Here came a man talking love and nonviolence and walking hand in hand with white people, and they took his head off…. It ain’t no such thing as no middle of the road no more…. White America has put itself in one hell of a trick now.
—Charles Cabbage
CORETTA SCOTT KING HAD GONE SHOPPING WITH HER daughter Yolanda on the afternoon of April 4. When she returned home, Jesse Jackson called to tell her that her husband had just been shot: “It hit me hard—not surprise, but shock—that the call I seemed subconsciously to have been waiting for all our lives had come.” Trying to spare her the gruesome details, Jackson told her that Martin had been shot in the shoulder. Soon, Andrew Young called to tell her his condition was deathly serious and she should come to Memphis.
Ivan Allen, the mayor of Atlanta, with his wife and city police, escorted Coretta to the airport, but as she prepared to board the plane, King’s secretary, Dora McDonald, approached to say her husband had died. King’s family and friends stood together weeping in the airport. Mrs. King returned home and spent the night with her four young children—Bernice (age five), Yolanda (twelve), Martin III (ten), and Dexter (seven)—trying to explain their devastating loss in terms they might understand. Senator Robert Kennedy called, as did many others, and he had three phones set up in her house to take dozens of incoming calls.
Since Montgomery, Coretta had lived with the ever-present possibility that someone would kill her husband. Racists had bombed their home in 1956, nearly killing her and their daughter Yolanda. Many threats, arrests, and physical attacks followed. When they watched television coverage of President John Kennedy’s 1963 assassination in Dallas, King had told her, “This is what is going to happen to me.” She accepted this reality—not morbidly, but realistically. In 1965, she told a Seattle audience, “You realize that what you are doing is pretty dangerous, but we go on with the faith that what we are doing is right. If something happens to my husband, the cause will continue. It may even be helped.”
Coretta knew all about his deep depression and premonitions of death. On recent Sundays, he had preached about his possible death and his legacy. In his prophetic “Drum Major” sermon on February 4, he seemed to preach his own funeral eulogy. “I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind,” he said. On March 12, before he began his whirlwind speaking trip for the Poor People’s Campaign, he sent his wife a synthetic red corsage, saying he wanted to give her something to remember him by that would always last. When he died, he left no will, no savings, and few earthly possessions beyond the King family’s modest home.
His wife had watched King agonize after the March 28 riot in Memphis and then resolve to return, despite his own great misgivings. King met with his parents and told them to be prepared for his death at any time, that money had been offered and professional killers were being recruited. Said Coretta, “Martin didn’t say directly to me that it’s going to happen in Memphis, but I think he felt that time was running out…. I was aware that any campaign was a dangerous one. But there was something a little different about Memphis.” More than anyone, she had supported King during his times of self-doubt and had urged him to go on.
On Friday morning, April 5, she went to Memphis in a plane provided by Senator Kennedy. No viewing of King’s body had been announced, but that morning a steady stream of people poured through the R. S. Lewis Funeral Home (only blocks from the riot scene of March 28), most of them in silence. The crowd included “a pitiful handful of whites,” wrote strike historian Joan Beifuss, and an array of blacks—“old men, maids and clerk typists and day laborers dressed for work, families with their children, men with button-down collars and teenagers in blue jeans.” People came to touch his face, to look upon him, to cry. Tears streamed down Andrew Young’s face, and Ralph Abernathy offered a prayer. Then a long procession of cars took King’s body to the airport, escorted by police and National Guardsmen.
King’s brother A. D. and his sister Christine helped to take King’s body on board. Young plaintively recalled that King “would plead with us all the time, don’t ever let anybody make you hate, that the world can’t live on hate.” A band of about 150 forlorn people stood at the runway sobbing, their voices breaking as they tried to sing, “We Shall Overcome.” Some of them collapsed as the plane’s roar drowned out their refrain, “Yes, we will not fight, Yes, we will not fight, God is on our side, Today.” A black man raised a fist in salute as the plane left.
Once home, Coretta opened the casket, surprised that “his face looked so young and smooth and unworried.” Embalmers had done a good job of hiding his hideous wound. Coretta’s fortitude in the ensuing days helped to stabilize the national temper—much as Jacqueline Kennedy had done after her own husband’s shocking, traumatic death five years earlier. Coretta’s spirit came from a particularly deep well, much like the one that had nourished Martin. Their partnership came not only from personal love but also from a joint political commitment. Although she had envisioned a career on the concert stage, she largely gave that up to return with him to her native Alabama.
True to the patriarchal society in which they had been raised, Martin felt she should devote herself primarily to making a home and raising the children. She did that, but she did it in the context of two lives absolutely committed to changing the world. She went with him as a peace pilgrim to India and to Scandinavia for the Nobel Peace Prize; marched with him on the dangerous road from Selma to Montgomery; joined the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and Women Strike for Peace. She spoke for King at a mass peace demonstration in San Francisco in April 1967; on January 15, 1968, King’s birthday, she led 5,000 women demonstrators in the nation’s capital against the Vietnam War. On March 28, while King was embroiled in the Memphis riot, she presided at a WILPF conference in Washington calling for a cease-fire in Vietnam. “All women have a common bond—they don’t want their husbands and sons maimed and killed in war,” she said.
Her husband was constantly gone and they had little money, but it seemed she never wavered in her support of King or the freedom movement. Now, as the King family reeled from tragedy, Coretta began to demonstrate her own quiet and steely commitment to nonviolence. “He gave his life for the poor of the world, the garbage workers of Memphis and the peasants of Vietnam,” she said on April 6. “The day that Negro people and others in bondage are truly free, on the day want is abolished, on the day wars are no more, on that day I know my husband will rest in a long-deserved peace.”
Her resolve would do a great deal to prevent a racial conflagration in Memphis.
JAMES LAWSON SAID that hatred of King symbolized America’s “moral blindness,” and true change could not occur until whites came to understand his message. Now, white Memphians suddenly caught a glimpse of King through a different lens—as national television and media gave his nonviolent teachings more widespread attention than they did in his life, a Commercial Appeal columnist wrote. NBC News anchor Chet Huntley ran excerpts of King’s speeches and mourned the loss of King’s “restraint, gentleness, charity—virtues we so desperately need.” Television networks carried special programs over the weekend and on April 9 would cover the whole three-hour King funeral in Atlanta. Observances of King’s life and philosophy began in the streets and in union halls, churches, and synagogues across the country.
Hesitantly, some whites in Memphis joined blacks to publicly mourn the loss of the era’s greatest advocate of interracial cooperation. At LeMoyne College on Friday morning, Margaret Valiant, the only white resident of the LeMoyne Gardens low-income housing project, and Midge Wade, a white suburban housewife, joined an overwhelmingly black memorial to King. Wade said, “We had to express something somewhere.” She felt “numb, hostile, bitter.” A white man sitting in front of her tried to offer consoling words to a black woman who ran the LeMoyne business office, but he collapsed into tears. The LeMoyne student choir tried to sing but broke down sobbing. TV crews were there, but Wade thought, “Surely they would not show whites and blacks weeping together in Memphis.”
Bishop Joseph Durick led Catholics in numerous memorial masses for King, beginning on Friday. He had been among the white moderates who objected to King’s desegregation protests in Birmingham in 1963 as “unwise and untimely,” only to be driven out of town by segregationists for his own racial moderation. Now, as senior bishop of the Catholic Church in Tennessee, ministering to 45,000 Catholics in Shelby County (half the state’s total), Durick honored King as a man who spoke for the poor and tried “to restore human dignity to every man.” Catholic churches across Tennessee read Durick’s pastoral letter asking for “a spirit of true love…to instill some reality into the dream” of King’s “promised land.”
The long-delayed gathering of white ministers (led by Rabbi James Wax) and black ministers (led by Reverend Henry Starks) also finally occurred on Friday. Some 300 of them met at St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral. James Lawson quietly preached from the Book of Isaiah that King had been “wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities.” Father Nicholas Vieron of the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church knelt before Reverend Starks and asked forgiveness for white religious indifference to racism. Presbyterian minister John William Aldridge read a statement, prepared at the home of Southwestern College theologian Carl Walters the night before, mourning the “unspeakable loss” of “our brother” and asking the mayor and the City Council to adopt union recognition and dues checkoff. “We who are white confess our implication in this tragic event by our failure to speak and act…with conviction and courage, to the attitudes of prejudice and patterns of injustice which produced the society in which this act could occur.”
Wax’s vacillation had ended. He asked the ministers to vote on this statement, and they promptly adopted it. Starks and Lawson lined them up, and Episcopal Dean William Dimmick, carrying a gold cross on a black staff, led about 150 of them two by two through the downtown to city hall. Police approached the ministers with their pistols drawn; three police cars, carrying helmeted police with shotguns, followed them. The faint of heart had already dropped out. Starks felt gratified but said, “I was appalled at the number of the clergy who didn’t have the courage” to march. It may have been too little, too late, but the annals of the civil rights movement fail to reveal southern white religious leaders joining blacks in taking such a stand anywhere else in the South.
The interracial group soon crowded into the mayor’s office and overflowed into the hall. Loeb, who had hardly slept, greeted them cordially. One minister thought, “He looked as if we were people coming to congratulate him rather than people coming to deliver an ultimatum.” Aldridge read their statement, which included an appeal “to create a new community where equality and justice prevail and no man suffers loss of human rights because of racial prejudice and arrogant paternalism.” Reverend Jordan asked the mayor to bring the city together with specific commitments to accept union recognition and dues checkoff.
Starks, in such mourning that he could barely speak, said only, “The greatest apostle of peace in our times has died,” and it was time for the “white brethren” to speak out. Despite his heartsickness, he believed that communication between whites and blacks had to continue. He said later, “We are getting on ground so dangerous that it will destroy both of us. It will destroy this country…. The painful thing about life is that when your trust is betrayed, you must keep on trusting.” Otherwise, “Life ends for you right there.”
Rabbi Wax took the lead, but not with such a forgiving heart. He addressed the mayor in stern tones of righteous indignation: “We came here with a great deal of sadness in our hearts, but also a great deal of anger, sir. What has happened in our city is the result of injustice, oppression, and lack of human decency and concern.” Admonishing Loeb personally, he continued, “I realize we live in a society of law and order. We must have laws. But I would remind you most respectfully, sir, that there are laws that are greater than the laws of Memphis and of Tennessee.” With “amens” echoing behind him, Wax accused the mayor of “dodging behind legal technicalities” and ignoring the fact that “the laws of God come before the laws of any man.”
Loeb stood listening in silence, but neither his Episcopal nor his Jewish faith moved him to accept this moral appeal. “I understand and share with you sorrow for what happened yesterday,” he said. “We don’t completely agree but we each have our sincerity in wanting to get this thing behind us.” He said that Governor Buford Ellington had asked him to talk to Frank Miles to get mediation started again, and that he would do so that morning. But he made no commitment at all on the issues.
In frustration, Reverend Ralph Jackson, his voice cracking and with tears on his cheeks, asked the mayor: “Will you agree to a dues check off and union recognition? We plead with you. Put it on the backs of the preachers. Put it on us. Please come down.” Loeb gave no response. Jackson continued, “If we had been able to get a hearing as ministers of the black community, we would never need to send for Dr. King or anybody else. But you would not hear. You will not hear now.” Loeb offered no commitments. Reverend Baxton Bryant of the Tennessee Human Relations Council gave Loeb a graceful way out, saying that he sympathized with the burdens of the mayor’s office.
As the meeting began to break up, seemingly in a spirit of reconciliation, a photographer captured the contradictions of Loeb. He stood shaking the hands of black and white ministers on the other side of his desk, the butt end of a loaded shotgun at his feet beneath the desk.
LAWSON STOOD IN the back and said nothing, unsurprised that so little was accomplished. But before everyone could disperse, Memphis State’s Presbyterian chaplain, Dick Moon, angry that the ministers seemed to be accepting Loeb’s evasions, protested, “He is not going to change his mind. I, for one, am going to stay in his office until he changes his mind. Until the strike is over, I’m going to stay without eating. Anyone who wants to join me, can!” Moon became more angry as the ministers filed past him. Only Sister Marie Hofstetter came to his side, and then a young white tug-boat worker named Edward Carter, Jr. MSU instructor Richard Geller and MSU student Jimmy Gates joined them later.
The mayor invited the protesters to stay in the carpeted entryway to his office, and they did so, but at the end of the day, police took the five of them outside to spend the night on wooden benches in the lobby. For the next seven days, they camped out at city hall, fasting and giving moral witness, in the tradition of Gandhi and Cesar Chavez. Moon lost twenty-two pounds and suffered from cold and hunger, but students from MSU and Southwestern soon joined in support.
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, ashen-faced, held a press conference in Memphis, accompanied by his distraught and shaken assistant attorney general, Roger Wilkins, nephew of NAACP President Roy Wilkins. They had already met with Mrs. King, talked to the governor and his assistant (former Director of Memphis Public Safety Claude Armour), to Holloman, to Lawson and other black leaders, and to the FBI. Clark presented a profoundly different personal approach than Memphis authorities. Clearly in mourning, he said that he had expressed his “profound sorrow” to Mrs. King and that King’s life “teach[es] that nonviolence can bring change within the rule of law.” He took the side of the movement in Memphis, saying, “There are many people in this city working with all their hearts…for equal justice,” and urging the authorities to resolve the current crisis “without repression.”
Clark said that “no evidence of a widespread plot” existed, that King’s death appeared to be the work of a lone assassin. He cited the “great difficulties inherent” in protecting King. He did not explain how hundreds of police officers in the area and at least thirty officers in the immediate vicinity of the Lorraine Motel could have failed to protect King and then let his shooter get away. African Americans and AFSCME unionists met Clark’s lone-gunman theory with massive skepticism, if not complete disbelief. The next day, the Commercial Appeal assured its readers: “All evidence indicates it was the work of an individual, a warped, mixed-up, emotional mind.” “Mobs Must Not Rule,” it editorialized, and there should be “no invasion of Memphis by extremist elements.”
Behind the scenes, someone in the FBI sent around an absurd memo suggesting that perhaps black nationalists such as Carmichael or Brown might have ordered King killed—but, to its credit, the FBI also launched the largest manhunt in its history. Within a few days, evidence pointed to a poor white with a variety of aliases, going by the name of Eric Starvo Galt. Few black people doubted that a white man killed King, but they asked, Which white man, and how many? Time magazine surveyed black Memphians, and most of them thought the Memphis Police Department was involved in King’s death. Black Firestone worker Clarence Coe voiced a common feeling at the time and even many years later, saying the circumstances of King’s death pointed toward a conspiracy: “If he was shot out of a window on Main Street, why the hell did every police in that area run to the Lorraine? You’ve fired a gun, you’ve heard a gun, seen it fired. The noise is where the cap burst, you know. If somebody shoots a gun here, why would you run five or six hundred yards away?…Somebody knew what the target was. You know, everybody knew what the target was.”
Many black Memphians instinctively believed that white government and police authorities engineered King’s death. One white woman conversed with her maid and commented that she hoped the authorities would catch King’s killer. “Oh, Mrs. Viar,” the woman responded, “we know who did it. Mayor Loeb paid one of those policemen to do it.” The FBI “got some sharp-shooters, too,” said Coe. People took little comfort from the fact that the authorities had flooded Memphis with about ninety FBI agents and twenty-seven police detectives in the aftermath of King’s death. J. Edgar Hoover’s second-in-command, Cartha DeLoach, who had engineered years of surveillance and intimidation designed to destroy King, directed the FBI investigation of his death.
Lawson and others wondered why investigators did not even bother to interview all of the people—some fifteen of them—believed to have been in the courtyard at the time of the shooting. James Orange and John Burl Smith claimed to have seen a shooter and a puff of smoke in the bushes. “There is a basic mistrust in the Negro community concerning the Memphis police, FBI and mayor’s office,” Lawson said. Black City Council members James Netters and Fred Davis both said blacks had no confidence in the mayor or the police, and they began to press for greater citizen control over the police.
The capture of James Earl Ray at a London airport in June did not assuage people’s doubts. It seemed logical that Ray—a poor southern white in and out of jail most of his life, a follower of George Wallace and the KKK’s J. B. Stoner who seemed to have tracked King around the country, whose fingerprints matched those on the alleged murder weapon—did it. But how did this escaped convict with no visible means of support track King for months, penetrate police and FBI security, and elude them for sixty-five days, let alone obtain a passport and funds to flee the country? London police arrested him at the airport as Ray began his effort to escape to white-supremacist Rhodesia.
A year later, Ray entered a guilty plea in return for a life sentence instead of the death penalty. Shelby County Attorney General Phil Canale said that Ray, like anyone, had the right to a plea bargain, but the government’s failure to hold a trial and present its evidence left nagging questions about King’s death. Many people agreed with a black minister who told the Tri-State Defender: “This fellow was a link in a well planned plot.” Investigating conspiracy theories and Ray’s guilt or innocence became an industry in itself.
Dr. Benjamin Mays, preaching at King’s funeral in Atlanta, said the killer knew that many people wanted King dead and that various whites created the poisoned climate that led to his death. A congressional investigating committee later documented that racist businessmen in the St. Louis area had put out a $50,000 bounty to kill King, and that James Earl Ray surely knew about it. The U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1977 concluded that Ray pulled the trigger, but he might have been part of a larger conspiracy of racists and extreme anti-Communists.
The mass media also revealed that the FBI had conducted a concerted “counterintelligence” campaign called COINTELPRO to destroy King, and that U.S. Military Intelligence and even the CIA had long conducted surveillance on King and his family. In 1976, the Memphis news media revealed that MPD officials had conducted widespread surveillance on King as well as local movement participants. The MPD burned its surveillance files before the public could see them. None of this ever inspired any confidence in the authorities. In a civil trial in December 1999, twelve Memphis jurors, six black and six white, heard a wrongful death lawsuit by the King family and reached a verdict that government agencies and private individuals had been involved in a conspiracy to kill Martin Luther King.
In April 1968, many civil rights supporters also asked not just who killed King but what killed him. They blamed racist rabble-rousers such as George Wallace; the Republican “Southern Strategy” of splitting whites from blacks by playing on white racial fears; and they blamed anti-communism, racism, and the violence of the Vietnam War as responsible for engendering a climate of hate that killed King.
Most white Memphians rejected such analyses, or any responsibility for what had happened. “It obviously was not done by a citizen of this city, so there is no reason for us to feel any personal guilt,” one white Memphian wrote to the Commercial Appeal. Over the years, King had been beaten, stoned, stabbed, bombed, jailed, and condemned by the highest officials in the land. Why should white Memphians accept any blame for his death? Lawson said this “moral blindness” was a “built-in apparatus…that tends to insulate us from reality.” But black scholar C. Eric Lincoln, raised in Memphis, said the Mississippi Delta provided a climate especially conducive to his murder, going back to the era of slavery. “Memphis was certainly not ready for Martin Luther King or anybody who had King’s style or had King’s philosophy…[and] black life has always been very cheap in Memphis.” Lincoln observed that many whites expressed shock when reporters “came down here because ‘a nigger’s been killed.’ Who was Martin Luther King? I mean, ‘he’s just another nigger.’”
As in life, King in death remained a polarizing figure in Memphis. On Friday, April 5, a rumor spread that someone planned to blow up Memphis State, so authorities called off the weekend’s fabled parade and crowning of the Memphis Cotton Carnival’s king and queen—an event that romanticized slavery and the virtues of the plantation—thinking it would incite black rebellion. One white woman complained, “All this to-do over King’s death—niggers going wild—the curfew and all—are upsetting my schedule.” Many white Memphians militarized their households. A group of white businessmen having lunch after King’s death decided to arm themselves, one of them vowing to buy a shotgun so that “if they come through my door I’ll be prepared to mow them down.”
Racists did not guard their comments, assuming that anyone white must have thought the same way they did. Kathy Roop, a young white Southwestern College student who had supported the strike by marching and fasting, was shocked when she heard whites at her local grocery store exulting about King’s death. A few white strike supporters began to write down such comments and put them in a file. They found that it was not unusual for white businessmen, professional people, teachers, or workers to refer to King as “Martin Lucifer” or “Martin Luther Coon.” Many whites questioned why someone hadn’t killed King sooner, and callers sarcastically asked radio stations to play a popular tune, “Bye, Bye, Blackbird.” A white insurance agent could not believe the attitude of his coworkers, who said they were glad King had been shot. He worried that bad publicity about Memphis would stop northern investments and hurt the city’s business climate.
When Mayor Loeb spoke at the Memphis Sertoma Club the next week, he unconsciously reinforced an idea common in white business circles: “Each of us’ heart and prayers are with Mrs. King and the King family. Certainly we wish the incident had happened elsewhere—if it had to happen.” Fortunately, he continued on, “Each of us knows that violence begets nothing but trouble for everyone, and each of us sincerely wishes that it hadn’t happened and regrets that this thing did happen.” A more typical, or perhaps more frank, view came from a white man who said, “King brought violence everywhere. I’m sorry it happened in Memphis, but I’m not sorry it happened.”
Some whites made crude and vulgar comments about King even in the presence of blacks. One black teenager first heard about King’s death while purchasing equipment at Radio Shack, where a white man “laughed and laughed” when the news came over the radio. Among some white teenagers, the “gross joke” became a fad. “What’s black and slower than a speeding bullet?” went one of them. “Do you know why they’re looking so hard for the killer of Dr. King? They want to make him president,” went another. “Why do the colored people want to send their children to school? So they can learn to read and ‘riot.’” Most uncaring of all, “I hear there’s to be a Spider march in Memphis tomorrow. What’s a Spider march? It’s going to be led by a Black widow!”
An ugly atmosphere pervaded many white schools. When a student teacher distributed My Weekly Reader, with a front-page picture of Dr. King, one child scratched out King’s face, and most of the other children quickly followed suit. The attitude of a white principal at a black school seemed just as twisted. “How am I going to teach law and order [to children] when they let these damn niggers tear up these cities?” he complained. In a survey of 173 Memphis State University students in three classes, 61 percent disapproved of the killing but 20 percent of the students approved of it, and 19 percent didn’t care one way or the other. Sentiments were worse at all-white secondary schools.
Assorted evangelical, anti-union, and segregationist organizations had long depicted the civil rights movement and King as Communist-inspired, and this “political debasement” made it difficult for many whites to separate fantasy from reality concerning King’s death, a communications scholar wrote. One man wrote a letter to the Commercial Appeal calling King “the biggest Communist in the nation.” A well-educated white housewife locked herself and her children inside the house on Thursday night and asked a friend, “Don’t you think this is all part of a Communist conspiracy?” Blacks had been happy until “King with his Communist background came in and stirred them all up,” said a white suburban housewife, and the Negro was “so stupid he is easy to dupe.” A white woman asked in a church discussion, “In the Negro movement, where does Christianity stop and Communism start?” Some claimed Communists had killed King to gain sympathy for the black cause, and a physician blamed his death on a northern–Jewish–Communist conspiracy to destroy the country. Many years later, black attorney and judge Otis Higgs said the pervasive white identification of King with Communism in 1968 dumbfounded him.
With King dead, other civil rights leaders became targets for white animosity. One white Episcopal priest voiced a widespread suspicion about Lawson, who “has been to Russia, studied Communism, but the local newspaper won’t print it.” Mothers in a school discussion club debated whether Lawson “was organizing a communist revolution.” One woman suggested that Ralph Abernathy had King killed so he could take over SCLC; a city fireman said, “Abernathy will never make it to Washington, he’ll get his on the way.” Another said that Mrs. King would also be killed if she stepped into Movement leadership.
Racist reactions to King’s death pervaded the Mississippi Delta. One white store owner in Louisiana recalled various white customers taking him by the arm and saying, “Way to go, fella, way to go,” when they heard he was from Memphis. In Hope, Arkansas, a local resident cautioned a motorcyclist on his way to Memphis, “Got a gun?” A white Mississippian, who himself had moved up from sharecropping to prosperity through union membership, said that the “crazy nigger” King had helped blacks take over the unions and should have been killed much earlier.
Many whites verbally attacked black workers and unions, some saying that garbage workers did not deserve higher wages or benefits and that the Poor People’s Campaign’s demands for expanded social programs discriminated against whites. “I just can’t stand feeding lazy people,” a white teacher said. “I have been poor all my life, and I have had to work. Why can’t they work and take care of their own families and own problems as I have done?” complained a white woman supervisor at a laundry company. One Southwestern College professor said one of his white neighbors told him racial problems could never be solved because, “No matter what else there is, you just can’t overlook that black skin.”
IN THIS POISONOUS and divided racial climate, union and civil rights organizers struggled to get the Memphis movement back on track. Jerry Wurf flew into town from Washington on Friday, April 5, determined to hold King’s march and to get a favorable settlement for the sanitation workers. The costs of losing this strike were now far too great even to contemplate. “You couldn’t kill King and then destroy the union,” he said. “That would have been too much. That would have been too much for Loeb, which that fool couldn’t understand. Do you understand what could have happened to that city had they destroyed the union?”
After King’s death on Thursday night, Lawson called Bayard Rustin in New York, asking for help. Rustin, with whom Lawson had consulted throughout the strike, left for Memphis the next morning, but federal agents diverted his plane to Washington, DC. President Johnson demanded his counsel and that of other civil rights leaders in formulating a federal response to King’s death. Rustin and Norman Hill, his assistant from the A. Philip Randolph Institute, got to Memphis that afternoon, as Judge McRae ruled that the April 8 march could go forward, under tight police controls.
On Saturday, Rustin and Lawson convened a twenty-person steering committee to map out details for the march, including members of The Invaders, AFSCME, the NAACP, and church leaders. Rustin, Lawson, and Ralph Jackson led training sessions in nonviolence for marshals, and Rustin told the New York Times: “Dr. King understood that political and social justice cannot exist without economic justice,” and that the Memphis movement now represented the things King had championed. He called it a “totally new stage” of the civil rights movement, and it all hinged on a successful march. Lawson said of Rustin: “In a very real way, he was my executive director for the march.”
King’s death galvanized unprecedented national union support for a local strike. Back in New York, King’s old union allies, such as Victor Gotbaum of AFSCME District Council 37, Cleveland Robinson and Leon Davis of UAW District 65, Moe Foner and others in Local 1199 of the Hospital Workers Union, Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers, and other union leaders pledged to bring planeloads of demonstrators. Word immediately went out from AFSCME that unionists, civil rights activists, clergy, academics, students, and other “people of good will” should come to Memphis to make King’s planned April 8 march a success, and union advocates in Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Cairo (Illinois), and elsewhere vowed to go to Memphis.
Infusions of funds from labor and civil rights supporters, particularly unions, gave Local 1733 renewed strength to hold out for a long time to come. George Meany publicly announced his $20,000 donation to support the strike and said that the AFL-CIO’s special fund-raising committee had pledged to raise more support as long as necessary. Rustin made an appeal on public television that produced nearly $100,000 in donations, and AFSCME locals and councils across the country established “Memphis, USA” committees to raise funds. The International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union pledged more funds, and the Field Foundation donated $30,000.
The Memphis labor movement also responded to the crisis, with the 35,000-member Memphis Labor Council calling on Loeb to resign. Tommy Powell told the press, “I feel that Henry Loeb is the cause of the national strife we’ve had in the last 24 hours because of his anti-union and racist attitude.” Even the Memphis Building Trades Council finally endorsed the strike. As it had in Selma, tragedy and death stiffened the resolve of civil rights movement and labor supporters everywhere.
The most powerful expression of determination to prevail came from the Memphis sanitation workers themselves, however. When they held their noon meeting on Friday at the United Rubber Workers union hall, L. C. Reed recalled, “Ralph Jackson asked us after the tragedy did happen, were we still willing to stick together, and we all agreed that we was and we wasn’t going to stop marching.” The police did not want to allow it, but the workers vowed the police would have to arrest them to stop their marches. That afternoon, they marched. Worker self-action remained the key to winning the strike, Reed’s wife said. “Mens are mens these days no matter what color they are.”
Women were women, too. On Saturday, thirty members of Alpha Kappa Alpha, Coretta Scott King’s sorority, marched to city hall from the Lorraine Motel. One lone man—a white auditor named Richard Pullen, who had come down from New York—walked with them. Wearing a suit, a bow tie, and closely cropped hair, he said he hoped to correct the misconception that whites taking part in the civil rights movement were all “beatniks” or “hippies.”
Although the court injunction against the Monday march had been lifted, behind the scenes the police still argued that they could not fully protect marchers. Said Lawson, “We made it clear that none of that really mattered, that the central fact was that we were engaged in a struggle for the justice of these men, and that struggle would be paramount.” Lawson told Lux and Holloman that on Monday, “We were stepping off and they would simply have to arrest everybody” if they wanted to stop them. Fire and Police Director Claude Armour had prevented violence during the early civil rights movement in Memphis, said Lawson, and police could do it again if they cared to. “Wherever you’ve had a law enforcement officer who took a fairly strong stand, very rarely did you get violence against the movement. And one of the best illustrations of this would be Memphis.”
Nonetheless, many people feared another mass march would produce a disaster of unprecedented proportions. The City Council met all day Friday, trying to find a way to mollify an angry black community. It unanimously sent a resolution of sympathy to Coretta Scott King and underwrote half of a $50,000 fund that businessman Ned Cook had pledged to raise as a reward for any information leading to the arrest of King’s killer. The Commercial Appeal and the Scripps-Howard Corporation each put up $25,000—for a total of $100,000. An anonymous donor also made an offer of $25,000 to pay the dues of workers to AFSCME as a way to end the strike. Jerry Wurf rejected it out of hand as “more than outrageous, it’s laughable.” If AFSCME accepted the offer, the city would not have to accept dues checkoff, and it would prove that all the union cared about was money. “We are not going through all this for some union dues but for some recognition and dignity for these men,” said Wurf.
The City Council that afternoon also unanimously adopted a resolution by Lewis Donelson requiring city government to provide “full and equal job and promotional opportunities for all of its citizens.” The council eliminated civil service tests that blocked less-educated African Americans from getting white-collar jobs and called for a plan to “substantially increase” minority employment and promotion in all administrative divisions of the city. Blacks welcomed this affirmative-action plan, but it did nothing to address the questions at hand: union recognition and dues checkoff. Memphis city government still followed a pattern criticized that very weekend by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, who blamed riots on white politicians who wouldn’t even “take the first step” to resolve their root causes.
But somebody finally took action to break the deadlock in Memphis: President Lyndon Baines Johnson. At 11 AM on Friday, President Johnson asked Undersecretary of Labor James Reynolds why the Labor Department had not already resolved this strike. Reynolds explained that the department did not involve itself in municipal affairs unless invited by local people. “I don’t care whether you are asked to do it,” Johnson told him. “I am telling you I want you to go down there.” Call the governor, tell everyone the president has sent you, Johnson said, and settle the strike. As Reynolds flew out to Memphis, he could see smoke billowing over a burning capital, which would suffer ten deaths and 711 fires. Washington had not looked like this since the British nearly burned it down in 1814.
Front-page newspaper pictures and vivid television documentation showed what looked like the bombings of World War II in places such as Chicago and Washington. By comparison, said a Commercial Appeal headline, “National Guardsmen Find Memphis to Be the Place of Good Abode.” As Undersecretary Reynolds walked through downtown Memphis on Saturday morning, however, it did not look like a “place of good abode.” He observed half-track tanks, National Guardsmen with rifles drawn, and city police (some in civilian clothes) brandishing pistols. Armed guards greeted him outside city hall, on the stairs to the mayor’s office, and inside the mayor’s office. Reynolds assured the press, “I don’t come here as a meddling federal bureaucrat who has all the answers.” He expressed the “grave concern” of the president, who wanted to settle “this relatively small labor dispute.”
But Reynolds recalled that when he asked Mayor Loeb just what the problem was, Loeb said it was, “We are not ever going to recognize this union…. I committed myself in the election that this city would never recognize this union…[and] we are not going to do it.” Furthermore, the city had spent all its spare money on the new city hall, and it could not afford it.
Aghast at the mayor’s unbending attitude, Reynolds sought out Frank Miles, who had been assigned by the City Council to mediate. The two men, who had each worked for business as well as for labor, set to work meeting with various people and trying to restart some semblance of the negotiations that had broken off on March 27. Reynolds realized that negotiations could not start until after the April 8 march and King’s funeral on April 9; he thought a conflict in negotiations at that point might touch off a riot. After all, riots still raged out of control in Chicago, Kansas City, Baltimore, and other major cities.
Meanwhile, seventy-five or eighty volunteers, equally divided between blacks and whites, worked out of the Memphis Board of Education building all day Saturday to spread the word by phone and leaflets of a rally for racial reconciliation on Sunday. John T. Fisher, an energetic young white car dealer active in the Chamber of Commerce, lived next door to Loeb and did not support unionization, but he wanted to create a bridge between the white and black communities. To do it, he started a group called “Memphis Cares,” and he asked the mayor and Frank Holloman for a permit for the planned gathering. They wouldn’t give it, so he went ahead without one.
Many blacks looked askance at this event. Fisher said it should take no position on the strike, nor should it memorialize King, because he didn’t want to alienate “moderate” whites. Recalled Maxine Smith, “Memphis came out with a whole lot of hulla-baloo—Memphis cares, you know…. It lasted the weekend, maybe. I have no faith in the powers that be in Memphis. We’ll only get, in every instance, what we’re strong enough to take.” Ralph Jackson said the event was simply an attempt by whites to “save face.” When rumors spread that Loeb would attend, James Lawson called Fisher and said, “Look, that destroys it for the black community.” Fisher assured him that Loeb would not be there, and he made sure he wasn’t.
Meanwhile, AFSCME sent out teams of workers to canvass the community, and black ministers pulled together their congregations to channel black-community rage into nonviolent action. Bayard Rustin and James Lawson went ahead with their plan to produce the biggest protest and interracial demonstration held in the South since Selma.
PALM SUNDAY, TYPICALLY a time of joy in Christian churches, marks the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem and Holy Week, a time for remembering the “passion” and then the resurrection of Jesus. On this Palm Sunday, April 7, many people inevitably compared King’s death to the crucifixion, but they wondered how there could be a resurrection. Dean William Dimmick of St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral thought he saw one coming. In his Sunday sermon, distributed in print, he compared King to Jesus as a “messenger of peace” whose message “may speak in death even more powerfully than in life,” calling for “love, justice and brotherhood.” He asked people to look at their own sins and take responsibility for bringing about change. One female Episcopalian resented any implication of guilt, saying, “Well, I may be a bigot, but I’ll be damned if I’ll pray for Martin Luther King’s soul!”
The Sunday Commercial Appeal editorial called on people to “Make This [A] Prayerful Day,” and those who hated King at least felt largely compelled to keep it to themselves. The liberal side of white Christianity began to be seen in Memphis for almost the first time. Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, and the Catholic diocese initiated discussions of urban issues. Memphis Unitarians read excerpts from King’s speech in 1966 urging Unitarians to “be maladjusted” to injustice, and they wrote a group letter to Mayor Loeb, asking him to settle the strike. “The quiet, complacent middle class could have averted this tragedy by listening to our consciences and speaking out loud and clear for human brotherhood,” it said. During Sunday services, the most segregated hour of the week, most white ministers at least trod lightly over issues relating to King’s death rather than stir up more racial animosity.
Complaints about this apparent turn toward moderation in the religious community flooded the Sunday newspaper. Some Catholics indicted “priests and nuns taking part in street demonstrations” and giving donations to strikers. Other people attacked Rabbi Wax for upbraiding the mayor, and one writer indicted Lawson as “a great comfort to our enemies…. Treason is treason and should be treated as such.” One writer said King’s death “supplies the communist cause with exactly what it needs at this time: a martyr.” Another expressed the common belief that the hypocrite King preached nonviolence, “but he just goes around causing trouble and then running away.” Subsequently, others complained that workers could cure their own poverty if they would only work harder, and that government officials should not give in to the pressure of riots.
Many thought white ministers sympathetic to the strikers had taken leave of their senses, but Dean Dimmick dismissed criticism of his role in leading Friday’s ministerial march. Jesus was crucified on a garbage heap between two thieves, he said, so, “If the cross, and the reconciling love of Jesus Christ has no business on the street, then I really don’t know where its main business is.” A split in white racial thinking emerged, giving some white citizens the courage to write to the newspapers and criticize white racism. A continuing white backlash against activist ministers took its toll, however: Brooks Ramsey, a white Baptist born and raised in Memphis, was threatened for his sympathy for King and called a Communist until he finally left the ministry. Reverend Aldridge left Memphis for a time, and other white, racially liberal religious activists suffered ostracism, threatening phone calls, and nasty letters. Malcolm Blackburn, the strongest and most consistent white minister in support of the strike, after briefly joining the AFSCME staff, ultimately left Memphis.
In the black churches, Palm Sunday produced an extraordinary outpouring of religious feeling fused with anger, sorrow, disgust, and righteous indignation. Most black people saw King, as he saw himself, as a Good Samaritan willing to sacrifice for the betterment of the whole human race. The Memphis movement scarcely needed to organize protests that weekend: black churches of every denomination held their own demonstrations of preaching, singing, and praying for deliverance from racism, war, poverty, and violence. From the pulpit of Lawson’s Centenary United Methodist Church, James Bevel spoke of Jeremiah in the Bible, who had also lived in a period when men used murder and other crimes to suppress justice. The spirit of King could not be killed with bullets, said Bevel, because he had already loosed the truths of righteousness and brotherhood upon the land. He said King’s name remained synonymous with hope, which could not be killed by any man.
African Americans struggled, however, over whether to adopt the Christian attitude of forgiveness or one of retribution. For many black youth, King’s death turned their hopes for a better world into rage. They quickly recalled various racial injustices that they and members of their families had suffered. Charles Warren felt ashamed, as if King’s death had been his fault. He decided, “The only thing left to do was to discard non-violence and put violence to work.” In a classroom writing exercise at Hamilton High, where students had experienced police violence on March 28, seventeen-year-old Frankie Gross wrote, “You could see and feel the hate in the Negro community after the assassination…. People took guns to work the next day just waiting for any white person to do anything wrong. There was burning and looting everywhere.” Powerfully affected by the images he saw on television of chaos across the country’s urban landscape, he wrote, “I guess I agreed with Stokely Carmichael’s philosophy of burning at first, and I wondered why Negroes hadn’t burned down more than they had.”
King’s death shook what little faith black youth had in the possibility of working with whites. Calvin Dickerson questioned whether whites expressing concern about King’s death “are sincere or just trying to console the Negro to prevent riots.” He concluded, “They are only trying to fool the Negro.” Alice Wright wrote, “I was so hurt when I heard about Dr. King’s death, that I couldn’t stand the sight of a white person. I didn’t realize that I could hate anyone that much until the night Dr. King was assassinated.” Milton Parson wrote, “I wanted to go out and do as much damage to the white community as I possibly could.”
Police violence on April 4 and over the weekend—although not as bad as on March 28—further embittered African Americans. One black woman saw a young black boy beaten by the police in front of her home because he was out after curfew. Her husband tried to explain from the safety of his porch that the boy worked for him as a construction laborer, but the police continued the beating and then nearly attacked her husband. Police threatened grade-school children in housing projects, and the trauma of police and military violence lingered long past the weekend. In a workshop on racism a month later, a black mother asked what she could do “to stop her children from getting hysterical every time they see uniformed men with guns, particularly with fixed bayonets.” A workshop participant said, “No one had an answer” to her question.
IN THE MIDST of destabilizing racial violence, a groundswell of support for racial reconciliation emerged when nearly 9,000 people, about 40 percent of them black, turned out at Crump Stadium on Palm Sunday afternoon. Many were still wearing their church clothes. As people filed into the stadium, the “Memphis Cares” organizers asked them to sign a pledge to build a city where people could “trust one another, respect one another and respond to the needs of one another.” The fact that only about a dozen police officers attended testified to the nonthreatening character of the event. Black and white businessmen, bishops, educators, politicians, ministers, and labor and civil activists sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” together, many with tears in their eyes. O. Z. Evers, long a supporter of the sanitation workers, chaired the event. The “Memphis Cares” Committee called for a statue to be built in Overton Park in memory of King and for a part of the freeway to be named after him.
The supposedly incendiary Zeke Bell had been asked to give the invocation, but apparently he couldn’t bear to do it and did not show up. Mary Collier, a black woman who worked in a white-collar job at Buckman Laboratories, and various others, called for individuals to go beyond race and class to commit themselves to make a better world, but said nothing about King or the strike. Tommy Powell went outside the guidelines for the day’s event, demanding an immediate strike settlement, and Ben Hooks went further, by excoriating the city’s leadership so sharply that Fisher said he “turned my stomach inside out.” Many disgruntled whites began to leave. Advertising man Tom O’Ryan then came to the podium and invoked his Irish immigrant family’s assimilation, saying, “America is the greatest country in the world.” As he lectured blacks that they should “educate and uplift themselves,” as had his forefathers, many of them got up and left.
Fisher’s hopes for reconciliation dimmed further when James Lawson, considered by so many whites as a frightful subversive, began to speak. True to his belief in not counting anyone out, Lawson did not boycott the event. Instead, he chose to say what most whites did not want to hear. His voice ringing out over the loudspeakers, Lawson called King’s death “God’s judgment on you and me and upon our city and our land that it is already too late.” The city and the nation could become “nothing more than a roost for vultures and a smoldering heap of debris”—if it did not repent. But, “Repentance is not being concerned whether or not business moves away from Memphis. Repentance is not being concerned whether or not people outside of our city will have a good feeling about us. How can anyone have a good feeling about Memphis when one of the finest sons of this world of ours was shot down in her streets?”
These were just the kinds of statements Fisher had hoped to avoid, but Lawson pressed on: “Memphis will be known for a long time as the place where Martin Luther King was crucified. Yes, crucified. We have witnessed a crucifixion here in Memphis.” The only way to atone for such a sin, he said, was by “a determination to work for transformations, real change, a move away from racism to genuine brotherhood.” Lawson said that hope for reconciliation and a brighter future could only happen if whites committed to significantly changing themselves and their world.
Whites rarely heard the kind of prophetic, righteous rhetoric that Lawson let loose on April 7. A few days later, Fisher told the Memphis Rotary Club that business leaders in the room had the power to bring about change, whereas “the only power that Jim Lawson has is to disrupt.” He had been greatly upset by comments made by Hooks and Lawson at “Memphis Cares,” but upon reflection, Fisher came to realize that platitudes about racial harmony would do nothing to change Memphis. He called on businessmen to see King’s death as a wake-up call, and a few of them began to do just that. Fisher, Ned Cook, and numerous others in the white establishment later contributed to numerous civic efforts to share more power with African Americans, and Lawson gave them credit for allowing their racial views to be significantly transformed by the events of 1968.
For his part, Fisher came to realize that blacks had no obligation to listen to whites who did nothing more than talk: “If I want a place to walk in the world, then I had better get around to creating that place.”
ON MONDAY, APRIL 8, the city braced for a national march in Memphis, even while that city—as well as Nashville, Raleigh, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and many others—remained under curfew and military occupation. The FBI tracked people coming into Memphis from all around the nation. Twelve charter flights brought at least 1,200 people, and many more came by bus, train, and automobile, including some 350 AFSCME workers and 250 members of the American Federation of Teachers from New York City. Scores of well-known public figures—such as Bill Cosby, Robert Culp, Sammy Davis, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Harry Belafonte, Percy Sutton (Manhattan borough president)—and religious, political, and union leaders appeared. Many of them went the next day to King’s funeral in Atlanta.
By contrast to the situation at the “Memphis Cares” event, police and military authorities massed their forces for the April 8 march. Undercover police and FBI agents, including Marrell (“Max”) McCullough, supplemented thousands of uniformed police and members of the military. The Memphis Police Department, after meeting with representatives of the National Guard, Tennessee Highway Patrol, and the sheriff’s and mayor’s offices, agreed to keep all police officers out of sight in order not to provoke trouble. Instead, 1,500 National Guardsmen out of the 5,000 stationed in Memphis patrolled downtown streets. Lieutenant Arkin of the MPD reported that “talk was rampant” that blacks would loot and riot at the end of the downtown march or else after King’s funeral in Atlanta, scheduled for the next day. A police informant claimed that “militant young Negroes” were telling people to store up water for emergency conditions during an urban rebellion.
Some demonstrators braced themselves for possible violence. Before leaving for the march, Episcopal chaplain Ted Hoover gave his will to his secretary in case he didn’t come back. Republican lawyer and City Councilman Jerred Blanchard returned to Memphis in the middle of the night after a business trip and stayed up the rest of the night sipping whiskey. Some of his friends had already stopped speaking to him, and many Republicans swore they would never vote for him again because he had tried to resolve the strike. He marveled at his predicament. “I really am a right-wing Republican. I have never liked labor unions,” said Blanchard, yet he believed in civil liberties and human rights. Early that morning, Blanchard went to the Clayborn Temple parking lot and lined up in the front row of the march. If someone had told him earlier that he would participate in a civil rights march, “I would have told you that you were crazy.”
On a gray, rain-threatening, foreboding day, thousands of marchers gathered, just as they had on March 28, but the feeling in the crowd was much different. Myra Dreifus, the wife of a downtown jeweler, ran a charitable school lunch program that fed impoverished black children for whom school authorities had neglected to get available federal funds. She and her son-in-law from Boston waited an hour and a half for the march to start. Surrounded by a sea of black faces, she felt completely comfortable. March organizers had everything in hand: “We were carefully monitored, so many people to each line.” Someone gave her a flyer reading, “HAVE YOU STOPPED TAKING the Commercial Appeal and the Memphis Press-Scimitar? WHY NOT?” The flyer ticked off the way the newspapers unfairly covered the strike, didn’t cover black news or hire blacks, disproportionately covered black crimes, carried “Hambone” cartoons, and ran segregated ads. It read, “They even segregate Negroes in death notices!”
Bayard Rustin’s tactical skills prevailed. He, Lawson, and SCLC organizers had apprised the police and the National Guard of all their plans, had set up mobile toilets, and had set aside a place for the media to film the speakers. Workers stayed up all night building a ten-foot-high platform and setting up sound equipment. Rustin walked the march route in advance, step by step, looking for trouble spots, and he ordered semi-trailers parked in certain areas to funnel marchers between them so that no one could leave the march and break store windows. COME passed out flyers with a message from Lawson instructing marchers to walk with heads held high, to follow the marshals’ instructions, to keep moving if any disturbance occurred, and to remember their purpose:
Today we honor Dr. King for the great work he did for all people and particularly for his great love and sacrifice for us. How best can we honor him now? The answer is simply: we honor him by making sure that the Sanitation Workers win their rights non-violently…. Each of you is on trial today. Not only Americans, but people from all over the world will be watching you on TV today. Therefore be considerate, polite and carry yourself with dignity.
Thousands of marchers carried signs that read, “Honor King: End Racism,” “Union Justice Now,” or, simply, “I Am A Man.” John Henry Ferguson was there with his Invaders jacket but also an orange armband. “Keep it quiet, down to a limited number of people across, and don’t let anyone break the line or carry anything as a weapon,” he instructed other marshals. Fog delayed a private plane sent to Atlanta for Mrs. King by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, so Harry Belafonte chartered a private jet in Atlanta and brought her and three of her children to Memphis. Marchers didn’t wait; they went ahead more or less as planned at 11:16 AM. They walked through black neighborhoods, passing shotgun shacks and beauty parlors, past Beale Street’s closed-up pawnshops and liquor stores, as National Guardsmen secured the York Arms gun dealership to make sure no one tried to loot it for weapons, as had happened on March 28.
Before the marchers got into the main commercial district, they halted for twenty minutes as motorcycle police escorted Mrs. King into the downtown from the airport. Ferguson and other Invaders held hands to form a protective chain for her as she and her children, escorted by Harry Belafonte and Ralph Abernathy, joined the march. The mass of people began to move forward again down Main Street, past department stores closed for the day, with lootable goods taken out of the windows and a few with signs honoring King. Ferguson said that Mrs. King’s entry into the march renewed people’s sense of pride, courage, and respect for the peaceful principles for which the Movement stood. “It’s beautiful,” he summarized to a newsman.
During the last five weeks, police had repeatedly arrested and harassed him, and Ferguson said nonviolence didn’t fit his twenty-year-old temperament. “I would much rather be burning than marching…like I say, I don’t feel we’re going to get too far with peaceful marches,” he told a reporter. Yet here he was, telling anyone with a cigarette to put it out. Marshals even told people not to chew gum because it was not dignified, and they complied. King had said that black youth attracted to Black Power and armed self-defense could also be brought into the nonviolent movement, and on this day it proved to be true.
Police banned all traffic in the area of the march. Holloman and Lux, peering down side streets and looking at the tops of buildings for possible snipers, walked ahead of Mrs. King, who linked arms with Abernathy on one side and three of her children—Martin III, Yolanda, and Dexter—linked to Belafonte on the other. A phone caller had threatened Lawson in the middle of the night, promising that when he reached Main Street, “You’ll be cut down.” Ignoring the threat, Lawson led off the march from Clayborn Temple, and he continued to march up front with UAW President Walter Reuther and Mrs. King after she arrived.
Police officers stayed largely out of sight, but National Guardsmen lined the streets, perched on M-48 tanks and on trucks, their bayonets mounted on unloaded rifles. Two helicopters circled overhead. Police ordered people to stay off the roofs and not to open windows. “The most shocking sight was the helmeted, bayonet carrying State Guard standing ‘at ease,’ guns in hand, with artillery and tanks behind them at most intersections,” wrote Myra Dreifus. Marchers moved silently down the streets in lines of eight, “proudly and reverently,” arms linked. “The complete silence of the thousands in our armed city of State Guard was eerie, impressive, and quite unbelievable in the ‘land of the free, and the home of the brave’—America, Our America. I felt as if the marchers were obedient prisoners in the quiet, closed-up city, so heavily guarded.”
Police counted 19,000 marchers, and Rustin estimated 42,000, streaming down Main Street. Many, many more Memphians turned out than had come from out of town. “I never have marched for any cause before,” seventy-year-old W. M. Horton told a reporter. He was an older black man who followed the agricultural harvest, making money however and wherever he could. His first political act had been donating $5 to the sanitation workers’ strike. “I guess I always favored Dr. King’s program and the things he worked for but I was around a long time before anybody worked for the colored people. When all of this business of marches and demonstrations started, I just let the young ones hold up my end.” But, no more. “I got friends who’s suffering over” the strike, he said. “It ought to be settled. I just, well, I’m here for those reasons and lots more.”
This march was perfectly disciplined: no talking, no smoking, and completely silent. Almost the only sound came from the soles of shoes meeting the sidewalk. As they silently merged into the city hall plaza, some people sat on concrete railings or patches of grass; thousands of others stood for hours more, but they remained mostly silent, somber, and vigilant. The marchers “gave Dr. King what he came here for and what was his last wish: a truly nonviolent march,” said Rustin.
Memphis on April 8 also represented the coalition King had always sought to build. AFSCME’s delegation from New York and the workers from Memphis provided a strong, organized, disciplined group, as did delegations from more than a dozen other international unions. UAW President Walter Reuther and his wife May, Donald Slaiman of the AFL-CIO civil rights committee, international union presidents and local labor leaders, Teamsters truck drivers, Local 1199 Hospital Workers, RWDSU retail, distributive, and department-store workers, AFSCME government workers, UE and IUE farm equipment and electrical workers, UFWA furniture workers, USWA steelworkers, AFT and NEA teachers, American Screen Actors’ Guild members, NMU and ILWU maritime workers, United Rubber Workers, and AFL-CIO department heads came from New York, Washington, DC, the Northeast, the Midwest, and other parts of the country. “The town was full of labor people,” said Bill Ross.
A full array of religious and political leaders also participated, including rabbis, Catholic and Episcopal bishops, Baptists, Methodists, and a wide array of other religious denominations. Academic and black community activists, national and local, marched arm in arm through the streets and quietly joined forces at the rally. King in life had been the one black leader who could bring together such an interracial alliance of labor, religious, middle-class, and working-class people, and he succeeded at it brilliantly on this day. Marchers in Memphis demonstrated the possibility of a different America.
Rosa Parks sat on the platform with actor Ossie Davis, who opened the ceremonies, and Samuel “Billy” Kyles led people in singing, “Lord, Hold My Hand While I Run This Race.” Walter Reuther declared, “Mayor Loeb will somehow be dragged into the twentieth century,” and he gave the strikers a $50,000 check from the UAW. He had more than doubled the AFL-CIO’s contribution, and there would be more coming if necessary. The problem wasn’t money, he said: “We have a nation poor in spirit—that’s where our poverty is.” Maybe so, but T. O. Jones adroitly moved in and plucked the check from his hands.
Reuther’s check would only cover the costs of the strike for one week, but his gesture meant much more in the eyes of the white establishment, Wurf said. Reuther and King had joined forces in Montgomery, in Detroit, at the 1963 March on Washington, and in Chicago. Reuther remained arguably the most powerful and well-funded social democrat in the country. His presence “create[d] the idea that this was for real,” said Wurf, who thought it a crime that local white UAW members in Memphis welcomed Reuther to town but did not join the march.
At the rally, Wurf declared that AFSCME would support the strikers to the end: “Until we have justice and decency and morality, we will not go back to work.” Harry Belafonte angrily decried the “bestiality and decay of the white world,” going back to genocide against the Indians. James Lawson demanded that the city pull troops out of the black community. “We aren’t killing anyone,” he said, and “if the curfew doesn’t end…we’re going to break it.” Ralph Jackson, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Ben Hooks, Bishop Joseph Durick, James Bevel, and others rededicated the Movement to King’s principles. Reverend Ralph Abernathy tried to invoke the power of King’s rhetoric, damning the death of black men in Vietnam, denouncing the poverty perpetuated by the capitalist system, demanding “a land free of joblessness where every American citizen that can work can have a job.” Many may have felt skeptical about his declaration that God had chosen him to follow King’s work, but Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, Lawson, and other SCLC staff members warmly gathered around and embraced Abernathy as he took up SCLC’s mantle of leadership.
The speeches went on at length, as people waited patiently for Coretta Scott King, the person they most wanted to hear. Finally, she stood at the podium—composed, restrained, dressed in black. She spoke quietly, in personal terms, about the love she and her children held for King, of his love for them, and of her family’s desire to carry on his work. She challenged the crowd to go on from that day as if King’s death were a crucifixion leading toward a time of resurrection that would “make all people truly free and to make every person feel that he is a human being. His campaign for the poor must go on.” She spoke, too, of Montgomery and the years in between.
Only in conclusion did her voice break, as she said, “But then I ask the question: how many men must die before we can really have a free and true and peaceful society? How long will it take? If we can catch the spirit, and the true meaning of this experience, I believe that this nation can be transformed into a society of love, of justice, peace, and brotherhood where all men can really be brothers.”
Skeptics might have scoffed at such idealistic sentiments, but to Luella Cook, a domestic worker in the audience that day, they meant a great deal. She said Coretta King’s courage and composure saved Memphis: “If Mrs. King had cried a single tear, this whole city would have give way.”
King’s death had engendered feelings of extreme bitterness and even hate in Alice Wright, a Hamilton High School student and granddaughter of a striking sanitation worker. After seeing Mrs. King on television following King’s death, however, she decided to spend April 8 marching. “I got very tired but I felt that if a person could give up his life to help you, the least you could do was to show that you appreciated what he had done.”
Ernestine Johnson, also from Hamilton High, on April 4 had felt “too stunned to cry. Everything left me. I had no feelings at all.” Then she became “very bitter and upset”—as she had when an assassin had killed President Kennedy—and she cried herself to sleep. She thought she had given up hope, but on April 8, she marched. As she listened to King’s “courageous wife speak, seeing how she controlled her emotions, I got the courage to go on with life and struggle for the best in life [and] to make something of myself.”
Milton Parson, age seventeen, said the mass march also stilled his fury at the loss of King. Instead of burning, “Yes, I marched. All the while that I was marching there was a solemn feeling that all the people in the march wanted to help make this city, and our country, a place where there should be no fear that a person would be shot down in the prime of his life doing something that they believe was right.”
As it neared the 5 PM curfew, the program ended and thousands of marchers quietly left the downtown. At least nineteen FBI agents had observed the march, but they found no violence to report. The crime rate dropped drastically that day, and the only violence occurred when a National Guardsman dropped his rifle, which discharged and shot him in the leg. Some young people had talked of instigating riots in the streets after the city paid its nonviolent respects to Dr. King, but Memphis didn’t explode that night or any other night after the April 8 mass march. “Memphis was in fact the quietest place in the nation,” said Billy Lucy.
THE NEXT DAY in Atlanta, Mrs. King led some 150,000 people, including presidential aspirants and top religious, civic, and labor leaders from across the land; civil rights leaders, ministers, and sanitation workers from Memphis also attended. An old wooden carriage drawn by mules, symbolizing the Poor People’s Campaign, pulled King’s body through the streets to his resting place. On the day of King’s burial, unionized black longshoremen shut down the Mississippi ports of Gulfport and Pascagoula, and African Americans carried out memorial marches throughout Mississippi, while longshoremen from the ILWU shut down many of the ports on the West Coast.
King’s mentor, Morehouse College President Benjamin Mays, that day memorialized King in Atlanta as the grandson of a slave called on by God to speak to America “about war and peace; about social justice and racial discrimination; about its obligation to the poor; and about nonviolence as a way of perfecting social change in a world of brutality and war.”
King drew no distinctions between rich and poor, said Mays. He “believed especially that he was sent to champion the cause of the man furthest down.” He thought King would probably say, “If death had to come, I am sure there was no greater cause to die for than fighting to get a just wage for garbage collectors.”