Excerpt
from Voices of Freedom, King’s Last Crusade, 1967-1968
…
Martin Luther King, Jr., understood the importance of delivering, victories.
But for King, there had been no triumph since Selma and the Voting Rights Act
in 1965. He had become skilled at forcing changes in the law. But he and his
colleagues were still searching for ways to changes in the society.
In
Chicago in 1966, and throughout the long, hot summer of 1967, King pointed out that the rhetoric of
the Great Society and the War on Poverty had raised expectations that had not
been met…..By late 1967, he and the SCLC embarked on a Poor People’s movement,
an effort to unite poor people across racial and gender lines. The oral history
interviews below discuss the period of 1968 as one of hope and despair.
MICHAEL HARRINGTON
Michael Harrington, whose book the Other America, published in 1962, has been credited with helping to inspire the War on Poverty, served on Dr. King’s research committee, a group that met regularly to discuss pressing issues.
In
conversations with Dr. King in the last years of his life, we always talked
about the fact that to abolish poverty, to abolish economic racism, would
require changing the structures of American society. That it meant that you had
to have a different kind of occupational structure, that you could not have
blacks concentrated among the unemployed, the low-paid, the uninteresting jobs,
the jobs without any responsibility. That you had to really change that in a
radical way. That you had to change the income structure of American society.
You had to redistribute wealth, and now that came out as a demand for more
progressive taxation. In private, we could talk in a sense much more candidly,
much more openly about the need for really basic democratization of investment
decisions, and much more democratic allocation of income and wealth and of
work. Then when you go Public, then you immediately have to think, How do you
phrase this message? And Dr. King had a genius for this. How do you phrase this
message so that you don't betray the message but you put it in terms which are
understandable and accessible to people on the street? But certainly he
wouldn't use radical phraseology in many cases for that reason. And I quite
agreed with that. Indeed, in my own book The Other America I did not
mention the word socialism once for precisely that reason. But I always knew
that Dr. King, through my conversations, had what I would consider in the good
sense of the word a small d democratic radical view of what was required in
American society.
In March 1967, Marian Wright, a young black attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and an associate of King's, testified before the Senate Labor Committee's subcommittee on poverty about conditions in Mississippi. The next month, the committee held hearings in Jackson.
MARION
WRIGHT EDELMAN
The biggest problem then was survival. I
mean, we were having major problems of hunger, even starvation. There were
people in Mississippi who had no income. The federal government was shifting
over to food stamps from commodities distribution. And the commodities
distribution program of the Department of Agriculture was lousy--didn't provide
enough food, it wasn't good enough food--it was free. And when you began to
shift to $2 per person, there were people in Mississippi who didn't even have
that two dollars. It was very hard to get people from Washington to believe
that there were families that could not afford a dollar or two. But the poor
were struggling. They were being pushed off the plantations of the
mechanization of cotton, because of the use of chemical weed killing. And while
it was a literal bondage system, the plantation system in Mississippi, in the
forties, fifties, and sixties, where the Senator Eastlands were subsidized in
the hundreds and thousands of dollars by the federal government, the peasants
and the tenants on those farms literally could not eat and did not have the
most basic survival needs in this rich American country.
I tried to bring the senators down to
Mississippi because I was trying to figure out ways of getting the country to see. You know, when
the white students came down in 1964, that helped the country to see, because
it was their daughters and their sons that were there and they were afraid for
them. These were not people who necessarily had been attuned to the problems
of' the black poor in America at that time. So one has to have someone to lift
the window. After the young people left at the end of the summer of '64, the
problems were still left. They were different. They were changing. We had begun
to make a difference. But there was so much suffering that remained to be
alleviated. So one was trying to find new ways to capture the imagination and
attention of the American public. Therefore, I went to see if I could get the
senators to see that it was still bad, and indeed was getting worse in many
ways, and that hunger was growing, even though we had the right to vote. The
cost of that for many is they got kicked off the plantations and lost that
little bit of money, unjust as it was, that they had had to survive. And so we
had to put another means in place.
I
told the committee, please come and see for yourselves, because they didn't
quite believe me when I talked about how the conditions of life, the poverty,
was getting worse and the people really didn't have enough to cat in
Mississippi. So they came, and Bobby Kennedy came with them, and while they
were there to examine the impact of the poverty program on Mississippi blacks
and whites, I used it as an opportunity to tell them about growing hunger in
the Delta. And they were shocked and, happily, two of the senators agreed to
stay over and to go up in the Delta to see for themselves whether it was true
that people were starving. Bobby Kennedy agreed to be one of those senators.
I was very moved by what Bobby Kennedy
did when we went to visit [a black family] in Cleveland, Mississippi. Without
cameras--because he was Bobby Kennedy some newspapermen had come along--we went
inside a very dark and dank shack. It was very filthy and very poor, and when
we walked through from front to back together, there was in the kitchen a
mother who was scrubbing in a tin tub, washing clothes. There was a child
sitting on a dirt floor, filthy. And there was very little light there, and got
down on his knees and he tried to talk to the child., and get 3 response from
the child. He kept poking or feeling the child and trying to get some response.
And I remember watching him in near tears, because I had this complicated
feeling. I was moved by it and wondering whether I would have gotten down on
that dirty floor. But deeply respectful that he did. He could do almost
anything after that and I trusted him from that time on, just as a human being.
And then he went out to the back yard where the reporters were waiting. And he
was correctly angry. But from that moment on, I knew that somehow he would be a
major force in trying to deal with hunger in Mississippi for children.
Later that summer after watching President Johnson
announce the military response to he civil disorders in Detroit, Robert Kennedy
told an aide, “It's over. The president is not going to do anything more. That’s it.
He’s through with domestic problems, with the cities…He’s not going to do
anything. And he’s the only man who can
In August, with urban uprisings still
sweeping through America’s inner cities, Marian Wright visited Kennedy at his
Virginia home, Hickory Hill, on her way back to Mississippi.
MARION WRIGHT
EDELMAN:
It was
a gorgeous day and he was lounging out around the pool at Hickory Hill, and we
went through our usual small chat about what was going on. And when I was having—I had also told him I was going to
stop back through Atlanta and see Dr. King—he said, “Tell him to bring the poor
people to Washington.” That it’s time for some visible expression of concern
for the poor. I had been been expressing to him my frustration that hunger was
still going on, and obviously he was still frustrated that the Agriculture Department
was so slow in doing something about it or the Johnson administration was
hesitant to move, so he thought that there really needed to be some push, some
national visible push. But it was a very simple suggestion: Tell Dr. King to
bring the
people
to Washington.
This was a period of white reaction and
backlash, it was a period when the war was becoming a much more divisive force,
where the problems of black and poor people were being left behind and people
thought they were annoyances, and we'd had a lot of violence in Northern
cities. And Martin King was really depressed. One of the things I always
remembered about him from my early student days was how he was able to share
his uncertainties, share his not knowing what to do next. 1 remember his founders’ day speech
at Spelman College, when I was a senior, when he talked about taking that one step even if
you can’t see the whole way and how you just have to keep moving, you’re slower
than you want. If you can’t walk, crawl, but keep moving.
He
was real down that day [shortly after the visit with Kennedy] when I walked in,
sitting in his office, and he was like everybody at that time—Kennedy and me
and all of us concerned about the poor and what was happening to civil rights
and the country turning itself away from it, about what we were going to do
next. And I told him that Bobby Kennedy said he ought to bring the poor people
to Washington. And he simply as Bobby Kennedy had said it, King instinctively
felt that that was right and treated me as if I was an emissary of grace here,
or something that brought him some light. Out of that, the Poor people’s
campaign was born.
William
Rutherford, a black Chicago native and skilled public relations man who had
spent much of his adult life abroad, had organized the Friends of SCLC in
Europe in 1966. In the summer of 1967 King appointment him executive director
of SCLC.
WILLIAM
RUTHERFORD
The
Staff was really quite busy and quite involved in things when Dr. King looked
up and in his reasoning—I’m paraphrasing of course—he said, “Fine, we now have
the right to vote. Fine. We can now go to any restaurant, any hotel, anyplace
we want to in America, but we don’t have the means. So what good does it do for
people to go to any restaurant in the world if you don’t have the money to pay
for a meal?” So, he says, we’ve got to attack the whole issue of poverty and
economic deprivation. And that was his thinking, his reasoning for pushing for
a Poor People’s Campaign…But the idea of attacking something as vast and as
amorphous as poverty, of course, wasn’t very appealing. I’d say that basically
almost no one on the staff thought that the next priority, the next major
movement should be focused on poor people or the question of poverty.
MARIAN
LOGAN
When
I first heard about it, I was really very apprehensive. …it was becoming much
too big and unwieldy for us to be able to handle. And also, considering the
tenor of the times, I wasn’t sure that we could be a success. ..’cause it
wasn’t like ’63, which was such a glorious march, and a glorious day. This
bringing of poor people to the seat of government was like throwing it in their
faces, and I don’t think too many of the officialdom of Washington was gonna
take that with any great grace. So I had many reservations about it
In early December,
King announced, without specifics, SCLC’s intention to bring poor people of all
races to Washington around April 1 and to “stay until America responds.” Plans
remained to be formulated
During
the fall period he worked very hard, and all into the early part of the year.
And in the spring he went all over this country talking about it and promoting
the idea and most people who knew him felt that he was working as if this was
going to be his last job. I mean, we were very concerned about him, but the
fact is that he could see, I think , a way that this could all come together,
and he felt very confident that this could be a real test of how nonviolence
can work to change the lives of people economically. When the president asked him,
“Dr. King, what if you fail?” he said, “it will not be Martin King, Jr. who
failed. It will be America that failed.” He believed very firmly, reaffirmed
his commitment in nonviolence as the most important weapon available to these
people. And he said, “if I be the sole person on earth who clings to the belief
and practice of nonviolence, I will be that person.
RALPH
ABERNATHY
In
Marks, Mississippi, I well remember, we visited a day care center. And Dr. King
was moved to tears there. There was one apple, and they took this apple and cut
it into four pieces for four hungry waiting students. And when Dr. King saw
that, and that is all that they had for lunch, he actually ended up crying. The
tears came streaming down his cheek. And he had to leave the room
MICHAEL
HARRINGTON
The
last meeting of the research committee that I attended in the early spring of
1968, we did two things. One was we discussed the general political situation,
which we always did at those meetings. And it struck me that Dr. King was very
pessimistic, deeply disturbed at
the way things were going. On the one hand, he was being increasing attacked
from within the black movement. There was a surge of black nationalism. The
Black Panthers had begun to come on the scene. There was SNCC, the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
There had been a turn away from nonviolence, so he was being attacked
for being too much of a pacifist. Too namby-pamby. Not willing to … fight back.
Not willing to use force against racism. On the other hand, he was being
attacked by Lyndon Johnson, and even by the Hubert Humphrey liberals, for going
too far to the left. For being in the antiwar movement. For taking part in the
April 1967 demonstration against the war in New York. And I had the feeling
that his sense was that the number of people who really supported him now had really sunk very much.
Within that context, we then talked about
the Poor People's Campaign. In a sense, the Poor People's Campaign was
certainly no repudiation by Dr. King of his opposition to the war, but it was
an attempt to then go back and refocus on basics, and perhaps more importantly,
to mobilize a mass movement.
The state of preparation for the poor
people's march was very chaotic. That was typical of Dr. King. Careful
organization and planning was not his strong suit. He was a genius at
improvising. What he did understand was that his strength was in his appeal to
masses of people. That he had to mobilize those masses given the defections he
felt both to his right and his left. And what I said to him at that meeting was
whatever else we do, what we have to do is we have to come up with some demands
that we can actually win on. That we can't ask for the moon, or we can ask for
the moon and should ask for the moon, but we should also make some demands, and
I don't remember the precise ones that I urged, but they would have been
winnable demands in terms of legislation. And I would say this is something
where Dr. King and I always agreed. That part of his genius was to understand
that you could not have a movement simply based on promises of the future. That
you had to deliver. And he had delivered on voting rights. He had delivered on
public accommodations. He had delivered on the Montgomery bus boycott, and so
many other things. And he understood now, above all, was the time to deliver.
In February,
Memphis Tennessee sanitation workers,
nearly all of them black, went on strike in Memphis. Angered by the city's
sending twenty-two black workers home with little pay because of inclement
weather (white workers were not sent home and they received pay), the strikers
were demanding that their union be recognized. SCLC's James Lawson, now pastor
of Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, invited King to speak at a rally in
support of the strikers. King recognized the chance to link the economic
conditions of the strike with the civil rights movement and arrived in Memphis
on March 18 to address a mass meeting.
ANDREW
YOUNG
The staff was really disturbed
that Martin would even consider going to Memphis. We had charted out fifteen
cities that we were going to try to organize. We were trying to organize poor
whites, Hispanics, southern blacks, northern blacks-I mean, there was just a
tremendous organizing job, and I didn't know how you could take on anything
else. And he said, "Well, Jim Lawson has been around for so long and here
are garbage workers on strike, he just wants me to come in and make a speech
and I'll be right back."
Bill
Lucy, an organizer for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal
Employees, had come to Memphis to work with the strikers.
BILL LUCY
In
March, when the issue began to be discussed about inviting Dr. King to come to
Memphis, it grew out of the frustrations of the city and, I guess, maybe the
media really putting a lid on what was taking place in Memphis. We were
forty-seven days into the strike and nobody knew it except us and the city of
Memphis. Roy Wilkins had come to town, Bayard Rustin had come to town to speak
in support of the strike, but still there was no understanding beyond the city
as to what was taking place. The invitation to Dr. King to come was that we
believed that he would not only lend his moral support to the strike, but he
was in the midst of organizing the Poor People's Campaign, and we just really
thought that that would be a good movement for him to identify With, that there
would be national media with him that would, in effect, take an interest in
what was taking place.
What I remember from that night of that
first speech was the incredible ability that King had to understand and
interpret the issues and what was taking place. He had not been there before,
and he had had the most minimal of briefings. But he understood that the
struggle was really about… people who worked forty hours a week and still lived
in poverty, and he was able to arrange his presentation to demonstrate to the
crowd that he understood this, and to give them a sense that their struggle was
a legitimate struggle, that they had every right to carry on.
The
crowd at Mason Temple numbered fifteen thousand. King was so moved by their
struggle that he decided to return to Memphis to lead a march. King Came back
on March 28. Bernard Lee and Ralph Abernathy wer at his side hwen the march
took an unexpected turn.
BERNARD
S. LEE
I
was a little upset that he didn't have some of our national staff in the march
organizing prior to its beginning. It was just a mass of people. I don't think
the leadership of the march was ever in control. As we marched, I began hearing
these noises behind me of glass, broken glass, taking place. And as I continued
to look back, and try to jump up over the crowd and see what was going on, I
could see and hear that there was tremendous disturbance not very far from us,
behind us, in the march. And the people in the march were breaking store
windows. And finally we marched, I guess maybe about a block, might have gone
two blocks, but I made a decision that Martin Luther King didn't need to be in
that march because it had become disruptive. It had become violent internally
and the leadership needed to deal with that march and Martin Luther King needed
to leave the march.
RALPH
ABERNATHY
At that moment, Bernard Scott Lee, who was
Dr. King's traveling assistant, stopped a car and asked the Young lady if he could
use this car to get Dr. Abernathy and Dr. King out of this situation- And
the young lady agreed, and she got over, and Bernard Lee, became our driver.
And we were taken down to the river, the Mississippi River. And we stopped the
motorcycle police at that point and asked them if we could use their
service to act Dr. King out of the area. And a policeman said, “Where do you
want to go?" -
And I said, "The Peabody Hotel."
And he said, "We cannot go to the Peabody Hotel, because
there's
nothing but violence over there.” And we said, "Well, what about the
Lorraine Motel?"
And
the policeman said, "We cannot go to the Lorraine Motel because there's
nothing but violence over there. And tear gas is everywhere." And he said,
"Well, I will take you to a place."
And
undoubtedly they had radioed ahead, because he took us to the headquarters
hotel of the Holiday Inn. It is on the banks of the Mississippi River, and it's
a plush hotel. They already had waiting for us a suite that had a living area
and two bedrooms, and one was for Dr. King, and one was for Bernard Lee and
myself.
Many
stores along the march route were damaged, 280 people were arrested, 60 people
were injured, and a black sixteen-year- old boy was killed by police gunfire.
Later, the FBI circulated a memorandum to newspaper editorial offices across
the country citing the breakdown of the nonviolent march in Memphis as a
precursor to possible violence during King's Poor People's Campaign in
Washington. Several papers wrote stories that followed the FBI's logic. The St.
Louis Globe-Democrat virtually reprinted the FBI memorandum as an editorial
against the Poor People's Campaign.
BERNARD
S. LEE
We
went to the motel. He didn't say anything. He just asked where was Jim, Jim
Lawson. Jim, I'm sure, was out there trying to deal with the march. I think
Andy was with us as well, if I'm not mistaken. But he just, he got on the bed
and just rested, just went to sleep.
I recall Ralph Abernathv getting a spread and putting it over him and he just
slept through it. He just slept. He slept his discontent off. But I knew he was
terribly, terribly moved, terribly Upset by the events of this march, because
deep in his heart and his mind, he knew that he would be criticized for the
violent outburst of the march. And he was a victim of circumstances. He had
been advised not to go to Memphis in the beginning, , that we needed to be
going to Washington to try to mobilize the Poor People’s Campaign.. That this
was an aside that he really didn’t have time for or shouldn’t have taken time
for. But responding to a friend, he did so.
When he did awake, he talked about what he
saw was happening with the press, and he saw this as a tremendous setback for
his efforts in Washington. He knew that those who had criticized his developing
the
Poor
People’s Campaign would say, you see, this is see, this is what will happen in
Washington, D.C., if you bring all of these people here. That a similar
situation will occurs And be.just saw people gloating who were in opposition to
the Poor People's Campaign.
Marian Logan was among the millions who had seen footage of the day's events on the evening news. That night King phoned her.
MARIAN
LOGAN
I was upset because I had seen the
expression on his face, and I saw Ralph, of course, who was with him, he was
distressed. And I just told him, I said, "Martin, I think you need to get
your ass out of Memphis."
And he
said, "Well, darling," he said, "you know we have to keep going,
this is our movement."
I said, "But you haven't prepared those garbage
workers." Like we generally have, you know, we'd send Andy in and Bayard,
and a few others too. To get people organized in nonviolence and make them
understand how important it was. And these garbage workers were not trained
like that. And it was really a polyglot group of men, it was a union movement.
But Martin wouldn't give in, because he just had to go back and prove that he
could lead a nonviolent march of garbage workers in Memphis, Tennessee, in
1968.
JUANITA
ABERNATHY
He
wanted to come here because if you go to a restaurant, then you got to answer
questions about, well, what happened to the march? Why the violence? And he was
not in the kind of mood to deal with answering those questions, because Dr.
King was very sensitive about anything that was in opposition to what his
philosophy was. And he didn't want anybody identifying him with the violence
that had taken place, 'cause you know some of it was done by us, by blacks. And
that hurt. And he just sort of felt that part of his reputation had been
damaged and tarnished a bit. So he didn't want to have to deal with answering
questions on that. And coming here, he would not encounter that. So we sat that
night. And talked about light things. And talked about me. And talked about
Ralph. We talked about each other. Talked about the movement. And just
chitter-chat. But nothing serious. And we did not talk about Memphis. The news
came on. And when- ever there was a flash on TV about it, he got very quiet and
he was really, really sort of depressed. And I think he was more depressed that
night, I believe, than I'd ever seen him.
On
Saturday, King held an emergency staff' meeting. One of those in attendance was
Jesse Jackson, who had been working with SCLC since the Chicago campaign.
JESSE
JACKSON
He
had this vision we should wipe out poverty, ignorance, and disease, that you
couldn't do it on an ethnic basis. That it was never going to be in the plan to
wipe out black poverty that would leave the Hispanics in poverty, or whites or
women in poverty, or Native Americans in poverty, so we had to pull people
together. And on this Saturday morning he said, "I've had a migraine
headache for three days, and sometimes because our movement is divided I feel
like turning around, just quitting, or maybe becoming president of Morehouse
College." And then he said, as if something struck him, "But we will
always be able to develop a minus into a plus. We can turn a stumbling block to
a steppingstone. Sometimes my works feel to be in vain but then the Holy Spirit
comes, I'm revived again." He preached himself out of the depression. He
said, "Let us move on from here to Memphis.",
On Sundav, March 31, President Johnson
announced to the nation that he would not be a candidate for reelection in
November. King found some hope in Johnson's announcement. Perhaps someone more
active in helping the poor would soon be installed in the White House.
On
Wednesday, April 3, King and Abernathy returned to Memphis to meet with local
leaders about new march, now tentatively scheduled for April 8. That afternoon,
a temporary restraining order was imposed against the march. SCLC planned to
challenge it in court the next day. King announced he would lead the march
whatever the outcome. That evening, King addressed … a crowd at Mason Temple.
…King
spoke fo the need to march again in Memphis, of the importance of ministers
being socially active in what he termed a “relevant ministry.” .. “It’s all
right to talk about ‘streets flowing with mil and honey,’ but God has commanded
us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can’t eat three
square meals a day. It’s all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one
day, God’s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new
Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee.
He spoke in some detail about the need for
the black community to launch an economic withdrawal from its oppressors. He
listed products for his listeners to boycott, banks people of goodwill should
support, black insurance companies who should receive the policies of black
clients.
His aides had heard versions of it on other
occasions, but for the strikers and
their supporters, his last words that evening were new: “Well, I don’t know
what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really
doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t
mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place.
But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to
the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. And I’m
happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine
eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
BILL
LUCY
I
guess that you could say the mountaintop speech was perfect for the kind of
speech that it was. It was an inspring speech, one that Dr. King had
really given what appeared to be a good
deal of thought to. It told about his personal experiences..It wove into it a
message that the strikers were entitled to continue their struggle, and
certainly entitled to the broad base of support that they had built across the
city. ..he had touched a chord that was so deeply rooted in all of the people
ANDREW
YOUNG
The
next day I was in the federal court, trying to testify to get the injunction
lifted so that we could have a march. I was in court all day long, on the
witness stand a good part of that day.
We
got the injunction thrown out and we got our permission to march, and I guess
about four-thirty or five o’clock I came back to the Lorraine Motel and I found
Martin and A.D. [King] and Ralph and everybody gathered there, and they’d been
eating, had lunch, and were talking and clowning. And when I came in, Martin
just grabbed me and threw me down on the bed and started beating me with a
pillow. I mean, he was like a big kind and he was fussing because I hadn’t
reported to him, and I tried to tell him I was on the witness stand. I’m here
in the federal court, and he was just standing ont eh bed swinging thepillow at
me, and I’m trying to duck with him sayin,”you have to let me know what’s going
on.” [Laughs} And finally I snatched the pillow and started swinging back and
everybody—it was sort of after a touchdown and everybody piles on everygbody.
….But I was clowning around with him and Martin came out and asked, “you think
I need a coat?” And we said, “yeah, it’s pretty cool and you’ve had a cold, you
better go back and get a coat.” And he said, “I don’t know whether I need a
coat.” And the next we know, a shot—well, I thought it was a car backfiring or
a firecracker.
RALPH
ABERNATHY
I
heard what sounded like a firecracker. And I jumped. And when I jumped I saw
only his feet laying on the balcony. And I immediately rushed ot his side and I
started patting his cheek, saying “Martin, Martin, Martin. Don’t be afraid.
Don’t be afraid. This si Ralph. This si Ralph. This is Ralph.” And I got his
attention. And he calmed down. His eyes were moving and he became very, very
calm.
And finally Andrew Young came up the steps
and said, “Oh God. Oh God, Ralph. It is over.”
And
I became angry with Andrew Young and said, “Don’t you say that, Andy. Don’t you
say that. It is not over.”
And
Billy Kyles, whom we were going to eat with , came up and I said, “Billy, get me an ambulance.”
And I heard nothing but a loud cry from our room. And I sad, “Billy, keep
yourself together. I want an ambulance.”
And
he sai,d “Ralph, all of the lines are busy. All of the lines are busy.”
[When
an ambulance arrived I went with him, rode with him in the back of the
ambulance. And I committed civil disobedience and I would not leave
the operating room. And finally the doctor came over to me and said, "You
are Dr Abernathy? He will not survive. It will be an act of mercy, because he
would he paralyzed from his waist down. You may have your last moments with
him."
And I went over and took him in my arms. And he
breathed his last breath.
With
oe Of his colleagues, William Rutherford had left Memphis after an afternoon
staff meeting with King.
WILLIAM
RUTHERFORD
We
returned to Atlanta by plane. We arrived in Atlanta airport, took a taxi to the
SCLC office, and it was a scene of total pandemonium as we arrived at the
office on Auburn Avenue. People were screaming and fainting and literally
rending themselves, tearing their clothing and so on and so forth, and we said,
"What on earth is happening?" And some young woman screamed at us,
"Dr. King has been shot. Dr. King has been shot." I said, "Well,
that's hardly possible. We just left him. Just left him." So I went in the
office and attempted to telephone to Memphis, and of course I couldn't get
through for hours. But then we had the radio on and we began hearing the radio
broadcast that reported not only that he had been shot, but that he actuallv
had died. That was the way we learned of his death, having left him. All of the
senior staff was with him in Memphis at the time of his death or very shortly
before. Oh, it took me ages and ages to accept the fact that Dr. King was
definitely dead. He was such an active man. He was.SL]Ch 3 force and a presence, and it was.iust
unbelievable and, I suppose, psychologically unacceptable that he would not be
coming back. And in the midst ol'all this chaos and pandemonium in the SCLC
office and headquarters, I kept expecting Dr. King to walk through the dooi- at
an'v minute saying, "All right, come on, this is great. But why don't we
stop the nonsense now and get back to work."
As
news of King’s assassination spread, black communities aacross the country
reacted with volence. Disorders broke out in 110 cities, more than 75,000
National Guardsmen were called out, and thirty-nine people were killed.
HARRY
BELAFONTE
The giving in to
the loss of Dr. King erupted, but only in moments. The real sense of grieving
about him did not come for me, and I think for my wife and a lot of others,
until much later. When I flew immediately to Atlanta, there was this
bewildering invasion of people, all these faces that we had never seen before,
never knew before. Allkins of people, many of whom had come to this tragic
moment as if it was a photo opportunity. I don’t mean to discredit many who
came out of real, genuine concern and goodwill, but there were others who saw
in it a time tha could be manipulated. So we had to do what we could to sort
out those who came with an agenda, who were going to be the manipulators, from
those who wanted to help move on with Dr. King’s mission, who felt that the
momentum of the movement should not falter. In a private conversation I had
with Coretta King, we talked about
going to Memphis, being thee, to meet up with the garbage workers, to
carry on the campaign and to do so immediately even before Dr. King was laid to
rest. …So I arranged for a plane and the necessary support to give Coretta and
others mobility to do what had to be done. It was important that this nation
know that even in the midst of our grief we were still committed to the
objectives of the movement and that the fallen Dr. King did not leave behind a
movemetn that, in midst of this great tragedy, would lose its courage or its
vision.
There was a sense at Dr. King’s funeral
that we were at a moment in history that was unique. All those hundred of
thousands of people who came there had a sense of oneness that I’ve never quite
experiences anywhere else again.
It’s interesting about death. At the March
on Washington, a major convention of very diverse groups, Dr. King was alive
and we had a great sense of ourselves and our power. It was another thing to be
in this other environment, equally dramatic. Dealing with this huge and
undefinable loss, very diverse groups of people on the one hand, feeling close
to their fellow humans
On the other hand, a need for perspective.
I'll never forget, I was standing, at one point, next to a reporter from the New
York Times and he was obviously saddened by Dr. King’s death. He was an
important writer for the Times. Recalling an article on Vietnam and Dr.
King, an editorial very critical and highly misleading which helped to fan the
flames of discontent with Martin, painting him as unpatriotic, making people
quite angry with him and the movement, I could not help but tell him that this
grievous moment was in part the result of a climate of hate and distortion that
the New York Times and other papers had helped create. in particular the
way the Washington Post wrote its editorial on Dr. King and Vietnam. It
was misleading. It was punitive. It was a great disservice to a great cause.
And at the funeral when I said this, I didn't say it to him as a personal
accusation. I said it because I wanted him to understand that no one could be
ex- empted from responsibility if in the protection of special interests we
abandoned moral responsibility. Just coming to grieve the loss was no cleansing
of guilt. History would remember what the Washington Post, the New York
Times, and other journals had done to make this moment realizable. I told
him that the time would come again when his power and that of his paper would
be put to the test. New leaders obviously are going to come. There's going to
be a new wave of need for revolt, a new wave of demand and it would even be
global.
Two months before his assassination, King
had spoken to his congregation at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and
offered what could be described as his own eulogy:
"Every now and then I think about
my own death, and I think about my own funeral. And I don't think of it in a
morbid sense. Every now and then I ask myself, 'What is it that I would want
said?' And I leave the word to you this morning.
"If any of you are around when I
have to meet my maker, I don't want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to
deliver the eulogv, tell them not to talk too long. Every now and then I wonder what I want them to say. Tell them
not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize, that isn't important. Tell them
not to mention that I have three or four-hundred other awards, that’s not
important. Tell him not to mention where I went to school.
"I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr.
tried to give his life serving others. I'd like for somebody to say that day,
that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody. I want you to say that
day, that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say
that day, that I did try to feed the hungry. I want you to be able to say that
day, that I did try, in my life, to clothe those who were naked. I want you to
say, on that day, that I did try to visit those in prison. I want you to say
that I tried to love and serve humanity.
“Yes, if you want to say that
I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a
drum major for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the
other shallow things will not matter. I won’t have any money to leave behind. I
won’t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just
want to leave a committed life behind.”