Redemption

by Joseph Rosenbloom

  King had often turned to Hooks as a trusted adviser. He had recruited him for the SCLC board and relied on him to oversee its books and order its finances. But as he pondered what to do about Judge Brown’s injunction, King did not seek Hooks’s counsel. There was no need, because King knew what he intended to do. According to Hooks, King had decided, “if the judge said no, he was going to march anyway, knowing that the police would break it up and he’d be collared immediately to jail.”14 King, apparently, had concluded that the imperative to march in Memphis outweighed the potential hostility from the federal bench should he defy Brown’s injunction.

  After lawyers Lucas and Bailey briefed King, he asked Lawson once again how he ought to respond to the injunction if it remained in effect on the day of the march. Lawson reiterated his advice: King ought to march no matter what.15

  King waited awhile in Lawson’s office for the federal marshal to arrive and serve Brown’s order. But there was an inexplicable delay. Having skipped breakfast in the rush to the Atlanta airport that morning, King was famished. He departed Centenary, leaving word that the marshal could find him at the Lorraine.

  Chapter 9

  The Injunction

  The federal courts have given us our greatest victories, and I cannot, in good conscience, declare war on them.

  —MLK, announcing that he would obey a federal injunction, Albany, Georgia, July 20, 1962

  IT WAS ALMOST 2:30 that Wednesday afternoon before King arrived back at the Lorraine. Smith and his three officers, still close behind, secured the area around the motel.1

  King headed to the second-floor dining room of the Lorraine to order lunch. He was eating at 2:50 when US marshal Cato Ellis pulled his car into the motel parking lot. King did not wait for Ellis to find him, but bounded downstairs right away to greet him. Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Bernard Lee, and James Orange followed on King’s heels to confront Ellis and a photographer from the Memphis Press-Scimitar in the parking lot.

  The photographer’s photo published in the paper would show the tall, bespectacled Ellis standing in the motel’s parking lot, tendering a sheaf of papers toward King and the four aides. Even at arm’s length they likely could have seen the heading on the cover page: City of Memphis v. Martin Luther King, Jr., et al. Later, when they sat down to read the full text, they would see these opening words: “It appearing to the Court that it is proper that a temporary order should issue herein.”

  Underlying Judge Brown’s order was an unstated but unmistakable threat. If King and his aides did not abide by the judge’s ruling and marched in Memphis anyway, they would likely be jailed for contempt of court. It all added up to the threat of a roadblock standing in the way of the planned march on Monday.

  Yet, oddly, the photo shows King and his aides grinning at the stern-faced Ellis. Dealing with court injunctions was then almost a routine, though nonetheless galling, matter for King. His spirits lifted by food in the belly, he apparently had cracked a joke to put his aides at ease. They did not seem to be showing disrespect for Ellis but rather were breaking the tension of the moment with a bit of levity.

  The injunction in hand, King climbed the stairs to the second floor of the Lorraine and entered Room 307. Abernathy, Young, Lee, and Orange filed into the room behind him. A team of lawyers led by Lucius Burch was waiting. With Burch were three young associates from his firm. Also in the room were Lucas and Bailey, the two lawyers who had represented King in federal court the day before. A few local ministers also squeezed into the room.

  Two beds occupied much of the space. King sat on the inner edge of one bed. Burch sat on the other so that they faced each other. King’s aides and Burch’s associates perched on the outer sides of the beds, their knees almost touching, or sprawled on the floor. Abernathy was sitting apart, still scooping the last of his fried-chicken dinner off a paper plate.

  Burch was widely regarded as one of the best trial lawyers in Memphis if not the best. He was fifty-six years old, solidly built, with a broad, handsome face, receding hairline, and barrel chest. He was known as having a steel-trap mind enhanced by a virtually photographic memory. His fellow litigators of the Memphis bar held him in high regard bordering on reverence. In a hearing on the injunction the next day, James Manire, the lead lawyer for the city, would pay homage to him, even though they were on opposite sides of the case.

  Addressing Judge Brown, Manire said, “I always get sort of attracted by Mr. Burch.”

  Judge Brown interjected, “Maybe you are mesmerized, Mr. Manire?”

  “I am,” Manire replied.2

  The day before, an urgent call from the American Civil Liberties Union had drawn Burch into the case. The ACLU legal director in New York, Mel Wulf, had heard about the injunction issued against King. He called J. Michael Cody, who was a thirty-two-year-old associate in Burch’s firm and an ACLU board member. Wulf told him, as Cody would recount: “We don’t want it to happen that King marches without the injunction being lifted because we’re depending on federal injunctions to help the movement. You know, they have been the backbone of the movement.”3

  Figuring that King ought to have a seasoned trial lawyer representing him, Cody turned to Burch. His full name was Lucius Edward Burch Jr. The scion of a wealthy Tennessee family, he grew up on a large farm outside Nashville and attended Vanderbilt University, where his father was dean of the medical school. His grandfather had been a secretary of the US Senate and, as Burch would openly and ruefully admit, a slaveholder. Among Burch’s ancestors were two of the three Tennesseans who had occupied the White House, Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk.4 (The third was Andrew Johnson.)

  As a young man, Burch had a zest for pranks and a yen for adventure. While a student at Vanderbilt Law School, he caught some fish and kept them alive and swimming by storing them in a drinking water tank near the office of the law school’s dean. At his brother’s wedding, he displayed a shotgun as though to suggest that it was a shotgun wedding. It wasn’t.5 Other stories had him shooting clay pigeons with Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, hunting game for bounty in Alaska, and living on a sailboat in Siberia.6

  Burch had a defiant, contrarian streak. He seemed born to challenge arrogance and power. “He always didn’t like somebody who would tell him what he had to do,” Cody would say of him years later.7 Burch was a thorn in the side of E. H. Crump, the city’s longtime political boss. As Crump’s electoral machine shifted into high gear to promote its slate of candidates, Burch advocated against them. His views were progressive, yet he straddled the divergent worlds of liberal politics and conservative highbrow society. Even while championing civil rights, he belonged to two of the city’s most privileged and exclusive playgrounds, the Memphis Country Club and the Hunt and Polo Club.

  Burch took it upon himself to tear down the wall that excluded black lawyers from the Memphis Bar Association. He plotted with local civil rights leaders to maneuver the Memphis establishment into desegregating the municipal library and other public facilities.

  But when he was asked to represent King, Burch hesitated. His firm’s clientele consisted of blue-chip corporations like the Standard Oil Company and the Illinois Central Railroad. Having King as a client “was not the sort of thing they like to see their lawyer engaged in,” Burch would say later.8 Knowing that many Memphians loathed King, Burch ran another risk if he advocated on his behalf. “You’ve got to expect,” Burch would note, “there might be somebody that comes onto the panel [in a jury trial] and says, ‘Well, there’s the goddamn son-of-a-bitch that represented Martin Luther King! That nigger-lover. I’ll fix him.’”9

  Before agreeing to represent King, Burch insisted on meeting him, sizing him up face to face. He had questions, doubts that he wanted to put to rest. Was King a reasonable man? Did he really believe in the nonviolence that he espoused? What did he intend to achieve by returning to Memphis? How did Memphis fit into his overall, national strategy at the time?

  Now in Room 307 at the Lorraine, Burch took charge. As Walte
r Bailey would recall, Burch said, at once, “Dr. King, I’m going to get right to the point.” He asked: would King like Burch to represent him? If so, Burch proposed petitioning Judge Brown to lift the pending injunction. King confirmed that indeed he desired Burch to proceed in that manner.

  Burch went on, “Now I want to ask a few questions and find out a few things.”10 He asked about King’s view of the rioting on March 28. It had been a “complete fiasco,” King replied, saying that it resulted from “poor planning.”

  In the aftermath of the riot, King went on, he believed that his whole future and, in particular, the Poor People’s Campaign, “depended on his being able to have a nonviolent march in Memphis.”11 King said he was under attack from black militants who rejected his approach. To counter the militants, King told Burch, he had to prove in Memphis that nonviolence still worked.12

  Burch asked, obliquely, if King would obey the injunction should Judge Brown refuse to vacate his order. King said he would march in any event, even if he had to disobey a court injunction.13

  King knew that he would be on weaker legal ground in defying a federal injunction, in comparison with a state injunction. In state court he had disputed segregationist laws as violating his rights under the US Constitution. If King defied an order that the federal judiciary deemed lawful under the Constitution, he might have to fall back on his personal concept of unjust law as his only defense. He had touched on the concept in his famed “Letter from Birmingham City Jail”: “An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law . . . that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”14 That is, King was saying that on his own authority he could decide which laws were just or unjust under natural law.

  Justifying civil disobedience on the basis of natural law posed a problem for King because it endorsed a principle on which others might act in ways he regarded as objectionable. Why couldn’t a man who was a segregationist, for example, contend that his concept of natural law justified disobeying court orders that mixed the races in schools or in marriage?

  Burch suggested a strategy that might rescue King from the dilemma of either obeying a federal injunction or defying it on the legally flimsy basis of a natural law defense. He told King to expect that Judge Brown probably would not lift his order without insisting on some restrictions to minimize the chance that the march might turn violent. Burch said that if King would agree to abide by restrictions that would minimize the risk of violence, the judge might allow the march to go forward. Yes, King told Burch, he would accept such terms.

  Burch would say later of King, “He completely reassured me that [his intention] was not phony in any degree and that it was just exactly what it was represented to be, the right of these people to express by assembly, petition, and demonstration what they felt was a just grievance.”15 King did not appear to be phony or deceptive at all. Rather, Burch remembered him as plainspoken and straightforward.

  Someone asked King which group he feared more, white racists or Black Power militants. David Caywood, one of the young associates with Burch, recalled King responding that it “could easily be either group, but that wasn’t the issue. The issue was to do whatever was necessary to make the [march] safe.”16 Thus reassured, Burch had no second thoughts about representing King. He would earn no fee. He was taking the case pro bono.

  Looking back on the Burch-King meeting, Cody would recall the hushed atmosphere in the room. Except for Burch and King, almost nobody uttered a word. Cody knew the story about Burch’s skeet-shooting adventure with Hemingway. As the story had it, Burch had not been intimidated by the fame of the legendary writer or by his overbearing personality. He had refused to “play second fiddle” to Papa Hemingway, Cody said.17

  In the presence of King, however, Burch showed a surprising humility. It was a rare instance of Burch deferring to someone, Cody would say. He attributed Burch’s reaction to a kind of spell cast by King’s harmonious voice and calm manner. It was as if King possessed “an almost messianic or historical aura,” Cody would say.18

  That afternoon Burch and the city’s lawyers met with Judge Brown in his chambers at the courthouse. Brown agreed to schedule a re-hearing on the injunction at 9:30 the next morning. Returning to their genteel law office off Court Square in downtown Memphis, Burch and his associates prepared to work all night building a case against the injunction.

  Chapter 10

  Invaders

  We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.

  —MLK, “I Have a Dream” speech, August 28, 1963

  THE FEDERAL INJUNCTION threatened to derail the march on Monday, but that was not King’s only worry. If he did lead the march, with or without the court’s blessing, there was the alarming possibility that rowdies would replay the violence of March 28.

  King was pursuing a strategy to avoid that outcome. He intended to recruit the Invaders as parade marshals. He reasoned that if the Black Power group marched under his banner, younger and more disaffected members in the African American community would take their cues from the Invaders and not cause trouble during the march.

  King believed that a similar strategy had worked for him in Chicago in 1966, when he had been pursuing a campaign to improve the deplorable state of the city’s slum housing. To build grassroots support, he sought the cooperation of ghetto residents. Recruiting large numbers of them to put their bodies on the line in marches and protests became an overriding goal. But his efforts to mobilize support in the slums stalled without the involvement of an inner-city power broker: the street gangs of Chicago.

  So King met with the gangs—the Vice Lords, Cobras, and Blackstone Rangers—seeking their support. It did not go well. He was stunned by their belligerence, their angry tirades, and coarse language. All the same, King did not stop talking with them. The sessions stretched late into many a night. He tried reasoning with them in a kind of tutorial, pointing out why they should trust him, why they should cooperate with him, why they ought to believe in nonviolence. Historian Stephen Oates described the tenor of the talkathons: “Gently, with great sincerity, King would explain the nature and purpose of nonviolence, asking them to try it as an experiment and put away their guns and knives.”1

  Against all odds, his words struck a responsive chord with some gang members. According to one estimate, two hundred of them pledged themselves to nonviolent marches following King through the streets of Chicago. From the experience of Chicago he drew a lesson. As he wrote in his 1967 book, The Trumpet of Conscience, “I am convinced that even very violent temperaments can be channeled through nonviolent discipline.”2

  What worked in Chicago, he concluded, could serve as a model for defusing the Black Power militancy that he feared might disrupt the Washington campaign. At a news conference on February 16, 1968, he had unveiled details of the antipoverty push. On the question of how he would counter Black Power–inspired violence, he cited his success with the gangs in Chicago. “We’ve worked in communities before where nationalists existed, where persons who believe in violence have existed,” he said, “and yet we’ve been able to discipline them.” He cited his experience with the Blackstone Rangers, terming them “the worst gang in Chicago,” but said they had “marched in the demonstrations with us, and they never retaliated with a single act of violence.”3

  In Memphis the Invaders were eager to talk to King. About a dozen of them were checked into Rooms 315 and 316 of the Lorraine. That morning they had met with King’s aides. Next they were to meet with him. Early in the afternoon, Charles Cabbage led his group to the dining room on the second floor of the motel to wait for him.

  It would not be the first time that King had met with Cabbage. He and two other Invaders had turned up at King’s room in the Holiday Inn Rivermont on the morning after the riot. (When the rioting broke out, King had taken refuge at the Holiday Inn in accord with a policeman’s instructions. The offic
er had warned that the mayhem in the streets would block the route to the Lorraine, and he had escorted King to the Holiday Inn, where he stayed the night.)

  According to one unofficial report that circulated immediately after the riot, it was the Invaders who were responsible for the looting and vandalism or at least had provoked youths to violence. King was aware of the report and believed it to be true. His despair over the rioting had not eased. He was profoundly depressed. Even so, he greeted Cabbage and his companions courteously. King wanted to know: would the Invaders help him stage a peaceful march?

  Cabbage would remember how much at ease he felt in King’s company. He would say that he could feel “peace around that man. It was one of the few times in my life when I wasn’t actually fighting something.”4 In just a few moments, it seemed that they had a deal. The Invaders would have a voice in planning the march. In exchange, King would help them secure funds to support their community-outreach programs in the inner city.

  To nail down the agreement, King had assigned James Orange, Hosea Williams, and James Bevel to continue the discussions with the Invaders. On the evening of April 1, the Invaders and aides had gathered at the Lorraine.

  Facing off against the trio of Orange, Williams, and Bevel required a certain daring. All three were hardened paladins of the civil rights struggle. Orange, a giant of a man, had been on the receiving end of police assaults during SCLC demonstrations in Birmingham. Williams, a heavily bearded Korean War veteran, had been savagely beaten at a bus station for drinking from a water fountain for whites only. He had been in the thick of the SCLC campaign in St. Augustine, Florida, and had been teargassed and beaten horribly during the storied voting-rights march at Selma, Alabama. According to Dorothy Cotton, he especially among the SCLC staff had the chops to deal with “street dudes.”5 Bevel, a fast-talking ordained Baptist pastor, had shown his fearlessness facing vicious mobs during protests to desegregate lunch counters in Nashville and at bus stops during the 1961 Freedom Rides. He was on the front lines during protests in Birmingham, Selma, and Chicago.