9781422277805

nearly every kind of twisted, anonymous death threat, and once in New York, a decade before, a deranged woman had stabbed him in the chest as he autographed books in a department store. The latest reminder of the danger King faced took place at the Atlanta airport on that April morning. The scheduled time of departure for Memphis passed, and their plane did not budge. King and Abernathy shifted impatiently in their seats. Finally, the pilot’s voice crackled over the public address system: “Ladies and gentlemen, I want to apologize for the delay. But today we have on board Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and we have to be very careful—we had the plane guarded all night—and we have been checking people’s luggage. Now that everything’s clear, we are preparing for takeoff.” King laughed and shook his head. “In all my flights,” he said, “I’ve never had a pilot say that. If I’m going to be killed it looks like he’s trying to make it only too plain to me.” At 10:30 a . m . , they landed in Memphis. It was King’s third trip to the city in less than three weeks, but it was not a place he particularly wanted to be. He had come to support the city’s striking sanitation workers, but every moment in Memphis was one less he had for his principal order of business that spring of 1968: the Poor People’s Campaign. For months, King and the SCLC had been planning a massive demonstration to dramatize the plight of poverty-stricken Americans. It was an ambitious undertaking. King envisioned a great march in Washington, D.C., and the construction in the capital of a “poor people’s city” of shacks and shanties that would remain standing until Congress approved sweeping antipoverty legislation. All sorts of problems threatened to derail the campaign, and to keep it on track King wanted to give it all his time and effort. Still, the 39-year-old minister could not say no to his friends in Memphis. The garbage collectors of Memphis were badly paid, overworked, and had no job security, no insurance, and no pensions. Nearly every garbage collector was black. When it

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C I V I L R I GH T S L E A D E R S : MA R T I N LU T H E R K I NG J R .