Praise for Redemption
“I’m a Martin Luther King Jr. devotee. When I was a boy growing up in the South in his wake, this Southern black man of towering intellect, soaring oratory, and piercing moral clarity was to me a beacon in the darkness, a template for a life lived with purpose. I still can’t get enough of reading about him. So I recommend Redemption, by Joseph Rosenbloom. The granular detail of this slender volume is immersive, humanizing, and demystifying.”
—CHARLES BLOW, The New York Times
“In this gripping account of the King assassination, Joseph Rosenbloom does more than recover the story of the hours leading up to that fateful shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, April 1968. Writing with the urgency of a journalist’s pen, Rosenbloom melts time away to redeem the fully human struggle of a man, a leader, under enormous pressure, risking his reputation and his life, trying to answer the question, Where do we go from here? The result is not only an absorbing narrative of what happened; it offers readers a chance to reflect on what might have been.”
—HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.,
Alphonse Fletcher University Professor,
Harvard University
“A compelling and meticulously researched account by investigative journalist Joseph Rosenbloom, Redemption casts Martin Luther King Jr.’s last thirty-one hours into bold relief. With artful story-telling, the narrative draws the reader intimately into King’s life and courageous moments at a time of grave danger to himself and the civil rights movement, constantly rewinding to provide crucial context. King’s initial struggle to bolster striking sanitation workers in Memphis becomes a piece of the larger, transcendent story that Redemption vividly explores, one that still resonates powerfully today. It is the story of King’s urgent crusade to end poverty in America.”
—MICHAEL K. HONEY, author of Going Down Jericho Road:
The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign
“In this crisply wrought story, in this absolute thriller, I read courage like never before. Joseph Rosenbloom walks us through an American tragedy, a righteous American tragedy of a Martin Luther King Jr. unstinting in his final movement against poverty and racism. King comes to life in death—a courage ever so inspiring.”
—IBRAM X. KENDI, author of Stamped from the Beginning:
The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
“Martin Luther King Jr. has remained a towering figure through so many decades, during which his dream has gone unfulfilled, that any account of his death at thirty-nine by an assassin’s bullet outside a Memphis hotel still shocks, still feels freshly tragic. Yet Joseph Rosenbloom’s Redemption is like no other. He tells the suspenseful story of King’s last days in remarkable detail, illuminating King’s increasing radicalism and intensifying purpose in a narrative that takes in both the worst and the best of human possibility.”
—MEGAN MARSHALL, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Margaret Fuller:
A New American Life and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast
“Redemption is a rare, intimate account of Martin Luther King Jr.’s last stand. It is a story of courage and tragedy, a story of a man guided by deep religious faith in his quest to end poverty. More powerfully than any other, the book tells of his sacrifice for a cause that is as critically vital today to our nation’s democracy and security as it was when he dedicated himself to it fifty years ago.”
—JAMES MEREDITH, veteran civil rights activist and desegregation
pioneer as the first to integrate the University of Mississippi
“Rosenbloom commits an extraordinary act of scholarship and storytelling to summon a moment that still echoes in the American soul. He turns Memphis itself into a kind of character, full of flaws and yearnings and aching hopes, as vividly rendered in Rosenbloom’s hands as the great Martin King himself. As city and man wrestle toward their shared destinies, what takes shape is a masterpiece of narrative history. A deeply moving book.”
—RON SUSKIND, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist
and author of A Hope in the Unseen
“Investigative journalist Rosenbloom reinforces the story of the end of Martin Luther King Jr.’s remarkable life with an integrated summary of the career that brought him finally to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in spring 1968. . . . Rosenbloom also concisely describes the quotidian bonding of King and his diverse associates, and he doesn’t ignore King’s relationship with his wife, Coretta, as well as his extramarital adventures. The personality and moods—often dark, sometimes frolicsome—of the supremely gifted orator and preacher are a salient feature of the author’s report. Also integral to the text are the. . . activities of King’s feckless murderer, James Earl Ray. The portrayal of Ray in his perch watching the civil rights leader at the Lorraine Motel is succinctly cinematic. The previous night [King] mused on the possibility of a curtailed life, but, he said, he had ‘been to the mountaintop.’. . . A skillful depiction of the people and the scenes surrounding the killing of the champion of the civil rights movement.”
—Kirkus Reviews
– Contents –
Preface
CHAPTER 1 Atlanta Departure
CHAPTER 2 Detour
CHAPTER 3 The Strike
CHAPTER 4 Airport Arrival
CHAPTER 5 The Invitation
CHAPTER 6 The Mayor
CHAPTER 7 Lorraine Check-In
CHAPTER 8 Damage Control
CHAPTER 9 The Injunction
CHAPTER 10 Invaders
CHAPTER 11 Nine-to-Five Security
CHAPTER 12 Reluctant Speaker
CHAPTER 13 The Stalker
CHAPTER 14 Summoning Dr. King
CHAPTER 15 From the Mountaintop
CHAPTER 16 Long Night
CHAPTER 17 Home Pressures
CHAPTER 18 Invaders’ Exit
CHAPTER 19 Melancholy Afternoon
CHAPTER 20 Ray’s Lucky Breaks
CHAPTER 21 Dark Night
CHAPTER 22 Redemption
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
– Preface –
DURING THE SUMMER OF 1968 I had a reporter’s internship at the Commercial Appeal, the morning daily in Memphis. The city was then trying to right itself from the shock and horror of the assassination, on April 4, of Martin Luther King Jr. In the newsroom, amid the cigarette smoke and brass spittoons, there was much talk about the events leading to King’s murder. In my mind I filed away an idea. Someday, maybe, I would look into what happened in Memphis leading to the violent finale to King’s life.
It took me forty years to get around to it. By then I had read a number of biographies of King. They typically included a chapter or two about his last days in Memphis. Some books scarcely dealt with King’s presence in Memphis at all except as a backdrop to their actual subject: the story of King’s assassin, James Earl Ray.
The books about Ray homed in on two questions: Why did he kill King? Did he conspire with others in a plot to assassinate him? Exhaustive investigations by the FBI, a task force of the Justice Department, the US House Select Committee on Assassinations, and authors such as George McMillan and Gerald Posner were never able to nail down a definite motive. Why Ray killed King probably will always remain a mystery. He was a virulent racist. Perhaps that was motive enough. The House panel relied on circumstantial evidence to conclude, vaguely, that there likely was a conspiracy. It pointed to Ray’s brothers, John and Jerry, as possible coconspirators. But no clear-cut proof of a conspiracy has ever emerged.
The published accounts dealing with Memphis followed a broad story line. They told how, by April 1968, King was pursuing perhaps the most ambitious undertaking of his life, the Poor People’s Campaign. No longer was he
seeking only an end to racial segregation and discrimination, the cause that had consumed him for more than a decade. He was striving to end poverty in America, once and for all. He was mobilizing thousands of poor people to set up a shantytown in Washington, DC. He was vowing to lead his army of poor people for weeks, if not months, of civil disobedience in the streets and offices of federal lawmakers until they adopted a costly, sweeping antipoverty program.
When the biographies of King reached the chapters about Memphis, the story line centered on four consequential days: March 18 and 28 and April 3 and 4. He was in Memphis on March 18 to speak at a rally in support of a garbage workers’ strike. On March 28 he was back in Memphis leading a pro-strike march, which turned into a riot. On April 3 he flew back, having resolved to organize a peaceful march. If he could stage a second march without another riot, he thought he could prove that his brand of nonviolent protest remained under his control. Unless he reasserted his leadership in that way, his plan to recruit a legion of poor people to protest nonviolently in the nation’s capital was in jeopardy. Or so he reasoned. On April 4 he was murdered, snuffing out his plans for a redemptive march and the Poor People’s Campaign.
I did not see any point in looking into the much-investigated question of whether Ray had conspired with others to kill King. I sensed that there was more to say about how events in Memphis might have conspired to obstruct King’s plans as he returned to the city in 1968.
During a ten-year stint as a staff reporter for Frontline, the investigative documentary series on PBS, I developed a reflexive skepticism toward any supposed final word about a major public figure or event. Often the digging at Frontline uncovered new layers of revelation and understanding about stories that others had already put to bed. On that hunch I resolved to delve further into the Memphis story.
I had grown up relatively close, in Jackson, Tennessee. On visits to my family, I took the opportunity to stop by Memphis and continue my inquiry into King’s last hours. I interviewed more than two dozen people who were either close to King or the events surrounding him in March and April 1968. Of course, I reviewed the vast trove of King-related files from sources such as the FBI and congressional investigators, as well as memoirs from King aides and confidants. Some of the material, surprisingly, was published or released as recently as 2012, such as the documents at the Woodruff Library at the Atlanta University Center and at Emory University.
A more complete picture of what happened to King in Memphis did indeed come into focus, along with some startling insights. It seems likely that Memphis and the Poor People’s Campaign were linked in a way not previously revealed. King may have dramatized the garbage workers’ strike in Memphis, at least in part, to drum up support for the Poor People’s Campaign. By April 1968 the antipoverty operation was in great disarray, starved for funds and volunteers. A number of King’s close aides strongly objected to his intervening in the Memphis strike. King may well have disregarded their advice not only because the strikers’ cause was dear to him but also because of the urgency he felt to put the Poor People’s Campaign back on track.
Venturing into Memphis not once or twice but three times was enormously risky. He knew little of the city’s political and racial environment, yet he somehow reckoned that he could organize a peaceful march within a week in a strike-bound, riot-torn city on a razor’s edge. He faced an implacable, sophisticated foe in Memphis mayor Henry Loeb. Most of all, King was raising his visibility as a highly controversial figure at a time when his opposition to the Vietnam War and promise of massive protest in the nation’s capital already had made him a marked man in his own eyes.
It required extraordinary courage to return to Memphis and push ahead with the antipoverty campaign. It also reflected his growing impatience with capitalism and embrace of radical ideology in response to the urgent social and economic problems he perceived. That shift leftward seemed to seize him with greater passion by April 1968, an abrupt change in tone not fully documented in other accounts.
King was under enormous pressure from all sides in Memphis. He was exhausted from brutal days on the road proselytizing the Poor People’s Campaign. He was contending with dissension within his staff and the broader civil rights movement and marital tensions at home. He had to confront a nettlesome Black Power faction in Memphis and an expected federal injunction barring him and seven members of his SCLC staff from leading another march in the city. He was fearful that he would die a violent death at any moment, as his last speech, the so-called “Mountaintop” speech on the evening of April 3, revealed so emotionally. The full story of King under the intense strain of Memphis paints a portrait of him in his last days that differs from the conventional view of him as master of his destiny.
The idea of redemption, as referenced in the book’s title, Redemption: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last 31 Hours, ties together three strands that defined the last phase of his life. He was trying to redeem his reputation as a nonviolent leader by leading a nonviolent march in Memphis. He was seeking an end of poverty to redeem what he regarded as the American promise of economic justice. He was drawing deeply on his faith in the redemptive power of sacrifice for a noble cause, as he risked his life—a faith rooted in the biblical example of Jesus.
Despite the many books already written about King, there seemed to be room for a concise story constructed around a narrative of the last thirty-one hours and twenty-eight minutes of his life. That is the span from the time King returned to Memphis on the morning of April 3 until his murder at 6:01 p.m. on April 4. Unlike the other books that cover King and Memphis, this one explores not just King’s movements in Memphis but also Ray’s during the same time period. It examines how a bumbling convict could have pulled off the assassination of the nation’s foremost civil rights leader.
This book is, most of all, a close-up view of King as he struggled against enormous odds to end poverty in America. It is a view of him as he sought desperately to recover from a riot that threatened to subvert his impassioned cause, the Poor People’s Campaign. Ultimately, he achieved redemption in the sense most important to him. He died sacrificing himself for the cause of social justice, in which he profoundly believed.
—Joseph Rosenbloom
June 19, 2017
Chapter 1
Atlanta Departure
This is terrible. Now we’ll never get anybody to believe in nonviolence.
—MLK, reacting to TV coverage of a riot that erupted during a march he was leading in Memphis, Tennessee, March 28, 1968
AT ABOUT NINE O’CLOCK on Wednesday morning, April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. boarded Eastern Air Lines Flight 381 in Atlanta. Along with four of his top aides he was flying to Memphis on an urgent mission.
King and his entourage of smartly dressed African Americans would have been an eye-catching sight for the forty-three other passengers on the airplane. With King were three men—Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, and Bernard Lee—and one woman, Dorothy Cotton. The men wore dark suits, white shirts, and muted neckties. Cotton was tastefully outfitted in a dignified dress, her hair smartly coiffed in a beehive. In style and demeanor, the five of them might have been a team of high-powered lawyers or corporate executives departing Atlanta on a business trip.
King would have attracted particular notice. A widely recognizable figure in 1968, he had been in the limelight since the heavily publicized Montgomery bus boycott twelve years before.
Anyone who remembered him as a young man first embracing the civil rights cause in the mid-1950s would have been shocked by the change in his appearance. In 1955 he was just twenty-six years old, recently hired—“called to the pulpit,” as the expression had it—by the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Photos from that period show him nattily garbed in a dark, loosely fitting suit, necktie, and fedora, a white handkerchief poking out of his jacket pocket. There was something about him then, the freshness of the face and the limpid softness of his eyes that conveyed a boyish innocence. It was
easy to imagine him as a teenager outfitted in Easter finery for a service at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where his father was the pastor.
Now, in 1968, he was a man in distress. His years in the movement had tested the limits of his courage and endurance. The strain had taken its toll emotionally and physically. He looked run-down, his eyes weary, face puffy, and neck straining against a white shirt collar.
He was dog-tired. He had been sleeping badly for weeks. He had been on the road drumming up support for the Poor People’s Campaign, the mammoth antipoverty protest that was to commence in Washington in nineteen days.
He had left his house in Atlanta early that morning. His aide and dear friend Ralph Abernathy had driven to the modest redbrick house in the scruffy neighborhood of Vine City to pick him up. King’s wife, Coretta, had offered the men a quick breakfast. No time to eat, they had told Coretta, not even accepting coffee and orange juice.1
Although he had scarcely caught his breath at home after two weeks of almost nonstop travel, he was traveling again. This time, though, he was not on another trip to recruit the thousands of poor people he intended to mobilize from around the country for weeks, or possibly months, of demonstrations in Washington.
He was bound for Memphis to lead a march the following Monday. In the spring of 1968 Memphis was a city in turmoil. A bitter strike by twelve hundred African American garbage workers had turned quickly into a racial firestorm. A pro-strike march under King’s leadership six days earlier, on March 28, had spun out of control. Windows had been smashed, many downtown stores looted.
The stakes in Memphis were enormous for him and his movement. The fate of the Poor People’s Campaign and, more broadly, his leadership of the civil rights movement were hanging in the balance. He was venturing back into a city reeling from the trauma of racial conflict and rioting. Even before the trouble in Memphis, his fear of being assassinated had been rattling him. Now he was being widely blamed and denounced for the riot, and the fear of a violent death preoccupied him all the more.
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