Redemption

Williams, and Bevel required a certain daring. All three were hardened paladins of the civil rights struggle. Orange, a giant of a man, had been on the receiving end of police assaults during SCLC demonstrations in Birmingham. Williams, a heavily bearded Korean War veteran, had been savagely beaten at a bus station for drinking from a water fountain for whites only. He had been in the thick of the SCLC campaign in St. Augustine, Florida, and had been teargassed and beaten horribly during the storied voting-rights march at Selma, Alabama. According to Dorothy Cotton, he especially among the SCLC staff had the chops to deal with “street dudes.”⁵ Bevel, a fast-talking ordained Baptist pastor, had shown his fearlessness facing vicious mobs during protests to desegregate lunch counters in Nashville and at bus stops during the 1961 Freedom Rides. He was on the front lines during protests in Birmingham, Selma, and Chicago.

If Orange, Williams, and Bevel presented a formidable front, they would nonetheless meet stubborn resistance from the Invaders. From the outset of the negotiations Cabbage and his group had relentlessly demanded money from the SCLC—lots of it. The talks had continued late into Monday night. By the end of the jawboning marathon Orange had all but pledged that the SCLC would satisfy the Invaders’ demands. But he cautioned: the final say would be up to King.

Cabbage, John Burl Smith, and the third Invaders cofounder, Coby Smith (no relation to John Burl), were part of a young, restless, disaffected generation of African Americans for whom the siren of Black Power resonated powerfully. In 1968, Cabbage was twenty-three, Coby Smith a year younger. Racial bigotry had shaped their early years. As a child in Memphis, Coby Smith had no illusions about the second-class status of African Americans. He would remember: “They used to have an old saying when I was a kid, ‘Dogs that chase cars and niggers that chase white women do not last long.’”⁶

Blacks of Smith and Cabbage’s generation, however, had seen some racial barriers fall. Emboldened by the progress, they were impatiently demanding the removal of those that remained. Not coincidentally, their generation of blacks was developing a growing sense of self-worth and empowerment. Nothing summed it up better than James Brown’s song, “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” that rocketed to the hit parade after its release in 1968.

Cabbage and Coby Smith had been standouts at Memphis’s all-black schools. Cabbage had starred on the football and basketball teams at Carver High. Smith had been the student body president at Manassas High. He was one of the first black students admitted to prestigious Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis. Cabbage went on to Morehouse College, where he was student government president.

Both Cabbage and Coby Smith had their baptism in Black Power while they were living in Atlanta. Cabbage was finishing his studies at Morehouse. Smith was dabbling in civil rights work, hanging out with Stokely Carmichael and other activists who identified with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

SNCC had emerged in the early sixties as a youthful counterpoint to the SCLC. By the mid-sixties Carmichael was at the peak of his political influence as the chairman of SNCC. Under his leadership, the group embraced a black-nationalist agenda and demanded greater political and economic power for African Americans.

SNCC scorned King’s bedrock principles of integration and nonviolence as too conservative to advance the movement further. It took on a more belligerent tone in May 1967 when H. Rap Brown replaced Stokely Carmichael as chairman. Brown escalated Black Power rhetoric by famously declaring that violence was “as American as cherry pie.” He threatened that “if American cities don’t come around . . . they should be burned down.”⁷

Inspired by the call of Black Power, Cabbage and Coby Smith conceived a mini version of SNCC for Memphis that they named the Black Organizing Project. It would be a “liberation school” for youths, teaching black history and building racial pride.

Upon their return to Memphis, they roamed inner-city streets recruiting “brothers” to join their group. From the title of a popular TV show about hostile aliens descending upon Earth, they borrowed a new, more muscular name for themselves, the Invaders. Their network of activists was a loose-knit collection of people linked to what an FBI report termed Black Power “cells” of students at LeMoyne and Owen Colleges, Memphis State University, and local high schools, plus graduates and dropouts. All told, they totaled about seventy-five people, according to an FBI estimate.⁸

When the garbage workers’ strike began, the Invaders saw an opportunity. By identifying with the goal of economic justice, they aimed to widen their influence. By 1968, another member of the Invaders, John Burl Smith, had emerged as a leader of the group. John Burl Smith, back in Memphis after a stint in the air force, seemed to borrow from H. Rap Brown’s rhetoric. He developed what he called an “armed wing” of the Invaders and implied that they ought to equip themselves with guns.⁹

The Invaders turned up at meetings of the Community on the Move for Equality, known as COME, the strike-support group led by Reverend Jim Lawson. In the early days of the strike, Cabbage and several other Invaders were involved in COME’s deliberations. At a meeting of COME on March 5, Cabbage defied the organization’s principle of nonviolent protest by circulating a flyer by H. Rap Brown that included instructions for making a Molotov cocktail.¹⁰ John Burl Smith rattled another COME meeting by scorning it as nothing more than a group of “ministers praying.” If the ministers meant business, Smith went on, they had to “do some fighting.”¹¹ Lawson soon lost patience with the Invaders and paid them little mind at meetings.¹² Feeling slighted and resentful, Cabbage stopped attending.

Lawson privately expressed his disgust with the Invaders as a “divergent, dissident, belligerent group” that did nothing except “beg money without offering anything constructive.”¹³ Lawson’s low opinion of the Invaders did not bode well for King’s effort to recruit them. Lawson nonetheless suspended his disbelief that