Not that King and A.D. discussed anything all that sensitive while they were in Room 201. Giddy to be together again and seized by an adolescent impulse, the brothers telephoned their mother in Atlanta. They talked to her for almost an hour. Indulging an urge for boyish mischief, they teased her. Alberta, whom everyone called Mama King, did not seem like a mother who would have had much tolerance for her sons’ foolishness. A short, stocky woman who dressed meticulously, an accomplished church organist, she had an air of formality about her. She did not call her husband, Martin Sr., by his first name. To her he was always Reverend King.7 But according to Coretta, her dignified mother-in-law actually had a “keen sense of humor.”8
Taking turns on the phone, King and A.D. pretended to be the other. That kept their mother guessing which was which. The more they confounded her, the more they laughed. Whoops and hoots filled the room. Turning serious, Mrs. King expressed her distress about the rioting in Memphis the week before. She handed the phone to Daddy King.9 He expressed his concern as well. To relieve his parents of worry, King said that everything was fine in Memphis. Back on the phone, Alberta gushed about how happy she was that her sons were together.
The warmth and cheer from his parents buoyed King. Once he was off the phone, however, his mood darkened. He seemed pensive, distracted. King remained flat on his back in bed for much of the afternoon, awake, saying little, staring blankly at the ceiling, lost in his thoughts. “Most of the day, he was just resting and relaxing,” Davis would recall.10
He had much to mull over, moments fresh on his mind. The bomb threat to his plane from Atlanta, the outpouring of mournful emotions in his speech at Mason Temple, Dorothy Cotton’s angry departure from the Lorraine, the futility of his attempt to enlist the Invaders as parade marshals—they were all unsettling events in his life since the morning before.
As he struggled with the Memphis crisis, he was still hearing a drumbeat of criticism against him for his stand against the Vietnam War. Top union leaders were continuing to object, as were some prominent civil rights leaders.11 Among the union leaders continuing to take issue with him over Vietnam were longtime friends and allies such as Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young. The criticism grated on him. Close friend Marian Logan would tell of his acute anguish because of his friends’ disagreement with him over Vietnam. She would recall: “I don’t think it was because he doubted the position he had taken, that it was wrong. I think he felt badly that a lot of people didn’t agree with him or couldn’t understand his reason for taking a stand. It depressed him terribly.”12
He could hardly have been happy, moreover, about being trapped another day in the city where rioting had so subverted his reputation. Critics from all sides were questioning his relevance as a nonviolent leader. Even he was losing hope. In the article for the issue of Look magazine slated for April 16, 1968, he wrote: “As committed as I am to nonviolence, I have to face this fact: If we do not get a positive response in Washington, many more Negroes will begin to think and act in violent terms.”13
Very likely nothing troubled King more, as he stared at the ceiling of Room 201, than the fading prospects of the Poor People’s Campaign. As a consequence of the rioting in Memphis, he was stranded in a motel room rather than on the move to recruit and organize for the antipoverty drive set to begin in just eighteen days.
Even before the crisis in Memphis, the mobilization of King’s army of poor people was lagging. Then, with five weeks to go before the scheduled kickoff of the Washington campaign, Hosea Williams was lamenting the slow pace of recruitment. In a memo to SCLC staff, Williams, the campaign’s field director, wrote: “Yes, many meetings are being held, some money is being raised, but hardly anyone is being recruited for the long, hard drive in Washington.” Williams added that he was “very much disturbed” by the lack of progress.14
Money was being raised, but it was far from enough to meet the heavy costs they expected to incur in Washington. At the SCLC money had always been tight. In 1965, when its staff roster totaled 150 people, the budget was shy of a million dollars.15 To cover its expenses, the SCLC relied on the uneven flow of direct-mail appeals and King’s income as a writer and speaker. At times only emergency bailouts from labor unions or fund-raising performances by celebrities such as Harry Belafonte and Aretha Franklin kept the SCLC afloat.16
King was counting on the pastors of African American churches to promote the Washington campaign. Some were proving to be less supportive than he had expected. As the FBI would note in field reports, a group of 150 pastors King had convened in Miami to enlist as boosters in the antipoverty drive “had remained noncommittal” despite his impassioned plea for help.17
Even some of King’s long-devoted benefactors were abandoning him. Labor union dollars were barely trickling in, and King seemed at a loss what to do about it.18 The reasons varied: a shift of liberals’ attention from civil rights to Vietnam, a backlash against inner-city rioting, and doubts about the Poor People’s Campaign.19 So little money was coming in during February that William Rutherford, the executive director of the SCLC, wrote an urgent plea to Marlon Brando. Rutherford said that the SCLC’s needs were great, and
