History’s Edge: The Bullet on the Balcony: Remembering MLK and April 4, 1968
He entered the spotlight young, but left behind a legacy no generation has fully outrun
Welcome to History’s Edge, a new weekly exploration of important anniversaries, with photos, links, and my own perspective, if I have one.
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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis 57 years ago, on April 4, 1968. He was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike and was on his way to meet a friend when James Earl Ray shot and killed him with a hunting rifle.
When he was murdered, official, legal chattel slavery was 103 years in the past, ended by a bloody Civil War and the 13th Amendment. The residual racism, however, was Dr. King’s challenge. It remains the challenge of a new generation.
I only met him once, days after I started a job covering civil rights for The Associated Press in Mississippi.
It is hard to overstate the importance of his short career. He was devoted to non-violent change but never wavered from a Ghandi-like determination to free the descendants of slaves from eternal subservience.
Dr. King became a nationally known civil rights leader in 1955, when he was a young pastor in Montgomery, Alabama. At 26 years old, he was chosen to head the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Five years later he was made co-pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and ten years after that he was dead.
He left a legacy that history still hasn't erased, forged in a time of national troubles. There was Vietnam, the core source of the infection; the assassinations of John Kennedy and Malcolm X before Dr. King; and Robert F. Kennedy after him. Add to that Medgar Evers of the Mississippi NAACP, who was killed by a sniper in his own front yard. Convicting his killer took thirty years.
Conspiracy Theories
James Earl Ray was confronted with very strong evidence of his guilt, especially his fingerprints on the murder weapon. He pleaded guilty in order to avoid the death penalty and was sentenced to 99 years, although he never stopped claiming he’d been a pawn in a mysterious conspiracy. He died of liver failure after thirty years in prison.
Integrating the schools in Grenada
One of Dr. King’s best-known interventions was in September 1966, when he went to Grenada, a poor town then and now, on the edge of a cotton-growing area where Steinbeck would be at home. He was accompanied by Joan Baez, who had already recorded three gold records. Woodstock would follow three years later, and she is still singing. Her songs are easy to find on my iPhone playlist.
As the school year began, Grenada was integrating its public schools over the strong objections of a toxic combination of white parents and visiting members of the KKK.
That is where I met him, on my first big story for The Associated Press (more about that later). He was in Grenada to support school integration with a series of marches and speeches. He was delayed a day and asked his friend Joan Baez to arrive a day early, hoping her celebrity power would attract the attention of the network TV cameras and distract the local segregationists from throwing rocks at the children. It seemed to work.
I reached Grenada at about the same time. AP hired me for its Jackson bureau the minute I graduated from college, and Grenada was my first big assignment. If you worked in or around the wire services of the day you will understand the thrill I felt when my first story landed on the A-Wire Budget, the heads-up notice to subscribers of notable stories they should expect that day. Everything on the bjt, as we knew it, was destined for front pages all over the country.
I had worked at two local newspapers and a TV station during my college years, which gave me enough experience and clips to qualify for a job where important things were happening. In the sixties, the decade of assassinations, political unrest, and Vietnam, I wanted to be as close to the center of action as I could be. It was only two years after the murders of the three civil rights volunteers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, two hours south of Grenada, so even though the famously bloody march over the Pettus Bridge was history, there was news to be covered in Mississippi.
The day after I graduated, I drove from Texas to the main regional bureau in the New Orleans Times-Picayune building and settled in to spend a month learning the inner workings of AP and preparing to move to Jackson, the state capital, where the legislature was usually the big story.
My time in New Orleans was cut short by the need for more people to cover the turbulence in Grenada. I originally regretted that because I was born in New Orleans and looked forward to seeing the city, but the big story was in the next state over. That’s where I wanted to be.
Violent Resistance
The white population was resisting integration with violence. The local worthies had begun throwing rocks at the schoolchildren during the day and targeting the parents’ nighttime marches around the town square with lead fishing weights launched from slingshots. There were stories of small Black children being beaten with chains. It was dangerous and frightening, but it also made me even more certain I was where I needed to be.
Joan Baez, who was about my age but ten years into her career, was there to help Dr. King. I met her briefly one afternoon in Belle Flower Baptist Church, the small brick building that served as unofficial headquarters for the integration forces. In the Youtube video linked below, she talks about the time.
My connections with Dr. King, tenuous as they were, bookended my time with AP in Mississippi. I arrived at Grenada when he arrived, and I left only months after his murder. Jackson did not have riots to equal those in the major cities, especially Washington, but they were serious enough to get my almost-new Ford burned in the street outside a big public meeting. AP bought me a new one without complaint, and a couple of months later transferred me to the Washington Bureau.
A year after I arrived I volunteered for the national economics and finance beat. At the World Bank meeting of 1969 I met the Washington Post’s young reporter who covered the same basic areas and we were married four months later. We’ve lived many places in the U.S., Germany, France, and that foreign country called Florida, but now we’re back in Washington and loving it. I hope you’ll enjoy the stories I plan to bring you.
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LINKS
Wikipedia page on the assassination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Martin_Luther_King_Jr.
Joan Baez interview on Martin Luther King Jr.:
Belle Flower Baptist Church and Dr. King, September 1966
Joan Baez (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Baez