That the staff was headstrong and arrogant was hardly surprising. To join the SCLC staff meant forsaking, or at least delaying, a stable career and comfortable life. It meant running the risk of potential physical harm and possible death. No mild-mannered, submissive person was likely to enlist in the SCLC, and King was savvy enough to know it. He wanted young, ego-driven, risk-taking mavericks, and he had them. At times the infighting turned fierce. Only half-jokingly King and Abernathy “complained about the lack of nonviolence within SCLC,” wrote historian Adam Fairclough.11
As he prepared to return to Memphis, King called an emergency meeting of his executive staff at Ebenezer Church on Saturday, April 30. “Memphis is the Washington campaign in miniature,” he said, rallying his aides behind his audacious plan to stage another march in Tennessee.12
They replied with a barrage of objections. Young, fearing that exhaustion was impairing King’s judgment, pointed to a lack of groundwork for a successful return to Memphis.13 Bevel and Jackson were the most vehement. They denounced not only the Memphis plan but also the whole idea of the Poor People’s Campaign. Bevel argued, instead, that the SCLC ought to devote all its energy to opposing the Vietnam War. “We don’t need to be hanging around Washington,” he barked. “We need to stop this war.” Jackson termed the plan for Memphis “too small” and the one for Washington “too unformed,” wrote historian Taylor Branch. Jackson demanded that King scrap the antipoverty crusade altogether. Jackson desired to replace it with Operation Breadbasket, his pet project in Chicago to improve the economic circumstances of African Americans.14
King’s typical response to outbursts from his staff was to keep his cool. His manner was calm and Socratic. He would listen placidly while his aides fussed at one another or at him. All the while, in the words of historian Stephen Oates, he “would sit there thinking and scratching his whiskers. He would continue raising questions until they had worked through a problem collectively and reached a conclusion.”15
But on this day he did not retain his usual composure and gentle authority. Unnerved by the setback in Memphis, he had no patience for his staff’s carping and haggling. He erupted in rage. He ripped into Bevel and Jackson. He snapped first at Bevel: “You don’t like to work on anything that isn’t your idea.” To Jackson he shouted, “If you want to carve out your own niche in society, go ahead. But for God’s sake, don’t bother me.” King marched out of the meeting and left the staff to sort it all out. By the end of the meeting, which dragged on for six hours, the staff swallowed their objections. King was their leader, and they would follow him to Memphis.16
Dorothy Cotton would remember the tenor of the meeting: “There was a lot of energy. Everybody just arguing and expressing their opinions. But it was clear. We were going to go. When Martin spoke, it was, like, the discussion was over.”17 Abernathy would tell Coretta King, “We are all together now. We are going to Washington by way of Memphis.”18
They were all together in acceding to King’s desire that they go to Memphis. But they were not all together in their desire to go. Tensions between King and the staff were following them to Tennessee. Once he arrived, Jackson called his wife, Jackie, to report that the staff was “not supportive” of King. “They’re rumbling,” Jackson told his wife. “They don’t want to be here, but we’re stuck.”19
King must have sensed that he had not seen the end of Bevel and Jackson’s nettlesome challenge to his leadership. He trusted that they would fall in line behind him in Memphis anyway. Headstrong and defiant, verging on insubordination, they offered something that King’s other aides did not. They were young, hip, and brash. Bevel was thirty-one; Jackson, twenty-six. The gap in years was not that large—King was eight years older than Bevel, thirteen years older than Jackson—yet in movement terms they were separated by a generational chasm.
Bevel and Jackson had come of age in the movement as undergraduate seminary students in the early sixties. They were in the forefront of a more aggressively defiant style of protest. They had been among the first to put their bodies on the line in sit-ins, nonviolent but unyielding, at segregated lunch counters. They had been cursed, beaten, and spit upon, and the experience had toughened them. Theirs was a confidence, a swagger, born of youthful courage.
They did not conform to the tacit SCLC executive dress code of muted dark suits and staid ties. Bearded and gaunt, Bevel dressed in denim overalls, a skullcap over his shaved head. The boyishly handsome Jackson, who had been a football star at North Carolina A&T, often wore jeans, the cuffs turned up high above the ankles.
They could relate more easily to the restless, angry generation of young African Americans, whose allegiance King was eager to earn. Bevel and Jackson might be headache-provoking, but he needed them. What’s more, he had other more pressing matters on his mind than smoothing out relations with Bevel and Jackson.
Chapter 8
Damage Control
If we don’t have a peaceful march in Memphis, no Washington. No Memphis, no Washington.
—MLK, quoted by Jim Lawson
KING HAD NO TIME TO LOSE. He had five days to drum up support, recruit and train marshals in the discipline of peaceful protest, and pursue all possible means to preclude another violent outburst during the march on April 8. He was expecting thousands of participants. Not only garbage workers would march. He was urging students to skip classes at high schools and colleges and march with him. There were reports that thousands of people from out of town would converge on Memphis to join the march.
King was counting not only on his staff for organizational support. He was also expecting African American leaders in Memphis to bolster his efforts. He had to identify the religious and political figures
