50 years later, King assassination remembered as end of 'innocent optimism'

Neal Simpson The Patriot Ledger @nsimpson_ledger

Wednesday

Apr 4, 2018 at 7:00 PMApr 4, 2018 at 8:10 PM

A half-century ago today, Stephen London was at an evening event at a school in Wellesley when a school administrator came onto the stage and shared the news: The man London had traveled to Washington D.C. five years earlier to see, and with whom he'd later worked in the poor neighborhoods of Chicago, had been shot dead on a motel balcony in Memphis.

"For me, there was grieving, but also frustration," London, a Quincy native who went on to have a long career as a sociology professor at Simmons College in Boston, said. "I saw this in a larger context of the failure of the civil rights movement to implement so many of its goals, the hopes and aspirations that King himself had."

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, was just one shock delivered that year to a nation already reeling from seismic shifts in culture, politics, music and art, as what would later become known as the Baby Boomer generation left the shelter of their parents' homes and entered a world they were eager to change.

More than 16,000 Americans had already died in Vietnam by the start of 1968, and the front pages of The Patriot Ledger regularly carried news of the the deaths of local soldiers, as the war entered a year that would prove to be its bloodiest. And a nation still mourning the loss of its young president in 1963 would soon see his younger brother, Bobby Kennedy, gunned down in a hotel kitchen while King's assassin was still on the run.

For many Baby Boomers engaged in the civil rights movement and other progressive causes of the 1960s, King's death was singularly devastating. For them, King was not only a pioneer of social justice and non-violent resistance, but a moral leader at time when it appeared that America had lost its way. It was, in the words of Weymouth native and retired federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent Bill Murphy, the end of "innocent optimism."

"When Dr. King was assassinated, it kind of devastated me," said Murphy, one of four Patriot Ledger readers who met Tuesday for the first in a year-long series of round-table discussions about the defining events and themes of 1968, which Time magazine has declared "the year that shaped a generation."

King was two years into a campaign to desegregate northern cities, including Boston, when he came to Memphis in 1968 to march alongside black sanitation workers who were captured in iconic photographs marching with signs declaring, "I AM A MAN." After a demonstration in March that turned violent, King returned to Memphis on April 3 and delivered what would be his last speech, declaring that, like Moses, he had been "up to the mountain" and seen the promised land.

"I may not get there with you,' he said, prophetically. "But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."

The following evening, King was preparing to go to the home of a Memphis minister for dinner when he stepped out on the floor of his second-floor balcony at the Lorainne Motel to talk to a group of organizers in the parking lot below. As he did, a single bullet fired from across the street hit the side of King's face and pierced his aorta. He was pronounced dead the following day.

As word of King's death spread, violence erupted in more than 100 cities across the country, leaving 46 people dead, all but five of them black. Property damage was estimated at over $50 million and 28,000 people were arrested. Army troops and the National Guard were mobilized to quell the violence.

In Boston, after a night of scattered violence, city officials convinced singer James Brown to allow his scheduled April 5 concert to be broadcast live on Channel 2 to keep people in their homes and off the street. The city was quiet that night.

Sen. Robert Kennedy, on the fourth day of his campaign for president, appealed for calm in a speech in a black neighborhood of Indianapolis. Kennedy referred to the assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy four-and-a-half years earlier, and urged his audience to avoid becoming polarized and filled with hatred.

"Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love," Kennedy said.

Murphy, then a student at American University in Washington, D.C., found himself trapped in his dormitory with friends visiting from Weymouth as the city erupted in riots. National Guard troops were called in. For several days, Murphy said his friends mostly ate canned spaghetti and barbecue sauce heated up in dormitory kitchenette, as outside DC burned. When they finally left, Murphy remember finding sandbag machine-gun nests stationed on the National Mall.

"I'll never forget it," he said.

ASSASSINATION TIMELINE

March 28, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr. leads about 6,000 people in a march in support of black sanitation workers striking in Memphis. King is rushed from the scene after the march descends into looting and violence.

April 3: King flies back to Memphis to lead a second march and delivers what becomes his last speech, known as the "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech.

April 4: After the march, King steps out onto the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis and is hit by a single bullet fired from across the street.

April 9: King is buried in Atlanta.

June 8: James Earl Ray is arrested at Heathrow Airport in London and charged with King's murder.

But on the South Shore, which then, as now, was home to relatively few black families, the tumult following King's death felt distant to some, compared to the other events that would rock the country that year. Cathy Mahoney, a Quincy native who spent many of those years looking after her young siblings after their father died and left them parentless, said she does not recall King's assassination as clearly as the deaths of President John F. Kennedy five years earlier or Sen. Robert Kennedy several weeks later.

But for Murphy, London and others engaged in the civil rights struggle, King's assassination transformed them. "There’s not a single day that goes by now that I don't think about him," London said.

A half-century later, amid regular reports of unarmed black men being shot by police and persistent wage gaps between whites and blacks, there is a sense among some on the South Shore that King's work is largely unfinished. Some say that those who harbor racist views have only become louder and more emboldened in recent years.

But others, like Quincy resident Sandy Eaton, said they see the legacy of King's dream in movements like Occupy, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and, most recently, the March for Our Lives.

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