At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  King sat spent, drenched in perspiration. Friends gathered around with congratulations and wonder for his thunderclap ending of little more than one hundred words. They said he transcended death while capturing freedom, gazing forward and backward on both. They compared details from the biblical story of Moses, who was permitted to see Canaan across the Jordan River from atop Mount Nebo, but died there for transgressions before his people entered the Promised Land. King revived in preacher talk with peers, and lingered eagerly to greet the sanitation workers. Notwithstanding an endless day since the airport bomb search, in fact, he hummed with incandescent stamina and disappeared with Abernathy and Bernard Lee for a long night on the town. When they returned by taxi to the Lorraine Motel after four o’clock the next morning, King saw a car with Kentucky license plates outside a room with the lights still burning. “Where’s the Senator?” he called in booming welcome for Georgia Davis, who had just completed her first legislative session as the only black or female member of the Kentucky Senate. She was vacationing with her best friend, a mistress to King’s younger brother, A.D., when they persuaded A.D. King to fly down from Louisville to Florida for a drive up through the Alabama and Mississippi storms into Tennessee, arriving too late at the Mason Temple. The brothers caught up on family talk and the Memphis crisis before King followed Davis to her Room 201 for the short remainder of night. Only then, after an abbreviated morning huddle to send Andrew Young into federal court as his designated witness, did he collapse for a nap.

  IN A jammed U.S. Court for the Western District of Tennessee, Mayor Loeb watched his attorneys defend the injunction to exclude SCLC from any march in downtown Memphis. Frank Holloman, director of the combined fire and police divisions, testified that neither the city nor King would be safe. “The white citizens of Memphis, in letters to me and telephone calls to me, are greatly agitated at the present time,” he told the court. “There was a theft from a sporting goods store last evening of guns and ammunition.” Citing numerous threats that King would not survive, Holloman also listed fourteen reasons why the march would endanger the half-million citizens in his charge. “Number one,” he testified, “I am convinced that Dr. Martin Luther King, his leaders, or others, cannot control a massive march of this kind in this city or elsewhere.” Judge Bailey Brown qualified Holloman to give expert opinion based on his distinguished career in the FBI, where he had served as chief inspector, but the judge asked pointedly for evidence that King’s influence in a constitutional demonstration would be a net plus for violence. “I would rather local people lead the march,” replied one of Holloman’s subordinates.

  Back at the Lorraine Motel, Chicago lawyer Chauncey Eskridge reported to Room 306 about eleven o’clock Thursday morning. “Chauncey,” said King, “drop your bags right here and get down to court.” He hurried Eskridge to fortify the ACLU lawyers on his position crafted from the Selma march, which was to assert the right of protest while accepting reasonable conditions to promote safety and nonviolence. Eskridge left before Charles Cabbage and three other Invaders intruded on King’s revolving staff session to declare a more aggressive posture. They demanded specific commitments to their budget, and, in exchange for accepting tactical nonviolence along with temporary positions on his staff, they wanted equal respect for their doctrine of “tactical violence.” King rejected them firmly in his way. “I don’t negotiate with brothers,” he said—brothers only look for ways to help each other in good conscience. When the Invaders stormed off, King turned on Hosea Williams for letting the Invaders hoodwink him. He had wanted Williams to seek common ground with them, he said, but never to compromise the core principle of nonviolence on the SCLC staff. Pacing the room, he worked himself into a sermon much like the scolding he had inflicted on Bill Rutherford in Washington. Williams went away fuming. He believed King had sent mixed signals. He thought Bevel and James Orange deserved King’s wrath more than he did, and grumbled that they were off joyriding with other Invaders.

  Abernathy sent down to the motel kitchen for two orders of fried Mississippi River catfish. King dispatched some staff members back to Atlanta, and he sent Bernard Lafayette to Washington for Friday’s opening press conference at the national headquarters of the Poor People’s Campaign. Instead of postponing the event because of Memphis, Lafayette would substitute for King, and they went over what he should say. King instructed Lafayette to keep his room at the Lorraine and come right back to help train marshals over the weekend. “In the next campaign,” he remarked, “we’ll have to institutionalize nonviolence and take it international.” Lafayette blinked in disbelief. Before he could ask about this flash of optimism, so high above the tribulations of Memphis and Washington, King only smiled as he turned back inside, where Abernathy was having communication trouble with the motel waitress. She kept bringing two of the wrong side items but only one lunch dish. This vexed co-owner Lorene Bailey, who lionized King, long after he and Abernathy amiably decided to share catfish off the one plate.

  In the afternoon court session, lawyers for Memphis grilled James Lawson about how any assurances of nonviolence could be credible in light of his failures as chief marshal to keep peace in the march a week ago. “Are you telling the Court that unless there is a march that there will be violence,” asked one, “and people will disobey the laws, have looting, fires, Molotov cocktails, et cetera?” Lawson sparred with the lawyers, arguing that the best way to avoid a riot was to have a creative protest against injustice. Another line of cross-examination asked how the sanitation workers could have any grievance to justify protest, since they could make up to $3,700 per year, or nearly twice the average family income for Negroes in Memphis. Flustered, Lawson said even that dubious comfort made sanitation workers eligible for Food Stamps. Judge Brown interceded to ask whether the defense would accept a restriction against sticks used to carry placards. “There will be no sticks in any march, or any other potential weapons or weapon,” Lawson agreed, and he confessed regret from the stand: “That, that was a major error to even have such signs.”

  In Room 306, Abernathy had fallen asleep shortly after finishing his catfish, but King, still restless after a series of business calls, went downstairs to meet his brother and the two Kentucky women in Room 201. They caught up on Louisville politics and gossip. A.D. worried about where to get a pair of pants pressed. King admitted severe anxiety that he might have to defy a federal rather than a state injunction on Monday, because this would tarnish the movement’s anchor hope for vindication through the national compact, and he complained intermittently about hearing nothing all day from Andrew Young about how he fared in court. For relief, he and A.D. placed a call to Mama King in Atlanta. They talked with her for nearly an hour, pretending at first to be each other and often laughing uproariously at her tales of life with Daddy King, who came on the line, too. Afterward, the two brothers merrily sifted for ways in which their father might be considered modern even though it choked him to pay his maid a measly $25 a week. King called upstairs to wake Abernathy, who soon heard a buoyant replay of the phone call home. “She’s always happy when A.D.’s with me,” said King. “She doesn’t often have a chance to talk to us both together.”

  He reminded Abernathy that Billy Kyles expected them at five o’clock for an early supper before the mass meeting. They certainly would arrive late, with extra guests such as Eskridge and the Kentucky group, but King claimed to worry most about the menu. He wanted to make sure they would get real soul food rather than some dainty starvation of asparagus and greens. “Call her,” he prodded Abernathy with an insistent undercurrent of mirth, until the exasperated sidekick called Gwen Kyles. She said there was plenty of food and the dinner was at six o’clock, not five. (By disclosing the actual time, she inadvertently spoiled her husband’s trick to combat King’s chronic tardiness.) As for the puzzling question about the menu, she mentioned a few dishes hesitantly until excitement spread through her household that Abernathy was repeating each item to King—roast beef, sweetbreads, c
hitterlings, pork chops, neck bones, fried chicken, and ham in the meat line, plus six kinds of salad, featured turnip greens and candied sweet potatoes, a bread table of hot rolls, corn bread, corn muffins, biscuits, and corn pones, and pretty much the works for dessert. Kyles had recruited the best cooks from her church, along with many helpers, favored daughters, and hostesses in finest clothes to spread forth a feast. (“They were really laying for that dinner,” she recalled.) Her menu, greatly embellished in Abernathy’s relayed account, more than satisfied King, but A.D. still preferred supper at the motel. He often shied from social events that invited comparison to his world-famous older brother, while hating also to embarrass him with his binge weakness for alcohol.

  By mid-afternoon, as the last major witness in the federal hearing, Andrew Young withstood withering cross-examination on “the so-called doctrine of nonviolence,” which lawyers for Memphis treated like a crackpot myth. “Now the nonviolent school is to be distinguished from the so-called passive school?” asked one, who wondered how meek notions could be squared with militant words. Young managed to parry a question about how the movement had “plagued” Birmingham in 1963. “Really, by marching down to City Hall every day for about forty-five days,” he said, “and having a prayer meeting.” He did concede that he had never seen King so depressed by the difficulty of maintaining nonviolent discipline and spirit. “I think history shows that most of the riots that have occurred in America have occurred during or just after wartime,” Young testified, “when the whole country is attuned to violence.” He bristled when asked why prominent Negroes like Roy Wilkins said King could not control demonstrations. Because the NAACP “has almost no history of mass action,” Young replied, “and I think of Mr. Wilkins very much like my father.”

  The cross-examiner pounced on the witness to explain the implied criticism of his own father. Young replied bluntly that his father, as a comfortable member of the New Orleans establishment, would feel no urgency about the plight of 1,300 garbagemen who were not eating very well. The need for change was urgent and real, he added, quickly recovering. “I would like to remind you that there is almost no place else in the world where people even assume that this kind of change should come about nonviolently except Martin Luther King and the Southern Leadership Conference. There is no tradition of nonviolence anywhere else in the world, in labor, and even in most areas of our own government,” Young testified in a rush. “And certainly when America felt oppressed by Britain, they didn’t seek nonviolence to seek redress of grievance. So I say we do have probably the only vested interest in nonviolence in this society, and we intend to make it work, and we would not want to run any unnecessary risks, because it jeopardizes what Dr. King has made a way of life for him.”

  The lawyer for Memphis suffered the outburst. “Are you through?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” said Young.

  At four o’clock, a bungled intelligence crisis led to the removal of Detective Redditt from the surveillance post at Fire Station Number 2. His superiors downtown discussed the threats against Redditt with a visiting investigator for U.S. senator John McClellan, who was in town to see whether the dangers of Memphis could justify federal action to curtail King’s Washington campaign. The investigator marveled that he had just received parallel reports of a plot to kill a black officer in Memphis. In fact, as he soon discovered to his chagrin in the files, the alleged plot was directed toward Knoxville, not Memphis, on the shaky word of an informant from Mississippi. Still, the prospect of a double-jointed conspiracy within the black community tended to overstimulate intelligence officers hostile to civil rights, and the seeming confirmation of a “hit contract” rocketed up to fire and police director Holloman on his return from federal court. He ordered a police guard to hide Redditt and his family in a motel under assumed names. Redditt’s partner, officer Willie Richmond, took over the surveillance post alone. He let a fireman or two peep through the binoculars when they came by to use the lockers and vending machines.

  Also at four o’clock, an escaped convict bought a pair of Bushnell binoculars just up Main Street at York Arms Company, one of the businesses whose windows were smashed on March 28. He drove back to finish setting up a surveillance post more or less by the method Redditt had used the day before. The convict had driven from Atlanta, where the newspapers said King was leaving for a march in Memphis, arriving late the previous night. This day, reading front-page news that King was staying at the Lorraine, and perhaps hearing radio reports that specified Room 306, he had located and studied the motel until an hour ago, when he rented a room for $8.50 per week in Bessie Brewer’s flophouse next door to Fire Station Number 2. With the seven-power Bush-nells, he could read room numbers on the motel doors seventy yards distant, and the same strength on his Redfield scope would make human figures seem only thirty feet away. The scope was mounted on a .30-06 Remington Gamemaster, which was engineered so that its 150-grain slug would lose less than .01 inch in altitude and reach the motel balcony with 2,370 pounds of knockdown power—enough to drop a rhinoceros. However, the odd angle of an occluding building next door meant the convict could fire the long rifle only by leaning out his window. To avoid that, he must wait until he sighted his target from the room, then run with the rifle down the hallway to the common bathroom, find it unoccupied, and hope King stayed long enough on the balcony to get a clear shot from a rear window above the bathtub.

  About five o’clock, when Andrew Young returned from court to find a general bull session in Georgia Davis’s Room 201, King greeted him with playful fury by wrestling him to the floor between the two beds. Abernathy, Hosea Williams, Bernard Lee, and A.D. King joined in a wild tickling punishment of Young for failure to keep “our Leader” informed all day, which turned into a free-for-all pillow fight, with King sometimes squaring off against A.D. as in childhood. Once the hysteria subsided, Young said he thought the hearing went pretty well. Chauncey Eskridge walked in from a lawyers’ conference with Judge Brown just as the motel television shifted from local news centered on last night’s tornadoes (“death and destruction…over the mid-South last night”) to the network broadcast. King joked that his esteemed lawyer was more reliable even than Walter Cronkite, and Eskridge said Judge Brown would permit SCLC to lead Monday’s march under the restrictions King and Lawson desired: a prescribed route, no weapons, and narrow ranks to give the marshals wide space on the flanks to keep the spectators away. This relief started a fresh buzz of determination for weekend preparations. Young claimed vindication. King watched only part of the national news, which featured a rare, standing ovation in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral when President Johnson entered for the installation of Terence Cardinal Cooke as archbishop. They should all get ready for dinner, King said, and Officer Richmond noted through binoculars at 5:40 his brisk walk with Abernathy upstairs to their Room 306.

  While dressing, Abernathy disclosed sheepishly to King that he could not join him in Washington for the preliminary lobbying in the Poor People’s Campaign, because the new start date of April 29 conflicted with his long-scheduled spring revival in Atlanta. King said this would never do. West Hunter Street Baptist was a magnificent congregation, he purred, claiming that he would have gone there himself if Daddy King had not invited him to Ebenezer, and surely the deacons would understand that Abernathy had to revive the soul of a whole nation instead. Abernathy weakened, but did not give in until King promised to help secure a substitute revival leader of stature. He placed a call to a New Orleans revivalist. In the esoteric bargaining, King and Abernathy used the little-known childhood first names they reserved for each other in private—Michael and David, respectively—and they ignored the commotion outside. Upstairs, Hosea Williams loudly evicted the last of the Invaders from two rooms provided during negotiations, after discovering to his outrage that fifteen of them had crammed inside to live on meals charged to the SCLC account. Downstairs, Jesse Jackson rehearsed an Operation Breadbasket ensemble, and bystanders crowded into the
room to belt out extra hymns such as “Yield Not to Temptation” and “I’m So Glad Trouble Don’t Last Always.”

  Rev. Billy Kyles left Jackson’s songfest and knocked at Room 306 to hurry King along. Abernathy played him for a sign of deliverance. “Why don’t you do my revival?” he asked Kyles, who adroitly dodged, saying he thought he was scheduled to preach in Columbus, Ohio. King chimed in to needle Kyles about the relative status of his invitations. “Anybody’d rather come to Atlanta than go to Columbus,” he said. He shifted tone to inquire how Memphis churches achieved such unity behind the sanitation workers, who were not members of the prestige congregations, but Abernathy reopened preachers’ banter on the subject of food. “All right now Billy, I don’t want you fooling me,” he said, warning that if he went all the way to the Kyleses’ home for T-bone steaks or filet mignons, which he pronounced “FEEL-ay MEEN-yuns,” then, “you’re gonna flunk.” King shuddered at the memory of a preacher in Atlanta whose house was so big that he could afford to serve only cold ham bone, cold potatoes, cold bread, and Kool-Aid. Abernathy said the Kool-Aid wasn’t even sweet.