Downtown everything was pandemonium. When the police encountered Negro youths with rocks and picket signs, they fired tear gas and clubbed looters, marchers, bystanders—anybody with a black face—and then raked the street with gunfire. By the time the battle ended 155 stores had been damaged, 60 people injured, and a sixteen-year-old Negro boy killed by police gunfire. Mayor Loeb imposed a curfew at once, and the governor of Tennessee sent in 3,500 National Guardsmen to patrol the city.
In his Rivermont suite, King was horrified, unable to believe that somebody had been killed, that violence had broken out on a march he had led. It was the first time that this had ever happened. When reports blamed the disorders on a militant youth group called the Invaders, King was even more upset. Why hadn’t Lawson and the others told him about the Invaders? Told him that there were people in Memphis who preached violence? “We should have had some intelligence work done before we came here,” Lee groaned. “We walked right into this thing.”
This was a disaster. King did not know what to do. Now what would the press and his legion of critics say about him? That he couldn’t lead a nonviolent demonstration? That this was a harbinger of what would happen in Washington? That Martin Luther King was finished? There was a report that Roy Wilkins said he should forget the entire Washington project because mass street marches would only lead to violence. A mass meeting scheduled for that night, to feature King, had to be canceled. King was inconsolable. He kept thinking about that boy shot down by the police, about the rioting youths. He couldn’t sleep, wouldn’t sleep. Abernathy could not get him to sleep that night. In the depths of despair, he told Abernathy that “it may be that those of us who adhere to nonviolence should just step aside and let the violent forces run their course, which will be very temporary and very brief, because you can’t conduct a violent campaign in this country.”
But he could not step aside. His guilt would be intolerable if violence engulfed the land. He had to hang on. He had to come back to Memphis and lead another march. Before, the city had been a minor detour, the kind of “itinerant aid” he had often supplied local movements. But now he was trapped here. He would never get the Washington campaign under way unless he proved that he could conduct a peaceful march through the streets of Memphis, Tennessee. “Yes,” he said, “we must come back. Nonviolence as a concept is now on trial.” He would say so in a press conference already scheduled for that morning. Then he lay down for a few minutes of rest.
Abernathy woke him, scowling. Three Invaders were here and wanted to talk to him. “Well, Ralph, you can take care of it,” King said. He had to shave for the press conference. In the bathroom, he could hear Abernathy arguing with the young men in the other room. At that, King went out and “there was a complete change in the atmosphere,” one Invader recalled, as King greeted the youths cordially and calmed everyone down. They spoke in whispers, King asking for their side of the story, the young men admitting their role in inciting the violence but insisting that they only wanted to play a significant part in the strike. They had tried to meet with the established leadership, only to be snubbed and left out of the action. They felt “rejected” and angry, and one of the reasons violence had broken out yesterday was because the strike leaders had ignored them. King said he wanted to see the Invaders when he returned to Memphis, but warned that he would not condone any group that advocated violence.
Then he left for the press conference, followed by Lee and Abernathy. He marched into the room and took charge, not even waiting for Lee to introduce him, as was his custom. Ladies and gentlemen, he said, he was coming back to Memphis as early as April 3 and no later than April 5, and he was going to lead “a massive nonviolent demonstration” here. He admitted that he had come to Memphis without adequate preparation—his staff had not been involved in planning the march yesterday and his intelligence had been nonexistent. He did not know that there were blacks in Memphis who were talking about violence. Had he known that, he would have sought them out and made them parade marshals, as he had done with Negro gangs in demonstrations in other cities, with great success. No, he had not left yesterday’s march “in a hurry,” as the media reported. He had departed because he would not be associated with a violent demonstration, but he had “walked” to the car, “agonizing over what had happened.” As far as the Washington project was concerned, the disorders yesterday in no way affected his plans to start the campaign on April 22.
Back in the suite afterward, Abernathy hugged him. “I had never seen the lion in him come forth like that,” Abernathy said later. “He was just—he was so beautiful.” But King”s mood had changed again. “Ralph,” he murmured, “I want to get out of Memphis. Get me out of Memphis as soon as possible. You’ve got to get me out of Memphis.”
They flew back to Atlanta that Friday afternoon.
AS KING FEARED, THE PRESS from the New York Times to papers in Memphis linked the disrupted march to the poor people’s campaign, reinforcing what a good part of America already believed: that King and rioting were equated. An editorial in the Memphis Commercial Appeal was representative: “Dr. King’s pose as a leader of a nonviolent movement has been shattered. He now has the entire nation doubting his word when he insists that his April project…can be peaceful. In short, Dr. King is suffering from one of those awesome credibility gaps. Furthermore, he wrecked his reputation as a leader as he took off at high speed when violence occurred, instead of trying to use his persuasive prestige to stop it.”
The ever-vigilant FBI issued a blind news story about Memphis, which the St. Louis Globe-Democrat printed almost verbatim in a derogatory editorial. What happened in Memphis, the paper asserted, “could be only the prelude to civil strife in our Nation’s Capitol” and proved that King was more dangerous than Stokely Carmichael because he “continues to talk nonviolence even as it erupts all about him.” “This is the real Martin Luther King,” the paper warned, “a man who stoops to using anti-Democratic and dictatorial means to try to force his will on the highest legislative body in the United States, a man who hides behind a façade of ‘nonviolence’ as he provokes violence.” To illustrate, the paper ran a cartoon showing a haloed, thick-lipped King shooting up “trouble,” “violence,” and “looting” with a pistol. “I’m not firing it,” the caption read, “I’m only pulling the trigger.”
The FBI and papers like the Globe-Democrat only contributed to a growing climate of hatred against King and his projected marches in Memphis as well as Washington. In fact, one man who read the Globe-Democrat editorial was John Ray, a St. Louis tavern owner and brother of escaped convict James Earl Ray. Both Ray brothers were active in the American Independent party in the St. Louis area, where Kauffmann and Sutherland had their $20,000 and $50,000 offers for King’s life.
On Saturday morning, March 30, King assembled his executive staff at Ebenezer Church in Atlanta and told them about Memphis. It was a stormy session, with much of the staff against his returning there. But Walter Fauntroy defended King’s decision. “We’ve got to go all the way with Martin because he’s Martin. I don’t care what your reservations are. He’s our leader. Let’s do what he wants.” A black union organizer, attending the meeting, said that the press had done a vicious job on King in accusing him of running out on Thursday’s march, and he thought that impression had to be challenged. As the debate raged on, Bevel and Jesse Jackson raised objections to the poor people’s campaign itself. Yes, Bevel was still fighting it. “I don’t even know how to preach people into the Poor People’s campaign,” he said. Abernathy looked at King. “He was very depressed,” Abernathy said. “He was back in his shell.” Around noon, he simply walked out of the room, leaving his aides dumbfounded.
Abernathy ran after him. “Martin, what is wrong with you? Tell me.”
“I can’t take it any more,” he said. “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.”
“Well, tell me what is bugging you,” Abernathy
persisted.
“All I’ll say is, Ralph, I’ll—I’ll snap out of it. Didn’t I snap out of it yesterday? You said I did yesterday at the press conference. I’ll pull through it.”
That afternoon, Abernathy contacted King and said the staff wanted him to come back to the church. Around three, he walked into the room where they awaited him, worried and chastened. He was right, they chorused: they had to return to Memphis in order to save the poor people’s campaign and King’s own credibility as a nonviolent leader. The Washington project might have to be postponed for a couple of weeks until they resolved the problem in Memphis. King was glad they were with him, but still seemed “really demoralized,” Fauntroy thought, “really in the dumps on this thing.” As they left the church, Jackson called out insistently, “Doc,” as though to continue the argument. King whirled around on the steps. “Jesse, don’t bother me. It may be that you want to carve your own niche in society. Go ahead and carve it. But for God’s sake don’t bother me.” His aides had never heard him speak so harshly to young Jackson, the head of SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket in Chicago.
To avoid the debacle of the first march, SCLC planned the next one in minute detail: Rustin, Jackson, and other lieutenants set about recruiting labor leaders, public officials, churchmen, and entertainers to join King in Memphis. On Sunday, Bevel, Williams, and other staffers went there to hold workshops on nonviolence and lay the groundwork for the march, now scheduled for Friday, April 5. Young and other staff members soon followed.
King was in Washington that Sunday, preaching to a mostly white audience in the Washington Episcopal Cathedral. That evening, he watched Lyndon Johnson give a nationally televised speech. The President faced almost certain defeat at the hands of McCarthy in the forthcoming Wisconsin primary; Johnson’s organization, in fact, was coming unraveled. Kennedy wasn’t entered in Wisconsin, but his strength was growing daily. Discredited by his own Vietnam policy, assailed by both McCarthy and Kennedy, Johnson announced on television that he had ordered a reduction of the bombing in Vietnam, dwelled on all the ugly strife that plagued America, said the country needed unity. Then he raised his right arm—a signal that he wanted to add a postscript. “I have concluded that I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year,” he said. “Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
King was astounded. Did he dare believe what he had just heard? He spoke to Wachtel on the phone, and Wachtel offered his congratulations. “What are you congratulating me for?” King asked. “For getting rid of Johnson,” Wachtel said. “You really did it. In my opinion, you’re one of the strongest people who set the groundwork for his quitting.” King took heart from this auspicious turn of events. With Johnson out of the way, maybe the civil-rights and peace forces could elect a compassionate President who would end the Vietnam nightmare, save the cities, and put America back on the high road toward the fulfillment of her destiny. Now the poor people’s campaign assumed an even greater urgency, and he returned to Atlanta and prepared for the Memphis trip with awakened resolution.
King was in good spirits when he, Lee, Abernathy, and several others left for the Atlanta airport on the morning of April 3. But there had been a bomb threat and the Memphis flight was delayed. When they finally boarded the jet, the pilot announced over the intercom: “We’re sorry for the delay. But we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all the bags were checked and to be sure that nothing would be wrong in the plane, we had to check out everything carefully. We’ve had the plane protected and guarded all night.”
King laughed, thought this “ridiculous,” and fell to talking about the other threats on his life. On the flight to Memphis, King continued to act “very, very well,” Abernathy thought.
At the Memphis airport, Lawson and several other local Negroes greeted King’s party at the gate. There was the usual bevy of reporters and cameramen and a security detail of four detectives from the Memphis police department. King did not want a security detail—the police were not his friends, and the detectives made him jumpy. “We don’t want no police around him,” a Negro yelled at one detective. “Get the hell out of here.”
King’s escort whisked him away to the Lorraine Motel and checked him and Abernathy into Room 306, which overlooked a courtyard parking lot and a covered swimming pool. Police cars pulled up at the Lorraine, too, and two detectives set up a surveillance post in a nearby fire station, noting that SCLC staffers and several Invaders kept going in and out of the motel’s conference room. Because King and his hosts were hostile to the security detail, the police subsequently called it off despite the threats to King’s life. But the two detectives in the fire station continued to observe the Lorraine from behind a papered-up window. King’s activities generated media interest, too, and at least one radio station announced that he was staying at the Lorraine and even gave his room number.
It was a busy afternoon for King, filled with meetings and conferences about Friday’s march. Word reached him that a U.S. district court judge in Memphis had issued a temporary restraining order against the demonstration. SCLC’s legal counsel Chauncey Eskridge intended to challenge the injunction in the federal courthouse the next day, but King promised to lead the march regardless of the outcome. “We are not going to be stopped by Mace or injunctions,” he told reporters.
By late afternoon, King was unsettled again. Tornado warnings were out for Memphis, and the weather fit his mood: dark, menacing skies, cracks of thunder. By nightfall, a heavy rain lashed the city. King was supposed to address a rally at Mason Temple, but he didn’t want to go. He feared that only a few people would turn out in this storm and that the press would point to a small crowd as evidence of his failing appeal. And anyway he was too exhausted to go out tonight. So he sent Abernathy to speak in his place, changed into his pajamas, and tried to relax.
Around 8:30 the phone rang. It was Abernathy, telling King that he had to come down to the temple. Two thousand very enthusiastic people were there, along with a large press and television cameras. When Abernathy had entered the temple, the people had gone wild because they thought King was with him. They were extremely disappointed, Abernathy said. They all wanted to hear King, “the most peaceful warrior of the 20th century.”
King still didn’t want to go. “Come on, Ralph. Can’t you talk to them? Won’t they listen to you?”
“I really think you should come down,” Abernathy persisted. “The people want to hear you, not me. This is your crowd.”
Finally King gave in. He trusted Abernathy’s judgment: if the people were coming out and really wanted him, then he would speak tonight. He didn’t want to—he was tired, in low spirits—but he would do it for the people. He dressed and went out into a driving rain.
When he mounted the speaking platform and looked at the blur of faces and blaze of lights in the temple, King appeared nervous. After Abernathy introduced him, King told the crowd, “Ralph Abernathy is the best friend that I have in the world.” He went on without reference to a script, his voice filled with sadness. As he spoke, thunder rumbled outside, and rain beat desperately against the roof.
Something was happening in Memphis, he said. Something was happening in the world. If he were standing at the beginning of time and God asked, “Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?” he would take his “mental flight” by Egypt to see Moses leading his people across the Red Sea toward the Promised Land; by Mount Olympus to see Plato and Aristotle and Euripides and Aristophanes as they discussed “the great and eternal issues of reality” by Europe during the Renaissance and then by Germany to see Martin Luther tack his ninety-five theses on the door of the church at Wittenberg; by 1863 to see a vacillating President sign the Emancipation Proclamation; by the early 1930s to view a leader grappling with the bankruptcy of a nation. But King would not stop at any of these times. “Stra
ngely enough,” he said, “I would turn to the Almighty and say if you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.
“Now that’s a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land, confusion all around.” But “only when it’s dark enough can you see the stars.” And King saw God working in this period in a way that men were responding to. The masses of them were rising up in South Africa, in Kenya and Ghana, in New York City, Atlanta, Jackson, and Memphis, and everywhere their cry was the same: “We want to be free.”
Today, King said, men were forced to grapple with problems that had troubled humankind throughout history—war and peace and human rights. But the issues were far more urgent today, because man’s very survival was at stake and King’s generation had to do something about them. If something were not done—and done in a hurry—to bring the world’s colored people out of their long years of poverty, hurt, and neglect, the whole world was doomed. Now King was just happy that God had allowed him to live in this period, to see what was unfolding. And King was happy that God had allowed him to be in Memphis.
He was in Memphis to help the sanitation workers for the same reason that the Good Samaritan stopped to help the man in need. The question, King said, was not what would happen to him if he stopped to help those men. “The question is, if I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them. That’s the question.” The crowd roared with applause.
He recalled being stabbed in New York City almost ten years before, telling how the blade had been so close to his aorta that if he’d sneezed, the doctor said, he would have died. He remembered the high school girl who had written him how glad she was that he hadn’t sneezed. He wanted to say tonight that he too was happy he hadn’t sneezed. Because if he had sneezed, he wouldn’t have been around to see the student sit-ins and Freedom Rides. He wouldn’t have seen the Negroes of Albany straighten their backs and the Negroes of Birmingham arouse the conscience of a nation and bring the civil-rights act into being. He wouldn’t have stood at the Lincoln Memorial and told America about a dream he had. He wouldn’t have seen the great movement in Selma or been in Memphis to see a community rallying behind its suffering brothers and sisters. Yes, he was so happy he hadn’t sneezed.
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