Redemption

by Joseph Rosenbloom

  The Buick left the airport, heading toward the Lorraine Motel, a twenty-minute drive away. In a convoy close behind were cars carrying Withers, the undercover team of Redditt and Richmond, and Smith’s four-man security detail.

  Chapter 5

  The Invitation

  There comes a time when one [must] take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular.

  —MLK, sermon at the National Cathedral, Washington, DC, March 31, 1968

  KING FIRST HEARD in detail about the Memphis strike while he was attending a ministers’ conference in Miami. He and dozens of other African American clergy from around the country were at the Four Ambassadors Hotel over the last weekend in February. Under the sponsorship of the Ford Foundation they had gathered to discuss how to prevent the kind of rioting that had convulsed the nation’s inner cities. One of those attending was Billy Kyles, pastor of the Monumental Baptist Church in Memphis.

  Kyles, an old friend of King, was keeping a close watch on the developments surrounding the strike in Memphis. He was well aware too of the Poor People’s Campaign, which he knew was entering a critical phase and absorbing King’s energy almost to the breaking point. Mostly as a joke, Kyles suggested to King that he add the strikers’ cause to his heavy agenda. “Man, we’ve got a garbage strike in Memphis,” Kyles would remember saying to King, “and we may have to get you to come in and help us out.”1

  By the third week of the walkout, the strikers felt that they had hit a wall. It wasn’t that Mayor Loeb was proving to be a tough negotiator. Until the strikers returned to work he was refusing to negotiate—period. That was a condition that the strikers rejected out of hand. To pressure Loeb to reconsider, strike supporters asked national civil rights leaders Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Bayard Rustin, the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, to come to Memphis and speak on their behalf. Wilkins and Rustin agreed. They spoke at a rally on March 14, but their appearance attracted little media coverage.

  Kyles figured that King would make a much bigger splash and decided to invite King again to Memphis, this time not as a joke. He telephoned SCLC headquarters in Atlanta and left word. “When we first made the call,” Kyles would recall, “he didn’t get the message. The people who got the message said, ‘You know we are really in sympathy with you guys, but we are so far behind on the Poor People’s Campaign. We just don’t have time to come to Memphis.’”2

  At the same time, apart from Kyles’s overture, Reverend Lawson was thinking about how King might help the strikers’ cause. Lawson knew King well. He had conducted workshops in nonviolence for the SCLC and served on its board. As head of the community group supporting the strike in Memphis, Lawson now had something to ask of King in return. He called King to ask if he would come to Memphis and speak at a pro-strike rally.

  In Lawson’s retelling of the conversation King agreed right off to come to Memphis. Lawson would recall, “There was no hesitation. He was committed.” Lawson would remember King as having said, “You’re doing in Memphis what I want to do [with the Poor People’s Campaign], namely, tie up this question of economic justice with racism.”3

  King figured that he could fit Memphis into his busy schedule with scarcely any downtime from the Poor People’s Campaign. He would dash into the city and deliver a single speech. He would get up at four o’clock in the morning, catch a six o’clock plane to Memphis, speak at a rally for the strike and be in Washington for another event the same evening.4

  Even the quick-hit scenario gave Andrew Young pause. He was perhaps King’s most able adviser among the top-tier SCLC staff. He was smart, diligent, and reliable. Within three years of his joining the SCLC staff, in recognition of his obvious gifts as an administrator and strategist, King had named him executive director.

  The two men were close in age. Young was just three years younger. They could relate openly and easily as contemporaries with similar backgrounds. Unlike Bevel, Jackson, Williams, and Abernathy, Young had not had to endure the hardships that typified the lives of many African Americans in the South. Like King, Young had grown up in a stable family—in Young’s case, in New Orleans. His parents were well educated and financially comfortable. His father was a dentist, his mother a teacher. Theirs had been a solidly bourgeois life.

  It seemed no coincidence that Young and King were fraternity men. Both had belonged to a prestigious black fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, King at Morehouse College, Young at Howard University.5 Rather than pursue a career in dentistry, as his father would have liked, Young had chosen divinity school. He had worked in New York City for the National Council of Churches before joining the SCLC in 1961.

  Despite the tight bond between them, King had not always followed Young’s advice. Young’s was the voice of caution. “I was constantly in the position of urging Martin to focus our limited staff resources and resist the temptation to respond to every worthy cause,” he would explain years later.6

  King came to value Young as a counterweight to the hotbloods on the SCLC staff. When they would demand that King plunge into some high-risk undertaking, Young would point out the pitfalls. From him King could count on hearing a careful, pragmatic argument. He was in effect a brake on the staff’s passions, and they taunted him for it. He was their Uncle Tom, they would say. At times, even King could not resist ridiculing him with the same put-down.7

  Young had implored King not to speak out against the Vietnam War. Better to keep his antiwar views to himself, Young had advised. Wouldn’t it offend civil rights leaders who supported the war or believed that King’s opposition to it would undercut progress on civil rights? Wouldn’t denouncing President Johnson’s war policy cost the movement a powerful ally in the White House?

  King rebuffed Young’s advice. (Young eventually would come around to agreeing with King’s outspokenness on Vietnam.) When King felt deeply about his rightness on an issue, he could be headstrong and unyielding. Ben Hooks, a member of the SCLC board, shared Young’s view on the question of Vietnam. Hooks, a judge and Baptist pastor in Memphis, was a devoted friend of King. At a board meeting, when the discussion turned to Vietnam, Hooks did not hold back. He would recall: “I asked the question, ‘With Johnson doing all he could for civil rights, would it be better for us not to antagonize him at this point?’. . . When I made that statement, innocently, Martin ate me alive.”8

  As Young feared, King’s declarations on Vietnam did offend some top civil rights leaders. Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League, objected to King mingling war policy and racial justice, which he said was doing a “disservice” to civil rights.9

  And as Andrew Young and Ben Hooks had predicted, King’s high-profile opposition to the Vietnam War had enraged Lyndon Johnson. The president had retaliated by turning a cold shoulder to King and the movement. Johnson had expected King to fall in line on Vietnam out of loyalty to him for his having maneuvered landmark civil rights legislation through Congress. “That goddamned nigger preacher,” Johnson ranted privately about King.10

  Now as King toyed with the idea of speaking to garbage workers in Memphis, Young felt another surge of misgivings. He doubted that King could duck into the crisis in Memphis, deliver a single speech, and then drop the strikers’ cause like a hot potato.

  As Young might have put it, King seemed to be forgetting the “lesson of Albany.” In 1961 King had interceded in a desegregation campaign under way in Albany, Georgia. King had intended to appear once in a quick visit. He would lead a march in Albany and leave town. That would be it. But during the march, on December 14, he was swept up in a mass arrest of demonstrators and jailed. He found himself entangled in the Albany struggle. It became his campaign. He would be stuck in Albany for a year. It was the civil rights version of mission creep. The Albany campaign ended in futility when the city closed down its buses and other public facilities instead of desegregating them. As Dorothy Cotton would note, Albany proved that the SCLC, before starting a campaign, had to “send in a training team to
prepare the community,” organizing its supporters for massive, nonviolent protest.11

  When Young thought about King’s plan for a quick visit to Memphis, he saw the risk of another Albany in the making. He feared “that one speech would lead to two, and two would lead to his going to jail or something like that, because it was out of his control once he got involved.”12

  Then there was the urgency of the Poor People’s Campaign. If King and his staff got mired in Memphis, as Young feared, it could delay the start of the Washington initiative. Young pointed out that, even if the campaign started on schedule, the time for pressuring lawmakers in the nation’s capital would be short. Congress would adjourn as usual for its summer recess in late June or early July, certainly no later than the Fourth of July. As it was, Young told King, in that narrow window it would be hard to accomplish much.”13 Further delay would close the window all the more.

  In sum, Young was dead set against King going to Memphis. He argued that the Poor People’s Campaign ought to have the undivided attention of King and the staff. He pleaded with King not to go.

  King was not persuaded. How could he ignore the compelling cause of Memphis, where the strike had developed into a major civil rights struggle? Perhaps no less important to him, Memphis offered a stage on which he could dramatize the antipoverty drive. How better to illustrate the face of poverty in the United States than to spotlight garbage workers, whose wages were so low that some were on welfare?

  To Young’s warning about the risk that King could become bogged down in Memphis, he replied, simply, “They just want me to come down and preach. And the Poor People’s Campaign is about people just like this. And the least I can do is go down there.”14

  So King agreed to speak at a rally on March 18. A hectic speaking schedule that Monday had him hopscotching around the country. He flew from Los Angeles to New Orleans, then to Jackson, Mississippi, and finally to Memphis. He arrived in the Tennessee city for an evening speech. It was the thirty-fifth day of the strike.

  The rally was at Mason Temple, the centerpiece of the six-building headquarters of the Church of God in Christ. The church, one of the largest African American denominations, with congregants worldwide, had been making its cavernous sanctuary available to the strike’s supporters. Now they prayed that King’s star power would fill Mason Temple.

  Lawson figured that King’s appearance at Mason Temple would draw a large crowd. He predicted a turnout of ten thousand. Sure enough, on the night of the rally, he watched as people arrived in droves. Then he headed to the airport to meet King’s flight.

  When King entered the terminal, Lawson apologized about the turnout at Mason Temple. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened, but it doesn’t look like you’re going to speak to 10,000 people,” Lawson said, according to an account by labor historian Michael Honey.

  King’s face fell. “Yeah, it looks, doctor, as though you might speak to 25,000 people,” Lawson said. “He just lit up like a lantern,” Lawson would recall.15

  The eventual estimates of the crowd’s size varied. Lawson would lower his to fifteen thousand. The police said the number was only nine thousand. Whatever the number, the crowd greatly exceeded the temple’s capacity. As historian Joan Beifuss would decribe the scene, people were “sitting on steps, standing in aisles and doorways, spilling outside.”16 It was just past nine o’clock that evening when King entered the temple through a side door. Several striking workers escorted him to the podium.

  Waiting to hear him was a boisterous throng. When they saw him on the podium, they leaped to their feet. Many raised their arms in clenched-fist salutes. A deafening, full-throated cheer filled the vastness of the sanctuary, seemingly rebounding from the steel girders overhead and suffusing King on the podium.

  He was thrilled by the welcome. “He was surprised” Billy Kyles would say, “first of all to see the black community as close together as it was and having the old movement spirit. It really lifted him.” The days when King could evoke such passion from a crowd fervently united behind him had seemed past. Suddenly that intensity was back. Kyles would remember how King fed on the crowd’s exuberance, buoyed to hear them “whooping up everything he’d say.”17

  In his speech King portrayed the strikers’ cause as right and just. “All labor has worth,” he said. He extolled the Poor People’s Campaign and linked the strike to that grand cause. He said that the garbage workers were “reminding the nation” that it was a “crime” for workers in “this rich nation” to receive “starvation” wages.

  He implored the strikers to press on with their demands. To put clout behind the rhetoric, he called on the city’s African American community to stay away from work and school for a day to pressure the mayor to accept the strikers’ demands.18

  As King neared the end of his speech, Lawson and Young conferred behind him on the speaker’s rostrum. Lawson whispered to Young that King ought to return to Memphis and lead a march to bolster the strikers. Young scribbled a note to that effect and slipped it to King at the rostrum.

  King glanced at the note but sat down without responding. Lawson and Young huddled with King. As though seized by a sudden force, he returned to the rostrum. In a strong, vibrant voice he proclaimed that Memphis could mark “the beginning of the Washington movement.” If the strikers would like it, and of course they would, he announced that he would return to Memphis and lead them in a march to City Hall.

  On an impulse he had committed himself more deeply into a tangled labor and racial dispute of a city in crisis. Abruptly, he had ditched his own plans and promised to come to Memphis a second time in support of the strike. As Beifuss would note, it was “an involvement that he had originally neither envisioned nor desired” when he had accepted the invitation to speak in Memphis.19

  Chapter 6

  The Mayor

  I want you to stick it out so that you will be able to make Mayor Loeb and others say yes, even if they want to say no.

  —MLK, speaking to Memphis garbage workers, March 18, 1968

  IF MEMPHIS WERE a thumbtack on a map of the United States, it would pin down a spot where the borders of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee converge. Memphis and the region surrounding it are commonly called the Mid-South. Memphis sees itself apart from both the Deep South and the Border States, like Kentucky to the north. Viewed through the lens of the Civil War, Memphis stands roughly halfway between Issaquena County in the Mississippi Delta (which once had the highest concentration of slaves anywhere in the United States) and the southernmost edge of Kentucky (a slave state until Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, though it never seceded from the Union).

  King did not know Memphis well. Over the years he had breezed into the city for one purpose or another, a speech to a Baptist convention or a brief stopover en route to a nearby state. He was always, more or less, passing through.

  The SCLC waged campaigns in many southern cities but steered clear of Memphis. Everyone knew that Memphis was a NAACP town. The Memphis chapter of the NAACP championed a civil rights agenda of its own under the leadership of accomplished African Americans. Prominent among them was lawyer, minister, and later judge Benjamin Hooks and Maxine Smith, who held a master’s degree in French from Middlebury College in Vermont and who served as executive director of the NAACP in Memphis.

  Unlike some other chapters of the NAACP, the one in Memphis did not turn to the SCLC for help—until 1968. As Andrew Young said years later, reflecting on the prevailing view at the SCLC toward Memphis: “They had it all together, and I said, ‘They don’t really need us.’”1

  Memphis differed from southern cities like Little Rock and Birmingham in having navigated the turbulent years of racial tension during the late fifties and sixties without major strife until 1968. Yet in its racial profile it was undeniably deeply Southern. “Keep Memphis Down in Dixie” was the bumper-sticker slogan of a prominent mayoral campaign in the late fifties.2

  A visitor to Memphis in 1968 need look no furth
er for confirmation of the city’s down-in-Dixie tradition than the prominent statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate cavalry general and first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The lofty statue of Forrest sitting erect in the saddle stood in a downtown park bearing his name. A plaque memorializing Forrest noted his “heroic raid to recapture Memphis from federal troops.” What the plaque did not say was that he was one of the city’s most successful slave traders in the years before the Civil War. The commerce at “Negro Mart” on Adams Avenue, where he dealt in slaves, was highly lucrative. One of his slaves could fetch as much as $1,000, a huge sum at the time.3

  Once King accepted the invitation to support the strike in Memphis, he had much to learn about the city. It seems likely that he knew little about Henry Loeb, who had been mayor only three months. The perfect source for guidance about what made Loeb tick was Methodist minister Frank McRae. But King did not know McRae and was not in touch with him.

  When the strike began in mid-February, Mayor Loeb turned to McRae as his confidant. The lanky, affable McRae and the mayor were old friends. During the crisis Loeb would invite McRae to the white-marbled city hall for lunch several times a week. Loeb would send out for hamburgers. The two men would eat in the mayor’s office while two or three policemen in plain clothes stood vigil nearby. “He was so cheap he’d never buy anything but hamburgers, but I loved him,” McRae would remember.4

  Loeb’s red-carpeted, wood-paneled office was spacious and handsomely appointed in a modern, manly style. The mayor sat in a high-backed leather chair at an oversize desk that seemed to magnify his bigger-than-life persona. Loeb, who stood six foot five, cut a strapping, square-jawed figure. “You knew damn well he was in the room when he was there,” Joe Sweat, who was the city hall reporter for the Commercial Appeal, would recall years later.5