April 1968: Martin Luther King

When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968,  I was a senior at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.  I see myself getting the news in the Gizmo, the campus coffee shop, that night.  I was in some early part of the process of directing a play I'd written.  It had a large cast and involved multimedia, so there was a lot to think about.  I wanted to being thinking about it, to be in that creative cocoon and not naked to the daily onslaught of painful information and images, warping the present and endangering the future, including my imminent one.  I didn't want to think about the killing of the man who shaped nonviolent protest and the civil rights movement.

 I'd been among the thousands who heard him speak at the March on Washington in 1963, when I was still in high school.  As some of the articles that appeared this past week noted, things had changed amazingly in those few years, and I was aware of it at the time.  King had to defend his nonviolent tactics and his goals to more militant new leaders and organizations outflanking him within the world of black activism.  Their grievances and goals were larger, more culturally expansive, and some advocated violence.

At the same time, King had lost support within the Lyndon Johnson administration as well as among many white voters by coming out strongly against American involvement in the Vietnam War.  His new emphasis on economic justice for blacks rather than civil and political rights confused, irritated and alarmed many.

Fifty years later his "I have a dream" speech at the March on Washington is linked with his instant image.  (JFK's face flashes on the screen, a two word soundbite: "Ask Not," followed immediately by MLK "I have a dream today.")  The last speech of his life was in Memphis and referred back to the dream but in the language of the promised land, in which he uttered the eerie words "I may not get there with you."

He clearly did not mean simply that the fight for true equality would take more than his natural lifetime, although if he had, he would have been right. He would be 89 now, and despite a twice-elected black President, inequality and pernicious racism still exist--and black people are still dying, still being killed because of it.

He clearly was talking about the possibility of his early, perhaps imminent death. I recall my reaction the first time I saw a clip of that speech: that's a man who knows--or at least suspects--that he's going to be killed.

One of the 50th anniversary stories last week, by Tom Jackman in the Washington Post, stated that the King children and other family members do not believe that James Earl Ray alone killed Martin Luther King.  He also writes: Until her own death in 2006, Coretta Scott King, who endured the FBI’s campaign to discredit her husband, was open in her belief that a conspiracy led to the assassination."

I know that's what she suspected, but I also know she wasn't always open about it.  In 1976 I was the editor of Washington Newsworks, a weekly alternative newspaper in DC.  (In fact, our offices were in the Adams-Morgan area, parts of which still bore obvious signs of the rioting and burning that followed the King assassination in several cities.)  One of our reporters made contact with investigators who were presenting their evidence to a congressional subcommittee on the King assassination.  It outlined a conspiracy.

We were given an advance look at that report.  We were also told that Coretta King was so interested that she was in Washington to attend these hearings, but in secret. Not publishing this fact was a condition of our getting this exclusive.

I edited and arranged this material into a narrative and we made it our cover story. At the last minute before we went to press the investigator-contact got cold feet about publication. I suggested that if we were prevented from publishing the story, any agreement not to reveal Coretta King's presence in Washington would be nullified.

So he relented and we not only published, but several of us from Newsworks personally delivered a copy of that issue to every congressional office on Capitol Hill.  We may have caught a glimpse of a few Members but we were unable to make personal contact with any.

This stuff was toxic then and even fifty years later is considered out there.  But here's the thing: just because most conspiracy theories are crazy, doesn't mean they all are.  It used to be said that such conspiracies could never happen because the secret couldn't be kept, sooner or later someone would talk.  Well, lots of people have talked and none have been believed.  (Once again, just because there are a lot of crazy people who claim to know something, doesn't mean that some people don't really know something.)

Now of course it's all safely in the "no one will ever know the truth" zone, especially in our era when factual evidence has no special standing.   What we have learned (as Jackman's story outlines) is the antipathy and extra-legal surveillance of King by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, along with the violent antipathy of southern white extremists, who didn't need much encouragement to act.  King must have known something about this.  He may have seen danger to his life in an upcoming protest or he may have sensed something else, but clearly he foresaw the possibility of being killed.



In April 1968 I would have also read or seen the story of how Robert Kennedy spoke to a largely black audience in Indianapolis that same night, and was the one who broke the news to them of King's assassination.  His short heartfelt speech is credited with the fact that no rioting happened in that city that night.  A Washington Post story this week called it "one of the most compelling and overlooked speeches in U.S. political history."

I was not surprised by his speech. For me at that moment Robert Kennedy was the last beacon of hope.  He'd started his campaign for the presidential nomination.  By the time my spring classes and comprehensive exams were over, the primaries would be as well. If he got the nomination,  I looked forward to the possibility of somehow working in his presidential campaign, assuming I would be free to do so--which was, given the draft calls, a large assumption.

But that of course is another story.