Holloman’s testimony revealed the low priority that he had assigned to King’s security. He said that he had not involved himself in the particulars of the security plan for King on April 3. Nor had he monitored how things were going. Holloman’s priority was surveillance, not security. The surveillance by officers Ed Redditt and Willie Richmond did not end on Wednesday afternoon. They returned to their post at the firehouse across Mulberry Street from the Lorraine the next morning.
Holloman acquired his training in law enforcement during his decades with the FBI under the surveillance-prone management of J. Edgar Hoover. Holloman joined the bureau in 1937 after graduating from the University of Mississippi Law School. He rose through the ranks, heading regional bureaus in Atlanta, Memphis, Cincinnati, and Jackson, Mississippi. In 1956, Hoover named him “inspector in charge” at FBI headquarters. In that position he oversaw FBI personnel for eight years, reporting to Hoover.
After Mayor Loeb appointed him to head the Memphis Police Department, in January 1968, Holloman moved swiftly to create an Inspectional Division. In effect it meant a new emphasis on covert operations. As he would explain later, Holloman had a “special interest” in developing the department’s intelligence capacity.14
Holloman was taking a page from Hoover’s playbook. The Inspectional Division was the Memphis version of the FBI’s Intelligence Division. At Hoover’s direction the FBI had launched, in the late 1950s, a secret program known as COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program). COINTELPRO officially existed to investigate communist activity, but it morphed into a mammoth “dirty tricks” operation to thwart supposedly radical elements in the civil rights movement. King was a major target.
When the garbage workers went on strike, Holloman assigned Redditt and Richmond to surveillance. He assigned Marrell McCollough, a recent police recruit, to undercover work, tasking him to infiltrate the Invaders. Like Redditt and Richmond, McCollough was an African American. No African Americans were assigned to Detective Smith’s security detail.
Holloman’s emphasis on surveillance over security in King’s case seemed in line with his enthusiasm for counterintelligence. In defending his policy years later, Holloman would say that, had King agreed to cooperate, the police would have provided security for him the whole time he was in Memphis. Without that cooperation, Holloman said, he did not think that a security detail would have served any purpose.15
In some other cities, however, law enforcement officials did not take no for an answer. They persuaded King to cooperate or provided security regardless. FBI records show that security measures for King were put into effect in a number of cities—from Milwaukee to Cincinnati, Boston to Las Vegas.
Even in die-hard segregationist Albany, Georgia, Chief Laurie Pritchett commenced round-the-clock police protection for King. Though King objected, Pritchett ignored him. The chief recognized the great risk to his city and his reputation if the nation’s leading civil rights champion should die a violent death in Albany. According to an account by historian Stephen Oates, Pritchett declared that if King were murdered in Albany, “the fires would never cease.”16
In 1964, during King’s visit to Las Vegas, sheriff’s deputies kept him under constant guard by day, and they stood vigil in his hotel suite at night.17 In Los Angeles on February 28, 1965, one hundred police officers were deployed to protect him.18 In Charlotte, North Carolina, where he attended a two-day conference in September 1966, Police Chief John Ingersoll assigned fourteen African American policemen to a security detail for King. As he left a speaking engagement, the officers held hands and formed a human corridor to shield him.
As recently as February, a few weeks before King’s return to Memphis in April, police officers stood guard in the hallway leading to his room at the Sheraton Four Ambassadors Hotel in Miami. Apparently alarmed by death threats, the police prevailed on King to cancel a speech scheduled at Miami Beach and remain in the hotel. King complied.19 Billy Kyles, the Memphis minister who was at the conference, would recall: “The Miami police begged Martin not to leave the hotel because there were so many threats against him. So we stayed inside.”20
That’s the sort of caution that Holloman’s predecessor as head of the Memphis police, Claude Armour, had exercised during King’s 1966 visit to Memphis. In the early 1960s, an era of court-ordered desegregation of schools and other public facilities, he decreed that his officers would follow the law and prevent any outbreak of violence. In the words of Maxine Smith, the executive director of the Memphis branch of the NAACP at the time: “He let his force know that he would not tolerate anything. He was going to see to it that those kids got to school and got home safely, and he did that.”21
Under Armour’s stewardship of the department, however, allegations of police misconduct against African Americans did not cease. Maxine Smith accused the department of arresting blacks without cause in some instances and mistreating them. Smith said, “Police officers can do whatever they want to do under the guise of being police officers.” The term “John Gaston turbans” came into currency among the city’s defense lawyers. It was a reference to the many swaddled heads of blacks beaten by police and treated at the city’s public John Gaston Hospital.22 Young blacks had another term for the police violence: blue crush.
An incident during the summer of 1967 buttressed the claim that police, under Armour’s stewardship, were brutalizing blacks in Memphis with impunity. One sweltering night the police arrested the wrong man for the robbery of a convenience store. That night Gregory Jaynes, a reporter for the Commercial Appeal, was working the pressroom at police headquarters. Through the wall he heard the police walloping the suspect in a room next to his. He grabbed
