Martin Luther King Jr.

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Martin Luther King Jr. died at the age of 39, yet his autopsy showed the heart of a 60 year old, according to his biographer Taylor Branch. Branch attributed the damage to stress. The causes were many. King was jailed repeatedly, attacked in public, and pursued by powerful men who wanted him out of his leadership role. He was also pulled between allies who disagreed about how far a movement should go.

  This documentary follows a minister from Atlanta who led the American civil rights movement from 1955 until his death. It asks where his conviction in nonviolence came from. It asks what that conviction won, and what it cost him. And it asks why, near the end of his life, he began to lose friends by reaching beyond race toward poverty and war. The first clues sit in his boyhood home in Atlanta.

  3798485

• 2. Boyhood In Atlanta

  ›

  Michael King Jr. was born on the 15th of January 1929 in Atlanta, the second of three children of Michael King and Alberta King. The family lived on the second floor of the home of Alberta's parents. Her father, Adam Daniel Williams, had moved to Atlanta in 1893 and become pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church the following year. Michael Sr., the son of sharecroppers in Stockbridge, Georgia, enrolled at Morehouse College to prepare for the ministry. He and Alberta married on the 25th of November 1926. The boy grew up with an older sister, Christine King Farris, and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel King.

  Williams died in the spring of 1931, and that fall King Sr. took his place at Ebenezer. With his wife's support, he raised attendance from six hundred to several thousand.

  In 1934 the church sent King Sr. on a multinational trip that included Berlin and the Fifth Congress of the Baptist World Alliance. He also visited German sites tied to the Reformation leader Martin Luther. Alarmed by the rise of Nazism, the Congress adopted a resolution that August. It condemned “all racial animosity, and every form of oppression or unfair discrimination toward the Jews.” The resolution named “colored people” and “subject races in any part of the world” as well. After returning home in August 1934, Michael Sr. changed his own name to Martin Luther King, and his five-year-old son's name to Martin Luther King Jr.

  At home, Martin Jr. and his siblings read the Bible aloud on their father's instruction. After dinner, his grandmother Jennie, whom he called “Mama,” told lively Bible stories. Discipline was harsh. King Sr. regularly used whippings, sometimes having the children whip each other. He later remarked, “Martin Jr. was the most peculiar child whenever you whipped him. He'd stand there, and the tears would run down, and he'd never cry.” Once, after his brother A.D. upset their sister Christine, Martin Jr. knocked A.D. unconscious with a telephone. On another day, A.D. slid down a banister and struck Jennie, who fell unresponsive. Martin Jr. believed she was dead, blamed himself, and tried to take his own life by jumping from a second-story window. He rose from the ground when he heard she was alive.

  In September 1935, when he was about six, Martin Jr. started at Yonge Street Elementary School, a school for Black children. His white playmate, whose father owned a business across the street, went to a separate school for white children only. Soon afterward, the boy's parents stopped letting the two play together. They told King, “we are white, and you are colored.” His own parents then talked with him about the history of slavery and racism in America. He later said this made him “determined to hate every white person.” Yet they instructed him that it was his Christian duty to love everyone.

  A police officer once called King Sr. “boy,” and Martin Sr. replied sharply that his son was a boy but he was a man. In a downtown Atlanta shoe store, a clerk told father and son to sit in the back. King Sr. refused. He said, “We'll either buy shoes sitting here or we won't buy any shoes at all.” Outside, he told his son, “I don't care how long I have to live with this system, I will never accept it.” In 1936, he led hundreds of African Americans in a march to Atlanta's city hall to protest voting rights discrimination. Martin Jr. later called him “a real father.”

  By the age of five, Martin Jr. had memorized hymns and Bible verses. From the age of six, he attended church events with his mother and sang while she played the piano. His favorite hymn was “I Want to Be More and More Like Jesus.” He joined the junior choir, enjoyed opera, and played piano himself. Reading dictionaries gave him a large vocabulary, and he used words to talk his way out of fights with neighborhood boys. Spelling and grammar never interested him, and that lasted his whole life.

  In 1939, King sang with his church choir, dressed as a slave, for the all-white audience at the Atlanta premiere of the film Gone with the Wind. In September 1940, at age 11, he enrolled in the seventh grade at the Atlanta University Laboratory School. There he took violin and piano lessons and showed keen interest in history and English.

  On the 18th of May 1941, King sneaked away from his studies at home to watch a parade. When he returned, he learned that his grandmother had suffered a heart attack and died while being taken to a hospital. He took her death very hard and believed his deception might have led God to take her. Again he jumped from a second-story window, and again he survived. His father told him not to blame himself, because she had been called home as part of God's plan. Martin Jr. struggled with that explanation. Soon afterward, the family moved to a two-story brick home on a hill overlooking downtown Atlanta.

  At 13, in 1942, King became the youngest assistant manager of a newspaper delivery station for the Atlanta Journal. That year he skipped the ninth grade and entered Booker T. Washington High School, the only high school in the city for African-American students. He kept a B-plus average. He felt resentment toward whites because of the “racial humiliation” that his family and neighbors often endured. At 13 he also began to question the literalist teaching of his father's church, and he denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus during Sunday school. He could not identify with the emotional displays of congregants. He later said, “doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly.”

  In high school, King's voice had grown into an orotund baritone, and he joined the debate team. He chose English and sociology as his main subjects. He leaned on Christine for spelling while he helped her with math. His taste for polished patent leather shoes and tweed suits earned him the nickname “Tweed” or “Tweedie.” His brother A.D. later said, “He kept flitting from chick to chick, and I decided I couldn't keep up with him. Especially since he was crazy about dances, and just about the best jitterbug in town.”

  On the 13th of April 1944, in his junior year, King gave his first public speech in an oratorical contest. He declared, “black America still wears chains. The finest negro is at the mercy of the meanest white man.” He won. On the bus ride home to Atlanta, the driver ordered King and his teacher to stand so white passengers could sit, and cursed him with a racial slur. King at first refused, but he complied when his teacher said he would be breaking the law. They stood the rest of the way. King later wrote, “That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.”

  Morehouse College, the all-male historically Black college that his father and maternal grandfather had attended, began accepting high school juniors who passed its entrance examination. World War II had pulled many Black college students into service, and the school wanted to raise enrollment. King passed the examination in 1944, aged 15, and enrolled that autumn.

  That summer, King boarded a train with his friend Emmett “Weasel” Proctor and other Morehouse students bound for the tobacco farm of Cullman Brothers Tobacco in Simsbury, Connecticut. It was his first trip into the integrated north. The farm had partnered with Morehouse to put the students' wages toward tuition, housing, and fees. On weekdays they picked tobacco from 7:00 am to at least 5:00 pm in temperatures above 100 °F, for roughly $4 a day. In a June 1944 letter to his father, King wrote, “After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at all.” On Friday evenings the students went to downtown Simsbury for milkshakes and movies. On Saturdays they traveled to Hartford for theatre, shopping, and restaurants. On Sundays they worshiped in a Hartford church filled with white congregants. King told his parents he was amazed they could eat at “one of the finest restaurants in Hartford” and that “Negroes and whites go to the same church.”

  At Morehouse, King played freshman football. In the summer of 1947, before his last year, the 18-year-old chose the ministry. He concluded that the church offered the surest way to answer “an inner urge to serve humanity,” and he made peace with the Baptist Church. He believed he would be a “rational” minister whose sermons were “a respectful force for ideas, even social protest.” He credited the college's president, the Baptist minister Benjamin Mays, as his “spiritual mentor.” In 1948, aged nineteen, King graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in sociology, with his ministry still ahead of him.

  248913

• 3. Seminary And Sit-In

  ›

  Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania, elected King president of its student body, and he also took several courses at the University of Pennsylvania. There he studied with William Fontaine, the university's first African-American professor, and with philosophy professor Elizabeth F. Flower. His father arranged for him to work with J. Pius Barbour, a family friend who pastored Calvary Baptist Church in nearby Chester. King became known as one of the “Sons of Calvary,” alongside William Augustus Jones Jr. and Samuel D. Proctor, who both became well-known preachers. He once reproved another student for keeping beer in his room, saying they shared responsibility as African Americans to bear “the burdens of the Negro race.” For a time he was drawn to Walter Rauschenbusch's “social gospel.”

  On Sunday, the 11th of June 1950, King and his Crozer classmate and housemate Walter McCall went into Mary's Cafe, a tavern in Maple Shade, New Jersey. Their dates, Doris Wilson and Pearl Smith, came with them. The group had been at church services in Merchantville. Their landlord, Jesthroe Hunt, had warned them that Black people were not welcome at Mary's. King replied, to the effect, that perhaps they needed to go there so they could start to go anywhere they wanted. They chose the tavern knowing its reputation.

  No one came to serve them. McCall went to the bar and asked owner Ernest Nichols for beer to take away. Nichols refused, saying the law barred such sales on Sundays. McCall then asked for four glasses of beer, and Nichols answered, “no beer, Mr! Today is Sunday.” Nichols would later claim the group had tried to push him into breaking New Jersey's blue law. McCall asked for ginger ales, which the law did not cover. Nichols refused those too, and reportedly said, “the best thing would be for you to leave.” The group stayed in their seats. A 1945 New Jersey anti-discrimination law guaranteed them service in public accommodations without regard to race.

  Nichols stomped out and came back with a gun. Standing outside, he fired into the air and reportedly shouted, “I'd kill for less.” Fearing for their lives, the four ran. At the Maple Shade Police Department, officers refused to file their complaint. King and McCall then contacted Ulysses Simpson Wiggins, president of the Camden County branch of the NAACP, who helped them file a police report. Nichols was charged with disorderly conduct and with violating the anti-discrimination law. He was found guilty and fined $50, but the discrimination count was dismissed. His attorney said Nichols had not meant a threat and had wanted to alert a watchdog somewhere on the grounds.

  King later called the episode “a formative step” in his “commitment to a more just society.” It is believed to be the first use of the nonviolence and civil disobedience tactics that would mark his activism. On the 19th of November 1950, King heard Mordecai Johnson lecture on Gandhi at the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia. In that lecture, and in talks with Johnson at the Fellowship House, King was inspired by how Gandhi had integrated Henry David Thoreau's theory of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. Patrick Duff, a South Jersey resident, found the police report decades later while searching the archive of The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.

  In his third year at Crozer, King fell in love with Betty Moitz, the white daughter of an immigrant German woman who worked in the cafeteria. He planned to marry her. Friends and his father advised against it, warning that an interracial marriage would provoke animosity from both Black and white people and could damage his chances of pastoring a church in the South. King tearfully told a friend that he could not endure his mother's pain, and he ended the relationship six months later. One friend said, “He never recovered.” Others, including Harry Belafonte, said Betty had been “the love of King's life.”

  King earned his Bachelor of Divinity in 1951. He had applied to the University of Edinburgh for a doctorate but chose Boston University instead, where he began doctoral studies in systematic theology that year. He worked as an assistant minister at Boston's Twelfth Baptist Church under William Hunter Hester, an old friend of his father and an important influence. Among his circle of young ministers was Michael E. Haynes, associate pastor at Twelfth Baptist in Roxbury. The young men held bull sessions in their apartments about theology, sermon style, and social issues.

  King received his PhD on the 5th of June 1955. His dissertation, A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, was first supervised by Edgar S. Brightman and, after Brightman's death, by Lotan Harold DeWolf. In October 1991, an academic inquiry concluded that portions of it were plagiarized and that King had acted improperly. The committee still said that “no thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King's doctoral degree.” It found that the dissertation “makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship.” A letter attached to the library's copy now notes that numerous passages lacked proper quotation and citation. Significant debate remains over how to interpret the plagiarism.

  While in Boston, King asked Mary Powell, a friend from Atlanta studying at the New England Conservatory of Music, if she knew any nice Southern girls. Powell spoke to fellow student Coretta Scott, who was not interested in dating preachers. She agreed to let King telephone her. On that first call he said, “I am like Napoleon at Waterloo before your charms.” Scott replied, “You haven't even met me.” They married on the 18th of June 1953 on the lawn of her parents' house in Heiberger, Alabama. They had four children: Yolanda King (1955-2007), Martin Luther King III (b. 1957), Dexter Scott King (1961-2024), and Bernice King (b. 1963). King limited Coretta's role in the civil rights movement, expecting her to be a housewife and mother. At the age of 25, in 1954, King was called as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

  2930394149

• 4. Boycott And Organization

  ›

  In March 1955, Claudette Colvin, a Black schoolgirl in Montgomery, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, in defiance of the local Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation. On the 1st of December 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus. These incidents led to the Montgomery bus boycott, which Edgar Nixon urged and planned and King led. King's preaching had already made him known across the region. The other ministers asked him to take the leadership role because his relative newness to community leadership made it easier for him to speak out. He was hesitant, but he decided to do it if no one else wanted it.

  The boycott lasted 385 days. The situation grew so tense that King's house was bombed. King was arrested for traveling 30 mph in a 25 mph zone and jailed, which drew the attention of national media and raised his public stature. The controversy ended when the US District Court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that racial segregation on Montgomery public buses was prohibited. The boycott transformed King into a national figure and the best-known spokesman of the civil rights movement.

  In 1957, King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with the ministers Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Joseph Lowery, along with Bayard Rustin and other activists. The group aimed to harness the moral authority and organizing power of Black churches for nonviolent protest in the service of civil rights reform. The evangelist Billy Graham, who befriended King, inspired its approach. So did the national organizing of In Friendship, a group founded by King allies Stanley Levison and Ella Baker. The SCLC's 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom was the first time King addressed a national audience. He led the SCLC until his death.

  King's strategy rested on the press. He believed organized, nonviolent protest against Jim Crow would bring extensive coverage of the struggle for Black equality. Reports and televised footage of the daily indignities suffered by Southern Blacks, and of segregationist violence and harassment, produced a wave of sympathetic public opinion. That wave convinced most Americans that civil rights was the most important political issue of the early 1960s.

  On the 20th of September 1958, King was signing copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom at Blumstein's department store in Harlem. Izola Curry, a mentally ill Black woman who thought King was conspiring against her with communists, stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener. The surgeons Aubre de Lambert Maynard, Emil Naclerio, and John W. V. Cordice operated, and King remained hospitalized for weeks. Curry was later found mentally incompetent to stand trial.

  From February to March 1959, on his doctor's advice, King traveled to Europe, India, and the Middle East to recuperate. Coretta and the Alabama State College history professor Lawrence D. Reddick went with him. Back in Montgomery, King agreed with the SCLC board to fire executive director John Lee Tilley, and he hired co-founder Bayard Rustin to manage press relations. In December 1959, King announced his return to Atlanta at the request of the SCLC. He served as co-pastor with his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church until his death. Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver expressed open hostility toward the return and vowed to keep King under surveillance.

  5354585960

• 5. Jails And Marches

  ›

  On the 4th of May 1960, King was driving the writer Lillian Smith to Emory University when police stopped them. He was cited for driving without a license, because Georgia had not yet issued him one. His Alabama license was still valid, and Georgia law set no time limit for getting a local license. King paid a fine, but he did not know his lawyer had agreed to a plea deal that included probation.

  On the 19th of October 1960, King joined a mass sit-in at the restaurant inside Rich's, Atlanta's largest department store. The Atlanta Student Movement had asked him to take part, and the day was timed to show that the presidential campaigns had ignored civil rights. King was among the many arrested. Authorities released everyone over the next few days except King. Invoking the probation deal, Judge J. Oscar Mitchell sentenced him on the 25th of October to four months of hard labor. Before dawn the next day, King was taken to Georgia State Prison. Many feared for his safety among inmates convicted of violent crimes, many of them white and hostile to his activism.

  The case forced presidential candidates to respond. Richard Nixon, who had been closer to King before, declined to make a statement even after Jackie Robinson visited him to request his intervention. John F. Kennedy phoned the governor, enlisted his brother Robert to press state authorities, and, at the request of Sargent Shriver, called King's wife to offer help. King was released two days later. His father openly endorsed Kennedy, who narrowly won the election on the 8th of November.

  King first visited Albany, Georgia, on the 15th of December 1961, planning to stay a day or so. The next day he was swept up in a mass arrest of peaceful demonstrators, and he declined bail until the city made concessions. He said the city dishonored that agreement after he left. He returned in July 1962 and was offered 45 days in jail or a $178 fine. He chose jail. Three days into his sentence, Police Chief Laurie Pritchett quietly arranged for the fine to be paid. King wrote, “We had witnessed persons being kicked off lunch counter stools... ejected from churches... and thrown into jail...” He added, “But for the first time, we witnessed being kicked out of jail.” The King Center later acknowledged that Billy Graham was the one who bailed King out.

  After nearly a year of intense activism with few tangible results, the Albany movement began to deteriorate. King asked for a halt to all demonstrations and a “Day of Penance” to promote nonviolence. Divisions within the Black community and the canny, low-key response of local government defeated the effort. The national media was highly critical of King's role. The SCLC's lack of results widened a gulf between the organization and the more radical SNCC. After Albany, King sought to choose engagements where he could control the circumstances.

  In April 1963, the SCLC began a campaign against segregation and economic injustice in Birmingham, Alabama. Wyatt Tee Walker helped develop its nonviolent but intentionally confrontational tactics. King aimed to provoke mass arrests and “create a situation so crisis-packed” that negotiation became inevitable. Early volunteers failed to shut down the city or draw media attention to the police. Over King's uncertainty, the SCLC strategist James Bevel changed course by recruiting children and young adults to join the demonstrations. Newsweek called the strategy a Children's Crusade.

  Birmingham's police, led by Eugene “Bull” Connor, used high-pressure water jets and police dogs against protesters, including children. Television carried the footage nationwide. It shocked many white Americans and consolidated Black Americans behind the movement. Not all demonstrators were peaceful, despite the SCLC's avowed intentions. In some cases bystanders attacked the police, who responded with force. Critics said King and the SCLC were putting children in harm's way. Still, the campaign succeeded. Connor lost his job, the “Jim Crow” signs came down, and public places became more open to Black people.

  King was arrested early in the Birmingham campaign, his 13th arrest out of 29. From his cell he composed the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which answers calls to pursue legal channels for change. It has been described as “one of the most important historical documents penned by a modern political prisoner.” In it he wrote, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” He noted that the Boston Tea Party was illegal civil disobedience, and that “everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal.’” Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, arranged $160,000 to bail out King and his fellow protesters.

  The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place on the 28th of August 1963. King represented the SCLC among the “Big Six” organizers. The others were Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Whitney Young of the National Urban League, A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, John Lewis of SNCC, and James L. Farmer Jr. of the Congress of Racial Equality. Bayard Rustin's open homosexuality, support of socialism, and former ties to the Communist Party USA led many white and African-American leaders to demand that King distance himself. King agreed to do so. Even so, he collaborated on the march, for which Rustin was the primary organizer.

  President Kennedy at first opposed the march outright, fearing it would hurt the drive for civil rights legislation. When organizers held firm, the Kennedys decided to ensure its success. Kennedy worried the turnout would fall below 100,000, and he enlisted church leaders and Walter Reuther to help mobilize demonstrators. The organizers had meant to denounce the federal government for failing to protect civil rights workers. They gave way to presidential pressure, and the event took on a less strident tone. Some activists felt it presented a sanitized pageant of racial harmony. Malcolm X called it the “Farce on Washington,” and the Nation of Islam forbade its members from attending.

  The march made specific demands. They included an end to segregation in public schools, a law prohibiting discrimination in employment, protection of civil rights workers from police brutality, a $2 minimum wage for all workers, and self-government for Washington, D.C. More than a quarter of a million people attended, sprawling from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial onto the National Mall. It was the largest gathering of protesters in the city's history up to that time. King delivered a 17-minute speech later known as “I Have a Dream.” In its most famous passage, he departed from his prepared text, possibly at the prompting of Mahalia Jackson, who shouted, “Tell them about the dream!” The speech came to be regarded as one of the finest in the history of oratory.

  8892968387

• 6. Surveillance And Selma

  ›

  In the fall of 1963, the FBI began tapping King's telephone line under a written directive from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy was concerned that public allegations of communists in the SCLC would derail the administration's civil rights initiatives, and he had warned King to end those associations. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover feared the civil rights movement, considered King a radical, and investigated the allegations. No evidence emerged. The FBI instead used incidental details caught on tape over the next five years, as part of its COINTELPRO program, in attempts to force King out of his leadership position. Agents also spied on his personal life and secretly recorded him.

  In 1964, the FBI mailed King a threatening anonymous letter, which he interpreted as an attempt to make him commit suicide. That same year, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance.

  In March 1964, King and the SCLC joined forces with Robert Hayling's movement in St. Augustine, Florida. Hayling's group had been forced out of the NAACP for advocating armed self-defense alongside nonviolent tactics, yet the pacifist SCLC accepted them. King and the SCLC worked to bring white Northern activists to St. Augustine. They included a delegation of rabbis and the 72-year-old mother of the governor of Massachusetts, all of whom were arrested. During June, the movement marched nightly through the city, often facing counter demonstrations by the Klan. Hundreds of the marchers were arrested and jailed.

  Starting in November 1964, King supported a strike by several hundred workers at the Scripto factory in Atlanta, a few blocks from Ebenezer Baptist. Many strikers were members of his church. He helped lift the dispute from a local to a nationally known event, and he led the SCLC to organize a nationwide boycott of Scripto products. As the strike stretched into December, King wanted to focus on a campaign in Selma, Alabama. He negotiated in secret with Scripto's president, Carl Singer, and brokered a deal. The SCLC would call off the boycott, and the company would give the striking employees their Christmas bonuses. King's involvement ended on the 24th of December.

  James Bevel called for a march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital, and he and other SCLC members organized it in partial collaboration with SNCC. The first attempt, on the 7th of March 1965, was aborted because of mob and police violence against the demonstrators. King was not present. The day became known as Bloody Sunday, and it was a turning point in gaining public support for the movement. Two days earlier, King had met with officials in the Johnson Administration to request an injunction against any prosecution of the demonstrators. He stayed away because of church duties. He later wrote that had he known how brutal the troopers would be, he would have given up those duties to “lead the line.”

  Footage of the police brutality was broadcast extensively and aroused public outrage. King next planned a march for the 9th of March. The SCLC petitioned a federal court for an injunction against Alabama, which was denied, and the judge issued an order blocking the march until after a hearing. King nonetheless led marchers to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. There he held a prayer session, turned the marchers around, and asked them to disperse so as not to violate the court order. The unexpected ending surprised and angered many within the local movement.

  The march finally went ahead fully on the 25th of March 1965. At its conclusion, on the steps of the state capitol, King delivered a speech that became known as “How Long, Not Long.” He said equal rights for African Americans could not be far away, “because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

  The movement achieved pivotal legislative gains in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The third, the Fair Housing Act, did not arrive until 1968.

  6465696098

• 7. Beyond Civil Rights

  ›

  In 1966, King and Ralph Abernathy moved into a building at 1550 S. Hamlin Avenue, in the slums of North Lawndale on Chicago's West Side. Both men came from the middle class, and they wanted to show support and empathy for the poor. The SCLC formed a coalition with the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, an organization founded by Albert Raby, and together they worked as the Chicago Freedom Movement. That spring, tests of real estate offices using white and Black couples with matching income and background uncovered racial steering and discriminatory processing of housing requests.

  Marches followed in Bogan, Belmont Cragin, Jefferson Park, Evergreen Park, Gage Park, Marquette Park, and other neighborhoods. King later said, and Abernathy wrote, that the movement met a worse reception in Chicago than in the South. The march through Marquette Park on the 5th of August 1966 was met by thrown bottles and screaming crowds, and rioting seemed very possible. King's beliefs ruled out staging a violent event. He negotiated an agreement with Mayor Richard J. Daley to cancel a march, to avoid the violence he feared. A brick hit King during one march, but he continued to lead. When King and his allies returned to the South, they left Jesse Jackson, a seminary student, in charge. Jackson organized Operation Breadbasket, which targeted chain stores that did not deal fairly with Black people. A 1967 CIA document, declassified in 2017, quoted a source saying King “sought at least constructive, positive projects.”

  King had long opposed American involvement in the Vietnam War, but at first he avoided the topic. He feared that criticizing President Johnson's policies might damage his civil rights goals. James Bevel urged him on, and the outspokenness of Muhammad Ali inspired him. In April 1967, at the Riverside Church in New York City, King delivered a speech titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” He argued that the US was in Vietnam “to occupy it as an American colony.” He called the US government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He tied the war to spending at home. He said: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

  The speech cost King the support of white allies including Johnson, Billy Graham, union leaders, and powerful publishers. Life magazine called it “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post declared that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.” King complained, “The press is being stacked against me.” He saw a double standard that applauded his nonviolence at home but deplored it when applied “toward little brown Vietnamese children.”

  On the 15th of April 1967, King spoke at an anti-war march from Manhattan's Central Park to the UN, organized under the chairmanship of James Bevel. His stance encouraged Allard K. Lowenstein, William Sloane Coffin, and Norman Thomas, with the support of anti-war Democrats, to try to persuade him to run against Johnson in 1968. King considered it but decided against, feeling uneasy with politics and better suited to activism.

  Thích Nhất Hạnh, an influential Vietnamese Buddhist, wrote King a letter in 1965 titled “In Search of the Enemy of Man.” During his 1966 stay in the US, he met King and urged him to denounce the war publicly. Later, King nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. He wrote, “I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of this prize than this gentle monk from Vietnam.”

  In 1968, King and the SCLC organized the Poor People's Campaign to address economic justice. King traveled the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor.” It would march on Washington and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol until Congress created an “economic bill of rights.” His final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, laid out his view of how to address poverty and other social issues. In it he quoted Henry George's Progress and Poverty in support of a guaranteed basic income. He said Congress had shown “hostility to the poor” by spending “military funds with alacrity and generosity” while providing “poverty funds with miserliness.” He wanted change more revolutionary than reform, citing the flaws of “racism, poverty, militarism and materialism.”

  The campaign was controversial even within the civil rights movement. Bayard Rustin resigned from the march. He said its goals were too broad, its demands unrealizable, and that such campaigns would accelerate repression of the poor and the Black.

  95856694

• 8. Memphis And After

  ›

  On the 29th of March 1968, King went to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of Black sanitation workers represented by AFSCME Local 1733. They had been on strike since the 12th of March for higher wages and better treatment. In one incident, Black street repairmen were paid for two hours when sent home by bad weather, while white employees were paid for the full day.

  On the 3rd of April, King addressed a rally at Mason Temple with his “I've Been to the Mountaintop” address. A bomb threat against his plane had delayed his flight to Memphis. Referring to such threats, he told the crowd, “Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead.” He continued, “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.” Then came the line, “I may not get there with you.”

  King was booked into Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel. Ralph Abernathy told the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations that King and his entourage stayed there so often that it was known as the “King-Abernathy suite.” According to Jesse Jackson, King's last words went to the musician Ben Branch, who was to perform that night at an event King was attending. He said, “Ben, make sure you play ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord’ in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty.”

  At 6:01 p.m. on Thursday, the 4th of April 1968, James Earl Ray shot King as he stood on the motel's second-floor balcony. The bullet entered through his right cheek, smashed his jaw, traveled down his spinal cord, and lodged in his shoulder. Abernathy heard the shot from inside the room and ran to the balcony to find King on the floor. After emergency surgery, King died at St. Joseph's Hospital at 7:05 p.m. Ray was convicted of the assassination, though it remains the subject of conspiracy theories. King was first interred in South View Cemetery in South Atlanta. In 1977, his remains were moved to a tomb on the site of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park.

  Riots broke out in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, Louisville, Kansas City, and dozens of other cities. Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was on his way to a campaign rally in Indianapolis when he heard the news. He gave a short, improvised speech urging supporters to continue King's ideal of nonviolence. The next day he delivered a prepared response in Cleveland. James Farmer Jr. and other civil rights leaders also called for nonviolent action, while the more militant Stokely Carmichael called for a more forceful response. President Johnson telephoned civil rights leaders, mayors, and governors and told politicians to warn police against unwarranted force. He told his aides, “I'm not getting through.” He said the leaders were “all holing up like generals in a dugout getting ready to watch a war.”

  The city of Memphis quickly settled the strike on terms favorable to the sanitation workers. The Poor People's Campaign went ahead, with criticism of its plan subdued and the SCLC receiving an unprecedented wave of donations. It officially began on the 2nd of May in Memphis, at the motel where King was killed. Thousands of demonstrators arrived on the National Mall and stayed for six weeks in a camp they called “Resurrection City.”

  Johnson declared the 7th of April a national day of mourning. Vice President Hubert Humphrey attended the funeral on the president's behalf, because there were fears that Johnson's presence might incite protests and violence. At his widow's request, the service played King's last sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, given on the 4th of February 1968. In it he asked how he should be remembered. He said, “Say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace.”

  1070717273