The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I

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Speaker 27 Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

Speaker 32 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 36 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 36 Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production, and partnership with Argenix explores people discovering strength in the most unexpected places.

Speaker 38 Listen to Untold Stories on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 13 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck.

Speaker 13 And it's just the two of us today, which is fine because we need to keep our nose to the grindstone and really focus on a pair of really important episodes, which we kick off now.

Speaker 9 That's right.

Speaker 9 We haven't done a two-parter in a while, but as we got into the originally one-parter of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.,

Speaker 9 you were like, man, there's a lot more here that we can just kind of explode this into a two-parter.

Speaker 13 Yeah, that was verbatim what I said.

Speaker 9 And I said, let's do it.

Speaker 13 There was a ton of stuff that I did not know about MLK, his assassination. Yeah, same.
James Earl Ray, like there's a lot of stuff around it.

Speaker 13 And it's just a reminder that history gets so boiled down to like its bare essence or even like a caricature of itself. And when you really dig into like a historical event,

Speaker 13 you're just reminded that there's just so many people affected and involved. And it's not just, you know, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King Jr.

Speaker 13 and, you know, the world mourned. I mean, that was all true, but there was just so much more to it.
So hopefully we'll kind of get some of that across in this.

Speaker 9 Yeah, for sure. I mean,

Speaker 9 we'll talk about it some, but I've been to the King Center. I've been to the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis at the Lorain Motel.

Speaker 9 And like, I've thought I knew a lot about this stuff, but until we do our job

Speaker 9 like we do, I learned a lot more. So it's pretty great.

Speaker 13 So let's talk MLK because he kind of skyrocketed to prominence

Speaker 13 from just the start. He became involved in the Montgomery bus boycott, which most people say kicked off the civil rights era in the United States, thanks to Rosa Parks,

Speaker 13 who we did an episode on, Rosa Parks Agent of Change. You remember that? That's right.
That was great. Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 9 And all this is just, you know, so we were setting the table kind of as a lead-in to where things were in April of 1968. Yes.

Speaker 9 So like you said, you know, 12-ish years earlier is when he really rose to prominence.

Speaker 9 And so much so that in February of 57, he was on the cover of Time magazine.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 9 So in 1963, he was Times Man of the Year after being on the cover just, you know, a handful of years earlier. And in 1964, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Speaker 9 So he was one of the most famous Americans by the early 1960s.

Speaker 13 Yes.

Speaker 13 But one of the things you don't learn about these days as often is that he was at that point

Speaker 13 beginning to become widely criticized,

Speaker 13 not just by white Americans, many of whom had been criticizing him all along, but by black Americans as well.

Speaker 13 There was a real division in the civil rights movement between Martin Luther King's vision of his doctrine of nonviolence, which is basically saying, Hey, we're going to

Speaker 13 essentially do everything we can to show white Americans the

Speaker 13 problems that black Americans face just by being black in America. And

Speaker 13 no matter what they do to us, we're not going to fight back and we're going to make an example of ourselves

Speaker 13 that will hopefully set for for them. And the ultimate goal was to integrate into America, to integrate black Americans into America so that there wasn't black America and white America.

Speaker 13 And that ran very much contrary to the other rival idea, which was Malcolm X's idea.

Speaker 9 Yeah, and we haven't done one on Malcolm X yet, so maybe

Speaker 9 we should hit that up as a follow-up at some point.

Speaker 3 For sure.

Speaker 9 But yes, this was sort of the other side of the coin. Malcolm X believed in black separatism.
He was like, this nonviolent approach isn't working. And black people cannot integrate into white America.

Speaker 9 It's a racist society, and it's just not possible. So we need

Speaker 9 self-determination.

Speaker 9 Violence, you know, by any means necessary, is an acceptable sort of avenue to achieve the goals of black determination.

Speaker 9 And especially considering violence is being inflicted upon black black people by white people constantly. So it's time to fight back, like with fists and clubs and whatever else.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 And again, that's totally contrary to King's doctrine of nonviolence, which Malcolm X considered criminal, as he put it, in the face of just being beaten by whites just for marching in the streets peacefully.

Speaker 13 And a big portion of the people who are critical of King and his nonviolence doctrine were the younger generations. They tended to lean more militantly, more in Malcolm X's direction.

Speaker 13 And then on in white America, with white Americans,

Speaker 13 he was basically never popular during his lifetime, at least with the majority of white Americans.

Speaker 9 Yeah, I mean, and we know this because they did polls back then. There were Gallup polls that found

Speaker 9 in 1963 through 1966, each year found that fewer than 40% of white Americans viewed Martin Luther King Jr. favorably.

Speaker 9 So one of the other things that didn't help besides his work in the, you know, in civil rights was his stance on Vietnam and the war in Vietnam.

Speaker 9 He was always against it, but really changed his stance in 1967, started being really, really vocal about it as far as publicly condemning the war, started leading anti-war marches, giving speeches against the war.

Speaker 9 One very famous one was

Speaker 9 Beyond Vietnam Colon, A Time to Break the Silence, a speech he gave in New York City at Riverside Church in April, actually exactly one year, April 4th, 1967, before his murder.

Speaker 9 And it was a very controversial speech because it was his most adamant anti-war, anti-Vietnam speech yet. And he specifically called out

Speaker 9 America and the U.S. military by sending a disproportionate number of, you know, kind of poor black American boys to fight that war.

Speaker 13 Yeah. And so this is, it's really hard to overstate how controversial this speech was.
Like he just stopped mincing words and came out and said everything that needed to be said.

Speaker 13 And so his alliance with Lyndon Bain Johnson, who was president at the time, was just shattered right then. LBJ stepped away from him, publicly broke with him.
I think

Speaker 13 Laura helps us out with this. She found 168 newspapers, issued editorials denouncing him for that speech.
So that, like, he was already not super popular with white Americans.

Speaker 13 His popularity was so-so with Black Americans, and all Americans were now mad at him for his stance on Vietnam, or a ton of them were. And then, one of the other things that really

Speaker 13 proved to be very difficult for him later in his life, later in his career,

Speaker 13 was he shifted focus from strictly civil rights for black Americans to economic justice for poor Americans of all races.

Speaker 13 He created something called the Poor People's Campaign. He came up with an economic bill of rights that is essentially pretty socialist, I mean, at its core.

Speaker 13 And he also basically said, like, this campaign is also going to be a shift, not just in focus, but in potency. Like, we're not going to be quite as peaceful as we were before.

Speaker 13 We're not going to go Malcolm X, like, full-on militant, but we're, you can expect, you know, I think he famously said 15 to 16% more more militancy.

Speaker 9 Right. Yeah.
And, you know,

Speaker 9 this ship, so he already had, you know, people coming at him from all sides. And now even within his own camp, they didn't love it either.

Speaker 9 His advisors and his staff didn't love this change of direction.

Speaker 9 So, you know, by the time April of 1968 rolls around, he's exhausted. He's tired.
He's...

Speaker 9 got people coming at him from every angle, even within his own camp. And he just wasn't at his peak peak personally or with his career.

Speaker 13 Right. So, Chuck, do you want to take a break now?

Speaker 9 Yeah,

Speaker 9 we've set the stage with where King was, and we'll come back and then set the stage with Memphis and where Memphis was. Well, it was in Tennessee, but how Memphis was in April of 1968.

Speaker 2 Support for the show today comes from public.com.

Speaker 4 You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 5 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side.

Speaker 9 The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and Public gets that.

Speaker 10 Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously.

Speaker 12 On Public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 13 Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there.

Speaker 14 Plus, an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash account.

Speaker 17 Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously.

Speaker 7 Go to public.com slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.

Speaker 19 That's public.com slash SYSK.

Speaker 20 Paid for by Public Investing.

Speaker 22 All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.

Speaker 23 Brokerage services for U.S.

Speaker 25 listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Crypto provided by ZeroHash.

Speaker 27 Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

Speaker 32 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 36 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 40 That's right.

Speaker 41 And in the latest season of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby studio production in partnership with Argenix, host Martine Hackett explores what it means to reclaim your identity, discover resilience, and cultivate self-advocacy.

Speaker 30 From the frustration of misdiagnosis to the small victories that fuel hope, every story told is meant to unite, uplift, and empower.

Speaker 36 And that inspires us all to take one step closer to being a better advocate and seeing life from a different point of view.

Speaker 42 So if you or a loved one are living with an autoimmune condition, find inspiration along your path.

Speaker 42 Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 13 So in the spring of 1968, Memphis, Tennessee, which had previously prided itself on its white community and black communities, kind of, you know, fairly getting along, especially compared to some other places like places in Alabama,

Speaker 13 it was by this time in high tension as a town.

Speaker 13 And it was largely because of the Memphis sanitation worker strike.

Speaker 13 MLK became very interested in helping further the goals of the Memphis sanitation workers in their strike because he basically saw this as like, this is a perfect bridge between this transition from a focus just on civil rights to this larger focus on poor people of all colors.

Speaker 13 Because

Speaker 13 like this was mostly, almost exclusively, black sanitation workers who were struggling for recognition of their work, dignity in their work, decent wages.

Speaker 13 Apparently, if you were a full-time sanitation worker in Memphis, you were still eligible for food stamps after your full salary.

Speaker 13 And he was like,

Speaker 13 this is exactly the perfect kind of thing that I'm trying to get across. Like, this is important.

Speaker 13 So he kind of focused on Memphis in the spring of 1968.

Speaker 13 And like I said, it was in a state of high tension because a couple of

Speaker 13 protests, marches essentially to support the workers had not really gone really well previously.

Speaker 9 Yeah, but before these marches, there was, you know, there was already a strike going on. It just wasn't, you know, full throttle at this point.

Speaker 9 What would really kick that into gear were the very tragic deaths of two sanitation workers, Echo Cole and Robert Walker.

Speaker 9 They were crushed to death. Their truck malfunctioned.
They were trying to take shelter from the rain and were crushed by the truck and the city.

Speaker 9 didn't pay any compensation to their families at all. So this is what really kind of triggered the mass walk off the job.

Speaker 9 Almost all the workers, black sanitation workers, went on strike at the time.

Speaker 9 And King was like, all right, I got to get to Memphis. It's in trouble.
It's an opportunity for me as well, like you said, to sort of

Speaker 9 help me segue into this other movement.

Speaker 9 And there were a couple of different marches. On March 28th, he led a march.
of 5,000 people through Memphis. And almost right away, it turned violent.

Speaker 9 Not by his hand, but it was a group called the Invaders. It was a militant group of young African Americans who were not on board with King.
They were not on board with nonviolence, obviously.

Speaker 9 And they started looting. They started breaking windows and stores.
Police came in and

Speaker 9 we all know the drill at this point.

Speaker 9 People scatter.

Speaker 9 Police are beating people, shooting at people. There was a 16-year-old named Larry Payne that was shot and killed by a police officer named Leslie Dean Jones.

Speaker 9 60 people injured. And then all of a sudden, Memphis is under curfew and close to 4,000 National Guardsmen are brought in.

Speaker 13 Yeah. And this was on the heels of another march the month before in February where protesters, including some ministers who were marching, were maced by police.

Speaker 13 So Memphis just like basically almost like throwing a switch went from like a generally okay city as far as race relations were concerned to like the National Guard is now here keeping order in like a month, it just changed that quickly.

Speaker 13 And because he was leading the march on March 28th,

Speaker 13 King became totally-I don't want to say obsessed, but he was fully zeroed in on returning to Memphis to set things right. Yeah.

Speaker 13 Because that was a huge black eye in his against him, his career, and in particular, his whole

Speaker 13 doctrine of nonviolence. And again, like the invaders were not related to what was going on.
They essentially used this as a chance to mix things up.

Speaker 13 And King just basically wanted to go give it another try and hopefully restore his reputation, hopefully restore the reputation of the civil rights movement he was leading.

Speaker 13 And he put everything on the line to go back to Memphis and try it again because it could have gone wrong again. and that would have really damaged things even further.

Speaker 13 A lot of his advisors were like, We don't need to go back to Memphis. Like, we have a trip to Africa scheduled, and like, let's just follow through and we'll leave it behind us.

Speaker 13 And he was like, No, we have to go back. So, we actually canceled that Africa trip and brought everyone back to Memphis.
And he got back there on April 3rd.

Speaker 13 And that evening, he gave what's been known today as his I've Been to the Mountaintop speech. I believe it it was his final speech.
He gave it at the Mason Temple Church in Memphis.

Speaker 13 And it was a pretty significant speech, as you can imagine. I mean, basically everyone's aware of this.
But in it, he recounts a previous assassination attempt that I had never heard of. Had you?

Speaker 9 Yeah, from visiting the museums, but it's certainly not something I don't think is like super widely known.

Speaker 13 Right. Well, so he was signing a book at a department store when he was stabbed in the chest by a mentally ill woman named Azola Curry, stabbed in the chest with a seven-inch letter opener.

Speaker 13 And Azola Curry was convinced that civil rights organizations like MLKs were tracking her, had singled her out and were tracking her, preventing her from getting employment, just generally messing with her life.

Speaker 13 And the papers all reported that the surgeon who treated MLK, obviously he survived, was that the letter opener came so close to his heart that had he sneezed, it would have penetrated his aorta and killed him.

Speaker 13 So he really lucked out. And he talked about this in his I've been to the mountaintop speech.
But the thing that most people remember about it is that he,

Speaker 13 in a way, almost predicted his death the following day at the end of the speech.

Speaker 9 Yeah, I mean, I'll go ahead and read it. He talked about not being around.
He said, like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place.
But I'm not concerned about that now.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. So

Speaker 9 a definite sort of eerie thing to happen the night before his murder.

Speaker 13 Yeah, and I've read that some people are like he was. He felt like that death was close, that he didn't have much time left.

Speaker 13 So it makes sense that he would have put that in. I don't think he expected to be murdered the next day, but he just, I read that he sensed that he was not going to live much longer.

Speaker 9 Yeah, I mean, he had seen what happened with Kennedy,

Speaker 9 obviously what happened with Robert Kennedy afterward. But

Speaker 9 yeah, it was those kind of things, you know, very sadly were just much more common back then.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I was thinking about that and just like living in an era. of assassinations, like successful assassinations of prominent political figures, one of whom was the president at the time.

Speaker 13 That's just nuts that America went through that period.

Speaker 9 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, King, Malcolm X, the two Kennedys.

Speaker 9 Yeah, it's just

Speaker 9 a very fraught, fraught time in our history, for sure. For sure.
So he's back in town to hold a march to set the previous march right.

Speaker 9 And one of the things he had to do was get the invaders on board with not doing this again. So at the Lorain Motel,

Speaker 9 he was actually meeting with them. One of the things he did there was meet with them and negotiate a deal where like, hey, you guys don't turn this thing violent.
And they said, okay, we can do that.

Speaker 9 Give us some money, give us some cars, and give us a little more influence. And we'll do that.
So they were negotiating that.

Speaker 9 The march was actually planned for April 4th.

Speaker 9 And this is one of those sort of sliding doors thing.

Speaker 9 It was actually put on hold because the city got an injunction to stop it from a federal court. And if that hadn't happened and he would have been marching on April 4th,

Speaker 9 perhaps James O'Ray would have continued to sort of pursue King because as we'll see, he had been following him around for about a month. Or maybe not.

Speaker 9 Maybe that assassination never happens. But because of that injunction, the march was delayed from April 4th.

Speaker 9 King stayed in town to go to court to help appeal that injunction, was in court on April 4th through the day. And then late that afternoon, the judges said, said, all right, we can do this march.

Speaker 9 It'll be next Monday. And King,

Speaker 9 so late that afternoon, the judges said, all right, the march can go forward, but it's going to go forward next Monday.

Speaker 13 So that day on April 4th, it was the evening. It turns out Bono got it wrong in that song Pride.

Speaker 13 Did you know they corrected it? Did they?

Speaker 9 Yeah,

Speaker 9 I never listened to much of it, but they put out

Speaker 9 reimaginings of a bunch of their songs called Songs of Surrender. And like you said, it was early morning, April 4th.
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky and the song Pride in the Name of Love.

Speaker 9 And he changed it to In the Evening, April 4th.

Speaker 13 Well, yes, that's much more accurate because that's when it happened.

Speaker 13 King had just been grinding away in Memphis for two days by then.

Speaker 13 And he was staying in room 306 of the... now very famous Lorain Motel.

Speaker 13 That was the room that he usually took anytime he and his people were in Memphis, they stayed at the Lorain Hotel because it was a black-owned business and had been owned by Walter Bailey and his wife Lori since the 1940s.

Speaker 13 It was listed in the Green Book, even.

Speaker 13 It was just a black-owned business, and it was a nice hotel to stay in.

Speaker 13 And by the time the late afternoon, early evening rolled around, MLK was late for a dinner at the Reverend Billy Kyle's house in Memphis.

Speaker 13 And they all started to leave to head to Billy Kyle's house for dinner. And he stepped outside of his room and onto the balcony.
And he was speaking down to some other members of his group.

Speaker 13 I think he told one of them to start the car.

Speaker 13 And a shot did ring out and it hit MLK in the face.

Speaker 9 Yeah,

Speaker 9 sort of in the chin and jaw area and the neckline.

Speaker 9 There's that very famous photograph

Speaker 9 of the people, you know, his his group standing on the on the balcony. I think like three guys are pointing across Mulberry Street, which ran between the Lorain Motel and the,

Speaker 9 what was it, the Bessie what boarding house?

Speaker 13 Bessie Brewer's boarding house.

Speaker 9 Yeah, Bessie Brewer's boarding house. And they were like, that's where the shot came from.

Speaker 9 The picture was taken by a South African photographer named Joseph Lau, L-O-U-W.

Speaker 9 uh became one of the most famous you know photographs in american history of course and the gentleman kneeling uh attending to King, trying to do whatever he could,

Speaker 9 that was a guy named Merrill McCullough. And he was an undercover cop who had infiltrated the invaders.
So just by chance, he was on hand as an undercover cop there.

Speaker 9 And he's the one that's kneeling, kind of trying to attend to King.

Speaker 9 Again, he was shot at 6.01,

Speaker 9 was alive,

Speaker 9 even at the hospital, barely, but he died just an hour later. He's pronounced dead at the age of 39 at 7.05 p.m.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 And a doctor named Jerry T. Francisco was the medical examiner at Shelby County at the time, and he conducted an autopsy.

Speaker 13 And he concluded that Martin Luther King was killed by a gunshot wound to the chin and neck with a total transaction of the lower cervical and upper thoracic spinal cord and other structures of the neck.

Speaker 13 I read somewhere that

Speaker 13 Martin Luther King probably didn't even hear the shot that

Speaker 13 killed him. It just hit him so fast.
It was shot from a high-powered rifle at, you know, close enough by that, like it would have, he just wouldn't have heard it.

Speaker 13 And I was thinking it was possible that he died almost instantly.

Speaker 13 Had you read that he was still alive for a period, like when he got to the hospital?

Speaker 9 Yeah,

Speaker 9 he was apparently just hanging on. He was alive in the ambulance.
He was alive,

Speaker 9 I think, shortly after he got to the hospital.

Speaker 13 Well, hopefully he was completely unconscious at the time. So

Speaker 13 I mean, it's my hope that

Speaker 13 he just never knew what hit him or anything hit him. I didn't, yeah, I didn't realize that.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I thought he probably died instantly.

Speaker 9 Yeah, but when Francisco, that doctor, he, you know, he described the gunshot wound, but he didn't fully dissect the path of the bullet.

Speaker 9 He said he did that because he didn't want to deform the body any further.

Speaker 9 But that, of course,

Speaker 9 would help out later with conspiracy theories

Speaker 9 as far as not having a full accounting of the path of the bullet, which we'll get into all that, I believe, in part two.

Speaker 13 But right after...

Speaker 9 the shooting, like literally the minutes right afterward, there were two men in that boarding house who saw a guy leaving with a suitcase and like a blanket bundled up that had a bunch of stuff in it, big enough where it could have held a rifle.

Speaker 9 And what happened was, well, there was another witness that said they saw a man passing, I don't know how it's pronounced,

Speaker 9 K-A-N-I-P-E, K-9, or Kanip.

Speaker 13 Kaneeps. That's what I'm going to say.
Knipes?

Speaker 9 Okay,

Speaker 9 Knipes Amusement Company. And just dropped this bundle on the front door of the store.

Speaker 9 You can, you know, there's a picture of it if you look that up, and you can kind of see the rifle poking out even. And that's what they found.
They found some aftershave. They found a portable radio.

Speaker 9 They found some brand new binoculars, a couple of cans of beer, and precisely a 30-out six Remington 760 Game Master rifle with a scope, which is a hunting rifle. It's kind of a...

Speaker 13 a unique gun in that it's a it's a long-range rifle that's a pump action rifle which uh usually they are bolt action rifles oh i didn't know that yeah that is fairly unique um so yeah that's that's pretty specific um at the boarding house too at bessie brewer's boarding house people who were staying there um later told police that they heard people or at least someone maybe going back and forth to the bathroom.

Speaker 13 This is a boarding house, so obviously there was a shared bathroom rather than a bathroom in each room.

Speaker 13 And somebody kept going to the bathroom, hanging out in the bathroom, coming out of the bathroom, going back to the bathroom. And the cops who investigated found scuff marks in the bathtub,

Speaker 13 obviously left by somebody's shoes. And the bathtub was where you would have had to have stood to see out the window to have a shot at Martin Luther King on the balcony.

Speaker 13 So the people in the boarding house heard. MLK's assassin.
The question was who it was. And obviously, we know now it was James Earl Ray, but at the time they didn't realize that.

Speaker 9 Also, like two minutes later, the shooting had been radioed into the police.

Speaker 9 And just five minutes later at 6.08, the owner of that amusement company told police that he saw a white man running through the alley and like actually saw him drop that bundle and then flee the scene in a white Ford Mustang.

Speaker 13 Yeah. We'll talk about the investigation and everything like that in part two.

Speaker 13 But I say we take our second break and come back and talk about what happened after MLK died.

Speaker 2 Support for the show today comes from public.com.

Speaker 4 You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 5 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side.

Speaker 9 The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and public gets that.

Speaker 10 Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously.

Speaker 12 On public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 13 Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there.

Speaker 14 Plus an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash account.

Speaker 17 Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously.

Speaker 7 Go to public.com slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.

Speaker 19 That's public.com slash SYSK.

Speaker 20 Paid for by Public Investing.

Speaker 22 All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.

Speaker 23 Brokerage services for U.S.-listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC.

Speaker 25 CryptoTrading provided by ZeroHash.

Speaker 27 Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

Speaker 32 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 36 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 40 That's right.

Speaker 40 And in the latest season of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby studio production in partnership with Argenix, host Martine Hackett explores what it means to reclaim your identity, discover resilience, and cultivate self-advocacy.

Speaker 30 From the frustration of misdiagnosis to the small victories that fuel hope, every story told is meant to unite, uplift, and empower.

Speaker 33 And that inspires us all to take one step closer to being a better advocate and seeing life from a different point of view.

Speaker 42 So, if you or a loved one are living with an autoimmune condition, find inspiration along your path.

Speaker 42 Listen to Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 44 Let's talk about something you probably haven't thought about. Your couch.

Speaker 45 Yeah, that thing you nap on, geek it on, cry on.

Speaker 44 Turns out that most sofas are basically bacteria playgrounds.

Speaker 7 It's true.

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Take the covers off, throw them in the machine, boom, clean.

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Speaker 9 So, you know, very famously, Walter Cronkite

Speaker 9 came on the news and very somberly told the nation what had happened on the CBS nightly news.

Speaker 9 President Johnson declared the next day, April 7th, a national day of mourning. Flags went to half-staff.
A lot of businesses around the country closed for the day.

Speaker 9 And he said,

Speaker 9 Johnson said on TV, the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
has not died with him.

Speaker 9 Men who are white, men who are black, must and will now join together as never in the past to let all the forces of divisiveness know that America should not be ruled by the bullet, but only by the ballot of free and of just men.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 So, yeah, like you said, the National Day of Mourning was April 7th.

Speaker 13 But throughout that whole period from the day that his assassination took place to his funeral, there was a lot of places closed down.

Speaker 13 And I saw, Chuck, that on the day of his funeral, the New York Stock Exchange closed, which is pretty significant.

Speaker 13 The NBA and the NHL were in their playoffs and they rescheduled their games, but the Major League Baseball did... they did not postpone opening day,

Speaker 13 much to their discredit. But Roberto Clemente and Maury Willis of the Pirates said, Well, we're not playing today.
It's Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral. That's great.

Speaker 13 And we're not going to disrespect it like that. And they inspired players on other teams to sit it out too.

Speaker 13 So, from what I saw, effectively, opening day was postponed for a number of teams, if not all of MLB.

Speaker 9 Yeah. And hey, we did do a good episode on Roberto Clemente.
Remember that one?

Speaker 13 Yep, that was a good one.

Speaker 9 So

Speaker 9 all across the country,

Speaker 9 you know, people react with extreme upset, which led to violence and some rioting and uprising in like 125 cities over the course of a few days. 39 people were killed.
3,500 people were injured.

Speaker 9 50,000 federal troops,

Speaker 9 you know, dispatched all over the country, basically, except New York and Los Angeles. They were a couple of the only major cities that they managed to kind of talk people down.

Speaker 13 Atlanta, too.

Speaker 9 Oh, Atlanta as well?

Speaker 13 That's great.

Speaker 9 So despite the fact that, you know,

Speaker 9 black folks and a lot of white folks are mourning this death,

Speaker 9 it also sort of widened the rift because it became a symbol all of a sudden as

Speaker 9 white America's rejection of equal rights, basically, and white Americans' rejection of nonviolence by literally dying by a bullet, a nonviolent man.

Speaker 9 But there were, you know, it wasn't just this. This was sort of the straw that broke the camel's back with just sort of every the state of things in 1968 with race relations.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I would call it more like a match thrown on a powder keg.

Speaker 13 The

Speaker 13 just the explosive reaction was, like you said, not just because of MLK's assassination, but that was the thing that set it off.

Speaker 13 Previously, the summer before, it was called the long, hot summer, because there have been a ton of riots nationwide in cities like Detroit.

Speaker 13 There was was five days of rioting um it just kept happening all over the place in um black communities around the united states and there were reasons for this um the there were like segregation had officially ended but in practice there was tons of segregation left especially kinds of like housing discrimination that essentially created black ghettos in downtown American cities that white Americans had left for the suburbs.

Speaker 13 And then they were starting to build highways through these cities and it was tough to find employment and the city itself didn't usually maintain stuff there so it was crumbling and deteriorating so there was a ton of frustration already and there had been riots already but there were a ton of them after MLK passed as well yeah and you know

Speaker 9 there was a a legitimate fear that a race war could break out in the United States. It wasn't,

Speaker 9 I don't think it was overstated

Speaker 9 looking back that that was a very real thing that could have happened.

Speaker 9 And there were, you know, there was one editorial writer who basically in the month after the assassination was like, King was the one that was preventing this from happening.

Speaker 9 So we may be in trouble here in the United States, like real trouble. Thankfully, that didn't happen, obviously.
But

Speaker 9 like we said, a lot of these cities, you know, people were killed, arrested, buildings were burned. Wilmington, Delaware was occupied by the National Guard for a year afterward.

Speaker 9 And looking back, it's looked as basically it was just a

Speaker 9 harassment campaign that made things worse.

Speaker 13 Yeah, the mayor was like, okay, you guys can leave pretty shortly after things calmed down. But the governor was like, no, we're going to stay.

Speaker 13 We're going to keep them here for a year. It was very odd.

Speaker 13 It was the longest occupation of any American city ever,

Speaker 13 which is, yeah, I mean, you just don't think of Wilmington, Delaware, stuff like that that happening to Wilmington, Delaware.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 9 One of the sort of

Speaker 9 positive things that happened after this, and it's hard to even frame it like that, but Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King's widow, did finish the job in Memphis on April 8th.

Speaker 9 She did lead that march with her four small kids along with 40,000 other people in a silent march.

Speaker 9 And that was King, you know, Martin Luther King was so adamant about going back to Memphis and having a nonviolent march. So it was special that she was able to see that through.

Speaker 13 Yeah. And imagine seeing 40,000 people pass by you silently.
How powerful that would be to see. Yeah.

Speaker 13 So the following day after Coretta Scott King led the Memphis march that MLK had set out to lead, his funeral was held in Atlanta at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he had been a preacher.

Speaker 13 And I think his father was the preacher there at the time.

Speaker 11 Is that right?

Speaker 9 I'm not sure. It's like four miles from my house.
Yeah. Right in the middle of Atlanta.

Speaker 13 I don't know. Yeah, I was going to say later, but that whole area that's called the Sweet Auburn community

Speaker 13 is largely preserved like it was

Speaker 13 around King's death. Like they, they, you know, there's still new businesses and people move in and out, but they've really gone to a lot of trouble to preserve like how it looked.

Speaker 13 The National Park Service has preserved it. And like you said, you toured the King Center.
That's an amazing place to go as well.

Speaker 13 But I thought that was really cool that it's been designated a National Historic Site. Yeah.
It's under protection.

Speaker 9 Yeah, which is always a little odd when you're driving through that area and you see a park ranger

Speaker 9 in the middle of the city. You're like, what's going on? They're like, oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 9 National. National Historic Site.
So that's.

Speaker 13 Yeah, you just assume they're lost.

Speaker 9 But

Speaker 9 that's the place that I always recommend when stuff you should know people write in or saying they're coming to Atlanta. That's a good thing.
And what should they do?

Speaker 9 I'm like, well, the Carter Center and the King Center are both very close to each other. And that's just a really great afternoon to go in there.

Speaker 9 And there's a lot of really cool displays, including a very sort of, I think I've talked about it before, a very sort of chilling single thing at the King Center, which is just a lone case. with the

Speaker 9 room 306 Lorain Motel Hotel Key sitting in it with nothing else else around it. It's just sort of speaks for itself.

Speaker 13 That's better than what I always reply with. I just tell them that they should go to Applebee's.

Speaker 9 I'm glad you got a good joke in this one.

Speaker 9 God bless you.

Speaker 13 Thank you. So his funeral, I looked up a picture of it.

Speaker 13 His casket was carried on a cart by two mules processing down

Speaker 13 one of the streets, probably Auburn Avenue. I didn't catch which street it was.
But there were 100,000

Speaker 13 people in this procession, not including people lined up on either side of the street as it passed,

Speaker 13 in a procession behind his casket, 100,000 people. And it's hard to get across.
what that looked like unless you see a photo of it. It just keeps going back and back and back and back.

Speaker 13 Literally as far as you could see, as far as the photographer could capture, there's a stream of people filling the road entirely following his casket and a procession.

Speaker 13 And I was heartened to see when I zoomed in that, like, it wasn't 50-50, but it wasn't completely lopsided.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 13 The number of white faces and black faces in the photograph all marching together mourning MLK. Like, yeah, for sure.
When it happened, you know?

Speaker 9 Yeah, I mean, especially in Atlanta, you know, a city with a fraught racial history as well.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 9 Benjamin Mays delivered the eulogy. He was the president of Morehouse University, and

Speaker 9 Morehouse would have their own ceremony, I believe, a day later on their campus, which, by the way, Martin Luther King Jr. was a student at Morehouse at 15 years old.
So let that sink in for a second.

Speaker 9 And Mays predicted in that eulogy that

Speaker 9 Here's the quote, that King would probably say that if death had to come, I'm sure there was no greater cause to die than to get a just wage for garbage collectors.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 9 Pretty powerful stuff.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 So the Lorraine Motel has become the National Civil Rights Museum. But after King's assassination, Walter Bailey kept it open for years, but he never rented room 306 again, and he didn't touch it.

Speaker 13 He left it exactly as it was when MLK,

Speaker 13 as MLK had left it when he was assassinated. But Walter Bailey's story was additionally sad.
He was a very proud hotel owner to have MLK stay every time he came into Memphis.

Speaker 13 So it was bad enough that Martin Luther King was assassinated at his motel.

Speaker 13 But he also, his wife, Lori, who the motel was named after, she had a stroke in all of the commotion and the horrificness of what had happened right after MLK was assassinated.

Speaker 13 And she died five days later.

Speaker 13 And so over the years, I'm sure after Walter Bailey passed, the motel started to fall into disrepair and it finally closed in 1988, but it was purchased and refurbished and preserved and turned into the National Civil Rights Museum, like I said, which is, I've not been there, but it looks like a world-class museum and it looks amazing.

Speaker 13 And they've preserved room 306.

Speaker 9 uh just as king left it as well yeah it's it is a great museum uh i i can highly recommend memphis as a whole for a a weekend trip. I've spoken before.

Speaker 9 That's where my mom's family is from and grew up going to Memphis and went back a couple of years ago with Ruby. And it's just a great weekend.
You can go see that.

Speaker 9 You can go to, you know, there's obviously all the Graceland and Sun Records and Stacks Records and Beale Street. It's just, you can easily find like three days of great, fun stuff to do in Memphis.

Speaker 13 Very nice. Yeah.

Speaker 13 Memphis, where it's at.

Speaker 9 That's right. So that's it for part part one, I guess.
We're going to skip listener mail as we traditionally do on our two parters, right?

Speaker 13 Yeah. I figured we would.

Speaker 9 So maybe just the traditional sign-off? That's you, right?

Speaker 13 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't do that, do I? No, you don't.

Speaker 13 Even though we're not going to read listener mail, if you want to send us a listener mail in the future, you can send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

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Speaker 32 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 36 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 33 Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production, in partnership with Argenix, explores people discovering strength in the most unexpected places.

Speaker 13 Listen to Untold Stories on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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