TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/king/king.007

Text File | 1992-08-29 | 11.3 KB | 214 lines

                                                                                April 12, 1968

The Assassination



     In causation and execution, the murder of Martin Luther King
was both a symbol and a symptom of the nation's racial malaise.
The proximate cause of death was, ironically, a minor labor
dispute in a Southern backwater: the two-month-old strike of
1,3000 predominantly Negro garbage collectors in the decaying
Mississippi river town of Memphis. The plight of the sanitation
workers, caused by the refusal of Memphis' intransigent white
Mayor Henry Loeb to meet their modest wage and compensation
demands, first attracted and finally eradicated Dr. King, the
conqueror of Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma.

     Paradoxically, when a Negro riot ensued during his first
Memphis march a fortnight ago, and Loeb (along with Tennessee
Governor Buford Ellington) responded with state troopers and
National Guardsmen, King felt that his nonviolent philosophy had
been besmirched and wanted to withdraw. Only at the urging of his
aides in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference did he
consent to return.

     Repairing the Image. King was more concerned with his
planned "camp-in" of poverty-stricken Southern Negroes in the
nation's capital, planned for April 22. There, as he wrote in a
news release that reached S.C.L.C. supporters the morning after
his death, he hoped to "channelize the smoldering rage of the
Negro and white poor" in a showdown demonstration of nonviolence.
Memphis was supposed to be only a way station toward Washington.
Yet when he agreed to continue the Memphis struggle, it was under
threat of both death and dishonor.

     The Eastern Airlines jet that carried King from Atlanta to
Memphis was delayed 15 minutes before takeoff while crewmen
checked its baggage for bombs that anonymous callers had warned
were aboard. That was nothing particularly unusual for a man
whose life had been threatened so often, but when King arrived in
Memphis he met a different challenge. Some newspapers had
emphasized during the previous week that the prophet of the poor
had been staying at the luxurious Rivermont, a Holiday Inn
hostelry on the Mississippi's east bank, which charges $29 a
night for a suite. To repair his image, King checked into the
Negro-owned Lorraine, a nondescript, two-story cinderblock
structure near Memphis' renowned Beale Street (and conveniently
close to the Claiborne Temple on Mason Street, kickoff point and
terminus for the sanitation marches). At the Lorraine, King and
his entourage paid $13 a night for their green-walled, rust-
spotted rooms.

     The Fear of Death. Across Mulberry Street from the Lorraine,
on a slight rise, stands a nameless rooming house adorned only
with a metal awning whose red, green and yellow stripes shade an
equally nameless clientele. Into that dwelling--actually two
buildings, one for whites, the other for Negroes, and connected
by a dank, umbilical hallway--walked a young, dark-haired white
man in a neat business suit. "He had a silly little smile that
I'll never forget," says Mrs. Bessie Brewer, who manages the
rooming  house. The man, who called himself John Willard,
carefully chose Room 5, with a view of the Lorraine, and paid his
$8.50 for the week with a crisp $20 bill--another rarity that
stuck in Mrs. Brewer's mind.

     Back at the Lorraine, King and his aides were finishing a
long, hot day of tactical planning for the next week's march--one
that would be carried out in defiance of a federal district court
injunction. In the course of the conference, King had assured his
colleagues that, despite death threats, he was not afraid. "Maybe
I've got the advantage over most people," he mused. "I've
conquered the fear of death." King was well aware of his
vulnerability. After the strategy session, King washed and
dressed for dinner. Then he walked out of Room 306 onto the
second-floor balcony of the Lorraine to take the evening air.
Leaning casually on the green iron railing he chatted with his
co-workers readying his Cadillac sedan in the dusk below.

     "A Stick of Dynamite." To Soul Singer Ben Branch, who was to
perform at a Claiborne Temple rally later that evening, King made
a special request: "I want you to sing that song 'Precious Lord'
(Lead, lead, lead me on to the Land, Oh, oh, oh, take my hand,
Precious Lord, And lead your child on home.) for me--sing it real
pretty." When Chauffeur Solomon Jones naggingly advised King to
don his topcoat against the evening's chill, the muscular
Atlantan grinned and allowed: "O.K., I will."

     Then, from a window of the rooming house across the way,
came a single shot. "It was like a stick of dynamite," recalled
one aide. "It sounded like a firecracker, and I thought it was a
pretty poor joke," said another. All of the aides hit the deck.
The heavy-caliber bullet smashed through King's neck, exploded
against his lower right jaw, severing his spinal cord and
slamming him away from the rail, up against the wall, with hands
drawn tautly toward his head. "Oh Lord!" moaned one of his
lieutenants as he saw the blood flowing over King's white,
button-down shirt.

     His aides tenderly laid towels over the gaping wound; some
30 hard-hatted Memphis police swiftly converged on the motel in
response to the shot. In doing so, they missed the assassin,
whose weapon (a scope-sighted 30.06-cal Remington pump rifle),
binoculars and suitcase were found near the rooming house. A
spent cartridge casing was left in the grimy lavatory. The range
from window to balcony: an easy 205 ft.

     An ambulance came quickly, and raced him to St. Joseph's
Hospital 1 1/2 miles away. Moribund as he entered the emergency
ward, Martin Luther King Jr., 39, was pronounced dead within an
hour of the shooting. His death was the twelfth major
assassination and the most traumatic in the civil rights struggle
since 1963.

     South Toward Home. The flurry of Negro outrage that followed
the murder in Memphis was conducted mostly by high-spirited
youths -- and was more than compensated for in solemn grief. As
soon as he learned of the shooting, Atlanta's Mayor Ivan Allen
Jr., one of the South's best-accredited white civil rights
advocates, called Mrs. Coretta King -- who only last January had
undergone major surgery -- and arranged a flight to Memphis. At
the Atlanta terminal, Allen received word that King had died at
the hospital, and he broke the news to the widow in the foyer of
the ladies' rest room. Mrs. King returned to the family's modest
home on the edge of Atlanta's Vine City, a middle-class Negro
neighborhood, where the phone was already ringing with calls from
across the country. On hand to help answer was Mrs. Eugene
McCarthy, wife of the Minnesota Senator, who had long worked with
Mrs. King in ecumenical church affairs. One caller was New York's
Senator Robert Kennedy, who had come to King's aid in 1960 when
he was in jail for his Atlanta sit-ins. R.F.K. promised to send a
plane to transport the leader's body back to Atlanta.

     To many whites, the subsequent mourning might have seemed
unbearably emotional. In Memphis, before it was carried south
toward home, King's body lay in state at the R.S. Lewis & Sons
Funeral Home in an open bronze casket, the black suit tidily
pressed, the wound in the throat now all but invisible. Many of
those who filed past could not control their tears. Some kissed
King's lips; others reverently touched his face. A few women
threw their hands in the air and cried aloud in ululating agony.
Mrs. King was a dry-eyed frieze of heartbreak. At the funeral
this week, to be attended by many of the nation's and the world's
great men, her composure will be hard to match.

     Highest Priority. For all the sense of personal loss that
pervaded the nation with his death, Martin Luther King's heritage
of nonviolence seemed to have endured its architect's demise.
Those who predicted that racial pacifism had passed with him were
contradicted last week from Harlem to Watts, in Northern ghettos
and Southern grit towns, where black leasers and youths in great
numbers took to the tense streets and urged their brothers to
"cool it for the Doc." Mississippi's Charles Evers curbed a
Jackson rising with Kingly oratory. Even such hardcore militants
as Harlem Mau Mau Leader Charles 37X Kenyatta and Los Angeles'
Ron Karenga, the shaven-skulled boss of the "US," manned sound
trucks and passed resolutions calling for calm. Yet in the
unhappy racial climate of the U.S. today, that forbearance could
unravel with calamitous speed.

     If the murder of Martin Luther King is not to further
polarize the racism, both black and white--decried only last
month by the President's riot commission--the nation will have to
accept the need for new programs, new laws and new attitudes
toward the Negro. As the commission concluded, "There can be no
higher priority for national action and no higher claim on the
nation's conscience."


____________________________________________________________
The Man in Room 5


     He was not a very methodical murderer. U.S. Attorney General
Ramsey Clark, who descended on Memphis with 75 federal lawmen 14
hours after Martin Luther King was shot, said that the assassin
had shed an "unusually large" amount of physical and
psychological evidence.

     In the frowzy--and unlocked--communal bathroom where the
killer waited for more than an hour before he could fire the
fatal shot, investigators found a handprint, a thumbprint and an
expended casing from his rifle. On the street outside the rooming
house, where he occupied Room 5 with a clear view of King's motel
across the way, he dropped his rifle and a blue overnight bag
containing some clothes. All of these items and imprints gave the
FBI and Memphis police a microscopic field day whose yield should
provide invaluable courtroom evidence.

     Though few occupants of the rooming house who saw "John
Willard" might prove credible witnesses, there were several solid
citizens who distinctly recall his appearance and mannerisms. One
was Bessie Brewer, the rooming-house manager, who recalls quite
clearly the killer's looks, height (about 6 ft.), age (30-32),
build (roughly 165 lbs. and slender) and accent ("he spoke just
like any other Memphian," i.e., with a drawl). Other witnesses
recounted in detail how a man of that description ran from the
rooming house at the time of the shooting (6:01 p.m.), leaped
into a white Mustang with no front license plate (all Tennessee
cars have two), and then "laid rubber" up the road. Those clues
-- plus a total reward offer of $100,000 -- seemed more than
enough to turn up the killer.

     The fact remains that the Memphis police -- there were 35 in
the immediate neighborhood -- muffed their best chance to capture
the killer during the minutes immediately after the shot. He
escaped in exactly the right direction: the entrance to the
rooming house fronted on a street just one block west of
Mulberry, across which the shooting occurred. Thus the gunman had
eluded the main concentration of police even before he hit the
street. Just why he dropped his weapon and overnight bag is a
mystery. Though the search spread to a six-state area (Alabama,
Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee),
Attorney General Clark refused to predict an early arrest.