Just feet from shot that claimed icon

who had taken the American civil rights movement to world-wide recognition and was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize was dying there on the black side of town in Memphis.

As I watched Abernathy, I made notes on the sheath of paper I carried. In 1968, I was a reporter for The New York Times. I could hear distant voices shouting desperate orders.

“An ambulance. Call for an ambulance!”

I rose from my kneeling position alongside Dr. King. I heard myself uttering about “going to call the newspaper.”

I left Abernathy there and ran down the alley to a pay phone on the wall just outside the restaurant that was behind the motel office.

Reporters as young as I was then lust for a big story.

They tell themselves that they don’t want anything bad to happen. . . but if it does, nothing is more important to a reporter than being there.

Reporters believe that if you are there, you can see what happens and then you can tell it, the real story, witnessed firsthand.

Memphis was my lesson on what really happens: You are there, yet you don’t see everything.

But in the tangle of events, there is a sliver of whatever it is that happened that comes past you, and that’s precious.

All these 50 years later, I still carry that piece, that sliver of what came past me, that which I witnessed at the Lorraine Motel but could not understand in the moment.

A lot of times, you do not understand the significance of what you see. But when something truly important happens, those pictures do not fade. They stick in the mind. As the poet Robert Frost said, they are there waiting to be understood.

And that is the way it was for me in Memphis.

I did not see the bullet strike King. I was in my room on the ground floor of the motel. King’s room was in the middle of the long part of the L-shaped configuration.

Looking out from the motel, my room was about four doors to the left of the room King shared with Abernathy.

My door was open when I heard the loud boom that was the shot. In two, maybe three strides, I was in the doorway expecting to see smoke, debris, fire ... but there was none of that. Nothing.

Instead, directly in front of me, beyond the parking lot and atop an embankment across the street, I glimpsed a figure half crouched in the thicket of the high brush.

His attention was trained on something at the motel. He was a white man. What kept him focused on the Lorraine, I did not know — but I kept my eyes on him, believing he held some clue as to what had happened. He appeared to be wearing something like coveralls. And he was twisting, turning — but all the while, focused on the motel.

My attention was pulled away when, off to my right, I saw people jumping up and down. I recognized them. They were Dr. King’s guys, members of his team. I thought they might have exploded a firecracker. Then a Cadillac roared toward my door. The car stopped, moved back and then jerked forward again. I recognized the driver, Solomon Jones. He had told me earlier that a local undertaker had hired him and provided the car to chauffeur Dr. King about during his stay in Memphis. I ran to the car.

“What happened?” I hollered.

He didn’t answer. I stepped back and then, from my position in the parking lot, I saw Dr. King. He was down, on the floor of the balcony.

Ten days before that morning, in New York, I had been called into the newsroom of The Times by national news editor Claude Sitton.

It wasn’t unusual for me to be summoned to the national desk. I had earned high marks with Sitton during the tumultuous riotfilled summer of ’67 and good assignments followed.

But what Sitton outlined to me that day was worrisome. He was sending me to the deep South. I had never worked in that region. For me, a black reporter from Pennsylvania, the South was the land of the bogeyman and I wanted no part of it.

But Sitton wanted me to go to Memphis — King was headed there to lead a second march in support of striking garbage collectors who were black and protesting low wages and working conditions.

The first march in Memphis that King took part in had ended in violence — although King’s organization insisted he hadn’t participated in it and was not in control of the event.

King’s return to Memphis for a second time was meant to prove something: A march organized and led by his Southern Christian Leadership Conference would be peaceful. Sitton was skeptical. “He’s lost control of his people,” the editor told me, adding he wanted me to get down there and “nail” King with my reporting.

“Get down there early,” Sitton suggested. “Where King stays, you stay. No matter what, I want you in the same hotel.”

That’s how I came to be at a motel the regulars called “Sweet Lorraine” on the first Wednesday of April in 1968.