Redemption

by Joseph Rosenbloom

  If Orange, Williams, and Bevel presented a formidable front, they would nonetheless meet stubborn resistance from the Invaders. From the outset of the negotiations Cabbage and his group had relentlessly demanded money from the SCLC—lots of it. The talks had continued late into Monday night. By the end of the jawboning marathon Orange had all but pledged that the SCLC would satisfy the Invaders’ demands. But he cautioned: the final say would be up to King.

  Cabbage, John Burl Smith, and the third Invaders cofounder, Coby Smith (no relation to John Burl), were part of a young, restless, disaffected generation of African Americans for whom the siren of Black Power resonated powerfully. In 1968, Cabbage was twenty-three, Coby Smith a year younger. Racial bigotry had shaped their early years. As a child in Memphis, Coby Smith had no illusions about the second-class status of African Americans. He would remember: “They used to have an old saying when I was a kid, ‘Dogs that chase cars and niggers that chase white women do not last long.’”6

  Blacks of Smith and Cabbage’s generation, however, had seen some racial barriers fall. Emboldened by the progress, they were impatiently demanding the removal of those that remained. Not coincidentally, their generation of blacks was developing a growing sense of self-worth and empowerment. Nothing summed it up better than James Brown’s song, “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” that rocketed to the hit parade after its release in 1968.

  Cabbage and Coby Smith had been standouts at Memphis’s all-black schools. Cabbage had starred on the football and basketball teams at Carver High. Smith had been the student body president at Manassas High. He was one of the first black students admitted to prestigious Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis. Cabbage went on to Morehouse College, where he was student government president.

  Both Cabbage and Coby Smith had their baptism in Black Power while they were living in Atlanta. Cabbage was finishing his studies at Morehouse. Smith was dabbling in civil rights work, hanging out with Stokely Carmichael and other activists who identified with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

  SNCC had emerged in the early sixties as a youthful counterpoint to the SCLC. By the mid-sixties Carmichael was at the peak of his political influence as the chairman of SNCC. Under his leadership, the group embraced a black-nationalist agenda and demanded greater political and economic power for African Americans.

  SNCC scorned King’s bedrock principles of integration and nonviolence as too conservative to advance the movement further. It took on a more belligerent tone in May 1967 when H. Rap Brown replaced Stokely Carmichael as chairman. Brown escalated Black Power rhetoric by famously declaring that violence was “as American as cherry pie.” He threatened that “if American cities don’t come around . . . they should be burned down.”7

  Inspired by the call of Black Power, Cabbage and Coby Smith conceived a mini version of SNCC for Memphis that they named the Black Organizing Project. It would be a “liberation school” for youths, teaching black history and building racial pride.

  Upon their return to Memphis, they roamed inner-city streets recruiting “brothers” to join their group. From the title of a popular TV show about hostile aliens descending upon Earth, they borrowed a new, more muscular name for themselves, the Invaders. Their network of activists was a loose-knit collection of people linked to what an FBI report termed Black Power “cells” of students at LeMoyne and Owen Colleges, Memphis State University, and local high schools, plus graduates and dropouts. All told, they totaled about seventy-five people, according to an FBI estimate.8

  When the garbage workers’ strike began, the Invaders saw an opportunity. By identifying with the goal of economic justice, they aimed to widen their influence. By 1968, another member of the Invaders, John Burl Smith, had emerged as a leader of the group. John Burl Smith, back in Memphis after a stint in the air force, seemed to borrow from H. Rap Brown’s rhetoric. He developed what he called an “armed wing” of the Invaders and implied that they ought to equip themselves with guns.9

  The Invaders turned up at meetings of the Community on the Move for Equality, known as COME, the strike-support group led by Reverend Jim Lawson. In the early days of the strike, Cabbage and several other Invaders were involved in COME’s deliberations. At a meeting of COME on March 5, Cabbage defied the organization’s principle of nonviolent protest by circulating a flyer by H. Rap Brown that included instructions for making a Molotov cocktail.10 John Burl Smith rattled another COME meeting by scorning it as nothing more than a group of “ministers praying.” If the ministers meant business, Smith went on, they had to “do some fighting.”11 Lawson soon lost patience with the Invaders and paid them little mind at meetings.12 Feeling slighted and resentful, Cabbage stopped attending.

  Lawson privately expressed his disgust with the Invaders as a “divergent, dissident, belligerent group” that did nothing except “beg money without offering anything constructive.”13 Lawson’s low opinion of the Invaders did not bode well for King’s effort to recruit them. Lawson nonetheless suspended his disbelief that the Invaders would fall in line behind King. If King was determined to recruit the Invaders as part of a united community front behind the upcoming march, Lawson said he would go along with it.

  King supposed that he could win the allegiance of Black Power militants by the force of his arguments for nonviolence. First, he portrayed his brand of massive civil disobedience as radical in its own way. It was not passive. It relied on massive “militant” (his word) confrontation and protest. Second, he dismissed as fantasy the idea of armed revolution that some Black Power extremists were envisioning in their rhetoric. He would test the strategy in Memphis.

  If the strategy worked in Memphis, King might conclude that it would work with Black Power militants who might otherwise disrupt the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington. Heading off a threat to the Poor People’s Campaign was not the only reason that King sought to bring Black Power militants under his wing. Black Power was commanding the media spotlight. Its energy, fueled by anger and revolutionary zeal, was captivating and radicalizing black youth.

  His strategy rested on the premise that he could repeat elsewhere what he had achieved in Chicago. How complete a conversion of the gangs he had achieved in Chicago, however, was never clear. Years later, Ralph Abernathy would look back on King’s earnest efforts as having been largely a bust. Abernathy’s recollection was very different from King’s: “Martin had encountered for the first time a crowd of blacks that he could neither reason with nor overpower with his philosophy.”14

  In Abernathy’s telling, King’s approach to the gangs was doomed from the start because the gang members were devoid of “respect for anything or anybody, most especially for preachers.” Historian Fairclough agrees, saying that many of the gang members with whom King rapped for hours remained “cynically aloof.”15

  Now in Memphis, applying the lesson of Chicago, he courted the Invaders. But the Invaders differed from the Blackstone Rangers. The Invaders were not poorly educated, ghettoized toughs engaged in drug trafficking or other criminal enterprise. Cabbage’s group had no criminal intent. The Invaders were led by college students or graduates steeped in SNCC rhetoric. Their motivation was Black Power ideology.

  In recruiting the Invaders, King would not be filling an ideological void, as he had with the Chicago gangs. He would have to confront the Invaders’ radicalism head-on and rebut their conviction that King’s nonviolence was feckless, that its time was past. To dissuade them was to dispute the idea at the crux of Black Power. In Chicago, King and his aides had spent much of one summer working to gain the gangs’ allegiance. In Memphis they had less than a week.

  At 3:17 p.m., Monday, April 3, King left the meeting with Lucius Burch. He headed to the motel’s dining room, where he found Cabbage, John Burl Smith, and about fifteen other Invaders seated in chairs.16 King sat down facing them. Even sitting, the lanky Cabbage loomed over King. Cabbage was wearing blue jeans, a sweatshirt, and sandals. The same clothes had
served as his virtual uniform for the preceding year. He owned just one pair of blue jeans, and he and other Invaders were struggling to feed themselves for lack of money.17

  King asked Cabbage’s group if they could agree to a pledge of nonviolence.18 The Invaders evaded the question but portrayed themselves as the key to a peaceful march in Memphis. They argued that King ought to work with them because they had grassroots support in the African American community. They faulted Jim Lawson for not including them in COME’s planning before the march of March 28. As one Invader recounted years later, they said that, if King had met with the Invaders early on, the march would have been “free of violence.”19 On the strength of that claim, the Invaders repeated their demand for money to fund their Black Organizing Project. King seemed sympathetic. Emboldened, Cabbage asked for $2 million, according to an account of an FBI informant.20 The sum far exceeded the SCLC’s total annual budget.

  King did not promise to tap SCLC’s treasury to fund any of the Invaders’ programs. He said, however, that he would try to find other sources of money. He mentioned a coalition of black churches that had established a fund-raising arm to aid militant black groups. To show that he meant business, King picked up the telephone right then and called a number in New York. “Okay,” he told Cabbage a moment later, “we have a commitment to partially fund your program.”21

  For his part King asked the Invaders to make the rounds of the city’s black high schools and urge the students’ cooperation to keep Monday’s march peaceful.22 He asked that the Invaders provide at least twenty-five of their members to serve as parade marshals.23 When King again demanded a pledge of nonviolence, Cabbage hedged. “We told him, okay, we will try to do our best,” Cabbage would recall. “We will try to do this, even though we can’t guarantee that violence will not break out.”24 On that note the meeting with the Invaders ended at about 4:30 p.m.

  Chapter 11

  Nine-to-Five Security

  I can’t lead that kind of life. I’d feel like a bird in a cage. . . . There’s no way in the world you can keep somebody from killing you if they really want to kill you.

  —MLK, responding to a plea that he travel with bodyguards, Albany, Georgia, March 23, 1968

  EXHAUSTED AT THE END OF A DAY of travel and high-stakes meetings, King returned to his room to rest. Despite his outward calmness at the time, the bomb threat to his flight that morning was still eating at him. That would become painfully evident in an emotional speech that he would deliver that night.

  The bomb scare appeared to have struck him as a dire warning about the perils awaiting him in Memphis. If he could not say who or when someone might attack, he knew that he was in mortal danger. Would his assailant be an extremist pro-war hawk aggrieved by his denunciation of US policy in Vietnam? Might it be a law-and-order zealot outraged by his vow to hound and disrupt Washington for the poor? Perhaps a trigger-happy racist inflamed by loathing for him and everything he personified? Or a Black Power fanatic targeting a man he perceived as an anti-revolutionary?

  Being in Memphis was doing nothing to allay King’s fear. The city was very much on edge, the racial tensions from the strike sharpened by continuing bitterness over the riot and the harsh police response to it. Anxiety was in the air, and King was being swept into it. John Lewis, the young movement leader who was working in tandem with the SCLC, was hearing reports from people close to King that he was seized by dread. Lewis would later recall learning that King was anguished by “the ugliness and killing that was rising up all around him. He could feel it closing in.”1

  King’s fear for his safety in Memphis was in no way alarmist. It was well founded, as the police were aware. Even before King’s visits to the city on March 18 and March 28, the Memphis police were fielding threats against him.2 According to Memphis police director Frank Holloman, police headquarters and other city agencies had been receiving calls warning that “something was liable to happen to Dr. King.”3

  Holloman nevertheless decided against providing security for King on either March 18 or 28. In congressional testimony in 1978, Holloman explained why. He said of King: “He was just another person who was involved in the sanitation strike, and there was no reason, apparently, that we even thought of providing security for him.”4

  Nor did the Memphis authorities notify King of the threats against him. Or so it appears. In his testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations about the police handling of King’s security, Holloman did not mention any such warnings having been conveyed to King in mid-March. More threats had poured in after the March 28 riot. The police evidently did not warn King of those threats either. An after-action report prepared by the police department detailing hour-by-hour the surveillance and security surrounding King’s presence in Memphis on April 3 and 4 says nothing about warnings to him.5

  It would seem that the bomb scare in Atlanta might have prompted him to request police protection in Memphis whether or not he knew of the threats. But he did not request a police bodyguard in Memphis. He rarely sought police protection, yet he feared that he could die a violent death at any moment.

  He tried to buffer his fear by developing a numb fatalism, a defense against the dread that someone might kill him at any moment. If dying violently was inevitable, he reckoned, he might as well resign himself to it. He girded himself mentally against the nerve-racking despair of constant panic. “He was philosophical about his death,” Andrew Young would recall. “He knew it would come, and he just decided, you know, there was nothing to do about it.”6

  When President Kennedy was slain in 1963, King told his wife, Coretta, that he expected the same fate for himself.7 If the president had not been safe from an assassin’s bullet, King confided to his aides, neither was he. From the time John Kennedy was killed, Andrew Young would remember, “Dr. King just felt, when your time comes, if the president can’t be secured with hundreds of Secret Service, there’s nothing that two or three officers are going do with us.”8

  As he traveled around the country, King declined many offers of police security. He did not want a phalanx of police hanging around him. He believed that having armed officers in uniform standing vigil over him would send the wrong message. His was a message of nonviolent protest, a Christian tenet of turning the other cheek to hatred and violence. It was a credo that clashed with the open display of armed police guards ready to shoot.

  To look to the Memphis police in particular for protection must have struck King as a doubtful proposition. Undercover officers on Holloman’s force were infiltrating the meetings of striking garbage workers and their supporters. The police were suspect in the eyes of the strike supporters for having employed harsh tactics to quell the rioting on March 28. Though many marchers had been teargassed and beaten, King had not. All the same, considering the conduct of the Memphis police that day, he had reason not to trust them.

  In the days before King returned to the city on April 3, the number of death threats spiked higher.9 According to Holloman, the authorities received a flurry of telephone calls to the effect that King “would not live through” the march of April 6. Holloman said in court testimony on April 4 that he was “very much concerned” about King’s safety.10

  The surge of threats and the rioting on March 28 had caused Holloman to reconsider his position that King did not warrant any special protection. Under the circumstances the police director had determined that prudence dictated a security detail for him. So it was that, when King arrived at the Memphis airport on April 3, Inspector Donald Smith’s detail of four officers had been there to guard him.

  Smith and the other officers remained on the King watch all day. At 5:05 p.m., Smith called headquarters for permission to “secure the detail”—police-speak for “end the mission.” Permission was granted. That concluded the security for King, not just for that day but indefinitely. There was no security detail assigned to protect him that night or the next day.11 The security shield for King, such as it was, had been in effect si
x hours and thirty-two minutes.

  Why the security detail was disbanded at 5:05 p.m. on that Wednesday is a mystery. The after-action report, the police department’s most complete review of its security for King during the visit in April 1968, does not say why. The report notes only that Chief J. C. MacDonald, who worked under Holloman’s command, ordered the security detail to stand down at 5:05 p.m.12 Holloman would say later that he did not remember having authorized the stand-down. In his testimony he conceded that abandoning security on the afternoon of King’s first day in Memphis was “not proper considering the circumstances.”13

  Holloman’s testimony revealed the low priority that he had assigned to King’s security. He said that he had not involved himself in the particulars of the security plan for King on April 3. Nor had he monitored how things were going. Holloman’s priority was surveillance, not security. The surveillance by officers Ed Redditt and Willie Richmond did not end on Wednesday afternoon. They returned to their post at the firehouse across Mulberry Street from the Lorraine the next morning.

  Holloman acquired his training in law enforcement during his decades with the FBI under the surveillance-prone management of J. Edgar Hoover. Holloman joined the bureau in 1937 after graduating from the University of Mississippi Law School. He rose through the ranks, heading regional bureaus in Atlanta, Memphis, Cincinnati, and Jackson, Mississippi. In 1956, Hoover named him “inspector in charge” at FBI headquarters. In that position he oversaw FBI personnel for eight years, reporting to Hoover.

  After Mayor Loeb appointed him to head the Memphis Police Department, in January 1968, Holloman moved swiftly to create an Inspectional Division. In effect it meant a new emphasis on covert operations. As he would explain later, Holloman had a “special interest” in developing the department’s intelligence capacity.14