On more than one occasion King called Davis to say that his brother was so despondent that he was threatening suicide. King would ask her to intervene and help sober him up. She would hurry to A.D.’s house. His wife, Naomi, would let her in. Davis would find A.D. in a bedroom and ask what was wrong. Davis would recall how she would scold him. She would ask, “Why would you put that burden on your brother with all the problems he has?”22 A.D. would reply that he was really okay, and she should not worry: he was not going to kill himself. But the brother’s alcoholic binges were a continual source of worry to King.
In 1967 Davis hit upon a bold idea. Instead of working to elect another candidate for public office, she would work to elect herself. She jumped into the race for the Kentucky Senate. It seemed very much a long shot. No African American or woman had ever been elected a Kentucky state senator. In her district, whites outnumbered blacks by almost two to one. She had the guts to run anyhow, and she won.
She had served only three months in office when she arrived in Memphis in the early morning of April 4. Having found A.D., Ward, and Davis awake and in a talkative mood, King sat down with them in Room 207. King and his brother were in lighthearted spirits. They rattled off a round of jokes. The room filled with laughter.23
Not all of the chatter was lighthearted. The new arrivals had questions for King. What about the violence that had erupted during the march six days earlier? As Davis would recount, King said that he was concerned, that “they had rushed him out of the area, and what would people say [about his courage and leadership]?”24 King was being pilloried in the press for having left the scene of the riot, even though the full story should have noted that he had done so under instructions from the police.
Even on the dreary subject of the riot, King could not resist a droll bit of understatement. He turned to Davis. “I would rather have been in Florida getting a tan than here in the middle of turmoil,” he said.
“You are invited,” she said.
He replied that there was a more urgent task for him at the moment. The Invaders had disrupted the last march, he said, and might do the same during the next one. King was determined that they would not. Davis replied, playfully, as she would recount in her memoir: “Maybe they should be called the Disrupters.”25
There was talk of Judge Brown’s injunction. King said he was directing his lawyer, Chauncey Eskridge, and Andrew Young to appear in Brown’s court later that morning and urge the judge to vacate his order barring him from marching.
The conversation in Room 207 continued into the early morning. It ended when King announced that he had set a meeting with his staff for eight o’clock that morning, and he needed rest. Davis left A.D.’s room to walk toward hers. She heard King’s footsteps behind her.
She left the door to her room slightly ajar, and he followed a moment later. He may have been a night owl of great stamina, but he had reached his limit. As Davis would write in her memoir: “He declared, softly, ‘I’ve never been more physically and emotionally tired.’”
He collapsed into bed, saying, “Senator, our time together is so short.” It was 4:30 a.m.
Chapter 17
Home Pressures
I’m away two and three weeks at a time. . . . But every day when I’m at home, I break from the office for dinner and try to spend a few hours with the children before I return to the office for some night work.
—MLK, interview with Playboy magazine, January 1965
OPERATING ON LESS than four hours sleep, King was up by 8 a.m. to face the day. Time was short before the march on Monday. Still hanging over him was the federal injunction barring him from marching. A hearing on the injunction was set for 9:30 that morning before Judge Brown. But King, the central defendant in the case, would not be going to court. He was weary from lack of sleep. Andrew Young and James Lawson would be testifying in his stead.
There were other issues that demanded his attention. One was a delicate matter involving Dorothy Cotton. She was one of his most valued aides, the only woman on his staff in an executive role. He had agreed to meet her for a bite to eat after the rally at Mason Temple the night before, but he had not shown up.1 She would want an explanation.
It was yet another headache for King, this one self-inflicted. The Memphis crisis had all but shattered his nerves. In his fraught condition he needed the support of people close to him. His wife, Coretta (whom he called Corrie), had been at his side in troubling times. The night before, he had called her. They had talked while he was still in his room at the Lorraine before he departed for the rally at Mason Temple.
As Coretta would write in her memoir, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., King had sounded upbeat.2 He spoke optimistically about the prospects for a large turnout of marchers on Monday. King, however, was not entirely reassuring. The subject of Judge Brown’s injunction came up. Repeating what he had indicated to others in his inner circle, King told Coretta that he would lead the march on Monday even if he had to violate the injunction.
Though King and his wife were in touch by phone, she was at home in Atlanta, not with him as he confronted the crisis in Memphis. He had summoned Georgia Davis and his brother to Memphis. It’s unlikely that King had asked Coretta to come. She was recovering from surgery for a fibroid stomach tumor and not in the best shape to travel.3
Probably he would not have urged Coretta to
