Holloman was taking a page from Hoover’s playbook. The Inspectional Division was the Memphis version of the FBI’s Intelligence Division. At Hoover’s direction the FBI had launched, in the late 1950s, a secret program known as COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program). COINTELPRO officially existed to investigate communist activity, but it morphed into a mammoth “dirty tricks” operation to thwart supposedly radical elements in the civil rights movement. King was a major target.
When the garbage workers went on strike, Holloman assigned Redditt and Richmond to surveillance. He assigned Marrell McCollough, a recent police recruit, to undercover work, tasking him to infiltrate the Invaders. Like Redditt and Richmond, McCollough was an African American. No African Americans were assigned to Detective Smith’s security detail.
Holloman’s emphasis on surveillance over security in King’s case seemed in line with his enthusiasm for counterintelligence. In defending his policy years later, Holloman would say that, had King agreed to cooperate, the police would have provided security for him the whole time he was in Memphis. Without that cooperation, Holloman said, he did not think that a security detail would have served any purpose.15
In some other cities, however, law enforcement officials did not take no for an answer. They persuaded King to cooperate or provided security regardless. FBI records show that security measures for King were put into effect in a number of cities—from Milwaukee to Cincinnati, Boston to Las Vegas.
Even in die-hard segregationist Albany, Georgia, Chief Laurie Pritchett commenced round-the-clock police protection for King. Though King objected, Pritchett ignored him. The chief recognized the great risk to his city and his reputation if the nation’s leading civil rights champion should die a violent death in Albany. According to an account by historian Stephen Oates, Pritchett declared that if King were murdered in Albany, “the fires would never cease.”16
In 1964, during King’s visit to Las Vegas, sheriff’s deputies kept him under constant guard by day, and they stood vigil in his hotel suite at night.17 In Los Angeles on February 28, 1965, one hundred police officers were deployed to protect him.18 In Charlotte, North Carolina, where he attended a two-day conference in September 1966, Police Chief John Ingersoll assigned fourteen African American policemen to a security detail for King. As he left a speaking engagement, the officers held hands and formed a human corridor to shield him.
As recently as February, a few weeks before King’s return to Memphis in April, police officers stood guard in the hallway leading to his room at the Sheraton Four Ambassadors Hotel in Miami. Apparently alarmed by death threats, the police prevailed on King to cancel a speech scheduled at Miami Beach and remain in the hotel. King complied.19 Billy Kyles, the Memphis minister who was at the conference, would recall: “The Miami police begged Martin not to leave the hotel because there were so many threats against him. So we stayed inside.”20
That’s the sort of caution that Holloman’s predecessor as head of the Memphis police, Claude Armour, had exercised during King’s 1966 visit to Memphis. In the early 1960s, an era of court-ordered desegregation of schools and other public facilities, he decreed that his officers would follow the law and prevent any outbreak of violence. In the words of Maxine Smith, the executive director of the Memphis branch of the NAACP at the time: “He let his force know that he would not tolerate anything. He was going to see to it that those kids got to school and got home safely, and he did that.”21
Under Armour’s stewardship of the department, however, allegations of police misconduct against African Americans did not cease. Maxine Smith accused the department of arresting blacks without cause in some instances and mistreating them. Smith said, “Police officers can do whatever they want to do under the guise of being police officers.” The term “John Gaston turbans” came into currency among the city’s defense lawyers. It was a reference to the many swaddled heads of blacks beaten by police and treated at the city’s public John Gaston Hospital.22 Young blacks had another term for the police violence: blue crush.
An incident during the summer of 1967 buttressed the claim that police, under Armour’s stewardship, were brutalizing blacks in Memphis with impunity. One sweltering night the police arrested the wrong man for the robbery of a convenience store. That night Gregory Jaynes, a reporter for the Commercial Appeal, was working the pressroom at police headquarters. Through the wall he heard the police walloping the suspect in a room next to his. He grabbed a telephone and called Barney DuBois, the paper’s rewrite man. “I put the receiver to the wall so Barney could hear the beating and back me up,” Jaynes would relate years later. His story ran on the front page of the Sunday paper. Four police officers were suspended. There was a civil service hearing, but the officers were not prosecuted. “They let the cops go,” Jaynes would recall.23
Despite the department’s mixed record on racial matters under Armour, his handling of security for King reflected a caution that would be lacking in the department under Holloman. In June 1966 King operated out of Memphis while he took part in a march across Mississippi begun by James Meredith, the first black student admitted, in 1962, to the state’s flagship university at Oxford. In his home state Meredith was staging what he called a “march against fear” to combat racism.
Armour was determined that no harm would come to King while he was in Memphis. He ordered a security detail of eight African American officers and issued strict instructions: they would keep King safe, or there would be hell to pay.24 Jerry Dave Williams, a black homicide detective, was put in charge. “We would go in and check the rooms, make sure the telephone wasn’t bugged, check under the beds, check everywhere. Then I would assign two officers outside his door. We would take turns every two hours through the night,” Williams would say later.25
Detective Redditt was one of the eight officers in Williams’s detail. Armour took it upon himself to issue orders to Redditt. He summoned Redditt to his office. Redditt would remember Armour saying, “This man is an international figure, and you better not let anything happen to him. If something happens, you lose your badge.”26
Guarding King had been unlike any other duty that Detective Redditt had performed as a police officer. King was staying at the Lorraine, where he had his customary Room 306 on the second floor. Wiry and fleet-footed (he had been a star sprinter on the track team at Manassas High School), Redditt had positioned his body as a human shield for King.
When King would leave his room to descend the open stairway to the ground floor, Redditt and other officers in the security detail were standing by. In Redditt’s telling: “We had to put our bodies around him and walk him down the stairs.” One morning, while King was eating breakfast, Redditt joked about all the trips up and down the stairs. “Why don’t you get another room?” he asked King. “It’s killing me walking up and down those steps.”27
But Holloman did not follow Armour’s example. He did not see security for King as a critical matter demanding his close attention and scrutiny. In sharp contrast to Armour’s diligence in safeguarding King from harm, Holloman’s attitude was passive, halfhearted. As a consequence, King was in greater jeopardy on April 4, 1968.
Chapter 12
Reluctant Speaker
The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.
—MLK, in his book Where Do We Go from Here, published in June 1967
THAT NIGHT IT SEEMED that even the Lord was turning against King. From inside his room at the Lorraine, he could hear the insistent wailing of tornado sirens. The fury of the approaching storm gave him pause. He doubted that much of a crowd would turn out for a speech on such a night. He could picture yawning rows of empty seats in the vastness of Mason Temple. If the crowd was paltry, if the rally was a bust, it would add to his misery. Abernathy would recall King’s hesitation: “It was clear that few people would show up at the speech. Martin never liked to address small crowds.”1
King’s health was another issu
e. He had a sore throat. His weeks of breakneck travel pitching the Poor People’s Campaign had worn him down. He badly needed rest.
He knew from long experience that he would pay a price for subjecting his body to punishing days on the road. He had a history of collapsing from exhaustion. When he returned from the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo in 1964, he was brimming with pride but so fatigued that he had checked into an Atlanta hospital.2 Two years later, succumbing to what Abernathy called “his virus,” meaning the utter exhaustion and fever that struck him in times of great stress, he missed most of the SCLC’s annual convention in Jackson, Mississippi.3 It was then, in February 1968, that on doctor’s orders he sought refuge in Acapulco for a break from the relentless pace of the Poor People’s Campaign.4
On occasion, according to Andrew Young, King feigned sickness so he could duck out of an unwelcome event.5 This time, though, he was not faking. He had a sore throat, likely aggravated by his smoking habit (a pack a day of Salems), and he was not feeling well.6
Sleepless nights worsened his exhaustion. Toward the end of March, as he wrapped up a busy round of recruiting in Harlem and Newark for the Poor People’s Campaign before the rush back to Memphis, he was laboring under a severe sleep deficit. He told a reporter, “I’ve been getting two hours of sleep a night for the past ten days.”7
King suffered from migraine headaches and chronic insomnia.8 He tried sleeping pills, but they no longer worked for him. It was “Martin’s war on sleep,” Abernathy would say.9 Some of his aides were night owls too and would sit with him, talking into the wee hours through whatever issues were bedeviling him. As Andrew Young put it, “We almost always ran relays keeping him company.”10 His aides suspected that his bouts of depression, which hit him in moments of extreme sadness and even great joy, might have been at the root of the insomnia.11
Even if he could overcome the exhaustion and acquit himself well in Mason Temple that night, King worried how the media would play his speech. If the crowd were to be small, reporters might ask embarrassing questions: Why had so many more people turned up for his speech on March 18? Was the storm howling outside the sole explanation? Had the rioting in Memphis on March 28 degraded King’s support in the pro-strike community?
He was acutely aware of how he and his campaigns would play in newspapers and on TV screens. In his rise to national prominence King owed much of his success to media coverage. The emotional intensity of television operated as a crucial prop. King was savvy enough to recognize the potential of TV as an ally, and he and his aides tailored their strategy to exploit its power to the fullest. Journalist David Halberstam even portrayed the civil rights movement under King as “a great televised morality play.”12
In Birmingham the seduction of TV cameras had contributed to King’s decision to mobilize high school students as demonstrators. To have police dogs snapping at young marchers was bound to produce dramatic footage. It was a shrewd, though controversial, tactic. It would expose children to the risk of a violent police response. Andrew Young would explain years later how much the lure of television coverage shaped SCLC strategy: “During the Birmingham campaign we would schedule demonstrations in the morning in order to leave time for the national TV networks to ship film footage out on the 2 p.m. flight to New York. The footage would arrive in time for the networks to produce it for their evening news shows.”13
But by 1968 the media spotlight was on urban rioting and Black Power militancy. The thrust of the coverage was negative. Media interest in King’s comparatively moderate message of nonviolent protest was waning. Mostly his antiwar utterances gained much traction, and it was largely critical. Other than the riot on March 28, the Memphis story was capturing little national media coverage. As Jesse Jackson would recount: “Memphis was an isolated area, the media wasn’t there, and we were already in a media slump. They had about locked Martin out of the press, and the Memphis garbage workers could only be a small space at best.”14
King had no reason to expect that many reporters would turn up at Mason Temple on the stormy night of April 3. The opposite was more likely. There might not be any TV cameras or national reporters on hand, and there would probably be only a few local ones. Maybe none. It was a disheartening thought.
Given the dim prospects, he was uneasy about speaking at all that night. He decided not to go. Instead he would stay in his room and rest.
He told Abernathy, “I really don’t feel like speaking.”
Abernathy replied, “Why don’t you let Jesse go? He loves to speak.”15
No, King said. He was wary of Jackson’s outsize ambition and did not want the charismatic twenty-six-year-old spellbinder filling in for him. He asked Abernathy to speak. “Can I take Jackson along?” Abernathy asked.
“Yes, but you do the speaking,” King insisted.16
So, with Jackson and Young in tow, Abernathy drove through slashing rain to Mason Temple.
Alone in Room 306, King telephoned SCLC board member Marian Logan in New York City. King and Logan had been arguing about the Poor People’s Campaign for weeks. Logan and her husband, Arthur, were close friends of King and longtime financial supporters of the SCLC. King so valued their friendship that he had invited them, as part of a select group of family and close associates, to be on hand in Oslo when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Logans were unlike many of King’s close friends. They lived outside the South. Neither was a minister. Arthur Logan was a well-regarded surgeon and civic leader in New York. One of his patients was jazz great Duke Ellington. Marian herself had been a fine cabaret singer. It was a measure of King’s esteem for her that he had asked her to join the SCLC board. On the board she was unique in two respects: the only woman and the only Northerner. She was avidly devoted to King and his nonviolent movement.
But when King embraced causes beyond his core civil rights mission, he no longer enjoyed Marian Logan’s unwavering support. The Poor People’s Campaign struck Logan as a great mistake. Ordinarily, if she had a bone to pick with King, she would do it privately. But she felt so strongly about the Poor People’s Campaign that on March 8 she had fired off a six-page memo to King and the other SCLC board members detailing her objections.
Bluntly she told them it was not the time for thousands of poor people to besiege the nation’s capital. Many Americans were already angry about rioting in urban ghettos. She noted the “climate of confusion, splintering, backlash and reaction that reigns over the country at present.”17 She expected that King’s confrontational tactics would not sway Congress to authorize programs for the poor but rather would harden its opposition to them. As she told him, she believed his antipoverty campaign was crudely planned and would fail “to move the conscience of the Congress.”18 She predicted instead that the militant and disruptive (if nonviolent) demonstrations vowed by King would play into the hands of conservative, law-and-order candidates by fueling voters’ support for them at the polls.
On the evening of Monday, March 25, having wound up a speaking tour in the East, King showed up unannounced at the Logans’ brownstone on West Eighty-Eighth Street. He and Marian were soon hard at it, resuming their debate about the Poor People’s Campaign. As journalist and author Gerold Frank would portray King that night, he lounged on a couch, his shoes and tie off. Fortified by copious amounts of orange juice and vodka, he jousted nonstop with Logan until almost dawn. Despite naysayers’ arguments against his Washington plan, he told Logan, he would trust his instincts. If he had not trusted his instincts, he said, there would have been no Montgomery, no Selma, no Birmingham.19
Logan would relate, years later, the way the marathon session had ended: “Finally my husband said, ‘Martin, leave her alone. You know, she’s not gonna change her mind. She believes in this very strongly, and I think you should accept it.’”20
King quit the Logans’ apartment that morning, but he wouldn’t let the matter drop. Over the next week he called Logan almost every night. In the motel room on the evening o
f April 3 he called again, wheedling and badgering her, imploring her to side with him, begging her to trust his judgment.
Logan had the utmost respect for King. She revered him for his genial manner, sense of humor, profound moral sensibility, and oratorical genius. She would tell a reporter: “He was a brilliant man. I don’t need to tell you how he could speak.”21
But his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War was troubling to her. Like several other close friends of King’s, she feared that his antiwar stand would anger President Johnson and result in the loss of White House support for civil rights.
Moreover, she questioned King’s judgment in reorienting the SCLC to fight against poverty. On that Monday night in New York, King had pressed her to see the logic, his logic, for the Poor People’s Campaign. The harder he argued, the more she objected. She restated her concern: he should stick to racial progress for African Americans as his central cause, not pursue broad political and economic relief for all poor Americans. King’s plan for Washington protest seemed to her unwieldy and unrealistic. She believed, as she put it, “We had bitten off a lot more than we were going to be able to chew.”22
Logan had only to read the charter of the SCLC, which was founded in 1957, to see how the organization’s scope under King’s leadership had widened. The charter stated: “SCLC has the basic aim of achieving full citizenship rights, equality, and the integration of the Negro in all aspects of American life.”23 King had led the SCLC in that spirit for a decade in the push to desegregate public facilities and secure voting rights for African Americans. The charter said nothing about ending poverty for all Americans.
Having achieved much of his civil rights agenda in the South, King had reset the SCLC’s agenda. He shifted its focus to remedy what he viewed as the nation’s next great social injustice: the poverty afflicting millions of people, including a disproportionate number of African Americans. He often summed up his thinking with a snappy one-liner: “What does it profit a man to be able to sit at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee.”24
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