At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Acheson, notoriously imperious, had championed the Vietnam War with his prestige as a principal architect of the Cold War and President Truman’s Secretary of State for Asian crises up through the war in Korea. His emphatic defection lit a smoldering new stalemate among the Wise Men, which Johnson tried to control with gratitude. “What we want to do is take what you have said,” he concluded, “and what Congress may be able to approve, what we may need to do, and try to make our course here as effective as possible.” That evening, General Abrams took the President aside to offer strained comfort about assuming a stalemated command. “I know there is a lot of dying men out there, but you should know about me,” said Abrams. “I had made up my mind several years ago whether I would continue serving in the Army with all this business, and I decided there was something worse than being dead. I thought I would put up with it. I don’t like it, but it’s worth it.”

  To answer military valor with proper judgment nearly crushed Johnson. He decided that no peace initiative would produce a response from Hanoi worth the risk in lives, but he informed Wheeler and Abrams that they could expect only a small fraction of the 205,000 additional soldiers—roughly 14,000, toward a peak of 549,000. For both these reasons, he called for ringing war themes in the latest drafts of his Sunday Vietnam speech: “We have set our face against the enemy, and he will fail.”

  Johnson knew, however, that this posture would expose the secret flaw that had haunted him and close advisers since the escalations more than three years ago. He was fighting not to lose. The United States had no political bonds with the South Vietnamese people anywhere near as strong as the Communist movement to expel foreigners, and still fell woefully short of the cultural appreciation or contact skills to nourish them. Military power could stave off defeat, but the domestic cost had skyrocketed since 1965, when few Americans knew of Vietnam. Public opinion polls had shifted nearly 20 percent against the war since Tet. Political director Lawrence O’Brien pleaded for drastic action to address “deepening disenchantment” among LBJ supporters, then warned bluntly that Johnson would lose to Eugene McCarthy in the April 2 Wisconsin primary less than a week away, which posed a dangerous humiliation for a sitting President. Johnson moaned that he was throwing away every sane advantage of incumbency by demanding both new taxes and huge domestic cuts in an election year. “I don’t give a damn about the election,” Johnson told Wheeler and Abrams, with unhappiness more convincing than his literal statement. “I will go down the drain.”

  STANLEY LEVISON reached King by telephone during Tuesday’s stops in Harlem, Queens, and Rockville Centre, Long Island. His mission, relayed from Atlanta, gave FBI wiretappers access to candid talk about partisan politics, as King readily approved a letter requesting media outlets to remove his name from presidential straw polls, including Time magazine’s survey of college students. King told Levison he did not want to diminish antiwar opinion already split between McCarthy and Kennedy, and that while he had endorsed no candidate, “we have to be realistic enough to see that if there’s any possibility of stopping Lyndon, it’s going to be Kennedy.” (Hoover rushed the inflammatory intercept to the White House, leaving out King’s qualified public comment that Johnson might win back his alienated voters if he settled the Vietnam War.) On the phone, King said McCarthy fell far short of Kennedy’s strength among white working-class voters as well as minorities, and Levison agreed that the choice should not rest narrowly on McCarthy’s “Galahad” courage to challenge Johnson first.

  “We’ll make him Secretary of State,” King quipped. He let Andrew Young accompany Levison on a side trip to Boston, seeking another financial contribution from Anne Farnsworth, provided they returned in time for King’s detour on Thursday. “We rescheduled that march,” King told Levison. “I’ve never seen a community as together as Memphis, and it hasn’t had much coverage.” One story deep in Sunday’s Times—“Memphis Protest Avoids Violence”—noted an interim study of the sanitation workers’ strike by Atlanta’s Southern Regional Council, which found that the daily marches sustained over six weeks had acquired “the tone and much of the spirit” from civil rights movements earlier in the decade.

  With Levison, Young returned to New York for a Wednesday night fund-raiser at the apartment of Harry and Julie Belafonte. They were pleased to see some donors drifting back after several years, perhaps convinced on reflection that King was less upstaged by black power or misguided on Vietnam. Very late, after Levison and the guests had gone home, King paced back and forth in his socks, drinking sherry from a personal bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream on which for years he had denoted authorized withdrawals with mock fanfare. He talked of the day’s breakneck antipoverty rallies across northern New Jersey—in Paterson, Orange, Jersey City, and especially Newark, where he had visited churches, riot-torn ruins, upscale telephone executives, two welfare families, and the angry black playwright LeRoi Jones. King rambled about the poverty campaign as a monster more complex than race, which could bring new hope into view only if they made headway also against Vietnam and the great divisions of class. He quoted Bevel’s line that there was nothing unconstitutional about starving. His nearly incoherent fatigue put King increasingly at loggerheads with Young, who said they must not let all the world’s burdens drive them into the ground. Young wanted to postpone the Washington campaign until June. He said they had no business going back to a Memphis struggle that would only drain limited energy. His soothing insistence irritated and frustrated King until he slammed his palm on the Belafontes’ sitting room bar, rattling glasses, and said he felt closer to the rage of Newark than to Young’s calm priorities. “We may be integrating into a burning house,” said King. They had no choice but to push forward, he fumed, in a state of temper that silenced his friends.

  Only traveling aide Bernard Lee accompanied King back to Memphis the next morning, March 28. Because of flight delays out of Atlanta, they did not land in Memphis until 10:30—half an hour after the scheduled start for the march—and by then impatience rustled through crowds outside Clayborn Temple AME. Early arrivals had cheered an unexpected delegation of black schoolteachers, who risked their jobs to be there, then welcomed scores of white trade union supporters alongside forty priests and nuns who marched with the blessing of Tennessee’s Catholic bishop, Joseph Durick. Nearly all the thousand striking sanitation workers stood near the front, many with assorted relatives, including children. A preacher on the garbage force had suggested the new slogan to honor their crushed co-workers Cole and Walker—I AM A MAN—which William Lucy of AFSCME had printed on masses of placards to supplement regular themes such as WE ARE TOGETHER and MACE WON’T STOP TRUTH. Bored, unruly teenagers darted about with hand-lettered rebel messages on the reverse side: DAMN LOEB / BLACK POWER IS HERE and LOEB EAT SHIT. At 10:15, James Lawson ran about fifty feet to confront a group of students trying to shoulder their way into a closed liquor store, remonstrating in his clerical collar until he drove them away, then returning agitated to the starter’s post. A young man back in the crowd paraded with a noose hung from a tree branch, shouting about a big day for nonviolence with sarcasm that frightened or puzzled adults but vastly amused his peers.

  Pandemonium greeted King at 10:56. Young people engulfed his borrowed white Lincoln, and Ralph Abernathy pretended to apologize for the enthusiastic crowd. “It’s my fault,” he told King inside the car. “My speech last night was too inspiring and arousing.” King laughed. The assembled march, which Abernathy had arrived Wednesday to promote, was numbered anywhere between six thousand and twenty thousand, with estimates clouded by spectators teeming the sidewalks along Hernando Street. At the eye of a demonstration, King and Bernard Lee recognized the first hints of abnormal tension in faces that pressed against the car’s glass, making it impossible to get out. Lawson pushed through, leaned inside a passenger window, and said the crowd was compressed with pent-up energy. He and Lee managed to agree above the noise that they should move out right away, dispensing with preliminary speeches.
Still, it took nine minutes to extricate King and wedge him into the head of a march line across both lanes, locked arms between Abernathy and H. Ralph Jackson. Police motorcycles roared ahead of a flatbed press truck loaded with cameras facing backward, and the huge throng began to stretch out north along a long block of Hernando to famous Beale Street, turning left by the park named for W. C. Handy, pioneer of the blues.

  Next to the statue holding a trumpet, a wreath of fresh flowers marked the tenth anniversary of Handy’s death in 1958. Above, officers in police helicopter 201 sighted a clump of thirty students with rocks and clubs trotting west along Beale Street to merge at the turn, then radioed a frantic complaint that one of the television news helicopters “came within a hundred feet of us.” Young people pushed among the sanitation workers, shouting, “Let me get by,” and one college student watched high school students dismantle an old bed frame into metal bars. As the march swung right into Main Street for the last ten blocks to City Hall, a surge pushed the front ranks into an uncomfortable speed, nearly a trot, jostled and patted from behind. Abernathy sensed an overly familiar, hostile edge in the cries of tribute—“We’re glad you came to Memphis”—not long before loud pops turned anxious heads to listen for gunshots. Crashes after the bangs signaled instead the unmistakable sound of storefront windows being smashed along Beale and Main. Moans went up that something was wrong. Young marauders ran through overmatched marshals to attack storefronts ahead of the march—Shainberg’s department store, York Arms Company, Perel and Lowenstein’s—sometimes needing multiple blows to break the heavy plate glass. A helicopter bulletin at 11:24 reported fifteen young people destroying a parked car a few hundred yards to the side, and marshals relayed shouted commands to halt the line of march. “It had come seven blocks,” wrote Memphis historian Joan Beifuss, “and lasted about twenty-five minutes.”

  Assistant Police Chief Henry Lux, marching within twenty feet of King, lent his bullhorn in the emergency. “This is Reverend Lawson speaking!” shouted the voice above chaos. “I want everybody who’s in the march, in the Movement, to turn around and go back to the church.” Lawson joined a heated debate in the middle of Main Street, surrounded by pleas for calm as well as battle cries of “Black Power!” and “Burn it down, baby!” King was torn between pledges to shun violence but never the movement faithful. Most others yelled to evacuate him as a target of opportunity, and Bernard Lee pulled King and Abernathy among swirling followers down McCall Avenue toward the Mississippi River. Lee bulled and dodged interference until he flagged down two astonished women in a Pontiac, then a police motorcycle. Lieutenant M. E. Nichols, appraising danger by radio, avoided roadblocks already sealing off routes to the Lorraine Motel, and escorted the Pontiac under siren to the uptown Rivermont Holiday Inn.

  Trouble radiated from wild looting on both flanks of the regular sanitation marchers, who were fighting panic to double back in good order. Four minutes after King’s departure, radio orders to disperse the march brought a convergence of new tactical police units that scattered rampaging young people behind them in every direction. Nine officers would be injured, including one beaten by five teenagers with the flat sticks that held the placards. Two hundred eighty black people would be arrested and more than sixty hospitalized for emergency treatment—mostly teenaged males, but also females younger than twelve and as old as seventy-five. One patrolman cornered a sixteen-year-old suspected looter in a stairwell and shot him point-blank with a sawed-off shotgun. (Twenty witnesses claimed the riot’s lone fatality died with his hands raised, but city officials pronounced it self-defense the same day and then disposed of all physical evidence for lack of a pending investigation.) Fleet young rioters threw rocks or bricks and then ducked back among neighborhood buildings for cover. At Clayborn Temple, where nearly two thousand marchers had taken refuge, officers lobbed tear gas canisters inside to flush out vandals, and one intrepid reporter found Lawson trembling in failed efforts to establish police communication under siege. That same afternoon, the Tennessee legislature swiftly proposed and enacted the first state of emergency since the 1866 Reconstruction riot against black soldiers stationed in Memphis, when forty-eight people had died over three days of rape and pillage. Now before dark, mobilized by Governor Buford Ellington, the first armored personnel carriers rolled into the city with 3,800 National Guard soldiers to enforce the seven o’clock curfew proclaimed by Mayor Loeb.

  Trapped at the Rivermont, King watched nonstop television news lift Memphis before the whole nation. Officials of the Illinois Central Railroad announced that the Panama Limited would skip the Memphis stop between New Orleans and Chicago. Local news outlets praised a few embattled peacemakers of both races, and a reporter for the NBC affiliate told viewers that he was “accidentally exposed to Mace today for the second time.” Nearly all stories marshaled politicians to praise police conduct in a senseless and shameful crisis. Some civic leaders blamed media exaggeration for defaming the “City of Good Abode,” while others said the riot erased forty years of progress: “You can’t take these Negro people and make the citizens out of them you want.” For King, the dominant attitudes were familiar and immaterial next to the recycled images of bleeding officers, shattered windows, and jubilant black people hauling liquor from ransacked stores. He sank beneath the bedcovers in his underwear, transfixed by the news, smoking cigarettes.

  The telephone rang incessantly. From the Atlanta SCLC office, a confidential buzz reached Andrew Young in Washington, where King’s schedule for Friday was canceled already. Young called Stanley Levison. Given his own recent frictions over the Memphis trip, he sought more soothing counsel for King’s disaster, and Levison got through to Suite 801 at 9:15 P.M. Thursday night by the FBI wiretapper’s log in New York. King confessed despair. Young black militants seemed to have provoked the riot, he told Levison, which ignited police and black bystanders against each other. He blamed everybody including himself for lack of foresight. He said his depression made him think of calling off the poor people’s march.

  Levison groped for triage with four succinct points. First, acute fatigue made King’s depression unduly grim. Second, King should stay positive about nonviolence and maintain that the riot came from interlopers. Third, the Washington campaign would be different because of direct training and supervision by the SCLC staff. Fourth, King should postpone an emergency conclave until Saturday in Atlanta, so he could recuperate.

  King approved the delay and the evaluation, but they brought no sleep. He howled at Abernathy and Lee until nearly dawn. “Maybe we just have to admit that the day of violence is here,” said King. “And maybe we just have to give up and let violence take its course.”

  “THE VIOLENCE in Memphis was a godsend to the FBI,” wrote King scholar Adam Fairclough. Until then, under intense pressure from headquarters, the field offices churned out operations against King mostly aimed for harassment or sabotage. When SCLC sent out fund-raising letters to seventy thousand supporters late in March, headquarters approved a fictitious news leak to Northern newspapers that King did not need contributions because Washington churches and synagogues already had agreed to support the poverty marchers. Headquarters simultaneously authorized anonymous letters to selected black outlets in the South stating just the opposite—there was “no provision to house or feed marchers” in a Washington campaign geared for “King’s personal aggrandizement.” (Director Hoover issued the usual security instructions: “Prepare the letters on commercially purchased stationery and take all necessary precautions to insure they cannot be traced to the Bureau.”) Otherwise, the schemes ran to lame propaganda. Headquarters subsidized the lecture tour of a cranky black woman from the early HUAC era, who said she had infiltrated civil rights groups for the FBI and found them subversive. Marlin Johnson, head of the Chicago FBI office, bravely cautioned against one plan to embarrass King as a hate partner of the “anti-white” Nation of Islam. The target black audience knew better, he objected, and the parallel idea to smear King as an as
sociate of Muslim boxer Muhammad Ali might backfire, because Ali was widely considered “a black folk hero.” Nevertheless, Hoover ordered Chicago to implement the attack.

  FBI headquarters seized upon the Memphis upheaval within hours. Top officials disseminated to “cooperative news sources” a blind memorandum stating that “the result of King’s famous espousal of nonviolence was vandalism, looting, and riot.” The lapse from nonviolent discipline freed the FBI from inhibitions due to public respect for King’s conduct, if not his message, which opened character assassination on all fronts, and by the next day, March 29, Hoover approved a second effort “to publicize hypocrisy on the part of Martin Luther King.” The document whiplashed him as cowardly and violent, servile and uppity. “Like Judas leading lambs to slaughter,” Hoover confidentially advised news contacts, “King led the marchers to violence, and when the violence broke out, King disappeared.” A gossipy addition highlighted the place of refuge. “The fine Hotel Lorraine in Memphis is owned and patronized exclusively by Negroes,” stated the propaganda sheet, but King had chosen instead “the plush Holiday Inn Motel, white owned, operated, and almost exclusively white patronized.” This petty account twisted every motive and circumstance to release torrents of FBI contempt. By April 2, Hoover formally requested permission to reinstall wiretaps at SCLC. Two days later, the Mississippi FBI office sent headquarters a two-pronged COINTELPRO proposal, first, to breed confusion and resentment on King’s poverty tours by spreading false information about whether he or surrogates would appear at scheduled rallies, and second, to distribute leaflets skewering King as a fancy dresser who deserted his people. The combination would “discredit King and his aides with poor Negroes who he is seeking support from,” argued Mississippi, but the Bureau would not have time to act on the plan. At a far pole from accountable public trust, or constitutional duty, Hoover corrupted the FBI to wage political war.