The NAACP called an emergency meeting of its regional leaders in what a spokesman described as an effort "to keep the hotheads out of the streets." There were reports of broken windows and false fire alarms in black sections of North, South and West Philadelphia. Police Commissioner Frank L. Rizzo put police on 12-hour shifts as a precaution.
Mayor James H.J. Tate drafted a proclamation declaring a limited state of emergency throughout the city, banning liquor sales and prohibiting groups of 12 or more people from gathering anywhere in the city.
But before the proclamation could be signed, leaders of the Philadelphia branch of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference scheduled a noontime memorial service for King at Independence Hall. On several hours' notice, it
drew more than 5,000 people, black and white, many weeping openly as the crowd sang "We Shall Overcome" over and over again.
From the beginning, the organizers were worried about a confrontation with police.
"There were a lot of barricades up and policemen standing by in riot gear," remembers Norval Reece, a leader of Sen. Eugene McCarthy's Pennsylvania presidential campaign who had met with King several weeks earlier to help the civil-rights leader develop a new economic program.
Most speakers tried to keep the crowd calm. But others talked bitterly of King's assassination - described by Stanley Branche, then the leader of the Freedom Now group in Chester, as a declaration of war on the nation's blacks.
"Not any longer will we take the abuse and insults we have taken in this country," Branche vowed. "When you leave here, remember - the revolution is now. . . . To the black man, there is no freedom in this country we call America. The last hope this corrupt society had died last night."
