Yet another face in the crowd at Gate 17 was Tarlese Matthews. An impassioned strike supporter, she had made a name for herself in local civil rights circles a decade earlier. She had demanded entry to the Memphis Zoo at Overton Park on a day other than Thursday. The zoo was open to blacks only on Thursdays (except when a Thursday coincided with a holiday, when only whites could attend). On non-holiday Thursdays a sign at the gate proclaimed: “NO WHITE PEOPLE ALLOWED IN THE ZOO TODAY.” Stopped from entering one day when the zoo was closed to blacks, Matthews did not merely turn around and go home. She sued. Her lawsuit forced the city to desegregate not just the zoo but also the nearby municipal park and golf course.
Matthews was at the airport in her gray-and-black Buick Electra to chauffeur King while he was in Memphis. She noted that Lieutenant George Davis, one of the officers in Smith’s detail, was at the gate. She also recognized Detective Redditt nearby.
Matthews bristled. She knew that undercover police were monitoring the pro-strike meetings. She claimed that the police were intimidating the strikers, violating their rights to free speech and assembly, not enforcing the law impartially. She faulted the police for having employed what she regarded as brutal tactics during two pro-strike marches.
On February 23 the police had used clubs and the anti-riot agent Mace against the marchers. (How the incident started was a matter of dispute. Did a squad car crowd the marchers and run over a woman’s foot, or did the marchers provoke the police by rocking a squad car?) On March 28, during the march led by King, the police had responded to the rioting by a small number of youths. Officers fired tear gas and once again clubbed many people who were protesting peacefully.
Matthews stopped Lieutenant Davis. “We have not invited any police,” she said.4
Then she confronted Detective Redditt. He and Richmond had been working undercover as partners since the strike began. They had the delicate task—“snooping,” the strike’s supporters called it—of tracking pro-strike meetings, rallies, and marches and reporting their observations to the Inspectional Division of the Memphis Police Department.
Pointing a finger at Redditt, Matthews snapped, according to a police report, “I’m going to get you.” The anger that she directed at Redditt reflected her deep distrust of the Memphis police, even of the African Americans on the force.
In the hallway beyond Gate 17, King paused before a knot of reporters. He invited questions. In its edition that morning the Commercial Appeal reported that Mayor Loeb probably would seek an injunction from US District Court judge Bailey Brown to bar King from marching in Memphis.
King was asked if he would obey such an injunction. “I have my legal advisors with me,” he replied, “and conscience also has to be consulted.” If the federal court in Memphis blocked him from leading the march, he said, it would amount to “a basic denial of First Amendment privileges. We stand on the First Amendment.”5
If King violated a federal injunction, he would be scuttling a core principle of his longtime strategy. He had defied state court injunctions against SCLC demonstrations on the grounds that they were protected under the US Constitution. He had, however, never disobeyed a federal court injunction (although he had come close to doing so in Selma, Alabama). Favorable rulings of the federal judiciary had been a critical bulwark of the movement.
A reporter asked about the risk that people marching under King’s banner might act violently during the upcoming protest, as they had on March 28. “We have been meeting with them,” King said, interpreting the question to refer to a local Black Power group, the Invaders. “These groups have committed themselves to co-operation with us.”
Another reporter asked a question that went beyond the immediate crisis in Memphis. He asked if the rioting during the march in Memphis six days earlier had caused King to rethink his plan for the Poor People’s Campaign.
“Our plan in Washington is going on,” King replied. “Memphis will not in any way curtail or deter it. We must spotlight the plight of the poor nationally.”
What about NAACP president Roy Wilkins’s comment that the Memphis rioting might be a preview of what lay ahead for the People’s Campaign?
“He said that before,” King shot back. “That’s not new.”
At the conclusion of the impromptu press conference King and his entourage of aides hurried down the glass-and-brick concourse toward the terminal exit. The four aides traveling with him were seasoned SCLC staff members. Ralph Abernathy, who was forty-two, was the oldest. The thirty-two-year-old Bernard Lee was the youngest. King himself was thirty-nine.
Abernathy had been at King’s side, often literally, through the twelve tumultuous years bookended by the crises of Montgomery and Memphis. The two men were close. If anything should happen to King, he wanted Abernathy to assume the leadership of the SCLC.6
Andrew Young, the organization’s executive vice president, was also close to King but played a different role. Abernathy was King’s folksy sidekick. Young had the composure and polish of a diplomat, which in a sense he was. King would call on him to negotiate with hostile white politicians and businessmen.
Young and Dorothy Cotton, the SCLC director of education, had trained countless volunteers of all ages in the discipline of nonviolent protest. She was the lone woman in the SCLC’s executive ranks. Bernard Lee, who looked a bit like King and dressed like him, was his frequent traveling companion.
Close behind them on the way to the airport exit was the four-man security detail under Inspector Smith. The four officers were not obvious choices to guard King. Two of them, Davis and Detective Ronald Howell ordinarily worked in vice and narcotics. The fourth, William Schultz, was on loan from homicide. All were white in a
