Giving himself utterly to the movement meant accepting the risk that he might die a violent death at any moment. He found comfort in the Christian concept that noble sacrifice for others had a “redemptive” value. Christian theology had adapted the word redemption from its usage in the Old Testament. In the earlier version, redemption had a specific meaning: paying a ransom to free or redeem a slave from bondage. In Christian theology the concept of redemption referred to the death of Jesus, a sacrifice to atone for the sins of others so that they might achieve eternal salvation.
By 1960 King was saying, in effect, that he had embedded the concept into his own psychic fiber. That year he published an essay in a Christian magazine explaining why he had reconciled himself to suffering in the struggle for freedom. “Recognizing the necessity for suffering,” he wrote, “I have tried to make it a virtue”—as a means to “heal” people afflicted by racism. The suffering he could justify by living “with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive.”14 That is, the sacrifice of his life would have redemptive value if he died in a virtuous quest for social injustice
Had he been less deeply religious or courageous, he might have been less outspoken, lowered his public profile, and minimized the risk of violent death. Instead, he doubled down. Within a few years, he was demanding not just racial desegregation and voting rights but total relief from poverty as a citizen’s fundamental right. He couched the idea in the name of redemption of a different kind.
The idea cropped up in his “I Have a Dream” address at the Washington Mall on August 28, 1963. He lamented that African Americans were living on “a lonely island of poverty,” and he portrayed the Declaration of Independence as a “promissory note” that the federal government must redeem. If all Americans had a God-given right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, King reasoned, that promise translated into the government’s obligation to alleviate poverty.
In the glow of the “I Have a Dream” speech, he was ever more visible on the national stage. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and in his acceptance speech at Oslo he said grandly, “I accept this prize for all men who love peace and brotherhood.”15 Time magazine put him on its cover. He had a private audience with Pope Paul VI. He met in the Oval Office with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. By and by, he had come to see himself in a more exalted light. As journalist David Halberstam would say, he had “finally come to believe his myth.”16
His scope of purpose widened in proportion to his self-image. He dedicated himself to pursuit of a mammoth federal program to end poverty, once and for all. In 1964 he called on Congress to pass a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged. It called on the government to devote, in his words, the “full resources of the society . . . to attack the tenacious poverty which so paradoxically exists in the midst of plenty.”17
When Congress did not respond as he hoped, he determined that he would bring greater political force to bear, and it needed to happen urgently. His answer was the Poor People’s Campaign. He imagined that his intervening in the garbage workers’ strike would further that mission. So he had gone to Memphis.
In the Look article published in the early spring of 1968, he explained why he was making poverty his paramount concern. He wrote, “If something isn’t done to deal with the very harsh and real economic problems of the ghetto, the talk of guerrilla warfare [among black militants] is going to become much more real.” Further, he expressed alarm that a continuing surge of riots in the nation’s inner cities might “strengthen the right wing of the country, and we’ll end up with a kind of right-wing take-over and a fascist development” that would be “terribly injurious to the nation.”18
If King was right in saying that a massive federal antipoverty program would spare the country the calamity of widespread rioting and fascism, it followed that it was a matter of the greatest urgency. But he was not optimistic that the public would rally quickly behind his costly proposal to end poverty. He expected stiff political resistance to a program that would vastly redistribute wealth and power.
His was a far-reaching ideology—“revolutionary,” he called it. His vision of the federal government providing a minimal income or guaranteed job for all Americans would have fit neatly into the platform of a European socialist. For the Poor People’s Campaign to succeed, Washington lawmakers had to agree to adopt a system of that kind—a system at odds with the American tradition of free enterprise and limited government. How likely was that to happen?
Even Michael Harrington, the socialist activist and astute writer, had his doubts that King would prevail in Washington. Harrington said that bringing thousands of poor people to lay siege to the government in the name of antipoverty relief could “make a strong moral point,” but he did not think it would “register as a victory in the public eye.”19
King himself doubted he would see the response he desired from Congress and the president. As he confided in Young, he expected the powers that be to come down heavily on him in Washington. He expected that his civil disobedience would land him in jail yet again. He might be there a long time.
Young would remember telling him, “If we get locked up in jail, it’s not going to be any thirty or sixty days. You’re going to get three to five years.”
King replied, “That would be just the right amount of time. We would be strong enough, spiritually, coming out of jail to really transform this nation.”20
Perhaps he knew of the government’s delayed response to the kind of grievance that had triggered the veterans’ Bonus March in Washington in 1932. Though President Hoover had not supported their demand for a bonus and had forcibly removed the veterans from their makeshift camp, their protest may not have been entirely in vain. It may have led Congress to enact educational benefits for World War II veterans in the form of the GI Bill of 1944.
No matter the outcome of the Poor People’s Campaign, King insisted, he would win a moral victory. As he told a union rally in New York City on March 10, 1968, “People ask me, ‘Suppose you go to Washington and you don’t get anything? You ask people and you mobilize and you organize, and you don’t get anything. You’ve been an absolute failure.’ My only answer is that when you stand up for justice, you can never fail.”21
King’s aggressive new posture was exposing him to another risk besides failure. He was issuing an ultimatum: either Washington politicians approve the revolutionary ideology he advocated or his army of poor people would paralyze the business of Washington. He would be more visible and controversial than ever. His tactics were sure to provoke a harsh backlash. The establishment would vilify him, and he knew it. King was putting his life in greater jeopardy, and he knew that too.
At Ebenezer Church on February 4, he preached his own eulogy in what became known as the Drum Major Sermon.22 If his congregants read between the lines, they understood that he was sermonizing about his imminent death and how he had come to terms with it. He began by quoting from the tenth chapter of the Gospel of Mark. It tells of two apostles of Jesus—James and John—seeking to sit beside him in glory. In King’s telling, Jesus responds that “whosoever will be great among you” shall be thy servant, and “whosoever will be the chiefest shall be the servant of all.”
From that homage to humble service to others, as exemplified by Jesus, King drew a moral for himself. He went on to reflect on his low regard for what he called the “drum major instinct.” He conceded, “We all want to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade.” He noted how that instinct can lead people astray in many ways—extravagant spending on cars and houses, self-puffery, crime, false gossip, a racist sense of superiority, and other evils.
Then he turned to his own legacy. That thought had him ruminating about his death, his funeral, and the kind of eulogy he would want. His legacy, he said, he would leave to the Ebenezer congregation to define. Not entirely, though. He implored them to remember him not for his Nobel Peace Prize or his three or four hundred other awards.
No, he cried out, as the sermon reached its climax, if they should remember him as a drum major, he beseeched them to remember him as a drum major for justice and righteousness. His voice taut, he went on to say that if he could do his Christian duty and “bring salvation to a world once wrought, if I can spread the message as the master taught,” then his life would not have been in vain.23
He imagined that he would die with a sense of redemptive virtue. That was the compensation he sought.
– Epilogue –
Eluding a massive manhunt to capture him, JAMES EARL RAY remained at large for sixty-five days after King’s death. On June 8, as he attempted to leave Heathrow Airport in London, bound for Brussels, he was identified and arrested. To avoid a jury trial that might have resulted in his execution, on March 10, 1969, he pleaded guilty in a Memphis courtroom to first-degree murder and was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. Three days later, he denied having shot King, claiming that he was the dupe of a conspiracy. Despite intensive investigations by the FBI, a Justice Department task force, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, no specific conspiracy was established, though the congressional committee theorized, based on circumstantial evidence, that some individuals, possibly one or both of Ray’s brothers John and Jerry, might have been coconspirators with him. Ray died in a Nashville prison of kidney failure and complications from liver disease on April 23, 1998. He was seventy.
HENRY LOEB never wavered from his stand not to negotiate directly with the sanitation workers’ union. Within two weeks of King’s death, the Memphis city council reached a settlement with the union, providing a dues checkoff through the credit union, union recognition, and a ten-cent increase in hourly pay. Loeb did not officially ink the settlement but did not stand in the way of its adoption. He left the mayoralty when his term ended in 1972 and relocated to a farm near Forrest City, Arkansas. In 1988 he suffered a stroke that left him unable to speak. He died four years later at the age of seventy-one.
FRANK HOLLOMAN retired as Memphis police and fire director in 1970 to become security coordinator at the University of Missouri. In a speech to members of a security-industry association five months after King’s death, he stated that the involvement of “outside people” had caused the trouble in Memphis that year by “inflaming the Negro community.”1
LUCIUS BURCH practiced law in Memphis until shortly before his death in 1996 at eighty-four.
WILLIE RICHMOND served for thirty-two years as a police officer in Memphis. He became eligible to take the police department’s test for promotion to lieutenant in 1973. He scored one hundred but was not promoted until 1979. He and one other policeman were the first two blacks to make lieutenant. Richmond retired from the force in 1997 as a captain.
JOE WARREN remained active in AFSCME Local 1733 for many years. He was one of eight former sanitation workers—participants in the strike of 1968—honored by President Obama in a White House ceremony in April 2011. Warren died of a heart attack in 2012. He was ninety-one.
GEORGIA DAVIS served as a Kentucky state senator for twenty-one years, championing legislation to end discrimination in employment and discrimination by sex and age. She married James Powers in 1973 and took his name. She was widely regarded as one of the most influential civil rights leaders in the history of Kentucky. She died of congestive heart failure on January 30, 2016, at the age of ninety-two.
ANDREW YOUNG served as congressman from Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District, US ambassador to the United Nations, and mayor of Atlanta. Since retiring from politics in 1990, he has held positions with a variety of nonprofit organizations, including a term as president of the National Council of Churches.
JESSE JACKSON resigned as director of Operation Breadbasket in 1971 after a falling-out with Ralph Abernathy. He has continued to pursue civil rights and political causes as head of Rainbow/PUSH, based in Chicago. In 1984 and 1988 he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for president.
RALPH ABERNATHY succeeded King as president of the SCLC in April 1968. Along with Coretta King, he assumed leadership of the Poor People’s Campaign, which commenced the next month. The antipoverty drive ended futilely after police, on June 24, drove hundreds of protesters from the shantytown they had erected near the Washington Memorial. When he refused to comply with orders to evacuate, Abernathy was jailed for nearly three weeks. He headed the SCLC for nine more years. He died of complications from blood clots on April 17, 1990, at the age of sixty-four.
After her husband’s death, CORETTA KING played a prominent role as a political activist supporting the causes of African Americans, women, and gay people. In 1968 she founded the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. She died of ovarian cancer on January 30, 2006. She was seventy-eight.
– Notes –
CHAPTER 1: ATLANTA DEPARTURE
Ralph David Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 419.
1. Coretta Scott King, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 290.
2. G. Wayne Dowdy, A Brief History of Memphis (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2011), 63.
3. Joan Turner Beifuss, At the River I Stand: Memphis, the 1968 Strike, and Martin Luther King (orig. pub., 1985; Memphis: St. Lukes Press, 1990), 256.
4. E. H. Arkin, Civil Disorders, Memphis, Tennessee, Feb. 12–April 12, 1968, report of Memphis Police Dept., 36–37, Frank Holloman Collection, Shelby County Room, Memphis Public Library, Memphis, Tennessee (hereafter Holloman Collection).
5. Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 376.
6. Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 238.
7. David L. Lewis, King: A Critical Biography (New York: Praeger, 1970), 383.
8. Ibid.
9. FBI memo from New York Bureau to headquarters, April 1, 1968, transcript of conversation between King and Stanley Levison, King FOIA file 00000172–176.TIF.
10. David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Leadership Conference (orig. pub., 1986; New York: Perennial Classics, 2004), 391; Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, 323; and Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 513.
11. Gerold Frank, An American Death: The True Story of the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Greatest Manhunt of Our Time (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 91.
12. Harry Belafonte with Michael Shnayerson, My Song: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 2011), 311.
13. Tavis Smiley, Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year (New York: Little, Brown, 2014), 74.
14. Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Free Press, 2000), 6.
15. Ralph Abernathy, testimony, August 14, 1978, in Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the US House of Representatives Ninety-Fifth Congress, Second Session (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1979) (hereafter cited as HSCA testimony), vol. 1, 18.
16. Dorothy F. Cotton, If Your Back’s Not Bent: The Role of the Citizenship Education Program in the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Atria Books, 2012), 260.
17. Dorothy F. Cotton, author interview by telephone, February 18, 2013.
18. Andrew Young, author interview, Atlanta, October 12, 2012.
19. Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, 428.
CHAPTER 2: DETOUR
Martin Luther King Jr. at Stanford, “The Other America,” 1967, available at YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3H978KlR20.
1. Martin Luther King Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” National Cathedral, Washington, DC, March 31, 1968, in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperOne, 1986), 272–73.
&nb
sp; 2. Ibid., 275.
3. Briefcase contents, Morehouse College: Martin Luther King Jr. Collection, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, Atlanta (hereafter cited as Woodruff Library).
4. Martin Luther King Jr., unpublished manuscript, October 14, 1966, 1–2, Woodruff Library.
5. Helen B. Shaffer, “Negroes in the North,” in Editorial Research Reports 1965, vol. II, 779–97 (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1965), http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/cqresrre1965102700.
6. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (orig. pub. 1964; Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 21.
7. Ibid., 107.
8. Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” speech delivered April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church, New York City, Common Dreams, http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115–13.htm.
9. Martin Luther King Jr., “Need to Go to Washington,” unpublished transcript of a news conference, Atlanta, January 16, 1968, 1–6, archives of King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Atlanta (hereafter King Center archives).
10. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 615.
11. King, “Remaining Awake,” 272–73.
12. Martin Luther King Jr., transcript of a speech, Waycross, Georgia, March 22, 1968, 3–6, King Center archives.
13. King schedule, Southern Christian Leadership Conference Records, William Rutherford Files, box 197, folder 9, item 3810, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta.
Redemption Page 19
