic that these civil rights activists were the first two people arrested on suspicion of the King slaying. Ultimately, he got the charges against them dropped.
One of about twelve blacks out of some 800 attorneys in Memphis, Bailey had left Memphis to go to law school and had come back determined to make a difference through the practice of law. But on April 4, as he entered the police station, he was confronted by the same old racism that he had known as a child. Squads of white officers came in and out of the building holding guns and wearing gas masks. One officer at the door held a gun on him; he said, “I don’t know whether it was a shotgun or one of these submachine guns or what it was.”
Later that night, Fire and Police Director Holloman, who knew that Bailey was a lawyer for Dr. King, greeted him as “Bailey,” and told him he’d be glad to give him a pass so he could get around the city. “I didn’t say anything, I didn’t respond—I just turned and walked away,” said the attorney. He felt that whites still could not give him the simple respect of calling him “Mr. Bailey,” or “Attorney Bailey.” As a black man, he was, simply, “Bailey.” Holloman said he never used titles and perhaps in a casual setting he called everyone by his or her last name, but it didn’t matter—Walter Bailey, like thousands of black Memphians, felt a profound white disrespect for his personhood.
For the next few days, Attorney Bailey interviewed dozens of black people assaulted by police officers, many of whom had taken off their badges so they could not be identified: “I noticed that most everybody who had been arrested had some marks about his person”—a head wound, a bandage, blood on their shirt. “I saw no police officers bandaged who had arrested those persons. You see, which indicated that it was all a one-way sort of thing….”
His thoughts flashed back to his meeting with King on April 3, when he had shaken hands with him. King’s quiet humility, calmness, and sincerity had been self-evident, and the attorney couldn’t believe he was gone.
Reverend Henry Starks felt the same devastating sense of loss. On the evening of King’s death, Starks had rushed to the Lorraine like everyone else, but police had forced him to turn back. He felt utterly dejected and miserable as he returned home, and suddenly he wished that the strike had never happened: “Here was a man who could see down the corridor of time and see the road ahead that we were taking would lead to almost a suicidal status…destroyed by the very thing that he denounced—violence.”
At 1 AM, a handful of King’s closest supporters gathered in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel. Jesse Jackson had gone back to his hometown of Chicago to try to stop one of the country’s biggest riots, already in progress. Those who remained met late into the night. James Bevel said that everything SCLC had been doing—especially the Poor People’s Campaign and the strike—had to continue, and the group expressed unanimous support for Abernathy, whom King had asked to take his place as SCLC president if he suddenly died. “There was a great sense of unity,” Lawson recalled, “a great sense of realization that Martin had died on behalf of all of us.” As tanks and military vehicles once again rolled down Beale Street, in Room 306 they sang, “We Shall Overcome.”
Later that night, one of his aides went through King’s coat pockets and found his handwritten note, “The Ten Commandments on Vietnam,” refuting the false reasons given for the war. Coretta Scott King would read it at a mass antiwar rally in May 1968. Even without the aid of its most visionary and accomplished leader, the Movement would go on.
James Lawson said they had witnessed “a crucifixion event” in Memphis. That night, he prayed for the resurrection of hope and the will to carry on.