The Assassination: April 4, 1968
THURSDAY, APRIL 4, was the fifty-third day of the strike. While Dr. King slept, Judge Bailey Brown began to hear arguments on whether the temporary restraining order should be made permanent, thus making it illegal for the march which had been rescheduled for April 8 to go ahead. The legal team representing Dr. King and his colleagues requested a dismissal or a modification of the existing order and proposed a series of restrictions on the march, acceptable to Dr. King. Around 4:00 p.m. that afternoon, Judge Brown announced that he was going to let the march proceed, subject to those restrictions.
In the late morning Dr. King met with some of the Invaders and then met with Abernathy over lunch in their room, 306. Abernathy recalled that after the meal, Dr. King and his younger brother, Alfred Daniel “A. D.” King, who had arrived unexpectedly, joked with their mother on the telephone to Atlanta, probably from A. D.’s room, 201. Shortly afterward the executive staff meeting began in room 306. Hosea Williams has told me that at that meeting Dr. King took him to task for attempting to put some of the Invaders on the SCLC staff (Hosea was always a keen strategist, and he saw the usefulness of co-opting some of the Invader leadership to their side). Dr. King said that he couldn’t appreciate anyone who hadn’t learned to accept nonviolence, at least as a tactic in the struggle if not in one’s way of life. He said he didn’t want the SCLC to employ anyone who didn’t totally accept nonviolence.
The meeting was in full swing when Andy Young returned from court to give his report. He was later than expected and had also neglected to call in and give a report on how the proceedings in court were going, as King had asked him to do. He was jokingly taken to task. Hosea remembers Dr. King tussling with him in the room, saying, “I’ll show you who the leader is.”
JUST ABOUT THE TIME that the staff meeting was heating up in the motel, less than three hundred feet away a man calling himself John Willard was registering for a sleeping room in the rear of the South Main Street rooming house whose back faced the Lorraine. Also during this time, one of the SCLC’s senior field organizers, the Rev. James Orange, went off to do some shopping, driven by Invader Marrell McCollough. On the way back to the motel they picked up James Bevel at Clayborn Temple.
About two hours later, J. Edgar Hoover was about to have the first of his predinner martinis at his usual table at Harvey’s Restaurant in Washington. The fact that he attended Harvey’s for dinner as usual on that day would be cited by defenders of the FBI as indicating a lack of knowledge of the events that were to take place in the next half hour.
Reverend Kyles stated that he arrived at the motel around 3:00 p.m. and went from room to room for a period of time, visiting with various people. Dr. King and about fourteen other aides were to go to his house for a buffet dinner organized by his wife, Gwen. In At the River I Stand,4 Joan Beifuss records in detail Kyles’s comments on his activity during the last hour of Dr. King’s life, which have now become accepted as fact. In light of what I learned later, I believe it useful to quote verbatim from her transcription of Kyles’s story:
Ralph was dressed when I got in [to room 306] and Martin was still dressing…. Ralph said, “All right now, Billy. I don’t want you fooling me tonight. Are we going to have soul food? Now if we go over there and get some filet mignon or T–bone, you’re going to flunk….” Martin says, “Yeah, we don’t want it to be like that preacher’s house we went to in Atlanta, that great big house. We … had some ham—a ham bone—and there wasn’t no meat on it. We had Kool Aid and it wasn’t even sweet….” I said, “You just get ready. You’re late.” I had told them 5:00 and I told my wife 6:00. I said, “Hurry up. Let’s go.”
He was in a real good mood…. It may have been from what they accomplished in the staff meeting…. When Martin’s relaxed he’s relaxed…. He’d put his shirt on. He couldn’t find his tie. And he thought that the staff was playing games with him, but we did find it in the drawer. When he put the shirt on, it was too tight. And I said, “Oh, Doctor, you’re getting fat!” He said, “Yeah, I’m doing that.”…
Ralph was still doing something. He’s very slow. And we went back out together, Dr. King and myself, and stood side by side…. Solomon Jones [King’s local driver] said something about it was getting cool and to get your coat…. I was greeting some of the people I had not seen…. Martin was leaning over the railing….
I called to Ralph to come on. They were getting ready to load up. I said, “I’ll come down. Wait a minute. Somebody can ride with me.” As I turned and got maybe five steps away this noise sounded. Like a firecracker.
Some minutes after the shot, photographer Joseph Louw snapped the picture flashed around the world that showed a group of SCLC staff, including Andy Young, standing on the balcony pointing in the direction of the back of the rooming house. In the photograph a person is kneeling at the feet of the others, apparently checking Dr. King for life signs. At the time no one seemed to know who this person was.
The first call for help to the police department’s dispatcher was recorded at 6:03 p.m. Calls went out from police dispatch and fire station 2 diagonally opposite the Lorraine, where patrolman Willie B. Richmond had sounded the alert.
Lt. Judson E. Ghormley of the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department commanded TACT unit 10 (TACT 10) that afternoon. They were in place with three cars at fire station 2 on South Main and Butler. The TACT units each consisted of twelve officers from the MPD and the Shelby County sheriff’s department. All, except officer Emmett Douglass, who was sitting in the unit’s station wagon monitoring the radio, were inside the fire station drinking coffee, playing ping-pong, making phone calls, or talking. When the shot rang out and Richmond called out, “Dr. King has been shot!” all of the men ran out the north exit of the station and around to the rear of the building. Ghormley said he stopped at the concrete wall at the rear of the fire station, turned around, ran back to the front of the station, and headed north up South Main toward the rooming house, arriving in front of the recessed doorway of Canipe Amusement Company at 424 South Main within two minutes of the shot. There he found a bundle that contained a gun inside a cardboard box and several other items, including nine 30.06 unfired rifle bullets. One of the two customers in Canipe Amusement Company and Canipe himself described hearing a thump as the bundle was dropped and said that they noticed a young man pass by and a white Mustang parked just south of the shop pull away.
Sheriff’s deputy Vernon Dollahite apparently arrived shortly after Ghormley from the opposite direction, having continued from the motel around the block up to South Main. He entered Jim’s Grill located directly beneath the rooming house where John Willard had rented a room. (See Chart 1). Dollahite ordered Loyd Jowers, the owner and manager of the grill, to lock the door and let no one in or out.
According to those present, Dr. King was lifted onto a stretcher and carried down the stairs to a waiting ambulance. Ralph Abernathy rode with him to St. Joseph’s Hospital. Bernard Lee, Andy Young, and Chauncey Eskridge, King’s personal lawyer, followed behind in a car driven by Solomon Jones, a driver for the R. S. Lewis Funeral Home who had been provided to Dr. King as his chauffeur when he was in Memphis.
At that time Mayor Henry Loeb was on his way, driving south on Interstate 55 for a speaking engagement at the University of Mississippi. He spotted Sheriff Bill Morris’s car. Morris told him what had happened. After the news was confirmed by MPD director Holloman, Loeb’s car turned around and headed back to Memphis.
Around 6:30 p.m. a police dispatcher, William Tucker, received a call from a patrol car that supposedly was chasing a white Mustang across the northern part of the city.
Upon hearing about the shooting, Lorraine Bailey had screamed, run to her room, and collapsed on her bed. She suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and was rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital. She never regained consciousness and died the following Tuesday, just as the funeral for Dr. King began in Atlanta.
Rev. A. D. King had been in the shower when the shooting occurred. He was dressing when the ambulance left, and he remained at the motel, waiting for word from the hospital and keeping in touch with his parents in Atlanta.
At St. Joseph’s, King was worked on feverishly by a team of five or six doctors in the emergency room while police sealed off the hospital. Early on it became apparent to the medical team that the high-velocity bullet had entered the right lower facial area around the chin, penetrated downward, and severed the spinal cord in both the lower neck, upper chest, and back regions.
Andy Young and Chauncey Eskridge waited in a small anteroom. Ralph Abernathy and Bernard Lee stood against the wall of the small emergency room, waiting while the doctors worked. Finally, neurosurgeon Frederick Gioia approached Abernathy and told him that there was no hope. The only life function remaining was King’s heartbeat. Finally, that too ceased. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. The hospital chaplain, Faith Coleman Bergard, reached the emergency room shortly afterward, and while Dr. King’s aides prayed in the anteroom, he bent over the body, prayed, and closed the dead man’s eyes.
Having heard about the shooting, Coretta King was on her way to board a plane for Memphis when the news of his death reached her. She returned home to be with their four children.
Around this time I was pulling into the driveway of my parents’ home in Yonkers, New York. A bulletin announcing Dr. King’s shooting came over the radio. Stunned, I sat immobile for several minutes.
For one bright moment back there in the late 1960s we actually believed that we could change our country. We had identified the enemy. We saw it up close and we had its measure—and we were very hopeful that we would prevail. The enemy was hollow where we had substance; shallow to our depth; callous, cruel, and unfeeling in the face of unashamed caring and love. All our dreams were instantly gone, destroyed by an assassin’s bullet. To me they were as dead as the man who in my lifetime had been their prophet and whose remains were by now lying lifeless on a Memphis hospital operating table.
Shortly afterward I called Ben Spock. We arranged to travel together to Memphis for the memorial march the following Monday and then go to Atlanta for the funeral.
FEAR AND UNCERTAINTY PREVAILED in Memphis that evening. Telephone communications broke down in the central city. Though a curfew had been imposed and the meeting at Mason Temple, at which Dr. King was to speak, had been called off, masses of blacks, some unknowing, some in defiance, converged on the temple. By 8:15 p.m. window-breaking and rock-throwing incidents were increasing. By 9:00 sniper fire was reported in northern Memphis, and by 10:00 a building supplies company, just north of downtown, was the scene of a major fire. Rioting and looting became rampant, with liquor stores the main target. The first contingent of a four-thousand-strong National Guard force moved into the streets, joining the police, sheriff’s deputies, state highway patrol, and fifty Arkansas highway patrolmen.
Eventually, Ralph Abernathy, Andy Young, Hosea Williams, and the other SCLC staff members regrouped at the motel and met into the early hours of Friday, April 5. All pledged loyalty to Ralph Abernathy as Dr. King’s appointed successor.
By Friday morning the autopsy by Shelby County’s medical examiner, Dr. Jerry Francisco, had been completed at John Gaston Hospital. Dr. King’s body was then taken to R. S. Lewis and Sons Funeral Home, where people came to pay their respects.
Coretta King was on her way from Atlanta to escort the body home, and the SCLC staff gathered at the funeral home to take the body to the airport when she arrived. She and her children never left the private jet Sen. Robert Kennedy had chartered for her. Attorney General Ramsey Clark visited her on board and publicly announced, “All of our evidence at this time indicates that it was a single person who committed this criminal act.”