Redemption

and shake their hands and talk to them.”²⁴ It was not an ordinary night.

Chapter 16

Long Night

I just want to spend a quiet evening here with you without worrying about the problems that beset me.

—MLK, comment to Georgia Davis, Chicago, spring of 1967

BY THE END OF HIS SPEECH at Mason Temple, King was wrung out—not just physically but also emotionally. Yet, despite his fatigue and the wrenching drama of the evening, he was in a better frame of mind than he had been earlier in the day. The crowd’s jubilant reception seemed to dispel the gloom that had enveloped him.¹

There likely was another reason for his brighter spirits. He was expecting Kentucky state senator Georgia Davis, with whom he was having an affair, to arrive at the Lorraine that night. Davis was driving to Memphis from Florida, along with King’s younger brother, A.D., and another woman, Lukey Ward.

Rather than return to his room at the Lorraine right away, King headed to a Memphis house for a late-night dinner. Bernard Lee and Ralph Abernathy went with him. The host was a friend of King’s, according to a memoir that Abernathy published years later. Abernathy did not identify the friend, except to say that she was a woman and a Memphian. The friend served steak and provided dinner partners, two other women, for Lee and Abernathy.²

Following the meal the three men and three women sat in the living room of the house engaging in light conversation. Then, in Abernathy’s account, he and Lee dozed off in the living room, and King and the friend retired to another part of the house. It was long past midnight when King reappeared. The three men departed, taking a taxi through the incessant rain back to the Lorraine.³

On arriving at the motel’s parking lot, King saw a pink Cadillac convertible bearing Kentucky license plates. He recognized the car as Lukey Ward’s. Despite the lateness of the hour, the lights were still burning brightly in A.D.’s room, 207, and in Davis’s, 201. King exited the taxi and knocked on the door of Room 207. He found Davis, Ward, and his brother in the room.⁴ They were still awake, restored to life by coffee.

A few days before, while in Florida, Davis had the idea that she ought to join King in Memphis. After completing a hectic session of the Kentucky legislature, she was on a sun-and-surf vacation at Fort Walton Beach. Ward, a friend of hers and fellow civil rights activist, was with her there. From TV news Davis had learned of the rioting in Memphis on March 28.

Stunned that the march being led by King had turned violent and concerned about King, Davis called the SCLC office in Atlanta. She did not reach him but left a message. When he returned the call, she told him that she was in Florida on vacation. “Are you getting a tan?” he teased, laughing.

Next he asked, “Senator, why don’t you come help me?”⁵

“Well,” she would recall replying, “I was thinking I’ve had about enough sun. I will be there Tuesday or Wednesday.”⁶

King’s brother, A.D., was then about to leave Louisville, where he was pastor at Zion Baptist Church, to join Davis and Ward in Fort Walton Beach. He intended to spend a few days with Ward. He was planning to fly back to Louisville afterward. But King called A.D. in Louisville, saying he needed his brother’s moral support in Memphis. A.D. agreed to come to Tennessee, but first he flew to Florida, arriving on Monday, April 1. Ward agreed to deliver A.D. and Davis to Memphis in her Cadillac. Early Wednesday morning, the threesome set out on the five-hundred-mile journey from Fort Walton Beach to Memphis.

Davis had blocked out a month for sun and relaxation in Florida. Heeding King’s appeal for help, she had left Florida two weeks early. She felt that he needed her, that she could bolster his spirits as he faced the crisis in Memphis. Further, she would write in her memoir, she “felt guilty relaxing when so much needed to be done in the civil rights struggle.”⁷

Nothing in Davis’s early life foreshadowed her future as one of the “real heroes,” as Kentucky governor Edward Breathitt would put it one day, of the civil rights movement in her state.⁸ She was born in a two-room cabin in the farming hamlet of Jimtown (short for Jim Crow Town) in central Kentucky. Her parents, Frances and Ben Montgomery, were just teenagers when they married. Frances was fifteen, Ben nineteen. Davis was the second oldest of the nine children they would have, and the only daughter.

When she was seventeen months old, a tornado had ripped through their cabin. It might have killed her had not the mattress on her bed flipped and shielded her. Their house in ruins, the family sought refuge with relatives in Louisville. Her father landed a steady job in a foundry, and the family settled in Louisville and stayed.

They managed well enough by the standard of the African American community of Louisville. They owned their house on Grand Avenue. (Muhammad Ali would eventually live two doors down.) Davis’s family always had food on the table. But her parents did not have the money to pay for their children’s college. Upon graduating from Central High School, Davis swore that one way or another she would go to college. She was barred from the University of Louisville, her first choice, because of her race. It was an affront she would never forget. “How we were discriminated against and segregated,” she would remember, “it put fire in my belly to make changes.”⁹

She landed a two-year scholarship to attend all-black Louisville Municipal College but dropped out in her second year for lack of money. She married a man who promised to pay her tuition. He reneged, and they quickly divorced. She worked in a variety of jobs, including airplane riveter, sewing-machine operator, and data processor. She remarried, but the relationship with her second husband, a soldier, was often