Being in Memphis was doing nothing to allay King’s fear. The city was very much on edge, the racial tensions from the strike sharpened by continuing bitterness over the riot and the harsh police response to it. Anxiety was in the air, and King was being swept into it. John Lewis, the young movement leader who was working in tandem with the SCLC, was hearing reports from people close to King that he was seized by dread. Lewis would later recall learning that King was anguished by “the ugliness and killing that was rising up all around him. He could feel it closing in.”1
King’s fear for his safety in Memphis was in no way alarmist. It was well founded, as the police were aware. Even before King’s visits to the city on March 18 and March 28, the Memphis police were fielding threats against him.2 According to Memphis police director Frank Holloman, police headquarters and other city agencies had been receiving calls warning that “something was liable to happen to Dr. King.”3
Holloman nevertheless decided against providing security for King on either March 18 or 28. In congressional testimony in 1978, Holloman explained why. He said of King: “He was just another person who was involved in the sanitation strike, and there was no reason, apparently, that we even thought of providing security for him.”4
Nor did the Memphis authorities notify King of the threats against him. Or so it appears. In his testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations about the police handling of King’s security, Holloman did not mention any such warnings having been conveyed to King in mid-March. More threats had poured in after the March 28 riot. The police evidently did not warn King of those threats either. An after-action report prepared by the police department detailing hour-by-hour the surveillance and security surrounding King’s presence in Memphis on April 3 and 4 says nothing about warnings to him.5
It would seem that the bomb scare in Atlanta might have prompted him to request police protection in Memphis whether or not he knew of the threats. But he did not request a police bodyguard in Memphis. He rarely sought police protection, yet he feared that he could die a violent death at any moment.
He tried to buffer his fear by developing a numb fatalism, a defense against the dread that someone might kill him at any moment. If dying violently was inevitable, he reckoned, he might as well resign himself to it. He girded himself mentally against the nerve-racking despair of constant panic. “He was philosophical about his death,” Andrew Young would recall. “He knew it would come, and he just decided, you know, there was nothing to do about it.”6
When President Kennedy was slain in 1963, King told his wife, Coretta, that he expected the same fate for himself.7 If the president had not been safe from an assassin’s bullet, King confided to his aides, neither was he. From the time John Kennedy was killed, Andrew Young would remember, “Dr. King just felt, when your time comes, if the president can’t be secured with hundreds of Secret Service, there’s nothing that two or three officers are going do with us.”8
As he traveled around the country, King declined many offers of police security. He did not want a phalanx of police hanging around him. He believed that having armed officers in uniform standing vigil over him would send the wrong message. His was a message of nonviolent protest, a Christian tenet of turning the other cheek to hatred and violence. It was a credo that clashed with the open display of armed police guards ready to shoot.
To look to the Memphis police in particular for protection must have struck King as a doubtful proposition. Undercover officers on Holloman’s force were infiltrating the meetings of striking garbage workers and their supporters. The police were suspect in the eyes of the strike supporters for having employed harsh tactics to quell the rioting on March 28. Though many marchers had been teargassed and beaten, King had not. All the same, considering the conduct of the Memphis police that day, he had reason not to trust them.
In the days before King returned to the city on April 3, the number of death threats spiked higher.9 According to Holloman, the authorities received a flurry of telephone calls to the effect that King “would not live through” the march of April 6. Holloman said in court testimony on April 4 that he was “very much concerned” about King’s safety.10
The surge of threats and the rioting on March 28 had caused Holloman to reconsider his position that King did not warrant any special protection. Under the circumstances the police director had determined that prudence dictated a security detail for him. So it was that, when King arrived at the Memphis airport on April 3, Inspector Donald Smith’s detail of four officers had been there to guard him.
Smith and the other officers remained on the King watch all day. At 5:05 p.m., Smith called headquarters for permission to “secure the detail”—police-speak for “end the mission.” Permission was granted. That concluded the security for King, not just for that day but indefinitely. There was no security detail assigned to protect him that night or the next day.11 The security shield for King, such as it was, had been in effect six hours and thirty-two minutes.
Why the security detail was disbanded at 5:05 p.m. on that Wednesday is a mystery. The after-action report, the police department’s most complete review of its security for King during the visit in April 1968, does not say why. The report notes only that Chief J. C.
