The Invaders: Caught up in the Throes of the Sanitation Strike

Invaders Calvin Taylor (left), Charles Cabbage and Coby Smith try
to restore peace on the campus of LeMoyne Owen College in this '60s
era photo (Courtesy photo)

Editor’s Note: This is the final installment of a two-part series about John Burl Smith and the Invaders.

 

By Wiley Henry

 

MEMPHIS, TN – John Burl Smith, Charles Cabbage, Coby Smith and others identifying themselves as the Invaders were embroiled in a conflict with local Black leaders working to end the Memphis sanitation strike in 1968.

The strike was called after sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker were crushed to death in the back of a garbage compactor Feb. 1, 1968. They were seeking shelter from that day’s downpour when the compactor malfunctioned. 

“On inclement days, they would let the white workers go back to the locker room and send the Black workers home without pay,” Smith said. “Black workers tried to figure out what they could do to stay on the clock.”

On Feb. 12, 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers refused to show up for work at the Memphis Department of Public Works. They were demanding better working conditions, better pay, and union dues check-off. 

Henry Loeb, the cantankerous mayor of Memphis who governed with a hardened heart, refused to recognize the strike and the union that represented the sanitation workers – Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). 

A number of strategy meetings was convened. “I started going down to the meetings,” said Smith, who was fully engaged in the fight to restore the dignity of the Black sanitation workers and improve their condition. 

After speaking with them, Smith said they were unhappy with the contingent of local leaders negotiating with Loeb to end the strike. Their jobs were on the line; they were urged to go back to work. 

Smith said he encouraged the strikers to stay the course. “I told them that if you go back, you’d be right back in the same place. If you go back to work, Loeb can do to you what he wants to do.”

Another meeting was convened at the Rubber Workers Union Hall in North Memphis. This was a secret meeting, he said. “[Some] of the workers came by my apartment, which served as the headquarters for the Black Organizing Project (to uplift the poor) and the Invaders. They told us what they had up.”

They decided to crash the meeting. “[But] they wouldn’t let us in,” said Smith, who was told by someone at the scene to go to the side door of the building if they wanted to get into the meeting. 

After entering the building, Smith said Jerry Wurf, a U.S. labor leader and AFSCME’s president, was up speaking. He said Wurf was explaining to the assembly that Loeb had agreed with him to give the workers the union dues check-off.

“When I heard Jerry Wurf talking about them getting the dues check-off, I started shouting him down,” said Smith, making the point that the union had gotten what it wanted, “but the workers hadn’t gotten anything.”

His outburst forced security to eject him from the meeting.

The strike was nearing a crescendo and prompted the Rev. James Lawson, chairman of the strike committee and co-founder of COME (Community on the Move for Equality), to extend an invitation to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to come to Memphis and speak.

On March 18, 1968, Dr. King, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, made his way to Memphis and spoke at Mason Temple Church of God in Christ in support of the sanitation strike. The throng of sanitation workers was convinced of Dr. King’s commitment, Smith noted.

“They (strike leaders) felt that by bringing Dr. King to Memphis, he would give them an image that was larger than the Invaders,” he said. “They thought Dr. King was going to come to town and do what they were doing. But he did the opposite.”

The Invaders were active participants in the strike, but Smith believed they were being marginalized by the strike committee and the local civil rights leaders who did not see the benefit of working with the militant group.

A meeting was held at Parkway Gardens Presbyterian Church during the month of March. The pastor was the Rev. Ezekiel Bell, a fireball preacher, civil rights activist, and founding president of the Memphis Chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

“When Ezekiel Bell started talking about the city burning, I made a newsletter and put a diagram on the back of it on how to make a Molotov cocktail,” said Smith, noting to his army training. “While they were inside talking, we were outside passing out the newsletter with the Molotov cocktail in it.”

After that move, he said no one wanted to have anything to do with the Invaders. But that didn’t stop them. The march was set for March 28, 1968. Determined to make an impact, his group set out to recruit five-to-10,000 young marchers.

“We got teams of people together to go down in Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi,” he said. “[Teams] to go to colleges and high schools to recruit students to come to the march.”

Their efforts paid off. A groundswell occupied downtown Memphis and marched from Clayborne Temple to Beale Street to Main Street, where Memphis police, he said, were waiting for them. Dr. King was ushered to the front of the march before all hell broke loose. 

Smith said he witnessed a scuffle between a police officer and a young Black man. “He (police) tried to hit the guy and hit a window. It sounded like an explosion. At that moment, police waded into the crowd [with mace and Billy clubs] and started hitting people.”

A riot commenced and more windows were shattered, forcing frantic marchers to run for their lives. Looters took advantage of the melee and left behind damaged property. “The Invaders were blamed for it,” he said.

Dr. King knew what happened, Smith said. “He gives Calvin Taylor (a young copy editor identified as an Invader) the message that he wants to meet with us.”

On April 4, 1968, the Invaders met with Dr. King. Since then, they’ve been trying to prove their innocence – that they were not the culprits that started the riot and that they were not trying to destroy Dr. King’s non-violent reputation.

Another Perspective on Dr. King and the Invaders

John Burl Smith has been fighting for the rights of African Americans
in the United States since the 1960s. He has written a book about 400
years of African-American resistance and met with Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. hours before his assassination. (Courtesy photo)

Editor’s Note: The Invaders, a militant group from Memphis, dared to make a difference during the tumultuous Civil Rights Movement. They’re now an integral part of history. This is the first installment of a two-part series.

 

By Wiley Henry

 

There have been countless stories written about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from various perspectives that differ in scope from one author to another. But could the truth about the iconic civil rights leader be mired down in inaccuracies?

John Burl Smith has a rare perspective on Dr. King’s final hours that he believes, unequivocally, to be the truth. He was there in room 306 at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968, when he and Charles Cabbage met for two hours with the civil rights leader. 

Both Smith and Cabbage – co-founders of the Invaders, a 1960s militant group in Memphis drawn to the Black Power movement – worked out an agreement with Dr. King after he asked the Invaders to serve as marshals at the next march since the one on March 28, 1968 ended in a riot. 

Fifteen Invaders, Smith said, occupied rooms 315 and 316 at the motel in advance of their 1 p.m. meeting with Dr. King, who met with the group before meeting privately with Smith and Cabbage.

Smith said Dr. King shared his innermost thoughts with them about the Civil Rights Movement and his plan for the Poor People’s Campaign. Much of their conversation has been stored in his memory bank and now included in his upcoming book, “The 400th: From Slavery to Hip Hop.”  

He said the Invaders left the motel at 5:30 p.m. Dr. King was fatally shot by an assassin at 6:01 p.m. Smith has since told his story about the Invaders, their role in the Memphis sanitation strike, and the agreement with Dr. King that never came to past. 

But how did the Invaders become infamous and find themselves at a pivotal moment in the nation’s history when the Civil Rights Movement was teetering on the edge of uncertainty? 

“The Invaders, as a group, didn’t start that way,” said Smith, who credits Cabbage, a Morehouse College political science graduate, for introducing him to the concept of Black Power.

During that turbulent era, Dr. King was promoting nonviolence and civil disobedience, while Stokely Carmichael was espousing Black Power. “Nobody knew what that meant,” Smith said. “So, when Charles came home in 1967, he really brought Black Power to Memphis.”

Smith, an Air Force veteran, had gone to Vietnam. He was discharged in 1966. But Memphis had not changed while he was away. In fact, racist attitudes still prevailed, and anger welled up in him.

At the corner of Parkway and Third sat a full-service gas station. Smith pulled up in a 1962 Volkswagen. The station owner, a white male, “comes out, fills the tank, and tells me I didn’t have a gas cap. I knew I had one.” 

Smith said the man threatened to shoot him. “I’m a disabled veteran who just came from Vietnam,” he explained. When the police arrived, “they talked to the white guy. So, I ended up going to jail.”

Meanwhile, Cabbage and Coby Smith, who was one of two Black students to enroll at Rhodes College, developed a friendship in Atlanta. John Smith was given an introduction. Soon, the young radical scholars/intellectuals started talking about the political climate and the plight of African Americans.

“We realized we really needed to do some organizing,” said Smith, now a willing student of the Black Power movement. 

That year, in 1967, Archie Walter “A.W.” Willis Jr. – the first African American elected to the Tennessee General Assembly since the 1880s – was on the ballot in the crowded race for Memphis mayor.

Russell B. Sugarmon, an attorney, civil rights activist, political strategist, and a General Sessions judge later in his career, was Willis’ campaign manager. “So he recruits us to become a part of his (Willis) campaign,” Smith said.

Smith was learning the political system. A brainstorming session with the group soon followed, and the Black Organizing Project was born. At that time, Smith was working at the Memphis Defense Depot.

He lost that job and another one at Map South, he said, thanks to U.S. Rep. Dan Kuykendall, who represented the 8th and 9th congressional districts. “He got us fired from Map South,” Smith said, “because Russell Sugarmon got us working at Map South as community aides.”

Smith matriculated at Owen College before the merger with LeMoyne. Higher education was a worthy pursuit, but activism had become his way of life. To strengthen the movement, he turned to the youth. 

“We wanted to go out,” he said, “and get the youth involved in Black Power.”

They recruited the youth from high schools in Memphis and outside the district. “My apartment was sitting right in the back door of Carver (High School),” he said. “My back door faced Carver.”

Richard B. Thompson Sr. was Carver’s principal. Since the Board of Education had banned the wearing of afros and Afrocentric paraphernalia, “he was kicking kids out of school for that,” Smith said.

He said the students ended up at his apartment instead. One of them was a talented artist. “He had decorated a jacket and had written ‘Invaders’ on the back. I liked that. So I put the word Invaders on my old Army jacket.”

Meanwhile, the Memphis sanitation strike was simmering and caught Smith’s attention. He gave it his undivided attention from this point forward and drew the ire of local leaders and those from the strike committee who were running the show.

NEXT: The Invaders: Caught up in the Throes of the Sanitation Strike 

Dr. William Pepper Explores the Plot to Kill Dr. King

Nearly 50 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of the Loraine Motel, James Earl Ray is still – and forever will be – inextricably linked to the civil rights leader.

That fact cannot be disputed. What is often disputed is whether Ray, described as a two-bit petty criminal with a hankering for money, acted alone or was merely the patsy that a well-heeled apparatus employed to divert attention from the real assassin.

Ray did not kill Dr. King, according to Dr. William F. Pepper, who offered his perspective and keen insight on the role Ray played leading up to the assassination and afterward during a book talk at the National Civil Rights Museum on Nov. 2.

Dr. William F. Pepper

Drawing his conclusion from countless interviews, court documents, sworn depositions, and other painstaking research material, Pepper compiled what he’d learned into his latest book, “The Plot to Kill King: The Truth Behind the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.”

Questions still abound, however. Was Ray indeed the patsy rather than the assassin whose aim was spot on? And was Ray telling the truth when he implicated the mysterious “Raoul” in the murder of Dr. King?

Ray pleaded guilty to Dr. King’s murder to avoid a jury trial and possibly the death penalty, if he had been convicted. Three years later he recanted his confession and aroused suspicion when he fingered Raoul.

The book talk wasn’t centered precisely on Ray, but around a chain of events that conspiracy theorists and the inquisitive alike have long chewed on and regurgitated over and over since that fateful day on April 4, 1968.

“The Plot to Kill King” is Pepper’s third and final book in the trilogy surrounding Dr. King’s assassination and the trail of evidence leading to government culpability, including a plot, Pepper maintains, with far-reaching tentacles across the United States.

“What I’m trying to do in the final book is to now put the full context of all the critical depositions we took in the appendix of the book so nobody can say Pepper is making this up.”

“A volume of new people had evidence and wanted to relay it before they died,” added Pepper, detailing, for example, in book two – “Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” – that new evidence confirmed Ray’s innocence.

“‘Orders to Kill’ laid out the evidence at that time,” said Pepper, a New York-based attorney also working from London. He represented Ray and fought valiantly to get him a trial that he’d never had.

“The case took on a whole new perspective,” he said.

Pepper’s first book, “An Act of State: The Execution of Dr. Martin Luther King,” was the end product of an exhaustive investigation that Pepper began in 1978, 10 years after the martyrdom of Dr. King.

He surmised it was Frank Liberto, a Memphis grocer with supposed Mafia connections, who admitted on TV that he’d killed Dr. King during the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations.

In his quest to find the elusive truth, Pepper has tarried over the years with laser-focus determination to bring the murder conspiracy to its final conclusion by uncovering the real culprits behind this inglorious chapter in American history.

The bullet that killed Dr. King was fired by a civilian, claimed Pepper, who’d befriended the civil rights leader in 1967 and represented the King family in a wrongful death lawsuit following the death of Ray in 1998.

The King family was convinced that Ray did not kill Dr. King after his son, Dexter King, had interviewed him. They weren’t buying the lone gunman theory and that Ray was the mastermind.

It was Pepper’s revelation of Dr. King’s admittance to St. Joseph Hospital that likely drew some attention – even disbelief that a nonviolent crusader of international repute would be whisked on a gurney to the emergency room.

“Dr. King was not dead when they took him to St. Joseph,” Pepper shared with the audience. “Martin was alive in the emergency room on a gurney.”

Pepper said Lula Mae Shelby, a surgical assistant at the hospital, maintained that Dr. King was alert in the operating room when a team of surgeons began working to save his life.

He said according to Shelby’s testimony, Dr. Breen Bland, the hospital’s chief of surgery, forbade the team to “stop working on the nigger and let him die.” Then he ordered them out of the operating room.

“The witness said Dr. Bland put a pillow over Dr. King’s head and suffocated him. I believe that’s how he died,” Pepper said.

There was a Q&A session following the book talk. After drawing to a close, an unsuspecting man on a cane was determined to have his say.

“You remember me, John Billings?” the man asked Pepper. “I do respect your education and your perseverance – because we know each other quite well – to find out the true killer of Martin Luther King.”

Pepper acknowledged knowing Billings, who worked with him in 1990 to investigate the death Dr. King, and again in 1993 for the televised mock trial to determine Ray’s guilt or innocence.

“Why didn’t you ask me?” said Billings, a 20-year-old college student and emergency room orderly in 1968 who was asked to guard Dr. King’s body.

“What you’ve said is full of crap,” he shouted at Pepper. “I was there (at the hospital). He’s going on hearsay.”

While being escorted from the auditorium by Memphis police, he exhorted the audience to Google “John Billings, Private Investigator.”

“Find out for your own self,” he said.

Memphis compensates sanitation workers in advance of the 50th anniversary

The city of Memphis is offering $50,000 in grants to 14 sanitation workers from 1968.
Baxter Leach, now retired, said he could use the money. (Photo by Wiley Henry)

When Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland announced in early July that the city would offer $50,000 in tax free grants to the 14 surviving 1968 sanitation strikers, a wave of excitement washed over Baxter Leach.

“I feel great about it,” said Leach, who never imagined that he would be compensated nearly 50 years after the sanitation workers opted to participate in Social Security rather than a pension plan offered by the city at that time.

“We’re proposing a new retirement plan, an additional retirement plan for all sanitation employees,” said Strickland, making his remarks at the National Civil Rights Museum, site of the former Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

Standing before the 7,000-pound bronze sculpture “Movement to Overcome,” Strickland and other city officials expressed the need to remedy the decades-long pension debacle that did not give sanitation workers anything to look forward to after retirement other than Social Security.  

Whatever it took for the city to arrive at its decision, “the money comes in handy,” said Leach, 77, who retired in 2005 and receives a small Social Security check each month after working 43 years in the Public Works Department.

Nine other sanitation workers from the 1960s have retired as well and getting by on Social Security. Four others, including 85-year-old Elmore Nickleberry, are still on the city’s payroll trying to keep up their standard of living.

The money, Nickleberry noted in The New York Times, “will really help me retire.”

 “Obviously we can’t undo everything,” said Robert Knecht, the public works director. “As Chief [Operating Officer Doug] McGowen said, ‘It’s never the wrong time to do the right thing.’”

The city is drawing down $700,000 from its general fund reserves to pay the striking sanitation workers and added an additional $210,000 to cover the taxes on the grants. First Tennessee Bank and the nonprofit Operation HOPE, which offers free financial literacy workshops and one-on-one financial counseling, will administer the grants.

Leach is expecting a payday soon. He’s unsure how much of the money will be allotted at a time, but he’s certain that the money will be put to good use. “I show can use the money,” he said.

The money can’t come too soon for Leach, who eked out a living day and night to take care of his wife and six children. He worked odd jobs during the day and hauled garbage at night.

“I was hustling,” he said. “I did some of everything to make a dollar. I hauled junk. I painted houses and worked at a mechanic shop while working my routes at night throughout the city.”

Recalling the hard knock job of hauling filthy garbage, Leach said, “It was hard back in those days. We didn’t have anywhere we could go to the bathroom and nowhere to wash our hands when we got through eating.”

Leach recalls having nowhere to shower either after liquid stench would dribble from the metal tubs they had to lug to the garbage truck. “We would wear the same clothes back home,” he added.

The announcement serves as a prelude to the 50th anniversary of the sanitation workers strike and the assassination of Dr. King, who rallied the sanitation workers and encouraged them to stick together to achieve their goal: a fair wage, recognition of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and better safety standards.

 It was the horrible crushing deaths of garbage collectors Echol Cole and Robert Walker that led to the sanitation workers strike and Dr. King’s visit to Memphis. Thirteen hundred black men went on strike carrying placards with the slogan “I Am A Man.”

The sanitation workers who participated in the strike fought long and hard to initiate change. Choosing to forego the pension, they were not able to retire in relative comfort. Many of them kept working.

“I got tired of working. I’ve been working since I was 9 years old in Mississippi,” said Leach, spending his leisure with family. Most times he’s sitting around at the restaurant they own, Ms. Girlee’s Soul Food Restaurant.

SCLC convenes its 59th Convention in Memphis

Dr. Charles Steele Jr. is taking the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
to new heights beyond the apex of its glory days. (Photo from the SCLC website)

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference survived decades of internal discord and instability after its founding in 1957, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., SCLC’s first president, began leading the organization through the tumultuous civil rights movement.

Dr. Charles Steele Jr., SCLC’s current president and CEO, is leading the organization through global discord and instability, and evokes the organization’s creed to “Redeem the Soul of America.”

Steele will be in Memphis July 20-23 when SCLC convenes its 59^th convention at the historic Peabody Hotel. The theme: “The Hour is Now to: Believe, Empower, Act.” The issues: poverty, injustice, economic inequality, police brutality, and others.

Steele is the first non-clergyman to lead SCLC, an interfaith organization committed to peace, unity and non-violence. Since its founding 59 years ago, he said, “We’re in worse shape than we were.” Black success today, he added, is cosmetic at best. “We attained it, but we didn’t maintain it,”

There have been highs and lows over the course of SCLC’s existence. The organization, however, is still relevant, said Steele, recalling a conversation he once had with Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union before its collapse.

“The first thing he asked me was, ‘Steele, have we fulfilled the dream? Is the dream complete?’ I told the president, ‘Mr. Gorbachev…no…we’re not halfway there.’”

Gorbachev’s sentiments were embodied in the hopes and aspirations of African Americans past and present who’re still searching for the elusive dream. Steele said other world leaders likewise understand the black experience and the travails of black life in America.

On Sept. 13, 1964, Dr. King delivered a heartfelt speech in East Berlin at Sophienkirche (Sophia Church). Gorbachev was listening intently, Steele said. “He wasn’t in the audience; he was eavesdropping.”

Steele has traveled all over the world. He’s visited five continents and countless countries, including Moscow, Russia; Berlin, Germany; Jerusalem, Israel; Rome, Italy; and many countries in Africa.

He’s motivated by the support that SCLC has received from many world leaders. “People say to me, who’re receiving us, ‘Don’t give up on SCLC, because if you stop, you stop the flow of freedom throughout the world.’”

Steele has taken SCLC to new heights. In 2006, he raised $3.3 million (and more than $10 million altogether in first five years at the helm) to build an international headquarters for SCLC in Atlanta.

The slogan, “New Day…New Way,” signified that a change had come.

“I can’t run SCLC the way we ran it in the ’50s and ’60s,” he said. “I have to have God to give me the anointing, vision and enough sense to understand that I got to have good people who will never be seen supporting me resourcefully….”

Steele is focused on economic development – which, like the black man’s quest for freedom, has eluded the black community, the charismatic leader said. “We’ve gone backwards due to the fact that we have not embraced the economic development aspect in our community.”

He predicts, for example, a sobering decline in black banks and financial institutions within the next 15 to 20 years. “Something is wrong with that,” said Steele, adding that the problem is systemic.

“In the last 8 to 9 years, we have lost 52 to 53 percent of our black wealth. It will take two generations for us to get it back,” Steele said. He pointed out that 52 to 53 percent of homes in the black community were lost through Wall Street and the banking industry.

Black wealth, Steele said, is evaporating and cannot be solidified with government oversight. “The government is the enemy,” he said, borrowing the line from Dr. King. “The government is not going to do anything to free you.”

It wouldn’t matter who is president, Steele said. “I don’t care if we have a black president, brown president, Caucasian, Hispanic, politics can’t free us. We’re in a system.”

He said it also wouldn’t matter the political party. “I’m not Republican or Democrat. I’m Baptist. I do ‘Thus said the Lord.’ That’s what sustains us. That’s where we are. That’s where we’re gonna be… and we’ll be here forever.”

Selma-bound Memphians ready to roll

      Elaine Lee Turner didn’t need words to describe the pandemonium that broke out on U.S. Route 80 in Selma, Ala. However, those who reported the news on March 7, 1965, and thereafter, were calling that moment in history “Bloody Sunday.”

      On that fateful day, more than 600 civil rights marchers were pummeled with billy clubs and tear-gassed in a horrendous show of force by state and local lawmen hell-bent on stopping the determined marchers from crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge into neighboring Montgomery.

      Turner, a 20-year-old junior at LeMoyne College that year, wasn’t there on Bloody Sunday, but was disturbed nonetheless by those horrific images of wanton injustice at the behest of law enforcement.

Elaine Lee Turner

      “They just wanted the right to vote,” said Turner, who heeded the call from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to join the nationwide throng of freedom fighters for a third attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery’s state capitol.

      Although the 54-mile Selma-to-Montgomery March for voting rights ended tragically the first time, Turner was among the sea of freedom fighters making their presence felt and their demands known. Those images of Bloody Sunday, however, still tug at Turner every now and then.

      On Sunday (March 8th), Turner, the owner of Heritage Tours of Memphis, will return to Selma with a busload to commemorate Bloody Sunday and to reenact that pivotal moment in history 50 years ago that led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

      A reporter from The New Tri-State Defender will also be among the group to offer a unique perspective via Twitter feed, photos and news stories to reflect the journey from Memphis to Selma and back.

      The pre-march rally will start at Brown Chapel AME Church, the site of the now famous march in 1965. Marchers will also cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma and return for a rally at the foot of the bridge to salute the “foot soldiers.”

      In 1965, Turner was stirred to action before the fight for justice, freedom and equality was beginning to gain traction. She is still just as spry, dedicated and duty-bound to make life better for African Americans in 2015. The trip to Selma, she said, is a reminder of how far African Americans have come.

      “It’s hard to describe my feelings now,” said Turner, who was arrested numerous times in the ’60s for participating in the civil rights movement. Many of her siblings were arrested a number of times as well, which caught the nation’s attention as a family of freedom fighters.

      “In reflecting on the beatings and severity in 1965 Selma, we won our rights,” said Turner, “but some of them are being challenged today.”

African Americans, she said, should not put aside their marching shoes. “We still have to march to maintain the rights that we fought so hard for. We have to be the guardians of those rights and not take them for granted.”

      Turner alluded to today’s justice system and its inability to administer justice in the recent wave of police-associated deaths involving young African-American men. Cases in point: Michael Brown Jr., Eric Garner and Tamir Rice.

      “We’ve fought for a lot of rights, but there is still trouble in our justice system,” Turner said. “We just have to continue the struggle.”

One man, one play: Bringing Dr. King back to life

       Rabia Louis Haynes was 13 years old when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968. Forty-six years later, the spirit of Dr. King is embodied in a one-man stage play entitled “If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Were Alive Today.”     

       “I wanted to keep Dr. King’s legacy alive,” said Haynes, an actor, writer and director, who will perform the play at the Harrell Performing Arts Theatre in Collierville at 440 West Powell Rd. The show dates are Jan. 29 – 31 at 8 p.m.; Feb. 1 at 3 p.m.; Feb. 5 – 7 at 8 p.m.; and Feb. 8 at 3 p.m.

       The play is approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes without intermission. General admission is $20; students and seniors: $15; and groups of 12 or more: $10. Tickets can be purchased online at www.mlkplay.eventbrite.com or at the door on the day of the play at no additional cost.

Rabia Louis Haynes plays the role of Bobby, who relies on
the iconic civil rights leader's guidance to overcome some
unfavorable situations. (Courtesy photo)

       Haynes has loaned his thespian talents to the stage play numerous times since 2011, the year he fleshed out the script. In fact, he’s rolled out the play in Memphis five times in four years before a bevy of theatregoers.

       “Our greatest enemy is forgetfulness. Non-violence is still the way to go even in 2015,” said Haynes, adding that young people in particular need stimuli in the form of entertainment. “They don’t have the attention span to listen to Dr. King’s words of non-violence.”

       Haynes wanted to do something that’s entertaining, yet maintain the seriousness of the message that Dr. King tried to convey. “Society as a whole did not hear Dr. King,” the actor said. “Society often responds out of fear.”

Haynes brings “Dr. King back to life as the audience follows the experiences of a man named Bobby who finds himself in unfavorable situations and relies on the guidance of his hero, Dr. King, to overcome whatever obstacle it is that he is facing in that moment.”

The hypothesis of Haynes’ stage play is as close to reality in 2015 as it were during the turbulent civil rights movement when throngs followed the iconic civil rights leader and looked to him as their moral compass.

Whether there is one person or 100 people in the audience, Haynes said the play has earned the respect of the audience and kudos for him. In fact, “I’ve never done a show where I didn’t get a standing ovation.”

Haynes ventured into acting at Laurence Merrick Drama College in Los Angeles in 1975 when he was 20 years old. He’d migrated from Chicago’s South-Side and took up residence on the west coast, where he’s lived since.

Raised by a single mother in the crime-ridden, 4,400-unit Robert Taylor Homes public housing project, Haynes and his seven siblings endured the conditions in what was declared the nation’s largest housing project.

Haynes admits he was the class clown in school. The attention he sought no doubt took his mind away from the travails of life and provided the impetus he needed to pursue a career in acting. Laurence Merrick was his launching pad.

“That’s when I began to take acting seriously,” he said. “At that time, I was chosen as the No. 1 actor at the school.” 

The acting bug was seriously chomping away at Haynes, who’d completed Dov S-S Simens Hollywood Film School in New York City as well. For 40-plus years, the 59-year-old thespian wrote, directed and produced more than eight plays.

During those years, Haynes honed his skills in other areas such as sound, casting, editing, composing, cinematography and production. Using Leon Isaac Kennedy, Jermaine Jackson, Akon, Eve, and Swizz Beats as references, he’s added to his repertoire improvisation, dancing, comedy, Martial Arts and voiceover.

A member of the Screen Actors Guild, Haynes has shadowed noted director Stephen Spielberg on the set of “The Terminal” starring Tom Hanks. He also has performed for Saudi Emirs and worked as a director for PBS.

Memphis is ground zero for “If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Were Alive Today,” Haynes said. “The dream began April 4, 1968, and Memphis is the most important place where this play should be.”

Haynes is contemplating taking the play on the road to Atlanta, Chicago and Washington, D.C., and hopes to start scheduling the play at certain theatres in those cities very soon.

Although Haynes is comfortable with his performance as Bobby, he’s assembled a tight-knit crew of light and sound operators to help him transform the legacy of Dr. King into a meaningful stage play that awakens one’s consciousness.

“I believe God has put this in my heart to do this,” said Haynes. “I won’t stop. If I do, I would be disobedient.”