civil rights

I'd been with the Journal-Constitution less than five months when an old friend in Washington called and asked me to do this piece for UPI's package on the 20th anniversary of King's death. I had written the story of his assassination, the funeral leads and the search for his killer. So I was glad to do this piece for old times sake. My new employer was kind enough to use it too, and gave it good play.

   Dusk was gathering along the banks of the Mississippi and winter's last chill was still in the air on the day the dreamer died.

   In that first week of April in 1968, Memphis was a coiled spring. A garbage collector's strike had swiftly turned to racial conflict, and thousands of National Guard troops sent into the city to quell weekend rioting had only just pulled out.

   It was 6 p.m. on April 4 when Martin Luther King fell dying on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, his neck torn by a sniper's bullet. When word of his assassination spread across the nation, the night erupted in an unparalleled paroxysm of grief and violence.

   Long before his martyrdom, King had assumed something approaching sainthood among most of the nation's blacks, and whites not blinded by bigotry saw in him the sole hope of achieving racial peace without a bloodbath. The "I Have a Dream" speech cemented his place in the annals of oratory; his Nobel Peace Prize confirmed his stature to the world.

   King shunned the bloody exhortations of radical blacks and the painstaking boardroom negotiations of the conservatives. Instead, he revealed the ugly face of oppression by drawing forth its violence.

    Time after time, with television cameras whirring, King led his followers calmly into the maelstrom, and time after time, with seemingly inexhaustible stupidity, Southern officialdom obliged with fire hoses, billy clubs, attack dogs and cavalry charges.

King seemed to sense death

   King seemed to sense that he could not tempt fate this way forever; from words he uttered not long before that night, he was expecting the sniper's bullet.

   King was in Memphis that week to bolster the sanitary workers in their fight with the city, and at 6 p.m. on Thursday he was going out to dinner. His chief lieutenants were with him, on the balcony and in the parking lot below, and he had just stepped out of his room when the rifle barked from the bathroom window of Bessie Brewer's flophouse on Mulberry Street 200 feet away.

   At 6:16 p.m. , a Fire Department ambulance screamed up to the emergency room entrance at St. Joseph's Hospital and King, lying limply under a sheet, was rushed in with doctors and nurses already working over him. He appeared to be breathing.

   Police with riot guns took up positions at the hospital's entrances. There were rumors of white-hooded Klansmen. The police radio crackled with reports of mysterious high-speed chases. It was no rumor, though, that several witnesses saw a white man run out of Bessie Brewer's flophouse and speed away in a white Mustang - after leaving on the doorstep a .30-caliber Remington pump rifle with a scope attached.

   At 7:30 p.m. , Paul Hess, the assistant administrator at St. Joseph's Hospital issued a one-sentence statement.

   "At 7 p.m. , Dr. Martin Luther King expired in the emergency room of a gunshot wound in the neck," he said.

   Word spread instantly to the crowd gathered outside.

   "They have killed Dr. King," screamed a woman.

Violence engulfs nation

   The violence that King had stood so firmly against spread like wildfire through the ghettoes and the campuses of black colleges from New York to California. A white youth died in a fire set by blacks in Tallahassee, Fla. A white man was stabbed to death in Washington and another died in New York.

    Blacks attacked whites with rocks, bottles, guns and even bows and arrows. President Lyndon Johnson broadcast an appeal for calm. Indeed, there was relative calm in Memphis; the city's shock seemed paralytic.

    On Friday the mourning and the maneuvering began. Stokely Carmichael called a news conference to urge blacks to take up arms and avenge the assassination. Johnson summoned black leaders to the White House and called on men "of all races, all regions and all religions to deny violence its victory in this sorrowful time."

    Coretta Scott King flew to Memphis to bring the body of her husband back to Atlanta. She did not leave the plane, but collapsed sobbing on the shoulder of a friend when a freight lift hoisted the casket to the door.

    When darkness fell on Friday, the violence resumed around the nation. National Guard troops were called out to enforce tough curfews, but the burning, shooting and pillaging continued. On the campus of Morehouse College in Atlanta, blacks hurled rocks and smashed windows into the early morning.

     Late Saturday the body was taken to Sisters Chapel [at Spelman College] and lay in state before a steady stream of mourners until it was taken back to King's Ebenezer Baptist Church Monday. Journalists kept a 24-your vigil at the chapel, but there were no incidents.

    Tuesday, the day of the funeral, was clear and bright in Atlanta. The red-brick church where King preached was jammed with his closest friends and family, and with officials led by Vice President Hubert Humphrey and all the presidential candidates, including Robert Kennedy. Outside the church, a mighty throng estimated at 150,000 stood to hear the two-hour ceremony.

'Drum major for justice'

   At the end of the service a tape recording King made only a couple of months before he died was played. In this inexpressibly poignant message, King read his own eulogy:

   "... Every now and then I think about my own death and I think about my own funeral....I ask myself what it is that I would want said, and I leave the word to you this morning:

   "I don't want a long funeral and if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy tell him not to talk too long. Tell him not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize - that isn't important.

   "If you want to, say I was a drum major. Say that I was drum major for justice. Say I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all the other shallow things will not matter."

   And then the drum major's body was borne outside and placed upon an old wooden wagon drawn by two work-worn mules, who pulled it four miles to Morehouse College. A sea of humanity marched slowly behind the wagon. Church bells pealed throughout the city and the anthem of King's civil rights movement, "We Shall Overcome," welled up through the tall buildings in a funeral dirge.  

**************************************** 

Ten years later, the Constitution asked me to write my personal memories of King's assassination.  

I was, I believe, the only writer on the staff who could remember that night.

     It was raining that evening half a lifetime ago when I finished packing the family station wagon for a vacation and slammed the tailgate shut. I was cranking the window up when the front door flew open.

    “The office is on the phone,” my wife yelled.   “King’s been shot!”

    The Southern Division headquarters of United Press International at that time was in the upper floor of a squat, two-level brick building built into a hill on Williams Street.  The building is still there, the first door north of 14th Street. The bottom floor housed the local Muzak operation.

      It took me about 10 minutes to get there in the station wagon, our only vehicle. The rest of that evening is largely a blur, difficult to describe to anyone who was not in the wire service business when it was the most fiercely competitive endeavor in all of journalism.

     There would have been three newsmen or newswomen in the bureau when the bulletin moved out of Memphis and perhaps half a dozen teletype operators. When you walked in the back door of the bureau you entered a world of constant pressure, dominated by a steady din from two dozen or more teletype machines and ringing telephones, spiced by clouds of cigarette smoke.

     It seems that all the telephones rang all the time that night, all with the wrong people on the other end of the line. Many of the calls were from the desk at world headquarters in New York, where hysteria, as usual ruled. Others were from the wire desks of newspapers in the United States and Europe, trying to find out things we didn’t know.

     It was several hours before we could confirm anything more than the fact that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Since those around him were all his aides, and they had seen no gunman, it was obviously the work of a sniper. But we didn’t know if King was dead or badly wounded.

     In the meantime, rumors abounded. There were reports that Memphis police had been siphoned out of the area around the motel by a manufactured emergency elsewhere. There were rumors of a high-speed chase involving a red Mustang. When King’s death was finally confirmed, terrible violence erupted in most major cities.

      It was a couple of days before I got home again – much to the relief of my four children, whose shoes were in the back of the station wagon. The vacation was put off for a couple of months.

     King’s slaying came as no surprise to anyone in the news business. He was, clearly, the heart and soul of the civil rights movement – and the wire services were his heralds. He led his followers into the teeth of blind racial hatred, but had there been no one to portray to the rest of the nation the mindless violence that resulted, it would have accomplished nothing.

     The South was at war. The bigots hated white reporters almost as much as the black demonstrators. We were all “outside agitators.” In the stockroom on Williams Street were three helmets and three gas masks. Anyone going out to cover one of King’s marches had to take one. There were standing rules: Put nothing on your vehicle to indicate you’re a reporter. Wear no ID. Keep your notebook out of sight as much as possible. Never use a glass phone booth. Never stand in front of a plate glass window. Call in every three hours. Photographers, unable to hide their profession, had it even worse than reporters.

     Violence was so much a part of the fabric of politics then that the wonder is that King survived as long as he did. Police did not merely stand by and let enraged whites attack his demonstrators. They often led the charge, nowhere more notably than on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala.

     I knew reporters then on both sides of the fence. A few, born and raised on prejudice, proved untrustworthy. Others simply reported what they saw, exactly as they saw it. Most of them didn’t need to see much before they felt a growing admiration for King.

     It took a while for the emotion to surface after that frantic night. When King’s body was returned to Atlanta and placed in state in Sisters Chapel at Spelman College, we had to keep watch over it 24 hours a day. We rented a fleet of cars; a reporter never used his own vehicle unless there was no other option. We set up three shifts a day to watch the coffin. One reporter refused. He was too frightened to venture into a black neighborhood. We had no black staffers.

     At 8 a.m. on the day of King’s funeral, UPI’s New York headquarters turned control of the national wire – we called it the A-wire – over to Atlanta. To my knowledge, headquarters had never before, and certainly never since, relinquished the wire.

     We had, I believe, seven reporters in the streets and one at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Several of them carried new technology provided by the telephone company at great expense – portable wireless telephones.

     I sat in the slot, writing the story as it developed, from notes passed to me by other staffers who were taking dictation from our reporters. I don’t suppose I stopped writing, except to light smokes, for four hours, for probably eight or 10 thousand words, until the cycle for afternoon papers was over at 1 p.m.

     When the church bells began ringing throughout the city, I started to weep, and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop writing, either, and the keys of the old Underwood grew slippery.

     Here, from an old clipping from the San Francisco Examiner of April 9, 1968, is the final lead of the afternoon cycle:

    ATLANTA – (UPI) – The recorded voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the “drum major for justice,” rang out in his own eulogy today and mules drew his body on a creaking wooden wagon through the streets of Atlanta.

     Reading that now, my eyes fill up again. I don’t know if any of the rest of the staff saw my tears. Nobody said anything. Perhaps they had problems of their own. -- Atlanta Journal Constitution, April 3, 1998  

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