At Centenary Church, Lucas and Bailey told King that he could expect a federal marshal to serve his aides and him with a copy of Brown’s order that day. In fact, they said, the marshal was expected to appear at the church momentarily.
For days King had been bracing for the possibility of an injunction. He had discussed the matter with Jim Lawson by phone over the weekend. As he plunged into the crisis in Memphis, King was turning to the Methodist minister as a sounding board. King had a high opinion of Lawson, as he would say publicly at a pro-strike rally that night. King would hail him as a longtime fighter for the rights of African Americans.8
King and Lawson had bonded the first time they met, in February 1957. Lawson was studying for a master’s degree in theology at Oberlin College in Ohio. King was on campus to speak. They were the same age, then both twenty-eight, Lawson just four months older. Both were the sons of preachers. A pacifist, Lawson later refused induction into the army during the Korean War and served thirteen months in federal prison.
Lawson had looked into Gandhi’s concept of nonviolent protest and adopted it as his own. He developed a sense of rectitude and fierce resolve to push the limits of nonviolent civil disobedience. In the late 1950s, as a PhD divinity student at Vanderbilt University, Lawson was in the forefront of the sit-in movement, leading students to desegregate the lunch counters of department stores in Nashville. Vanderbilt expelled him.
Lawson landed at Centenary as its pastor in 1962 and was soon deeply immersed in civil rights protest in Memphis. He quickly adopted a confrontational approach. He told a reporter, as quoted in the Commercial Appeal on November 30 of that year, “Negroes who seek improvements in education, income and housing can probably best realize their goals through massive social dislocation.” If the demands were not met, Lawson threatened to make “it impossible for government to operate.” He did not wait for a court order to integrate the city’s restaurants. He and his wife, Dorothy, and their young son, John, simply showed up at a whites-only cafeteria and stood in line for food. They were served.9
If Lawson appeared more righteously pure than King, he did not possess the same warmth and affability. People complained that Lawson was holier-than-thou and off-putting. “He was not palatable,” remembered Frank McRae, the superintendent of the Memphis district of the Methodist Church that oversaw Lawson’s pastorate at Centenary. “He was not well received in the white community, because Jim had this rough veneer. His whole strategy was confrontational.”10
Lawson was exhibiting that steely resolve in advising King to fight a court injunction that might stop him from marching in Memphis. Lawson would recount what he told King: “So I had called him as soon as I could and told him that I was preparing to organize against it. We’d get lawyers.”11 If Judge Brown did not lift his injunction before the march on Monday, Lawson urged King to defy the order.
In 1963, circuit court Judge W. A. Jenkins had enjoined King from demonstrating in Birmingham. King had led protesters into the streets of Birmingham anyhow. He was arrested and thrown in jail. But Jenkins was a judge of an Alabama state court. This time, in Memphis, the stakes were much higher. King was not dealing with the Tennessee equivalent of Jenkins’s edict under Alabama state law—an order flagrantly tainted by segregationist bias. If he defied Brown’s injunction, he would be rebuking the authority of a federal, not a state, judge.
Andrew Young would recall, years later, that federal judges were “our best ally, and we didn’t want to run against them.”12 Ralph Abernathy, also commenting years later, would put the point even more strongly: “After all, we had made obedience to federal courts a central argument in our efforts to desegregate the South.”13
A string of cases crucial to civil rights progress had included two decided by the US Supreme Court: one in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education, banned the racial segregation of public schools, and another, two years later, Browder v. Gayle, invalidated the segregated bus system of Montgomery, Alabama. To violate Brown’s order would cross a divide with potentially grave consequences. It might impair King’s reputation with the federal judiciary and cost the movement a critical ally.
When considering how to respond to injunctions against him in earlier crises, King had consulted Ben Hooks. He was perhaps King’s closest friend in Memphis. As a young student he had excelled in the city’s segregated public schools before going on to Howard University in Washington, DC, and the DePaul University College of Law in Chicago. He had come home to practice as one of the first African American lawyers in Memphis. He split his time between the law and a job as pastor of the Middle Baptist Church. In 1965 he was appointed a criminal court judge, the first African American in that post in Memphis.
King had often turned to Hooks as a trusted adviser. He had recruited him for the SCLC board and relied on him to oversee its books and order its finances. But as he pondered what to do about Judge Brown’s injunction, King did not seek Hooks’s counsel. There was no need, because King knew what he intended to do. According to Hooks, King had decided, “if the judge said no, he was going to march anyway,
