At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Kennedy and Sorensen pressed Johnson on political details. Would he allow Cabinet members to take sides in the Democratic primaries? (Postmaster General Lawrence O’Brien was eager to go back to the Kennedys once released from loyal campaign duty for LBJ.) Would Johnson give courtesy warning of any adverse stands he felt compelled to take? The President hesitated, then agreed, and the horse trading provoked a maudlin speech. Johnson acknowledged the torture of being Vice President—“and you wouldn’t have liked it either,” he told Kennedy in a pointed aside—and complained that his surviving devotion to President Kennedy was not fully appreciated. He had never fired a Kennedy appointee, the President whispered, and had asked many like Sorensen not to leave. He regarded all he had done as a continuation of the Kennedy-Johnson program. He believed President Kennedy could look down to this day and agree Johnson had kept faith in education, poverty, and civil rights even while repaid with disaffection by Negroes and young people. “The next man who sits in this chair,” he managed to say, “will have to do better.”

  “You are a brave and dedicated man,” Robert Kennedy responded, so softly he cleared his throat and said so again.

  Had Vietnam yielded magically to symbols, the dynastic saga of Johnson and Kennedy might have been celebrated for the glorious triumph of opposites over tragedy. As it was, however, an assassin would take Kennedy in two months, and the war would drag on toward North Vietnam’s victory through two more Presidents until 1975, two years past Johnson’s death. What would outlast even the war was a legend of personal enmity between him and Kennedy so strong that it swallowed up the lessons of Vietnam along with many lingering issues of substance, thus helping to introduce a cynical era of spitball politics. Meanwhile, the Kennedy-Johnson program maintained inertia beneath the April 3 summit. A federal court ruled that Alabama could not maintain single-race sports conferences for high schools. By a vote of 2,033 to 792, the Missouri Athletic Club eliminated the word “white” from its bylaws, on promise from club officers that the change would affect guest restrictions but not new memberships for the near future. Headlines revealed a drive to raise tenfold the percentage of black recruits accepted into National Guard units nationwide, which ranged by state from none to negligible, and the Pentagon also announced an odd mix in weekly American casualties from Vietnam: a record number of wounded (3,886) but the lowest total killed (330) since the beginning of January’s Tet offensive.

  A BOMB scare stalled Eastern Air Lines Flight 381 more than an hour on the Atlanta runway, which made King’s return trip to Memphis coincide almost exactly with the White House parley between Kennedy and President Johnson. The pilot announced belated clearance for take-off with an upbeat apology that threats to King had generated a precautionary overnight guard for the aircraft, plus an extra hand search of the baggage compartment. Like the strangers exposed, King could only guess the level of danger. He had received no briefing, because of J. Edgar Hoover’s spiteful edict that excluded him from the kind of notice other threat targets received, and the FBI confined warning to police agencies, the Secret Service, and the Federal Aviation Administration of one local phone threat recorded Monday in particularly clear diction: “Your airline brought Martin Luther King to Memphis, and when he comes again a bomb will go off, and he will be assassinated.”

  SCLC comptroller James Harrison endured frayed nerves on King’s flight to preserve his secret status as the prized FBI informant. Harrison would obey risky orders to call the Memphis FBI office with inside reports on the transplanted staff meetings, but he had compromised his Atlanta handlers by embezzling funds from the SCLC treasury. The FBI indulged the crime (which in turn eroded its control of Harrison by common complicity), partly because Hoover’s white agents had trouble replacing human sources within the civil rights movement. The Memphis police force, by contrast, had integrated its force of 850 officers with roughly one hundred black recruits, nearly all of whom drew hazardous political assignments. They escorted garbage trucks with replacement workers, for instance, and many courted fury by infiltrating strike supporters and black power groups on undercover duty. (“Had one in our meetin’,” recalled a striker. “The only way we knowed he was police, his radio went off while he was there.”) On this fifty-second consecutive day of the City Hall vigils and uncollected garbage, King’s chief of staff William Rutherford made note of the suspicion between black people and police units through the city, beginning at the airport. A woman from James Lawson’s greeting party accosted a plainclothes black detective in the crowd as a turncoat spy. Lawson himself told police inspector Don Smith that King could not cooperate with the uniformed security detail because of his nonviolent objection to firearms. He also defended a recommendation for King not to submit his schedule in advance, or accept security officers into private events, arguing bluntly that the two Mace attacks revealed the intention of the police to repress legitimate protest more than to apprehend criminals such as window-breakers. During this dispute, Robert Lewis stepped from a hearse through the surrounding reporters to beseech Lawson for the honor of an introduction to King, and Abernathy joked on the way into town that their morning already sandwiched a bomb search with the hungry-looking welcome from Lewis, the richest black undertaker in Memphis.

  Detective Ed Redditt shrugged off being publicly exposed again at the airport. As a community relations officer for the police department, he had been an unlikely choice for undercover duty, but the commanders of the new anti-riot squads needed operatives familiar with black Memphis. Redditt and his partner followed King’s party to the Lorraine Motel, then followed them again at noon to James Lawson’s Centenary Methodist Church. Radio orders split them up temporarily from there, with the partner remaining on stakeout. While unable to enter the church, he had no trouble learning that Jesse Jackson gave a rousing speech to the strike committee on the potential for boycott techniques from Operation Breadbasket to help sanitation workers. King emerged to address the latest crisis: a federal court order secured by Mayor Loeb against the “redemption” march set for Monday, April 8. He told reporters he would ask the district judge to modify or vacate the order, but that he would march in defiance of the court order if necessary. “We are not going to be stopped by Mace or injunctions,” King declared. His group departed so quickly that the partner lost them. He rushed north to Clayborn Temple on a hunch that they might be joining the daily pilgrimage to City Hall, only to hear by police radio that Redditt spotted King returning to the Lorraine with Lawson at 2:15. Redditt by then had selected a makeshift surveillance post among lockers on the rear wall of Fire Station Number 2. By taping a newspaper over the window, with two holes cut to match his binoculars, he had a clear view over the motel parking lot to King’s Room 306, on an open balcony. Redditt and his partner took the first shift transmitting a log: 2:30, U.S. marshals serve the federal injunction on King, who poses with them outside for photographers. At 3:00, local ACLU lawyers enter 306, presumably about the next day’s emergency hearing in court, and by 4:00, King receives known members of the Invaders youth gang.

  The large Invaders delegation included the police department’s most valued undercover officer, known as “Agent 500.” A native of Mississippi, Marrell McCullough had distinguished himself since being hired upon Army discharge the previous year. He agreed to grow one of the early Afro hairdos in Memphis, and mastered black power rhetoric with paramilitary swagger so convincing, boasted the special unit commander, that half his fellow police officers “would have given their eye teeth to have locked him up.” Held forth as the Invaders’ “Minister of Transportation,” McCullough added presence to the student leaders, while his firsthand bulletins as Agent 500 complemented James Harrison’s FBI spy work on the inner deliberations at the Lorraine. When Charles Cabbage requested some $200,000 to start a “Liberation School,” King’s top aides acknowledged from contacts since Monday that the Invaders could turn out young people in large numbers, but found them fixated on ambition to purge James Lawson while committed t
o teach guerrilla warfare and martial arts. They said the Invaders had painted the windows of their storefront black except for small sentry slits, and that guards stood armed during negotiations. Cabbage and his cohorts hotly replied that there was a time to pray and a time to fight, but Abernathy and Bernard Lee waved aside their stories of arrest and persecution, saying true or not, they were no excuse to extort money from King. Andrew Young entered the fierce standoff with a gambit developed since the Meredith march. “How many people did you kill last year?” he asked the Invaders. Last week? What are you waiting for? Why not try something real in the meantime? He offered to help them translate militancy into a funding proposal that King could endorse, without violence, and the meeting stumbled to uneasy recess.

  In police jargon, Detective Redditt recorded the movement of the Invaders from King’s room back to their own: “4:50. About nine male coloreds and one female colored entered Room 316.” He noticed quite a bit of activity to secure Coca-Colas and ice. “View from Fire Station window is very good,” Redditt wrote. The four-officer security detail left the motel permanently a few minutes later, on orders from downtown that they were no longer to stand unwanted outside King’s door. Tom Offenburger, SCLC’s press secretary, emerged briefly from the nonstop staff meeting to tell reporters before their Thursday deadlines that the start of the poverty campaign in Washington would be delayed once again, until April 29. Two senior police lieutenants, including the founder of the Domestic Intelligence Unit, appeared at 6:35 to assume personal command of the fire station surveillance post for the night. They ordered Redditt and his partner to cover King’s evening speech, where black officers would be less conspicuous than whites, but Redditt had scarcely entered the Mason Temple after supper when a preacher advised him to leave. Word was out that Redditt was peeping at Dr. King through binoculars from a fire station, he warned, and there was too much stress among the garbage workers to guarantee his safety. Redditt fled, keeping his panic in check while planning his revenge against those who exposed him. He remembered only two men likely to have recognized him, or to have passed word so quickly to strike sympathizers, and he resolved to find out if his superiors valued his work enough to use their clout on behalf of a black officer. They did, and before midnight both black firefighters from Station Number 2 would receive peremptory transfer orders to report elsewhere in the morning.

  TORNADO WARNINGS made King fret about his crowd, as ominous streaks of gray and purple crossed the sky from the west. Radio bulletins told of a seven o’clock twister that picked up and dumped a stretch of asphalt on cars near Star City, Arkansas, killing seven people, and the first squalls hit Memphis half an hour later in slanted sheets of rain. Phone calls from the Lorraine to Lawson in Mason Temple verified that the crowd indeed was thin—perhaps fewer than two thousand in the huge hall that had packed seven times that many for King’s visit on March 18. He feared the sharp drop-off would invite belittling stories of a downward trend for him, along with the riot and new federal injunction. “Ralph,” said King, “I want you to go speak for me tonight.”

  Abernathy balked, and suggested sending Jesse Jackson, but King insisted. He was still testy about Jackson from Atlanta. Abernathy asked if he could take Jackson along. “Yes,” said King, “but you do the speaking.”

  Song leaders and speakers filled the time in Mason Temple while Abernathy drove through the rain. James Lawson emphasized that Monday’s big march would go forward regardless of the outcome in federal court, because the day’s injunction applied only to King and a handful of associated “non-residents of the state of Tennessee.” He said they could survive this injunction like the earlier one secured by Mayor Loeb against Jerry Wurf and the AFSCME leadership, which had called forth unprecedented unity among local black churches behind the strike. Lawson rallied spirits, and murmurs of anticipation ran through the hall when Abernathy, Jackson, and Young were sighted—only to hush when King’s absence registered. For Abernathy, a keen reader of crowds, the palpable disappointment was worse than he feared. He went to a vestibule telephone instead of the podium and marshaled enticements for King—mentioning news cameras, the big spray of microphones, and Lawson’s point that the movement seldom gathered so many people in the South. Most of all, Abernathy told King this was a core crowd of sanitation workers who had braved a night of hellfire to hear him, and they would feel cut off from a lifeline if he let them down. When King gave in, Abernathy pressed for assurance. “Don’t fool me now,” he said, and King promised to hurry.

  His entrance caused an eerie bedlam of communion under shelter. Cheers from the floor echoed around the thousands of empty seats above, and the whole structure rattled from the pounding elements of wind, thunder, and rain. Two giant exhaust fans in the ceiling leaked and creaked so badly they had to be shut down. Abernathy seized the spotlight to introduce King with a saucy, tongue-in-cheek imitation of his “Drum Major” sermon, detailing a lineage of preachers. “His daddy is a preacher. His granddaddy was a preacher. His uncle was a preacher. His brother is a preacher, and of course,” Abernathy cried, pointing to himself, “his dearest friend and other brother is one of the world’s greatest preachers!” For half an hour, he reviewed the honors and attainments of King’s life as though appropriating each one into a family arsenal for the sanitation workers. King had not yet decided whether to become President of the United States, Abernathy teased, “but he is the one who tells the president what to do.”

  King came smiling to the microphones about 9:30, just as the storms crested. (Tornadoes killed five more people. One at ten o’clock demolished forty trailer homes just north of Memphis, where the only serious injury was a man struck by a flying television.) He strung together several of his speech themes aimed toward the shared moment, beginning with a poetical tour of history. “If I were standing at the beginning of time,” and could choose any lifetime, he would “take my mental flight” past the glories of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome—“But I wouldn’t stop there,” he kept saying—down past scenes from the Renaissance and Martin Luther and Abraham Lincoln until he could say, “If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.” It might seem strange with the world so messed up, King said, but he chose above all to see the stirrings of a human rights revolution for freedom worldwide. “I can remember when Negroes were just going around as Ralph has said, so often scratching where they didn’t itch and laughing when they were not tickled.” He smiled. “But that day is all over. We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God’s world.”

  He saluted every aspect of the Memphis movement, beginning with the families of sanitation workers. “I call upon you to be with us Monday,” King said. “We need all of you.” Overlooking the intramural controversies, he praised Lawson for his vanguard career in nonviolence, and he turned once in mid-speech to ask Jesse Jackson for a reminder about local tactics. Then he meandered into another speech theme to recap the parable of the Good Samaritan. “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers,” he concluded, “what will happen to them. That’s the question…. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you.”

  Abruptly King swerved into a third oratorical run, retelling of his brush with death when a demented woman stabbed him at a Harlem bookstore in 1958—how a doctor told the New York Times that the blade would have severed his aorta if he so much as sneezed, and how a little girl wrote a simple letter of thanks that he did not sneeze. “I want to say that I am happy that I didn’t sneeze,” said King, “because if I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around here in 1960 when students all over the South started sitting in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy….” His voice climbed again in rhythm and fervor, using survival as a melodramatic device to relive the civi
l rights movement. “If I had sneezed,” he cried near the end, “I wouldn’t have been down in Selma.”

  Experienced preachers behind him felt fleeting anxiety that King might miss his landing, because he was in full passion on a peroration unsuited to close. The “sneeze” run always came earlier in his speeches, being informal and thin. King sputtered at the podium, then slipped a gear. “And they were telling me—now it doesn’t matter now,” he said. “It really doesn’t matter. I left Atlanta this morning….” He told briskly of the pilot’s bomb search announcement. “And then I got into Memphis.” He frowned. “And some began to say the threats—or talk about the threats—that were out, what would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers. Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now.”

  King paused. “Because I’ve been to the mountaintop,” he declared in a trembling voice. Cheers and applause erupted. Some people jerked involuntarily to their feet, and others rose slowly like a choir. “And I don’t mind,” he said, trailing off beneath the second and third waves of response. “Like anybody I would like to live—a long life—longevity has its place.” The whole building suddenly hushed, which let sounds of thunder and rain fall from the roof. “But I’m not concerned about that now,” said King. “I just want to do God’s will.” There was a subdued call of “Yes!” in the crowd. “And he’s allowed me to go up the mountain,” King cried, building intensity. “And I’ve looked over. And I have s-e-e-e-e-e-n, the promised land.” His voice searched a long peak over the word “seen,” then hesitated and landed with quick relief on “the promised land,” as though discovering a friend. He stared out over the microphones with brimming eyes and the trace of a smile. “And I may not get there with you,” he shouted, “but I want you to know, tonight [“Yes!”] that we as a people will get to the promised land!” He stared again over the claps and cries, while the preachers closed toward him from behind. “So I’m happy tonight!” rushed King. “I’m not worried about anything! I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glo-ry of the coming of the Lord!” He broke off the quotation and stumbled sideways into a hug from Abernathy. The preachers helped him to a chair, some crying, and tumult washed through the Mason Temple.