March 25, 2025 • 39 mins
When he was murdered by an assassin’s bullet, MLK was going through a hard time in his life and many close to him say that he knew the end was near. But even he couldn’t have predicted the impact his death would have – good and ill – on the United States.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck 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 3 (00:26):
That's right. We haven't done a two parter in a while.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
But as we got into the originally one part of
the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior, you were like, man,
there's a lot more here that we can just kind
of explode this into a two parter.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Yeah, that was verbatim what I.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Said, and I said, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
There was a ton of stuff that I did not
know about mlk's assassination. Yeah, James lay like, there's a
lot of stuff around it, and it's just a reminder
that history gets so boiled down to like it's its
bare essence or even like a caricature of itself, and
when you really dig into like a historical event, you
(01:10):
just you're just reminded that there's just so many people
affected and involved, and it's not just you know, James
ear already shot Martin Luther King Junior, and you know,
the world mourned. I mean, right, 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.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
This Yeah for sure. I mean, you know, we'll talk
about it some. But I went to I've been to
the King Center, I've been in the Civil Rights Museum
in Memphis at the Lorraine Motel, and like I've thought,
I knew a lot about this stuff, but until we
do our job.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Like we do, I learned a lot more. So it's
pretty great.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
So let's talk MLKA because he kind of skyrocketed to
prominence 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,
who we did an episode on Rosa Parks Agent of Change.
(02:10):
You remember, that's.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Right, was gay?
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Yeah for sure, And all this is just you know,
so we're setting the table kind of as a lead
in to where things were in April of nineteen sixty eight. Yeah,
so like you said, you know, twelve this year's earlier
is when he really rose to prominence, and so much
so that in February of fifty seven, he was on
(02:32):
the cover of Time magazine.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
So in nineteen sixty three he was Times Man of
the Year after being on the cover just you know,
a handful of years earlier. And in nineteen sixty four
he won the Nobel Peace Prize. So he was one
of the most famous Americans by the early nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yes, But one of the things you don't learn about
these days as often is that he was at that
point beginning to become widely criticized, not just by white Americans,
many of whom have been criticizing them all along, but
by black Americans as well. There was a real division
(03:12):
in the civil rights movement between Martin Luther King's vision
of his doctrine of non violence, which is basically saying like, hey,
we're going to essentially do everything we can to show
white Americans the problems that black Americans face just by
(03:34):
being black in America, and no matter what they do
to us, we're not going to fight back, and we're
going to make an example of ourselves that we'll hopefully
set for them. And the ultimate goal was to integrate
into America, to integrate black Americans into America, so that
there wasn't Black America in white America, and that ran
(03:56):
very much contrary to the other rival idea, which was
Malcolm X's idea.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Yeah, and we haven't done one on Malcolm X yet,
so maybe we should. We should hit that up as
a follow up at some points, for sure. But yes,
this was, you know, sort of the other side of
the coin. Malcolm X believed in black separatism. He was like,
this non violent approach isn't isn't working, and black people
(04:22):
cannot integrate into white America. It's a racist society and
it's just not possible. So we need self determination. Violence,
you know, by any means necessary, is an acceptable sort
of avenue to achieve the goals of black determination, and
especially considering violence is being inflicted upon black people by
(04:46):
white people constantly, so it's time to fight back, like
with fist and clubs and whatever else.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah, and again that's totally contrary to King's doctrine of
non violence, 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. And a big portion
of the people who are critical of King and his
nonviolentce doctrine were the younger generations, they tended to lean
(05:11):
more militantly, more in Malcolm X's direction, and then in
White America. With white Americans, he was basically never popular
during his lifetime, at least with the majority of white Americans.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Yeah, I mean, and we know this because you know,
they did polls back then. There were Gallop Poles that
found in nineteen sixty three through nineteen sixty six. Each
year found that fewer that forty percent of white Americans
viewed Martin Luther King Junior favorably. So one of the
other things that didn't help, besides his work in the
(05:46):
you know, and civil rights, was his stance.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
On Vietnam and the war in Vietnam.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
He was always against it, but really changed his stance
in nineteen sixty seven, started being really really vocal about
it as far as publicly condemning the war, started leading
anti war marches, giving speeches against the war. One very
famous one was Beyond Vietnam Colon a Time to Break
the Silence speech he gave in New York City at
(06:12):
Riverside Church and April actually exactly one year April fourth,
nineteen sixty seven before his murder. And it was a
very controversial speech because it was his most adamant anti war,
anti Vietnam speech yet, and he specifically called out America
and the US military by sending a disproportionate number of
(06:34):
you know, kind of poor black American boys to fight
that war.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Yeah, and so this was it's really hard to oversee
how controversial this speech was. Like he just stopped mincing
words and came out and said everything that needed to
be said. And so his alliance with Lyndon Baine Johnson,
who was president at the time, was just chattered. Right
then LBJ stepped away from him, publicly broke with him.
(06:58):
I think Laura helps out with this. She found one
hundred and sixty eight newspapers issued editorials denouncing him for
that speech. So that like he was already not super
popular with white Americans, his popularity was so so with
black Americans, and all Americans were now mad at him
(07:20):
for his stance on Vietnam, or a ton of them were.
And then one of the other things that really proved
to be very difficult for him later in his life.
Later in his career was he shifted focus from strictly
civil rights for black Americans to economic justice for poor
Americans of all races. He created something called the Poor
(07:44):
People's Campaign. He came up with an economic bill of
rights that is essentially pretty socialists, I mean at its core.
And he also basically said, like, this campaign is also
going to be a shift not just in focus, in potency,
Like we're not going to be quite as peaceful as
(08:05):
we were before. We're not going to go Malcolm X
full on militant, but we're you can expect, you know,
I think he famously said, fifteen to sixteen percent more militancy.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Right, Yeah, and you know 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.
His advisors and his staff didn't love this change of direction.
So you know, by the time April of nineteen sixty
eight rolls around, he's exhausted, he's tired, he's got people
(08:40):
coming at him from every angle, even within his own camp,
and he just wasn't at his peak personally or with
his career.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Right. So, Chuck, do you want to take a break now?
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Yeah, 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 nineteen sixty eight.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
So in the spring of nineteen sixty eight, 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. It
was by this time in high tension as a town,
(09:54):
and it was largely because of the Memphis sanitation workers strike.
Okay 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, because like,
(10:19):
this was mostly almost exclusively black sanitation workers who were
struggling for recognition of their work, dignity in their work,
decent wages. Apparently if you were a full time sanitation
worker in Memphis, you were still eligible for food stamps
after your full salary. And he was like, this is
(10:41):
this is exactly the perfect kind of thing that I'm
trying to get across, Like this is important. So he
kind of focused on Memphis in the spring of nineteen
sixty eight, and like I said, it was in a
state of high tension because a couple of protests, marches
essentially to support the word workers had not really gone
(11:02):
really well previously.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Yeah, but before these marches there was you know, there's
already a strike going on. It just wasn't you know,
full throttle at this point. What would really kick that
into gear were the very tragic deaths of two sanitation workers,
Echo Cole and Robert Walker. They were crushed to death
their truck malfunction. They were trying to take shelter from
the rain and were crushed by the truck, and the
(11:27):
city didn't pay any compensation to their families at all.
So this is what really kind of triggered the mass
walk off the job. Almost all the workers black sanitation
workers went on strike at the time. And King was like,
all right, I gotta get to Memphis. It's in trouble.
It's an opportunity for me as well, like you said,
(11:48):
to sort of help me segue into this other movement.
And there were a couple of different marches. On March
twenty eighth, he led a march of five thousand people
through Memphis, and almost right away it turned violent, not
by his hand, but it was a group called the Invaders.
It was a militant group of young African Americans who
(12:11):
were not on board with King. They were not on
board with non violence obviously, and they started looting. They
started breaking windows and stores. Police came in, and we
all know the drill. At this point, people scatter, Police
are beating people, shooting at people. That was a sixteen
year old named Larry Payne that was shot and killed
by a police officer named Leslie Dean Jones. Sixty people injured.
(12:36):
And then all of a sudden, Memphis is under curfew
and close to four thousand National guardsmen are brought in.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Yeah, and this was on the heels of another march
the month before in February where protesters, including some ministers
who were marching were mazed by police. So Memphis just
like basically almost like throwing a switch, went from like
a generally o case city as far as race relations
were concerned, to like the National Guard is now here
(13:06):
keeping order in like a month. That just changed that quickly.
And because he was leading the march on March twenty eighth,
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, because that was a huge black
(13:28):
eye in his against him his career and in particular
his whole 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, and
King just basically wanted to go give it another try
(13:49):
and hopefully restore his reputation, hopefully restore the reputation of
the civil rights movement he was leading. 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. A
lot of his advisors were like, we don't need to
(14:10):
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, 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 third, and that evening he gave
what's been known today as is. I've been to the
(14:31):
Mountaintop speech. Yeah, I believe it was his final speech.
Gave it at the Mason Temple church in Memphis, and
it was a pretty significant speech, as you can imagine.
I mean, basically everyone's aware of this. But in it
he recounts in a previous assassination attempt that I had
(14:51):
never heard of, had.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
You, yeah, from visiting the museums. But it's certainly not
something I don't think this like super widely known.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Right. Well, So he was signing a book at a
department store when he was stabbed in a chest by
a mentally ill woman named Isola Curry. Stabbed in the
chest but with a seven inch letter opener, and Isola
Curry was convinced that civil rights organizations like mlk's were
tracking her, had singled her out, and we're tracking her,
(15:20):
preventing her from getting employment, just generally messing with her life.
And the papers all reported that the surgeon who treated
MLKA obviously here survived, was that the letter opener came
so close to his heart that had he sneezed, it
would have penetrated his aorda and killed him. So he
really lucked out, and he talked about this, and I've
(15:41):
been to the mountaintop speech. But the thing that most
people remember about it is that he he in a
way almost predicted his death the following day in the
At the end of the.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
Speech, yeah, I mean, I'll go ahead and read it.
He talked about not being around. He said anybody it
would like to live along life. Longevity has its place,
but I'm not concerned about that now.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
I just want to do God's will.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
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 a definite sort of
eerie thing to happen the night before his murder.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
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, 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 1 (16:41):
Yeah, I mean, he had seen what happened with Kennedy
obviously what happened with Robert Kennedy afterward. But yeah, it
was those kind of things, you know, very sadly were
we just much more common back then.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Yeah, I was thinking about that, and just like living
in an era of assassinations, like success full assassinations of
prominent political figures, one of whom was the president at
the time. That's just nuts that America went through that period.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yeah, absolutely, I mean King Malcolm X, the two Kennedy's. Yeah,
it's just a very fraught, fraught time in our history
for sure. So he's back in town to hold a
march to set the previous march right, and one of
the things he had to do was get the invaders
on board with not doing this again. So at the
Lorraine Motel he was actually meeting with them. One of
(17:32):
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.
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. The march was actually planned for
April fourth, and this is one of those sort of
(17:53):
sliding doors things. 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 fourth, perhaps James or Ray
would have continued to sort of pursue King because as
we'll see, he had been following him around for about
(18:13):
a month or maybe not. Maybe maybe that assassination never happens.
But because of that injunction, the march was delayed from
April fourth.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
King stayed in town.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
To go to court to help appeal that injunction, was
in court on April fourth through the day and then
late that afternoon the judges said, all right, we can
do this march.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
It'll be next Monday. And King.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
So late that afternoon the judges said, all right, the
march can go forward, but it's going to go forward
next Monday.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
So that day on April fourth, it was the evening.
It turns out Bono got it wrong in that song Pride.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Because he says early, you know they corrected it, did they? Yeah? They?
Speaker 1 (19:00):
I never listened to much of it, but they put
out a reimaginings of a bunch of their songs called
songs of Surrender. And like you said, it was early
morning April fourth, shot rings out in the Memphis s
Guy and the song Pride in the Name of Love,
and he changed it to in the evening April fourth.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Well, yes, that's much more accurate, because that's when it happened.
King had just been grinding away in Memphis for two
days by then, and he was staying in room three
h six of the now very famous Lorraine Motel. That
was the room that he usually took anytime he and
his people were in Memphis. They stayed at the Lorraine
Hotel because it was a black owned business and had
(19:38):
been owned by Walter Bailey and his wife Laurie since
the nineteen forties. It was listed in the Green Book
even it was just a black owned business, and it
was a nice hotel to stay in. And by the
time the late afternoon early evening rolled around, MLK was
late for a dinner at the Reverend Billy Kyle's house
(20:00):
in Memphis, 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. I
think he told one of them to start the car
and a shot did bring out and it hit MLK
in the face.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Yeah, sort of in the chin and jaw area and
the neckline. There were there's that very famous photograph of
the people, you know, his his group standing on the
on the balcony off I think like three guys are
pointing across Mulberry Street, which ran between the Lorraine Motel
and the what was it, the Bessie What boarding house?
Speaker 2 (20:44):
Bessie Brewers boarding House.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
Yeah, Bessie Brewers boarding House, and they were like, that's
where the shot came from. The picture was taken by
a South African photographer named Joseph Lowe l o u
W became one of the most famous, you know photographs
in a American history, of course. And the gentleman kneeling
attending to King, trying to do whatever he could, that
(21:07):
was a guy named Meryll 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
and he's the one that's that's kneeling kind of trying
to tend to King again. He was shot at six
(21:29):
oh one, was alive even at the hospital, barely, but
he died just.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
An hour later.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
He's pronounced dead at the age of thirty nine at
seven five pm.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah, and a doctor named Jerry T. Francisco was the
medical examiner at Shelby County at the time, and he
conducted it an autopsy, and he concluded that Martin Luther
King was killed by a gunshot wound to the chin
and neck with a total transaction action of the lower
(22:01):
cervical and upper thoracic spinal cord and other structures of
the neck. I read somewhere that that Martin Luther King
probably didn't even hear the shot that killed him. It
just hit him so fast and was shot from a
high powered rifle at you know, close enough by that
(22:23):
like it would have he just wouldn't have heard it.
And I was thinking it was possible that he died
almost instantly. Had you read that he was still alive
for a period like when he got to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Yeah, he was apparently just hanging on, you know, he
was alive in the ambulance. He was alive, I think
shortly after he got to the hospital.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Well, hopefully he was completely unconscious at the time. So
I mean, it's my hope that he just had he
just never knew what hit him or anything hit him.
I didn't, Yeah, I didn't realize that. Yeah. I thought
he probably died instantly.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
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 3 (23:07):
He didn't.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
He said he did that because he didn't want to
deform the body any further. But that, of course, you know,
would help out later with conspiracy theories as far as
you know, not having a full accounting of the path
of the bullet, which we'll get into all that, I
believe in part two. Yeah, but right after the shooting,
like literally the minutes right afterward, there were two men
(23:30):
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 to where
it could have held a rifle. And what happened was, well,
there was another witness that said they saw a man
passing I don't know how it's pronounced k k n
i p e kN iper cannip.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Caneps. That's what I'm going CAP's.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Okaynie's Canep's Amusement Company, and just drop this bundle on
the front door of the store. You can, you know,
there's a picture of it if you 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 portable radio, they found some brand
new binoculars, a couple of cans of beer, and precisely
(24:18):
a thirty out six Remington seven sixty game Master rifle
with a scope, which is a hunting rifle. It's it's
kind of a unique gun in that it's a it's
a long range rifle that's a pump action rifle, which
usually they are bolt action rifles.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, that is fairly unique.
So yeah, that's that's pretty specific. At the boarding house too.
At Bessie Brewer's boarding house, people who are staying there
later told police that they heard people, at least someone
maybe going back and forth to the bathroom. This is
a boarding house, so obviously there was a shared bathroom
(24:57):
rather than a bathroom in each room, and so 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,
obviously left by somebody's shoes, And the bathtub was where
you would have had to stood to see out the
(25:19):
window to have a shot at Martin Luther King on
the balcony. 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 1 (25:35):
Also, like two minutes later, the shooting had been radioed
into the police, and just five minutes later, at six
point eight, the owner of that amusement company told police
that he saw a white man running through the alley
and actually saw him drop that bundle and then flee
the scene in a white Ford Mustang.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
Yeah, we'll talk about the investigation and everything like that
in part two, but I say we take our second break,
come back and talk about what happened after MLK died.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
So, you know, very famously, Walter Cronkite came on the
news and very somberly told the nation what had happened
on the CBS Nightly News President Johnson declared the next day,
April seventh, the National Day of Morning.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
Flags went to half staff.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
A lot of businesses around the country closed for the day,
and he said, Johnson said on TV, the dream of
doctor Martin Luther King, Junior has not died with him.
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 2 (27:15):
Yeah. So, yeah, like you said, the National Day of
Morning was April seventh, 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 3 (27:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
And I saw Chuck that on the day of his funeral,
the New York Stock Exchange closed, which is pretty significant.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
The NBA and the NHL were in their playoffs and
they rescheduled their games, but the Major League Baseball they
did not postpone opening day, much to their discredit. But
Roberto Clemente and Maury Willis as the Pirates, said, well,
we're not playing today. It's Martin Luther King Junior's funeral.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
That's great.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
We're not going to disrespect it like that. And they
inspired players on other teams to sit it out too,
So from what I saw, effectively, opening Day was postponed
for a number of teams, if not all, of MLB.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Yeah, and hey, we did do a good episode on
Roberto Clemente, remember that one.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Yep, that was a good one.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
So all across the country, you know, people react with
extreme upset, which led to violence and some rioting and
uprising in like one hundred and twenty five cities over
the course of a few days. Thirty nine people were killed,
thirty five hundred people were injured, fifty thousand federal troops
(28:41):
you know, dispatched all over the country basically except New
York and Los Angeles. There were a couple of the
only major cities that they managed to kind of talk
people down. Atlanta too, Oh, Atlanta as well.
Speaker 3 (28:53):
That's great.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
So despite the fact that you know, black folks and
a lot of white folks are mourning this death, it
also sort of widened the rift because it became a
symbol all of a sudden as white America's rejection of
equal rights basically and white Americans rejection of non violence
(29:15):
by literally dying by a bullet a nonviolent man. But
there were you know, it wasn't just this. This is
sort of the straw that broke the camels back with
just sort of every the state of things in nineteen
sixty eight with race relations.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Yeah, I would call it more like a match thrown
on a powder keg. The just the explosive reaction was,
like you said, not just because of mlk's assassination, but
that was the thing that set it off previously, the
summer before it was called the long Hot Summer. Yeah,
because there have been a ton of riots nationwide in
(29:50):
cities like Detroit, there was five days of rioting. It
just kept happening all over the place in black communities
around the United State States. And there were reasons for this.
There were like segregation had officially ended, but in practice
there was tons of segregation left, especially kinds of like
(30:11):
housing discrimination that essentially created black ghettos in downtown American
cities that white Americans had left for the suburbs. 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,
(30:35):
and there had been riots already, but there were a
ton of them after MLK passed as well.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Yeah, and you know, there was a legitimate fear that
a race work could break out in the United States.
It wasn't I don't think it was overstated looking back,
that that was a very real thing that could have happened.
And there were you know, there was one editorial writer
who basically in the month after the assassination was like,
(31:02):
King was the one that was preventing this from happening,
So we may be in trouble here in the United States,
like real trouble. Thankfully that didn't happen obviously, but 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, and looking back,
(31:23):
it's looked as basically it was just a harassment campaign
that made things worse.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
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. We're going to keep them here
for a year. It was very odd. It was the
longest occupation of any American city ever, which is I mean,
(31:49):
you just don't think of Wilmington, Delaware, stuff like that
happening to Wilmington, Delaware.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
One of this sort of 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 eighth. She did lead that
march with her four small kids, along with forty thousand
other people, in a silent march.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
And that was King.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
You know, Martin Luther King was so adamant about going
back to Memphis and having a non violent march. So
it was, you know, special that she was able to
see that through.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Yeah. And imagine seeing forty thousand people pass by you silently,
how powerful that would be to see.
Speaker 3 (32:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
So the following day, after Coreta 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, and I think his father
was the preacher there. At the time. Is that right.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
I'm not sure. It's like four miles from my house. Yeah,
right in the middle of Atlanta.
Speaker 3 (32:57):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Yeah, I was gonna say later, but that that whole
area that's called the Sweet Auburn Community, Yeah, it's awesome.
Is largely preserved like it was around King's death. Like
they they you know, there's still new businesses and people
move in and out, but they they've really gone to
a lot of trouble to preserve like how it looked.
(33:20):
The National Park Service is preserved it. And and like
you said, you toured the King Center. That's an amazing
place to to go as well. But I thought that
was really cool that it's been designated a National Historic Site. Yeah,
it's under protection.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Yeah, which is always a little odd when you're driving
through that area and you see a park ranger in
the middle of the city.
Speaker 3 (33:40):
You're like, what's going on.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
They're like, oh, yeah, yeah, national Historic site.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
So yeah, you just assume they're lost.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
But the uh, that's the place that I always recommend
when you know stuff, you should know. People right in
or saying they're coming to Atlanta, that's again like.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
What what should they do?
Speaker 1 (33:56):
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. And there's
a lot of really cool displays, including a very sort
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 room three h six
(34:19):
Lorraine Motel hotel key sitting in it, with nothing else
around it.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
It's just sort of speaks for itself.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
That's better than what I always reply with. I just
tell them that they should go to Applebee's.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
I'm glad you got a good joke in this one.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
God bless you, Thank you. So his funeral, I looked
up a picture of it was his casket was carried
on a cart by two mules, processing down one of
the streets, probably Auburn Avenue. I didn't catch which street
it was, but there were one hundred thousand people in
(34:58):
this procession, including people lined up on either side of
the street as it passed in a procession behind his casket.
One hundred thousand 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,
literally as far as you could see, as far as
(35:20):
the photographer could capture, there's a stream of people filling
the road entirely following his casket and a procession. And
I was hardened to see when I zoomed in that, Like,
it wasn't fifty to fifty, but it wasn't completely lopsided. Yeah,
the number of white faces and black faces in the
photograph all marching together morning MLK Like, yeah, for sure
(35:45):
when it happened.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
You know, yeah, I mean especially in Atlanta, you know,
a city with a racial history as well. Yeah, Benjamin
Mays delivered the eulogy. He was the president of Morehouse University,
and Morehouse have their own ceremony, I believe a day
later on their campus, which, by the way, Martin Luther
King Junior was a student at Morehouse at fifteen years old.
(36:09):
So let that sink in for a second. And May's
predicted in that eulogy that 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.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
For garbage collectors.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:26):
Pretty powerful stuff.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Yeah, So the Lorain Hotel has become the National Civil
Rights Museum. But after King's assassination, Walter Bailey kept it
open for years, but he never rented room three oh
six again, and he didn't touch it. He left it
exactly as it was when MLK, as MLK had left
(36:48):
it when he was assassinated. But Walter Bailey's story was
additionally sad. He was very proud hotel owner to have
MLK stay every time he came in Memphis. So it
was bad enough that Martin Luther King was assassinated at
his hotel, but he also his wife, Laurie, who the
motel was named after. She had a stroke in all
(37:12):
of the commotion and the horrificness of what had happened
right after MLK was assassinated, and she died five days later. Yeah,
And so over the years, I'm sure after Walter Bailey passed,
the motel started to fall into disrepair, and it finally
closed in nineteen eighty eight, but it was purchased and
(37:32):
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 and they've preserved Room three h six just as
King left it as well.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Yeah, it is a great museum. I can highly recommend
Memphis as a whole for a weekend trip. I've spoken before.
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 you can go to. You know,
there's obviously all the Graceland and Sun Records and Stax
(38:08):
records and Beale Street. It's just you can easily find
like three days of great fun stuff to do in Memphis.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Very nice. Yeah, Memphis where it's at.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
That's right. So that's it for part one.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
I guess we're going to skip listener mail, as we
traditionally do on our two.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
Partners, right, yeah, I figured we would, so.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Maybe just the traditional sign off that's you, right, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I don't do that, do I?
Speaker 2 (38:34):
No, you don't. 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
Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck 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 3 (00:26):
That's right. We haven't done a two parter in a while.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
But as we got into the originally one part of
the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior, you were like, man,
there's a lot more here that we can just kind
of explode this into a two parter.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Yeah, that was verbatim what I.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Said, and I said, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
There was a ton of stuff that I did not
know about mlk's assassination. Yeah, James lay like, there's a
lot of stuff around it, and it's just a reminder
that history gets so boiled down to like it's its
bare essence or even like a caricature of itself, and
when you really dig into like a historical event, you
(01:10):
just you're just reminded that there's just so many people
affected and involved, and it's not just you know, James
ear already shot Martin Luther King Junior, and you know,
the world mourned. I mean, right, 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.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
This Yeah for sure. I mean, you know, we'll talk
about it some. But I went to I've been to
the King Center, I've been in the Civil Rights Museum
in Memphis at the Lorraine Motel, and like I've thought,
I knew a lot about this stuff, but until we
do our job.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Like we do, I learned a lot more. So it's
pretty great.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
So let's talk MLKA because he kind of skyrocketed to
prominence 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,
who we did an episode on Rosa Parks Agent of Change.
(02:10):
You remember, that's.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Right, was gay?
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Yeah for sure, And all this is just you know,
so we're setting the table kind of as a lead
in to where things were in April of nineteen sixty eight. Yeah,
so like you said, you know, twelve this year's earlier
is when he really rose to prominence, and so much
so that in February of fifty seven, he was on
(02:32):
the cover of Time magazine.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
So in nineteen sixty three he was Times Man of
the Year after being on the cover just you know,
a handful of years earlier. And in nineteen sixty four
he won the Nobel Peace Prize. So he was one
of the most famous Americans by the early nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yes, But one of the things you don't learn about
these days as often is that he was at that
point beginning to become widely criticized, not just by white Americans,
many of whom have been criticizing them all along, but
by black Americans as well. There was a real division
(03:12):
in the civil rights movement between Martin Luther King's vision
of his doctrine of non violence, which is basically saying like, hey,
we're going to essentially do everything we can to show
white Americans the problems that black Americans face just by
(03:34):
being black in America, and no matter what they do
to us, we're not going to fight back, and we're
going to make an example of ourselves that we'll hopefully
set for them. And the ultimate goal was to integrate
into America, to integrate black Americans into America, so that
there wasn't Black America in white America, and that ran
(03:56):
very much contrary to the other rival idea, which was
Malcolm X's idea.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Yeah, and we haven't done one on Malcolm X yet,
so maybe we should. We should hit that up as
a follow up at some points, for sure. But yes,
this was, you know, sort of the other side of
the coin. Malcolm X believed in black separatism. He was like,
this non violent approach isn't isn't working, and black people
(04:22):
cannot integrate into white America. It's a racist society and
it's just not possible. So we need self determination. Violence,
you know, by any means necessary, is an acceptable sort
of avenue to achieve the goals of black determination, and
especially considering violence is being inflicted upon black people by
(04:46):
white people constantly, so it's time to fight back, like
with fist and clubs and whatever else.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah, and again that's totally contrary to King's doctrine of
non violence, 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. And a big portion
of the people who are critical of King and his
nonviolentce doctrine were the younger generations, they tended to lean
(05:11):
more militantly, more in Malcolm X's direction, and then in
White America. With white Americans, he was basically never popular
during his lifetime, at least with the majority of white Americans.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Yeah, I mean, and we know this because you know,
they did polls back then. There were Gallop Poles that
found in nineteen sixty three through nineteen sixty six. Each
year found that fewer that forty percent of white Americans
viewed Martin Luther King Junior favorably. So one of the
other things that didn't help, besides his work in the
(05:46):
you know, and civil rights, was his stance.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
On Vietnam and the war in Vietnam.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
He was always against it, but really changed his stance
in nineteen sixty seven, started being really really vocal about
it as far as publicly condemning the war, started leading
anti war marches, giving speeches against the war. One very
famous one was Beyond Vietnam Colon a Time to Break
the Silence speech he gave in New York City at
(06:12):
Riverside Church and April actually exactly one year April fourth,
nineteen sixty seven before his murder. And it was a
very controversial speech because it was his most adamant anti war,
anti Vietnam speech yet, and he specifically called out America
and the US military by sending a disproportionate number of
(06:34):
you know, kind of poor black American boys to fight
that war.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Yeah, and so this was it's really hard to oversee
how controversial this speech was. Like he just stopped mincing
words and came out and said everything that needed to
be said. And so his alliance with Lyndon Baine Johnson,
who was president at the time, was just chattered. Right
then LBJ stepped away from him, publicly broke with him.
(06:58):
I think Laura helps out with this. She found one
hundred and sixty eight newspapers issued editorials denouncing him for
that speech. So that like he was already not super
popular with white Americans, his popularity was so so with
black Americans, and all Americans were now mad at him
(07:20):
for his stance on Vietnam, or a ton of them were.
And then one of the other things that really proved
to be very difficult for him later in his life.
Later in his career was he shifted focus from strictly
civil rights for black Americans to economic justice for poor
Americans of all races. He created something called the Poor
(07:44):
People's Campaign. He came up with an economic bill of
rights that is essentially pretty socialists, I mean at its core.
And he also basically said, like, this campaign is also
going to be a shift not just in focus, in potency,
Like we're not going to be quite as peaceful as
(08:05):
we were before. We're not going to go Malcolm X
full on militant, but we're you can expect, you know,
I think he famously said, fifteen to sixteen percent more militancy.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Right, Yeah, and you know 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.
His advisors and his staff didn't love this change of direction.
So you know, by the time April of nineteen sixty
eight rolls around, he's exhausted, he's tired, he's got people
(08:40):
coming at him from every angle, even within his own camp,
and he just wasn't at his peak personally or with
his career.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Right. So, Chuck, do you want to take a break now?
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Yeah, 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 nineteen sixty eight.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
So in the spring of nineteen sixty eight, 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. It
was by this time in high tension as a town,
(09:54):
and it was largely because of the Memphis sanitation workers strike.
Okay 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, because like,
(10:19):
this was mostly almost exclusively black sanitation workers who were
struggling for recognition of their work, dignity in their work,
decent wages. Apparently if you were a full time sanitation
worker in Memphis, you were still eligible for food stamps
after your full salary. And he was like, this is
(10:41):
this is exactly the perfect kind of thing that I'm
trying to get across, Like this is important. So he
kind of focused on Memphis in the spring of nineteen
sixty eight, and like I said, it was in a
state of high tension because a couple of protests, marches
essentially to support the word workers had not really gone
(11:02):
really well previously.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Yeah, but before these marches there was you know, there's
already a strike going on. It just wasn't you know,
full throttle at this point. What would really kick that
into gear were the very tragic deaths of two sanitation workers,
Echo Cole and Robert Walker. They were crushed to death
their truck malfunction. They were trying to take shelter from
the rain and were crushed by the truck, and the
(11:27):
city didn't pay any compensation to their families at all.
So this is what really kind of triggered the mass
walk off the job. Almost all the workers black sanitation
workers went on strike at the time. And King was like,
all right, I gotta get to Memphis. It's in trouble.
It's an opportunity for me as well, like you said,
(11:48):
to sort of help me segue into this other movement.
And there were a couple of different marches. On March
twenty eighth, he led a march of five thousand people
through Memphis, and almost right away it turned violent, not
by his hand, but it was a group called the Invaders.
It was a militant group of young African Americans who
(12:11):
were not on board with King. They were not on
board with non violence obviously, and they started looting. They
started breaking windows and stores. Police came in, and we
all know the drill. At this point, people scatter, Police
are beating people, shooting at people. That was a sixteen
year old named Larry Payne that was shot and killed
by a police officer named Leslie Dean Jones. Sixty people injured.
(12:36):
And then all of a sudden, Memphis is under curfew
and close to four thousand National guardsmen are brought in.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Yeah, and this was on the heels of another march
the month before in February where protesters, including some ministers
who were marching were mazed by police. So Memphis just
like basically almost like throwing a switch, went from like
a generally o case city as far as race relations
were concerned, to like the National Guard is now here
(13:06):
keeping order in like a month. That just changed that quickly.
And because he was leading the march on March twenty eighth,
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, because that was a huge black
(13:28):
eye in his against him his career and in particular
his whole 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, and
King just basically wanted to go give it another try
(13:49):
and hopefully restore his reputation, hopefully restore the reputation of
the civil rights movement he was leading. 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. A
lot of his advisors were like, we don't need to
(14:10):
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, 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 third, and that evening he gave
what's been known today as is. I've been to the
(14:31):
Mountaintop speech. Yeah, I believe it was his final speech.
Gave it at the Mason Temple church in Memphis, and
it was a pretty significant speech, as you can imagine.
I mean, basically everyone's aware of this. But in it
he recounts in a previous assassination attempt that I had
(14:51):
never heard of, had.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
You, yeah, from visiting the museums. But it's certainly not
something I don't think this like super widely known.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Right. Well, So he was signing a book at a
department store when he was stabbed in a chest by
a mentally ill woman named Isola Curry. Stabbed in the
chest but with a seven inch letter opener, and Isola
Curry was convinced that civil rights organizations like mlk's were
tracking her, had singled her out, and we're tracking her,
(15:20):
preventing her from getting employment, just generally messing with her life.
And the papers all reported that the surgeon who treated
MLKA obviously here survived, was that the letter opener came
so close to his heart that had he sneezed, it
would have penetrated his aorda and killed him. So he
really lucked out, and he talked about this, and I've
(15:41):
been to the mountaintop speech. But the thing that most
people remember about it is that he he in a
way almost predicted his death the following day in the
At the end of the.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
Speech, yeah, I mean, I'll go ahead and read it.
He talked about not being around. He said anybody it
would like to live along life. Longevity has its place,
but I'm not concerned about that now.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
I just want to do God's will.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
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 a definite sort of
eerie thing to happen the night before his murder.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
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, 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 1 (16:41):
Yeah, I mean, he had seen what happened with Kennedy
obviously what happened with Robert Kennedy afterward. But yeah, it
was those kind of things, you know, very sadly were
we just much more common back then.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Yeah, I was thinking about that, and just like living
in an era of assassinations, like success full assassinations of
prominent political figures, one of whom was the president at
the time. That's just nuts that America went through that period.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yeah, absolutely, I mean King Malcolm X, the two Kennedy's. Yeah,
it's just a very fraught, fraught time in our history
for sure. So he's back in town to hold a
march to set the previous march right, and one of
the things he had to do was get the invaders
on board with not doing this again. So at the
Lorraine Motel he was actually meeting with them. One of
(17:32):
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.
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. The march was actually planned for
April fourth, and this is one of those sort of
(17:53):
sliding doors things. 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 fourth, perhaps James or Ray
would have continued to sort of pursue King because as
we'll see, he had been following him around for about
(18:13):
a month or maybe not. Maybe maybe that assassination never happens.
But because of that injunction, the march was delayed from
April fourth.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
King stayed in town.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
To go to court to help appeal that injunction, was
in court on April fourth through the day and then
late that afternoon the judges said, all right, we can
do this march.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
It'll be next Monday. And King.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
So late that afternoon the judges said, all right, the
march can go forward, but it's going to go forward
next Monday.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
So that day on April fourth, it was the evening.
It turns out Bono got it wrong in that song Pride.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Because he says early, you know they corrected it, did they? Yeah? They?
Speaker 1 (19:00):
I never listened to much of it, but they put
out a reimaginings of a bunch of their songs called
songs of Surrender. And like you said, it was early
morning April fourth, shot rings out in the Memphis s
Guy and the song Pride in the Name of Love,
and he changed it to in the evening April fourth.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Well, yes, that's much more accurate, because that's when it happened.
King had just been grinding away in Memphis for two
days by then, and he was staying in room three
h six of the now very famous Lorraine Motel. That
was the room that he usually took anytime he and
his people were in Memphis. They stayed at the Lorraine
Hotel because it was a black owned business and had
(19:38):
been owned by Walter Bailey and his wife Laurie since
the nineteen forties. It was listed in the Green Book
even it was just a black owned business, and it
was a nice hotel to stay in. And by the
time the late afternoon early evening rolled around, MLK was
late for a dinner at the Reverend Billy Kyle's house
(20:00):
in Memphis, 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. I
think he told one of them to start the car
and a shot did bring out and it hit MLK
in the face.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Yeah, sort of in the chin and jaw area and
the neckline. There were there's that very famous photograph of
the people, you know, his his group standing on the
on the balcony off I think like three guys are
pointing across Mulberry Street, which ran between the Lorraine Motel
and the what was it, the Bessie What boarding house?
Speaker 2 (20:44):
Bessie Brewers boarding House.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
Yeah, Bessie Brewers boarding House, and they were like, that's
where the shot came from. The picture was taken by
a South African photographer named Joseph Lowe l o u
W became one of the most famous, you know photographs
in a American history, of course. And the gentleman kneeling
attending to King, trying to do whatever he could, that
(21:07):
was a guy named Meryll 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
and he's the one that's that's kneeling kind of trying
to tend to King again. He was shot at six
(21:29):
oh one, was alive even at the hospital, barely, but
he died just.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
An hour later.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
He's pronounced dead at the age of thirty nine at
seven five pm.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah, and a doctor named Jerry T. Francisco was the
medical examiner at Shelby County at the time, and he
conducted it an autopsy, and he concluded that Martin Luther
King was killed by a gunshot wound to the chin
and neck with a total transaction action of the lower
(22:01):
cervical and upper thoracic spinal cord and other structures of
the neck. I read somewhere that that Martin Luther King
probably didn't even hear the shot that killed him. It
just hit him so fast and was shot from a
high powered rifle at you know, close enough by that
(22:23):
like it would have he just wouldn't have heard it.
And I was thinking it was possible that he died
almost instantly. Had you read that he was still alive
for a period like when he got to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Yeah, he was apparently just hanging on, you know, he
was alive in the ambulance. He was alive, I think
shortly after he got to the hospital.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Well, hopefully he was completely unconscious at the time. So
I mean, it's my hope that he just had he
just never knew what hit him or anything hit him.
I didn't, Yeah, I didn't realize that. Yeah. I thought
he probably died instantly.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
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 3 (23:07):
He didn't.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
He said he did that because he didn't want to
deform the body any further. But that, of course, you know,
would help out later with conspiracy theories as far as
you know, not having a full accounting of the path
of the bullet, which we'll get into all that, I
believe in part two. Yeah, but right after the shooting,
like literally the minutes right afterward, there were two men
(23:30):
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 to where
it could have held a rifle. And what happened was, well,
there was another witness that said they saw a man
passing I don't know how it's pronounced k k n
i p e kN iper cannip.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Caneps. That's what I'm going CAP's.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Okaynie's Canep's Amusement Company, and just drop this bundle on
the front door of the store. You can, you know,
there's a picture of it if you 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 portable radio, they found some brand
new binoculars, a couple of cans of beer, and precisely
(24:18):
a thirty out six Remington seven sixty game Master rifle
with a scope, which is a hunting rifle. It's it's
kind of a unique gun in that it's a it's
a long range rifle that's a pump action rifle, which
usually they are bolt action rifles.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, that is fairly unique.
So yeah, that's that's pretty specific. At the boarding house too.
At Bessie Brewer's boarding house, people who are staying there
later told police that they heard people, at least someone
maybe going back and forth to the bathroom. This is
a boarding house, so obviously there was a shared bathroom
(24:57):
rather than a bathroom in each room, and so 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,
obviously left by somebody's shoes, And the bathtub was where
you would have had to stood to see out the
(25:19):
window to have a shot at Martin Luther King on
the balcony. 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 1 (25:35):
Also, like two minutes later, the shooting had been radioed
into the police, and just five minutes later, at six
point eight, the owner of that amusement company told police
that he saw a white man running through the alley
and actually saw him drop that bundle and then flee
the scene in a white Ford Mustang.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
Yeah, we'll talk about the investigation and everything like that
in part two, but I say we take our second break,
come back and talk about what happened after MLK died.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
So, you know, very famously, Walter Cronkite came on the
news and very somberly told the nation what had happened
on the CBS Nightly News President Johnson declared the next day,
April seventh, the National Day of Morning.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
Flags went to half staff.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
A lot of businesses around the country closed for the day,
and he said, Johnson said on TV, the dream of
doctor Martin Luther King, Junior has not died with him.
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 2 (27:15):
Yeah. So, yeah, like you said, the National Day of
Morning was April seventh, 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 3 (27:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
And I saw Chuck that on the day of his funeral,
the New York Stock Exchange closed, which is pretty significant.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
The NBA and the NHL were in their playoffs and
they rescheduled their games, but the Major League Baseball they
did not postpone opening day, much to their discredit. But
Roberto Clemente and Maury Willis as the Pirates, said, well,
we're not playing today. It's Martin Luther King Junior's funeral.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
That's great.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
We're not going to disrespect it like that. And they
inspired players on other teams to sit it out too,
So from what I saw, effectively, opening Day was postponed
for a number of teams, if not all, of MLB.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Yeah, and hey, we did do a good episode on
Roberto Clemente, remember that one.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Yep, that was a good one.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
So all across the country, you know, people react with
extreme upset, which led to violence and some rioting and
uprising in like one hundred and twenty five cities over
the course of a few days. Thirty nine people were killed,
thirty five hundred people were injured, fifty thousand federal troops
(28:41):
you know, dispatched all over the country basically except New
York and Los Angeles. There were a couple of the
only major cities that they managed to kind of talk
people down. Atlanta too, Oh, Atlanta as well.
Speaker 3 (28:53):
That's great.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
So despite the fact that you know, black folks and
a lot of white folks are mourning this death, it
also sort of widened the rift because it became a
symbol all of a sudden as white America's rejection of
equal rights basically and white Americans rejection of non violence
(29:15):
by literally dying by a bullet a nonviolent man. But
there were you know, it wasn't just this. This is
sort of the straw that broke the camels back with
just sort of every the state of things in nineteen
sixty eight with race relations.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Yeah, I would call it more like a match thrown
on a powder keg. The just the explosive reaction was,
like you said, not just because of mlk's assassination, but
that was the thing that set it off previously, the
summer before it was called the long Hot Summer. Yeah,
because there have been a ton of riots nationwide in
(29:50):
cities like Detroit, there was five days of rioting. It
just kept happening all over the place in black communities
around the United State States. And there were reasons for this.
There were like segregation had officially ended, but in practice
there was tons of segregation left, especially kinds of like
(30:11):
housing discrimination that essentially created black ghettos in downtown American
cities that white Americans had left for the suburbs. 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,
(30:35):
and there had been riots already, but there were a
ton of them after MLK passed as well.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Yeah, and you know, there was a legitimate fear that
a race work could break out in the United States.
It wasn't I don't think it was overstated looking back,
that that was a very real thing that could have happened.
And there were you know, there was one editorial writer
who basically in the month after the assassination was like,
(31:02):
King was the one that was preventing this from happening,
So we may be in trouble here in the United States,
like real trouble. Thankfully that didn't happen obviously, but 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, and looking back,
(31:23):
it's looked as basically it was just a harassment campaign
that made things worse.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
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. We're going to keep them here
for a year. It was very odd. It was the
longest occupation of any American city ever, which is I mean,
(31:49):
you just don't think of Wilmington, Delaware, stuff like that
happening to Wilmington, Delaware.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
One of this sort of 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 eighth. She did lead that
march with her four small kids, along with forty thousand
other people, in a silent march.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
And that was King.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
You know, Martin Luther King was so adamant about going
back to Memphis and having a non violent march. So
it was, you know, special that she was able to
see that through.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Yeah. And imagine seeing forty thousand people pass by you silently,
how powerful that would be to see.
Speaker 3 (32:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
So the following day, after Coreta 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, and I think his father
was the preacher there. At the time. Is that right.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
I'm not sure. It's like four miles from my house. Yeah,
right in the middle of Atlanta.
Speaker 3 (32:57):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Yeah, I was gonna say later, but that that whole
area that's called the Sweet Auburn Community, Yeah, it's awesome.
Is largely preserved like it was around King's death. Like
they they you know, there's still new businesses and people
move in and out, but they they've really gone to
a lot of trouble to preserve like how it looked.
(33:20):
The National Park Service is preserved it. And and like
you said, you toured the King Center. That's an amazing
place to to go as well. But I thought that
was really cool that it's been designated a National Historic Site. Yeah,
it's under protection.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Yeah, which is always a little odd when you're driving
through that area and you see a park ranger in
the middle of the city.
Speaker 3 (33:40):
You're like, what's going on.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
They're like, oh, yeah, yeah, national Historic site.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
So yeah, you just assume they're lost.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
But the uh, that's the place that I always recommend
when you know stuff, you should know. People right in
or saying they're coming to Atlanta, that's again like.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
What what should they do?
Speaker 1 (33:56):
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. And there's
a lot of really cool displays, including a very sort
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 room three h six
(34:19):
Lorraine Motel hotel key sitting in it, with nothing else
around it.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
It's just sort of speaks for itself.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
That's better than what I always reply with. I just
tell them that they should go to Applebee's.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
I'm glad you got a good joke in this one.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
God bless you, Thank you. So his funeral, I looked
up a picture of it was his casket was carried
on a cart by two mules, processing down one of
the streets, probably Auburn Avenue. I didn't catch which street
it was, but there were one hundred thousand people in
(34:58):
this procession, including people lined up on either side of
the street as it passed in a procession behind his casket.
One hundred thousand 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,
literally as far as you could see, as far as
(35:20):
the photographer could capture, there's a stream of people filling
the road entirely following his casket and a procession. And
I was hardened to see when I zoomed in that, Like,
it wasn't fifty to fifty, but it wasn't completely lopsided. Yeah,
the number of white faces and black faces in the
photograph all marching together morning MLK Like, yeah, for sure
(35:45):
when it happened.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
You know, yeah, I mean especially in Atlanta, you know,
a city with a racial history as well. Yeah, Benjamin
Mays delivered the eulogy. He was the president of Morehouse University,
and Morehouse have their own ceremony, I believe a day
later on their campus, which, by the way, Martin Luther
King Junior was a student at Morehouse at fifteen years old.
(36:09):
So let that sink in for a second. And May's
predicted in that eulogy that 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.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
For garbage collectors.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:26):
Pretty powerful stuff.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Yeah, So the Lorain Hotel has become the National Civil
Rights Museum. But after King's assassination, Walter Bailey kept it
open for years, but he never rented room three oh
six again, and he didn't touch it. He left it
exactly as it was when MLK, as MLK had left
(36:48):
it when he was assassinated. But Walter Bailey's story was
additionally sad. He was very proud hotel owner to have
MLK stay every time he came in Memphis. So it
was bad enough that Martin Luther King was assassinated at
his hotel, but he also his wife, Laurie, who the
motel was named after. She had a stroke in all
(37:12):
of the commotion and the horrificness of what had happened
right after MLK was assassinated, and she died five days later. Yeah,
And so over the years, I'm sure after Walter Bailey passed,
the motel started to fall into disrepair, and it finally
closed in nineteen eighty eight, but it was purchased and
(37:32):
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 and they've preserved Room three h six just as
King left it as well.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Yeah, it is a great museum. I can highly recommend
Memphis as a whole for a weekend trip. I've spoken before.
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 you can go to. You know,
there's obviously all the Graceland and Sun Records and Stax
(38:08):
records and Beale Street. It's just you can easily find
like three days of great fun stuff to do in Memphis.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Very nice. Yeah, Memphis where it's at.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
That's right. So that's it for part one.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
I guess we're going to skip listener mail, as we
traditionally do on our two.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
Partners, right, yeah, I figured we would, so.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Maybe just the traditional sign off that's you, right, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I don't do that, do I?
Speaker 2 (38:34):
No, you don't. 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
Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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