At Canaan's Edge (111 page)

By mid-afternoon, as the last major witness in the federal hearing, Andrew Young withstood withering cross-examination on “the so-called doctrine of nonviolence,” which lawyers for Memphis treated like a crackpot myth. “Now the nonviolent school is to be distinguished from the so-called passive school?” asked one, who wondered how meek notions could be squared with militant words. Young managed to parry a question about how the movement had “plagued” Birmingham in 1963. “Really, by marching down to City Hall every day for about forty-five days,” he said, “and having a prayer meeting.” He did concede that he had never seen King so depressed by the difficulty of maintaining nonviolent discipline and spirit. “I think history shows that most of the riots that have occurred in America have occurred during or just after wartime,” Young testified, “when the whole country is attuned to violence.” He bristled when asked why prominent Negroes like Roy Wilkins said King could not control demonstrations. Because the NAACP “has almost no history of mass action,” Young replied, “and I think of Mr. Wilkins very much like my father.”

The cross-examiner pounced on the witness to explain the implied criticism of his own father. Young replied bluntly that his father, as a comfortable member of the New Orleans establishment, would feel no urgency about the plight of 1,300 garbagemen who were not eating very well. The need for change was urgent and real, he added, quickly recovering. “I would like to remind you that there is almost no place else in the world where people even assume that this kind of change should come about nonviolently except Martin Luther King and the Southern Leadership Conference. There is no tradition of nonviolence anywhere else in the world, in labor, and even in most areas of our own government,” Young testified in a rush. “And certainly when America felt oppressed by Britain, they didn't seek nonviolence to seek redress of grievance. So I say we do have probably the only vested interest in nonviolence in this society, and we intend to make it work, and we would not want to run any unnecessary risks, because it jeopardizes what Dr. King has made a way of life for him.”

The lawyer for Memphis suffered the outburst. “Are you through?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” said Young.

At four o'clock, a bungled intelligence crisis led to the removal of Detective Redditt from the surveillance post at Fire Station Number 2. His superiors downtown discussed the threats against Redditt with a visiting investigator for U.S. senator John McClellan, who was in town to see whether the dangers of Memphis could justify federal action to curtail King's Washington campaign. The investigator marveled that he had just received parallel reports of a plot to kill a black officer in Memphis. In fact, as he soon discovered to his chagrin in the files, the alleged plot was directed toward Knoxville, not Memphis, on the shaky word of an informant from Mississippi. Still, the prospect of a double-jointed conspiracy within the black community tended to overstimulate intelligence officers hostile to civil rights, and the seeming confirmation of a “hit contract” rocketed up to fire and police director Holloman on his return from federal court. He ordered a police guard to hide Redditt and his family in a motel under assumed names. Redditt's partner, officer Willie Richmond, took over the surveillance post alone. He let a fireman or two peep through the binoculars when they came by to use the lockers and vending machines.

Also at four o'clock, an escaped convict bought a pair of Bushnell binoculars just up Main Street at York Arms Company, one of the businesses whose windows were smashed on March 28. He drove back to finish setting up a surveillance post more or less by the method Redditt had used the day before. The convict had driven from Atlanta, where the newspapers said King was leaving for a march in Memphis, arriving late the previous night. This day, reading front-page news that King was staying at the Lorraine, and perhaps hearing radio reports that specified Room 306, he had located and studied the motel until an hour ago, when he rented a room for $8.50 per week in Bessie Brewer's flophouse next door to Fire Station Number 2. With the seven-power Bush-nells, he could read room numbers on the motel doors seventy yards distant, and the same strength on his Redfield scope would make human figures seem only thirty feet away. The scope was mounted on a .30-06 Remington Gamemaster, which was engineered so that its 150-grain slug would lose less than .01 inch in altitude and reach the motel balcony with 2,370 pounds of knockdown power—enough to drop a rhinoceros. However, the odd angle of an occluding building next door meant the convict could fire the long rifle only by leaning out his window. To avoid that, he must wait until he sighted his target from the room, then run with the rifle down the hallway to the common bathroom, find it unoccupied, and hope King stayed long enough on the balcony to get a clear shot from a rear window above the bathtub.

About five o'clock, when Andrew Young returned from court to find a general bull session in Georgia Davis's Room 201, King greeted him with playful fury by wrestling him to the floor between the two beds. Abernathy, Hosea Williams, Bernard Lee, and A.D. King joined in a wild tickling punishment of Young for failure to keep “our Leader” informed all day, which turned into a free-for-all pillow fight, with King sometimes squaring off against A.D. as in childhood. Once the hysteria subsided, Young said he thought the hearing went pretty well. Chauncey Eskridge walked in from a lawyers' conference with Judge Brown just as the motel television shifted from local news centered on last night's tornadoes (“death and destruction…over the mid-South last night”) to the network broadcast. King joked that his esteemed lawyer was more reliable even than Walter Cronkite, and Eskridge said Judge Brown would permit SCLC to lead Monday's march under the restrictions King and Lawson desired: a prescribed route, no weapons, and narrow ranks to give the marshals wide space on the flanks to keep the spectators away. This relief started a fresh buzz of determination for weekend preparations. Young claimed vindication. King watched only part of the national news, which featured a rare, standing ovation in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral when President Johnson entered for the installation of Terence Cardinal Cooke as archbishop. They should all get ready for dinner, King said, and Officer Richmond noted through binoculars at 5:40 his brisk walk with Abernathy upstairs to their Room 306.

While dressing, Abernathy disclosed sheepishly to King that he could not join him in Washington for the preliminary lobbying in the Poor People's Campaign, because the new start date of April 29 conflicted with his long-scheduled spring revival in Atlanta. King said this would never do. West Hunter Street Baptist was a magnificent congregation, he purred, claiming that he would have gone there himself if Daddy King had not invited him to Ebenezer, and surely the deacons would understand that Abernathy had to revive the soul of a whole nation instead. Abernathy weakened, but did not give in until King promised to help secure a substitute revival leader of stature. He placed a call to a New Orleans revivalist. In the esoteric bargaining, King and Abernathy used the little-known childhood first names they reserved for each other in private—Michael and David, respectively—and they ignored the commotion outside. Upstairs, Hosea Williams loudly evicted the last of the Invaders from two rooms provided during negotiations, after discovering to his outrage that fifteen of them had crammed inside to live on meals charged to the SCLC account. Downstairs, Jesse Jackson rehearsed an Operation Breadbasket ensemble, and bystanders crowded into the room to belt out extra hymns such as “Yield Not to Temptation” and “I'm So Glad Trouble Don't Last Always.”

Rev. Billy Kyles left Jackson's songfest and knocked at Room 306 to hurry King along. Abernathy played him for a sign of deliverance. “Why don't you do my revival?” he asked Kyles, who adroitly dodged, saying he thought he was scheduled to preach in Columbus, Ohio. King chimed in to needle Kyles about the relative status of his invitations. “Anybody'd rather come to Atlanta than go to Columbus,” he said. He shifted tone to inquire how Memphis churches achieved such unity behind the sanitation workers, who were not members of the prestige congregations, but Abernathy reopened preachers' banter on the subject of food. “All right now Billy, I don't want you fooling me,” he said, warning that if he went all the way to the Kyleses' home for T-bone steaks or filet mignons, which he pronounced “FEEL-ay MEEN-yuns,” then, “you're gonna flunk.” King shuddered at the memory of a preacher in Atlanta whose house was so big that he could afford to serve only cold ham bone, cold potatoes, cold bread, and Kool-Aid. Abernathy said the Kool-Aid wasn't even sweet.

“Now Billy,” said King, “if you've bought this big new house and can't afford to feed us, I'm gonna tell everybody in the country.”

Kyles rejoined that there would be more soul food than King's waistline needed.

“Your wife can't cook, anyway,” King teased. “She's too good-looking.” He fell into a chauvinist bromide about the value of plain wives, and Abernathy took up the flip side with remarks on the beauty of Gwen Kyles. He retreated to the bathroom with a flirtatious grin that he must splash on Aramis cologne just for her.

King walked ahead of Kyles to look over the handrail outside, down on a bustling scene in the parking lot. Police undercover agent Marrell McCullough parked almost directly below, returning with James Orange and James Bevel from a shopping trip to buy overalls. Orange unfolded his massive frame from McCullough's little blue Volkswagen, tussling with Bevel, and Andrew Young stepped up to rescue Bevel by shadow-boxing at a distance. King called down benignly from the floor above for Orange to be careful with preachers half his size. McCullough and Orange walked back to talk with two female college students who pulled in just behind them. Jesse Jackson emerged from the rehearsal room, which reminded King to extend his rapprochement. “Jesse, I want you to come to dinner with me,” he said.

Kyles, overhearing on his way down the balcony stairs, told King not to worry because Jackson already had secured his own invitation. Abernathy shouted from Room 306 for King to make sure Jackson did not try to bring his whole Breadbasket band, while Chauncey Eskridge was telling Jackson he should upgrade from turtleneck to necktie for dinner. Jackson called up to King: “Doc, you remember Ben Branch?” He said Breadbasket's lead saxophonist and song leader was a native of Memphis.

“Oh yes, he's my man,” said King. “How are you, Ben?” Branch waved. King recalled his signature number from Chicago. “Ben, make sure you play ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand,' in the meeting tonight,” he called down. “Play it real pretty.”

“Okay, Doc, I will.”

Solomon Jones, the volunteer chauffeur, called up to bring coats for a chilly night. There was no reply. Time on the balcony had turned lethal, which left hanging the last words fixed on a gospel song of refuge. King stood still for once, and his sojourn on earth went blank.

P
OLICE
undercover agent Marrell McCullough first reached the victim and grabbed a cleaning-cart towel to stanch blood loss from a massive wound opened downward through the jaw. The knot from King's necktie was blown off the balcony. Frantic telephone calls for help went nowhere because Lorene Bailey kept slapping her head oddly to mutter nonsense instead of working the motel switchboard, saying, “Somebody done hit that old white truck.” She went to the hospital, too, with a fatal cerebral hemorrhage. Someone whisked A. D. King from the trauma of sirens to the Kyles home, where the evening's banquet was spread untouched. “They got my brother,” he said vacantly. Gwen Kyles said Negroes were “born to truth,” compelled to face hard realities in a white world, and she supported a remarkable civic commitment across racial lines to gather every scrap of memory or fact that might shed light on the world-shaking local tragedy.

Volunteers from the Memphis Search for Meaning Committee managed to secure even the unused news footage normally discarded by local television stations. In a segment filmed outside the emergency room at St. Joseph's, one young reporter failed to elicit any response from a catatonic Ralph Abernathy about the crime scene or how King had been pronounced dead, but a throwaway question on personal history brought forth a reverie about the cold January morning in 1954 when a friend-to-be turned up at the Montgomery parsonage in the company of a pulpit legend, and Abernathy launched into yarns about the irascible genius Vernon Johns, oblivious to the reporter's desperate pleas for comment on bulletins of looting in Washington and fires in Chicago. Riots erupted in 110 American cities. A remorseful Congress passed the nondiscrimination bill for housing transactions one day after what amounted to a state funeral in Atlanta, with the casket wagon drawn by mules. On orders from President Johnson, federal mediators settled the Memphis strike with a 10 cents-per-hour raise and Mayor Loeb's face-saving claim of helplessness to stop a sanitation union imposed by the City Council. The probate court in Atlanta established that King died intestate, leaving no will and a net worth less than $6,000—his estate's largest asset being a disputed bequest of $12,351.36 from the eccentric poet and essayist Dorothy Parker.

In 1970, Alabama voters elected to countywide office three founding members of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, which by then had merged into affiliation with the statewide Democratic Party. The new sheriff, John Hulett, served continuously for twenty-two years and then won three terms as county probate judge before retiring in 2001. Lowndes County remained conspicuously poor, owing in part to the scarcity of larger vision, but the climate of racial terror and subjugation long since had dissipated from the courthouse in Hayneville.

On December 12, 1972, a ripple of surprise passed through surviving luminaries of the civil rights era—including Roy Wilkins, Clarence Mitchell, Whitney Young, and Justice Thurgood Marshall—when ex-President Lyndon Johnson slowly entered the dedication ceremony for the LBJ Library. He rose to commend a speech by State Representative Julian Bond of Georgia—“whom I don't know so well but admire a great deal”—in remarks about why the presidential papers on equal rights held the “most intimate meanings” for him on the nature of government. Johnson warned of complacency that could visit storms upon future generations. Afterward, short of breath and gobbling blood pressure pills, he sought out an awed Bond to offer private encouragement with a heartfelt note of thanks for his independent convictions on freedom, overlooking Bond's signal dissent against a Vietnam War that still raged more than four years after it broke Johnson's presidency. Six days later, President Nixon ordered 36,000 tons of ordnance dropped on Hanoi and Haiphong. Although the “Christmas bombing” killed some 2,196 North Vietnamese civilians at a cost of ninety-three more U.S. airmen lost from twenty-six aircraft, its true purpose was to force South Vietnamese allies to pretend that American withdrawal was a victory. Johnson died a month later, just before the Vietnam settlement signed on January 27, 1973.

In July of 1974, lawyer Pauli Murray knelt trembling in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania's, Church of the Advocate to receive a blessing from the newly priested Jeannette Piccard, a seventy-nine-year-old chemist and pioneer of high-altitude balloon flight. Male priests shouted in the background that female clergy were a grave sin against the peace of Christ. “God here and now as father and judge sees you trying to make stones into bread,” cried one, and the Episcopal House of Bishops quickly pronounced the ordination of Piccard's maverick group “invalid” by emergency decree. Murray herself persevered with her seminary education through the upheaval over the sanctity of male-only clergy, and on January 8, 1977, at the age of sixty-six, she became the only black pioneer among the first female priests ordained by official sanction of the Episcopal Church, at a ceremony in the Washington Cathedral. It was a decade since her Lowndes County lawsuit with Charles Morgan had opened jury service to women in many states.

The church struggles of the 1970s coincided with special investigations of corrupt government secrets in the Cold War era—political manipulations, assassination plots, spy games, and petty tyranny from high officials. News of the FBI wiretaps, which had emerged from the Muhammad Ali draft trial in 1969, led to muffled allegations about King's extramarital affairs. A comprehensive review of the murder investigation showed FBI agents capable of disciplined public duty alongside a numbing array of extra-constitutional bugs, vendettas, and crimes. Within days, they had traced the mark in a T-shirt abandoned with the assassination rifle to the Home Service Laundry in Los Angeles, while following a service sticker from the suspected getaway car in Atlanta to a Los Angeles address listed in the same phony name as the bundle of clothes. Neighbors remembered a loner who attended bartender school. The Birmingham clerk who sold the murder weapon identified his customer among bartenders in a graduation photograph, and fingerprints from the weapon led to a matching photograph of the escaped convict James Earl Ray, who evaded capture through two months of clumsy stickups and street-savvy acquisition of false identities. Meanwhile, the political side of the FBI brazenly suggested to President Johnson that Stokely Carmichael or Rap Brown ordered King killed, and high FBI officials planted a malicious story that the family of King's Los Angeles mistress had arranged the murder—going so far as to arrange a confrontation with the couple by columnist Jack Anderson.

Shortly after the assassination, a grief-stricken Stanley Levison complained that most Americans already distorted the loss of “their plaster saint who was going to protect them from angry Negroes.” Pride and fear subverted King's legacy from all sides. James Bevel, ignoring the frailty of life, promptly declared James Earl Ray a mere pawn, because “there is no way a ten-cent white boy could develop a plan to kill a million-dollar black man.” In 1978, Bevel stood witness at an eerie wedding ceremony conducted in prison by James Lawson, helping inmate Ray begin his short-lived marriage to a courtroom artist. More than forgiveness, the motive of Bevel and Lawson was to assert that some evil greater than Ray must account for all the pain, and some casualties from the movement gave way to the undertow of many conspiracies. Dennis Sweeney, who suffered greatly in Mississippi demonstrations, was committed to an asylum for the unhinged murder of his mentor Allard Lowenstein in 1980. Rap Brown, as the sectarian Muslim leader Jamil Al-Amin, was sentenced to life for the baffling murder of a sheriff's deputy. Dexter King publicly proclaimed James Earl Ray innocent of his father's murder in 1997—“in a strange sort of way, we're both victims”—citing fantastic theories grounded in dogma that the federal government was guilty instead.

Critics of the movement made political history from a mirror distrust. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced his belief that secret FBI files one day would establish whether King was a loyal American or a Communist sympathizer. “But since they seem bent on making it [King's birthday] a national holiday,” he added, “I believe the symbolism of that day is important enough that I will sign that legislation when it reaches my desk.” Reagan's sunny disposition tempered his political platform that government was bad—proven despotic, incompetent, and wasteful—at least when aimed toward the purposes of the civil rights era. This became the dominant idea in American politics, as a cyclical adjustment in history shifted the emphasis of patriotic language from citizenship to command, shrinking the public space.

A paradox remains. Statecraft is still preoccupied with the levers of spies and force, even though two centuries of increasingly lethal “total warfare” since Napoleon suggest a diminishing power of violence to sustain governance in the modern world. Military leaders themselves often stress the political limits of warfare, but politics is slow to recognize the glaring impact of nonviolent power. In 1987, students spilling into the streets of South Korea compelled a dictator to respect a permanent structure for elections. In 1989, the Soviet empire suddenly dissolved in a velvet revolution of dockworkers' strikes and choruses of “We Shall Overcome” at the dismantled Berlin Wall. There was no warning from experts, nor any hint of the nuclear cataclysm long prepared for and dreaded. That same year, Chinese students inspired the world from Tiananmen Square with nonviolent demonstrations modeled on the sit-ins, planting seeds of democracy in the authoritarian shell of Communist control. In 1990, Nelson Mandela emerged from twenty-seven years in prison to a Cape Town balcony, where he destroyed the iron rule of apartheid not with Armageddon's revenge but a plea for hopeful consent: “Universal suffrage on a common voters' roll in a united, democratic, and non-racial South Africa is the only way to peace and racial harmony.”

Like America's original Founders, those who marched for civil rights reduced power to human scale. They invested enormous hope in the capacity of ordinary people to create bonds of citizenship based on simple ideals—“We the people”—and in a sturdy design to balance self-government with public trust. They projected freedom as America's only story in a harsh world. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” King often said, quoting the abolitionist Theodore Parker, “but it bends toward justice.” His oratory mined twin doctrines of equal souls and equal votes in the common ground of nonviolence, and justice refined history until its fires dimmed for a time.

King himself upheld nonviolence until he was nearly alone among colleagues weary of sacrifice. To the end, he resisted incitements to violence, cynicism, and tribal retreat. He grasped freedom seen and unseen, rooted in ecumenical faith, sustaining patriotism to brighten the heritage of his country for all people. These treasures abide with lasting promise from America in the King years.