Redemption

by Joseph Rosenbloom

  Yet King, undeterred by the Invaders’ Black Power rhetoric, intended to recruit them as parade marshals for the march he would lead on Monday. He regarded their cooperation as a key to a violence-free march. To secure the Invaders’ cooperation, he was depending on his aides—especially Bevel, Williams, and Orange—to help win them over.

  He would need his aides’ cooperation. Securing their enthusiastic assistance in Memphis was testing his leadership. In Memphis, as elsewhere, King’s charisma was the glue that bound the SCLC together. “We would argue like crazy,” Dorothy Cotton would say of her fellow staff. “He would sit there quietly. When he spoke, we would shut up.”8 It was King who charted their course, mediated disputes, and built morale. Inducing his aides to pull in the same direction was not always easy. As Andrew Young would say, the staff “was a passionate group of wild men that sort of functioned like wild horses.”9 Dorothy Cotton would put it even more bluntly, terming the staff a bunch of “young, self-important egomaniacs.”10

  That the staff was headstrong and arrogant was hardly surprising. To join the SCLC staff meant forsaking, or at least delaying, a stable career and comfortable life. It meant running the risk of potential physical harm and possible death. No mild-mannered, submissive person was likely to enlist in the SCLC, and King was savvy enough to know it. He wanted young, ego-driven, risk-taking mavericks, and he had them. At times the infighting turned fierce. Only half-jokingly King and Abernathy “complained about the lack of nonviolence within SCLC,” wrote historian Adam Fairclough.11

  As he prepared to return to Memphis, King called an emergency meeting of his executive staff at Ebenezer Church on Saturday, April 30. “Memphis is the Washington campaign in miniature,” he said, rallying his aides behind his audacious plan to stage another march in Tennessee.12

  They replied with a barrage of objections. Young, fearing that exhaustion was impairing King’s judgment, pointed to a lack of groundwork for a successful return to Memphis.13 Bevel and Jackson were the most vehement. They denounced not only the Memphis plan but also the whole idea of the Poor People’s Campaign. Bevel argued, instead, that the SCLC ought to devote all its energy to opposing the Vietnam War. “We don’t need to be hanging around Washington,” he barked. “We need to stop this war.” Jackson termed the plan for Memphis “too small” and the one for Washington “too unformed,” wrote historian Taylor Branch. Jackson demanded that King scrap the antipoverty crusade altogether. Jackson desired to replace it with Operation Breadbasket, his pet project in Chicago to improve the economic circumstances of African Americans.14

  King’s typical response to outbursts from his staff was to keep his cool. His manner was calm and Socratic. He would listen placidly while his aides fussed at one another or at him. All the while, in the words of historian Stephen Oates, he “would sit there thinking and scratching his whiskers. He would continue raising questions until they had worked through a problem collectively and reached a conclusion.”15

  But on this day he did not retain his usual composure and gentle authority. Unnerved by the setback in Memphis, he had no patience for his staff’s carping and haggling. He erupted in rage. He ripped into Bevel and Jackson. He snapped first at Bevel: “You don’t like to work on anything that isn’t your idea.” To Jackson he shouted, “If you want to carve out your own niche in society, go ahead. But for God’s sake, don’t bother me.” King marched out of the meeting and left the staff to sort it all out. By the end of the meeting, which dragged on for six hours, the staff swallowed their objections. King was their leader, and they would follow him to Memphis.16

  Dorothy Cotton would remember the tenor of the meeting: “There was a lot of energy. Everybody just arguing and expressing their opinions. But it was clear. We were going to go. When Martin spoke, it was, like, the discussion was over.”17 Abernathy would tell Coretta King, “We are all together now. We are going to Washington by way of Memphis.”18

  They were all together in acceding to King’s desire that they go to Memphis. But they were not all together in their desire to go. Tensions between King and the staff were following them to Tennessee. Once he arrived, Jackson called his wife, Jackie, to report that the staff was “not supportive” of King. “They’re rumbling,” Jackson told his wife. “They don’t want to be here, but we’re stuck.”19

  King must have sensed that he had not seen the end of Bevel and Jackson’s nettlesome challenge to his leadership. He trusted that they would fall in line behind him in Memphis anyway. Headstrong and defiant, verging on insubordination, they offered something that King’s other aides did not. They were young, hip, and brash. Bevel was thirty-one; Jackson, twenty-six. The gap in years was not that large—King was eight years older than Bevel, thirteen years older than Jackson—yet in movement terms they were separated by a generational chasm.

  Bevel and Jackson had come of age in the movement as undergraduate seminary students in the early sixties. They were in the forefront of a more aggressively defiant style of protest. They had been among the first to put their bodies on the line in sit-ins, nonviolent but unyielding, at segregated lunch counters. They had been cursed, beaten, and spit upon, and the experience had toughened them. Theirs was a confidence, a swagger, born of youthful courage.

  They did not conform to the tacit SCLC executive dress code of muted dark suits and staid ties. Bearded and gaunt, Bevel dressed in denim overalls, a skullcap over his shaved head. The boyishly handsome Jackson, who had been a football star at North Carolina A&T, often wore jeans, the cuffs turned up high above the ankles.

  They could relate more easily to the restless, angry generation of young African Americans, whose allegiance King was eager to earn. Bevel and Jackson might be headache-provoking, but he needed them. What’s more, he had other more pressing matters on his mind than smoothing out relations with Bevel and Jackson.

  Chapter 8

  Damage Control

  If we don’t have a peaceful march in Memphis, no Washington. No Memphis, no Washington.

  —MLK, quoted by Jim Lawson

  KING HAD NO TIME TO LOSE. He had five days to drum up support, recruit and train marshals in the discipline of peaceful protest, and pursue all possible means to preclude another violent outburst during the march on April 8. He was expecting thousands of participants. Not only garbage workers would march. He was urging students to skip classes at high schools and colleges and march with him. There were reports that thousands of people from out of town would converge on Memphis to join the march.

  King was counting not only on his staff for organizational support. He was also expecting African American leaders in Memphis to bolster his efforts. He had to identify the religious and political figures with the most influence in the community, and recruit them to the cause. It was not unlike organizing an electoral campaign for public office except for one inescapable fact. He had little time to pull it off. The march was set for Monday, five days away.

  He would be bucking the mayor’s fierce resistance and the contempt of most white Memphians. David Caywood, a white lawyer who closely monitored the events surrounding King in 1968, would say, years later, that many whites abhorred King. “He was the lightning rod for all the segregationist attitudes here in Memphis,” noted Caywood.1

  Nor were the major Memphis newspapers welcoming. In its morning edition of April 3, the Commercial Appeal previewed King’s return to the city that day with an editorial headlined “Take the March to Court.” The paper decried King’s plan to lead another march in Memphis. It called for federal marshals and endorsed the mayor’s expected attempt to secure an injunction barring King from marching. “There is no reason,” the editorial said, “why Memphis should have to take a second chance of downtown rioting just to allow Dr. King to wipe out the stain left by his previous ‘nonviolent demonstration.’”

  The usually milder afternoon paper, the Memphis Press-Scimitar, ran a barbed editorial of its own that day. It quoted NAACP leader Roy Wilkins expressing doubt that King coul
d prevent violent outbursts during the Poor People’s Campaign. The Press-Scimitar likewise said that King was courting violence by staging a second march in Memphis. Applying Wilkins’s critique to King’s upcoming march, the paper editorialized: “All good, practical advice for any mischief-maker, black or white.”

  If King had much to learn about Memphis, he would have been familiar with its basic contours. It was, after all, another southern city. Its DNA did not differ all that much from what he knew from his deep experience living and working in other southern cities. Further, he had friends in Memphis, including Baptist preachers Ben Hooks and Billy Kyles, to whom he could look for advice. In 1959 King had come to Memphis to campaign for two African American candidates, Hooks for juvenile court judge and Russell Sugarmon for public works commissioner. But Memphis was not Atlanta or Montgomery, cities he knew intimately. It was not terrain that he knew well. Much could go wrong.

  A first order of business now that he was back in Memphis was connecting with local preachers. At 12:05 p.m. he departed the Lorraine in Tarlese Matthews’s Buick for a meeting at Centenary Church. It was a redbrick building with white trim, unremarkable except for its long, sharply pitched roof. The Buick halted in front of the church, followed by two squad cars carrying Smith’s four-man detail. Also arriving on the scene, in an unmarked car, was the two-man surveillance team of Redditt and Richmond.

  Smith’s detail promptly “secured” the front and rear entrances to the church, as a police field report would note.2 During the two hours that King remained inside the church, Smith and his men stayed in their cars.3 Redditt and Richmond, however, departed quickly. On orders from headquarters, they drove to a fire station on South Main Street near the Lorraine to set up a surveillance post. To camouflage their presence, they papered over a back window of the fire station, leaving a small peephole. The window offered a view of the Lorraine across Mulberry Street.

  King entered the church along with aides Abernathy, Young, and Jackson. Waiting inside were Lawson, the Centenary pastor, and about thirty other black clergymen. Their clout as strike supporters was hard to overestimate in the religiously devout African American community of Memphis. At Sunday services they were blessing the strike, appealing to their congregants for support, and soliciting donations. They raised many thousands of dollars for the union’s strike fund, which was helping to keep food on the strikers’ tables.

  The meeting at Centenary was in the church’s Fellowship Hall, a barren room equipped with little more than folding chairs. King rose to address the clergy. The fallout over the riot on March 28 still hung darkly in the air. King wanted to dispel the cloud of despair. Speaking quietly, he reminded the ministers that he was in Memphis to lead a nonviolent march. He called on them to close ranks behind him, saying that unity was crucial. There would be no violent disruption of the march this time, he assured them.4

  King reminded the ministers that it was a smattering of youths, not garbage workers, who had caused the trouble six days earlier. King denied that the garbage workers were in any way at fault for the violence.5 Without excusing the rioters, King sought to relate their criminality to poverty. According to an informant’s account of the meeting as relayed to the FBI, King said that the youths who had smashed windows and looted stores were “actually to be pitied for all they have ever known is poverty and the economic war attendant on living in poverty.”

  King went on to say that the ministers should not lose sight of what the struggle in Memphis was all about. On one basic level it was a labor dispute. It was, he said, about raising the wages and improving the working conditions of the garbage workers. That was the goal.

  Then he called on Jesse Jackson to speak. Jackson, in charge of the SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, proposed an economic boycott in Memphis to mirror what he was doing in Chicago. There would be an appeal to strike supporters not to buy the products of big corporations, such as Coca-Cola or Wonder Bread—the kind of markets where blacks had consumer power. Jackson said the economic boycott would translate into political pressure because the corporations would insist that the mayor settle the strike.6

  While Jackson was talking, King headed to Lawson’s pastoral office to speak with two local lawyers, Louis Lucas and Walter Bailey. They had been in federal court that morning to oppose the city’s petition for an injunction against King. Lucas and Bailey had rushed from the courthouse to brief King. The news was not good. At a hearing before Judge Bailey Brown, the city’s lawyers had asked for an injunction on the grounds that it was crucial to prevent another riot. They had argued that King’s march through the tense city likely would “cause great hazard, danger and irreparable harm.” The judge had acted swiftly, granting a temporary injunction. It prohibited King, Abernathy, Williams, Bevel, Orange, and Lee from “organizing or leading a parade or march in the City of Memphis” over the next ten days.7

  At Centenary Church, Lucas and Bailey told King that he could expect a federal marshal to serve his aides and him with a copy of Brown’s order that day. In fact, they said, the marshal was expected to appear at the church momentarily.

  For days King had been bracing for the possibility of an injunction. He had discussed the matter with Jim Lawson by phone over the weekend. As he plunged into the crisis in Memphis, King was turning to the Methodist minister as a sounding board. King had a high opinion of Lawson, as he would say publicly at a pro-strike rally that night. King would hail him as a longtime fighter for the rights of African Americans.8

  King and Lawson had bonded the first time they met, in February 1957. Lawson was studying for a master’s degree in theology at Oberlin College in Ohio. King was on campus to speak. They were the same age, then both twenty-eight, Lawson just four months older. Both were the sons of preachers. A pacifist, Lawson later refused induction into the army during the Korean War and served thirteen months in federal prison.

  Lawson had looked into Gandhi’s concept of nonviolent protest and adopted it as his own. He developed a sense of rectitude and fierce resolve to push the limits of nonviolent civil disobedience. In the late 1950s, as a PhD divinity student at Vanderbilt University, Lawson was in the forefront of the sit-in movement, leading students to desegregate the lunch counters of department stores in Nashville. Vanderbilt expelled him.

  Lawson landed at Centenary as its pastor in 1962 and was soon deeply immersed in civil rights protest in Memphis. He quickly adopted a confrontational approach. He told a reporter, as quoted in the Commercial Appeal on November 30 of that year, “Negroes who seek improvements in education, income and housing can probably best realize their goals through massive social dislocation.” If the demands were not met, Lawson threatened to make “it impossible for government to operate.” He did not wait for a court order to integrate the city’s restaurants. He and his wife, Dorothy, and their young son, John, simply showed up at a whites-only cafeteria and stood in line for food. They were served.9

  If Lawson appeared more righteously pure than King, he did not possess the same warmth and affability. People complained that Lawson was holier-than-thou and off-putting. “He was not palatable,” remembered Frank McRae, the superintendent of the Memphis district of the Methodist Church that oversaw Lawson’s pastorate at Centenary. “He was not well received in the white community, because Jim had this rough veneer. His whole strategy was confrontational.”10

  Lawson was exhibiting that steely resolve in advising King to fight a court injunction that might stop him from marching in Memphis. Lawson would recount what he told King: “So I had called him as soon as I could and told him that I was preparing to organize against it. We’d get lawyers.”11 If Judge Brown did not lift his injunction before the march on Monday, Lawson urged King to defy the order.

  In 1963, circuit court Judge W. A. Jenkins had enjoined King from demonstrating in Birmingham. King had led protesters into the streets of Birmingham anyhow. He was arrested and thrown in jail. But Jenkins was a judge of an Alabama state court. This time, in Memphi
s, the stakes were much higher. King was not dealing with the Tennessee equivalent of Jenkins’s edict under Alabama state law—an order flagrantly tainted by segregationist bias. If he defied Brown’s injunction, he would be rebuking the authority of a federal, not a state, judge.

  Andrew Young would recall, years later, that federal judges were “our best ally, and we didn’t want to run against them.”12 Ralph Abernathy, also commenting years later, would put the point even more strongly: “After all, we had made obedience to federal courts a central argument in our efforts to desegregate the South.”13

  A string of cases crucial to civil rights progress had included two decided by the US Supreme Court: one in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education, banned the racial segregation of public schools, and another, two years later, Browder v. Gayle, invalidated the segregated bus system of Montgomery, Alabama. To violate Brown’s order would cross a divide with potentially grave consequences. It might impair King’s reputation with the federal judiciary and cost the movement a critical ally.

  When considering how to respond to injunctions against him in earlier crises, King had consulted Ben Hooks. He was perhaps King’s closest friend in Memphis. As a young student he had excelled in the city’s segregated public schools before going on to Howard University in Washington, DC, and the DePaul University College of Law in Chicago. He had come home to practice as one of the first African American lawyers in Memphis. He split his time between the law and a job as pastor of the Middle Baptist Church. In 1965 he was appointed a criminal court judge, the first African American in that post in Memphis.