Redemption

the privation that had inspired him to launch the Washington campaign. It was a backwater Delta town of twenty-six hundred inhabitants in Quitman County, one of the poorest counties in the United States. At the edge of cotton fields, he said, he had seen “hundreds of little black boys and girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear” and heard stories from jobless mothers and fathers about times when they could survive only if they would “go around to the neighbors and ask them for a little something.”¹¹

In his travels to rally poor people to Washington, King barnstormed from one small airport to another in a chartered, twin-engine Cessna 40. King and a few aides then would rush to a nearby African American church where he would speak. Even with the benefit of a private plane, they sometimes arrived hours behind schedule.

After Mississippi they moved on to Alabama and Georgia. He would talk to whatever crowd waited long enough to hear him. King would call on the people who turned out, as he did in Waycross, Georgia, on March 22, to join the “powerful and meaningful” Washington campaign that, he promised, would cause the “walls of injustice to come tumbling down.” His voice would resound with emotional fervor, attuned to the religious convictions of his listeners. In Waycross he hit that pious note, saying that poor people, as God’s children, were no less deserving than other Americans of jobs and income.¹²

If it had not been for the quagmire of Memphis, King’s schedule would have had him presiding over a meeting of the national steering committee of the Poor People’s Campaign in Atlanta on April 1.¹³

That meeting had been called off. Further, he would have been in Chicago on April 3, the day he was now flying to Tennessee instead, and in Detroit the next day. Now he would have to scrub travel to both cities. The detour to Memphis was bleeding time and energy that King and his staff had intended to devote to the antipoverty drive at a critical stage.

The top echelon of his staff flying with him that morning from Atlanta to Memphis had major assignments as area managers of the Poor People’s Campaign. Abernathy had three cities under his watch, Washington, Baltimore, and Newark, New Jersey, Young had New York City and Philadelphia, and Cotton had North Carolina and Virginia.

Other key aides—Jesse Jackson, James Bevel, James Orange, and Hosea Williams—were already in Memphis, having arrived earlier in the week. All would have to suspend their work on the antipoverty campaign. Williams had a particularly vital role as the national field director overseeing the entire campaign. King’s aides did not want to pause the antipoverty campaign and come to Memphis. They relented only at King’s insistence. Ordinarily they would have held workshops and planning sessions for many weeks, if not months, to pull off a protest of that magnitude. Preparing for the Birmingham campaign had consumed three months of planning and training. In Memphis they would have five days.

King disregarded not just his aides’ advice but also the pleadings of Marian Logan, a trusted SCLC board member on whom he relied for counsel and emotional support. On the night of March 28, still reeling from the day’s riot, King had called Logan at her apartment in New York City. When she heard that he was stranded in Memphis, she winced. She told him bluntly, as she would recall, “You ought to get your ass out of Memphis.”

King replied, “Darling, we can’t turn around now. We have to keep going.”¹⁴

Chapter 3

The Strike

We have thousands and thousands of Negroes working on full-time jobs with part-time income.

—MLK, speaking at an SCLC retreat in Atlanta, January 15, 1968

THE STRIKE THAT BROUGHT King to Memphis in 1968 began on February 12. The date coincided with Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. The timing was accidental. As the strike’s leaders initially conceived it, the walkout had nothing to do with race—no symbolic link to the Great Emancipator.

The workers struck for the usual reasons: better wages and working conditions and union recognition. Yet what began purely as a labor dispute swiftly assumed the proportions of a highly charged racial confrontation, as labor historian Michael K. Honey explains in his definitive book about the Memphis strike.¹ Just four days into the strike, the Memphis chapter of the NAACP thrust race to the front and center. At a news conference NAACP officials decried “racial discrimination” in the city’s treatment of the garbage workers.

Within a few weeks, the men on strike were carrying signs reading, “I AM A MAN.” As a rallying cry, the slogan might have seemed oddly mild. Yet it evoked an anguished plea for an end to the era in which Southerners assumed the right to address adult black men as “boys” and lorded over them as if they had no more rights than boys.² Taylor Rogers, who was in his tenth year as a garbage worker before going on strike in 1968, would put it years later: “We wanted some dignity. We wanted to be treated like men. We were tired of being treated like boys.”³

The NAACP played no part in initiating the strike, only in backing it once it began. To the Reverend Samuel “Billy” Kyles, a Baptist minister and prominent member of the NAACP in Memphis, the strike came as a complete surprise. The garbage workers belonged to a world apart from the NAACP.

They were not part of the city’s African American elite, the ministers, lawyers, and other professionals. The NAACP was in the hands of the elite. In the early 1960s, it turned to the federal judiciary for progress on civil rights. It brought lawsuits seeking court orders to desegregate schools, parks, and other public facilities. In some instances it engaged in sit-ins and picketing. But the NAACP leaders conducted their protests quietly, respectfully, collaboratively.

To see a movie at a segregated Malco theater, Kyles, a film buff, would have had to climb a fire escape stairway and sit in the