The most noteworthy feature of the Lorraine was a sign that towered over the parking lot. In a medley of colors the sign seemed to declare that the motel deserved a certain regard. Crowning the top like a rooster’s comb was a red arrowhead-shaped pointer indicating the entrance to the parking lot. Below was the name Lorraine in black script against a yellow background, followed by M-O-T-E-L, each fiery red letter set in a white circle. A massive, turquoise arch supported the whole edifice.
As a black-owned motel located near Beale Street, the Lorraine became known as the place to stay for African American visitors to the city. Among the notables who spent a night there during the Jim Crow era were music greats Ray Charles, Louis Armstrong, and B. B. King. In 1968 King could have opted for recently desegregated hotels, such as the posh Peabody downtown or the Holiday Inn Rivermont, which offered a spectacular view of the Mississippi River. He preferred the Lorraine.
He had stayed at the flat-roofed motel several times, often enough that the Baileys had designated Room 306 on the second floor as his whenever he desired it.3 Though one of the motel’s best, the room was not luxurious. There were two double beds, a rabbit-eared TV perched on a simple wooden dresser, two small table lamps, and a chair with striped upholstery. There was a basic bathroom accessible through a wide opening in a knotty-pine back wall.
When King arrived that Wednesday morning, Walter Bailey and his wife greeted him warmly. “Everywhere were smiles and handshakes,” historian Joan Beifuss would write about the moment.4 The Baileys always bent over backward to please King. The room rate was thirteen dollars a night, but they did not charge him. “We just felt a part of the Lorraine,” Abernathy would say years later. “It is a black motel and, of course, they had a lot of catfish there, and Dr. King and I loved catfish, and they were not strict so far as room service [was] concerned.”5
For all its appeal to King, the Lorraine posed a particular risk for anyone who might fear an assassin’s bullet. There was no elevator. To reach Room 306, a guest had to climb one of two stairways and continue to rooms that opened onto a balcony. The stairways and balcony were nakedly exposed to Mulberry Street. Nothing except an iron railing sheltered the second-story balcony from the parking lot, which faced Mulberry.
The risk to King was obvious to Lieutenant Jerry Williams, an African American police officer on the Memphis force. During one of King’s visits to the city Williams had warned him not to stay at the Lorraine “because of its exposed balconies,” according to historian Michael Honey.6
If the warning stuck with King until April 1968, he did not heed it. Precautions did not interest him because he did not think anything or anybody could protect him against a determined assassin.
With King and almost the entire top echelon of his staff installed at the Lorraine, it became, in short order, the operational headquarters of the SCLC in Memphis. King and Abernathy checked into Room 306, which they were sharing. Andrew Young, Dorothy Cotton, and Bernard Lee fanned out to other rooms. Hosea Williams, Jesse Jackson, and James Orange turned up on Sunday. James Bevel had been in Memphis earlier that week before leaving for Chicago. He was expected back that night.
Also checked into the motel were members of the local Black Power group, the Invaders. They were hanging out at the Lorraine for ready access to King and his staff, with whom they were trying to cut a deal. The Invaders wanted money, financial support for a proposed “Liberation School” where they would teach black history and heighten pride in black identity.
They were not hard to spot. A dozen of them, including cofounders Charles Cabbage and John Burl Smith, were milling around the front door of the office that morning. Dressed in jeans, they wore their hair in Afros. Some wore dark glasses. Several sported amulets dangling from their necks.
Cabbage and Smith identified with the restless Black Power faction of the civil rights movement. In rhetoric, if not action, they rejected King’s nonviolent approach. In the aftermath of the rioting on March 28, Cabbage stated his point of view in advance of King’s return to Memphis. He told a newspaper reporter that whatever belief he might have had in nonviolent protest had “died” that day.7 Presumably he was aggrieved by the aggressive police response to the riot.
Yet King, undeterred by the Invaders’ Black Power rhetoric, intended to recruit them as parade marshals for the march he would lead on Monday. He regarded their cooperation as a key to a violence-free march. To secure the Invaders’ cooperation, he was depending on his aides—especially Bevel, Williams, and Orange—to help win them over.
He would need his aides’ cooperation. Securing their enthusiastic assistance in Memphis was testing his leadership. In Memphis, as elsewhere, King’s charisma was the glue that bound the SCLC together. “We would argue like crazy,” Dorothy Cotton would say of her fellow staff. “He would sit there quietly. When he spoke, we would shut up.”8 It was King who charted their course, mediated disputes, and built morale. Inducing his aides to pull in the same direction was not always easy. As Andrew Young would say, the staff “was a passionate group of wild men that sort of functioned like wild horses.”9 Dorothy Cotton would put it even more bluntly, terming
