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TORNADO WARNINGS MADE KING FRET about his crowd, as ominous streaks of gray and purple crossed the sky from the west. Radio bulletins told of a seven o'clock twister that picked up and dumped a stretch of asphalt on cars near Star City, Ark., killing seven people, and the first squalls hit Memphis half an hour later in slanted sheets of rain. Phone calls from the Lorraine to Lawson in Mason Temple verified that the crowd indeed was thin--perhaps fewer than 2,000 in the huge hall that had packed seven times that many for King's visit on March 18. He feared the sharp drop-off would invite belittling stories of a downward trend for him, along with the riot and new federal injunction. "Ralph," said King, "I want you to go speak for me tonight."
Murmurs of anticipation ran through the hall when Abernathy, Jackson and Young were sighted--only to hush when King's absence registered. For Abernathy, a keen reader of crowds, the palpable disappointment was worse than he feared. He went to a vestibule telephone instead of the podium and marshaled enticements for King--mentioning news cameras, the big spray of microphones, and Lawson's point that the movement seldom gathered so many people in the South. Most of all, Abernathy told King this was a core crowd of sanitation workers who had braved a night of hellfire to hear him, and they would feel cut off from a lifeline if he let them down. When King gave in, Abernathy pressed for assurance. "Don't fool me now," he said, and King promised to hurry.
His entrance caused an eerie bedlam of communion under shelter. Cheers from the floor echoed around the thousands of empty seats above, and the whole structure rattled from the pounding elements of wind, thunder and rain. King came smiling to the microphones about 9:30, just as the storms crested. He strung together several of his speech themes aimed toward the shared moment, beginning with a poetical tour of history. Then he meandered into another speech theme to recap the parable of the Good Samaritan. "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers," he concluded, "what will happen to them? That's the question ... We have an opportunity to make America a better nation. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you."
Abruptly King swerved into a third oratorical run, retelling of his brush with death when a demented woman stabbed him at a Harlem bookstore in 1958--how a doctor told the New York Times that the blade would have severed his aorta if he so much as sneezed, and how a little girl wrote a simple letter of thanks that he did not sneeze. "I want to say that I am happy that I didn't sneeze," said King, "because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960 when students all over the South started sitting in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy ..." His voice climbed again in rhythm and fervor, using survival as a melodramatic device to relive the civil rights movement. "If I had sneezed," he cried near the end, "I wouldn't have been down in Selma."