On that Thursday morning, King found Cotton in her room at the Lorraine. She was seething from his not having met her for a snack the night before, as they had agreed. Now she confronted him. They argued.4 Furious, she told him she was leaving for the airport to catch a plane back to Atlanta. “Get a later plane,” she would quote him as saying. She left anyway. In Cotton’s memoir, published decades later, she said that she had left Memphis to attend a meeting in Atlanta.5
Lawyers and witnesses, meanwhile, were convening at the US District Court in downtown Memphis for a hearing on Judge Brown’s injunction. If Brown did not vacate the order before Monday and King stuck to his vow to march anyway, the judge was likely to find him in contempt. King could wind up in jail. To jail him and prevent him from marching would escalate the already heated racial tensions in Memphis.
The hearing opened with the testimony of Frank Holloman. “I am convinced that Dr. Martin Luther King, his leaders or any others cannot control a massive march of this kind in this city or elsewhere,” the police director stated.6 He went on, “I fear for the lives and property of the citizens of Memphis during the march.”
When it was the turn of Andrew Young and James Lawson to testify later that day, they would reassure the judge that King and his aides meant to keep the march orderly and nonviolent. Their lawyer, Lucius Burch, urged the judge to allow the march to proceed under King’s guidance. Surely, he argued, violence would be less likely to erupt with King in charge than if thousands were to march without him.
Back at the Lorraine, meanwhile, King’s aides were resuming negotiations with the Invaders. The Black Power group included Charles Cabbage and a half dozen others. In the SCLC delegation were Bevel, Williams, Orange, and Lee.
A FBI field report, drawing on the observations of undercover police officer Marrell McCollough, who was in the meeting, would describe what happened. The lanky Cabbage did most of the talking in his sonorous drawl. He repeated the group’s willingness to serve as parade marshals. But he reiterated their seemingly nonnegotiable condition: the SCLC must first agree to fund the Invaders’ community programs. Andrew Young would recall hearing of the Invaders’ demands: “They wanted us to buy their support. They were talking about our giving them a million dollars to buy cars and things. I said, ‘Look, we don’t have a million dollars to run our whole organization, see?’ At that time we were running the organization on about half a million dollars a year.”7
With the talks seemingly stalled, King ducked into the meeting. Cabbage still seemed far from embracing definitively the principle of nonviolence. Rather, he professed support for “tactical” violence. In Black Power terms “tactical” violence meant Watts-type rioting for the purpose of drawing urgent attention to racial grievances. King replied that either the Invaders were for nonviolence or they were not. There was no in-between. His frustration mounting, he added, “I don’t negotiate with brothers.”8 The meeting ended with the prospect of the Invaders’ cooperation ever more in doubt.
King and Abernathy were back in their room by noon. King, having skipped breakfast again, wanted an early lunch. He and Abernathy headed to the dining room of the Lorraine. When they were seated, a waitress told them that the day’s special was catfish. That must have been very welcome news. The catfish that they had eaten on earlier visits was one of their fondest memories of the motel. At the Lorraine the fish was served Southern style: deep fried to a crispy, golden brown.
Southern style was exactly what King wanted. He craved not just fried catfish. He craved the whole gamut of Southern food. He relished everything from hominy grits to corn bread to turnip greens to barbecued pork ribs. A favorite lunch was a pork chop sandwich. At times he liked nothing better than gnawing on a pig’s foot. His good friend Benjamin Hooks would say that soul food had a peculiar value in the black civil rights movement. Dinners prepared by the ministers’ wives were memorable events. Hooks explained it this way: “The tension of the marches. The threats on your daily life. The uncertainty of everything. The injustice you had to face. Dinner was an outlet. You could look forward to the best cooking.”9
This Thursday, their nerves on edge because of the crisis in Memphis, King and Abernathy were having lunch by themselves. They told the waitress they each wanted the day’s special with iced tea. They waited for what seemed like an eternity. When the waitress returned to their table, she was carrying a tray. On it were not two plates of catfish but one. It was a double order heaped on one plate At least one part of the order was right: there were two glasses of iced tea on the tray.
Abernathy eyed the single plate of catfish warily. “I opened my mouth to say something,” he would recall, “but Martin raised his hand.” As Abernathy reconstructed the conversation years later, King said: “Oh, Ralph. Don’t bother her anymore. She probably doesn’t get paid minimum wage, and you know what the tips must be like here. We’ll just eat from the same plate.” And they did.10
In the early afternoon King convened another meeting of his staff. He was fuming about how the Invaders were dealing with him. He was insisting on a total pledge of nonviolence, which they were withholding as they angled for a million-dollar funding commitment. Some of his aides reminded him that the Invaders had leverage. Unless the Invaders got their way, they might incite a violent disruption of the march on Monday.
King had heard enough. He fumed: “I’d rather be dead than afraid.” He seemed to be blurting out a maxim to steady his nerves, even if it did not seem to fit the moment. His frustration with the Invaders was spilling over. One of King’s aides asked him what he thought about inviting three or four Invaders to join the SCLC staff and paying them a modest salary. The theory was that, as staff members under King’s sway, the Invaders would adhere to a philosophy of nonviolence.11
Hosea Williams pressed the point. On questions of tactics, along with James Bevel, Williams occupied the hawkish end of the spectrum among the SCLC executive staff. It was Williams who persuaded King to approve a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge at Selma into a phalanx of Alabama state troopers. It was a highly daring plan that risked ending in a bloodbath for the marchers, which is exactly what happened.
As the meeting dragged on, Williams persisted in arguing that the Invaders’ notion of tactical violence had merit. King would have none of it. He rejected any hedging on the bedrock principle of nonviolence. As historian Adam Fairclough would write: “Refusing to let the matter drop, King paced the room, preaching to his staff.”12 King was not usually a pacer. In Memphis he could not resist pacing.
On this afternoon King might well have questioned his strategy for re-channeling Black Power anger into nonviolent protest. The strategy rested on a basic idea: that he could succeed in persuading Black Power groups like the Invaders to fall into line behind his style of protest. With the Poor People’s Campaign only weeks away, the objective seemed all the more critical.
Yet the radical tilt of SNCC under H. Rap Brown’s leadership was threatening to King’s agenda, and Brown’s inflammatory rhetoric could hardly have been reassuring to King. A speech to an already angered crowd in Cambridge, Maryland, in 1967 had resulted in Brown’s arrest for inciting the riot that followed.13 The arrest did not delegitimize him among masses of angry inner-city youths. On the contrary: for many, the rage he was expressing was theirs.
As he sought broad support for the Poor People’s Campaign, King had witnessed Brown’s aggressive tactics firsthand. In February 1968, Brown had barged into an SCLC board meeting in a Washington church. He had brought along walkie-talkie-carrying toughs as bodyguards. They had disrupted the meeting, even barring some of the board members from entering the room.14
King nonetheless continued to believe that he could redirect even the angry extremism of Brown’s followers into nonviolent protest to confront the government in Washington. He would convince Black Power militants that his nonviolent movement to end poverty was not meek or passive but a militant civil disobedience. In his history of the SCLC, Fairclough
explains King’s strategy this way: “Young blacks could be won to nonviolence, King believed, if they had a chance to join a movement of sufficient militancy and power.”15
Now in Memphis King was assuming that, if he could draw the Invaders into the movement on his terms, they would come to recognize nonviolent protest as a great force for social change. They would recognize his leadership to advance a common purpose. Their cooperation, he imagined, would be the linchpin to keeping the march on April 6 peaceful.
It was a dubious assumption. It was not the Invaders who had broken windows and looted stores on March 28 in Memphis. Few of them were in the marchers’ ranks, according to an FBI after-action report.16 Rather, as James Lawson would say, the rioters were “small time shoplifters and thieves in the Beale Street area who took advantage of the march to loot stores.”17
There was little evidence that the Invaders caused the riot, and they were denying that they had. But they meant for King to believe that they could prevent a riot from happening again. If he believed that, they had bargaining power. An FBI informant close to the Invaders reported: “Cabbage and his group want to give the illusion that they are the only force which can control militant Negro youths in Memphis and can prevent trouble.”18
It did appear that the Invaders had something of a following in the city’s high schools. Some students were intrigued enough by the group’s rhetoric to outfit themselves in jackets emblazoned with the word “Invaders” across the back. The youths wore the jackets “as a symbol of self-identity with Black Power,” not necessarily because they were allied with the Invaders or would follow their instructions, the FBI informant said.19
If King succeeded in recruiting the Invaders to his cause, he expected them to mobilize a significant number of parade marshals. Cabbage was promising twenty-five. But how many could he deliver? His core group totaled only ten to fifteen adherents. It was a loose-knit bunch. There was no membership roll. There were no dues. They had no resources to speak of. They had conferred on Marrell McCollough, the undercover policeman posing as an Invader, the lofty title of minister of transportation. He earned the title because he owned a car.20 “Largely ineffective” was how Robert Blakey, the counsel of a congressional committee that would investigate the Invaders, summed up the militants’ sway over the “younger, more disillusioned” blacks in Memphis.21
By Thursday afternoon, King no longer had any illusions about the Black Power group. He had come to see them as a distraction and a menace. As the staff meeting wound down, King said there was no point in continuing to negotiate. Hosea Williams conceded the point. He left the meeting to look for Charles Cabbage. When he found Cabbage, he delivered a blunt message: the SCLC did not regard the Invaders as trustworthy, and their refusal to renounce violence made them unfit to take part in the march on Monday.22 Williams ordered the Invaders to vacate their motel rooms for arriving guests to occupy.
At 5:50 p.m. all the Invaders spilled out of Room 315, toting bags, and quickly left the Lorraine. They left without paying their room and food costs totaling $167. The SCLC was stuck with the tab.23
In their rush to Memphis neither King nor his staff had had enough time to learn much about the city’s inner workings. King, lacking an understanding of the racial politics of Memphis, had misjudged the Invaders.
Chapter 19
Melancholy Afternoon
I can’t take it anymore. I’m going to the country to stay with one of my members. I need to go to the farm, and I’m going down there.
—MLK, comment to Ralph Abernathy, as he contemplated returning to Memphis, March 30, 1968
THE SURVEILLANCE DETAIL of officers Ed Redditt and Willie Richmond was on the King watch for a second day. They were still entrenched in their observation post in the back of Fire Station #2 across Mulberry Street from the Lorraine Motel. They had observed members of the Invaders and the SCLC staff buzzing from room to room of the motel as they gathered for meetings.1 They would report no sightings of King all morning or afternoon.
King remained in Room 306 for much of the morning, leaving only to confront Dorothy Cotton and eat lunch in the motel dining room. Once he and Abernathy had finished their catfish, they returned to the room. They were hoping for word from Andrew Young about the outcome of the hearing in Judge Brown’s courtroom.
They had heard nothing from Young all morning. They feared that a prolonged hearing meant bad news, that the judge would not vacate the injunction.2 If Young had called, he could have informed them that the testimony by three Memphis police officials had lasted all morning and that Young and Lawson were to testify after a lunch break.
While waiting for word from the courthouse, King busied himself on the phone. He telephoned SCLC headquarters in Atlanta, asking his secretary, Dora McDonald, for messages. He called Harry Wachtel, a back-channel lawyer and confidante of King, at his New York law firm.3 He called Ebenezer to notify church officials about the theme and title of his Sunday sermon. It would reflect his somber mood at the time. The title was: “Why America May Go to Hell.” King had found time to plan the sermon even as he grappled with the crisis in Memphis. He was able to convey a point-by-point preview to McDonald.4
With still no word from Young, King went downstairs to Georgia Davis’s Room 201. His brother, A.D., was already in the room, along with Lukey Ward and Davis. It did not surprise Davis that King preferred her room to his. King was well aware that the FBI had been bugging his hotel rooms, among other places. He was constantly suspicious of possible FBI eavesdropping.5 To prevent government monitoring of their conversation, he and Coretta sometimes even went so far as to talk in code.6
Not that King and A.D. discussed anything all that sensitive while they were in Room 201. Giddy to be together again and seized by an adolescent impulse, the brothers telephoned their mother in Atlanta. They talked to her for almost an hour. Indulging an urge for boyish mischief, they teased her. Alberta, whom everyone called Mama King, did not seem like a mother who would have had much tolerance for her sons’ foolishness. A short, stocky woman who dressed meticulously, an accomplished church organist, she had an air of formality about her. She did not call her husband, Martin Sr., by his first name. To her he was always Reverend King.7 But according to Coretta, her dignified mother-in-law actually had a “keen sense of humor.”8
Taking turns on the phone, King and A.D. pretended to be the other. That kept their mother guessing which was which. The more they confounded her, the more they laughed. Whoops and hoots filled the room. Turning serious, Mrs. King expressed her distress about the rioting in Memphis the week before. She handed the phone to Daddy King.9 He expressed his concern as well. To relieve his parents of worry, King said that everything was fine in Memphis. Back on the phone, Alberta gushed about how happy she was that her sons were together.
The warmth and cheer from his parents buoyed King. Once he was off the phone, however, his mood darkened. He seemed pensive, distracted. King remained flat on his back in bed for much of the afternoon, awake, saying little, staring blankly at the ceiling, lost in his thoughts. “Most of the day, he was just resting and relaxing,” Davis would recall.10
He had much to mull over, moments fresh on his mind. The bomb threat to his plane from Atlanta, the outpouring of mournful emotions in his speech at Mason Temple, Dorothy Cotton’s angry departure from the Lorraine, the futility of his attempt to enlist the Invaders as parade marshals—they were all unsettling events in his life since the morning before.
As he struggled with the Memphis crisis, he was still hearing a drumbeat of criticism against him for his stand against the Vietnam War. Top union leaders were continuing to object, as were some prominent civil rights leaders.11 Among the union leaders continuing to take issue with him over Vietnam were longtime friends and allies such as Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young. The criticism grated on him. Close friend Marian Logan would tell of his acute anguish because of his friends’ disagreement with him over Vietnam. She would recall: “I don’t think it was be
cause he doubted the position he had taken, that it was wrong. I think he felt badly that a lot of people didn’t agree with him or couldn’t understand his reason for taking a stand. It depressed him terribly.”12
He could hardly have been happy, moreover, about being trapped another day in the city where rioting had so subverted his reputation. Critics from all sides were questioning his relevance as a nonviolent leader. Even he was losing hope. In the article for the issue of Look magazine slated for April 16, 1968, he wrote: “As committed as I am to nonviolence, I have to face this fact: If we do not get a positive response in Washington, many more Negroes will begin to think and act in violent terms.”13
Very likely nothing troubled King more, as he stared at the ceiling of Room 201, than the fading prospects of the Poor People’s Campaign. As a consequence of the rioting in Memphis, he was stranded in a motel room rather than on the move to recruit and organize for the antipoverty drive set to begin in just eighteen days.
Even before the crisis in Memphis, the mobilization of King’s army of poor people was lagging. Then, with five weeks to go before the scheduled kickoff of the Washington campaign, Hosea Williams was lamenting the slow pace of recruitment. In a memo to SCLC staff, Williams, the campaign’s field director, wrote: “Yes, many meetings are being held, some money is being raised, but hardly anyone is being recruited for the long, hard drive in Washington.” Williams added that he was “very much disturbed” by the lack of progress.14
Redemption Page 16