At Canaan's Edge (107 page)

“This is what I am not so sure about,” said Levison.

“Well, you watch your newspapers,” said King. “Watch the
New York Times
editorials…. I think it will be the most negative thing about Martin Luther King that you have ever seen.”

“For a time, yes,” admitted Levison, unable to check King's mood.

“There will not be even one sympathetic—even with our friends, it won't be there.”

King broke away to catch an afternoon flight home. AFSCME president Jerry Wurf escorted him to the airport so they could exchange crisis strategy in person, and they agreed the sanitation strike had very little time to mount a comeback. Wurf admitted a negotiating error in his early offer to defer all economic demands, including a 10 cent hourly raise, which left no room for compromise once Mayor Loeb publicly rejected bargaining rights for the union as immoral. Wurf had just squeezed a $20,000 sustenance donation from AFL-CIO leader George Meany, but strike support was costing $50,000 per week. Impoverished strikers already were suffering evictions and repossessions of scarce property. For Wurf, the desperate challenge was to find reinforcements among distant white trade unions that were tepid at best about civil rights or critics of the Vietnam War, and thereby raise bargaining leverage decisively above the uncollected garbage and daily marches. Doggedly at that moment, Lawson was leading sanitation men back to City Hall under a precarious truce, secured by intermediaries, that police would attack only if they saw young people in the line. (“We never had any problem with what we called the ‘tub-toter,'” said assistant chief Lux.) With their placards now hung from strings instead of sticks, as a nonviolent precaution, marchers stepped gingerly over riot debris between boarded windows and National Guard formations of bayoneted rifles, past piles of garbage starting to cook in 82 degree weather.

This was plainly not enough to secure a settlement. For King, Memphis prefigured the huge dilemma of Washington. How could he mobilize a large coalition in the face of a hostile consensus that nonviolence would not work? His internal opposition now included young factions maneuvering a treacherous line between competitive hustle and sincere belief that guerrilla methods superseded “old-time” civil rights. “The young people here have reached a political consciousness that those ministers do not understand or control,” one Invader told a movement journal. “As for nonviolence, that died in Newark and Detroit.” Another proclaimed the end of marches in an interview featured among world events on NBC's
Nightly News.
“I think my answer is ‘by any means necessary,'” Coby Smith told viewers, echoing Malcolm X. “If the community can only respond to force and burning and shooting and looting, then we'll do it.”

K
ING ASKED
Abernathy to drop him off straight from the Atlanta airport at the downtown Butler Street YMCA, where he hoped a steam bath and rubdown from his blind masseur would revive him for a promised Friday night out with Coretta and the Abernathys. Shortly, however, he called Juanita Abernathy from the gym to say he did not feel like going to a restaurant or movie. “If I get some fish, will you cook it?” he asked. “Corrie will help you.” She readily agreed, in part because he sounded so needy, and saved for a surprise her annual casserole of leftover pig dishes that he and Abernathy considered a sublime delicacy. That night, after the casserole and fish, the other three instinctively tried to divert King with light memories from Montgomery before the bus boycott, about church gossip and eager young couples. Although vacant and depressed, he seemed vaguely entertained and refused to go home. He fell asleep in his clothes on a love seat, grumbling that it was too small. Abernathy dozed nearby. Coretta, still tender from surgery, lay across a bed, and Juanita Abernathy slumped over a kitchen counter.

They woke late for the emergency meeting about Thursday's riot. Lawyer Chauncey Eskridge had arrived from Chicago along with Stanley Levison from New York, Walter Fauntroy from Washington, and Joseph Lowery from Mobile. Jesse Epps came from Memphis with a mandate from AFSCME and James Lawson to ensure King's return for a “redemption” march, but the top SCLC staff members lodged dozens of complaints by the time Abernathy and King trudged up to the third-floor conference room at Ebenezer. Some said trade unions always shortchanged partnership with black groups. Several grilled Bernard Lee about Memphis. Who trained the marshals? Did Lawson collect weapons in advance, or conduct workshops on nonviolence with the participants? Did the marshals even try to keep bystanders separate from the lines? Why did King and Abernathy start the march if they felt ominous stirrings all around them? Not a few critics recalled their predictions that King would get bogged down in this backwater movement. Bernard Lafayette objected that Memphis would mean more strain and distraction for a Washington crusade they had postponed twice already. “Why take us to Memphis, broke as we are?” he asked.

King absorbed the raw speeches mildly, as was his custom, then rose from a wooden Sunday School table to argue that they all underestimated their problem. “We are in serious trouble,” he said. The Memphis riot had discredited nonviolent tenets at the heart of their movement. If they simply abandoned the garbage strike, a presumption of violence would follow them to the national stage with greatly magnified risk and opposition. Therefore, said King, he felt by no means committed to either Memphis
or
Washington—regardless of what he told the press—unless first convinced that they could restore the integrity of nonviolent protest. This was a staff decision, because he could not do it alone. “Memphis is the Washington campaign in miniature,” he said.

His appeal backfired by reopening dissent against the Washington campaign itself. Andrew Young warned that the whole plan might be moot for the year, anyway, as the tangled logistics could well push the start back into June, when the summer recess of Congress would deprive them of “Pharaoh” rulers to plague. Young proposed to make constructive use of delay, and questioned the enormous effort to assemble and maintain a novel protest army of polyglot poor people in Washington. He doubted Stanley Levison's analogy with the Bonus Marchers of 1932–34, whose suffering and rejection had kindled delayed support for New Deal initiatives, and James Bevel renewed his attack on the entire calculation. “Aw, that's just a bunch of bullshit,” he declared. “We don't need to be hanging around Washington. We need to stop this war.” Bevel described Vietnam as a political sickness more deeply rooted than poverty, and his rhetoric bristled with street militancy poised ingeniously at the limit of nonviolence. Jesse Jackson, like Bevel, excelled in slashing vocabulary that suggested a competitive preacher's “chops” better suited to the new moods than King's ecumenical language. Jackson called Memphis too small and Washington too unformed. Nobody could tell him how long they might be in Washington, where they would be suspended on nothing more than political supplication tied to the lowest strand of the economy. How could he justify breaking off commitments to Operation Breadbasket, which forged real power out of settlements ranging from neighborhoods and youth gangs to big corporations?

This time King stood seething. “Ralph, give me my car keys,” he said quietly. Abernathy surrendered them with a stricken, quizzical look as King said they could go on without him. “He did something I've never heard him do before,” Levison confided afterward on his wiretapped phone. “He criticized three members of the staff with his eloquence. And believe me, that's murder. And was very negative.” King said Young had given in to doubt, Bevel to brains, and Jackson to ambition. He said they had forgotten the simple truths of witness. He said the movement had made them, and now they were using the movement to promote themselves. He confronted Bevel, who had been a mentor to Jackson and Young, as a genius who flummoxed his own heart. “You don't like to work on anything that isn't your own idea,” said King. “Bevel, I think you owe
me
one.”

Abernathy, Jackson, and Young rushed after King. “Doc, doc, don't worry!” called Jackson in the stairwell. “Everything's going to be all right.”

King whirled on a landing and pointed up to shout. “Jesse, everything's
not
going to be all right!” he cried. “If things keep going the way they're going now, it's not SCLC but the whole country that's in trouble. I'm not asking, ‘Support me.' I don't need this. But if you're so interested in doing your own thing that you can't do what this organization's structured to do, if you want to carve out your own niche in society, go ahead. But for God's sake, don't bother me!” His fury echoed in the conference room.

Abernathy returned alone, helpless. He said King left instructions to put his schedule on hold, beginning with tomorrow's sermon in Washington to defend the poverty campaign. Recriminations wore on for eight hours. Hosea Williams accused Bevel and Jackson of scheming to topple King. Jesse Epps said King would be scorned as a coward unless the staff facilitated a successful return to Memphis. Staff members flayed Epps and Lawson for causing the crisis, and arguments for contending options flew apart without King at the hub. William Rutherford said neither Memphis nor Washington made much sense to him, because they defied the stable plans and budgets dear to a professional manager, but he conceded that irrational inspiration from the movement was precisely what had lured him home from decades in exile. Stanley Levison criticized King in absentia for presenting their challenge as nothing less than making nonviolence popular, saying the goal was merely to keep a bunch of kids from ruining their protest method. If they did that, Levison argued, focus could be restored for projects on poverty and racism. On his reduced scope, Lafayette and Rutherford circulated with a pragmatic message that there would be support funds in the Washington campaign for Breadbasket and Vietnam protest, with an implicit message that Jackson and Bevel would be pinched otherwise through the SCLC budget. Andrew Young allowed that a corrective march would be quicker and surer if they all worked together. “All right,” he bargained with Epps. “For this one time.”

Gestures of accommodation ended with a mystical pronouncement from Joseph Lowery. “He said very quietly, ‘The Lord has been in this room this afternoon,'” Levison told a friend. “‘I know he's been here because we could not have deliberated the way we did without the Holy Spirit being here. And the Holy Spirit is going to be with us in Memphis and Washington, and I know we're going to win.' And then,” Levison continued, “because he was a little embarrassed at giving a little sermon, he ends up giving kind of an Indian war whoop. At which point Andy got up and started to do a little dance. And then somehow all of us were standing up shaking hands with each other.” Many of those present guessed—from alarmingly indiscreet movements in the wings—that King had arranged a rendezvous with his respected Atlanta mistress of many years, but only Abernathy knew how to track them down. King returned to learn of the battered reconciliation: they would go to Washington through Memphis. Bevel, Jackson, Williams, and James Orange agreed jointly to organize nonviolent workshops, as with the Chicago gangs. Lafayette would recruit poverty volunteers from one extra city, and Rutherford said he could run the next staff meeting from the Lorraine Motel.

K
ING KEPT
the next morning's engagement in Washington after all. He found the public mood broadly shuttered against him, as sympathetic voices saw in the Memphis “mini-riot” a harbinger of national calamity. “How do you keep the looters out?” asked Edward Brooke on the Senate floor. The
New York Times
warned against “emotional demonstrations in this time of civic unrest.” Its editors reminded King that Gandhi once “had made a ‘Himalayan miscalculation' by asking his people to adopt civil disobedience before they understood or were ready for it.” The Memphis march served only “to solidify white sentiment against the strikers,” said the
Times,
and “Dr. King must by now realize that his descent on Washington is likely to prove even more counterproductive.” The
Washington Post
brooded in plaintive apprehension. “Let us have a march, by all means,” an editorial soon suggested in feinted support. “But why not turn it around and have its route run from Washington to where the poverty is, instead of from where the poverty is to Washington?”

Overtly hostile opinion took up the FBI's dual themes. Tennessee representative Robert Everett told the U.S. House that King “ran like a scared rabbit,” while John Stennis of Mississippi led senators demanding that the administration blockade the anti-poverty hordes preemptively at the D.C. city limits. In a Saturday editorial, “King's Credibility Gap,” the
Memphis Commercial Appeal
argued that “King's pose as the leader of a non-violent movement has been shattered.” On Sunday, the
Commercial Appeal
headlined its attack, “Chicken a la King,” while the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
branded “The Real Martin Luther King…one of the most menacing men in America today.” The accompanying cartoon in St. Louis presented a grotesque zombie labeled King aiming a huge pistol from clouds of gun smoke and bullets with the caption: “I'm Not Firing It—I'm Only Pulling the Trigger.” Congressional investigators would discover a decade later that the
Globe-Democrat
was among the FBI's regular outlets, and that the editorial borrowed wholesale from Hoover's clandestine propaganda: “Memphis could be only the prelude to a massive bloodbath in the national's [sic] capital in several weeks.”