The SCLC treasury had been far short of the needed sums in late February when King agreed to speak at a rally in Memphis for the striking garbage workers. The timing suggested that he might have scheduled the speech to prop up the SCLC’s finances as it embarked on the Poor People’s Campaign. Dramatizing the impoverished plight of the garbage workers could have inspired support for the campaign in the form of money and volunteers.
The budgetary picture brightened somewhat the next month. A fervent direct mail letter signed by King yielded a $15,000 cascade of checks in a single day.22 Volunteers were signing on in numbers that promised to exceed the minimum target of two hundred persons per city or state in some locations.23
But by the end of March, as the FBI recorded in a wiretap, Rutherford was warning about an alarming shortfall between receipts and the extraordinary expense to transport, feed, and shelter three thousand volunteers for weeks, perhaps months.24 What’s more, according to Rutherford, King was so concerned about the lack of progress in recruiting volunteers that he was reassigning Hosea Williams, Bernard Lafayette, James Bevel, and Andrew Young to devote themselves to that priority.
As King brooded about the deficit of money and volunteers, another question was nagging at him. How would the American public respond to the massive civil disobedience that he was planning? He knew it would not be easy to build the groundswell of public support that would cause Washington lawmakers to approve the multibillion-dollar antipoverty programs he was demanding. He would succeed only if he could win broad popular support for his sweeping plan to end poverty. At a retreat for SCLC staff at Ebenezer Church on King’s thirty-ninth birthday, January 15, 1968, he conceded that taxpayers might recoil against his plan. He said, “It’s really going to cost billions of dollars, and, as a result of that, many people find themselves resisting.”25
King knew too that powerful forces were already converging to oppose the Poor People’s Campaign. Out of public view President Johnson was demanding that King call the whole thing off. Publicly, referring obliquely to the expected protests in Washington, Johnson vowed that he would oppose lawlessness “in whatever form and in whatever guise.”26
In the article for Look magazine King acknowledged the roadblock that his legislative agenda would encounter in Congress. Calling it a “coalition-dominated, rural-dominated, basically Southern Congress,” he wrote, “There are Southerners there with committee chairmanships, and they are going to stand in the way of progress as long as they can.”27 The US Supreme Court, which had vindicated the movement’s right to free speech and assembly in a string of First Amendment cases, seemed to be tilting the other way. In Walker v. Birmingham, the high court upheld, on June 5, 1967, King’s conviction for violating an Alabama judge’s injunction barring him from leading a march.
Not known to King were the dirty tricks being readied by J. Edgar Hoover to thwart the Poor People’s Campaign. Hoover was intensifying the smear campaign against King that had been ongoing for years. He was ordering FBI agents around the country to cook up various schemes. One would falsely link King to the highly controversial Nation of Islam in order to derail fund-raising. Another would spread disinformation to muddle King’s speaking schedule and frustrate prospective volunteers. Yet a third would falsely warn that participants in the antipoverty mobilization would lose their welfare checks. A special agent pretending to be a businessman already had called the SCLC office in Detroit offering buses to transport volunteers to Washington. The FBI had no intention of providing buses. It was a ruse that would dishearten volunteers and might deter them from going to Washington altogether.28
Despite the melancholy that seemed to engulf King that Thursday afternoon, he emerged from his lethargy for brief spells of conversation and laughter. He turned chatty when lawyer Chauncey Eskridge and an SCLC aide stopped by. But King did not leave the room. He did not join his friend Billy Kyles and aide Jesse Jackson elsewhere at the Lorraine to sing along with bandleader Ben Branch. The band, an arm of Operation Breadbasket, had flown in from Chicago to play at the pro-strike rally scheduled for that night at Mason Temple. At the Lorraine the band was rehearsing gospel hymns. One of them was entitled “I’m So Glad Trouble Don’t Always Last,” which seemed aptly chosen as a tonic for the troubles in Memphis.”29
Abernathy, who had returned to Room 306 for a nap, rejoined King downstairs at about four o’clock. Not long after, Andrew Young knocked at the door. Davis opened, and Young bounded in. Davis would recount what happened next.
Young turned to King. “The judge says you better not march,” Young said. “They gonna lock you up if you march.”
Everyone laughed, except King. He said, tersely, “We’ll go on and march regardless of what they say.” He did not seem amused.
“Nah,” Young said. “We can march as long as it’s peaceful.”
In a flash King grabbed a pillow and pitched it at Young, who lobbed it back to him. Peals of laughter filled the room.
Young briefed King on the day’s events in court. A march, Lucius Burch had told Judge Brown, was certain to occur with or without King at the head of it. In crafty cross-examination, Burch had then maneuvered Police Director Holloman into conceding a central point. Holloman had admitted that he would prefer a march under King’s leadership committed to nonviolence than a march that proceeded without him. That line of argument had carried the day. Brown had said he would allow King to march provided he
