By 1968, however, as he looked for support in his fight against poverty, King seemed far more intent on promoting common cause with unions than decrying the racism that pervaded many of them. In Where Do We Go from Here, his blueprint for the Poor People’s Campaign published in January 1968, King saluted unions for their increasing inclusion of African Americans.11
The turn of events in Memphis was drawing him into a closer embrace with the labor movement. If Memphis was risky for King, at least it offered a potential benefit. The more he advanced the unions’ cause, the more likely they were to support his.
Now, at the rally in Mason Temple, King had the opportunity to lift the morale of one union, Local 1733 of AFSCME. With still no sight of King, other speakers bided time by warming up the crowd. They led them in prayer and song. They solicited strike-support donations. Jim Lawson took the podium and denounced the pending injunction against King, declaring, “Mace cannot stop us, gas cannot stop us, and we are going to march.”12
Lawson reprised strike-related events of the previous few days. He denounced the police for employing what he regarded as brutally excessive force to quell the rioting on March 28. His voice ringing with indignation, Lawson accused one police officer of having fatally shot sixteen-year-old Larry Payne in cold blood.13 Payne allegedly had looted a television from a Sears, Roebuck store before fleeing. A police department review would conclude later that in the aftermath of the riot Payne had pulled a knife on the patrolman, who shot in self-defense. The officer was exonerated. A number of witnesses, however, disputed the department’s account.14 According to historian Michael Honey, a dozen eyewitnesses said Payne had no knife but had his hands up and was killed by a blast from a shotgun poked into his stomach.15
Lawson was still addressing the crowd when Abernathy, Jackson, and Young entered through a side door of the temple. At the sight of them there was a great eruption of cheers and applause. They might have been rock stars leaping onto a stage. But as soon as it dawned on the crowd that King was not among them, the uproar fizzled as abruptly as it had begun. The crowd’s message was unmistakable. “We said, ‘It’s not us they’re cheering for.’ We laughed about it, and we said he had to come,” Jackson would recall.16
Years later, Abernathy would recap his thoughts at that moment. He would write in his memoir that the people “who had driven through rainy, windswept streets” to Mason Temple “had done so because they expected to see Martin Luther King, Jr., not Ralph D. Abernathy. I knew that better than anybody, and I was overwhelmed by the fact as I walked down the aisle and onto the stage. Nobody shouted or applauded. Clearly they were all waiting for the evening’s attraction.”17
With their cameras, tripods, and lights set up in front of the podium, seven or eight TV film crews were waiting in anticipation of King’s arrival. Several were covering the event for the major television networks. As Abernathy would recollect: “That meant the audience would be national, so the event was much more important than a poorly attended local rally.”18 Abernathy told Jackson that he intended to telephone King and urge him to come to Mason Temple at once to speak. According to Abernathy, Jackson replied, “Don’t call him. If you don’t want to speak, then I’ll speak.”
Ignoring Jackson, Abernathy hurried to the temple vestibule where there was a telephone and called the Lorraine. King answered.
“Martin,” Abernathy said, “all the television networks are lined up waiting for you. This speech will be broadcast nationwide. You need to deliver it. Besides, the people who are here want you. Not me.”
“I’ll do whatever you say. If you say come, I’ll be there,” King said.
Abernathy replied, “Come.”19
Moments later, King left the motel. He arrived at Mason Temple about nine o’clock. The crowd had been waiting an hour and a half for King. The sight of him striding toward the podium set off another deafening cacophony of shouts and applause. As the crowd’s excitement washed over him, King grinned widely and took a seat on the podium.
Abernathy was no longer the main event. But he was wound up to talk. He would recall feeling an impulse, a powerful desire to exalt King’s greatness to this audience on this night.20 Abernathy offered to introduce his friend.
King and Abernathy had a friendship like no other. They had stood shoulder to shoulder during King’s civil rights campaigns since the earliest days of the Montgomery bus boycott. With Abernathy bravely accompanying King as moral support and for the safety of numbers, they had gone to jail together time and again. More weeks than not, they were on the road together. They had preached in each other’s churches, vacationed together, eaten in each other’s homes on countless occasions, and become enmeshed in the lives of each other’s families.
King’s other aides, no matter how close their relationship with him, called him Martin or “Doc.” Not Abernathy. For Abernathy the name was Michael. Nor did King call his friend Ralph, as others did. To each other they were Michael and David. Those were their boyhood names. Using them was a private compact between best friends, a sign of the special bond between them.
That night, during his address to the garbage workers in Mason Temple, King would express his feelings publicly for Abernathy. Once Abernathy had finished the introduction and yielded the rostrum to him, King would say: “Ralph Abernathy is the best friend that I have in the world.”21
They were not obviously cut out to be best friends. King was the heir to the ministerial crown of his father, one of Atlanta’s most esteemed African American ministers. The younger
