King figured that he could fit Memphis into his busy schedule with scarcely any downtime from the Poor People’s Campaign. He would dash into the city and deliver a single speech. He would get up at four o’clock in the morning, catch a six o’clock plane to Memphis, speak at a rally for the strike and be in Washington for another event the same evening.4
Even the quick-hit scenario gave Andrew Young pause. He was perhaps King’s most able adviser among the top-tier SCLC staff. He was smart, diligent, and reliable. Within three years of his joining the SCLC staff, in recognition of his obvious gifts as an administrator and strategist, King had named him executive director.
The two men were close in age. Young was just three years younger. They could relate openly and easily as contemporaries with similar backgrounds. Unlike Bevel, Jackson, Williams, and Abernathy, Young had not had to endure the hardships that typified the lives of many African Americans in the South. Like King, Young had grown up in a stable family—in Young’s case, in New Orleans. His parents were well educated and financially comfortable. His father was a dentist, his mother a teacher. Theirs had been a solidly bourgeois life.
It seemed no coincidence that Young and King were fraternity men. Both had belonged to a prestigious black fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, King at Morehouse College, Young at Howard University.5 Rather than pursue a career in dentistry, as his father would have liked, Young had chosen divinity school. He had worked in New York City for the National Council of Churches before joining the SCLC in 1961.
Despite the tight bond between them, King had not always followed Young’s advice. Young’s was the voice of caution. “I was constantly in the position of urging Martin to focus our limited staff resources and resist the temptation to respond to every worthy cause,” he would explain years later.6
King came to value Young as a counterweight to the hotbloods on the SCLC staff. When they would demand that King plunge into some high-risk undertaking, Young would point out the pitfalls. From him King could count on hearing a careful, pragmatic argument. He was in effect a brake on the staff’s passions, and they taunted him for it. He was their Uncle Tom, they would say. At times, even King could not resist ridiculing him with the same put-down.7
Young had implored King not to speak out against the Vietnam War. Better to keep his antiwar views to himself, Young had advised. Wouldn’t it offend civil rights leaders who supported the war or believed that King’s opposition to it would undercut progress on civil rights? Wouldn’t denouncing President Johnson’s war policy cost the movement a powerful ally in the White House?
King rebuffed Young’s advice. (Young eventually would come around to agreeing with King’s outspokenness on Vietnam.) When King felt deeply about his rightness on an issue, he could be headstrong and unyielding. Ben Hooks, a member of the SCLC board, shared Young’s view on the question of Vietnam. Hooks, a judge and Baptist pastor in Memphis, was a devoted friend of King. At a board meeting, when the discussion turned to Vietnam, Hooks did not hold back. He would recall: “I asked the question, ‘With Johnson doing all he could for civil rights, would it be better for us not to antagonize him at this point?’. . . When I made that statement, innocently, Martin ate me alive.”8
As Young feared, King’s declarations on Vietnam did offend some top civil rights leaders. Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League, objected to King mingling war policy and racial justice, which he said was doing a “disservice” to civil rights.9
And as Andrew Young and Ben Hooks had predicted, King’s high-profile opposition to the Vietnam War had enraged Lyndon Johnson. The president had retaliated by turning a cold shoulder to King and the movement. Johnson had expected King to fall in line on Vietnam out of loyalty to him for his having maneuvered landmark civil rights legislation through Congress. “That goddamned nigger preacher,” Johnson ranted privately about King.10
Now as King toyed with the idea of speaking to garbage workers in Memphis, Young felt another surge of misgivings. He doubted that King could duck into the crisis in Memphis, deliver a single speech, and then drop the strikers’ cause like a hot potato.
As Young might have put it, King seemed to be forgetting the “lesson of Albany.” In 1961 King had interceded in a desegregation campaign under way in Albany, Georgia. King had intended to appear once in a quick visit. He would lead a march in Albany and leave town. That would be it. But during the march, on December 14, he was swept up in a mass arrest of demonstrators and jailed. He found himself entangled in the Albany struggle. It became his campaign. He would be stuck in Albany for a year. It was the civil rights version of mission creep. The Albany campaign ended in futility when the city closed down its buses and other public facilities instead of desegregating them. As Dorothy Cotton would note, Albany proved that the SCLC, before starting a campaign, had to “send in a training team to prepare the community,” organizing its supporters for massive, nonviolent protest.11
When Young thought about King’s plan for a quick visit to Memphis, he saw the risk of another Albany in the making. He feared “that one speech would lead to two, and two would lead to his going to jail or something like that, because it was out of his control once he got involved.”12
Then there was the urgency of the Poor People’s Campaign. If King and his staff got mired in Memphis, as Young feared, it could delay the start of the Washington initiative. Young pointed out that, even if the campaign started on schedule, the time for pressuring lawmakers in the nation’s capital would be short. Congress would adjourn as
