Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis
on Thursday, April 4, 1968
Fifty years later his friends sat down to recall the last years of his life
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
I came over in the morning to pick Martin up
to drive him to the airport to go to Memphis.
The children saw him going to the airport all the time.
But this day, the boys blocked the door and said "Daddy, don't leave."
And he said, "Oh I'll be right back.
I'm just going down to Memphis! I'll be back."
Then they ran ahead of him and blocked the stairs,
and said, "Daddy, don't leave us."
And he said, "Listen, I'm coming right back.
I'm gonna go down there for a march. You know I explained why I'm going.
These people have been mistreated in Memphis
and I'm going to do something about it. That's my work and you know that."
They ran over to my car, and then they jumped on the hood of the car,
pleading again through the window,
"Daddy, please don't go. Daddy, please don't leave us. Daddy, please!"
Such pleading.
We backed out of the driveway and got on the way.
And he said, "What in the world happened to these kids?
They must be trying to tell me that they're missing me more.
And when I come back, I've gotta change my habits. I can't go through this."
I watched the transformation take place
from the man that I met in the first instance
to the man he became in the end.
With all of his experience,
he really was not quite ready for the human heart to reveal as much villainy.
What he saw was more hate than he saw resolve.
We were trying to redeem the soul of America
from the triple evils of racism, war, and poverty,
and Martin had become far more exposed to enemies
by taking on both civil rights and the war issue.
I couldn't imagine the pressure that was on him nobody could.
None of us could imagine that. It was just too overwhelming.
The most difficult time of his life was the 18 months before his assassination.
Very difficult time.
The Moses of nineteen hundred and sixty-eight, Martin Luther King.
He was disappointed,
and he wondered whether or not he could do any more than he'd done.
It had bothered him deeply that the nation had turned against him
and I always tell people he died of a broken heart.
I think he worried about dying before he had accomplished enough.
It's as though he knew that he was not going to be here
for the rest of the struggle.
We've got some difficult days ahead.
The movement ceased to be political for him it was spiritual.
But it really doesn't matter with me now.
He said, 'We have wondered in the wilderness of separate but equal,
and we're about to move into the promised land of creative integration,
and I don't know whether I'll get there,
but my people will get to the promised land.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!'
I'm 86, and you know, there's an African proverb that says,
"If the surviving lions don't tell their stories,
the hunters will get all the credit."
I tell the story of Martin Luther King as I knew it.
I lived it.
I value all of what they gave me now that I can remember.
I'm not just telling stories. I'm not making a speech.
I'm telling you what happened.
KING IN THE WILDERNESS
Speed. Civil Rights, King, Vanocur, roll 20, sound 36.
Dr. King, this church is as good a place as any
to go back over your commitment to the Civil Rights Movement.
When you went to Montgomery, Alabama and started the Bus Boycotts there,
what was the philosophy of the Civil Rights movement as you saw it then,
more than ten years ago?
I would say, then, the philosophy was that we must go all out
to use legal and nonviolent methods to gain full citizenship rights
for the negro people of our country. And that particular struggle centered
on breaking down all of the barriers of legal segregation.
That period was a great period of hope for me, and I'm sure for many others.
Many of the negroes who had lost hope
saw a solid decade of progress in the South.
And I think we are in a new era, a new phase of the struggle,
where we have moved from a struggle for decency,
which characterized our struggle for 10 or 12 years,
to a struggle for genuine equality,
because there are three evils in our nation;
it's not only racism, but economic exploitation of poverty would be one,
and then militarism.
And I think, in a sense, and in a very real sense,
these three are tied inextricably together,
and we aren't gonna get rid of one without getting rid of the other.
When you stood in that August day in 1963
on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial,
and you said, "I had a dream,"
did that dream envision a war in Asia, and in the ghettos of the North?
No, I didn't envision that then. In 1963, to be in the March on Washington,
it meant a great deal; it was a high moment, a great watershed moment.
But I must confess that that dream that I had that day
has in many points turned into a nightmare.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA AUGUST 11, 1965
We were all caught off guard when we saw the rebellions begin.
They started in Harlem and then Philadelphia in 1964,
and then Watts in 1965, which was the most massive.
Martin called me early in the morning saying that,
"There's a riot in Watts. We've gotta go to Los Angeles."
Thank you very much my dear friends of Los Angeles
and the Watts area of this city.
Now I live approximately 2,500 miles from here.
I'm not free there and our brothers and sisters are not free there,
and you are not free in California and in the North.
I've said all over America, and I come out to Watts to tell ya today,
no matter what color you are, you are somebody!
And all over the United States of America,
the negro must join hands and we must work.
Dr. King once said that,
"The riot became the language of the unheard."
You all know my philosophy; you all know that I believe firmly in nonviolence.
Or maybe some of you don't quite agree with this.
Nonviolent is more than a tactic. It is one of those immutable principles
that you cannot deviate from
if you're going to be able to redeem the soul of America.
The issues in Watts, and in the North,
were far more complex than black and white,
as they had been in the South.
He was dealing with racism,
but he was dealing with racism that was complicated by unemployment
and unprepared migrants moving from the South to the North.
And I realized we were in a different movement.
What we saw it as...
a lot of people who were suffering from the same kind of poverty,
the same kind of absence of employment opportunities,
and police brutality were in the urban areas,
and they responded with whatever weapons they could find.
The president during the riots was just depressed.
About a week before,
Johnson had signed the Voting Rights Act tells me,
"this is the most important piece of legislation I'll pass.
Even more important than the '64 Civil Rights Act."
He's virtually carried out of the room on shoulders,
and then, we start the massive rioting in Watts.
So he tells me, "Call Dr. King."
- Hello? - Yes, Dr. King.
Yes, we're expecting a difficult situation here.
How do you see it?
I'll tell ya, Mr. President, I have met with people in the Watts area.
I'm fearful that if something isn't done
to give a new sense of hope to the people in that area,
that a full-scale race war can develop here.
I've spent the biggest part of my life for the last four years
on civil rights bills, but all of it comes to naught
if you have a situation like war in the world or a situation in Los Angeles.
Yes.
All of this was happening
about the same time that the war in Vietnam heated up,
and the President was in the midst of a very heavy burden
both with the war and domestically.
I want peace as much as you do, and more so,
'cause I'm the fellow that had to wake up with morning with 50 Marines killed.
But these folks, they all got the impression, too,
that you're against me in Vietnam.
And I have said this, Mr. President. I am concerned about peace.
Dr. King made the decision in '65 that he had to be against the war.
NEW YORK CITY SEPTEMBER 10, 1965
We went to meet with Ambassador Goldberg at the United Nations.
And Goldberg pretty much agreed with us
that the war in Vietnam was not in anybody's interest.
But the press said that he had no business
having an opinion about foreign affairs. He was a civil rights leader, see.
And it hurt him.
He said to me, "Vivian, you don't think I know what I'm talking about do you?"
But he knew how he felt about the war.
Also, I think Martin knew that he had to be a part of the North sooner or later.
One must understand
that the civil rights legislation that we have had over the last few years,
even the voting bill rights bill which came the other day
didn't do too much to improve the lot
of the thousands and millions of negroes in teeming ghettoes of the north.
I opposed SCLC moving North
because we weren't finished in the South.
We needed to continue political education.
And we needed to work on building an economic base.
Martin could sit there for an hour, listen to us argue about,
"no let's go here. Let's go there. Let's teach this, let's... whatever."
But he would teach a lot by asking questions.
Then a sudden quiet would come over the room
because he wanted to make people think about what they wanted.
Martin could be very quiet and have all the power in the room.
Martin had decided that we had to prove
that nonviolence was relevant in the North.
That we had to find a way to get into these northern cities
before the riots occurred. And so, we went North, to Chicago.
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JANUARY, 1966
I do not know that everything that Martin said or did
he was quite prepared for.
He had felt that in many ways,
dealing with the South was a more predictable outcome,
because in the North, the racial hypocrisy was very subverted.
It gave the appearance of being not like the South;
the South was the center of all evil,
and that the North was a place of the higher experience.
And Dr. King said, "No, that's not the case."
We moved into an apartment on 16th and Hamlin.
It was a walk-up apartment, with no lights, no heat,
and it took quite an adjustment. I never got scared in the South.
SELMA, ALABAMA MARCH 7, 1965
I knew the dangers, and I was prepared to get killed in the South,
but I wasn't ready to, you know, to have a junkie stick a knife in me
in the middle of the night, coming into that apartment
for maybe fifteen or twenty dollars that I had in my pocket.
That first night was a very cold night,
and I got really worried that there weren't gonna be enough blankets,
so we went and got the blankets,
and went over to see Dr. King in his apartment.
And, as we were sitting there,
the doorbell rang, and there was a young man there.
The first thing he said when he came in the door was,
"Are you really Martin Luther King?"
They had a very lovely conversation
with Dr. King really saying, "We want you to join the movement."
Pretty soon later, there was another knock on the door,
and there was like a whole train of them going down the stairs.
And those young men came back a number of times to see Dr. King.
People in the community
they would just hang around waiting for him to come downstairs,
so they could see him.
But he would invite them in, sit down and talk to people.
They didn't think he was the kind of person he could talk to
and it made them feel, well honestly, that they were worthwhile as well.
Martin understood that if you ran with folk,
you could organize folk.
Remember, we've spent all of our lives being hated in one form or the other.
But when we see somebody who really cares for people, people period,
that person is worth knowing.
The first week we moved in,
temperature dropped to about sixteen degrees below zero.
And people came to us to complain that they had no heat.
And, to find babies wrapped in newspaper,
we had to start fire the furnaces.
So we got all the money we could
and we got enough coal and to get all of the furnaces to work.
We called the movement in Chicago the movement to end slums.
And it plunged us into several issues. One was the area of poor housing.
The other was the area of quality education, and also unemployment.
I feel like we know more about our problem than Dr. King
because we live here.
What would you suggest that he do, Reverend Mitchell?
I would suggest when it comes down to our city,
he should get the hell out of here.
So first we ran into stiff black resistance.
We had never met that in Montgomery or Birmingham or Selma before,
that was different.
A lot of the ministers were part of the patronage system.
Mayor Daley's patronage system was one where people's jobs
were handed out based on the number of votes that they could produce.
They called it the Daley Machine.
Martin had anxiety, because, as he put it,
"We don't want to flunk. We don't want to fail in our projects."
We met regularly with Mayor Daley, and we disagreed,
because we were challenging the way Chicago was structured.
I think we're beginning to crystalize some of the problems
and understand what we might do to begin to make some changes.
Does it mean demonstrations, too, possibly?
Yes, it would mean demonstrations,
but I think just when it would mean demonstrations,
we wouldn't be able to say.
At the same time, we were still being pulled back to the South,
and James Meredith decided to have a march in Mississippi.
MISSISSIPPI JUNE 6, 1966
When James Meredith,
a negro who desegregated the University of Mississippi,
started the march only three friends walked with him.
The surest way to power is through the vote.
And it is for this reason that I have decided
to use all of my spare time trying to encourage negroes to register and vote,
and that is the purpose of this march today.
Mississippi wanted black folk to leave.
They didn't want them to be there to vote.
They were trying to starve them out.
They were pushing people off the land and wanted them to go North.
And the violence continued.
James Meredith's march was a march against fear.
We had seen people in Mississippi getting killed
for trying to register to vote because they didn't want them to have power.
So he was trying to empower African Americans
to not be fearful of all the threats.
"If I can walk through Mississippi without harm," Meredith told reporters,
"Other negroes will see that they can too."
At that time, me and Stokely Carmichael were officers of SNCC,
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
And someone came along and told us that James Meredith had been shot.
I'm hit in the leg, and in the head. Ain't nobody gonna get me in a car.
Here it comes right now Jimmy.
The Meredith March wasn't on anybody's agenda.
He didn't consult with anybody.
But with the shooting of Meredith,
Dr. King and civil rights leaders rallied around that.
This march that we are continuing, started by James Meredith,
I am convinced will have as great an impact,
or probably a greater impact than the march from Selma to Montgomery.
If a man can be shot on the highways in Mississippi peacefully walking,
that march needs to be big.
Thank you very much, gentlemen.
Martin felt we could not ignore what was happening in Mississippi.
So, we had to divide what we were doing in Chicago,
and so we had a Mississippi March and a Chicago Movement.
- Nigger go home! - Where's Meredith?
From the moment that the civil rights leaders rushed in
to continue James Meredith's march,
there has been a struggle to see whose philosophy would guide the steps.
The philosophical struggle deepened
as the march column moved deeper into Mississippi.
The voice of Stokely Carmichael,
young leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
spoke louder and louder.
At Greenwood, he sounded the marches new rallying call.
It's time we stand up and take over.
- We want Black Power. - Black Power!
In SNCC, we saw a changing movement tactically.
Our focus was on empowering communities.
We don't have to be ashamed of it.
Not only politically, but in terms of culture and identity.
What do you want? That's what we gonna get.
What they were basically saying
is that black people needed to appreciate black,
and it wasn't a color, it was a culture.
Now, when I was growing up,
to call a person of color black was considered derogatory.
Those were fighting words.
But, there was a term that was used as well during that period: "white power."
Stokely Carmichael gets control of the SNCC,
and he purges the organization of all white people.
He said, "You go back and work in your community.
We want to have total control. It rippled throughout the movement.
I will never forget Dr. King's face when Black Power first began to emerge.
He looked like the most stricken man.
We must never forget that there are some white people in the United States
just as determined to see us free as we are to be free ourselves.
We were taught that there were good people and bad people
and we never viewed this as black against white.
We're taught that racism was a sickness and you don't get mad with sick people.
They just don't know any better.
They'd been taught that they are better than you.
What do you mean when you shout "Black Power" to these people?
I mean that they are oppressed because they are black,
and their rallying cry must be "Black Power"
so that they can use that to ensure justice for themselves...
Martin was very uncomfortable, but he knows that he has to be there
to support the courage of Stokely Carmichael
without supporting the message, or the form of the message.
Dr. King was not opposed to power, but to elevate so- called Black Power
over white power would break that which he was seeking to build
the coalition among white and black people.
I feel that while believing firmly that power is necessary,
that it would be difficult for me to use the phrase "Black Power"
because of the connotative meaning that it has for many people,
and the feeling that this may represent our desire to rise
from a position of disadvantage to one of advantage,
thereby subverting justice.
Some of the people on the march
were intimidated by the whole effort of Black Power.
They must ask themselves why they are afraid of the word "black"
and why they are afraid of the phrase "black power."
As long as we were talking about non-violence and all that kind of thing,
everybody felt comfortable.
Do you think they're really afraid of it or just feel not a good...
Anytime when we talk about black people having power
the assumption is that black people want to be violent against white people.
Mr. Carmichael, are you as committed to the nonviolent approach as Dr. King is?
- No, I'm not. - Why aren't you?
I just don't see it as a way of life. I never have.
I grew up in the slums of New York
and I learned there that the only way that one survived was to use his fists.
When Stokely became chairman of SNCC,
he had a different approach.
For me, it's always been a tactic and never a way of life.
He believed in self-defense.
Could you comment on that Dr. King?
The negro has an opportunity
to inject morality in the veins of our civilization
and for this reason I will continue to preach non-violence,
I will to continue to...
Martin was an amazingly tolerant,
understanding father-figure for all of us.
He understood Stokely's frustrations, and he never took it personally.
I think Dr. King never forgot that we were all on the same side.
He didn't have any enemies.
What I remember was the listening, the patience.
He was always there to say,
"I don't go there, but I want to really understand why you go there."
But that was the first real breach in the nonviolence commitment
that many of us had grown to accept.
I'm sick and tired of violence. I'm tired of shooting, I'm tired of hate,
I'm tired of selfishness, I'm tired of evil!
I'm not gonna use violence no matter who says it.
I had not, before meeting Dr. King,
ever taken the option of violence off the table.
We are a minority living in the belly of the beast.
When Dr. King stepped in, he methodically would look at violence
and challenge those who would seek the gun as the solution,
because morally, you cannot defeat the enemy by becoming the enemy.
But Stokely really believed that in the long run,
the gun was gonna have to be the answer.
We begged the president, we begged the federal government,
that's all we've been doing...
I accused Stokely of being just an angry, frustrated young man.
It's time we stand up and take over.
Every courthouse in Mississippi oughta be burned down tomorrow
to get rid of the...
Anger eats away at your own soul, and it hurts you.
Everybody has a right to be angry. Everybody has a right to be frustrated.
But, if you give in to your anger and your frustrations, you're gonna lose.
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JULY 10, 1966
This day, we must commit ourselves
to make any sacrifice necessary to change Chicago, this day.
That summer of '66 did feel like a very turbulent time.
We must avoid the error of building a distrust for a white people.
There was some question about whether it was appropriate for white people
to stay working with the movement.
And I remember one of my black friends saying to me,
"We need to know we can do this ourselves."
And in the middle of all that, was the rising of the Vietnam War.
Many of the staff who were very strongly opposed to the war
were trying to get Dr. King to speak out against it.
Martin was now being pulled back in to the war issue by the student left
and so you had almost three things coming together in Chicago,
pulling the same leadership in different directions.
This day, we must decide that our votes
will determine who will be the Mayor of Chicago next year.
Mayor Daley was very upset about what was going on here
and he was in touch with Lyndon Johnson and said,
"Get this Martin Luther King off my back."
- How are you, my friend? - Good. How are you, Mr. President?
What shape have you got King in? Is he about ready to get out?
Well, I don't think so.
I think we've gone a long way with the Good Doctor, Mr. President.
He's not your friend, he's against you on Vietnam.
He's a goddamn faker.
Do you think that you got things in pretty good shape in Chicago?
Well, as good as they can be...
The area that the movement insisted on getting into was open housing.
What is the make-up of the community here,
what would be the reaction of the community to a Negro family moving in?
I don't think they'd like it. They're very clannish in a way.
Chicago is probably the most segregated city I know.
It's not only segregated black and white, but the Irish, the Italians,
the Polish, the Jewish community.
Almost everybody lives in its own enclave in Chicago.
And so we started marching into those ethnic neighborhoods,
and we were challenging Chicago simply by marching.
I've moved out of a neighborhood that was colored.
Everybody that lives with a colored has to move.
Why?
Because you're not safe walkin' the streets at night.
You cannot leave the house.
Negroes have a right to move in under the constitution.
The only thing is, what kind of a negro?
Our marches were to the real estate offices,
because the real estate agents controlled the movement of people.
They're the ones who were managing this discrimination.
Every time Negroes went in, the real estate agents said,
"I'm sorry, we don't have anything listed."
And then we sent some of our fine white staff members in
to those same real estate offices and the minute the white persons got in
they open up the book,
"Oh yes, well we have several things. Now what exactly do you want?"
Something is gonna happen as a result of this, and I'm not losing faith.
I still have faith in the future.
Communist!
Move it back!
I remember marching through Gage Park,
and the difference in the South...
you had maybe a couple hundred, at most,
of the riff raff of the Klan.
But, in Chicago it was ten thousand. I mean everybody came out.
- Get out of here! - I live in here!
Get out of here!
I live here! Those fucking niggers don't live here!
I remember coming on those marches, prepared for anything.
Dr. King, did you get hit?
I said, "Did you know that I've been hit so many times, I'm immune to it."
But it was well beyond what we anticipated.
The superintendent of police of Chicago said that your civil rights tactics
have aroused hatred among Chicago white residents
and are hampering the negroes' progress.
There is no doubt about the fact that there are many latent hostilities
existing within certain white groups in the North.
And these latent hostilities have come out in the open
and I don't think you can blame the civil rights movement for that.
Certainly no one would blame a physician
for using his instruments and his know-how
to reveal to a patient that he has cancer.
Now we have only revealed in Chicago
that there is a blatant social hate-filled cancer.
And what we're trying to get rid of is hate.
Nonviolence had the power to pull the worst fever out of them
and show our moral strength. They had the stick, we had the bible.
I remember this one young lady came up to Dr. King just spitting in his face,
calling him all kinds of names.
And he said, "You know, you're much too beautiful to be so mean."
Why don't you go home and act like adult people?
And, when we came back through there, she came out of the crowd again
and went up to him and said,
"I'm sorry, I never should have been so rude."
The nonviolent approach is radical.
Radical enough to believe that under the worst conditions, there's hope.
It's radical enough to believe
that people who display some of the most insensitive kind of attitudes
can be changed.
Its ultimate goal is to win your opponents over.
So, you had to psychologically disarm them.
You confront your opponent, and you look at your opponent in the eyes
so that they will not see you as a target, but as a human being.
So, you are forcing your humanity on them.
Mayor Daley was very distressed and he really wanted it to end.
So, one of the religious groups in Chicago decided to call a meeting
to try to come to some agreement that would stop the marches.
Through the democratic process of discussion around the conference table,
an agreement has been reached unanimously,
and I think all of Chicago will be indebted to them. Thank you very much.
Would you hold it one second please. Just hold your questions.
Dr. King.
One of the most significant programs ever conceived
to make open housing a reality in a metropolitan area
was agreed upon here today at the table of reconciliation.
Therefore, the Chicago Freedom Movement hereby agrees
to halt neighborhood marches and demonstrations in Chicago
on the issue of open housing,
so long as these pledged programs are being carried out.
Dr. King, you say you're satisfied, but are you?
You don't sound too happy about what's happened in there. Are you?
I don't know what you mean. What do you mean?
You don't seem like you really are happy.
I'm a very honest man,
and I wouldn't say on this paper something that I don't believe.
I think that this is a very significant step forward.
I'm not happy about the total problem
that we face in the United States of America.
I always have to look at the ultimate, and in terms of the ultimate,
we are still a long, long way from our goals.
The staff was really disappointed. We did not get a definitive statement
from them that discrimination in housing will end in Chicago.
But one of the things that Andrew Young said was:
"Sometimes you only win half a loaf
and then you have to keep pushing for the rest of it."
The extent that there were successes that came later,
Dr. King didn't get to see that.
Up to the moment of his death,
I think that Dr. King referred to the experiences in Chicago
more regularly than any other experience.
I think Chicago was a huge awakening for him.
He saw that the movement now
was reflective more of the truth of what America was about
than just what we'd experienced in the south.
And Martin said to me, "Clarence, I've seen some hate filled eyes and mouths
in Mississippi and Alabama."
He said, "But the hate I saw in Illinois
was equal or greater than any of the hate I've seen in Mississippi."
He was really shaken.
When we left Chicago, I remember his battles with conscience.
He was very depressed that he hadn't been more forceful in his non-violence.
I will continue to work against violence and riots with all my might
that it is just as important to work passionately and unrelentingly
to get rid of the conditions that bring violence into being.
Do I sense that it is your feeling that the Civil Rights Movement,
as a movement, has entered sort of a different stage...
I said "Wait a minute, you're doing better than anybody else is doing,
there's no reason for you to feel guilty."
But he always felt he was not doing enough.
It was easier to integrate public facilities;
it was easier to gain the right to vote
because it didn't cost the nation anything.
And the fact is that we are dealing with issues now
that will call for something of a restructuring
of the architecture of American society. It's gonna cost the nation something.
As much as he did, he always blamed himself for not doing enough.
He was a kind of workaholic where he was never content.
He was driven by a kind of a need for perfection.
And he was always feeling that he wasn't doing his best.
I think because of his feeling
that somehow he wasn't good enough to be the leader.
Those were periods when he was really just physically exhausted.
Dr. King came to New York with great regularity,
and whenever he was here on quiet time, he often stayed at our home.
And we also made sure that his space
was filled with the things that brought him pleasure,
including his favorite drink, Bristol Cream Sherry.
I think one of the things that attracted him to my environment
was that here I was a very prominent black American.
And my wife then was a young woman named Julie Robinson
who was white and she and I were married
and brought children into the world
and at no point was her presence in my life ever obscured.
And Dr. King watched the environment around me accept that
and treated us with a lot of kindness and respect.
In Martin's earlier life, in his youth as a student,
his first real love was a white woman.
He adored this young lady and was deeply pained
when the wrath of Daddy King and everybody else came down on him
when he suggested that he wantrd a relationship with this young lady.
It betrayed everything that Daddy King had in mind for his son.
It's rare, Doctor, that we get a chance to see you in New York.
You've discovered it's a fun city?
I haven't quite discovered that side of New York.
Being a Baptist clergyman, they keep me involved in other areas.
Your home is actually in Atlanta? Atlanta, Georgia.
Do you have a church at this time in Atlanta?
Yes, I am the co-pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta,
and my father is Pastor. So, we are working together there as a team.
Both you and your father?
- That's right... - Is there any seniority?
He makes it clear,
sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously,
that he is the pastor and I'm the co-pastor.
Jesus was the leader in the way.
For he said, "I am the way, the truth, and the light."
Now that gets all of it...
When I met Daddy King in Atlanta,
I understood the real meaning of patriarch.
He was a huge force in the community as a black minister.
Glory God.
Very imposing.
Something wrong with your head.
And when you met him you understood that you were dealing with the power.
What was also fascinating for me
was the subservience that Martin reflected when talking with his father.
Not just parental,
but as someone whose view of where we should be going as a people
held great substance for Martin.
Martin really understood his father,
but he understood also the difference between he and his father.
So in a sense we look into a future
shrouded with impenetrable uncertainties.
There was a great difference between he and his father's preaching.
Martin made his points at a different level
and in a different way than most other preachers did.
And the reason for that was is because he had this unusual education.
Dr. King finished high school at 15. He finished Morehouse at 19.
He finished seminary at 22, his PHD at 26.
He knew that strong minds break strong chains.
I think his faith in the teachings that he had studied,
his constant references to Thoreau and I never knew of these guys,
never heard of these people, until Martin came in one day
and in the midst of some rather casual moment,
he would evoke what Nietzsche said, and what Thoreau...
and I'm sitting there saying, "Well who's Nietzsche?"
Daddy King used to say, "Just get in there and talk the gospel,
stop all with this college stuff
and all these highfalutin people you keep evoking.
People don't know who they are. He said, "Yes they do."
You could wake Martin up from a nap and he could do a sermon.
I remember saying to him,
"You are due at the church in twenty minutes."
I mean like his mother.
And when he got to the church,
you would think he'd been studying all night.
He was a natural preacher.
Everybody loved Martin as soon as they heard him.
There was a desire for people to be a part of an educated ministry.
The only thing that we had was Christianity.
The only thing that white America allowed us to have was our churches.
Martin's moments when the curtain was drawn,
and he was not on public display,
was a man who revealed his deepest concerns
about his right to do what he was doing.
The fact that he was touched by that calling in history, disturbed him
because he didn't quite understand it.
He referred everything to divine intervention, to divine power.
It's what God has called on me to do.
And in the depth of that belief, that religious commitment,
those voices that he heard really existed for him.
Daddy King, I don't think, was fully approving
of where the movement was going. He saw nothing but chaos.
Those fucking niggers don't live here.
He saw nothing but rage, he saw these young, young people.
We're gonna pitch the tents!
With the birth of SNCC,
and the kinds of passion that poured forth from these young people.
Come on, everybody follow me.
Many of whom were not much younger than his son.
And the fact that his son was at the spearhead of it,
was even more threatening for him.
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
Dr. King asked me and Stokely to come over and have dinner at his house,
and that he just wanted to talk. And so, we went over to his house.
He wanted to understand where Black Power came from.
He wanted to know everything we were thinking,
where we were going with it.
The discussion was about three hours long.
And then what we wanted to know was, as a moral icon of the movement,
when was he going to make a statement against the war in Vietnam.
The leaders of the peace movement were reaching out the Dr. King
and wanted him to get more actively and publicly involved,
but I resisted
because my initial reaction is I felt that they were trying appropriate
the legitimacy they didn't have.
LBJ, how many kids did you killed today?
Politically, we had to be very cautious
about whether or not we wanted to publically criticize
what could be described as having been the greatest president for civil rights
since Abraham Lincoln.
This is after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
and here we're going to publically excoriate and criticize
the man without who's leadership none of this would have been possible.
The anti-war movement was a new constituency for us.
There was a spiritual connectivity that we were comfortable with,
and we understood their positions.
They wanted to emulate our tactics.
But, there were radical elements of violence and anti-American discussion,
and we didn't want him taking his moral position
into an extreme left environment
with kids who were kind of anti-American, who were communists,
who were burning American flags. And we could not control that.
Johnson was worried,
because communists were on the other side on the war,
and over the years the FBI was constantly investigating King
and citing one or two of his associates who they said were communists.
He was afraid that the FBI would leak it,
that Hoover would really get King branded as a communist,
and it would build up an enormous backlash.
For a long period of time,
every conversation was wire tapped secretly by the FBI.
And the contents of the conversations, written down, transcribed verbatim,
and put in files marked "Top Secret".
And a top agent at the FBI said
that Martin Luther King Jr. is the most dangerous
and most powerful Negro in America.
In 1964, they were bugging Dr. King
and they also picked up his sexual activity.
Hoover would send these memos out. The memos would be about King's life.
I mean, they were obviously designed to destroy this guy.
I think J. Edgar Hoover hated, despised Dr. King.
Hoover just was one of these people with an immense amount of power
who abused that power. He used information improperly.
He was singularly arrogant about his position.
And underlying it had this feeling of superiority to people of color.
And I said,
"they should take that son-of-a-bitch's name off the building,"
because he was the antithesis of what you wanted in a democracy.
You know, during those days,
we assume that we all were being wiretapped or spied on.
But I think the people who made the recordings were really sick.
Everything the FBI was doing to hurt us
made us question whether this country was so sick that it couldn't be saved.
We were never running a program of personal piety.
We were running a program of social and political and economic justice,
and it's while we are yet sinners that Christ died for us.
And it's one of the things that makes it possible for us to understand
the difficulties and weaknesses in other people
is that we're aware of them in ourselves.
I think it's very important for us to see
that you can go on doing the good works and have slipped and fallen,
or gotten drunk or womanized.
But since we have no idea how his struggle felt,
we don't have any room to criticize it.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a human being, and he was imperfect.
He was conflicted by traveling so much, and may not have felt
that he was being the best father or husband that he could be,
but his love for his family was unchallengeable.
When I met Martin, I had, unfortunately, a stereotype impression of a minister.
Piety is good but I think there's a kind of a false piety which I don't like.
And he was a, just a human being,
a very, very warm, and very down to earth, and just different.
Coretta believed in his cause so much
that she was willing to pay the price,
and she tried hard to have him spend as much time with the children as he could
cause he wasn't home that much.
You pass your plate this way...
When he was home, she insisted that he have dinner with the children.
Daddy, you not talking.
I'm too hungry, Marty. I'm so hungry, I'm busy with this dinner.
I guess this is one of the most frustrating aspects of my life.
The great demands that come
as a result of my involvement in the struggle for justice and peace.
It's just impossible to carry out
the responsibilities of a father and husband
when you have these kinds of demands,
but fortunately I have a most understanding wife.
Now, alright. This leads me to ask you,
did you educate Mrs. King to become equal to you
in terms of sharing this burden
or did you research her before your marriage
to see that she had the potential for this, or...
I wish I could say, and satisfy my masculine ego,
that I led her down this path,
but I must say we went down together because she was as actively involved
and concerned when we met as she is now.
Mrs. King are you taking part in this demonstration
as an individual or as a wife?
I'm taking part as an individual and a wife. I'm both.
Martin Luther King wrestled with coming out publically
taking a stand against the war in Vietnam.
But, Mrs. King was involved in the anti-war movement long before,
so she had a lot of influence on Martin Luther King coming to that conclusion.
I come to express my own personal witness for the cause of peace.
In the civil rights struggle if we win all of the rights and privileges
that we are fighting for and have no world in which to exercise these,
then there is really no need for our efforts.
I decided that I would leave it to my wife to take the stands
and make the meetings on the peace issue,
but I came to the conclusion that I could no longer be a silent onlooker,
but that in some real way, I had to be an involved and concerned participant.
Andy Young had called me.
I was the Executive Director of a group that wanted to stop the war
and engage the religious community to help do that.
So, Andy proposed that Dr. King give a speech in New York
and Dr. King decided to make a full-blown statement.
So, I said, well, what about Riverside Church?
Because I think place makes a big difference.
When he came to the Vietnamese speech he struggled with it.
And, I remember very much because he wrote a big part of it in our home.
I have on my wall in the hallway,
a copy of his writings and the notes that he made.
He had a habit of using a yellow pad, constantly making notes,
and he'd crumble up these things at the end of an evening
and toss it away and I just do a swan dive right into the garbage pail
and retrieve those papers
'cause he always left some really profound sentence or something
that I thought was worth retrieving and saving.
Dr. King knew where his heart was,
but he also knew the criticism and the splits that would happen
the moment he said anything against the war in Vietnam,
and, of course, he did.
The night of April 4th 1967,
I believe that Martin Luther King Jr. delivered
probably one of the most powerful speeches I ever heard him deliver.
Ladies and gentlemen.
He said, in effect, that he was not going to butcher his conscience.
I knew that I could never again raise my voice
against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos
without having first spoken clearly
to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today
my own government.
He said as a nation, we talk about nonviolence here in America,
and then we engage in violence abroad.
He said in effect that the bombs that we're dropping in Vietnam,
they would be shattered over America.
Dr. King was worried that the government had gotten us into war
where we didn't need to be, and we were hurting ourselves.
The returning veterans, the inflation, the unemployment:
the consequences of the war.
He literally poured out his heart, the depth and essence of his soul.
I've heard many sermons, I was at the March on Washington,
but I think the speech at Riverside Church was his best.
If America's soul becomes totally poisoned,
part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam."
When the speech ended, the place exploded and I knew it was electric.
I knew he had hit it out of the park. But, the next morning he was blasted
in virtually every editorial column in America.
Some of us didn't want him to be that hard in the speech, but he said,
"I'm trapped by my own, you know, beliefs,"
and I think that that was one of the things that J. Edgar Hoover used
to try to turn the government completely against him.
Dr. King took on our government in a war time.
He was taking on angry people and misguided people in a war time.
Commie! Commie Jew!
Stick with civil rights! Leave the war to the generals!
Go back to Hanoi!
He said, "Many of my friends are turning on me:
many of my Morehouse friends, my classmates.
Preachers have said I can't come in their pulpits
'cause we shouldn't be engaged in the war."
He said, "You expect your enemies to disagree with you.
What I didn't understand is how our friends would leave me."
They stopped giving, they stopped calling,
they stopped caring, and he was devastated.
Change is painful. The loneliness and what it must have felt like
when he was so abandoned by so many and told to stay in your place.
He really felt betrayed. And he said over and over,
"They don't know me."
They applauded me and I told Negros to be nonviolent.
These same people are damning me when I say,
"You ought to be nonviolent toward little brown children in Vietnam."
The way all of America turned on him when he stepped into the Vietnam drama
was perhaps the single most challenging moment for Martin.
Martin went through very difficult, emotional times in 1967.
He had a doctor in New York, and I remember sitting with Dr. Logan,
and he generally felt that the state of Martin's emotional health was such that
that he maybe should seek
some kind of third-party independent psychiatric counselling.
I looked at Dr. Logan, and I said, "That's not gonna happen."
I was very blunt, and I said,
"If not within 24 hours, within 24 days,
the FBI would find out,
and everything that Martin King said to that psychiatrist
would be immediately in FBI files. Can't take that chance."
SUMMER 1967
This year, major Negro riots have broken out in Detroit and Newark,
and about eighty cities and towns all over the country.
Already it's become the worst crisis in the country since the Civil War.
The despair is deep,
the bitterness is wide in the ghettos of our nation.
And I will continue to raise my voice with all of my might against riots
because I know that black rioting can mean black suicide.
Don't point that gun at me!
Wait a minute, don't point that gun at me!
What must be said it that our nation's summers of riots
are caused by our nation's winters of delay.
Pillage, looting, murder, and arson have nothing to do with civil rights.
We will not tolerate lawlessness.
You gon' sit in front of your television set and listen to LBJ tell you that,
"Violence never accomplishes anything, my fellow Americans."
But the real problem with violence is that we have never been violent.
We have been too nonviolent. Too nonviolent.
I've decided to stick with love.
I'm not gonna give you a motto or preach a philosophy, "Burn baby burn,"
I'm gonna say, "Build, baby, build, organize baby organize!"
Martin Luther King called me from Atlanta,
and he said to me very directly,
"I need you to come on down here now because this may be my last campaign,
and we're going for broke.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference
will lead waves of the nation's poor and disinherited
to Washington, D.C. next spring.
He said, "Let's go to Washington. We're going to Washington,
if necessary, going to jail, civil disobedience,
and convince this Congress to shift from war in Vietnam to war on poverty."
It was Marian Edelman who came to Martin
with the concept of the Poor People's Campaign.
I got called to Washington to testify about poverty
and what was happening in Mississippi.
This is an urgent situation, which must be looked into and which must be met.
In the middle of it all, I asked them to come and see for themselves.
And Bobby Kennedy came with them.
There is a starvation and men and women who can't find jobs.
There's a reflection on all of us,
the fact that you have young children in the United States at the present time
with the wealthiest nation in the world who are hungry,
and their parents are hungry. It's completely unsatisfactory.
Robert Kennedy went back to Washington,
and I told him I was going to stop through Atlanta and see Martin
and he said, "Well tell him to bring the poor to Washington."
I went down to Atlanta and went to SCLC,
and he was depressed. He was sitting in his office by himself.
And I told him what Robert Kennedy said,
he ought to bring the poor to Washington
and he lit up, he just lit up.
I think he was realizing that he was running out of gas.
And the attacks and the criticisms on him
were getting more and more vicious.
But he was really aware of the fact
that we had not hardly raised the issue of poverty.
We have to do it for our own sense of dignity,
our own self-respect, our own determination.
But we can't do it if we don't give our all to it.
Martin Luther King embraced the idea of the Poor People's campaign,
and he wanted to move ahead with it.
But initially, he did not have the support of his executive staff.
People felt already committed to what they were working on at that time.
From our perspective as organizers...
He used to say that he was the pilot of the plane, but we were the ground crew.
And that he ground crew of the plane cannot leave the ground.
Given the realities of...
Martin Luther King went on a fast to reunite people
and get them to think collectively how they could participate.
As we go into these communities...
And, they finally thought coming aboard.
We must remember that we are the custodians of a philosophy.
But he talked about his frustration.
His staff was all concerned.
They said, "you know, we haven't seen him laugh in a longtime.
Now, I don't know whether we gon' win or lose or draw
or what we gon' bring back tonight, but I'm not gon' sit by and...
So, they called me, and told me, "think of something to do to make him laugh."
This was January 15th, his birthday, which ended up being his last birthday.
Now, some folks celebrate Abraham Lincoln,
but we're gonna celebrate Martin Luther King's day today.
Don't let him outta here!
We know that you, you really don't need much,
but we thought of some things you ought to have.
So, we searched around, and knowing what's coming up for you,
we thought you'd be strung out of shoe string,
so when you go to jail, here's some shoestring potatoes we want you to...
Then, we know how fond you are of our president, Lyndon Johnson,
and we know how you supporting everything,
and I got this little cup for you, and I want this back, because this is mine.
And it says, let me read it, it says,
"We are cooperating with Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.
Drop coins and bills in the cup."
And this is a special gift from me, a real one.
I don't think anyone possessed the capacity for humor,
both in receiving it and responding joyously, as Dr. King.
Much of the time I was the victim.
If he felt somebody was sensitive, he wouldn't pick on 'em,
but he would take something that somebody else said or did
and blame it on me.
He had a good way of imitating people. He would imitate Andy, or he would say,
"Now, Andy, if you do something foolish
and you go out there and get assassinated," he said,
"I promise, I'm gonna preach the best funeral for you."
And then he would start preaching your funeral.
He would do a very sadistic caricature of all of your faults and foibles,
and things that you would never want said about you in public.
And he'd weave it into a sermon,
and quite often he'd have a similar demon from the bible
who had the same problems.
And, by the time he got through,
he had everybody laughing at what was a life and death situation.
Mostly his life.
That was the way of externalizing the fact
that he had somehow talk about the elephant in the room
that we all had to live with.
Martin joked about it
because there wasn't any other way to be.
Dr. King, do you fear for your life?
Not really. I face the fact that something can happen to my life.
Ultimately, it isn't so important how long you live;
the important thing is how well you live.
Dr. King's expression of his anxiety
about this whole world in which he found himself, was not unfounded.
His fears were very real because the conditions were very real.
And what is it that America has failed to hear?
I had noticed that he had a tick. He had occasion to get caught.
It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor
has worsened over the past few years.
It wasn't consistent,
but it was apparent in enough situations for us to know
that there was a psychological problem there.
And then one day, that tick was no longer evident. I said to him,
I said, "Now what happened to the tick?" He said, "No, that's gone."
And I said, "Well, how'd you get rid of it,"
and he said, "I made my peace with death."
I know all of you are studying hard and you're just doing fine in school
and I'm glad to see you.
- We are glad to see you! - Thank you very much.
I think he always knew that each and every thing he did
could be the last thing that he did.
And he used to say that if you're really gonna be free
you have to overcome the love of wealth and the fear of death.
- You all just took off from school? - Yes.
He was prepared to die, but he was also determined that his death
and his life would have meaning,
and I think that's what he was wrestling with with Vietnam
and Chicago...
Tell Hosea and Ralph to rush off...
...and the Poor People's Campaign.
- Hello, give me some sugar. - Where we stopping?
It seemed to me we can begin to build up every Sunday a big march
to march around the Capitol someplace.
Dr. King appointed me as program administrator.
Grow and develop and by the time we get to seventh march
it could really be massive for those people...
And usually our campaign was related to discrimination and racism,
so we were talking about black people for the most part.
But, I said, "There are Chicanos who are poor, you want them to be in..."
He said, "Yes, we want them to be involved."
I said, "Okay," and so I said, "What about the Native Americans?"
He said, "Well yeah, Native Americans."
So, by this time he turned around and looked up at me
'cause he'd anticipated the next question.
I said, "Well, Dr. King, what about the poor whites?"
And he said to me, a little disgusted, he said,
"Are they poor?" I said, "Well, yes." "Well we want them involved!"
We assemble here together today
with common problems bringing together ethnic groups
that maybe have not been together in this type of meeting in the past.
I know I haven't been in a meeting like this
and it's been one of my dreams that we would come together
and realize our common problems.
Black people, Mexican Americans, American Indians, Puerto Ricans,
Appalachian Whites, all working together to solve the problem of poverty.
That was a very big thing that happened.
Of getting... finding common ground among the poor.
That didn't make things easy,
but it was a big benchmark into the next stage of the civil rights movement,
which had to do with economic rights.
Ultimately, we are concerned about a guaranteed annual income,
and the other thing I think is very necessary to say
is that everybody's on welfare in this country.
When it's for white people and rich, we call it subsidies.
Suburbia was built by federally subsidized credits,
and the highways and expressways that take people out there.
So, I think we've gotta see that is when it comes to poor people,
we call it welfare, handouts dolled,
but when it comes to rich people, we call it subsidies.
And it's the same thing it's all welfare.
We were in a staff meeting, and Martin Luther King got this call from Memphis.
MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE
On February 12th,
1300 workers in the city's sanitation department went on strike
and what began as a union matter soon became a civil rights cause.
The sanitation workers were strikin' because the wage was so low,
and they were concerned about safety,
so they were trying to get some support and protection.
One of the most powerful things that you see during that time
is all of the garbage workers had these sandwich board signs
that said "I AM A MAN."
That was saying, we want to be treated with dignity.
With the strike deadlocked, behind the leadership of negro ministers,
the marches grew larger and the ministers reveled in the new unity.
When Martin Luther King got the call, he said he had to go.
He said, you guys stay and continue working on the poor people's campaign.
We did not want him to go to Memphis at all.
But he got up at six o'clock in the morning,
and he said, "Imma catch the flight to Memphis."
MARCH 28, 1968
Martin went to a march that we had nothing to do with, no pre-planning,
and it got disrupted.
There were some young men outside of the garbage workers
who took the wooden sticks that held some of the I AM A MAN signs together
and used them to smash windows.
When the march degenerated into a riot, abandoned by its leaders,
the police, with my full sanction, took the necessary action
to protect the lives and property of the citizens of Memphis.
We urge you to return to your homes immediately for your own safety.
Why didn't you check out the situation in Memphis with your staff
before you came here,
especially since it's in the midst of a very touchy sanitation strike.
I would be honest enough to say
that I was completely caught with a miscalculation.
What steps have you taken to avert new violence in Memphis?
We're gonna take those steps, and we're not gonna stop here.
We are gonna have in Memphis a massive nonviolent demonstration,
and we're gonna do it in the next few days.
And we are gonna take the steps that we've taken in every other situation.
We are gonna take the steps of uniting this community.
Nonviolence can be as contagious as violence.
In between the first march and our going back to Memphis,
Martin gave us a good cussin' out about not being supportive of him.
And, it was the only time I saw him angry at the whole staff.
He cussed us out, got up, and walked out.
And we went behind him, trying to reassure him, but he just went on off.
Dr. King said, "I feel so alone." He was frustrated, he was full of pain.
And, I understand that pain now.
He said, "I've pondered... maybe I should quit now.
Maybe I've done as much as I can do."
I thought it was wrong to take on another movement
in the state we were in.
We were tired, and we knew he was tired.
The thing I think he had dreamed about from childhood
was to be able to pastor a church like Riverside Church.
And, they actually offered him the job as interim pastor.
All of us said, "Look. You're entitled to a sabbatical.
You've been at this for twelve years nonstop."
He wouldn't even consider it.
He used to say, "some of us are not gonna live to be fifty,
so you better live good right now.
It was almost as though he saw death as an escape,
and that he could not escape the way we wanted him to escape.
Before Dr. King left to go to Memphis,
we all had dinner together at their home.
His mother was there and we all had a wonderful, wonderful afternoon.
Playin' the piano, singin' church songs, tellin' jokes.
He said to me, "You know what, I bet you don't really know that I can...
I'm a good singer. Did you know that?"
He said, "I'ma prove it to you. So, give me a B flat."
I gave him a B flat and he starts singin',
and, man, we got the rhythm of a gospel song.
And, we just had such fun.
Now, I was to drive him the next morning to the airport to go to Memphis.
His mother called me and said,
"I know you're takin' ML to the airport tomorrow. While you have his ear,
will you tell him I wish we could have more family moments like that.
Can you tell him to plan it in his schedule sometime after he comes back.
MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE APRIL 3, 1968
After the march broke out in violence, we all went to Memphis, for two reasons:
to support the Sanitation Workers' march, so it would be nonviolent,
but also to continue our discussion of the Poor People's Campaign.
That night, there was a mass meeting at Mason Temple Church,
and Martin Luther King was scheduled to go and speak,
but it was pouring down raining.
Dr. King had sat in the room most of the day.
He said, "I have a headache, I don't feel like going,
but Jesse, will you go?"
So, we went over there and we walked in the door,
church was about three-quarters full and people cheering.
You could sense they were expecting him.
Martin Luther King is already in his pajamas in bed
and we were working on a press statement for Washington D.C.
We went out the side of the church and called him on the pay telephone
and said, "Martin, come just for a few minutes. You don't have to stay long.
They're so ready for you."
I could only hear one side of the call, but Martin Luther King said,
"Now, are you telling me that you want me to get up out of my bed
and take off my pajamas and get dressed
and come out in the pouring down rain," okay,
"to speak at this meeting?"
So, obviously, the answer on the other side said yes.
The Moses of 1968, Martin Luther King.
Martin came to that church thinking that he was just gonna make remarks
and not to give the major speech,
but he got up and he gave that speech
as though he knew that the end was near.
And so, I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything!
I'm not fearing any man!
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!
APRIL 4, 1968
The next morning,
we were workin' on the press statement for the Poor People's Campaign.
Martin Luther King said to me,
"Now, Bernard, the next project we're gonna work on
is to institutionalize and internationalize nonviolence."
I was on the witness stand most of that day.
We got permission to march and I came back to the Lorraine Motel.
He was childish and giddy and cussed me out,
you know, "Where you been?" He threw a pillow at me.
I threw it back. But, everybody else picked up pillows and they were...
It was like a bunch of ten-year olds.
And just about that time, Billy Kyles knocked on the door
and said, "you all are my house by 6 o'clock. My wife's got dinner waitin'."
And so, he jumped up and went upstairs to put on a shirt and tie.
I was coming across the courtyard, and from the balcony, Dr. King said,
"Jesse, you don't even have on a tie!"
So, I said, "Dr. King, a prerequisite for eating is an appetite."
He said, "You crazy." We laughed.
He was just extremely relaxed and comfortable and playful.
It was the happiest I had seen him in a long time.
We'd been laughing and playing, and POW.
And he raised up, bullet hit him right here.
It severed his tie.
I got up and went running toward him, but he was nonresponsive.
So, I got up and went and called Mrs. King.
It was a long ten steps to take from where he was to that phone.
I said, "Mrs. King,"
I said, "Dr. King been shot, I think he's been shot in the shoulder,
but I think you should come."
I really couldn't say what I saw. It was like too much to say.
Like I just couldn't say that. I couldn't say that.
What Dr. Martin Luther King called his beautiful dream,
expressed so dramatically during the 1963 March on Washington,
was shattered tonight in Memphis Tennessee by an assassin's bullet.
In Memphis and in New York, in Boston, Raleigh, North Carolina,
there are reports of looting and other angry reactions
to the killing of Dr. King.
It was awful.
My first thought was to go out
and tell children not to loot and not to riot and ruin their lives.
And this little boy about 12, looked me straight in the eye and said,
"Lady what future, I ain't got no future, I ain't got nothing to lose."
I was in Sarasota, Florida, with my parents,
and we see this happening on the television,
and the first thing out of my mother's mouth was,
"He deserved it. He was a rabble-rouser."
When white America killed Dr. King last night,
she opened the eyes for every black man in this country.
He was the one man in our race
who was trying to teach our people to have love, compassion,
and mercy for what white people had done.
When white America killed Dr. King last night, she declared war on us.
A day after the death of Dr. Martin Luther King,
there is a countrywide reaction.
Turmoil in at least a dozen more cities today:
Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, New York.
These are just a few of the cities
in which the negro anguish over Dr. King's murder,
presumably by a white man, expressed itself in violent destruction.
The assassination and its aftermath
temporarily pushed aside the President's plans
to pursue his new Vietnam peace effort,
as he put in a busy day at the White House.
I think of all the ups and downs, and all the turmoil,
and the tragedies that occurred in those years,
I never saw Johnson sadder,
about an event than he was at the assassination of King.
And he said to me, "Give me a draft letter to the Speaker.
You know, we're gonna get one thing out of this awful event.
We're gonna get our Fair Housing bill."
As part of the national day of mourning tomorrow,
hundreds of communities across the nation
have planned memorial services and peaceful marches in tribute to Dr. King.
It is, in this way, despite the ugly rioting and looting in many cities,
that thousands of Americans have planned to express their grief
quietly, and with dignity.
Nowhere was this more evident than in Atlanta, Georgia.
Before the funeral, Dr. King's body was to lie in state at Spelman College.
A security officer at Spelman called Mrs. King and said,
"There must be thousands here. What must we do?"
Then I said, "Mrs. King, the public will wait, you need to see him first."
So, we dashed over to the campus.
I didn't see the body 'til I got up close. I nearly died.
He looked awful.
He had a big blob of clay on his face.
Mrs. King was standing there in such pain.
The embalmer loudly said,
"His jaw was blown off! This is the best I can do."
And, oh, she nearly fainted.
So I took out some loose powder,
and I dabbed a little on his face, toning it down,
and Coretta smiled. It was working.
And, she said, "open the door and let 'em in."
Martin Luther King chose the best person possible as a wife,
and her stamina gave the country and the world relief,
because everybody were just crashing over this man's untimely death.
A man who lived for and died for goodness now ends up like this.
I would have preferred to be alone at this time with my children.
We were always willing to share Martin Luther King with the world
because he was a symbol of the finest man is capable of being.
Yet to us he was a father and a husband.
I am surprised and pleased at the success of his teaching,
for our children say calmly, "Daddy is not dead.
He may be physically dead, but his spirit will never die."
Through their tears, Mama King said to me,
"I want you to know
that when the tension of the moment tapers a little bit,
I can tell you fully how much I appreciate what you did."
And I said, "What did I do?"
She said, "Well, you told Martin what I said,
that I wanted him to spend more time with me." She said, "He called me."
And she thinks that she was one of the last persons he talked to,
and she said, "I know I'm gonna feel good about that one of these days."
I got a call that Mrs. Kennedy would like very much
to pay her respects to Mrs. King.
It was the date of the funeral,
and Mrs. Kennedy walks over to Mrs. King.
The now two widows embrace
and they hold one another.
I was on my way to the funeral, and I had to pass the office,
and the office door was open, our SCLC office,
and people were bringing things outta there.
We gather here this morning
in one of the darkest hours for Martin Luther King,
sent forth as a Moses in the wilderness of this sick nation of ours.
I went across the street over there, and sure enough,
it was a test of our nonviolence.
These people were taking things off the wall,
and off the desk, and everything else. And I had to calm them down,
'cause they were frantic, and they were wailing,
and moanin' and groanin'.
So, they were not like thieves,
they were people who had felt they had lost Martin Luther King,
and they were just trying to find something they could hold on to
that Martin Luther King, perhaps, had touched.
But I missed the funeral. I got there in time to see Robert Kennedy
and some others come out of the church,
but the wagon had, okay, gone off.
There has been a lot of historical tragedies
that give us time to reflect on much that has been lost to us
and the cruelty of the issues of race.
None more profoundly robbed me
of an important part of what I thought my life would be
than when Martin was murdered.
His death was not just a great loss historically,
but in a deep personal sense, I lost a friend.
The cemetery is too small for his spirit.
The grave is too narrow for his soul.
We commend his legacy of courage and love to ourselves,
our children, and our children's children.
We commend his life to the universe.
My first reaction was to be mad with him.
You got us in all this hell, now you're going to heaven and leaving us in hell.
Why don't you take us with you?
But I was panicked to know how we followed.
We were not able to stay together without him,
and the movement began to fragment.
What has happened in the past has been our lives.
As older people, we've gone through those different periods,
and we have suffered, and we have also made some progress.
But this is what our lives were about.
The question is the next generation,
cause it's not what you've gained, it's what you can maintain.
Martin Luther King went to the blackboard and taught us nonviolence,
but nonviolence is not confined to any historical period.
He speaks to this generation clearly, as if he's in yesterday's morning paper.
His strategies, his philosophy, his worldview remain real today.
He wanted a future world that was changed
because of our nonviolent struggles.
He wanted his life to be remembered by making the nation realize
that nonviolence is what we must in the end have.
I think people discovered only after his death
that he was more radical than they actually knew.
I don't think he wanted us to take anything other than all that we deserve,
and that's what radicalism in the best sense is about.
Using the power that you have to help transform the society for the better.
With Martin Luther King, we have the holiday,
and we talk about how wonderful he was, but we really should develop his work.
It's our responsibility, everybody's responsibility.
There are 300 million of us and social change is the jab of each of us.
When you see something that is not right, not fair,
not just, you have a moral obligation and a mandate to do something,
to say something, to speak up, to speak out.
He is issuing as much of a call to us today as he was calling to us in 1968,
and I hope we will hear that call and finish the next face of his movement.
He talked about the importance of keep going forward.
He said, "If you can't fly, you drive. If you can't drive, you run.
If you can't run, you walk.
If you can't walk, you crawl but keep moving forward."
From 1956 until April 4th, 1968
Martin Luther King Jr. may have done more
to achieve political, social, economic justice
than any other person in the journey of American history.
The problems we have that Martin lived for are still with us,
and the complexity of good and evil in this world
is gonna always be with us.
I don't know that anybody struggled with it any more or did any better
that Martin King in my lifetime.
He always said, we've come a long, long way,
but we still got a long way to go.
And somewhere, wherever Martin is,
he's struggling beyond this place in time and space.
Well, I never like to discuss Martin Luther King's influence.
I'm just trying to do a job and I think it's a job that has to be done,
and I'm not trying to do it merely for myself, or merely for my children,
or merely for the negro, but for America,
because I think it's true that if this problem isn't solved,
the soul of our nation will be lost.
And the only way to redeem the soul of America
is to remove or to eradicate racism in all of its dimensions.
The End