Despite the department’s mixed record on racial matters under Armour, his handling of security for King reflected a caution that would be lacking in the department under Holloman. In June 1966 King operated out of Memphis while he took part in a march across Mississippi begun by James Meredith, the first black student admitted, in 1962, to the state’s flagship university at Oxford. In his home state Meredith was staging what he called a “march against fear” to combat racism.
Armour was determined that no harm would come to King while he was in Memphis. He ordered a security detail of eight African American officers and issued strict instructions: they would keep King safe, or there would be hell to pay.24 Jerry Dave Williams, a black homicide detective, was put in charge. “We would go in and check the rooms, make sure the telephone wasn’t bugged, check under the beds, check everywhere. Then I would assign two officers outside his door. We would take turns every two hours through the night,” Williams would say later.25
Detective Redditt was one of the eight officers in Williams’s detail. Armour took it upon himself to issue orders to Redditt. He summoned Redditt to his office. Redditt would remember Armour saying, “This man is an international figure, and you better not let anything happen to him. If something happens, you lose your badge.”26
Guarding King had been unlike any other duty that Detective Redditt had performed as a police officer. King was staying at the Lorraine, where he had his customary Room 306 on the second floor. Wiry and fleet-footed (he had been a star sprinter on the track team at Manassas High School), Redditt had positioned his body as a human shield for King.
When King would leave his room to descend the open stairway to the ground floor, Redditt and other officers in the security detail were standing by. In Redditt’s telling: “We had to put our bodies around him and walk him down the stairs.” One morning, while King was eating breakfast, Redditt joked about all the trips up and down the stairs. “Why don’t you get another room?” he asked King. “It’s killing me walking up and down those steps.”27
But Holloman did not follow Armour’s example. He did not see security for King as a critical matter demanding his close attention and scrutiny. In sharp contrast to Armour’s diligence in safeguarding King from harm, Holloman’s attitude was passive, halfhearted. As a consequence, King was in greater jeopardy on April 4, 1968.
Chapter 12
Reluctant Speaker
The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.
—MLK, in his book Where Do We Go from Here, published in June 1967
THAT NIGHT IT SEEMED that even the Lord was turning against King. From inside his room at the Lorraine, he could hear the insistent wailing of tornado sirens. The fury of the approaching storm gave him pause. He doubted that much of a crowd would turn out for a speech on such a night. He could picture yawning rows of empty seats in the vastness of Mason Temple. If the crowd was paltry, if the rally was a bust, it would add to his misery. Abernathy would recall King’s hesitation: “It was clear that few people would show up at the speech. Martin never liked to address small crowds.”1
King’s health was another issue. He had a sore throat. His weeks of breakneck travel pitching the Poor People’s Campaign had worn him down. He badly needed rest.
He knew from long experience that he would pay a price for subjecting his body to punishing days on the road. He had a history of collapsing from exhaustion. When he returned from the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo in 1964, he was brimming with pride but so fatigued that he had checked into an Atlanta hospital.2 Two years later, succumbing to what Abernathy called “his virus,” meaning the utter exhaustion and fever that struck him in times of great stress, he missed most of the SCLC’s annual convention in Jackson, Mississippi.3 It was then, in February 1968, that on doctor’s orders he sought refuge in Acapulco for a break from the relentless pace of the Poor People’s Campaign.4
On occasion, according to Andrew Young, King feigned sickness so he could duck out of an unwelcome event.5 This time, though, he was not faking. He had a sore throat, likely aggravated by his smoking habit (a pack a day of Salems), and he was not feeling well.6
Sleepless nights worsened his exhaustion. Toward the end of March, as he wrapped up a busy round of recruiting in Harlem and Newark for the Poor People’s Campaign before the rush back to Memphis, he was laboring under a severe sleep deficit. He told a reporter, “I’ve been getting two hours of sleep a night for the past ten days.”7
King suffered from migraine headaches and chronic insomnia.8 He tried sleeping pills, but they no longer worked for him. It was “Martin’s war on sleep,” Abernathy would say.9 Some of his aides were night owls too and would sit with him, talking into the wee hours through whatever issues were bedeviling him. As Andrew Young put it, “We almost always ran relays keeping him company.”10 His aides suspected that his bouts of depression, which hit him in moments of extreme sadness and even great joy, might have been at the root of the insomnia.11
Even if he could overcome the exhaustion and acquit himself well in Mason Temple that night, King worried how the media would play his speech. If the crowd were
