The idea of redemption, as referenced in the book’s title, Redemption: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last 31 Hours, ties together three strands that defined the last phase of his life. He was trying to redeem his reputation as a nonviolent leader by leading a nonviolent march in Memphis. He was seeking an end of poverty to redeem what he regarded as the American promise of economic justice. He was drawing deeply on his faith in the redemptive power of sacrifice for a noble cause, as he risked his life—a faith rooted in the biblical example of Jesus.
Despite the many books already written about King, there seemed to be room for a concise story constructed around a narrative of the last thirty-one hours and twenty-eight minutes of his life. That is the span from the time King returned to Memphis on the morning of April 3 until his murder at 6:01 p.m. on April 4. Unlike the other books that cover King and Memphis, this one explores not just King’s movements in Memphis but also Ray’s during the same time period. It examines how a bumbling convict could have pulled off the assassination of the nation’s foremost civil rights leader.
This book is, most of all, a close-up view of King as he struggled against enormous odds to end poverty in America. It is a view of him as he sought desperately to recover from a riot that threatened to subvert his impassioned cause, the Poor People’s Campaign. Ultimately, he achieved redemption in the sense most important to him. He died sacrificing himself for the cause of social justice, in which he profoundly believed.
—Joseph Rosenbloom
June 19, 2017
Chapter 1
Atlanta Departure
This is terrible. Now we’ll never get anybody to believe in nonviolence.
—MLK, reacting to TV coverage of a riot that erupted during a march he was leading in Memphis, Tennessee, March 28, 1968
AT ABOUT NINE O’CLOCK on Wednesday morning, April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. boarded Eastern Air Lines Flight 381 in Atlanta. Along with four of his top aides he was flying to Memphis on an urgent mission.
King and his entourage of smartly dressed African Americans would have been an eye-catching sight for the forty-three other passengers on the airplane. With King were three men—Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, and Bernard Lee—and one woman, Dorothy Cotton. The men wore dark suits, white shirts, and muted neckties. Cotton was tastefully outfitted in a dignified dress, her hair smartly coiffed in a beehive. In style and demeanor, the five of them might have been a team of high-powered lawyers or corporate executives departing Atlanta on a business trip.
King would have attracted particular notice. A widely recognizable figure in 1968, he had been in the limelight since the heavily publicized Montgomery bus boycott twelve years before.
Anyone who remembered him as a young man first embracing the civil rights cause in the mid-1950s would have been shocked by the change in his appearance. In 1955 he was just twenty-six years old, recently hired—“called to the pulpit,” as the expression had it—by the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Photos from that period show him nattily garbed in a dark, loosely fitting suit, necktie, and fedora, a white handkerchief poking out of his jacket pocket. There was something about him then, the freshness of the face and the limpid softness of his eyes that conveyed a boyish innocence. It was easy to imagine him as a teenager outfitted in Easter finery for a service at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where his father was the pastor.
Now, in 1968, he was a man in distress. His years in the movement had tested the limits of his courage and endurance. The strain had taken its toll emotionally and physically. He looked run-down, his eyes weary, face puffy, and neck straining against a white shirt collar.
He was dog-tired. He had been sleeping badly for weeks. He had been on the road drumming up support for the Poor People’s Campaign, the mammoth antipoverty protest that was to commence in Washington in nineteen days.
He had left his house in Atlanta early that morning. His aide and dear friend Ralph Abernathy had driven to the modest redbrick house in the scruffy neighborhood of Vine City to pick him up. King’s wife, Coretta, had offered the men a quick breakfast. No time to eat, they had told Coretta, not even accepting coffee and orange juice.1
Although he had scarcely caught his breath at home after two weeks of almost nonstop travel, he was traveling again. This time, though, he was not on another trip to recruit the thousands of poor people he intended to mobilize from around the country for weeks, or possibly months, of demonstrations in Washington.
He was bound for Memphis to lead a march the following Monday. In the spring of 1968 Memphis was a city in turmoil. A bitter strike by twelve hundred African American garbage workers had turned quickly into a racial firestorm. A pro-strike march under King’s leadership six days earlier, on March 28, had spun out of control. Windows had been smashed, many downtown stores looted.
The stakes in Memphis were enormous for him and his movement. The fate of the Poor People’s Campaign and, more broadly, his leadership of the civil rights movement were hanging in the balance. He was venturing back into a city reeling from the trauma of racial conflict and rioting. Even before the trouble in Memphis, his fear of being assassinated had been rattling him. Now he was being widely blamed and denounced for the riot, and the fear of a violent death
