In a sense our nation is climbing a mountain . . . and now we are in the most difficult and trying stages.
—MLK, talk at Waycross, Georgia, March 22, 1968
IT WAS A FEW MINUTES before 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 4. The temperature in Memphis was in the mid-fifties, down from the seventies that morning. Despite the chill, King was not warmly dressed as he exited Room 306. He was wearing his customary dark suit, a conservative yellow and black tie, white shirt, and black shoes.
Freshly shaved, with cologne refreshing his face, he was primed for the much-anticipated dinner at Billy Kyles’s house. To finish shaving and dressing for the occasion, Abernathy stayed behind in their room. He wanted to look his best for the night out. He told King that he would be along directly.
King walked the few steps from Room 306 to the adjacent second-story balcony and paused to wait. He had a commanding view of the Lorraine parking lot below. His aides—Young, Bevel, Williams, Lee, Jackson, and Orange—had gathered in the parking lot. They would be going with him to the Kyles’s party. Kyles was waiting for King on the balcony. “People started waving at him,” Kyles would recall. “Hey,” King hollered, waving back. “Hey. Hey.”
In the brisk air, Young and Orange were frolicking about, shadowboxing like kids in a schoolyard. The massive Orange, six foot four and nearly three hundred pounds, towered over Young. Orange’s roughneck appearance was deceiving. He was a gentle, nonviolent guy (“sweet” was Young’s word for him), but the world did not know that. The sight of his imposing heft added a measure of security on the road for King and his entourage. “Nobody would try to be physical with us with James around,” Young would say.1
Bemused by the sight of the two men engaged in mock fighting, King bellowed to Young: “Don’t hurt him, Andy!”
King spotted Jesse Jackson standing in the parking lot. There had been tension between the two men since their exchange of acid words at the staff meeting in Atlanta on Saturday. In a fence-mending gesture King called down to Jackson: “Jesse, I want you to come to dinner with me.”2
“Jesse already took care of that,” Kyles said, as he started down the stairs from the balcony.
Not to let the matter drop quickly, King shouted: “Jesse, we’re going to Billy Kyles’s, and you don’t even have a tie on.”3 Jackson was dressed in the ruggedly mod style of the sixties: olive turtleneck sweater and unzipped brown leather jacket.
“The prerequisite to eating is an appetite, not a tie,” Jackson said.
King laughed. “You’re crazy,” he said, and everyone laughed with him.
Standing next to Jackson was Ben Branch, the director of the Operation Breadbasket band. Jackson shouted, “Doc, this is Ben Branch. Ben used to live in Memphis. He plays in our band.”4
“Oh, yes, he’s my man,” King replied. “How are you, Ben?” Branch, who was a trumpeter as well as bandleader, shouted hello back to King.
“Ben,” King said, “I want you to play ‘Precious Lord’ for me tonight.” It was one of King’s favorite gospel songs. He would have been aware of its origins as a melancholy lyric written in 1932 by Thomas Dorsey. The full title was “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” It was a plea for God’s help to cope with death, and in the case of Dorsey it had been a cry for God’s hand to allay the grief he felt over the deaths of his wife and newborn son.
“Sing it real pretty,” King said.
“I sure will, Doc,” Branch said.
Branch and the others were clustered around a white Cadillac limo. The R. S. Lewis Funeral Home had put the Cadillac and a driver, Solomon Jones, at King’s disposal in Memphis.
Jones was waiting in the parking lot for King. Jones cried out, “Dr. King, it’s going to be cool tonight. Be sure to carry your coat.”
Before King could say a word of thanks, a shot rang out. A bullet struck him on the right side of the face, traveled through his neck, and came to rest on the left side of his back, splintering his spinal column.5 He collapsed instantly onto the floor of the balcony.
It was 6:01 p.m.
When some of the people closest to King heard the shot, they did not recognize it for what it was. Abernathy was dousing his face with aftershave cologne. He would remember hearing what sounded to him like the backfire of a car. “But there was just enough difference to chill my heart,” he would recount years later. When he looked through the open doorway at the balcony adjacent to his room, he saw that King was no longer standing. He was flat on his back, sprawled between the doorway and the balcony’s railing.6
Andrew Young, who was still horsing around with James Orange in the parking lot, thought he had heard either the backfire of a car or the pop of a firecracker. His eyes turned toward King on the balcony. “I could see where he had fallen down, fallen back,” Young would write. “I remember for a moment I thought he was clowning; he had been in such a playful mood.”7
Billy Kyles was five or six steps down from the balcony, when he heard the report of the rifle. “I thought it was a car backfiring,” he would say. Down in the parking lot he saw people suddenly ducking behind cars. Kyles would remember somebody screaming, “Oh, my Lord, they’ve shot Martin!”8
Abernathy bolted through the door of his room to the balcony. He knelt next to King. “Even at the first glance I could see that a bullet had entered his right cheek, leaving a small hole,” he would recall. King’s eyes seemed to flutter. Abernathy patted his face and said, “Martin, this is Ralph. Can you hear me?” He then saw, as he would put it, “the understanding drain from his eyes and leave them absolutely empty.”9
Blood was seeping from his wounds, gathering in a pool on the concrete floor beneath his head. By then Young had rushed to the balcony and was leaning over King. Young peered at the blood and the severity of the wounds, how the skin had been ripped from the chin bone. “Oh, God! Ralph. It’s over,” Abernathy would recall Young saying.10
As Abernathy and Young were tending to King, a swarm of police officers, as many as ten of them, were converging on the Lorraine. They were arriving within a minute or two of the time Ray shot King. They were racing to the Lorraine not in patrol cars but on foot.11 How they arrived so quickly would become a question for investigators. By chance, at 6:01 p.m., the officers had been on a coffee break at Fire Station #2 at South Main and Butler Streets a half block from the Lorraine.
The officers belonged to Police Tactical Unit Ten, one of several created at the outbreak of the garbage workers’ strike to respond to emergencies during the crisis. Still at his surveillance post at the back of the fire station and monitoring the Lorraine, Patrolman Willie Richmond had seen, almost immediately, that King was down. Richmond had alerted the officers. They had sprinted to the motel.
It took five minutes or so before a fire department ambulance arrived. King was placed on a stretcher, hustled down the stairs, and lifted into the ambulance.12
The ambulance, its siren blaring, raced the two miles north through the heart of downtown Memphis to St. Joseph Hospital. Gregory Jaynes, a young reporter for the Commercial Appeal, was hanging out near the police radio monitor in the newsroom when he heard a bulletin that King had been shot. As Jaynes would recount, a copy boy cried, plaintively, “Why here?” A business reporter replied, “Why anywhere?”13
The doctors at St. Joseph, recognizing the gravity of King’s condition, could do nothing for him. He was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. It was forty minutes past sunset. By then the last light in the sky over Memphis had faded to darkness.
In the days before he had returned to the tense city of Memphis, King had been offered his dream job of old. He was invited to take a one-year sabbatical as the interim pastor at the splendid neo-Gothic Riverside Church in New York City.14 He knew it well. It had a long history serving as a forum for political activism and public debate. From its pulpit King had delivered his passionate speech against the Vietnam War, in 1967. If he had accepted the offer to return to the church in the eminent post as pastor, it would have spared him the travail of returning to Memphis. He had declined the offer.
Four days after King’s death at age thirty-nine, Coretta King and Ralph Abernathy led thousands of people on a march through downtown Memphis, mourning King’s death and supporting the garbage workers’ strike. In her remarks that day, Coretta King spoke of her husband’s deepest yearnings, the covenant he had sworn to himself that, by sacrificing himself, dying if necessary, for a cause that was “right and just,” his life would end in the most redemptive way possible.15