Chapter 4
Airport Arrival
The Movement lives or dies in Memphis.
—MLK, speaking to his staff, Atlanta, March 30, 1968
A CROWD AT GATE 17 of the Memphis airport was waiting for King’s delayed flight from Atlanta on Wednesday morning, April 3. In the welcoming party of about sixty were African American ministers, civil rights activists, and union leaders. There was a gaggle of news reporters, some shouldering TV cameras. Spilling into the hallway were dozens of curious outbound passengers. They stopped in their tracks to gawk.
King’s jet arrived at 10:33 a.m., as bursts of sunshine warmed the city. A photo published the next day in the Memphis Press-Scimitar, the afternoon daily, shows him and three of his aides on the airport tarmac. Overcoats draped over their arms, the aides hurry along. King seems to be hanging back, peering upward to his left, eyes narrowed, lips pursed. He looks wary, somber. In his white shirt and dark suit, the jacket tidily buttoned, he seems like a man with all under control except for the worry on his face.
Had his circumstances been different, the weather might have lifted his spirits. He was arriving in early spring. The temperature was in the upper sixties, though rain and a cold front were expected later in the day. Easter was eleven days away.
The sprawling city then stretched eastward almost to cotton fields. Westward was the downtown bluff near the swirling junction of the Mississippi and Wolf Rivers. Already Memphis was teeming with spring colors. Daffodils were peaking, bright yellow. The azaleas were a blaze of red, white, and purple. In sync with the flowers, ads in the two Memphis dailies were brimming with Easter sales offering pastel dresses and ornate bonnets.
The rhythm of life seemed utterly normal in other ways. Movie theaters were open for business. Hometown boy Elvis Presley had top billing in Stay Away, Joe, at the State, in which he played an Indian rodeo hand returning to the reservation to “raise the very devil with women,” as one reviewer wrote. In their nonstop Elvis watch, Memphis newspapers were reporting that he was in residence at Graceland with his wife, Priscilla, and their newborn daughter, Lisa Marie.
The annual Cotton Carnival was on the calendar, the city’s premier high-society event, a five-day extravaganza in late May. Exclusive secret societies were already doing their part by anointing faux-royalty from among the city’s social elite. Indeed, the Nineteenth Century Club and the Petroleum Club were each disclosing their picks for prince and princess. The princesses, all college students or fresh graduates, resplendent in white dresses and bejeweled crowns, would be riding through downtown streets on parade floats later that spring.
As the garbage workers’ strike entered its fifty-first day, however, no one could say that all was normal in Memphis. In many neighborhoods trash bags littered the sidewalks. Whole blocks of the downtown were in shambles from the riot of March 28. Store windows were shattered. Shelves were bare from looting.
Only a few of the thirty-eight hundred National Guard troops that patrolled the city after the riot remained on duty. The last of the armored personnel carriers, mounted with .50 caliber machine guns, were rumbling through the streets. Mayor Loeb had just lifted a curfew that had been in effect from 7:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. That order allowed the jazz and blues clubs on Beale Street to reopen. But an eerie, uneasy calm hung over the city.
Despite the air of foreboding, King was back in the thick of the racial crisis in Memphis. He knew that his plan to stage a peaceful march posed great risks. If the federal court issued an injunction prohibiting him from marching in Memphis, King would face some tough questions. Would he disobey a court order and risk the consequences? Would another march, in defiance of the court, spiral into violence, further damaging his reputation? Would he be risking his life recklessly? He already feared for his personal safety, a fear heightened by the bomb threat to his flight that morning in Atlanta.
When he emerged into the airport terminal, four policemen in blue uniforms would be waiting for him at Gate 17. It was the detail under the command of Lieutenant Don Smith, with orders to protect King while he was in Memphis. King had not been notified in advance that there would be police security for him. He may have scarcely noted the presence of Smith and the three other officers with him. Police often were on hand to greet King when he was traveling. They were hardly worth a second glance.
Along with Smith’s contingent, two African American police officers, Detective Edward Redditt and Patrolman Willie Richmond, were at Gate 17. They too were at the airport to watch King but for a different reason. Redditt and Richmond were wearing plain clothes. Their assignment was surveillance, not security. Their orders were to keep King “under continuous surveillance to see with whom he came in contact.”1
Also in the greeting party for King was the Reverend James Lawson, pastor of the Centenary United Methodist Church in Memphis. Lawson, himself a notable civil rights leader, was hard to miss. He was wearing black horn-rimmed glasses and a white clerical collar under a black pleated shirt. After the garbage workers’ strike began in Memphis, he had been chosen to head a support group known as the Community on the Move for Equality.
While waiting for King’s plane to arrive, Lieutenant Smith talked to Lawson. Smith informed him that there would be police security for King in Memphis and asked about his schedule for the day. “We have not fully made up our minds,” Lawson replied, according to a police report.2 Smith would say later that he interpreted Lawson’s response as evasive, that Lawson meant to sidestep the question. But Lawson would have another explanation. He would say that
