509. America in '68: The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (Part 2)

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Ladies and gentlemen

I'm only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening, because I have some very sad news for all of you. And I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world.
and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee. Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings.
He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.
For those of you who are black, you can be filled with bitterness and with hatred and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization,

black people amongst blacks,

and white amongst whites,

filled with hatred toward one another.

Or we can make an effort,

as Martin Luther King did,

to understand,

and to comprehend,

and replace that violence,

that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land with an effort to understand, compassion, and love. So that was Robert F.
Kennedy on the 4th of April, 1968, speaking to a crowd in Indianapolis, a crowd that was largely black, and who, when Bobby Kennedy stood up to give that speech, didn't know that Martin Luther King had been shot. So at the beginning of that interview, you listen to it, you can hear, I assume, Kennedy's aides in the background kind of talking about, do they know? Do people know? What's the news? And then he stands up and it's completely extemporized, isn it so it's an I mean amazing speech under the circumstances and of course what enhances the sense of drama and tragedy about it is of course that Bobby Kennedy himself is the brother of a man who had been assassinated and in due course will himself go on to be shot yeah agreed so you did two versions of that didn of that, didn't you, of that speech? And the second one I thought was pretty good.
The warm-up was a kind of cross between the Kaiser and Bugs Bunny. Yeah, I felt it didn't adequately convey the sense of tragedy and pathos that I genuinely want to, because this is actually, I mean, as I say, a very, very moving and powerful speech.
It is, totally. I hope that I have done it sufficient justice that people get some sense of that.

I think your version was really good, Tom.

I'm not going to, I'm not going to, I'm not going to stamp on it.

I am going to say that if listeners want to go on YouTube,

they can hear the speech and it is very,

very moving to hear the electricity in the air,

the shock of the crowd, Kennedy's kind of reedy voice.

Rawness.

Yeah, rawness. The rawness of it.
And am I right that this is almost the only time he ever talks in public about the assassination of his brother, JFK? Exactly. We'll come on to the second part of the speech in our next episode.
But you're absolutely right. It's one of the only times really where he lays himself bare in that way in front of a crowd at a moment that is so charged with tension, because as you say, the crowd is largely black in Indianapolis.
So we ended the last episode with Lynch and Johnson pulling out of the presidential race. Kennedy has only been in the campaign for a few days.
So we are now, what, five days after Johnson pulled out? And we have that sense now of events piling on events. So today's episode is all about Martin Luther King, his final days and his assassination, one of the most tragic moments in American history.
So perhaps we should set the scene a bit because we have had Martin Luther King on the podcast before. Some listeners may remember we did that episode about his I Have a Dream speech.
We did it on location, didn't we? Yeah. In Washington.
So we ended that episode. It's kind of King's high point.
King was one of the most admired men on the planet. In 1964, Americans named him their fourth most admired man in the world behind President Johnson, Winston Churchill, and President Eisenhower.
Interestingly, if you track him, King's popularity very obviously declines in the next few years. So by 1966, he'd fallen off the list entirely.
And actually the Gallup poll showed that six out of 10 Americans now viewed King unfavorably. Now, given that he's now a secular saint, Martin Luther King Day and so on, a lot of people may find that surprising.
How could people view him unfavorably? And it's a complicated story, but one reason for it is that having previously had his civil rights campaign in the South. So King is, of course, a Baptist minister.
He's from Atlanta, Georgia. He spent so much of his time in Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia and so on.
But now he's been moving to the North. So he and other activists are conscious that actually there are enormous numbers of African-Americans in the great cities of the North north they'd moved there in the first half of the 20th century and their plight that they're not subject to de jure segregation as they are in the south you know their lives aren't brilliant either they are much more likely than white their white neighbors to be unemployed subject to sort of informal discrimination as aware of various kinds housing discrimination and so on their schools in black areas tend to be less well funded than white schools they suffer police brutality all of these kinds of things and the implication of that presumably is unsettling for everyone in the united states because it implies that racial prejudice isn't just something that is legislated for or a legacy of of um the south or the confederacy that it is something that is a poison within the entire fabric of the United States, North as well as South.
Exactly. Exactly.
And when King does go North, so he went North in the summer of 1966 to Chicago, and he tries to dramatize this as he had dramatized the discrimination in the deep South, it doesn't really work. So he campaigns against housing segregation in the streets of Chicago.
His march is the subject of intense violence,

intense hostility from working class, blue collar, kind of white Chicagoans,

also from the city authorities who are Democrats. They give him no cooperation at all.

The local press accuse him of being in league with kind of organized crime

to create confusion and turbulence and to compound danger to Chicagoans. And King actually comes back from Chicago and he says, my goodness, this is worse than anything I'd ever faced in the South that is more entrenched, more vicious.
Partly because it's not a question, as you said, Tom, it's not a question of kind of the legacy of slavery and laws. It is in people's imaginations.
It is intangible, I guess. Mind-forged manacles.
Exactly. There's a sense, I think, as well, that he's very discomforted by the rightward turn in American politics more generally.
So the big gains for the Republicans in the 1966 midterms about law and order.

Journalists start saying to him, come on, are you still going on about this?

There's a famous exchange with CBS's Mike Wallace who says,

don't you find that the American people are getting a little tired, truly,

of this whole civil rights struggle?

King finds this clearly very demoralizing.

He finds it hard to raise money.

His staff are becoming exhausted, kind of fractious, all of this kind of thing.

Can I also just ask you, you mentioned the Republican gains in 1966 and said that this is focused on law and order. And it's a theme throughout the 60s, isn't it, that law and order is a bit of a dog whistle, that it is a way for white politicians to stoke racial anxieties among white voters without actually being overtly racist.
Is that fair or not fair?

Thank you. for white politicians to stoke racial anxieties among white voters without actually being overtly racist.
Is that fair or not fair? Both. That's a very evasive answer.
So I think it's perfectly reasonable to be very anxious about crime because crime has been shooting up so much. But I think there is also a degree to which it is also a dog whistle.
And we will do two episodes in this series on George Wallace and Richard Nixon, where we'll really explore that because of course, both of them really go for the law and order issue. So yeah, you're right.
And Reagan is also kind of a little bit playing with that. Absolutely.
Reagan wins California in 66. You know, law and order is a huge part of his campaign.
So King is already, you know, he's already, as it were, the love affair between him and the American public, such as it was, has gone sour. But what makes this a lot worse is Vietnam.
Vietnam is going to run through this whole 68 series. It's like a poison.
King had really come out against it in 1967. He had gone public in February 1967 at a conference.
He had talked about this horror at the children with napalm, the broken bodies in the fields. What are we doing? Sending home half men mutilated mentally and physically.
He then gave one of his greatest speeches. I mean, some people might say he's actually the greatest speech he ever gave.
April, 1967 at the Riverside Church in New York. And he talks about how he has wrestled with the issue because he knows how controversial it is, but he feels that as a man of the cloth, he has a duty.
He hasn't, he cannot stay silent any longer. And he gives this magnificent denunciation of the war.
And he talks, you know, we have corrupted women and children. We have killed their men.
He talks about the children. They wander into the towns.
People see thousands of children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs like animals. Children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food.
Children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. It's really powerful stuff.
And presumably, we talked in the previous episode about how LBJ feels betrayed by progressives who've turned against him. Yes.
But this is a break. Completely.
Between Martin Luther King and the guy who is steering through the civil rights legislation. Yeah, completely.
So again, both sides are feeling betrayed by the other, I guess. Completely they are.
The Johnson White House feel completely betrayed by King and their relationship is effectively at an end. And actually, it's not just Johnson.
The mainstream kind of democratic liberal press turn on King as well. The New York Times said it was wasteful and self-defeating.
What's he doing talking about Vietnam? He should be talking about civil rights. Life magazine accused him of a quote, a demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.
You know, he's on the wrong side of the debate, I guess. And isn't there another factor as well that Martin Luther King, I mean, his great cause is peaceful protest, but he has coming up on his kind of left wing, I guess, his left flank.
Yeah. He has black activists who are not committed to that, who are actually quite in favour of armed violence.
Yeah, absolutely. Violence was built into the narrative of the civil rights movement, because of course, when they organized all those marches in the South, they knew they bargained for the fact that they would be attacked, that they would be mistreated by the police and the police with their dogs and all of that kind of stuff.
And they would go to prison and everything. And they would publicly suffer.
Non know, non-violence, suffering publicly while other people attack you is a very important part of their strategy. I mean, Martin Luther King obviously is, as you said, he's a pastor.
He is aware of the biblical echoes of that. Of course.
The innocents who are persecuted by the apparatus of a great power. Exactly.
We know what the model is there. But what you have from about 1966, 67 is not black people as suffering as the people who are being subjected to violence.
But in the newspapers now, you have stories about African-Americans who are carrying out violence. So most obviously the rioters in the cities in 66, 67.
But also you have younger activists now who say we have suffered enough. You know, the time for just meekly marching is over.
And so Malcolm X. Well, Malcolm X has already been shot at this point.
But Malcolm X is, of course, a trailblazer, a harbinger for this kind of thing. The Black Power slogan comes from a guy called Stokely Carmichael, a much younger activist.
He is on a march through the South in the summer of 1966, and he starts chanting black power, black power. And younger, more militant activists are like, at last.
There's a generational issue here. King is an old man to them.
I mean, he's not old to us, but he's old to them. And they say, finally, somebody who's got a bit of backbone will stand up to the white establishment.
And also, they're quite cool, aren't they? The black pan. Well, this is the thing.
I mean, there's all the Tom Wolfe, radical chic stuff. Yeah.
The white liberals as well, you know, they're quite edgy and yeah, bringing them along to dinner parties and things. Exactly, exactly.
So the Black Panthers really exploded onto the scene in the spring of 1967. People like Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, they have an armed invasion of the state capital in California and Sacramento.
Huey Newton said, and I quote, political power comes to the barrel of a gun. We do not believe in passive and nonviolent tactics.
They haven't worked for us black people. They are bankrupt.
And do you think that, I mean, in the 60s, things are cool and you have to constantly be moving. You need new things by definition.
If you stay with the old tried ways of doing things, you know, you cliff richard yeah you're square you're square yeah i mean is that is that a kind of part of the climate as well i think it is i absolutely think it is so the student non-violent coordinating committee snick as it is called great name which has been such a big part of the civil rights movement in the south the name is the non-violent coordinating committee. By 1967, its new chairman, who is a man called H.
Rap Brown. That's an even better name.
He says, everybody should arm themselves and quote, wage guerrilla war on the honky white man. Let's make the Viet Cong look like Sunday school teachers.
Groovy. I mean, this is exactly the kind of thing that seizes people's imagination.
It is fashionable, frankly, in the late 1960s. And Martin Luther King is regarded as yesterday's man.
Have you ever written for the New York Review of Books, Tom? I haven't, no. Well, just as well, because they shame themselves at this point.
They publish an article about Martin Luther King by a guy called Andrew Copkind, August 1967. King once had the ability to talk to people, the power to change them.
But the duty of a revolutionary is to make revolutions and King has made none. He has been outstripped by his times, overtaken by events which he may have obliquely helped to produce but could not predict.
He is not likely to regain command. Kind of, goodbye granddad.
Right, I mean, it's kind of like, you know, this guy hasn't kept up with Sergeant Pepper or whatever. Exactly.
I mean, it's almost the same thing. You know, you've got to keep up with the vibe.
Yeah. The fact that he has been outpaced by his times, that he hasn't produced results.
Black Americans are still likely to be poor. They're still likely to go to prison.
All of this stuff. We don't, you know, the time that nonviolence is over, the time that urgency has begun.
That's basically what people are saying. And is Andrew Copkin black or white? He's white.
He's a white radical journalist. Right.
Okay. I mean, he's writing a bit like a white radical, it has to be said.
He is indeed. He is.
So King feels this pressure very, very deeply. If you think, he has for more than a decade, he has been in the public eye.
He's been long days. He's exhausted.
He's been in prison 18 times. He has been punched in the face.
He has been stabbed. He's been hit on the head with rocks.
He's been tear gassed, sprayed with water cannons, had dogs set on him. All the time, he is traveling.
He's staying in kind of cheap hotels. This is a chilling precedent for us going on our tour of the United States, Tom.
I hope this doesn't happen to us. Staying in cheap hotels.
We're not quite so saintly. And I look at this.
He's smoking and drinking too much, gaining weight, taking sleeping pills, constantly traveling, speaking and preaching. This is like you on tour, frankly.
Yeah, it is. Anyway, he's under enormous stress.
His marriage is also crumbling, by the way, because one of the things that people, I guess, now know about Martin Luther King is that he is a man, he's ravaged by guilt because he's not perfect. He's a sinner.
Yeah, he's a sinner. He has relationships outside his marriage.
He confessed an affair to Coretta, his wife, over Christmas 1967. She was devastated, but she wasn she wasn't surprised and she was one of the things that devastated her was that actually he was in such a mess about it he was seemed and I quote terribly distressed I had not seen him like this before and also isn't he being hounded by the FBI and J.
Edgar Hoover who was kind of exactly hoovering up scandalous details for his files and things like that yes the FBI The FBI have had King under surveillance for years. J.
Edgar Hoover tells LBJ, tells President Johnson in the course of 1967 that he's now convinced that King is, quote, an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation. He is absolutely obsessed with King's love life.
A tomcat with obsessive degenerative sexual urges, J. Edgar Hoover says of King.
He has him taped with one of his lovers in a Washington hotel. The FBI then sends that tape to King's wife anonymously for her to listen to.
So yes, he knows, I mean, King is not an idiot. He knows that the authorities are watching him the whole time, spying on him, spreading rumors about him to the newspapers.
He is under immense,

immense moral psychological pressure. And his reaction to this, actually, a lot of people say,

okay, come on, as it were, wind your neck in, stop speaking out about these things,

go back to being the cuddly, more moderate sort of moral prophet of talking about the South. But you use the word prophet and earlier you called him a secular saint.
I mean, he is both, but ultimately he's a prophet in the biblical sense. He is inspired by the example of the biblical prophets who denounce injustice, but are themselves sinners.
And that is clearly what motivates him. It's what keeps him on the trail, that sense of following in the line of Isaiah or Jeremiah or whatever.
But it's also what gives him his enduring power. I mean, he is drawing on the rhythms and cadences of the biblical prophets.
And that is the journey

to which he feels he is summoned. Yes, exactly so.
And that is why he does not

tack back towards the center. He feels that he has literally a God-given duty to keep going.

So he starts saying to people, you know, we need to go further. We need to have, and I quote,

a revolution of values, complete moral surgery, radical redistribution of economic power. Of course, this is why the FBI are calling him a communist.
He's not a communist. He's a biblical prophet.
Yeah. But he's also, his politics are those of, you know, a sort of Western European democratic socialist.
You know, what he's talking about is- I mean, practically, that's the effect. Of course, the religious stuff, I agree with you i mean he is if he's nothing if not a religious figure martin luther king he comes from the church he's steeped in the church and in the values that his father also a preacher had instilled in him and partly because of this prophet thing and again to completely echo what you've been saying at the end of 1967 he unveils his latest campaign, which is very kind of biblical.
He says, I want to force America to confront the reality of poverty. And I want to have a massive demonstration in the heart of the Capitol of Washington, DC.
It's going to be called the Poor People's Campaign. They will build a shanty town in the heart of Washington called Resurrection City.
So it'll be in sight of the halls of the rich and powerful. And he says, we will have African-Americans.
We will have Native Americans and Indians. We'll have poor whites from Appalachia.
We'll have Puerto Ricans. We'll have Pacific Islanders.
We will have Eskimos. Have the works.
Yeah. We will have the most marginalized people in the United States and we will bring them to the capital.
So it's Lazarus at the gates of Deves. It is.
Now, the thing is, lots of people in his allies say, this is a really bad idea. What will happen if it all goes wrong? What will happen if there's violence? We will get the blame.
You will get the blame and you will damage our cause. Thements are very different from the martin washington in 1963 the establishment of course had been very suspicious of that as well but kennedy and code eventually grudgingly come around to it it's the first time kennedy watches martin luther king speak isn't it at that yeah yeah and says my god he's good but this time it is clear the authorities will not cooperate at all.
In fact, the FBI are making plans to undermine it. And so as 1968 begins, King is all devoted to this Poor People's Campaign, but his aides are very worried about it.
He's under all this pressure from the authorities about it. And then he gets an invitation to come to Memphis, Tennessee.
So Memphis is not really featured in the civil rights story to this point. It's on the banks of the Mississippi.
It's a tough town, Memphis. It had once been one of the biggest slave markets in the South, run by the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, General Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Memphis had become a magnet for migrants from the countryside in the early 20th century. This is where you get the blues.
Yeah. So Beale Street, the home of the blues in Memphis, all these clubs.
But most people, of course, were not blues musicians. They are janitors.
They are waiters. They're cooks.
They're very poorly treated, poorly paid. And maids.
And maids, yes. Some of whom are working for Elvis.
Yeah, I guess that's right. Yes.
Who at this very moment is busy plotting his comeback in Graceland. Nice to get Elvis onto the show, Tom.
Well, but this is what's so fascinating about the politics of the United States in this period, is that the popular culture is so rich. And it's not just, I think, kind of extraneous.
It is part of the climate of opinion. I completely agree.
It's not just, as it were, literally the soundtrack, but it's also a kind of metaphorical soundtrack for everything that is happening. Yeah, and I mean, Elvis has come back.
There's a slight kind of Nixon parallel there as well, do you think? I tell you what, there's a great podcast in Elvis and Nixon and their tangled relationship. Well, he'll get a badge from Nixon, won't he? He will indeed.
So what happened in Memphis was this. On the 1st of February, two men who were, we would call them rubbish collectors, bin men in Britain, they are killed in their own rubbish truck.
They are pulled in by the machinery and crushed to death. And they made very little money.
The city gave them no benefits, no pensions, anything like that. So their widows are left destitute.
And after that, about one and a half thousand employees from the city's sanitation, sewer and drainage departments go on strike. They want union recognition.
They want better pay, better hours, all of these kinds of things. It's a very, you might say a very mundane campaign, but a very important one for those people.
You know, it's unglamorous, but for these people, I mean, it really matters. They are almost all black.
So there's a definite racial side to this. The city authorities are white, the strikers are black.
And a Memphis minister who was an old friend of King's called James Lawson. He'd been a nonviolent campaigner.
He'd been to India, all of this stuff. He takes up this cause and he says, we should make this a civil rights crusade.
And he goes to the striking workers, sanitation workers. And he says, you are human beings.
You deserve dignity. You're not a slave.
You are a man. And man and that becomes their slogan i am a man and so this guy lawson he rings martin luther king in march 17th of march and he says look we've got this strike in memphis nobody cares it's not really making the news nationwide because it's so unglamorous our men are being attacked by the police with clubs this feels to me very like what you're trying to do with your Poor People's Campaign.
Because the very fact that it's rubbish, that it's filth, that it's trash. I mean, that's the whole point, isn't it? Exactly.
Take this incredibly unglamorous cause, the cause of the gutter and make it your own. And King says, sure, I'm going to the South anyway, tomorrow.
I'll come and see you. Now, King's staff already think he's massively overworked.
What, really? Another one? Yeah. He says, of course, I'm going to do it.
He flies to Memphis the next day, the 18th of March, and he goes straight to this black Pentecostal church called the Mason Temple. There are 15,000 people there.
He speaks without notes. He gives another of these brilliant speeches.
I love this one. I absolutely love this one.
Do you want to read it, Tom? Well, so I'm just looking at the context that you've given it. Mason Temple, massive black Pentecostal church, huge turnout, 15,000 people there.
And he speaks without notes. And the spirit descends on him.
Clearly he is, you know, he speaks with fire

and he's talking about the struggle for equality,

which he says means economic equality.

And this famous line,

what does it profit a man to be able to eat

at an integrated lunch counter

if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a cup of coffee?

But then it goes beyond that.

He talks about what the United States is doing

and generally what humanity is doing,

what capitalist society is capable of achieving. And there are absolute echoes of Marx here, but I think that in both cases, both King and Marx are echoing biblical themes, whether consciously or not.
We build gigantic buildings to kiss the sky and gargantuan bridges to span the seas. Through our spaceships, we carve highways through the

stratosphere. So it's the year before the moon landing.
Through our submarines, we penetrate oceanic depths. But it seems I can hear the God of the universe saying, even though you've done all of that, I was hungry and you fed me not.
I was naked and you clothed me not. So you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness.
And even reading that, I feel a shiver down the spine. I mean, It is so powerful.

It is.

You know, to hear him say that, I mean, it must have been amazing. Incredible.
Just unbelievable. Yeah, I agree completely.
And, you know, the atmosphere, electric, people shouting, you know, Amen, Hallelujah, you know, say it. Yeah.
All of that kind of stuff. That's the call and response side of these kind of um african-american church services which makes it all the more exciting and electric to be there i think and he's buoyed as you said the spirit has descended he's buoyed by the response of the crowd and he says i'm going to come back to memphis i will lead a march through the city i want all of you to join me with your families and your children.
And there are people shouting and clapping and cheering and crying. His staff who are there are standing in a kind of grim silence.
This is awful. Like another event in the schedule, yet more pressure.
Memphis is not a very Martin Luther King friendly town. This is a bad idea.
However, he goes back that night to the usual place that he stays. And we should just talk about this because it's really important.
He stays in a motel called the Lorraine Motel. It's in the southern end of downtown, not far from the river.
It's the place where it's a black family owned and blues and gospel stars when they come to Memphis always stay there. So ray charles has stayed there louie armstrong has stayed there aretha franklin has stayed there king has been many times and the owners let him stay for free he always stays in one particular room room 306 on the second floor and if you look at photos of the motel it's very sort of mid-60s modern kind of mid-century modern it's quite simple a little bit scandy a bit ikea you could say yeah you know the room with a little tv all of that kind of thing so that's where he is that's where he always goes now the next day the next few days he goes off to the mississippi delta which is part of his poor people's campaign one of the poorest places in north america you knowden cotton fields, the shacks, a place absolutely haunted by the ghosts of slavery.
So he's off in Mississippi and he's waiting to come back to Memphis for this march that he's promised. But there's a series of freak snowstorms.
What? I know. Unbelievable.
Snowstorms? Yeah. I didn't know they had that in the South.
They do. Wow.
Who knew? So there's been a lot of snow and the March is postponed and postponed and is finally

rescheduled for Thursday, the 28th of March, 1968.

March 28, as they would say.

March 28, exactly.

But a spoiler alert, it will turn out very differently from what Martin Luther King is

expecting.

Okay. Well, we will find out how, just how differently after the break.
Hello, welcome back to The Rest is History. And we are in Memphis.
It's the 28th of May, or May 28, if you're American. It's Thursday.
and Martin Luther King, Dominic, is about to lead this much anticipated march in aid of the trash and refuse workers through the streets of Memphis. Yes and unfortunately the march is a complete and utter catastrophe for Memphis, for King himself, for the image of his campaign.
So we talked in the first half about this sense of how he'd lost control of, or was losing control of his movement. There's a generation gap in the movements.
There are people who are calling for greater urgency or this kind of thing. And you see this, you know, made manifest in the streets of Memphis.
Because when he gets there, he is horrified to find out that it's not the family friendly, you know, march of women, children or whatnot that he used to lead in the deep South in the late 1950s, early 1960s. There are loads of teenagers.
There are people drinking. There are people shouting about black power.
There were very aggressive placards about sort of taking the struggle against the whites, all of this kind of thing. And he seriously thinks, he's utterly downcast and he seriously thinks about cancelling the march.
And then he decides, no, the best thing is probably to go ahead anyway. They go ahead with the march through Memphis, which is already suffering the kind of urban blight that will become such a feature of American life in the 1970s and 80s.
So they're marching through these kind of dilapidated streets, boarded up shops, all of this kind of thing. There was a lot of pushing and shoving behind him.
He's very conscious of this. They get onto Beale Street, which is the home of the blues.
You know, once a great destination, now a lot of the clubs have moved out. It feels shabby and seedy and depressing.
And it's about this point that the violence starts. People start smashing shop windows.
They're looting. They're throwing bottles and bricks at the police.
The police start to wade in. It all kicks off.
King and his allies are ushered away for their own safety by the police to a hotel, the Holiday Inn, which is a brand new high rise luxury hotel. That's an important detail, which we'll come back to.
So he's in a hotel room there and he's watching what's happening on TV. And he is horrified because it is absolutely kicking off in Memphis.
The authorities call for the National Guard. The police chief goes on TV and he says, this is a civil war.
It's a local civil war. And King, this is one of the low points in his entire life.
He's just standing there watching this on TV. Because the violence is coming from the marchers as well as from the police this time.
So it's upended his strategy. It has completely.
This is not, you know, Alabama policemen wading in against defenseless women and children. These are black teenagers fighting back, looting stores, throwing things at the police.
And the sense of the violence has come from the march. It's not been directed at the march.
It is the march that has created the violence. And he's ringing his advisors.
He says to one of them, I know what the press will say. They will say, and I quote, Martin Luther King is dead.
He is finished. His nonviolence is nothing.
No one is listening to it. And that night he can't sleep.
He's with his greatest friend, his greatest ally, another minister called Ralph Abernathy. And he says to him, you know, this country is sick.
Maybe we should just give up and let it sink into its sickness. Maybe violence is what people want because they're not listening to us.
The next day he wakes up such as he can because he's hardly had any sleep and he looks at the next day's papers and they are terrible. And part of this is because the FBI has been fueling the criticism of Martin Luther King and they have told everybody this hypocrite, this sinner, this liar and fraud.
Do you know where he is? He's in a luxury hotel. He led this march.
It all kicked off. And then he went up to his suite and he's swanning around with his friends in this fancy white owned hotel.
And King is devastated by this. And it's really important because it means that the next time he Kemps to Memphis, he will definitely stay at his favorite place, the Lorraine Motel, no matter what the risks, because it is important to him to prove that he's not a hypocrite.
So on Saturday, the 30th of March, King flew back to Atlanta and he met the leaders of his kind of Southern Christian Leadership Conventional Conference or something. And they all say to him, look, that was an absolute disaster.
Please don't go back to Memphis, whatever you do. Your poor people's campaign is probably not a very good idea, but this Memphis trash workers business is terrible.
And he is very upset at this. He's visibly upset.
And he says, if I can't go to Memphis, then I can't go anywhere. Like, what's the point if I can't go somewhere like that and stand up for these people? They still don't agree.
And he actually does something he's never really done before. He storms out in a fury.
Biographers have poured over the details of that afternoon. Where did he go? Did he go to see his father? Did he go to see one of his lovers? Did he just go and pray? We don't know.
But in his absence, all the other people, a lot of whom, of course, are ministers too, are so shocked and upset that he has stormed out. They say, we will do anything to bring him back and to please him.
Fine. We will make this work.
We'll go with this poor people's campaign and we'll go with the Memphis thing. So he comes back and he is delighted by this.
But of course, King being King, his diary makes yours look like blank pages with nothing happening, Tom, which is saying something because he has to rush off immediately to Washington because the next day he's going to be preaching at the Washington National Cathedral. And this is his last formal sermon of his life on Sunday, the 31st of March.
It's a sign of how much he's doubling down on the radicalism. He talks about Vietnam in the sermon in Washington, he says, one of the most unjust wars in the history of the world.
He also doubles down on his poor people's campaign. America has not met her obligations to the poor.
You know, I'm going to go through with this. So he gives this sermon.
And then afterwards, he's surrounded by the press. The press are asking him actually about the election.
Who is he going to support? And he says, well, I cannot support President Johnson. I will not support him.
I could consider either Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy. What he doesn't know at that point is that just hours later.
Oh, it's the very night. The very night Johnson is going to go on television, pull out to the presidential race.
God, it is all happening, isn't it? It is all happening at once. All these things, that's the amazing thing about 1968.
It's all happening at once. So then a couple of days go by and four days later, the 3rd of April, he and Ralph Abernathy, his great pal, fly to Memphis.
There's a bomb scare, there's death threats. He's getting death threats all the time, but he's probably never had so many as he's getting now.
There's a bomb scare, the plane, a whole plane has to be searched, the luggage unloaded and searched for explosives. And then they're given the go ahead.
They fly and they land in Memphis at about 1030 and they go straight to the Lorraine Motel to his usual room, room 306. And he goes to this guy, Lawson, the guy brought him to Memphis.
They go to his church, Methodist church, to discuss the plans for their next march. Lawson says, well, there's bad news.
The city authorities have got an injunction to stop the march. Our lawyers are working on it.
They think they can reverse it, but they will need time. For now, we just have to kind of kick our heels for a day or two.
King says, yeah, fine, whatever.

He goes back to the Lorraine Hotel.

He's feeling exhausted.

He's shattered.

He feels ill.

There's a storm coming, literally.

A huge storm is building over the town.

He is supposed to speak that evening at the Mason Temple,

this huge kind of Pentecostal church,

where he'd given this amazing speech. And he says to Ralph Abernathy, I can't face going out in the storm.
I'm absolutely

exhausted. Would you consider doing it? And Abernathy goes to the church and then he rings him

at the Motown and says, Martin, I don't know what to say. Nobody wants to hear from me.

They want you. Is there any way you could come? And King says, fine, I'll come.
So nine o'clock, he arrives at this church. The rain is pouring down, there's thunder overhead.
It's a kind of quite apocalyptic, you know, very dramatic scene. Well, you might say it's a bit like God thundering forth from the summit of Sinai.

It is. Well, the summit of Sinai, the mountaintop analogy, Tom, very well chosen.
King stands up. He has no notes again.
He has to raise his voice to be heard above the thunder and the rain sort of hammering on the roof of the church. And at first he seems very exhausted and he says, the nation is sick you know there's trouble in the land and then he says however people are rising up and their cry across the world is the same we want to be free and he goes on and goes on and then you're very good at this tom so why don't you do it the famous climax the speech which i have to say we've done hundreds of episodes and all I find this so moving.
Some of the most moving stuff we've ever done in the rest is history. So I mentioned Moses climbing Sinai.
And Moses, of course, is the great prophet who leads his people out of slavery towards the promised land. But Moses himself is not allowed to enter the promised land.
But God allows him just before he dies to go up to Mount Nebo and from the summit of Mount Nebo to gaze out over the promised land. And that is the context for this very, very famous speech, the kind of the great climax of it.
And King says, you know, and imagine that as Dominic, you were saying the thunder, the rain hammering down on the roof. We've got some difficult days ahead, but it really doesn't matter with me now because I've been to the mountaintop.
The mountaintop is Mount Nebo in his mind. And I don't mind.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life, but I'm not concerned about that now. 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.
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 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. I mean, wow.
That is, the speech itself is so powerful. It's drawing on all these biblical echoes, the sense of a people coming slavery into redemption.
But of course, the context also is everything. Of course.
And if you listen to the recording, which you can hear on YouTube, it is incredible stuff because of the atmosphere, because there are people shouting as he's having to raise his voice because of the storm. There are people encouraging him.
They're shouting out, Amen, tell it, Martin. All of this kind of stuff.
And he does. But we've been talking about him as a prophet.
God speaks to Moses on the mountaintop, on Mount Nebo. And he says, I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither.
You know, you have led people this far. You will go no further.
And what is coming, Dominic coming dominic what is coming well at the end of the speech he collapses almost exhausted remember he didn't want to go because he was so tired into abanath his arms and there are people crying all around him and whatnot and he goes back to the array motel that night and people said at the time he seemed liberated it was he was giddy you know boyish having done the speech he has dinner with his staff at the motel. And then here is the human being, the man of flesh and blood.
He almost certainly spent that evening with his mistress, Georgia Davis, who was a state senator from Kentucky, who had come to spend the night with him. And she was well known in his circle.
Nobody was surprised at this. They knew he was a man of flesh and blood.
So he wakes up on Thursday, the 4th of April. It's the last day of his life.
He meets immediately with his aides to discuss this legal business about this march. They're waiting for the Western District Court to pronounce.
They're still confident the march will go ahead. He has lunch with Abernathy.
His brother is their AD and they ring their mother in Atlanta and they talk to her for an hour or so because his parents are still alive. Five o'clock, still no news.
They meet the lawyers. He's still quite giddy.
He and his aides have a pillow fight. I love that.
Yeah, we should do more of that do more of that way when we go on tour we will uh over the rest is history there's good news the injunction seems to have been partially lifted they will probably get their march in a few days time so now we're at the end of the afternoon and he's getting ready for dinner they're going to go to a local minister called billy carls's house there's lots of banter about bill Carls' wife and what a good cook she is. She's going to be cooking soul food, which is what King likes.
Candid yams sounds terrible to me, as does pig's feet, neck bones, and chitlins. What's corn pone? I don't know.
I don't really know. It's one of those strange Southern things that I just try to pretend doesn't exist because it sounds so terrible.
Like turnip greens is also going to be having i'm not a massive fan of this food our southern listeners will be horrified by this king loves it king loves it he's delighted he says oh it's going to be great i can't wait he goes to get into the bathroom to get ready for dinner and usually he has to use a powder to shave rather than like cream and a razor why because he's got incredibly heavy stubble. Oh.
And only this sort of chemical that he puts on his face will get rid of it. It's called magic shaving powder, which says so American.
I mean, anyway. Doubtless a lawsuit is brought against the manufacturers three years later.
By the way, if you're from the magic shaving powder company, please sue and not me yeah apologize for that he um they're now running late and they have to go for dinner he changes his shirt he's put on weight we said how unhealthy he was in his lifestyle so he's actually too fat for the first shirt that he puts on he gets his tie he goes all this he goes out on the balcony of 555 ralph abernathy is still getting ready so this is the scene this low slung motel out on the balcony of 555. Ralph Abernathy is still getting ready.
So this is the scene. This low slung motel just on the edge of downtown Memphis.
He's standing there on the balcony for all to see in front of room 306. The motel, by the way, has been featured in local news reports about him being in Memphis.
Everyone knows he's there. So everyone knows he's there.
And the TV news pictures showed the room and the room number. So everybody knows he is there.
There are police observers in a kind of firehouse on the other side of the street who have been watching him all this time. One of them says at this point, there is Dr.
King right there. I presume he's going to supper.
He's there for a couple of minutes. It's now 5.57 or so.
He goes inside to get his suit jacket. He puts it on.
In the pockets, there's a note that he's writing for a speech that he's going to give. And the line that is written is, nothing is gained without sacrifice.
He comes back out to the balcony. He's got his jacket on now.
His driver is downstairs with his Cadillac. And also downstairs are a group of other younger civil rights leaders, most notable of whom is Jesse Jackson, with whom Martin Luther King has had a slightly turbulent relationship.
They've had a bit of a falling out. A very prominent political figure in the 80s, weren't he? Very prominent, exactly.
The most prominent black leader in the 1980s and 1990s. And Jackson shouts out to him, our leader.
And King says, ah, Jesse, I want you to come to dinner tonight. And this is a nice moment because it's a bit of reconciliation after the arguments they've had about civil rights strategy.
It's now just gone past six o'clock. Jackson says, I've got this guy here who's a saxophonist he's called Ben Branch he's going to be doing a concert he's going to be playing for the sanitation workers at the temple and King says Ben I want you to do this song take my hand precious lord sing it real pretty and the guy says I sure will doc and then the driver gets out Solomon Jones he gets out of the car and he shouts up to King.
He says, it's getting chilly. I think you're going to need a top coat.
They're so solicitous about him. They're so protective of him.
He means so much to these people. And King says the last words he ever says, okay, Jonesy, you really know how to take good care of me.
And then he gets a menthol cigarette out of his pocket and he turns back from the railing to go back to his room to get this overcoat. And it's then that a single shot rings out, deafening sound.
Immediately, everybody there knew that King had been shot. The parking lot is full of people screaming and shouting, get an ambulance, getting an ambulance.
Oh my God, they've shot him. Don't move him and all of this.
The co-owner of the motel, who's a woman called Lurie Bailey, at this point had a stroke, fell into a coma and later died. Nobody talked about her, but she died at the same time.
On the balcony, they rush up. King is down.
He has been hit on the right side of his jaw by a bullet, soft bullet that has expanded and has then ripped into his neck. There's massive bleeding.
He's immediately in shock. His pulse is fading straight away.
They rushed him to the nearest hospital, which was St. Joseph's Hospital.
He was at this point barely alive. He had effectively been killed almost instantly.
I mean, very JFK, isn't it? The wound to the head. Yeah.
The absolutely clearly fatal injury and people trying to resuscitate what can't be resuscitated. Exactly.
20 minutes after this moment, Jesse Jackson rings Coretta, his wife, in Atlanta. She's been out shopping with her daughter.
At the same point, while Jackson's on the phone saying there's an accident, he's been hit in the shoulder so Jackson doesn't tell her the whole truth straight away, his boys who are watching TV see a newsflash about their father and they run into their mother to tell her. At this point, the surgeons are just about to get ready, working on King.
Right away, the chief neurosurgeon says to Ralph Abernathy, it will be a blessing if he dies. He has been so badly injured, he would have suffered a horrendous brain damage.
The spine is cut and he has sustained awful brain damage. And actually, the whole thing is done and dusted very quickly.
At five minutes past seven, he is pronounced dead. His parents are listening in their local church in Atlantalanta the ebenezer baptist church king's home church they're listening to the radio if it's a really really sort of heart-rending scene and they hear the news reports of their son has died now what about the killer within moments the police who of course are there right they're spying on king yeah yeah they are on the scene in the chaos in the in the car park of the motel they're like where did the shot come from all of king's friends point the same way to this particular kind of rundown looking brick house on south main street so this was a boarding house run by a woman called bessie brewer americans would call would call it, I think, a rooming house or something like that.
Hampton Sides wrote a brilliant book on the whole story about King's killer and the manhunt for him. And he says it was a haven for invalids, derelicts, transients, riverboat workers, and small-time crooks.
The police basically pile into this house. And Dominic, can I just ask, the police, is this the local police force or is this the FBI?

It's the local police.

It's the local police because it's the local police who are on the scene.

But the FBI get involved almost immediately.

And how does Hoover feel about that?

Really interesting this.

So Hoover obviously despises King.

But the interesting thing, Sir Hampton Sides in his book talks about this.

It's the biggest manhunt in FBI history.

Hoover had working on it 3,500 agents and they spent $200 million to track down King's killer. And the interesting thing is the one thing Hoover cared about most of all, apart from a lot of very insalubrious things, was the reputation of the Bureau.
That meant more to him than anything. To capture King's assassin would be good for the FBI.
He will not be accused. He does not want to be accused of having gone soft on this because of racism.
He wants to show the world that the FBI will crack this case. We are the best in the world at doing this, no matter who the victim is.
So is Hoover's contempt for Martin Luther King, is that racist or political? Oh, I think both. I think probably both.
I think a bit of both, actually. I think the two are fused in Hoover's minds.
He regards the civil rights movement as a subversive communist, all of this kind of stuff. And I undoubtedly there's a racial dimension to that, but there's a kind of political ideological one as well, I would say.
So I don't want to sound like a stuck record on these american assassinations but as for the kennedy assassination you could say the law enforcement authorities are actually really good because within an hour they know well they're pretty sure the shot has come from room 5b which was being occupied by a man called john willard they've also found the weapon which was left near the scene it's a remington game master rifle but willard himself has completely vanished he's nowhere to be seen so this manhunt begins they eventually work out that willard is probably a man who's going by a series of other aliases the one he uses most is eric stavro galt i've never heard of a more obvious unonym. Yeah, especially because this is clearly based on Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
Yeah. So they work out that this guy Gult has fled Memphis in a Ford Mustang.
He drove to Atlanta and then he got a series of buses and he's ended up in Toronto. In Toronto, he hung around there for a considerable time.
He stole the identity of a policeman called Ramon George Snade. I mean, that was actually really his name.
It wasn't. And he flew to London and his dream was to go to Rhodesia, to the white supremacist colony that had broken away from Britain, declared independence unilaterally.
Ian Smith, that all that. And Ian Smith.
He wants to become a mercenary fighting for the Rhodesians, this guy, Eric Stavro Galt. He hung around in Earl's Court to try to make contracts.
contact he so unexpected so unexpected this story which is so american ends up in earl's court which is the first place that we stayed when we moved to london oh so he tried to make contact with radiation mercenaries he did the obvious thing which is he got in touch with the daily telegraphs well right not the guardian no and said, seem like sound fellows would you be able to put me in touch with these incredibly racist mercenaries um and while they're doing trying to do that and that doesn't really work out he tried and failed to burgle a jeweler's shop in paddington but he did succeed in robbing a branch of the tsb bank in fulham i mean just an incredible to us who are British. And all this stuff about grits and weird Southern food and suddenly the TSB in Fulham.
Exactly. The FBI by this point had worked out what was going on.
This guy, Snade, is Galt, is Willard and is clearly going to be somebody else. They sent instructions to London and eventually he was stopped at Heathrowrow airport by scotland yard trying to fly to brussels to join up with african mercenaries there and under interrogation it turns out that he is actually a man called james earl ray who is from i mean he is classic kind of semi-criminal underclass he He is a high school dropout from a violent, rural, poor background.

He is virulently racist.

He's been in and out of prison.

He had escaped in 1967 from the Missouri State Penitentiary,

hidden in a, he'd been hiding in a load of bread, in a crate full of bread.

Did he have a ball on a chain that he'd carry as he hid in the crate of those stripy uniforms stripy uniforms with a cap he used to work in the the prison bakery and this is how he'd managed to escape in the sort of bread van then he'd ended up in los angeles calling himself galt he'd been a loner he had been involved in los angeles with the campaign of a man we'll be talking about later in this series, George Wallace, independent candidate, governor of Alabama, running for president. And he'd been part of the effort to get Wallace onto the California ballot.
He also seems to have been stalking Martin Luther King for months. Police found in his apartment in Los Angeles, they found a map of Atlanta with King's house and his church circled.
At first, James Earl Ray confessed and he pleaded guilty. And by doing that, he avoided the electric chair to which he would have been sent if he had tried to contest the charge.
But as soon as he's been sentenced, which is to 99 years in prison, he then immediately recants and says i didn't do it at all which of course has given rise to conspiracy theories ever since even though of all the assassinations i think this is probably well it's certainly one of the most clear-cut he briefly escaped i didn't know this until i read up on this in 1977 again not bread, I think this time, but was recaptured after three days and he died in 1998, aged 70, still protesting his innocence and saying that he had been framed. Rather like Lee Harvey Oswald, I suppose.
But back to Martin Luther King, just to tie up that story. His funeral was in Atlanta on the 9th of April, 150,000 people came.
LBJ did not go. But he had announced the day of mourning, hadn't he? He had done.
He had done. Yes, he had.
First ever in American history for a private citizen. But Nixon goes.
Nixon went and Nixon also visited King's widow privately. Reagan didn't go.
And I have to say Reagan rather let himself down with his reaction to Martin Luther King's death. He said, it's the end of a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws they would like to break, which basically was Reagan's way of hinting that he didn't approve of the civil rights movement, which I don't think personally, I don't think reflects terribly well on Reagan.
The Memphis strike was settled a week later.

Under pressure from the White House, the Johnson White House said,

you know, you've got to tie this thing up.

So the strikers basically got everything they wanted.

Their campaign had worked.

But just as King's aides had predicted, the Poor People's Campaign,

this kind of biblically inspired campaign that was his last great effort,

was a complete and utter disaster. This resurrection city, this shanty town was a complete nightmare.
The rain poured down. It was incredibly badly organized.
There was a lot of violence. It was a very depressing monument to King's career.
But actually all of that is eclipsed by what happens in the days immediately after King's death. So LBJ, as you said, Tom, he went on television straight away and he said, we'll have a day of mourning, please, will nobody react to this with violence? But actually violence had already begun even as he was speaking.
The Black Power architect Stoke Carmichael said, when white America killed Dr. King, she declared war on us.
The rebellions that have been occurring around this country are just light stuff compared with what's about to happen. And he was right.
Send Washington, DC alone. By that evening, large parts of the city are on fire.
Hundreds of stores have been looted. There is kind of fighting in the streets.
This continues the following day. So by the 5th of

April, round about lunchtime, the center of the city is kind of deserted because people have effectively fled the downtown area. There is huge fires, there is smoke, so much smoke that it gets into the White House.
By nightfall, the whole of the city is covered with this pool of black smoke. LBJ has called for troops to enter the capital.

So troops have occupied most of the city is covered with this pool of black smoke. LBJ has called for troops to enter the capital.
So troops have occupied most of the central area. They're ringing the White House and the capital, the Congress.
There are kind of sandbags everywhere. There are floodlights burning to illuminate the White House.
There are machine gun nests that have been set up. And you say that these soldiers have come from Vietnam.
I mean, what a grim irony. Exactly.
What an unbelievable irony. I mean, as people said at the time, to use the phrase that was so common in the late sixties, the war has come home.
Blowback. Yeah.
To the heart of America's cities. LBJ, who is in there in the white house, you know, the smoke outside surrounded by soldiers, this apocalyptic atmosphere.
Some of his aides say to him, God, this is terrible. And he says to them, you know, what did you expect? Why are we surprised? And I quote, when you put your foot on a man's neck and hold him down for 300 years, and then you let him up, what's he going to do? He's going to knock your block off.
And what happened in Washington is mirrored all across the country, in Chicago and Pittsburgh, in Kansas City, a hundred cities burn. There are dozens of people are shot dead by the police or by the National Guard.
Thousands of people are injured. Tens of thousands of people arrested.
I mean, it is an unbelievably apocalyptic scene, but there is one exception. There is one city where you would expect trouble and there is none.
And that's the city we began with, Indianapolis, because that's where Robert Kennedy, who is on his campaign, stands up and he gives yet another incredibly resonant, powerful, emotional piece of oratory. That's what we began with and extemporized.
And we will return to that speech and to Robert Kennedy and to his campaign and his own tragic fate in the next episode of this series. That's a huge thrill for all fans of my impression of Robert Kennedy because it will be featuring again in our next episode.
And if you want to hear that and Dominic's account of Kennedy's campaign and of course his assassination, then that will be the next episode that we do. And if you want to hear that and Dominic's account of Kennedy's campaign,

and of course his assassination, then that will be the next episode that we do. And if you want to hear it immediately and the rest of the series as well, then you can go right now to

therestishistory.com and join the club. But either way, we will be back with you very soon.
Bye-bye.