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His appeal backfired by reopening dissent against the Washington campaign itself. Andrew Young warned that the whole plan might be moot for the year, anyway, as the tangled logistics could well push the start back into June, when the summer recess of Congress would deprive them of "Pharaoh" rulers to plague. Young proposed to make constructive use of delay, and questioned the enormous effort to assemble and maintain a novel protest army of polyglot poor people in Washington. He doubted King's white attorney and closest confidant Stanley Levison's analogy with the Bonus Marchers of 1932-34, whose suffering and rejection had kindled delayed support for New Deal initiatives, and King aide James Bevel renewed his attack on the entire calculation. "Aw, that's just a bunch of bulls___," he declared. "We don't need to be hanging around Washington. We need to stop this war." Bevel described Vietnam as a political sickness more deeply rooted than poverty, and his rhetoric bristled with street militancy poised ingeniously at the limit of nonviolence. Jesse Jackson, like Bevel, excelled in slashing vocabulary that suggested a competitive preacher's "chops" better suited to the new moods than King's ecumenical language. Jackson called Memphis too small and Washington too unformed.
This time King stood seething. "Ralph, give me my car keys," he said quietly. Abernathy surrendered them with a stricken, quizzical look as King said they could go on without him. "He did something I've never heard him do before," Levison confided afterward on his wiretapped phone. "He criticized three members of the staff with his eloquence. And believe me, that's murder. And was very negative." King said Young had given in to doubt, Bevel to brains, and Jackson to ambition. He said they had forgotten the simple truths of witness. He said the movement had made them, and now they were using the movement to promote themselves. He confronted Bevel, who had been a mentor to Jackson and Young, as a genius who flummoxed his own heart. "You don't like to work on anything that isn't your own idea," said King. "Bevel, I think you owe me one."
Abernathy, Jackson and Young rushed after King. "Doc, doc, don't worry!" called Jackson in the stairwell. "Everything's going to be all right."
King whirled on a landing and pointed up to shout. "Jesse, everything's not going to be all right!" he cried. "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. But if you're 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!" His fury echoed in the conference room.
Chagrined by King's reprimand, the SCLC leaders agreed to return to Memphis, despite the mayor's petitioning the federal court to ban the organization from a march planned for the following week. The evening before the case was to be argued, supporters held a rally, at which they expected King to speak.