With the talks seemingly stalled, King ducked into the meeting. Cabbage still seemed far from embracing definitively the principle of nonviolence. Rather, he professed support for “tactical” violence. In Black Power terms “tactical” violence meant Watts-type rioting for the purpose of drawing urgent attention to racial grievances. King replied that either the Invaders were for nonviolence or they were not. There was no in-between. His frustration mounting, he added, “I don’t negotiate with brothers.”8 The meeting ended with the prospect of the Invaders’ cooperation ever more in doubt.
King and Abernathy were back in their room by noon. King, having skipped breakfast again, wanted an early lunch. He and Abernathy headed to the dining room of the Lorraine. When they were seated, a waitress told them that the day’s special was catfish. That must have been very welcome news. The catfish that they had eaten on earlier visits was one of their fondest memories of the motel. At the Lorraine the fish was served Southern style: deep fried to a crispy, golden brown.
Southern style was exactly what King wanted. He craved not just fried catfish. He craved the whole gamut of Southern food. He relished everything from hominy grits to corn bread to turnip greens to barbecued pork ribs. A favorite lunch was a pork chop sandwich. At times he liked nothing better than gnawing on a pig’s foot. His good friend Benjamin Hooks would say that soul food had a peculiar value in the black civil rights movement. Dinners prepared by the ministers’ wives were memorable events. Hooks explained it this way: “The tension of the marches. The threats on your daily life. The uncertainty of everything. The injustice you had to face. Dinner was an outlet. You could look forward to the best cooking.”9
This Thursday, their nerves on edge because of the crisis in Memphis, King and Abernathy were having lunch by themselves. They told the waitress they each wanted the day’s special with iced tea. They waited for what seemed like an eternity. When the waitress returned to their table, she was carrying a tray. On it were not two plates of catfish but one. It was a double order heaped on one plate At least one part of the order was right: there were two glasses of iced tea on the tray.
Abernathy eyed the single plate of catfish warily. “I opened my mouth to say something,” he would recall, “but Martin raised his hand.” As Abernathy reconstructed the conversation years later, King said: “Oh, Ralph. Don’t bother her anymore. She probably doesn’t get paid minimum wage, and you know what the tips must be like here. We’ll just eat from the same plate.” And they did.10
In the early afternoon King convened another meeting of his staff. He was fuming about how the Invaders were dealing with him. He was insisting on a total pledge of nonviolence, which they were withholding as they angled for a million-dollar funding commitment. Some of his aides reminded him that the Invaders had leverage. Unless the Invaders got their way, they might incite a violent disruption of the march on Monday.
King had heard enough. He fumed: “I’d rather be dead than afraid.” He seemed to be blurting out a maxim to steady his nerves, even if it did not seem to fit the moment. His frustration with the Invaders was spilling over. One of King’s aides asked him what he thought about inviting three or four Invaders to join the SCLC staff and paying them a modest salary. The theory was that, as staff members under King’s sway, the Invaders would adhere to a philosophy of nonviolence.11
Hosea Williams pressed the point. On questions of tactics, along with James Bevel, Williams occupied the hawkish end of the spectrum among the SCLC executive staff. It was Williams who persuaded King to approve a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge at Selma into a phalanx of Alabama state troopers. It was a highly daring plan that risked ending in a bloodbath for the marchers, which is exactly what happened.
As the meeting dragged on, Williams persisted in arguing that the Invaders’ notion of tactical violence had merit. King would have none of it. He rejected any hedging on the bedrock principle of nonviolence. As historian Adam Fairclough would write: “Refusing to let the matter drop, King paced the room, preaching to his staff.”12 King was not usually a pacer. In Memphis he could not resist pacing.
On this afternoon King might well have questioned his strategy for re-channeling Black Power anger into nonviolent protest. The strategy rested on a basic idea: that he could succeed in persuading Black Power groups like the Invaders to fall into line behind his style of protest. With the Poor People’s Campaign only weeks away, the objective seemed all the more critical.
Yet the radical tilt of SNCC under H. Rap Brown’s leadership was threatening to King’s agenda, and Brown’s inflammatory rhetoric could hardly have been reassuring to King. A speech to an already angered crowd in Cambridge, Maryland, in 1967 had resulted in Brown’s arrest for inciting the riot that followed.13 The arrest did not delegitimize him among masses of angry inner-city youths. On the contrary: for many, the rage he was expressing was theirs.
As he sought broad support for the Poor People’s Campaign, King had witnessed Brown’s aggressive tactics firsthand. In February 1968, Brown had barged into an SCLC board meeting in a Washington church. He had brought along walkie-talkie-carrying toughs as bodyguards. They had disrupted the meeting, even barring some of the
