He would be bucking the mayor’s fierce resistance and the contempt of most white Memphians. David Caywood, a white lawyer who closely monitored the events surrounding King in 1968, would say, years later, that many whites abhorred King. “He was the lightning rod for all the segregationist attitudes here in Memphis,” noted Caywood.1
Nor were the major Memphis newspapers welcoming. In its morning edition of April 3, the Commercial Appeal previewed King’s return to the city that day with an editorial headlined “Take the March to Court.” The paper decried King’s plan to lead another march in Memphis. It called for federal marshals and endorsed the mayor’s expected attempt to secure an injunction barring King from marching. “There is no reason,” the editorial said, “why Memphis should have to take a second chance of downtown rioting just to allow Dr. King to wipe out the stain left by his previous ‘nonviolent demonstration.’”
The usually milder afternoon paper, the Memphis Press-Scimitar, ran a barbed editorial of its own that day. It quoted NAACP leader Roy Wilkins expressing doubt that King could prevent violent outbursts during the Poor People’s Campaign. The Press-Scimitar likewise said that King was courting violence by staging a second march in Memphis. Applying Wilkins’s critique to King’s upcoming march, the paper editorialized: “All good, practical advice for any mischief-maker, black or white.”
If King had much to learn about Memphis, he would have been familiar with its basic contours. It was, after all, another southern city. Its DNA did not differ all that much from what he knew from his deep experience living and working in other southern cities. Further, he had friends in Memphis, including Baptist preachers Ben Hooks and Billy Kyles, to whom he could look for advice. In 1959 King had come to Memphis to campaign for two African American candidates, Hooks for juvenile court judge and Russell Sugarmon for public works commissioner. But Memphis was not Atlanta or Montgomery, cities he knew intimately. It was not terrain that he knew well. Much could go wrong.
A first order of business now that he was back in Memphis was connecting with local preachers. At 12:05 p.m. he departed the Lorraine in Tarlese Matthews’s Buick for a meeting at Centenary Church. It was a redbrick building with white trim, unremarkable except for its long, sharply pitched roof. The Buick halted in front of the church, followed by two squad cars carrying Smith’s four-man detail. Also arriving on the scene, in an unmarked car, was the two-man surveillance team of Redditt and Richmond.
Smith’s detail promptly “secured” the front and rear entrances to the church, as a police field report would note.2 During the two hours that King remained inside the church, Smith and his men stayed in their cars.3 Redditt and Richmond, however, departed quickly. On orders from headquarters, they drove to a fire station on South Main Street near the Lorraine to set up a surveillance post. To camouflage their presence, they papered over a back window of the fire station, leaving a small peephole. The window offered a view of the Lorraine across Mulberry Street.
King entered the church along with aides Abernathy, Young, and Jackson. Waiting inside were Lawson, the Centenary pastor, and about thirty other black clergymen. Their clout as strike supporters was hard to overestimate in the religiously devout African American community of Memphis. At Sunday services they were blessing the strike, appealing to their congregants for support, and soliciting donations. They raised many thousands of dollars for the union’s strike fund, which was helping to keep food on the strikers’ tables.
The meeting at Centenary was in the church’s Fellowship Hall, a barren room equipped with little more than folding chairs. King rose to address the clergy. The fallout over the riot on March 28 still hung darkly in the air. King wanted to dispel the cloud of despair. Speaking quietly, he reminded the ministers that he was in Memphis to lead a nonviolent march. He called on them to close ranks behind him, saying that unity was crucial. There would be no violent disruption of the march this time, he assured them.4
King reminded the ministers that it was a smattering of youths, not garbage workers, who had caused the trouble six days earlier. King denied that the garbage workers were in any way at fault for the violence.5 Without excusing the rioters, King sought to relate their criminality to poverty. According to an informant’s account of the meeting as relayed to the FBI, King said that the youths who had smashed windows and looted stores were “actually to be pitied for all they have ever known is poverty and the economic war attendant on living in poverty.”
King went on to say that the ministers should not lose sight of what the struggle in Memphis was all about. On one basic level it was a labor dispute. It was, he said, about raising the wages and improving the working conditions of the garbage workers. That was the goal.
Then he called on Jesse Jackson to speak. Jackson, in charge of the SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, proposed an economic boycott in Memphis to mirror what he was doing in Chicago. There would be an appeal to strike supporters not to buy the products of big corporations, such as Coca-Cola or Wonder Bread—the kind of markets where blacks had consumer power. Jackson said the economic boycott would translate into political pressure because the corporations would insist that the mayor settle the strike.6
While Jackson was talking, King headed to Lawson’s pastoral office to speak with two local lawyers, Louis Lucas and Walter Bailey. They had been in federal court that morning to oppose the city’s petition for an injunction against King. Lucas and Bailey had
