Civil Rights Events

MLK and RFK

Momentous Decisions

King saw Memphis as economic justice for the underpaid sanitation workers and argued that it all tied in to the Poor People’s Campaign. Some of the SCLC staff begged him not to go and continue planning for Washington.

They arrived in Memphis on March 18 (Suggs 8).

King spoke to more than 25,000 people gathered at the Bishop Charles Mason Temple.

“You are reminding, not only Memphis, but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages,” King told the crowd.

King insisted that there could be no civil rights without economic equality. “You are here tonight to demand that Memphis do something about the conditions that our brothers face, as they work day in and day out for the well-being of the total community. You are here to demand that Memphis will see the poor” (Brown 5).

King based part of his speech on the New Testament parable of Dives (pronounced DYE-veez) and Lazarus. King's point was that white Memphians were willfully indifferent to the suffering of the city's black working poor. One day these whites would suffer for their blindness, he warned.

Historian Michael Honey, author of Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign, says the issues in Memphis aligned perfectly with broader themes King was addressing in the Poor People's Campaign. "He came in and gave a speech saying, 'All labor has dignity,'" Honey says. He says King "reminded people, not only in Memphis but all over the country, that it's a crime for people to live in this country and work at starvation wages."

To get middle-class white people in Memphis to see their working poor neighbors, King told his Mason Temple audience to "escalate the struggle a bit." King called for a general work stoppage. "Not a Negro in this city will go to any job downtown," King said. The Mason Temple crowd - estimated at 12-14,000 people - erupted in cheers and foot-stomping (King’s 1-2).

At the end of his speech, almost as an impromptu ad-lib, King promised to come back and lead a march.

He returned 10 days later on March 28 to lead 6,000 protesters through the streets of Memphis.

“This was the first movement that we had been in that turned violent. And it turned violent because somebody paid some kids to disrupt it,” [Andrew] Young said (Suggs 8).

The marchers paraded down Beale Street, the famed Memphis thoroughfare where musician W.C. Handy pioneered the blues. King was at the head of the column. Then, a number of young African Americans began breaking storefront windows. James Lawson was leading the march with King. When they turned onto Main, Lawson says, they saw "lengths of police in riot gear across the street."

Remembering a violent crackdown by Memphis police during a February protest march, Lawson feared the police would attack again. He recalls telling King, "You must leave. They are going to break up the march and go after you more than anyone." A reluctant King was led away. The marchers turned around. Then, police attacked with tear gas and clubs. Peaceful marchers were caught up in the same violence as youthful looters. One teenager, a suspected looter, was shot to death. Dozens of protesters were injured and nearly 300 black people arrested. Stores in the black section of town got looted and burned (King’s 3). Police ran after protesters who had gathered at Clayborn Temple church and threw tear gas into the sanctuary. Police beat demonstrators with billy clubs as they fell to the floor to escape the tear gas (Brown 6). Journalists captured the debacle on film and broadcasted it live on local radio

Mayor Loeb declared martial law and called in the National Guard. The next day, more than 200 sanitation workers marched, carrying signs stating “I Am a Man.”

King hunkered down with his aides at a local hotel. He was deeply depressed by the events. It was the first time that marchers led by King had become violent.

At the top of King's mind was how the disastrous march would affect the Poor People's Campaign. In a phone conversation with adviser Stanley Levison in New York (wiretapped by the FBI), King gloomily considered calling off the Washington march. "He felt great guilt, as King was wont to do, that somehow he had failed, that it was his fault, that he had let the movement down," [the historian] Honey says. "He knew also that the FBI and the news media would go on the attack against him as a leader and against the Poor People's Campaign."

The next day, King faced sharp questions from reporters about whether he would be able to keep a protest in Washington by thousands of poor people peaceful. King responded that black people were not automatically given to nonviolence. They were willing to observe "tactical nonviolence," he said, when they were part of a well-disciplined march led by seasoned leaders of nonviolent protests. King vowed that the SCLC had the experience and the staff to keep the Poor People's Campaign nonviolent (King’s 4).

… King said that he had been unaware of the divisions within the community, particularly of the presence of a black youth group committed to “Black Power” called the Invaders, who were accused of starting the violence (Memphis 3).

... King denied charges that he abandoned the Memphis march when the going got rough.

Reporters pressed him to predict whether the coming summer would see more violence in urban ghettos.

After the press conference King was still despondent. He told Levison about meeting some of the rebellious young militants who took part in the Memphis melee and said that he was thinking of going on a Gandhi-style fast to unify the movement. For the Washington march to go forward, King said, he would have to return to Memphis and prove again that he could lead a nonviolent protest (King’s 5).

“… I thought he would never get over this,” said King’s older sister Christine King Farris.

[Author Joseph] Rosenbloom would describe that day as the beginning of King’s lowest point, as his reputation was at stake and he was being blamed for the violence.

But there was at least one highlight.

March 28 was also the 5th birthday of King’s youngest daughter, Bernice. They celebrated her birthday on March 29.

Bernice King was born in 1963, just as King’s profile was rising and he was on the road more.

“The first 3.5 years of my life, the relationship between the two of us was distant,” Bernice King said in a 2008 interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He was away from home so much. Going into my fourth year, I began to warm up to him.”

The day after Bernice’s party, on March 30, King gathered the SCLC staff for a tense meeting. They fought him. Not only about King’s suggestion to return to Memphis, but also about the Poor People’s Campaign, which was now scheduled to start in late April.

Young didn’t want to go back to Memphis. Jackson, who was more interested in Operation Breadbasket, thought Memphis was a waste of time. Bevel wanted to focus more on Vietnam.

“They couldn’t afford the time,” Rosenbloom said. “You can question how clearly King was thinking. But he was following his instincts.”

Rosenbloom said Jackson was adamant about his disagreements, leading to a loud showdown.

“If things keep going the way they’re going now, it’s not SCLC but the whole country that’s in trouble. I’m not asking ‘support me.’ I don’t need this,” King told Jackson. “But if you are so interested in doing your own thing that you can’t do what this organization’s structured to do, if you want to carve out your own niche in society, go ahead. But for God’s sake, don’t bother me” (Suggs 8-10).

There was no secret about how RFK felt about LBJ (and vice versa)—they hated each other.

…

This was more than the “mutual contempt” of Jeff Shesol’s great book on the RFK-LBJ feud. The Vietnam War was taking hundreds of American and countless Vietnamese lives a week, to no clear purpose. Back home, the country’s racial divisions were turning violent every summer. In Kennedy’s view, Johnson was simply unable to deal with the sense that things were spinning out of control. At times, he questioned whether four more years of Johnson would wreak permanent damage on the fabric of the country. He knew that both the polls and voices he respected … were beseeching him to run, warning that not to would cost him a part of his soul.

But then there was the harsh political reality: A sitting president had not been denied the nomination of his party since Chester A. Arthur in 1884. His Senate colleagues, including some who had turned hard against the war, like Wisconsin’s Gaylord Nelson and South Dakota’s George McGovern, were urging him not to run, fearing that a divided Democratic Party would only hand the reins of power to Richard Nixon. His advisers from JFK’s days, and his own brother Ted, were offering the same guidance—noting that in most of the big, delegate-rich states there were no primaries; the delegates were controlled by White House loyalists, making an insurgent run highly improbable. Their voices carried more weight than those of his Senate staffers—Adam Walinsky, Peter Edelman, Frank Mankiewicz—who were saying, in effect, “you have to run” (as a 24-year-old staff assistant eight months out of law school I was not exactly a key voice in these deliberations).

So it was not a shock when Kennedy told a breakfast of Washington journalists on January 30, 1968, that “under no foreseeable circumstances” would he run for president. …

But Kennedy soon changed his mind—why? In the accepted narrative, the deciding factor was Eugene McCarthy’s New Hampshire primary showing, and there is a good amount of truth in that view. RFK and McCarthy held each other, as the British might put it, in “minimum high regard.” McCarthy saw the Kennedys as exemplars of wealth and privilege, while Kennedy saw McCarthy as an indolent elitist, marginally concerned at best with the plight of the poor. At the start of McCarthy’s campaign, Kennedy said, “He’s running to increase his lecture fees.”

But as primary day grew closer, it was clear McCarthy had tapped into a powerful sense of discontent with the war. … it was enough to suggest that LBJ was about to receive a political shock. … That possibility, added to Kennedy’s own instincts, turned him around before the New Hampshire primary votes were cast.

President Johnson won the March 12 primary. McCarthy received 42 percent of the vote.

What was it that ultimately persuaded Kennedy to enter the race? His admirers will say he felt he had no choice; detractors will say it was an overweening sense of entitlement. I would add one more factor. At the 1960 convention, RFK had struggled very hard to persuade his brother not to put LBJ on the ticket; it helped turn the mutual dislike that stretched back to Senate days into something much more intense. In failing to keep Johnson off the ticket, Kennedy held himself personally responsible for what he saw as Johnson’s feckless, even cowardly leadership. Running against him was, in this sense, an act of expiation for his own earlier failure (Greenfield 1-5).

Kennedy announced his candidacy March 16 in Washington, D. C.

I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man but to propose new policies. I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I'm obliged to do all that I can.

I run to seek new policies - policies to end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our cities, policies to close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old, in this country and around the rest of the world.

I run for the presidency because I want the Democratic Party and the United States of America to stand for hope instead of despair, for reconciliation of men instead of the growing risk of world war.

I run because it is now unmistakably clear that we can change these disastrous, divisive policies only by changing the men who are now making them. For the reality of recent events in Vietnam has been glossed over with illusions.

The Report of the Riot Commission has been largely ignored.

The crisis in gold, the crisis in our cities, the crisis in our farms and in our ghettos have all been met with too little and too late.

No one knows what I know about the extraordinary demands of the presidency ….

…

As a member of the cabinet and member of the Senate I have seen the inexcusable and ugly deprivation which causes children to starve in Mississippi, black citizens to riot in Watts; young Indians to commit suicide on their reservations because they've lacked all hope and they feel they have no future, and proud and able-bodied families to wait our their lives in empty idleness in eastern Kentucky.

I have traveled and I have listened to the young people of our nation and felt their anger about the war that they are sent to fight and about the world they are about to inherit.

…

I cannot stand aside from the contest that will decide our nation's future and our children's future.

…

I do not lightly dismiss the dangers and the difficulties of challenging an incumbent President. But these are not ordinary times and this is not an ordinary election.

At stake is not simply the leadership of our party and even our country. It is our right to moral leadership of this planet (Announcement 1-2).

Two weeks later Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for a second term.

Works cited:

“Announcement of Candidacy for President.” Kennedy for President. Web. http://www.4president.org/speeches/rfk1968announcement.htm

Brown, DaNeen L. “‘I Am a Man’: The Ugly Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike that Led to MLK’s Assassination” The Washington Post. February 12, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/02/12/i-am-a-man-the-1968-memphis-sanitation-workers-strike-that-led-to-mlks-assassination/

Greenfield, Jeff. “When Bobby Decided to Run.” Politico Magazine. March 17, 2018. Web. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/17/bobby-kennedy-election-1968-217648

“King’s Last March.” APM Reports. Web. https://features.apmreports.org/arw/king/c1.html

“Memphis Sanitation Workers' Strike.” Stanford: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Web. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/memphis-sanitation-workers-strike

Suggs, Ernie. “Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” AJC: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Web. http://honoringmlk.com/