At Canaan's Edge (103 page)

King broke away to give a Thursday evening speech to nearly three thousand cheering supporters in the wealthy Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe. Some of the two hundred pickets on the sidewalk crashed inside with shouts of “Commie!” and “Traitor!” until officers ejected them to end heckling that King called the most intense yet during a speech, and tremors from national politics followed him. Robert Kennedy left a message for King at the SCLC office. Burke Marshall persisted until he reached King late Friday, saying Kennedy knew the California Democratic Council endorsed Senator McCarthy that night—amid rumors that King would do the same when he addressed the group at noon—and he hoped King at least could refrain from political commitments until they talked. King did stay noncommittal to reporters who intercepted him at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, where his speech earned cheers without preferring a candidate or attacking President Johnson by name. “The government is emotionally committed to the war,” King charged that Saturday, March 16. “It is emotionally hostile to the needs of the poor.” Kennedy's delayed entry and McCarthy's shortcomings roiled voter loyalties from the first weekend of a bitter three-way contest, when the President issued his most bellicose call for “total national effort” to win in Vietnam. “We love nothing more than peace,” Johnson told the National Farmers Union, “but we hate nothing worse than surrender and cowardice.”

King withdrew in Los Angeles to manage the aftermath of his non-black summit. He sent a telegram to César Chávez (“We are together with you”), knowing Robert Kennedy had just visited Chávez dramatically at the end of his fast. He resolved to change Michael Harrington's draft call to Washington with broader emphasis on all the invisible sub-nations of American poverty. He promised to squeeze in personal visits to Indian reservations and migrant labor camps from California and Appalachia to Massachusetts. With his schedule already jammed, and the start date looming in April, these extra commitments sorely distressed King's aides even before James Lawson tracked him down by telephone in Los Angeles through the leaders of Holman United Methodist Church—where King would preach the first of several sermons on Sunday, and where Lawson already had designs to become pastor. Lawson could hear Andrew Young and Bernard Lee remonstrating in the background. Any thought of going to Memphis was preposterous, they said, because King would get snared and bogged down as always, then have to postpone Washington again. To counter, Lawson told King why he would find no more potent juncture of poverty and race than the month-long garbage strike. He played to an orator's vanity with glowing accounts that Wilkins and Bayard Rustin had just drawn upward of seven thousand people, then closed with a practical argument that King's upcoming poverty tour of Mississippi could begin from Memphis, like the Meredith march.

A flurry of logistical changes began with flight detours out of New Orleans from Los Angeles on Monday, March 18. Lawson met King's plane that evening with Jesse Epps, an AFSCME representative known for volunteer work in SCLC's Grenada, Mississippi, movement. When Epps apologized that the crowd waiting was not the ten thousand Lawson had promised, King looked so crestfallen that Lawson quickly waved off the ruse. “Jim was wrong,” Epps corrected, beaming. There were
fifteen
thousand at least, he said. “No one else can get in the house.”

It took a flying wedge of preachers and sanitation workers to guide King's party into the cavernous Mason Temple through crowded aisles and a pulsing crescendo of cheers. Against all fire codes, some spectators climbed high into rafters that suspended a giant white banner with a Bible quote from Zechariah: “NOT BY MIGHT, NOT BY POWER, SAITH THE LORD OF HOSTS, BUT BY MY SPIRIT.” The platform below teemed with dignitaries, from AFSCME president Jerry Wurf to Rev. H. Ralph Jackson in his spats, plus three stately new garbage cans filled with donations. When King in his blue suit reached the bank of microphones, the noise receded no lower than a constant hum, and applause erupted again each time he paid tribute to their unity and purpose. “You are demanding that this city will respect the dignity of labor,” he said.

They clapped when he asked if they knew most poor people worked every day, and even cheered most sentences of his exegesis on the parable of Lazarus and Dives. “You are here to demand that Memphis will see the poor,” King cried. Energy in the hall brimmed so close to the surface that he backed off to summarize the previous decade. “Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality,” he resumed. There was no need to build or persuade by the rules of oratory, as a feeder line in rhythm easily rekindled the crowd. “We are tired,” said King. “We are tired of being at the bottom. [“Yes!”] We are tired…. We are tired of our men being emasculated so that our wives and our daughters have to go out and work in the white lady's kitchen.” He used old riffs—“Now is the time…”—and improvised new ones on staying together and the nature of power. “Power is the ability to achieve purpose,” said King, to applause. “Power is the ability to effect change…and I want you to stick it out so that you will be able to make Mayor Loeb and others say ‘Yes' even when they want to say ‘No.'” He paused through the next ovations with a quizzical look.

“Now you know what?” he asked. “You may have to escalate the struggle a bit.” His conversational tone for once hushed the crowd. “If they keep refusing, and they will not recognize the union,” said King, “I tell you what you ought to do. And you are together here enough to do it. In a few days you ought to get together and just have a general work stoppage in the city of Memphis.”

This time cheers rose into sustained, foot-stomping bedlam, which drowned out further words, and King stepped back into the embrace of colleagues already in furious consultation. With Lawson, Andrew Young passed King a note that perhaps he could swing back through Memphis. Temporarily at least, the rejuvenating clamor made the garbage strike seem the heart of a poverty movement instead of a foolish diversion from the Washington goal. Abernathy tried to hold the departing crowd until King returned to the podium. “I want to tell you that I am coming back to Memphis on Friday,” he said, “to lead you in a march through the center of Memphis.”

Walter Bailey welcomed his guests when the excitement was over. He had bought the old Melba Inn in 1945, when he could still raise turkeys in the back, and meant to name it for his wife, Lorene, before the sign came out Lorraine Motel “some kinda way.” Bailey enjoyed the SCLC preachers above Count Basie and many celebrities, because King was approachable enough to let people slap him on the back. “You could touch him,” said Bailey, who remembered the thick shoulders. “He was hard as a brick.”

Into the night, King coldly appraised the strike with his friends Benjamin Hooks and Billy Kyles. A shopping boycott hurt downtown merchants, but AFSCME sustenance for families ran low. Garbage piles grew slowly because the city found emergency crews for nearly half its trucks. Mayor Loeb's majority held solid. Later, eager students in bathrobes and slippers intruded with a command invitation to the Lorraine conference room, where the traveling women's choir from a Texas college serenaded King with a midnight medley on the theme “Hallelujah.”

K
ING'S BARNSTORMING
caravan descended from Memphis into the wonder and strain of Mississippi. With Bevel and Dorothy Cotton, he appealed for poverty recruits Tuesday morning in Batesville, then pushed west into Marks, where a small crowd waited in a flimsy board church with old funeral parlor calendars for interior walls. “Statistics reveal that you live in the poorest county in the United States,” King told them. “Now this isn't right.” He was describing the “great movement” ahead in Washington when a white man wobbled through the door and reached furtively in his pocket. The man pulled out a hundred-dollar bill for the collection plate, turning panic to awe, then introduced himself as a Mr. Mobley with a slurred speech to the effect that they were all going to the same place and should mind their own business. “But let me say this,” he added. “There ain't nobody hungry here in Mississippi. Old Kennedy got up here the other day and said folks are starving to death.”

“All right, all right,” King said carefully. “Thank you so much, brother Mobley. Thank you.”

“Wait a minute here,” said Mobley. “I ain't just exactly through.” In fits and starts, he said an old colored preacher was supposed to come with him but could not make it. That was all.

“Well, we want to thank you so much, brother Mobley,” King said, beckoning Abernathy and Hosea Williams to escort the troubled donor outside, and there was no way to tell how much the odd exchange put King off balance for the subsequent presentations. On invitation, local residents came forward in a stream. One mother said her children ate pinto beans “morning noon and night.” Another said hers stayed home from school because they had no clothes. Both Abernathy and Andrew Young were surprised to see tears roll down King's face from the plainspoken eloquence about hurt and disease. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I've listened to your problems, and it is—it has touched me,” said King. As he fumbled for words, Nina Evans walked up to say she had no food and no way to get any. King asked Hosea Williams to take down her name.

Right then, on the drive to Clarksdale, King resolved that the mule train for Washington would leave from Marks. He delivered an inspired pitch for volunteers to six hundred people waiting in Chapel Hill Baptist Church, but only two tentative hands went up to show interest in the long journey. They moved on to Greenwood two hours behind schedule, touching off shouts of joy—“He's here! He's here!”—as two local ministers virtually lifted King through the crowd at Jennings Temple Church. Praising Greenwood as “a real movement town,” he spoke nakedly of the testimony about Delta conditions in nearby Marks. “I wept with them as I heard numerous women stand up on their feet,” said King. “I heard them talking about the fact that they didn't even have any blankets to cover their children up on a cold night. And I said to myself, ‘God doesn't like this.' And we are going to say in no uncertain terms that we aren't going to accept it any longer. We've got to go to Washington in big numbers.”

He pleaded for lone grandparents or whole families alike, saying food and shelter would be provided. “Now we just want you to sign up and go,” King exhorted. “Don't have to worry about anything. Just have the will to go to Washington.” He promised freedom schools and music festivals along with demonstrations every day. He said they were going to put real sharecropper huts on trucks and present them to the Smithsonian as relics of modern poverty. “We're not playing about this thing,” cried King. “We're going to have a time in Washington. We're going to make this nation move again, and we're going to make America see poor people.”

Once again, King's call for volunteers turned cheers into fearful silence. Switching to the chartered Cessna, he flew to the same result at packed churches in Grenada and Laurel. Nearly eight hundred people still waited at St. Paul Methodist when the Cessna landed after midnight in Hattiesburg—four hours late—and the Mississippi marathon ended toward dawn in a Jackson motel. Though back up early, they were still six hours late to the last stop Wednesday night in Bessemer, Alabama, outside Birmingham. Crowds waited endlessly to press around King. Pleading hoarseness, he left most of the speaking to Hosea Williams, who announced another delay until April 27 on the start date for the mule train to Washington. Behind the scenes, recruitment troubles in rural areas stiffened resentment of Indian and Hispanic groups scheduled to join the Southeastern pilgrimage in Jackson. One of Williams's deputies grumbled that the newcomers failed to understand they were mere children within the freedom movement. In public, Williams pointed to three white observers with tape recorders in the balcony. “You can pass all the riot laws you want,” he shouted, “but you cannot suppress the dignity of man!” Bad weather mercifully allowed King to cancel several Alabama stops on Thursday, March 21, for sleep at home before the flight back to Memphis.

Crises converged for nonviolence and violence alike. In Washington, J. Edgar Hoover reported secretly to President Johnson that King had raised only $1,000 from eight Mississippi rallies and was discouraged by a lack of response to his anti-poverty drive. The President was consumed by his forthcoming speech on the big Vietnam troop request. To clear the way, he decided to relieve General Westmoreland from battlefield command with a promotion to Army chief of staff. He complained to Senator Russell that Robert Kennedy already was “storming these states and those governors and switching the bosses all over the country.” Of the Wise Men summoned for final advice the next Monday, only Justice Fortas of Memphis pushed in advance to send all the soldiers, telling Johnson that anything less would advertise weakness with “our own sensitivity to criticism, our own dislike of bloodshed.”

From Memphis, an amazed James Lawson called King before dawn on Friday, March 22. A rare dusting of snow in the Mississippi Delta had become a freak blizzard of sixteen inches on the first day of spring. The march would have to wait a few days, Lawson said wryly, but King could claim delivery of a work stoppage beyond dreams. Nothing moved at all, and interpretations of providential wonder circulated through silent, blanketed Memphis. “Well, the Lord has done it again,” H. Ralph Jackson mordantly declared. “It's a white world.” A church woman in white Memphis claimed to receive a sobering command for charity toward the strike: “The Lord sent the snow to give us another chance.”