HENRY LOEB never wavered from his stand not to negotiate directly with the sanitation workers’ union. Within two weeks of King’s death, the Memphis city council reached a settlement with the union, providing a dues checkoff through the credit union, union recognition, and a ten-cent increase in hourly pay. Loeb did not officially ink the settlement but did not stand in the way of its adoption. He left the mayoralty when his term ended in 1972 and relocated to a farm near Forrest City, Arkansas. In 1988 he suffered a stroke that left him unable to speak. He died four years later at the age of seventy-one.
FRANK HOLLOMAN retired as Memphis police and fire director in 1970 to become security coordinator at the University of Missouri. In a speech to members of a security-industry association five months after King’s death, he stated that the involvement of “outside people” had caused the trouble in Memphis that year by “inflaming the Negro community.”1
LUCIUS BURCH practiced law in Memphis until shortly before his death in 1996 at eighty-four.
WILLIE RICHMOND served for thirty-two years as a police officer in Memphis. He became eligible to take the police department’s test for promotion to lieutenant in 1973. He scored one hundred but was not promoted until 1979. He and one other policeman were the first two blacks to make lieutenant. Richmond retired from the force in 1997 as a captain.
JOE WARREN remained active in AFSCME Local 1733 for many years. He was one of eight former sanitation workers—participants in the strike of 1968—honored by President Obama in a White House ceremony in April 2011. Warren died of a heart attack in 2012. He was ninety-one.
GEORGIA DAVIS served as a Kentucky state senator for twenty-one years, championing legislation to end discrimination in employment and discrimination by sex and age. She married James Powers in 1973 and took his name. She was widely regarded as one of the most influential civil rights leaders in the history of Kentucky. She died of congestive heart failure on January 30, 2016, at the age of ninety-two.
ANDREW YOUNG served as congressman from Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District, US ambassador to the United Nations, and mayor of Atlanta. Since retiring from politics in 1990, he has held positions with a variety of nonprofit organizations, including a term as president of the National Council of Churches.
JESSE JACKSON resigned as director of Operation Breadbasket in 1971 after a falling-out with Ralph Abernathy. He has continued to pursue civil rights and political causes as head of Rainbow/PUSH, based in Chicago. In 1984 and 1988 he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for president.
RALPH ABERNATHY succeeded King as president of the SCLC in April 1968. Along with Coretta King, he assumed leadership of the Poor People’s Campaign, which commenced the next month. The antipoverty drive ended futilely after police, on June 24, drove hundreds of protesters from the shantytown they had erected near the Washington Memorial. When he refused to comply with orders to evacuate, Abernathy was jailed for nearly three weeks. He headed the SCLC for nine more years. He died of complications from blood clots on April 17, 1990, at the age of sixty-four.
After her husband’s death, CORETTA KING played a prominent role as a political activist supporting the causes of African Americans, women, and gay people. In 1968 she founded the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. She died of ovarian cancer on January 30, 2006. She was seventy-eight.
– Notes –
CHAPTER 1: ATLANTA DEPARTURE
Ralph David Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 419.
1. Coretta Scott King, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 290.
2. G. Wayne Dowdy, A Brief History of Memphis (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2011), 63.
3. Joan Turner Beifuss, At the River I Stand: Memphis, the 1968 Strike, and Martin Luther King (orig. pub., 1985; Memphis: St. Lukes Press, 1990), 256.
4. E. H. Arkin, Civil Disorders, Memphis, Tennessee, Feb. 12–April 12, 1968, report of Memphis Police Dept., 36–37, Frank Holloman Collection, Shelby County Room, Memphis Public Library, Memphis, Tennessee (hereafter Holloman Collection).
5. Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 376.
6. Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 238.
7. David L. Lewis, King: A Critical Biography (New York: Praeger, 1970), 383.
8. Ibid.
9. FBI memo from New York Bureau to headquarters, April 1, 1968, transcript of conversation between King and Stanley Levison, King FOIA file 00000172–176.TIF.
10. David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Leadership Conference (orig. pub., 1986; New York: Perennial Classics, 2004), 391; Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, 323; and Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 513.
11. Gerold Frank, An American Death: The True Story of the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Greatest Manhunt of Our Time (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 91.
12. Harry Belafonte with Michael Shnayerson, My Song: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 2011), 311.
13. Tavis Smiley, Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year (New York: Little, Brown, 2014), 74.
14. Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Free Press, 2000), 6.
15. Ralph Abernathy, testimony, August 14, 1978, in Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the US House of Representatives Ninety-Fifth Congress, Second Session (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1979) (hereafter cited as HSCA testimony), vol. 1, 18.
16. Dorothy F. Cotton, If Your Back’s Not Bent: The Role of the Citizenship Education Program in the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Atria Books, 2012), 260.
17. Dorothy F.
