After lawyers Lucas and Bailey briefed King, he asked Lawson once again how he ought to respond to the injunction if it remained in effect on the day of the march. Lawson reiterated his advice: King ought to march no matter what.15
King waited awhile in Lawson’s office for the federal marshal to arrive and serve Brown’s order. But there was an inexplicable delay. Having skipped breakfast in the rush to the Atlanta airport that morning, King was famished. He departed Centenary, leaving word that the marshal could find him at the Lorraine.
Chapter 9
The Injunction
The federal courts have given us our greatest victories, and I cannot, in good conscience, declare war on them.
—MLK, announcing that he would obey a federal injunction, Albany, Georgia, July 20, 1962
IT WAS ALMOST 2:30 that Wednesday afternoon before King arrived back at the Lorraine. Smith and his three officers, still close behind, secured the area around the motel.1
King headed to the second-floor dining room of the Lorraine to order lunch. He was eating at 2:50 when US marshal Cato Ellis pulled his car into the motel parking lot. King did not wait for Ellis to find him, but bounded downstairs right away to greet him. Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Bernard Lee, and James Orange followed on King’s heels to confront Ellis and a photographer from the Memphis Press-Scimitar in the parking lot.
The photographer’s photo published in the paper would show the tall, bespectacled Ellis standing in the motel’s parking lot, tendering a sheaf of papers toward King and the four aides. Even at arm’s length they likely could have seen the heading on the cover page: City of Memphis v. Martin Luther King, Jr., et al. Later, when they sat down to read the full text, they would see these opening words: “It appearing to the Court that it is proper that a temporary order should issue herein.”
Underlying Judge Brown’s order was an unstated but unmistakable threat. If King and his aides did not abide by the judge’s ruling and marched in Memphis anyway, they would likely be jailed for contempt of court. It all added up to the threat of a roadblock standing in the way of the planned march on Monday.
Yet, oddly, the photo shows King and his aides grinning at the stern-faced Ellis. Dealing with court injunctions was then almost a routine, though nonetheless galling, matter for King. His spirits lifted by food in the belly, he apparently had cracked a joke to put his aides at ease. They did not seem to be showing disrespect for Ellis but rather were breaking the tension of the moment with a bit of levity.
The injunction in hand, King climbed the stairs to the second floor of the Lorraine and entered Room 307. Abernathy, Young, Lee, and Orange filed into the room behind him. A team of lawyers led by Lucius Burch was waiting. With Burch were three young associates from his firm. Also in the room were Lucas and Bailey, the two lawyers who had represented King in federal court the day before. A few local ministers also squeezed into the room.
Two beds occupied much of the space. King sat on the inner edge of one bed. Burch sat on the other so that they faced each other. King’s aides and Burch’s associates perched on the outer sides of the beds, their knees almost touching, or sprawled on the floor. Abernathy was sitting apart, still scooping the last of his fried-chicken dinner off a paper plate.
Burch was widely regarded as one of the best trial lawyers in Memphis if not the best. He was fifty-six years old, solidly built, with a broad, handsome face, receding hairline, and barrel chest. He was known as having a steel-trap mind enhanced by a virtually photographic memory. His fellow litigators of the Memphis bar held him in high regard bordering on reverence. In a hearing on the injunction the next day, James Manire, the lead lawyer for the city, would pay homage to him, even though they were on opposite sides of the case.
Addressing Judge Brown, Manire said, “I always get sort of attracted by Mr. Burch.”
Judge Brown interjected, “Maybe you are mesmerized, Mr. Manire?”
“I am,” Manire replied.2
The day before, an urgent call from the American Civil Liberties Union had drawn Burch into the case. The ACLU legal director in New York, Mel Wulf, had heard about the injunction issued against King. He called J. Michael Cody, who was a thirty-two-year-old associate in Burch’s firm and an ACLU board member. Wulf told him, as Cody would recount: “We don’t want it to happen that King marches without the injunction being lifted because we’re depending on federal injunctions to help the movement. You know, they have been the backbone of the movement.”3
Figuring that King ought to have a seasoned trial lawyer representing him, Cody turned to Burch. His full name was Lucius Edward Burch Jr. The scion of a wealthy Tennessee family, he grew up on a large farm outside Nashville and attended Vanderbilt University, where his father was dean of the medical school. His grandfather had been a secretary of the US Senate and, as Burch would openly and ruefully admit, a slaveholder. Among Burch’s ancestors were two of the three Tennesseans who had occupied the White House, Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk.4 (The third was Andrew Johnson.)
As a young man, Burch had a zest for pranks and a yen for adventure. While a student at Vanderbilt Law School, he caught some fish and kept them alive and swimming by storing them in a drinking water tank near the office of the law school’s dean. At his brother’s wedding, he displayed a shotgun as though to suggest that it was a shotgun wedding. It wasn’t.5 Other stories
