Memphis had no black police officers until 1948, when the first few were invited to join the department. But they did not have the same status as white officers. Blacks did not ride in patrol cars. They patrolled Beale Street and black neighborhoods on foot. They were not to arrest whites even if they witnessed a crime unfolding before their eyes. Years later, when the black officers were permitted to ride in patrol cars, they had to ride separately from whites.
By 1968, there were 100 blacks on the 850-man force. Even then, though, it was not uncommon for black officers to hear white colleagues say “nigger” on the police radio.7 “Oh, a nigger was killed?” a patrolman’s radio squawked loudly enough for King to hear during the violent outbreak of March 28.8
The two African American officers on the King watch, Redditt and Richmond, tagged along behind King, keeping a low profile. In 1966 Redditt had worked a security detail during King’s visit to Memphis. He had shadowed King closely. King’s down-to-earth manner had impressed him. “He had this warmth about him all the time,” Redditt would recall years later.9 Sitting with him one day at breakfast, Redditt asked what more it would take to further the civil rights movement. “Keep telling the folks the truth. They’re going to wake up eventually,” he remembered King saying.
Redditt looked different now. To work undercover during the garbage workers’ strike, he had let his hair grow long in the Afro style, stowed his uniform, and donned khaki pants. In the crowd at the airport King might not have recognized Redditt.
King likely would have noticed Ernest Withers in the flock of people trailing him. The tall, ruggedly built Withers was a legendary African American photographer. On photo shoots throughout the Mississippi Delta, Withers had recorded images of Southern bigotry in all its naked ugliness. He combed the South for years, snapping photos of key civil rights moments for black-owned publications such as Jet magazine and the Memphis weekly Tri-State Defender. It was his classic shot that caught King on December 21, 1956, sitting at the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. That triumphant day marked the end of the city’s segregated bus system.
Now the forty-five-year-old Withers was covering King not entirely on his own account as a freelance photographer much admired in the movement. He was also moonlighting in the role of paid informant for the FBI, as the Commercial Appeal would report four decades later.
King exited the flat-topped, concrete-and-glass terminal on its upper departure level and climbed into the front passenger seat of Matthews’s Buick. Abernathy, Young, and Lee sat in the backseat.
The Buick left the airport, heading toward the Lorraine Motel, a twenty-minute drive away. In a convoy close behind were cars carrying Withers, the undercover team of Redditt and Richmond, and Smith’s four-man security detail.
Chapter 5
The Invitation
There comes a time when one [must] take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular.
—MLK, sermon at the National Cathedral, Washington, DC, March 31, 1968
KING FIRST HEARD in detail about the Memphis strike while he was attending a ministers’ conference in Miami. He and dozens of other African American clergy from around the country were at the Four Ambassadors Hotel over the last weekend in February. Under the sponsorship of the Ford Foundation they had gathered to discuss how to prevent the kind of rioting that had convulsed the nation’s inner cities. One of those attending was Billy Kyles, pastor of the Monumental Baptist Church in Memphis.
Kyles, an old friend of King, was keeping a close watch on the developments surrounding the strike in Memphis. He was well aware too of the Poor People’s Campaign, which he knew was entering a critical phase and absorbing King’s energy almost to the breaking point. Mostly as a joke, Kyles suggested to King that he add the strikers’ cause to his heavy agenda. “Man, we’ve got a garbage strike in Memphis,” Kyles would remember saying to King, “and we may have to get you to come in and help us out.”1
By the third week of the walkout, the strikers felt that they had hit a wall. It wasn’t that Mayor Loeb was proving to be a tough negotiator. Until the strikers returned to work he was refusing to negotiate—period. That was a condition that the strikers rejected out of hand. To pressure Loeb to reconsider, strike supporters asked national civil rights leaders Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Bayard Rustin, the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, to come to Memphis and speak on their behalf. Wilkins and Rustin agreed. They spoke at a rally on March 14, but their appearance attracted little media coverage.
Kyles figured that King would make a much bigger splash and decided to invite King again to Memphis, this time not as a joke. He telephoned SCLC headquarters in Atlanta and left word. “When we first made the call,” Kyles would recall, “he didn’t get the message. The people who got the message said, ‘You know we are really in sympathy with you guys, but we are so far behind on the Poor People’s Campaign. We just don’t have time to come to Memphis.’”2
At the same time, apart from Kyles’s overture, Reverend Lawson was thinking about how King might help the strikers’ cause. Lawson knew King well. He had conducted workshops in nonviolence for the SCLC and served on its board. As head of the community group supporting the strike in Memphis, Lawson now had something to ask of King in return. He called King to ask if he would come to Memphis and speak at a pro-strike rally.
In Lawson’s retelling of the conversation King agreed right off to come to Memphis. Lawson would recall, “There was no hesitation. He was committed.” Lawson would remember King as having said, “You’re doing in Memphis what I want to do [with the Poor
