Redemption

by Joseph Rosenbloom

Even on the dreary subject of the riot, King could not resist a droll bit of understatement. He turned to Davis. “I would rather have been in Florida getting a tan than here in the middle of turmoil,” he said.

  “You are invited,” she said.

  He replied that there was a more urgent task for him at the moment. The Invaders had disrupted the last march, he said, and might do the same during the next one. King was determined that they would not. Davis replied, playfully, as she would recount in her memoir: “Maybe they should be called the Disrupters.”25

  There was talk of Judge Brown’s injunction. King said he was directing his lawyer, Chauncey Eskridge, and Andrew Young to appear in Brown’s court later that morning and urge the judge to vacate his order barring him from marching.

  The conversation in Room 207 continued into the early morning. It ended when King announced that he had set a meeting with his staff for eight o’clock that morning, and he needed rest. Davis left A.D.’s room to walk toward hers. She heard King’s footsteps behind her.

  She left the door to her room slightly ajar, and he followed a moment later. He may have been a night owl of great stamina, but he had reached his limit. As Davis would write in her memoir: “He declared, softly, ‘I’ve never been more physically and emotionally tired.’”

  He collapsed into bed, saying, “Senator, our time together is so short.” It was 4:30 a.m.

  Chapter 17

  Home Pressures

  I’m away two and three weeks at a time. . . . But every day when I’m at home, I break from the office for dinner and try to spend a few hours with the children before I return to the office for some night work.

  —MLK, interview with Playboy magazine, January 1965

  OPERATING ON LESS than four hours sleep, King was up by 8 a.m. to face the day. Time was short before the march on Monday. Still hanging over him was the federal injunction barring him from marching. A hearing on the injunction was set for 9:30 that morning before Judge Brown. But King, the central defendant in the case, would not be going to court. He was weary from lack of sleep. Andrew Young and James Lawson would be testifying in his stead.

  There were other issues that demanded his attention. One was a delicate matter involving Dorothy Cotton. She was one of his most valued aides, the only woman on his staff in an executive role. He had agreed to meet her for a bite to eat after the rally at Mason Temple the night before, but he had not shown up.1 She would want an explanation.

  It was yet another headache for King, this one self-inflicted. The Memphis crisis had all but shattered his nerves. In his fraught condition he needed the support of people close to him. His wife, Coretta (whom he called Corrie), had been at his side in troubling times. The night before, he had called her. They had talked while he was still in his room at the Lorraine before he departed for the rally at Mason Temple.

  As Coretta would write in her memoir, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., King had sounded upbeat.2 He spoke optimistically about the prospects for a large turnout of marchers on Monday. King, however, was not entirely reassuring. The subject of Judge Brown’s injunction came up. Repeating what he had indicated to others in his inner circle, King told Coretta that he would lead the march on Monday even if he had to violate the injunction.

  Though King and his wife were in touch by phone, she was at home in Atlanta, not with him as he confronted the crisis in Memphis. He had summoned Georgia Davis and his brother to Memphis. It’s unlikely that King had asked Coretta to come. She was recovering from surgery for a fibroid stomach tumor and not in the best shape to travel.3

  Probably he would not have urged Coretta to come to Memphis even if she had been in perfect health. In keeping with the social convention of the times he believed a wife belonged at home caring for the children. He was always forthright about this. In proposing that they marry, he had specified that she must play the role of a traditional, stay-at-home wife attending to his needs.4

  She agreed to marry him all the same. She had scuttled her career as a singer and music teacher to become a preacher’s wife. Rather than devote herself to a career, she agreed to devote herself to him and, when the time came, to their children. So it was that she became a dutiful wife and mother. Years later, she would describe herself as having been his “confidante” and “best friend.” She would say they could “finish each other’s sentences,” and “feel each other’s wounds.”5

  For his part, he would extol her as a loyal wife to whom he was grateful for “not hampering his movement activities.”6 The tribute was incomplete. She had done more to support his activism than not stand in his way. They had comforted each other and steeled each other in the darkest hours. When their house in Montgomery was bombed, after his near death from the knife attack in Harlem, during the years of interminable telephone calls to their house from people threatening to kill him, through the travail of his many jail sentences—she was his emotional rock.

  That was not all Coretta had done. In one notable coup, in 1960, she had telephoned John Kennedy, who was then the Democratic nominee for president, and prevailed on him to help free her husband from the racially toxic confines of the Georgia State Prison at Reidsville, which Kennedy had done. She had spoken to large crowds, as she did at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. She had sung at fund-raising concerts to prop up the sagging treasury of the SCLC. She had always been there for him and his cause—their cause. All the same, she had played essentially an auxiliary role.

  As a young woman she had seemed more likely destined for civil rights activism than King had been in his youth. She had endured greater racist outrages. She was born in a crude, two-room house that her father had built with his own hands. She grew up in virulently racist Perry County, Alabama. (In the nearby town of Marion, in 1958, a jury sentenced a black man, Jimmy Wilson, to death for stealing $1.95 from a local woman. It took an international outcry, compelling a governor’s clemency, to spare the condemned man from the electric chair.) Her entrepreneurial father had angered whites by defying a tacit rule: transporting logs as a business was only for whites. Coretta’s father had nevertheless hauled logs in his truck to the local train station. White racists struck back. When she was fifteen, they had torched her family’s house, leaving behind only charred embers.7

  King had grown up in the urban, African American Old Fourth Ward of Atlanta. His had been a life cocooned from the extremes of Perry County bigotry. King would tease Coretta about her humble origins. He would say that if she had not found him, she might be back in the hot Georgia sun picking cotton.8

  When she won a scholarship to attend Antioch College at Yellow Springs, Ohio, she received a ticket out of the South. At Antioch she stretched herself politically as a member of the campus NAACP chapter, Race Relations Committee, and Civil Liberties Committee. She clamored for peace at campus rallies and attended a Progressive Party convention in Philadelphia.9

  King’s four years as an undergraduate at Morehouse College were very different. He signed up for the NAACP chapter, but that was as far as his political activism went.10

  In accepting King’s marital terms, Coretta ceded much of her political latitude to his control. But she never fully resigned herself to that constraint. She urged him repeatedly to allow her a larger role in the movement. She longed to be in the front line of protest. He had forbidden it. Concern for her safety was an issue. He did not want the two of them traveling and demonstrating together at the risk of orphaning their children.11

  According to historian Adam Fairclough, she had had “virtually no part” at the SCLC, even though she had begged for a greater involvement in the movement.12 With rare exceptions King had barred her from being with him during his civil rights campaigns. He forbid her from joining in protests, marching in racially tense cities or risking arrest and jail. He told her, “You see, I am called [by God], and you aren’t.”13

  As her friend Ella Baker would put it, Coretta’s gender, not just motherhood, had excluded her from playing a significant
role at the SCLC. Baker urged her to seek a greater role, to demand a seat among the “councils of men.”14

  Baker had been the first executive director of the SCLC. She held that position from 1957 to 1960 but left the organization after a falling-out with King. In her place King installed a man, Wyatt Walker. A personality clash with King may have been part of the reason.15 But Baker saw King’s desire to push her aside as a sexist act. Dorothy Cotton agreed. She would note that “sexist attitudes” within the SCLC meant that “men were the leaders and women were the followers and supporters.”16

  Sexism pervaded the whole of the civil rights movement, not only at the SCLC. Stokely Carmichael, referring to his own organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, had made the point jocularly, yet notoriously and revealingly: “The position of women in SNCC is prone,” he had said.17

  Coretta saw herself as victimized by the sexist mind-set of the time. She groused to him about it but to little effect. Her discontent festered between them, a sore that wouldn’t heal.

  That was not the only source of marital friction between them. Sometimes she felt like a single mother, and she shared her frustration with King.18 As a rule, King was away three weeks of every four.19 Even when he was at home, he was often too busy for a normal life. In 1960, Coretta complained to an interviewer for Life magazine: “We like to read and listen to music, but we don’t have time for it. We can’t even sit down to supper without somebody coming to the door.”20

  King was on the road when two of their children, Marty and Dexter, had their tonsils removed. Preoccupied by his travel commitments, he did not call home to ask how the surgery had gone.21 Nor was he around much to help Coretta recuperate after the births of each of their four children.22 In years to come she would say that she had yielded to his being absent so much for the greater cause of civil rights. But she admitted, wistfully, her regret at having been deprived a full family life.

  Then there was the constant tension over money and the lack of it to buy what she thought they should have. King was a natty dresser but otherwise stuck to a Gandhi-like vow to live plainly. As an advocate for the downtrodden, King thought he should own as little as possible. He wanted few possessions. His cramped, cluttered office at SCLC headquarters on Auburn Street in Atlanta reflected his lack of interest in material trappings. A reporter for the Baltimore Sun visited King in the office in June 1965. He described it as having “dingy green walls and a bare floor.” King sat in a creaky swivel chair behind an old wooden desk.

  Had he not denounced riches, he could have been a wealthy man. Honoraria from his speaking engagements poured in at the rate of $200,000 or more a year. But he kept only a tiny fraction for himself. The rest he diverted to the SCLC treasury. He allowed himself an income of $10,000 to $12,000 a year: $4,000 from Ebenezer Church, $2,000 in parsonage allowance, and at most $6,000 in speaker’s fees that he retained for himself. He accepted only a one-dollar annual salary from the SCLC (qualifying his family for a group insurance plan). In spite of Coretta’s strong objection, he donated all of his $54,000 in Nobel Prize money to the movement. She had pleaded with him, vainly, to set aside $20,000 to start a fund for their children’s education.23

  Ultimately, he did bow to Coretta’s repeated demands that they own a house rather than rent. In 1965 they bought a modest bungalow on Sunset Street in the lower-middle-class Vine City neighborhood of Atlanta. The house had a two-car garage. But the Kings had just one car, a 1960 Ford, to park in it.

  Reports of King’s marital infidelity threatened to fray his relations with Coretta all the more. How much she knew of the allegations is not clear. There is no evidence that she was aware of his affair with Georgia Davis, much less that he had invited her to Memphis.

  Had Davis been his only lover outside marriage, he more easily could have kept Coretta in the dark. But there were others, according to various accounts. In his memoir Abernathy acknowledged King’s (and his own) “extramarital relations.”24 King’s two most authoritative biographers, Taylor Branch and David Garrow, claim that King had longtime mistresses, whom they don’t name, in Atlanta and Los Angeles.25

  That many women took a fancy to her husband was no surprise to Coretta. It didn’t hurt that he was funny and charming. His effect on women was magnetic and powerful for another reason. In the eyes of some women he was a hero, an eloquent, courageous fighter for African Americans. In her memoir Coretta would quote him, tellingly, as having described women as “hero-worshipers.”26 If hints about her husband’s extramarital dalliances reached Coretta’s ears, she blanked them out. Or so she said, and Abernathy agreed. He would write, “She rose above all the petty attempts to damage their marriage by refusing to even entertain such thoughts.”27 The thoughts might have entered her head anyhow. Without admitting knowledge of King’s philandering, Coretta artfully evaded the issue. As quoted by Garrow, she stated: “If I ever had suspicions . . . I never would have even mentioned them to Martin. I just wouldn’t have burdened him with anything so trivial.”28

  Certainly, she could not have been entirely clueless. As far back as 1957, the rumor circulated in Montgomery that he was unfaithful to his wife. That year, the black-owned Pittsburgh Courier newspaper printed a gossipy blurb saying that “a prominent minister in the Deep South, a man who has been making the headlines recently in his fight for civil rights” risked creating a scandal by being caught “in a hotel room with a woman other than his wife.” The man’s identity, though undisclosed, was obvious to many in civil rights circles.29

  Years later, an audiotape revealing King’s sexual conduct at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, in 1964, with a woman other than his wife wound up in Coretta’s hands. The tape was the twisted handiwork of the FBI as part of the bureau’s secret, multiyear bugging operation against King. It began as a misguided investigation of King as a communist. It had mutated into an illegal, runaway smear campaign to damage King’s reputation and blackmail him into quitting the movement. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had ordered the tape sent anonymously to the SCLC headquarters in Atlanta.30 Without listening to it, a staff member had forwarded it on to the Kings’ house. Coretta had listened, along with her husband. Later she declared that she could not identify the man caught on the tape as King.31

  If doubts about King’s fidelity caused her lasting heartache, she did not admit as much in her memoir. The tone was overwhelmingly reverential toward her husband. In a ghostwritten autobiography based on interviews with her and published in 2017, eleven years after her death, she is quoted as having stated that she did not have a single “instance of proof of Martin’s infidelity.”32

  But whatever the extent of his wife’s knowledge of King’s extramarital relations, he could not avoid self-reproach. The guilt about his being a “sinner,” as he would put it, appeared to be causing him great distress by the winter of 1968. As a matter of religious principle, he subscribed to the biblical prohibition against sex outside marriage.33 In a sermon at Ebenezer on March 4 his feelings gushed forth in self-condemnation, though he left the details to the congregation’s imagination. The sermon, based on a biblical passage about King David of Israel not fulfilling his dream of building a temple in Jerusalem, dealt with the regret that comes from falling short of one’s standards. He told his parishioners that they need not “go out this morning saying that Martin Luther King is a saint” but rather that he was a “sinner like all of God’s children.”34

  The gnawing guilt over his sinful lapses, along with the marital tensions in his life, only added to the strain on him as he confronted the crisis in Memphis. According to David Garrow, some of King’s aides saw King’s marital troubles as an important factor contributing to the depths of despair into which he sank after the rioting in the Tennessee city.35

  Chapter 18

  Invaders’ Exit

  It would be an act of romantic illusions for the Negro to feel that he can win a violent revolution.

  —MLK, speaking at an SCLC retreat in A
tlanta, January 15, 1968

  THE INVADERS WERE ON King’s mind as he dragged himself out of bed on Thursday morning. He struggled to his feet for a brief meeting with his staff.

  His aides reported back that their meetings with the Invaders the day before had not produced a clear-cut pledge from the Black Power group to cooperate with King on terms that were acceptable to him. The Invaders were still pressing hard for money as a condition of their support, and they were not clearly disavowing violence.

  The haggling seemed nonstop. King’s patience was wearing thin, his trust in the Black Power group ebbing.1 He asked his staff to redouble their efforts to bring the Invaders around. Still weary from too little sleep, he returned to bed for more rest.2

  Refreshed by the catnap, King left his room to look for Dorothy Cotton. A deeply committed civil rights activist, she was an integral part of his staff in Atlanta. And in Memphis, she had a key role to play.

  Cotton was thirty-eight, a year younger than King. Round-cheeked and bright-eyed, quick to laugh, she favored stylish dresses and dangling earrings. She had grown up poor in segregated Goldsboro, North Carolina. Working to pay her way, she earned an undergraduate degree at Virginia State College in Petersburg, Virginia, and a master’s degree in education from Boston University.

  She joined the SCLC staff in 1960 and threw herself heart and soul into the movement. She relocated to Atlanta, leaving her husband of five years, George Cotton, behind in Petersburg.

  King asked her to head educational programs at the SCLC. Her specialty was training civil rights activists in the philosophy and methods of nonviolent protest. In that role she helped to organize workshops that trained the members of the so-called Children’s Crusade, the young people who took to the streets during the Birmingham campaign in 1963.

  Now King intended to repeat the strategy of Birmingham, at least to the extent that time allowed, in Memphis. He was relying on Cotton to organize workshops in Memphis that would train people in nonviolence. But she had less than a week to do in Tennessee what it had taken many weeks to accomplish in Alabama. Recruiting the Invaders was a central part of King’s strategy. He was asking the Invaders to cooperate with the SCLC in endorsing nonviolence and helping to build “a larger coalition across the city,” as Cotton would put it years later.3