Redemption

usual for its summer recess in late June or early July, certainly no later than the Fourth of July. As it was, Young told King, in that narrow window it would be hard to accomplish much.”¹³ Further delay would close the window all the more.

In sum, Young was dead set against King going to Memphis. He argued that the Poor People’s Campaign ought to have the undivided attention of King and the staff. He pleaded with King not to go.

King was not persuaded. How could he ignore the compelling cause of Memphis, where the strike had developed into a major civil rights struggle? Perhaps no less important to him, Memphis offered a stage on which he could dramatize the antipoverty drive. How better to illustrate the face of poverty in the United States than to spotlight garbage workers, whose wages were so low that some were on welfare?

To Young’s warning about the risk that King could become bogged down in Memphis, he replied, simply, “They just want me to come down and preach. And the Poor People’s Campaign is about people just like this. And the least I can do is go down there.”¹⁴

So King agreed to speak at a rally on March 18. A hectic speaking schedule that Monday had him hopscotching around the country. He flew from Los Angeles to New Orleans, then to Jackson, Mississippi, and finally to Memphis. He arrived in the Tennessee city for an evening speech. It was the thirty-fifth day of the strike.

The rally was at Mason Temple, the centerpiece of the six-building headquarters of the Church of God in Christ. The church, one of the largest African American denominations, with congregants worldwide, had been making its cavernous sanctuary available to the strike’s supporters. Now they prayed that King’s star power would fill Mason Temple.

Lawson figured that King’s appearance at Mason Temple would draw a large crowd. He predicted a turnout of ten thousand. Sure enough, on the night of the rally, he watched as people arrived in droves. Then he headed to the airport to meet King’s flight.

When King entered the terminal, Lawson apologized about the turnout at Mason Temple. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened, but it doesn’t look like you’re going to speak to 10,000 people,” Lawson said, according to an account by labor historian Michael Honey.

King’s face fell. “Yeah, it looks, doctor, as though you might speak to 25,000 people,” Lawson said. “He just lit up like a lantern,” Lawson would recall.¹⁵

The eventual estimates of the crowd’s size varied. Lawson would lower his to fifteen thousand. The police said the number was only nine thousand. Whatever the number, the crowd greatly exceeded the temple’s capacity. As historian Joan Beifuss would decribe the scene, people were “sitting on steps, standing in aisles and doorways, spilling outside.”¹⁶ It was just past nine o’clock that evening when King entered the temple through a side door. Several striking workers escorted him to the podium.

Waiting to hear him was a boisterous throng. When they saw him on the podium, they leaped to their feet. Many raised their arms in clenched-fist salutes. A deafening, full-throated cheer filled the vastness of the sanctuary, seemingly rebounding from the steel girders overhead and suffusing King on the podium.

He was thrilled by the welcome. “He was surprised” Billy Kyles would say, “first of all to see the black community as close together as it was and having the old movement spirit. It really lifted him.” The days when King could evoke such passion from a crowd fervently united behind him had seemed past. Suddenly that intensity was back. Kyles would remember how King fed on the crowd’s exuberance, buoyed to hear them “whooping up everything he’d say.”¹⁷

In his speech King portrayed the strikers’ cause as right and just. “All labor has worth,” he said. He extolled the Poor People’s Campaign and linked the strike to that grand cause. He said that the garbage workers were “reminding the nation” that it was a “crime” for workers in “this rich nation” to receive “starvation” wages.

He implored the strikers to press on with their demands. To put clout behind the rhetoric, he called on the city’s African American community to stay away from work and school for a day to pressure the mayor to accept the strikers’ demands.¹⁸

As King neared the end of his speech, Lawson and Young conferred behind him on the speaker’s rostrum. Lawson whispered to Young that King ought to return to Memphis and lead a march to bolster the strikers. Young scribbled a note to that effect and slipped it to King at the rostrum.

King glanced at the note but sat down without responding. Lawson and Young huddled with King. As though seized by a sudden force, he returned to the rostrum. In a strong, vibrant voice he proclaimed that Memphis could mark “the beginning of the Washington movement.” If the strikers would like it, and of course they would, he announced that he would return to Memphis and lead them in a march to City Hall.

On an impulse he had committed himself more deeply into a tangled labor and racial dispute of a city in crisis. Abruptly, he had ditched his own plans and promised to come to Memphis a second time in support of the strike. As Beifuss would note, it was “an involvement that he had originally neither envisioned nor desired” when he had accepted the invitation to speak in Memphis.¹⁹

Chapter 6

The Mayor

I want you to stick it out so that you will be able to make Mayor Loeb and others say yes, even if they want to say no.

—MLK, speaking to Memphis garbage workers, March 18, 1968

IF MEMPHIS WERE a thumbtack on a map of the United States, it would pin down a spot where the borders of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee converge. Memphis and the region surrounding it are commonly called the Mid-South. Memphis sees itself apart from both the Deep South and the Border States, like Kentucky to