He was acutely aware of how he and his campaigns would play in newspapers and on TV screens. In his rise to national prominence King owed much of his success to media coverage. The emotional intensity of television operated as a crucial prop. King was savvy enough to recognize the potential of TV as an ally, and he and his aides tailored their strategy to exploit its power to the fullest. Journalist David Halberstam even portrayed the civil rights movement under King as “a great televised morality play.”12
In Birmingham the seduction of TV cameras had contributed to King’s decision to mobilize high school students as demonstrators. To have police dogs snapping at young marchers was bound to produce dramatic footage. It was a shrewd, though controversial, tactic. It would expose children to the risk of a violent police response. Andrew Young would explain years later how much the lure of television coverage shaped SCLC strategy: “During the Birmingham campaign we would schedule demonstrations in the morning in order to leave time for the national TV networks to ship film footage out on the 2 p.m. flight to New York. The footage would arrive in time for the networks to produce it for their evening news shows.”13
But by 1968 the media spotlight was on urban rioting and Black Power militancy. The thrust of the coverage was negative. Media interest in King’s comparatively moderate message of nonviolent protest was waning. Mostly his antiwar utterances gained much traction, and it was largely critical. Other than the riot on March 28, the Memphis story was capturing little national media coverage. As Jesse Jackson would recount: “Memphis was an isolated area, the media wasn’t there, and we were already in a media slump. They had about locked Martin out of the press, and the Memphis garbage workers could only be a small space at best.”14
King had no reason to expect that many reporters would turn up at Mason Temple on the stormy night of April 3. The opposite was more likely. There might not be any TV cameras or national reporters on hand, and there would probably be only a few local ones. Maybe none. It was a disheartening thought.
Given the dim prospects, he was uneasy about speaking at all that night. He decided not to go. Instead he would stay in his room and rest.
He told Abernathy, “I really don’t feel like speaking.”
Abernathy replied, “Why don’t you let Jesse go? He loves to speak.”15
No, King said. He was wary of Jackson’s outsize ambition and did not want the charismatic twenty-six-year-old spellbinder filling in for him. He asked Abernathy to speak. “Can I take Jackson along?” Abernathy asked.
“Yes, but you do the speaking,” King insisted.16
So, with Jackson and Young in tow, Abernathy drove through slashing rain to Mason Temple.
Alone in Room 306, King telephoned SCLC board member Marian Logan in New York City. King and Logan had been arguing about the Poor People’s Campaign for weeks. Logan and her husband, Arthur, were close friends of King and longtime financial supporters of the SCLC. King so valued their friendship that he had invited them, as part of a select group of family and close associates, to be on hand in Oslo when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Logans were unlike many of King’s close friends. They lived outside the South. Neither was a minister. Arthur Logan was a well-regarded surgeon and civic leader in New York. One of his patients was jazz great Duke Ellington. Marian herself had been a fine cabaret singer. It was a measure of King’s esteem for her that he had asked her to join the SCLC board. On the board she was unique in two respects: the only woman and the only Northerner. She was avidly devoted to King and his nonviolent movement.
But when King embraced causes beyond his core civil rights mission, he no longer enjoyed Marian Logan’s unwavering support. The Poor People’s Campaign struck Logan as a great mistake. Ordinarily, if she had a bone to pick with King, she would do it privately. But she felt so strongly about the Poor People’s Campaign that on March 8 she had fired off a six-page memo to King and the other SCLC board members detailing her objections.
Bluntly she told them it was not the time for thousands of poor people to besiege the nation’s capital. Many Americans were already angry about rioting in urban ghettos. She noted the “climate of confusion, splintering, backlash and reaction that reigns over the country at present.”17 She expected that King’s confrontational tactics would not sway Congress to authorize programs for the poor but rather would harden its opposition to them. As she told him, she believed his antipoverty campaign was crudely planned and would fail “to move the conscience of the Congress.”18 She predicted instead that the militant and disruptive (if nonviolent) demonstrations vowed by King would play into the hands of conservative, law-and-order candidates by fueling voters’ support for them at the polls.
On the evening of Monday, March 25, having wound up a speaking tour in the East, King showed up unannounced at the Logans’ brownstone on West Eighty-Eighth Street. He and Marian were soon hard at it, resuming their debate about the Poor People’s Campaign. As journalist and author Gerold Frank would portray King that night, he lounged on a couch, his shoes and tie off. Fortified by copious amounts of orange juice and vodka, he jousted nonstop with Logan until almost dawn. Despite naysayers’ arguments against his Washington plan, he told Logan, he would trust his instincts. If he had not trusted his instincts, he said, there would have been no Montgomery, no Selma, no Birmingham.19
Logan would relate, years later, the way the marathon session
