Demoralised and exhausted King convinced his days were numbered
April 4 marked 50 years since the assassination of Martin Luther King jun, but as Ron Grossman reports, the civil rights leader was certain he would be killed.
THROUGH the months preceding his assassination on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King jun was haunted by a sense of impending death. He shared that premonition with his aide Andrew Young, who was with King when a fatal bullet struck, 50 years ago.
‘‘He talked about death all the time,’’ Young told Tavis Smiley, author of Death of A King.
For his 2014 book, Smiley asked those who had marched alongside King what they recalled of his mood in 1968. The comedian and activist Dick Gregory reported King, with tears in his eyes, said he was certain to be killed.
King had faced death threats since the 1950s, when he emerged as the acknowledged leader of the civil rights movement. But in 1968, the threats reached a crescendo.
The Chicago Tribune saw it the other way around: King was the danger. The paper was verbally at war with King because of his openhousing campaign in Chicago, two years earlier.
Five days before his murder, the Tribune observed in an editorial: ‘‘We think the time has arrived when the country must ask itself how much more it is going to put up with from this incendiarist.’’
The FBI took the threats seriously, though its director, J. Edgar Hoover, and King had traded insults. When King attended a meeting of black pastors in Miami in February 1968, the FBI received a bomb threat, so armed guards were stationed outside King’s room. Miami police insisted King stay out of sight during the fiveday conference.
In March, the announcement King would address the Human Relations Council of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, an affluent Detroit suburb, produced a rash of threats. To protect King, the police chief sat on his lap in the car carrying King to the high school where he spoke.
Might such incidents have set King to worrying that he would not live to see the results of the antipoverty campaign he was struggling to organise?
On March 3, he preached a sermon titled ‘‘Unfulfilled Dreams’’ at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where he was a pastor. Referencing the Old Testament, and noting that King David had not seen his dream of a Jerusalem temple realised, he preached: ‘‘Life is a continual story of shattered dreams.’’
King’s ‘‘Unfulfilled Dreams’’ sermon was a callback to his 1963 March on Washington, where he had delivered his famous ‘‘I Have a Dream’’ speech that inspired legislation aimed at Jim Crow, the systematic discrimination suffered by blacks in the South. But having concluded that political equality was meaningless without a measure of economic equality, on December 4, 1967, King announced he would lead a new march on Washington in the spring of the following year.
‘‘We will go there, we will demand to be heard, and we will stay until America responds,’’ King proclaimed.
‘‘If it means jail, we accept it willingly, for the millions of poor already are imprisoned by exploitation and discrimination.’’
Those words drew a firestorm of opposition, even from King’s loyal supporters. Bayard Rustin, who organised the earlier march, was opposed to a new one. So, too, was Jesse Jackson, another rising civil rights leader in King’s circle.
King’s critics must have been on his mind on February 4, 1968, when he delivered a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist. It was a riff on a biblical story about ‘‘an itinerant preacher’’, as King put it, ‘‘who just went around serving and doing good’’.
King’s opponents saw his proposed march as an invitation to rioting. In the 1960s, one inner city after another had exploded in deadly and destructive riots. King explained the violence with a metaphor: ‘‘A riot is the language of the unheard.’’
The Tribune rejected that argument in a January 21, 1968, editorial: ‘‘Every time there is a riot in the streets you can count on a flock of sociologists rushing forward to excuse the rioters.’’ King’s ‘‘nonviolence’’, the Tribune added, ‘‘is designed to goad others into violence’’.
Simultaneously, King was under attack by a younger generation of black militants who rejected his pacifist philosophy as weak. Their conclusion was echoed by Adam Clayton Powell jun.
‘‘I don’t call for violence or riots, but the day of Martin
Luther King has come to an end,’’ said Powell, a longtime US congressman from New York.
King attracted still more enemies as an opponent of the Vietnam War.
All the while, he was being implored to come to Memphis, Tennessee, where the city’s sanitation workers had gone on strike on February 12. The mayor refused to recognise their union, and demonstrators were gassed.
King was exhausted. His days were a blur of listening to the personal stories of poverty from across the South — one mother said her children could not go to school because they had no shoes — and rushing off to bigcity fundraisers, so his staff could be paid.
But by March 17, he could not deny the strikers’ pleas and said he would be there. The next day, his mood was lifted by the crowd of 25,000 that greeted him in Memphis’ Mason Temple.
But when he returned on March 28, to lead a march, it was a disaster. Looters broke shop windows. The police responded with tear gas and nightsticks, and King fled the chaotic scene.
The Tribune gleefully noted in its March 30 editorial, ‘‘King took it on the lam, sprinting down a side street and making off in a jalopy’’.
The New York Times urged King to cancel his Poor People’s Campaign.
Yet King would not be dissuaded. Three days after the failed march, he delivered a sermon in Washington’s National Cathedral, in which he wrestled with his options.
‘‘Cowardice asks the question — is it safe?’’ he noted. ‘‘Conscience asks the question — is it right?’’
He returned to Memphis on April 3, only to be served with a court order banning his planned demonstration. His flight had been delayed by a bomb scare, and there was a torrential downpour. Bonetired and thinking few would show up at a scheduled rally, he asked his good friend Ralph Abernathy to sub for him.
Shortly, Abernathy phoned King at their motel. The crowd was not about to leave until they heard King. So he hurried over and spoke about his reaction to the latest threat.
‘‘But I’m not concerned about that now,’’ he said. ‘‘I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.’’
The next day, as his lawyers prepared for a court fight, King took it easy at the Lorraine Motel. About 6pm he stepped out on a balcony. From a nearby rooming house, James Earl Ray, an escaped convict, fired a single shot.
‘‘We always knew this could happen,’’ said Coretta Scott King after she was told her husband was dead.
Five days later, enormous crowds lined the route of King’s funeral procession through the streets of Atlanta.
Famous names were among the mourners — professional athletes, celebrated entertainers, senators, governors and presidential candidates. It was an election year. But the procession also bore witness to the struggles of the little people for whom King fought.
His casket was carried on a farm cart pulled by two mules. — Chicago Tribune