Arkansans praise King’s legacy
Governor marks 50 years since murder of civil-rights leader
Fifty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis, his legacy was praised Wednesday on the State Capitol steps, the same spot where Arkansas Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller publicly mourned his death in 1968.
Children huddled in coats and adults wearing mostly dark colors gathered for the commemorative vigil, put on, in part, by the state commission named in King’s honor.
A few people held signs that read, “I Am A Man.” The same, simple slogan was used by Memphis sanitation workers whose strike took King to Tennessee the day before he was killed.
On April 3, 1968, King spoke about economic justice for the underpaid black workers whose union was ignored by city leadership. In closing, he told the workers that like anybody, he would like to live a long life.
“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,” King said.
The next evening, he was shot dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel by James Earl Ray.
The year King was killed, “cynicism” about the U.S. government and its leaders was at a level “perhaps never seen,” Gov. Asa Hutchinson
told the assembled crowd Wednesday.
Young people were protesting the Vietnam War. Civil-rights leaders were beating the drum for change.
“Out of the midst of the clamor, there arose a man who spoke to both issues,” Hutchinson said.
He referred to King’s first public denouncement of the Vietnam War delivered in New York City in 1967.
What a “cruel irony” it was to watch TV to see black and white boys “kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools,” King said.
“Dr. King had a way of making you feel uncomfortable,” Hutchinson said. “Dr. King had a unique capacity to challenge the status quo, to make you think.”
Hutchinson also celebrated Rockefeller, Arkansas’ Republican governor from 1967 to 1971. By historical accounts, he was the only Southern governor who held a public memorial service for King.
Thousands gathered on April 7, 1968, for the public remembrance. At an evening church service that day, Rockefeller told congregants, “Yes, I am my brother’s keeper, but remembering him I am something more. I am my brother’s brother.”
Did Rockefeller suffer a political cost for commemorating King so publicly?
“Probably,” Hutchinson told the crowd. “But he saw it as the right thing to do.”
Civil unrest and intense grief disrupted the country after King’s assassination, though Arkansas is remembered as having a more muted response than other states.
In El Dorado, two white men were arrested for threatening black marchers with a pistol. Fires were reported in North Little Rock and Hot Springs.
Days after King’s murder, Rockefeller dispatched 500 state National Guard troops to Pine Bluff after a reported shooting match between police and black residents, according to an article in the Arkansas Democrat.
King’s civil-rights involvement in Arkansas also tends to escape mainstream attention, though he notably sent a letter to President Dwight Eisenhower, thanking him for deciding to send federal troops to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1957.
King spoke at what became the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff and attended Ernest Green’s graduation ceremony. Green was the first black Central High graduate.
He also gave an anniversary sermon at the First Missionary Baptist Church, 701 S. Gaines St.
Arkansas has a “special connection, from our viewpoint, with Dr. King,” Hutchinson said.
DuShun Scarbrough, executive director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Commission, introduced Hutchinson by saying that though he “has become known as the jobs governor,” his concern “extends beyond economic development.”
During last year’s legislative session, Hutchinson supported splitting a state holiday that, for decades, celebrated both King and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
“This accomplishment is just the latest reflection of the governor’s concern for fairness and justice for all people,” Scarbrough said.
East of the Capitol steps, a handful of demonstrators disagreed, some of them members of the Arkansas Poor People’s Campaign, a movement started by King. They turned their backs to show disapproval of Hutchinson as the keynote speaker.
Wednesday’s tribute was “a dog and pony show,” Toney Orr said.
Often, when a politician invokes King, “it shows the public that OK, I agree with Dr. King. But underneath, I’m not going to do anything to truly embrace” his teachings, Orr said.
Anika Whitfield, a Little Rock public schools advocate, said it was a “disgrace” and a “re-assassination” of King’s legacy for Hutchinson to speak. She penned an open letter asking him to step aside, partly because of his role in the state’s control of the Little Rock School District.
On the Capitol steps, Baseline Academy students pirouetted in ballerina outfits. Doves were released. People softly sang lyrics to a hymn that played 50 years ago at King’s Atlanta funeral.
“We shall overcome. We shall overcome. We shall overcome, some day.”