King supposed that he could win the allegiance of Black Power militants by the force of his arguments for nonviolence. First, he portrayed his brand of massive civil disobedience as radical in its own way. It was not passive. It relied on massive “militant” (his word) confrontation and protest. Second, he dismissed as fantasy the idea of armed revolution that some Black Power extremists were envisioning in their rhetoric. He would test the strategy in Memphis.
If the strategy worked in Memphis, King might conclude that it would work with Black Power militants who might otherwise disrupt the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington. Heading off a threat to the Poor People’s Campaign was not the only reason that King sought to bring Black Power militants under his wing. Black Power was commanding the media spotlight. Its energy, fueled by anger and revolutionary zeal, was captivating and radicalizing black youth.
His strategy rested on the premise that he could repeat elsewhere what he had achieved in Chicago. How complete a conversion of the gangs he had achieved in Chicago, however, was never clear. Years later, Ralph Abernathy would look back on King’s earnest efforts as having been largely a bust. Abernathy’s recollection was very different from King’s: “Martin had encountered for the first time a crowd of blacks that he could neither reason with nor overpower with his philosophy.”14
In Abernathy’s telling, King’s approach to the gangs was doomed from the start because the gang members were devoid of “respect for anything or anybody, most especially for preachers.” Historian Fairclough agrees, saying that many of the gang members with whom King rapped for hours remained “cynically aloof.”15
Now in Memphis, applying the lesson of Chicago, he courted the Invaders. But the Invaders differed from the Blackstone Rangers. The Invaders were not poorly educated, ghettoized toughs engaged in drug trafficking or other criminal enterprise. Cabbage’s group had no criminal intent. The Invaders were led by college students or graduates steeped in SNCC rhetoric. Their motivation was Black Power ideology.
In recruiting the Invaders, King would not be filling an ideological void, as he had with the Chicago gangs. He would have to confront the Invaders’ radicalism head-on and rebut their conviction that King’s nonviolence was feckless, that its time was past. To dissuade them was to dispute the idea at the crux of Black Power. In Chicago, King and his aides had spent much of one summer working to gain the gangs’ allegiance. In Memphis they had less than a week.
At 3:17 p.m., Monday, April 3, King left the meeting with Lucius Burch. He headed to the motel’s dining room, where he found Cabbage, John Burl Smith, and about fifteen other Invaders seated in chairs.16 King sat down facing them. Even sitting, the lanky Cabbage loomed over King. Cabbage was wearing blue jeans, a sweatshirt, and sandals. The same clothes had served as his virtual uniform for the preceding year. He owned just one pair of blue jeans, and he and other Invaders were struggling to feed themselves for lack of money.17
King asked Cabbage’s group if they could agree to a pledge of nonviolence.18 The Invaders evaded the question but portrayed themselves as the key to a peaceful march in Memphis. They argued that King ought to work with them because they had grassroots support in the African American community. They faulted Jim Lawson for not including them in COME’s planning before the march of March 28. As one Invader recounted years later, they said that, if King had met with the Invaders early on, the march would have been “free of violence.”19 On the strength of that claim, the Invaders repeated their demand for money to fund their Black Organizing Project. King seemed sympathetic. Emboldened, Cabbage asked for $2 million, according to an account of an FBI informant.20 The sum far exceeded the SCLC’s total annual budget.
King did not promise to tap SCLC’s treasury to fund any of the Invaders’ programs. He said, however, that he would try to find other sources of money. He mentioned a coalition of black churches that had established a fund-raising arm to aid militant black groups. To show that he meant business, King picked up the telephone right then and called a number in New York. “Okay,” he told Cabbage a moment later, “we have a commitment to partially fund your program.”21
For his part King asked the Invaders to make the rounds of the city’s black high schools and urge the students’ cooperation to keep Monday’s march peaceful.22 He asked that the Invaders provide at least twenty-five of their members to serve as parade marshals.23 When King again demanded a pledge of nonviolence, Cabbage hedged. “We told him, okay, we will try to do our best,” Cabbage would recall. “We will try to do this, even though we can’t guarantee that violence will not break out.”24 On that note the meeting with the Invaders ended at about 4:30 p.m.
Chapter 11
Nine-to-Five Security
I can’t lead that kind of life. I’d feel like a bird in a cage. . . . There’s no way in the world you can keep somebody from killing you if they really want to kill you.
—MLK, responding to a plea that he travel with bodyguards, Albany, Georgia, March 23, 1968
EXHAUSTED AT THE END OF A DAY of travel and high-stakes meetings, King returned to his room to rest. Despite his outward calmness at the time, the bomb threat to his flight that morning was still eating at him. That would become painfully evident in an emotional speech that he would deliver that night.
The bomb scare appeared to have struck him as a dire warning about the perils awaiting him in Memphis. If he could not say who or when someone might attack, he knew that he was in mortal danger. Would his assailant
