The night before a racist sniper cut him down with a single shot, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a hauntingly eloquent speech—one that anticipated his own death.
After an evening of tornado alerts and slashing rain, Dr. King arrived late at the Mason Temple in Memphis to address a restless crowd of two thousand. They had waited two hours to hear him speak.
After thanking the audience for displaying their determination by braving the inclement weather, he delivered an emotional talk without notes, reassuring the city’s striking sanitation workers that he would help them prevail in their struggle.
To put that battle in context, he cited great moments in history, from biblical times to the present day, expressing his gratitude “that God has allowed me to live in this period to see what is unfolding.” Nearing his conclusion, he explicitly alluded to personal dangers and a flurry of threats from “some of our sick white brothers.”
As the crowd hushed, his delivery assumed an air of exultation. At that point, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, just thirty-nine years old, began to reflect, as he often did, on his own mortality.
“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. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know, tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”
FOUR FATALISTS
This prophetic proclamation, combined with his cruel martyrdom the next day, helped secure King’s place among the most admired of all Americans.
Only four individuals have been honored with federal holidays bearing their names: Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr. Though separated by nearly five hundred years of history and dramatically divergent backgrounds, those four shared a crucial common bond: an unshakable sense that their lives had been shaped by a higher power, to serve grand purposes.
Columbus took his first name seriously—it meant “Christ Bearer”—and he saw his voyages and discoveries as components of a divine mission.
Washington developed a similar sense of his own predestined role in a grand plan of cosmic significance. As a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant colonel in the Virginia militia, he emerged unscathed from the first major battle of the French and Indian War, in which nearly all of his fellow officers had been killed or wounded.
In Lincoln’s case, a childhood of mournful, impoverished obscurity unfolded together with an instinctive expectation that he would play a significant part in the development of the young nation. As president, he repeatedly described himself as “an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty.”
A hundred years later, Martin Luther King came to perceive his role in similar terms, expressing a grim, persistent fatalism that Lincoln himself might have recognized. Like Honest Abe, Dr. King spoke to friends about numerous childhood scrapes that nearly killed him.
“SAVING HIM FOR US”
At age five, young Martin, known at the time as “M.L.” or “Little Mike,” fell—or jumped—from an upstairs banister and plunged headfirst to the floor more than ten feet below. The way his Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Taylor Branch heard the story, the boy may have been upset over a household accident: his little brother A.D. (Alfred Daniel) slid down the banister of their comfortable home on Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue and knocked over their beloved grandmother, Jennie Celeste Parks Williams. According to family lore, M.L.’s small body bounced through an open door into the cellar. To the immense relief of his weeping relatives, the boy got back up to reassure them; miraculously, the damage to his limbs and skull was light.
A few years later, a car hit M.L.’s bicycle from behind, throwing him to the sidewalk. The accident destroyed the bike but spared the child. Six months later, on a new bike, he collided with another car and went hurtling over the handlebars, slamming his face against the street with a force that could have been fatal.
Years later, yet another blow to the side of his head came from a baseball bat that slipped from the hands of his younger but taller brother A.D. The guilty batter later recalled: “He was up right away and arguing that I was out because I’d missed on a third strike. M.L.’s got a hard head, all right.”
A final episode represented perhaps the most serious and troubling test to his apparent indestructibility.
On a May Sunday in 1941, when M.L. was twelve, he slipped out of the house after church to watch a parade downtown. That same afternoon, his grandmother had agreed to deliver an inspirational talk for “Women’s Day” at a neighboring Baptist church. Because of his furtive decision to see the parade, her “favorite grandson” missed the chance to hear her message.
When he returned at dusk, after hours of savoring the floats and marching bands near the center of the city, M.L. learned that his grandmother had been struck by a heart attack while waiting her turn to speak. She died on the spot at age sixty-eight. Overcome with guilt, M.L. felt responsible for the terrible news. The stricken boy trudged up the stairs of his home and, echoing the incident of seven years before, impulsively threw himself out of a second-story window.
Years later, Martin Luther King Sr. recalled the incident, especially his son’s distress as he “cried off and on for several days afterward and was unable to sleep at night.” Daddy King tried to explain “that God had His own plan and His own way, and we cannot change or interfere with the time He chooses to call any of us back to Him.”
The younger King remembered the events of that day as a personal turning point and, in an autobiographical sketch he composed at age twenty-two, recalled that they had a “tremendous effect on my religious development.” He wrote that both his parents comforted him with assurances that “somehow my grandmother still lived,” shaping his mature identity as “a strong believer in personal immortality.”
Five years later that belief helped him face down regular death threats during the yearlong struggle that became known as the Montgomery bus boycott. To compel local authorities to abandon the long-standing rule that forced black people to the back of public buses, King, newly arrived in town, led local pastors in urging congregants to walk to work each day.
Among the weary crowds trudging through the wintry streets in 1956, one elderly woman expressed the growing sense among King’s followers that the powerful young preacher had been dispatched and sustained by a higher power. She listened to some of her friends from church recounting the many close calls that spared him from death or serious injury during his eventful childhood. “The Lord had His hand on him even then,” she concluded. “He was saving him for us. No harm could come to him.”
When friends reported this comment to King himself, he felt too touched to dismiss it with a modest laugh or a shrug. After a pause, he basically concurred with the assumptions about heavenly protection. “Well, I guess God was looking out for me even then,” he allowed. “He must have given me a hard head just for that purpose.”
“THE MARK OF GREAT EXPECTATIONS”
King saw further indication of providential purpose in his dramatic renaming at age five.
His father had been born Michael Luther King, the son of a Georgia sharecropper and former slave. He named his eldest son after himself, recording his name as Michael Luther King Jr.—hence the nicknames “M.L.” and “Little Mike.”
In 1931, Daddy King succeeded his father-in-law as pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church and quickly established himself as one of the most influential black preachers in the South. In that capacity, he got the chance for a grand, once-in-a-lifetime tour of Europe and the Holy Land before attending a weeklong meeting in Berlin with the Baptist World Alliance.
While in Germany, he felt inspired to visit some sites associated with Martin Luther, who, more than four hundred years before, changed the church and the world through the force of his faith and his rhetoric. The traveling minister felt a profound spiritual connection with the Great Reformer. When Daddy King returned home to his family and congregants, he brought with him a dramatic announcement.
Welcomed as a conquering hero by local clergy, Daddy King triumphantly announced that he would legally change his first name from Michael to Martin, in order to make his middle name (Luther) a more explicit, unmistakable reference to the founder of Protestant Christianity. At the same time, he naturally changed the name of his precocious and promising son, who now became Martin Luther King Jr.—a resonant designation that seemed to anoint him in advance as a fearless reformer ready to challenge the oppressive institutions of his time.
As Taylor Branch observed in Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63: “The change of name was one of the most important events in the younger King’s early life. For him it would be the mark of great expectations, a statement of identity that honored traditions in both religion and race. Name changes have always been part of religious history, used to announce the existence of a ‘new person.’ Jacob became Israel, Saul of Tarsus became Paul, Simon became Peter, and the first act of every new pope is to choose a special name for his reign.”
In King’s case, the name selection made on his behalf by the father he greatly admired served not only to bring M.L. closer to the implacable, fearless Martin Luther, but to give his very existence a more godly and fateful dimension. After the name change, King had little doubt about his path in life. He had been raised, after all, to join the family business: his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all served as preachers, as did his only brother and his father’s brother.
Yet to him, the religious role he had been fated to fulfill shaped a prophet as much as a pastor. “Somehow the preacher must have a kind of fire shut up in his bones,” he told that enraptured Memphis audience the night before his death. “Somehow the preacher must say with Jesus, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me,’ and he’s anointed me to deal with the problems of the poor.”
“THE RICHEST NEGRO STREET IN THE WORLD”
He sensed that anointing despite the unquestionably comfortable circumstances of his own upbringing.
Born in an upstairs bedroom of his grandparents’ Atlanta home, King junior grew up in that same spacious two-story residence at 501 Auburn Avenue—a bustling boulevard celebrated by Fortune magazine in 1956 as “the richest Negro street in the world.” Lined with respectable wooden houses with generous front porches, and boasting a rich array of thriving businesses, cafés, churches, and nightclubs, the avenue lent its name to a district of approximately eight square blocks known affectionately as “Sweet Auburn,” home to the city’s most prominent, prosperous black families. At a time when segregated housing patterns remained strictly in force, no level of success would have enabled the Kings to venture beyond the Sweet Auburn district for one of the leafy, privileged white neighborhoods springing up elsewhere in and around the city. In fact, black businesses and residents had first migrated to that refuge east of downtown when the bloody race riots of 1906 left twenty-seven dead, sending an unmistakable message that people of color couldn’t feel welcome at the city’s center.
Throughout boyhood and adolescence, young King remained ensconced in the cozy confines of his neighborhood. Ebenezer Baptist Church, the fortress of faith where his mother’s father had preached the Gospel for a generation and his father continued to do so, stood less than three blocks from the family home. When King was thirteen, impressive test scores allowed him to enroll at Booker T. Washington High School, established just five years before his birth as Georgia’s first public high school for black students. He rode the bus and dressed so formally in tweed jackets that he earned the nickname “Tweedy.” He also quickly won a reputation for oratorical ability, earning a place on the school’s debate squad and winning a local speech contest sponsored by the Negro Elks Club.
Despite his age (two years younger than most of his fellow students), and the compact stature that classmates derided as “shrimpy” (even as an adult, King never stood more than five foot seven), he loved sports and excelled at basketball. On the court, he became notorious as a “will-shoot”—a foolhardy but surprisingly effective outside gunner who hated to pass the ball. Yet even his most irrational shots, launched directly above the heads of defenders who usually towered over him, somehow managed to find their own implausible arc to the basket and to glory.
At age fifteen, M.L. followed another unlikely arc in his personal ascent: he completed his high school graduation requirements and won admission to Morehouse College. The onetime Baptist seminary had been generously sustained and developed by the devoutly religious oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller (an ardent abolitionist before and during the Civil War) and had already claimed its aspirational title as “the Black Harvard.” Riding the bus between his family home and nearby classes at the Atlanta University Center, King wasted little time on distractions and single-mindedly pursued his goals: winning ordination as a Baptist minister and preaching part-time at his father’s church, even before his graduation as a sociology major at age nineteen.
At that point, the young prince of Sweet Auburn ventured far from his hospitable home ground for the first time, enrolling at the Crozer Theological Seminary, a predominantly white Baptist institution near Chester, Pennsylvania, that gave him a taste of life outside the South. He graduated as class valedictorian in 1951 and then moved on to Boston University, where he acquired both a PhD (in Systematic Theology) and, more important, a wife.
SMALL STATURE, BIG DELUSIONS
Coretta Scott came from the small town of Marion, Alabama, where her father, Obadiah, had briefly served in the local police department before establishing himself as Perry County’s most prominent black entrepreneur. Obie Scott owned a filling station and a trucking company, along with several hundred cotton-growing acres on which he built a gracious country house with his own hands. Coretta delighted her domineering daddy by displaying an early gift for music, mastering trumpet and piano and ultimately directing a local church choir. She developed a rich, velvety smooth, and powerful soprano voice and dreamed of an improbable career in the opera house or the recital hall, despite the lack of funds to secure the training she needed and the racial barriers that still confronted women of color. After following her sister to Antioch College, in Ohio, she earned a small scholarship to the prestigious New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.
There she met Martin Luther King Jr., the driven dynamo then pursuing his graduate studies at BU. Initially, Coretta found herself somewhat put off by the odd combination of small stature and big delusions of grandeur on the part of a twenty-two-year-old who was a full two years younger than she was.
In the memoir that she wrote shortly after his death, she recalled their conversation when he called her on the phone at the suggestion of a friend. He had seen her photograph and heard positive reports of her admirable qualities, so he aggressively demanded that they meet as soon as possible. “I’m like Napoleon,” he announced. “I’m at my Waterloo, and I’m on my knees.”
Won over by his pleading, she agreed to see him for lunch the next day, and as he drove her back to the conservatory he declared: “The four things that I look for in a wife are character, intelligence, personality and beauty. And you have them all.” Apparently, it never occurred to him that any young woman with such attributes could possibly pass up the opportunity to drop her own ambitions and to come along on his predestined winged chariot ride to the spiritual leadership of his people.
Daddy King presided, regally, over his son’s wedding on June 18, 1953, officiating on the spacious front lawn of Obadiah Scott’s farmhouse. After a wearying reception with crowds of relatives and well-wishers, the young couple never got much of a chance for a romantic wedding night. With an exhausted M.L. sleeping in the seat beside her, Coretta did most of the driving in their five-hour, pre-interstate trek toward the King family home in Atlanta. They couldn’t get a room anywhere in Alabama because long-standing tradition, backed by state law, prohibited motels and resorts from accommodating black people. They spent the first night of their marriage in a well-furnished funeral parlor that was owned by a friend of Coretta’s family.
“I’VE BEEN CALLED TO PREACH”
During their first summer, the newlyweds busied themselves with the affairs of Daddy King’s Ebenezer Church and participated in an eventful black Baptist convention in Florida, where younger leaders successfully challenged the stodgy establishment to force more aggressive efforts to demand civil rights. Back in Boston, M.L. tried to concentrate on finishing his PhD, but planned the next chapter of his life. He noted that by 1954, he had been “in school for twenty-one years without a break” and meant to begin his independent pastoral career at the same time he completed his doctoral dissertation.
He knew he could choose among any number of opportunities. A church in Massachusetts expressed interest in hiring him, as did another congregation in New York State, presenting the Kings with the chance to remain in the Northeast. A third church seemed to provide a more promising possibility, which would bring M.L. to Chattanooga, Tennessee—much closer to home. Three historically black colleges also corresponded with him over potential teaching or administrative positions, but after so many years of academia he leaned toward a pulpit position.
In the midst of these deliberations came an opportunity to preach a guest sermon at the historic Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. The venerable congregation had been searching for a new pastor for more than a year. The previous incumbent, the turbulent civil rights pioneer Vernon Johns, had been forced from his post after riling the local white power elite and, more destructively, offending his own congregation’s wealthiest and most influential members. Understanding the speaking invitation as a high-stakes audition, Daddy King strongly discouraged his son from making the appearance, naming the prominent families and overbearing individuals who would harass any newcomer to the prestigious pulpit.
The younger King nonetheless insisted that he could measure up to the challenge. He preached a sermon he’d already delivered as a guest in other black congregations. Under the title “The Dimensions of a Complete Life,” he insisted that “if my life’s work is not developed for the good of humanity, it is meaningless and Godless.”
Impressed by his message, and by his precocious oratorical command, the pulpit committee at Dexter recommended that the church secure King’s services as their new pastor. The members of the congregation unanimously endorsed the decision.
M.L. returned on May 2, 1954, to deliver his acceptance address to an expectant, excited crowd. “I come to the pastorate of Dexter at a most crucial hour of our world’s history,” he announced. Admitting that he addressed his task as neither a “great preacher” nor a “profound scholar,” he nonetheless expressed unshakable confidence in the significance of his new mission. “I have felt with Jesus that the spirit of the Lord is upon me,” he declaimed to his new congregants, “because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and to set at liberty them that are bruised.”
“THE MAN AND THE HOUR HAVE MET”
Within six months, the choice of this new pastor by a small but prestigious church in a provincial city had managed to change the world. Without King’s leadership, the Montgomery bus boycott might have occurred, and even succeeded, but it never would have become a stirring, almost apocalyptic struggle that aroused the conscience of the country. And had he not moved to Montgomery at precisely the right moment, Martin Luther King might well have emerged, eventually, as a significant African American leader, but it’s hard to imagine any way he could have achieved that dominating stature before the age of thirty.
At a very different confluence of historic forces in Montgomery, Alabama, former congressman William Lowndes Yancey proudly proclaimed: “The Man and the Hour have met.” Ironically, Yancey—a notorious pro-secession “fire-eater” and unrepentant racist—used that phrase to hail the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as the new president of the Confederacy. That 1862 ceremony took place at the Alabama capitol, which literally cast its shadow on the very site where Dexter Avenue Baptist Church (originally Second Baptist Colored Church) began building its permanent sanctuary some fifteen years later.
As the proud “Cradle of the Confederacy” (the original capital city before Richmond took over the role), Montgomery remained one of the most strictly, fiercely segregated cities anywhere in the South. Civil rights activist Virginia Durr, who had just returned home after ten years in the nation’s capital, described Montgomery as a venue of “death, decay, corruption, frustration, bitterness and sorrow. The Lost Cause is right.”
But the city’s black leaders found a new cause on the first of December in 1955.
Around six o’clock on that Thursday evening, a forty-two-year-old civil rights activist named Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus after a long day of work as a seamstress in a downtown department store. Contrary to common depictions of the ensuing incident, Parks made no attempt to sit anywhere in the front ten rows of the bus, which were reserved, by law and custom, for white people. Instead, she made her way toward the back and, together with three other people of color, occupied seats in the row right behind the white section.
They rode quietly, and undisturbed, for two or three stops before a crowd of white people boarded the vehicle and filled up all the places reserved for whites at the front. This left one particular gentleman standing in place, glowering down at the black faces in the row right behind the “whites only” portion of the vehicle. The driver took note of the situation, stopped the bus, and walked toward the rear to confront the uncooperative black passengers. As Rosa Parks recalled some forty years later: “When that white driver stepped back toward us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and out of our seats, I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night.”
In response to the bus driver’s impatient orders, three of the black passengers in the contested seats stood up and quietly complied. Rosa Parks did not. It wasn’t a question of her weariness, as much as a sense that she had reached a breaking point.
“I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day,” she remembered. “I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” The driver once more demanded that she vacate her seat but she politely declined. “And he told me he would have me arrested. And I told him he may do that. And of course, he did.”
With the bus parked on the street and many of the other passengers angrily abandoning it, two policemen arrived and one of them asked Parks why she refused to stand. “I told him I didn’t think I should have to stand up,” she recalled. “And then I asked him, why did they push us around? And he said, and I quote him, ‘I don’t know, but the law is the law and you are under arrest.’ And with that, I got off the bus, under arrest.”
After friends from the NAACP bailed her out, she appeared in court the next day to face charges of disorderly conduct and violations of the city’s segregation code. Her conviction took all of thirty minutes, with a fine of $10 plus $4 in court costs. By that time, news of her arrest had spread throughout the angry and exasperated black community, with activists drawing up plans for a one-day bus boycott at the beginning of the next week. Dr. King didn’t know Parks personally, since he was new in town and she attended a different black Baptist church, but he recognized the importance of her reputation. “Mrs. Parks was ideal for the role assigned to her by history,” he wrote years later, noting that “her character was impeccable and her dedication deep-rooted.”
“SUBSTITUTE TIRED FEET FOR TIRED SOULS”
On the Sunday after her Thursday arrest, ministers in all the black churches preached sermons about Rosa Parks, and proposed a bus boycott for the next day.
That Monday protest proved unexpectedly successful: local newspapers reported that some 90 percent of the city’s regular black passengers stayed off the buses and found alternate means to work. Later that afternoon, a mass meeting drew several thousand excited participants to the Holt Street Baptist Church and organized the Montgomery Improvement Association to extend the impromptu boycott to force concessions from the white establishment. They also chose Dr. King as its leader, despite his age (only twenty-six) and his status as a newcomer who had lived in the city less than two years. As Rosa Parks recalled, “The advantage of having Dr. King as president was that he was so new to Montgomery and to civil rights work that he hadn’t been there long enough to make any strong friends or enemies.”
He did make an immediate impression, however, on the jammed meeting that selected him. “Let us go out with a grim and bold determination that we are going to stick together,” he roared to the big crowd at Holt Street Baptist Church. “Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future, somebody will have to say, ‘There lived a race of people—a black people, fleecy locks and black complexion—a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights.’ ”
As he concluded and took his seat, the entire church rose and cheered, affirming their “grim and bold determination” in a sustained, emotional reaction. A prominent matron in the community named Idessa Williams Redden called out in piercing, soaring tones above the general tumult, “Lord, you have sent us a leader!”
That same night, the new Montgomery Improvement Association voted to extend the one-day protest. But no one expected the struggle to go on for more than a year. For most of the city’s fifty thousand black residents, public transit offered the only way to get to work: though less than half of the overall population, they made up more than three-quarters of the ridership on local buses. Without these African American passengers, those empty vehicles rattled down the Alabama avenues like useless husks, inflicting daily financial losses on the capital city.
Meanwhile, King and his associates struggled to provide alternate means of transportation. Some of the boycotters drove horse-drawn wagons to make their way to work; others actually rode mules. The MIA worked frantically to organize car pools, eventually deploying more than three hundred automobiles with volunteer drivers, using donations from around the country to purchase a few new station wagons for that purpose.
But for the most part, the city’s black population walked, making their way on foot to wherever they had to go. For many, this became a matter of choice as much as of necessity, creating indelible images for the international coverage that quickly focused on Alabama’s capital. People of all ages and social strata, from teachers to cleaning ladies to mechanics, trekked defiantly to jobs or schools or markets, turning every day into a silent, communal, compelling march of protest. King seized upon profound symbolism of these quiet, determined, daily walks to work. “We came to see that, in the long run, it is more honorable to walk in dignity than ride in humiliation,” he proclaimed. “We decided to substitute tired feet for tired souls, and walk the streets of Montgomery.”
A week after the boycott began, a white librarian named Juliette Morgan wrote a letter to the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser expressing her conviction that “history is being made in Montgomery these days….It is hard to imagine a soul so dead, a heart so hard, a vision so blinded and provincial as not to be moved with admiration at the quiet dignity, discipline, and dedication with which the Negroes have conducted their boycott.”
The formal demands of this movement remained almost laughably modest: the MIA explicitly insisted on “courteous treatment by bus operators” and “first-come, first-served seating for all,” but with no real expectation that black and white passengers would sit next to one another, in violation of Alabama’s statewide segregation law. To avoid running afoul of that odious statute, King and his colleagues still accepted that whites would board from the front of each bus and blacks would board from the rear. But they insisted that if there were empty rows in the “whites only” section of the bus, black people would be allowed to sit in them rather than have to stand in the back with the other black passengers.
THE KITCHEN CONVERSION
Despite the reasonable and respectful tone of King and his colleagues, the politicians and bureaucrats of the local power structure pushed back with indignant ferocity. They disrupted the painstakingly assembled car pools in the black community with claims that their organizers had been operating an illegal taxi company; local insurance even canceled policies for the cars and drivers who transported the boycotters. During the 381 days of the ongoing struggle, law enforcement officials indicted King (and eighty other boycott leaders) for violating a 1921 law prohibiting conspiracies that interfered with lawful business. Worst of all, his family received up to thirty calls a day on their home phone threatening violence if he continued to battle the bus company. The angry, abusive callers invariably ordered him to leave town immediately or to suffer the bloody consequences.
King later identified the first moment he actually felt fear for his physical safety. On the afternoon of January 26, 1956, he was driving home from church with two of his congregants when the Montgomery police began following the young minister and eventually pulled him over. “Get out, King,” they ordered. “You are under arrest for speeding thirty miles an hour in a twenty-five-mile zone.”
To his astonishment and horror, they loaded him into a patrol car. “As we drove off, presumably to the city jail, a feeling of panic began to come over me,” he remembered. “I had always had the impression that the jail was in the downtown section of Montgomery. Yet after riding for a while I noticed that we were going in a different direction. The more we rode the farther we were from the center of town. In a few minutes we turned into a dark and dingy street that I had never seen and headed under a desolate old bridge. By this time, I was convinced that these men were carrying me to some faraway spot to dump me off….Then I began to wonder whether they were driving me out to some waiting mob, planning to use the excuse later on that they had been overpowered. I found myself trembling within and without….By this time we were passing under the bridge. I was sure now that I was going to meet my fateful hour on the other side. But as I looked up I noticed a glaring light in the distance, and soon I saw the words ‘Montgomery City Jail.’ I was so relieved that it was some time before I realized the irony of my position: going to jail at that moment seemed like going to some safe haven!”
The sense of relief gave way to other thoughts as the jail doors slammed shut behind him. “For the moment strange gusts of emotion swept through me like cold winds on an open prairie. For the first time in my life I had been thrown behind bars.”
Even after friends arrived to post his bail, King felt shaken, anxious, and, for the first time since the boycott began, uncertain. The next night, a Friday, he stayed late at church for another strategy session for MIA and came home to find Coretta and their baby daughter both soundly asleep. Before he could join them, the phone rang and he picked it up so the noise wouldn’t wake his family. The unidentified voice on the line began with the same two words that launched most such calls: “Listen, nigger.” The caller then growled out an unusually specific threat. “We’ve taken all we want from you….If you’re not out of this town in three days we’re gonna blow your brains out and blow up your house.”
By the time King hung up, his nerves felt too jangled for sleep. He walked into his kitchen, put on a pot of coffee, and then, with shaky hands, set it down on the kitchen table. What followed amounted to a decisive religious experience that he recounted many times, in writing and in sermons, over the crowded twelve years remaining in his life.
“I was ready to give up,” he remembered. Staring at the untouched cup of coffee in front of him, he longed for a way to step aside from his position of leadership and vulnerability, without shaming his family or betraying his followers. He later recalled focusing especially on the fate of his newborn daughter, Yolanda, “the darling of my life,” who could well lose her own life amid the threats of violence that increasingly surrounded him.
In his weakness and desperation, he realized he couldn’t turn to his parents, 175 miles away in Atlanta. Instead, he could only “call on something in that person that your Daddy used to tell you about, that power that can make a way out of no way.” At that point, he held his head in his hands and bowed over the edge of the kitchen table, praying aloud. “The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. ‘I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid.’ ” He spoke of the fear that his own failing courage would undermine the determination of the people who depended on him, causing all their hopes to collapse. “I am at the end of my powers,” he confessed. “I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”
And in response to that confession, King “experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before….Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything….I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.”
This transformational moment became known to King’s friends, and later biographers, as his “Kitchen Vision” or “Kitchen Conversion.” It occurred at precisely the moment King needed the help.
Three nights later, he delivered his keynote address to a mass meeting at Ralph David Abernathy’s First Baptist Church. He spoke of his recent arrest at the hands of the Montgomery police. “If all I have to pay is going to jail a few times and getting about 20 threatening calls a day, I think that is a very small price to pay for what we are fighting for.” Minutes later, as the meeting prepared to adjourn, King got word that a bomb had exploded at his home, with Coretta and their baby daughter inside.
“I WANT YOU TO LOVE OUR ENEMIES”
He rushed to the scene and pushed through a swelling, angry crowd to find his front porch nearly demolished and several windows shattered. His wife and baby daughter, who had been sleeping in the back room, remained blessedly unharmed. Stepping over broken glass to get to his living room, King found the city’s mayor and police commissioner—staunch foes of the boycott—waiting for him with assurances that they condemned the bombing and hoped to find its perpetrators (they never did). Outside, leaping and shouting young men began waving fists in the air, as well as knives and firearms. They called for revenge, threatening the white policemen at the scene. King stepped up to his ruined porch and raised a hand to quiet the crowd. “Don’t get panicky,” he said. “Don’t get your weapons. If you have weapons take them home….We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies….We must meet hate with love.” As the crowd listened intently, he told them: “Go home and sleep calm. Be calm as I and my family are.”
As the crowd dispersed, the mayor of Montgomery, W. A. “Tacky” Gayle, turned to M.L. and quietly, gratefully affirmed: “Preacher King, you saved our lives.”
At that moment and others, even his enemies recognized King’s power as extraordinary and unprecedented. His followers increasingly believed it stemmed from a divine, supernatural source.
King himself sensed the same thing. When he looked back on that tumultuous, potentially deadly night of January 30, he wrote: “Strangely enough, I accepted the word of the bombing calmly. My religious experience a few nights before had given me the strength to face it.”
Increasingly, his rhetoric combined confidence and resignation, relying on divine protection and yet accepting fate’s inscrutable master plan. As the exhausting boycott struggle approached its one-year anniversary, the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed a lower court decision that bus segregation laws violated the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. Though the Montgomery Improvement Association savored the moment of triumph, its leaders decided to continue the bus boycott until the court order for desegregation had been fully implemented.
The day after the high court announced its decision on November 13, 1956, King addressed a jubilant crowd at Holt Street Baptist Church and warned of the dangers that still lay ahead. “I’m aware of the fact that a week never passes that somebody’s not telling me to get out of town, or that I’m going to be killed next place I move….I don’t have any guards on my side. But I have the God of the Universe on my side!” The audience roared in affirmation.
A few months later, the King family survived another serious attempt to kill them and destroy their home. On January 27—almost exactly a year since the last bombing attempt—the would-be killers planted a bundle with twelve sticks of dynamite on the front porch of the house but failed in their attempts to ignite the explosives. The Montgomery Advertiser ran the headline “ ‘DUD’ SPARES KING’S HOME ANOTHER HIT” and their readers understood exactly what had happened. The Advertiser also reported on the soaring sermon he delivered to his packed church the next day (under the headline “KING SAYS VISION TOLD HIM TO LEAD INTEGRATION FORCES”).
For the first time, King spoke publicly about the “Kitchen Conversion” that had altered his life the year before, describing the voice he heard on a “sleepless morning” telling him to “stand up for the truth, stand up for righteousness.”
“If I had to die tomorrow morning I would die happy, because I’ve been to the mountain top and I’ve seen the promised land!”
His language anticipated, almost word for word, the climax to the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech he delivered eleven years later, on the night before his death. More than a specific premonition of the next day’s bloody events, King’s phrases in both speeches expressed a general awareness of his own mortality. After the transformational kitchen encounter shortly after he turned twenty-seven, he gave voice frequently, almost constantly, to a sense of the limited time he had been granted to lead a transcendent cause. While he spoke of his faith in God’s promised, personal protection, he also knew the protection wouldn’t be permanent.
That knowledge of time running out for him—if not for his movement—drove his consistent focus on “the fierce urgency of now” so memorably invoked in the “I Have a Dream” speech. It also informed the theme and the title of his bestselling book the next year: Why We Can’t Wait. As he resoundingly declared in his superb “Letter from Birmingham Jail”: “We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”
Rather than bask in the glory of his historic victory in Montgomery, the impatient leader immediately shifted his attention to a larger arena and a wider struggle. Barely a month after the formal end of the bus boycott and the official desegregation of the local transit system, King assembled sixty ministers and lay leaders at his father’s church in Atlanta to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to push for integration and voting rights. In May 1957, he made his first address to a national audience as featured speaker at the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in Washington commemorating the third anniversary of the Supreme Court’s unanimous school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. He spoke to a large, peaceful crowd estimated at twenty-five thousand that gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial—the same venue that drew a vastly larger crowd for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom six years later.
In the interim between those two mass events, King traveled incessantly and became an international symbol of black liberation. He journeyed to Africa to join in the mass celebrations when Ghana became the first black nation to gain its independence from colonial rule, then flew to India to meet with the prime minister and to connect with Mahatma Gandhi’s inspired legacy of nonviolent resistance. Jet magazine estimated that in 1958 alone, King delivered 208 speeches—an average of four a week—and traveled some seventy-eight thousand miles.
“YOU WOULD HAVE DROWNED IN YOUR OWN BLOOD”
In one of those journeys, he faced the first attempt on his life that actually drew blood.
The incident came near the end of a high-profile trip to New York City to launch the promotional tour for his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, which told the triumphant story of the Montgomery bus boycott. On Friday night, September 19, 1958, King addressed a mass rally of some five thousand people in front of Harlem’s twelve-story Hotel Theresa. The featured speakers for this grand occasion also included the governor of New York, Democrat Averell Harriman, and his ultimately victorious Republican challenger Nelson Rockefeller, both angling for the “Negro vote” in a hotly contested campaign. The legendary Duke Ellington and his orchestra provided music for the event and baseball immortal Jackie Robinson thrilled the crowd with his welcoming address.
For the most part, the event unfolded successfully, though a few noisy hecklers regularly interrupted the speakers. One particularly annoying troublemaker had managed to position herself behind the podium, where she attracted attention with her piercing voice and stylish, garishly colored, European wardrobe. A strikingly tall and powerfully built black woman, she also wore sparkling green sequined eyeglasses and dangling earrings as she yelled special hatred for the distinguished white visitors to Harlem, telling them they had no business invading a black neighborhood.
Perhaps because she was a fashionably dressed female who carried herself with a sense of purpose and authority, no one thought to silence or remove her, but King seemed to be addressing her hostility when he got up to speak. “Many of you had hoped I would come here to bring you a message of hate against the white man,” he said. “I come here with no such message. Black supremacy is just as bad as white supremacy….Don’t let any man make you stoop so low that you have hate.”
After the rally, Manhattan’s black borough president, Hulan Jack, approached the dais with his principal aide and told King that in light of the agitation in the audience and backstage, he should have a bodyguard for the remainder of his trip to New York City. “Oh God, don’t get a bodyguard!” the civil rights leader insisted. He then turned to the politician’s assistant, William Rowe. “And don’t you try to act like one either!”
After all, the next day, a balmy Saturday, was meant to be his last in the city. Dr. King’s schedule called for a book signing at Blumstein’s department store on West 125th Street in Harlem, and some fifty people already waited in line when he arrived at 3:00 p.m. He spent a few minutes chatting with each of his admirers and by 3:30 had worked his way through more than half of the patient crowd. At that point, a tall woman in high heels and a bright blue raincoat cut to the front of the line and made her own stride toward murder. She came directly up to the desk where King had been signing his books and boomed out a strange question. “Is this Martin Luther King?” she demanded.
Unfortunately, he failed to recognize her as the heckler from the night before and unhesitatingly responded, “Yes, it is.”
Immediately she brought her hand out of her raincoat; in it was a gently curved Japanese blade about eight inches long, with an elegant handle of inlaid ivory—like a miniature samurai sword. Raising the weapon above her shoulder she brought it down full force and plunged it deep into King’s chest. Fortunately, he raised his left arm just before contact, cutting his hand. She tried to pull out the knife to stab again but bystanders restrained her. “I’ve been after him for six years!” she shouted. “I’m glad I done it!” As horrified onlookers held the assailant and waited for the police, she kept repeating, “Dr. King has ruined my life. He is no good. The NAACP is no good, it’s communistic. I’ve been after him for six years. I finally was able to get him now.”
Her name was Izola Curry. A forty-two-year-old loner with a long history of mental illness, she was one of eight children born to sharecroppers in a tiny Georgia town and left school in seventh grade. After a brief marriage in her early twenties, she led an itinerant life that took her from Ohio to Missouri to West Virginia, back to Georgia, then to Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina, Florida again, and finally to New York City. There, she worked as a cleaning lady to pay for the gaudy clothes and earrings she habitually wore. She also developed paranoid delusions about Communist penetration of the “Negro Church” and repeatedly contacted the FBI about Communist agents who were constantly pursuing her.
On the day of the attack on King, she carried a fully loaded .32-caliber semiautomatic pistol in her purse but fatefully chose to remove her “samurai letter opener” from its ceremonial scabbard of carved, crimson-painted wood and stab him. With its blade sharpened to a deadly point, it was said to possess “the penetrating power of an ice pick.”
Not yet fully aware of what had happened to him, or why, and with the handle still protruding from his chest, King staggered into a chair and struggled to reassure the near-hysterical crowd. “That’s all right,” he managed to say, with the gushing blood beginning to stain his crisp, white cotton shirt. “Everything’s going to be all right.” Some well-meaning people who hovered around him yelled for an effort to remove the blade, but fortunately, wiser heads prevailed. Doctors later affirmed that any such attempt would have almost certainly killed him.
At the hospital, the still-conscious but distinctly uncomfortable King received a parade of visitors, none of them particularly welcome. In the midst of his feverish reelection campaign, Governor Harriman came to offer comfort (and to strengthen his association with the popular black leader six weeks before the election). The chief executive of the Empire State stayed at the hospital for more than three hours, darting in and out of King’s room with a mournful expression and occasionally squeezing the great man’s hand.
Later, the police also brought in an even less appropriate guest: Izola Curry, the would-be assassin, now handcuffed but still ranting. The law enforcement officials wanted King to identify her as his assailant, before he lost consciousness or, as many expected, expired. Even though he was only twenty-nine, everyone counted his demise as a distinct possibility. King himself wrote later: “The razor tip of the instrument had been touching my aorta and that my whole chest had to be opened to extract it. ‘If you had sneezed during all those hours of waiting,’ [the chief of surgery] said, ‘your aorta would have been punctured and you would have drowned in your own blood.’ ”
Reviewing the case against Izola Curry, prosecutors found her mental state so unequivocally deranged that she never stood trial. Instead, the authorities confined her to various psychiatric hospitals and rest homes where she lived to the age of ninety-nine. Her deranged condition didn’t stop scores of white supremacists from sending donations to provide for her legal defense and to commend her “courageous blow” against a “nefarious advocate of race mixing.” While still in the hospital, King himself issued a magnanimous press statement declaring that he bore “no ill will” toward his attacker and knew “that thoughtful people will do all in their power to see that she gets the help she apparently needs if she is to become a free and constructive member of society.”
Meanwhile, King got the help he needed when his wife and mother arrived from Atlanta to supervise his care and lift his spirits. The press wrote glowingly of his forgiving spirit and gracious manners, featuring photographs of a smiling King wearing a shiny silk dressing gown he’d been given as a get-well gift. During his two weeks of recuperation, he developed a deepening sense that the bizarre sequence of events amounted to an important message: like his childhood scrapes with danger and injury, and the multiple attempts to harm his family in Montgomery, the knife near his heart reminded him of the proximity of death and of his purposeful, providential protection.
In fact, Dr. King later discerned physical evidence that reinforced the theme.
When the physicians finished their surgical work and stitched together the opening they had made in his body, they left behind a visible, raised scar that he bore for the rest of his life. At the center of his chest, this mark looked like a lowercase t. Others thought it resembled a plus sign. But looking at his own flesh, M.L. felt no doubt that he had been branded with the sign of the cross.
“I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE!”
The years that followed brought the honors and accomplishments that the nation recalls with reverence in observing the annual Martin Luther King holiday. He guided his movement through the climactic, occasionally brutal struggle to desegregate Birmingham, followed by the March on Washington, with its unprecedented crowd of 250,000. He won designation as Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” for 1963 and then received the Nobel Peace Prize presented in 1964. The passage of the most sweeping civil rights bill in American history brought bipartisan celebration, followed by dramatic confrontations in Selma that led to the Voting Rights Act, which enabled millions of African Americans to cast ballots for the first time.
Those years of lightning, thunder, and epic achievement gave King the status of international hero. More than a half century after his death, he looms in the national consciousness as such a monumental figure that it seemed natural to compare his martyrdom to Lincoln’s. But while Lincoln perished at a moment of triumph, just days after victory in the Civil War and congressional passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, King’s story concluded on an altogether different note: his last year brought the most stormy, painful, and frustrating months of his brief life.
PBS host Tavis Smiley underlined that point in his deeply sympathetic 2014 book Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year. Smiley characterizes that year as one of “unrelenting adversity” in which “everything and everybody turned against Dr. King.” As British journalist Gary Younge noted in the Guardian: “Before his death in 1968, King was well on the way to becoming a pariah. In 1966, twice as many Americans had an unfavourable opinion of him as a favourable one.”
By that time, the term “backlash” came to signify the mounting white resentment to the increasing militancy of a new crop of black activists—fiery voices that viewed Dr. King as increasingly irrelevant. Within the civil rights movement, younger leaders commonly referred to King as “De Lawd”—an ironic reference to his exalted reputation and grand biblical rhetoric. But the nickname also invoked the perceived distance between the revered international icon of brotherhood and the gritty realities that remained a daily challenge for the black community he sought to represent.
Without question, the inner-city explosions of looting, arson, and bloodshed that began with the Watts riots in Los Angeles in August 1965 did devastating damage to King’s standing among blacks and whites alike. In the “long, hot summer” of 1967 alone, riots scarred 159 cities in every corner of the country, resulting in nearly 100 deaths, 2,100 serious injuries, more than 11,000 arrests, and untold billions in property damage. King, of course, never encouraged or condoned the nihilistic violence, but horrified observers of all races felt disappointed by the great civil rights leader’s inability to stop the incidents. Many of his own supporters saw the riots as the ultimate rejection of Dr. King’s uplifting emphasis on nonviolence and “the beloved community.”
When the riots seemed to spread everywhere in the summer of 1967, King struggled to explain the violence without excusing it. “A riot is the language of the unheard,” he proclaimed, but the Chicago Tribune rejected the line with an indignant editorial: “Every time there is a riot in the streets you can count on a flock of sociologists rushing forward to excuse the rioters.” The newspaper concluded that King’s “ ‘nonviolence’ is designed to goad others into violence.” The Dallas Morning News similarly condemned him as “the headline-hunting high priest of nonviolent violence” whose “road show” resembled a “torchbearer sprinting into a powder-house.” Even longtime allies and associates deemed the Nobel Prize winner suddenly, irrevocably, irrelevant. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the pastor-politician who represented Harlem in Congress for more than a quarter century, contemptuously proclaimed: “I don’t call for violence or riots, but the day of Martin Luther King has come to an end.”
For King, the public attacks brought private despair—and a destructive pattern of self-punishment. His aides worried about “Doc” facing defeat in his ongoing “war on sleep”: his exhausted body found it increasingly difficult to rise to the demands of his impossible schedule, especially with his growing consumption of cigarettes and alcohol—sometimes to excess. In the last two years of his life, he added at least twenty unhealthy pounds to his previously compact, muscular frame.
Financial challenges compounded the stress: he faced the constant demands of charitable fundraisers, paid speeches, and book deadlines to cover the bills for the chronically broke Southern Christian Leadership Conference in order to pay his staff and provide for his family. Perpetual travel and Dr. King’s extramarital episodes also strained his increasingly remote marriage with Coretta. As early as November 1964, she’d been forced to confront evidence of his infidelity when she opened a package from an anonymous source that was addressed to his home in Atlanta. It contained tape recordings that featured snippets of off-color conversation and unintelligible, but clearly carnal, moans and exclamations. The packet also included a letter threatening imminent exposure:
The American public, the church organizations that have been helping—Protestant, Catholic and Jews will know you for what you are—an evil, abnormal beast….There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.
Historians and biographers now agree that high-ranking officials in the FBI penned and sent the “suicide letter,” and that it was the FBI, with the authorization of Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department, that bugged hotel rooms and gathered the tapes. For the final three and a half years of his life, M.L. lived not only with fear of death but with constant dread of blackmail and public humiliation.
No wonder he felt lost and wounded much of the time. His personal doctor believed he should see a psychiatrist, but his schedule and his pride made that impossible. A twenty-first-century psychiatrist, Dr. Nassir Ghaemi, author of the insightful study A First-Rate Madness, has examined the record and concluded: “He was increasingly damned, and increasingly depressed—not just sad, but clinically depressed.” Seven months before he died, he was spending another sleepless night in a Virginia hotel room, drinking alone, when he woke up his colleagues in a desperate state. “I don’t want to do this anymore!” he bellowed. “I want to go back to my little church!” He even discussed the possibility of leaving the United States altogether to take a peaceful pulpit somewhere in the English countryside.
“THE MOST RECENT UTTERANCE OF THE ONCE-ESTEEMED LEADER”
Instead of indulging his fantasies of escape, King decided on a bold but risky bid to rescue his reputation and reenergize his ministry with a dramatic thrust in a contentious new direction: aligning himself with the most strident, passionate voices of opposition to the Vietnam War. In doing so, he not only abandoned his old allies in Lyndon Johnson’s White House but indignantly attacked them.
On April 4, 1967, precisely one year before his death, he addressed a respectful crowd of left-leaning luminaries from New York’s progressive elite who gathered at Riverside Church, the soaring, lavishly ornate, nondenominational neo-Gothic cathedral built by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in upper Manhattan. All of the building’s 2,700 seats had been filled, together with more than 1,200 folding chairs to accommodate the eager overflow crowd. Instead of reciting patriotic phrases that emphasized America’s legacy of liberty as he had in previous major speeches (“From every mountainside, let freedom ring!”), this time he denounced “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government” and likened American troops to the Nazis, who employed “new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe.” He railed against this nation’s corruption by “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism.”
In retrospect, many of today’s progressives deem the “Beyond Vietnam” speech as “visionary” and “prophetic,” but Dr. King’s much-discussed address drew scant public praise in 1967.
The Washington Post denounced the speech under the headline “A TRAGEDY,” while the New York Times derided “the most recent utterance of the once-esteemed leader” as “wasteful and self-defeating.” Life magazine voiced strenuous objection to Dr. King’s apparent willingness to side with the enemy at the height of a bloody foreign conflict and described much of his speech as “a demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” Within days of King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, the sixty-member board of the NAACP unanimously endorsed a resolution distancing themselves from its core message and condemning any effort to link the civil rights cause with opposition to the war.
In the face of collapsing support, and the constant struggle to pay the bills for his ongoing activism, he tried to refocus on the unresolved issue of economic inequality that afflicted impoverished Americans of all races. He planned a “Poor People’s Campaign” for the summer of 1968 that would bring at least two thousand desperate and destitute protesters to Washington to construct shanties or pitch tents near the Capitol, refusing to depart until Congress had appropriated the money to lift stricken multitudes out of poverty. Meanwhile, his closest associates worried about King’s painfully fragile moods and obsession with his own imminent demise. “He talked about death all the time,” said Andrew Young, one of his most promising acolytes. He wept frequently, often inexplicably. Comedian and activist Dick Gregory recalled that King cried when he confided to him that he felt certain he’d be killed.
In this context of widespread public hostility and deepening private doubt, King’s themes in the last major speeches of his life begin to make sense. He repeatedly anticipates his own death and tries to justify the value of his life.
On February 4, he preached on his home ground at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in a truly remarkable sermon known as “The Drum Major Instinct” speech. The title refers to a famous homily delivered sixteen years earlier by a white Methodist pastor named J. Wallace Hamilton. The “drum major instinct,” as King explained it, is “a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first. And it is something that runs the whole gamut of life.”
That instinct, he argued, could drive people to “lead the parade” in meaningless materialism, living beyond their means in the cars they drove or the clothes they wore in a bid to outdo their neighbors. Or, the same impulse could bring anyone closer to God and righteousness, by getting out in front in order to serve—as the New Testament demanded.
Inevitably, that brought him to reflections on his own life and the approaching end. “I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long….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.”
“I SEE GOD WORKING IN THIS PERIOD OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY”
His “committed life” lasted just two months more, with much of that time consumed by his involvement in the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee.
That bitter struggle began with the organization of a union representing the city’s 1,300 trash collectors who suffered from unsafe working conditions, “starvation wages,” and blatantly racist supervisors. From the beginning of their strike, the union leaders pleaded with King to come to town to rally support for their cause and to attract national attention; despite his undeniably diminished public standing, his celebrated name still commanded a unique ability to win publicity.
When he arrived on March 18, he addressed a wildly enthusiastic crowd of some twenty-five thousand at the Mason Temple and delivered the message that ending segregation was only the first step in his campaign for justice. “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter,” he asked, “if he doesn’t have enough money to buy a hamburger?”
He returned ten days later to lead a march of some six thousand sanitation workers and their supporters to demand that the city negotiate in good faith. Dr. King marched resolutely at the head of the massive demonstration, but near the end of the line a group of black radicals who styled themselves “the Invaders” had their own plans. They began smashing downtown shopwindows and looting the merchandise while the police struck back with tear gas, beatings, and mass arrests. King fled the chaos, unable to stop the violence. The results proved devastating: 280 arrests, 62 serious injuries, and the death of a sixteen-year-old boy killed by a police shotgun blast.
To recover credibility and momentum for the strikers and their cause, King resolved to stage another march on April 8, determined to reaffirm the principles of nonviolence. Checking into the Lorraine Motel five days before the new demonstration, he planned to speak once again at the Mason Temple but felt reluctant to go due to his exhaustion, not to mention the rainstorm and tornado warnings that would obviously suppress the size of the crowd.
He tried to rest and dispatched his longtime colleague Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, and other lieutenants to take his place on the podium. But they called him from the venue and urged him to show up: two thousand supporters, mostly sanitation workers and their families, had turned out for the occasion expecting to hear King and they felt cheated by any substitute. He got out of bed, threw on his clothes, and rode through the torrential rain to the steamy, echoing rally site. He began his talk on an optimistic note that belied his late arrival and the sad current state of the strike.
“If I were standing at the beginning of time,” he said, “with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, ‘Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?’…Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, ‘If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the 20th century, I will be happy.’ But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.
“And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding.” The crowd murmured its enthusiastic assent, and King allowed: “I’m just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period to see what is unfolding. And I’m happy that He’s allowed me to be in Memphis.”
After calling for all his listeners to unite on behalf of the sanitation workers, after expressing full confidence that one more march, free of violence and doubt, would secure a victory for the downtrodden, he returned, as he so often did in his final years, to the theme of his own mortality.
He narrated in some detail the story of his Harlem stabbing by “a demented black woman” and described the way that “if I had merely sneezed, I would have died.” After listing all the progress and triumphs he had witnessed in the intervening decade, he boomed in defiance: “I’m so happy that I didn’t sneeze.”
Swept up with the surging emotions of his audience, his face gleaming with perspiration from the steamy, damp evening, he soared to his famous conclusion.
“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 so I’m happy, tonight….
“I’m not fearing any man!
“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”
With that last jubilant exclamation, he seemed to fall, or at least to totter, toward his friend Ralph Abernathy, who caught him in a hug and helped him into a chair as the Mason Temple echoed with tumultuous applause, exclamations, and hallelujahs.
At that point he had less than twenty hours to live.
“PRECIOUS LORD, TAKE MY HAND”
He didn’t use that time to rest or meditate or write, but instead opened a new front in his ongoing “war on sleep.”
After catching up with the admiring clergymen who clustered around him at the Mason Temple, then patiently greeting a line of sanitation workers he had inspired, he drove off with his longtime personal assistant and traveling companion, Reverend Bernard Lee, and his closest friend, Abernathy, for what King’s biographer Taylor Branch judiciously describes as “a long night on the town.”
The revelry began with an intimate, after-midnight dinner at the home of an activist and hair salon owner who was eager to support the cause by entertaining her famous visitors. According to Abernathy’s recollections, the after-feast festivities included private time for King behind closed doors in the bedroom of the hostess.
Finally, at 4:00 a.m., they took a cab back to the Lorraine Motel, where King spotted a car with Kentucky plates parked outside a room with all the lights still on. He immediately identified the vehicle with a recently elected member of the Kentucky legislature—the first woman and the first person of color ever to serve in the state senate. He knew that Georgia Davis had driven to Memphis in the company of his brother, Reverend A. D. King, but they had arrived too late for the earlier speech. So while Abernathy repaired, alone, to the room he shared with King, his friend spent the remainder of the night and most of the early morning in the company of Senator Davis. She later recalled that he preferred to spend time in her rooms because he felt certain that the FBI regularly bugged his accommodations wherever he traveled.
For twenty more years, Georgia Davis served in the state senate, stubbornly denying anything improper in her relationship with King. That changed in 1995, with the publication of her book I Shared the Dream, which detailed their passionate involvement in the months before his death. She also authorized release after her death (in 2016, at age ninety-two) of an interview describing her final hours with Dr. King.
After arising on April 4, M.L. spent most of his time with friends and staff (including his brother, Reverend Abernathy, and Georgia Davis), making arrangements for the forthcoming Poor People’s Campaign and the thousands of protesters he expected to lead to Washington. King displayed mostly good spirits, eagerly wolfing down a plate of fried catfish that he shared with Abernathy, looking forward to a big dinner at the home of a local minister before a scheduled mass meeting to rally support for the upcoming march.
At one point, King and his brother placed a call to their mother back home in Atlanta, and she took real delight in the chance to speak with both of her boys at once. Afterward, M.L. expressed special concern over the menu for the evening’s meal, asking for real “soul food” instead of some meager and purportedly healthful rations. He felt reassured when his hosts proudly summarized the menu of roast beef, sweetbreads, chitterlings, fried chicken, ham, pork chops, turnip greens, candied yams, corn bread, and corn pone, plus pies and cakes and cookies of every description.
In between the high spirits, the family fellowship, and big plans for the future, Senator Davis found King “unusually solemn.”
“I think he was conscious that something was going to happen, I really do,” she said in her long-concealed interview. “A lot of us were doing the talking. He was listening and had his eyes closed sometimes and it would just be like he was meditating.” Of course, the closed eyes could also reflect the nearly sleepless night he had spent the day before.
In order to get “De Lawd” to arrive close to on time at the lavish dinner in his honor, his aides lied to him about the schedule, as they often did: they told him the organizers expected him at five, though the real start time was supposed to be six. But even as that later hour approached, the group was still assembling at the Lorraine Motel, trying to organize transportation and bantering back and forth about the glorious feed awaiting them. Georgia Davis sat at her mirror, applying makeup, while King stepped out of his room and onto the second-floor balcony. He stood at the railing, calling down to associates who were waiting on him in the parking lot below.
Jesse Jackson had been rehearsing a singing group to provide inspiration at the meeting later in the evening. He wanted Dr. King to greet the lead singer, Ben Branch, who was also a gifted saxophonist. “Oh yes, he’s my man. How are you, Ben?” King called out from the balcony, recalling a number Branch had performed for another meeting in Chicago. “Ben, make sure you play ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand.’ In the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty.”
As Branch agreed, King’s increasingly impatient driver, Solomon Jones, tried to hurry the great man to the car. “Dr. King, it’s getting cool. You better get a coat.”
At that precise moment, 6:01 p.m., witnesses heard the crack of a single rifle shot. A soft-point, metal-jacketed bullet ripped through King’s right cheek and smashed through his jaw, shattering several vertebrae and severing his jugular vein in the process, before lodging into his shoulder. Losing consciousness instantly, King fell backward onto the balcony.
At St. Joseph Hospital, the doctors made a brief, vain attempt to resuscitate him before pronouncing him dead sixty-four minutes after the fatal blast.
“A TEN-CENT WHITE BOY”
After more than fifty years of conspiracy theories, and microscopic examination of every scrap of available evidence, there is still no reasonable doubt that James Earl Ray perpetrated the murder. An escaped convict with viciously racist attitudes, he’d been stalking King for nearly a month.
Less than a year older than his victim, Ray stands out among all the notable American assassins for the clearest pattern of criminality and the most prolific record of imprisonment. Arrested first at the age of fourteen for stealing newspapers, he dropped out of school the next year. When he was twenty-one, he began his first three-month jail term, for burglary. Longer sentences followed for armed robbery in Illinois and robbing a post office in Kansas. After he committed another armed robbery, his long string of offenses dictated a twenty-year sentence in the Missouri State Penitentiary.
In April 1967, after six years behind bars and two failed escape attempts, he hid himself in a large box that was supposed to be filled with fresh loaves from the prison bakery. When the bread truck rumbled past the prison walls on its regular route, Ray popped out and jumped off the back of the vehicle. Against the odds, he quickly found his way to Canada and from there to Mexico, where he made a brief attempt to film pornographic movies with local prostitutes.
Despite the obvious risks, the restless escapee couldn’t keep himself from returning to the United States. He obtained a fake driver’s license in Birmingham and bought himself a white ’66 Mustang. He volunteered for George Wallace’s “White Power” presidential campaign in Los Angeles, then headed for Atlanta, well known as the home of Dr. King. Two days later, he drove back to Birmingham, and using an alias, the escaped prisoner succeeded in purchasing a Remington Model 760 Gamemaster rifle, together with ammunition and a scope.
On April 2, Ray packed his weapon and drove the white Mustang to Memphis, after hearing about King’s scheduled rally for the sanitation workers. On the morning of April 4, he read in the local newspaper that King and his party used the Lorraine Motel as their base of operations. At three in the afternoon, he got a room in a flophouse across a parking lot from the Lorraine. He paid $8.50 in advance for a week’s rent and demanded a second-story room with a view of the motel.
Shortly after checking in, Ray left his room and bought a pair of binoculars. At about 5:55 p.m., he used them to spot King’s small, neatly dressed figure on the balcony, in front of room 306.
It then took him several minutes to take out his rifle and to conceal it in a bedspread, then to walk down the hallway to the shared bathroom. Fortunately, for his purposes, it turned out to be unoccupied. He went in and locked the door behind him, stood in the bathtub, and removed the screen on the window facing the Lorraine. That way he could angle the gun for a plausible shot. To his relief, King was still there, lingering at the handrail overlooking the parking lot, chatting with his friends and associates.
According to Ray’s confession, he shifted his feet until he got a sturdy, steady perch inside the bathtub. Unwrapping the deer rifle and lifting it to his shoulder, he lined King up in the scope he had attached to the gun. Then he squeezed the trigger, only once—the luckiest shot of his life, but for the nation one of the unluckiest in history.
Ray fled the scene immediately, leaving rifle and binoculars behind, and drove his Mustang to Atlanta. From there he took a Greyhound to Detroit and then a taxi to Canada. After lingering for a month in Toronto and securing a fake Canadian passport, he flew to England, then to Portugal, before returning to London. He successfully eluded capture for more than two months before authorities arrested him at Heathrow Airport when he tried to catch a flight to Belgium.
Extradited to the United States and charged with murder in Tennessee, he observed his forty-first birthday (March 10, 1969) by producing a full, detailed confession on how he went about murdering King. Less than a year had passed since the assassination, and Ray’s agreement to accept a ninety-nine-year sentence saved him from likely execution by electric chair under the laws of Tennessee at the time. The plea deal also spared the state the cost and trauma of a long, sensational, and gruesome murder trial.
Three days later, Ray took it all back—retracting his admission of guilt and dispatching a letter to a local judge demanding a trial. He never got it, despite multiple motions and appeals, with the Supreme Court ultimately declining to review the case.
As his years behind bars in Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary began to accumulate, Ray made several escape attempts. In June 1977, nine years after his notorious crime, he led six other inmates over the wall and managed to avoid his pursuers, including some two hundred FBI agents dispatched by President Jimmy Carter, for nearly three full days.
After his return to custody, the legal system’s continued refusal to give him the trial he wanted served to encourage his increasingly ardent insistence that he had been set up as an innocent “patsy.” This argument intentionally echoed the claims of Lee Harvey Oswald shortly after his arrest in 1963, but for several reasons the conspiracy theories about the King assassination never gained the traction of similar suspicions surrounding JFK’s murder. For one thing, Ray had provided a convincing confession to avoid electrocution, and had also compiled a long history of violent criminality and blatant racism that undermined his affirmations of innocence.
Nevertheless, some of King’s closest associates always rejected the idea that a career convict like James Earl Ray had managed to kill the great man on his own. Reverend James Bevel, King’s longtime colleague at SCLC, insisted that “there is no way a ten-cent white boy could develop a plan to kill a million-dollar black man.”
“I BELIEVE IN PROVIDENCE”
More significantly, some of King’s own children became entangled with swirling suspicions that their father had been slaughtered by a massive governmental conspiracy. In March 1997, M.L.’s second son, Dexter King, visited Ray in prison. He had been only seven years old when Ray shot his father and now confronted him directly. “I want to ask you for the record: Did you kill my father?” Dexter King demanded.
“No, no, I didn’t, no,” Ray haltingly responded. “But like I say, sometimes these questions are difficult to answer and you have to make a personal evaluation.”
Satisfied by the denial, the younger King made an embarrassing (and well publicized) declaration: “Well, as awkward as this may seem, I want you to know that I believe you and my family believes you, and we are going to do everything in our power to try and make sure that justice will prevail. And while it’s at the 11th hour, I’ve always been a spiritual person and I believe in Providence.”
Dexter King has never explained what that belief meant to him, but anyone tracing the blighted path that took James Earl Ray from his prison escape in Missouri to his appointment with destiny in Memphis could see the role of coincidence and illogical twists that made King’s murder possible.
If he hadn’t succeeded in escaping the fourteen remaining years on his Missouri prison term, or avoided capture for a year, or returned, unimpeded, to the American South from refuge he had found in both Canada and Mexico, it’s unlikely he would ever have felt the call or found the chance to kill a national celebrity. If a gun dealer in Birmingham had been less willing to sell him the fatal weapon, or if someone else had been locked in the shared bathroom at Ray’s rooming house when King made his appearance on the balcony, or if M.L. had lingered for less time at that Lorraine railing, or heeded the prodding of his aides and arrived for dinner at the scheduled hour, then M.L. might have lived to enjoy that savory feast and gone on to other rallies and controversies. Above all, if Ray’s single, difficult, standing-in-the-bathtub shot hadn’t proven so fatally effective and had it missed its mark by a few feet or even a few inches, it’s hard to imagine that he would have kept on firing before dropping his weapon and running away.
Any of these tiny alterations could have spared King’s life on that April evening. He might have survived the escaped con’s unlikely shot just as he had all previous efforts to kill or injure him, but if he had, it’s unlikely that his legacy would have taken on the monumental grandeur that it commands today.
As Gary Younge points out, in the last two polls before his death, King didn’t even show up on Gallup’s list of the most admired Americans of the year, but thirty years later, on the verge of the millennium, the same polling organization placed him second (behind Mother Teresa) on the list of the most admired people for the entire twentieth century.
PROVIDENTIAL LIFE, PROVIDENTIAL DEATH
It took time for the martyred King to make the transition from polarizing to unifying figure. In fact, the immediate reaction to his assassination brought ten days of devastating riots that erupted in 109 cities across the country. President Johnson worked with governors to deploy 58,000 National Guardsmen as well as dispatching regular troops from the army. At least 43 people died in the uncontrollable spasms of rage, with 3,500 injured and more than 27,000 arrested.
In response to the devastation, some public voices tried to connect King and his message to the arson and insurrection. William Tuck, a former governor of Virginia and an eight-term congressman from the Old Dominion, addressed the House of Representatives. While he allowed that “the killing of King” had been a misfortune for the nation, he went on to blame the civil rights hero for provoking his own murder because “he fomented discord and strife between the races.” Representative Tuck went on to rip King’s call for a Poor People’s Campaign in the summer of ’68 as a threat to national stability, in which Dr. King “was planning to invade Washington with a horde of the hosts of evil, to disrupt and stay the wheels of the government of the United States. Every sensible person knows, as he himself must have known, that such an act would result in wholesale property destruction, bloodshed, and death to this beleaguered city. This man trampled upon the laws of our country with impunity.”
Consider, for a moment, that a United States congressman took the floor of the House of Representatives to depict Dr. King, just six days after his death, as a demonic figure who could call forth “a horde of the hosts of evil”—and not one of Tuck’s congressional colleagues rose to object.
The power of “white backlash” in the late sixties helps to explain why the idea of a holiday in King’s honor took so many years to gain meaningful momentum. In that first week after the assassination, Congressman John Conyers of Michigan, one of the founders of the Congressional Black Caucus, drafted legislation to observe King’s birthday as a federal holiday but his initial effort attracted scant support. He persisted year after year, while Edward Brooke, a black Republican from Massachusetts, took up the fight on the Senate side of Capitol Hill.
In fact, once the Republicans took over both the White House and the Senate in the Reagan Revolution of 1980, the prospects for a King holiday seemed to brighten: young conservatives like the recently elected Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich picked up the cause with passion and eloquence. When Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina tried to filibuster against the bill by citing secret FBI files about King’s association with Communists and his “unnatural” sex life, several of his colleagues reacted with ferocious indignation. Bill Bradley, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, denounced the attacks on King’s character: “They speak for a past that the vast majority of Americans have overcome.”
As it turned out, that once confidential file made its public appearance in November 2017, disgorged as something of an afterthought along with previously classified material about the JFK assassination. Originally compiled in 1968, just three weeks before the assassination, the anonymous, top secret government report oozes with contempt and disgust, describing King as “a true, genuine Marxist-Leninist ‘from the top of his head to the tips of his toes.’ ” It also alludes to “drunken sex orgies,” abuse of prostitutes, extramarital affairs, and a “love child” with the wife of a dentist.
Considering that J. Edgar Hoover relentlessly expressed his hostility since the days of King’s first emergence as a national figure, it’s difficult to discern why the FBI director never planted such lurid stories with the pliant press. He may have collected the scurrilous details for precisely that purpose and waited for the right moment—like a discrediting defeat with the sanitation strike in Memphis. Of course, King’s assassination just twenty days after the bureau completed its report preempted the potential smear. After his death, the idea of trashing his memory appealed neither to Hoover nor to the journalists who often feasted on leaks from the FBI.
That’s another reason to argue that King not only lived a providential life but also died a providential death. His murder didn’t put an end to his impact but served instead to amplify and extend it. Without question, King achieved his greatest influence after his demise, without the smears and quarrels and disappointments that would have almost certainly been inflicted on him had he lived through the years immediately following 1968. In this broader context, a pointless killing by a low-life murderer—a “ten-cent white boy” in James Bevel’s phrase—could be seen to serve a larger purpose, just as could King’s fateful decision to accept his first pulpit in racist and provincial Montgomery.
The House finally passed the King holiday bill in 1983 with a lopsided vote of 338 to 90, earning solid majorities of both parties. In the Senate, even South Carolina’s crusty, onetime Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond (by then a Republican) supported the legislation, along with seventy-seven of his GOP and Democratic colleagues. In the signing ceremony, President Reagan aptly observed: “Dr. King had awakened something strong and true, a sense that true justice must be colorblind, and that among white and black Americans, as he put it, ‘Their destiny is tied up with our destiny, and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom; we cannot walk alone.’ ”
Coretta Scott King followed the president with her moving remarks: “In his own life’s example,” she said of her husband, “he symbolized what was right about America, what was noblest and best, what human beings have pursued since the beginning of history. He loved unconditionally. He was in constant pursuit of truth, and when he discovered it, he embraced it.”
BETWEEN MEMPHIS AND MONUMENT
And the nation he loved came to embrace that truth, gradually, incrementally in the years following his murder. Many states instantly welcomed the idea of a “King Day” and passed state legislation to authorize the holiday, but others resisted and quibbled for years. For complicated political reasons, the fight in Arizona proved especially contentious, with a dubious executive order of one governor rescinded by the next, two failed referenda, and punishing boycotts from national businesses—including the NFL, which stripped Phoenix of Super Bowl XXVII in 1993. Finally, in time to celebrate the new millennium in May 2000, South Carolina became the last state to authorize the King commemoration as a paid holiday for all state workers.
With all the progress he made in the electrifying twelve years between Montgomery and Memphis, attitudes toward King himself, and to black people in general, changed even more profoundly during the more than forty years between Memphis and monument.
In 2011, President Barack Obama presided over the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on a four-acre site near the National Mall, within sight of previous monuments to Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson. The cost amounted to $120 million to honor a man who left an estate for his widow and four children of less than $10,000.
More than 90 percent of the funds for the King monument came from private donations, including from some of the wealthiest and most prestigious corporations in the country. The parklike setting is dominated by an imposing granite centerpiece that shows a gigantic image of King, emerging from the raw rock like a force of nature and, with arms crossed across his chest, rising more than thirty feet from the ground. It’s known as the “Stone of Hope” statue to honor a line from the “I Have a Dream” speech: “Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.”
The vision statement for the monument describes it as “a quiet and peaceful space” that “drawing from Dr. King’s speeches and using his own rich language…will almost certainly change the heart of every person who visits.”
Whether the memorial or the national holiday can actually change the heart of “every person” remains a dubious proposition, but no one can doubt the profound change of heart in the nation at large in the generations since his death. Skeptics might dismiss the holiday as a tacky, convenient excuse for winter sales or a three-day weekend just a few weeks after New Year’s, but every January its messages—King’s messages—seem more universally discussed, accepted, and honored in private and in public.
“OUT OF THE MOUNTAIN OF DESPAIR, A STONE OF HOPE”: The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, dedicated by President Barack Obama in 2011 on a four-acre site near the National Mall, has become one of the five most-visited attractions in Washington, D.C.
Critics may carp over the Stone of Hope sculpture at the memorial as “block-headed,” “clumsy,” and “propagandistic,” but they can’t deny its popularity with visitors to the nation’s capital, or the reverence with which they stroll the grounds. It draws more than three million tourists every year, or nearly ten thousand per day, making it one of the top five most-visited attractions in Washington, D.C.
The other American heroes honored at or near the National Mall—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, and, soon to come, Eisenhower—are each associated with blatant, unmistakable American triumphs in war and peace. Assessing King’s victories is more complicated, precisely because changed attitudes and altered patterns of daily life are far more difficult to measure or celebrate than victories on the battlefield. But the very existence of a national holiday and a popular monument to an individual who once inspired division and denunciation should serve as reassurance of the distance we’ve traveled. The troublemaker became a national treasure; the agitator is now an icon.
But the redemptive impact of his martyrdom remained obscure, if not inconceivable, in the weeks of horror that immediately followed the assassination. In fact, another murder a mere two months later convinced even chronically optimistic, reflexively patriotic Americans that the same God who had so reliably and prodigiously blessed their country may have irrevocably removed his special protection.