Through the months preceding his assassination on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was haunted by a sense of impending death. He shared that premonition with his aide Andrew Young, who was with King when a fatal bullet struck, 50 years ago.
“He talked about death all the time,” Young told Tavis Smiley, author of “Death of A King.”
For his 2014 book, Smiley asked those who had marched alongside King what they recalled of his mood in 1968. The comedian and activist Dick Gregory reported King, with tears in his eyes, said he was certain to be killed.
King had faced death threats since the 1950s, when he emerged as the acknowledged leader of the civil rights movement. But in 1968, the threats reached a crescendo.
The Chicago Tribune saw it the other way around: King was the danger. The paper was verbally at war with King because of his open-housing campaign in Chicago, two years earlier.
Five days before his murder, the Tribune observed in an editorial: “We think the time has arrived when the country must ask itself how much more it is going to put up with from this incendiarist.”
The FBI took the threats seriously, though its director, J. Edgar Hoover, and King had traded insults. When King attended a meeting of black pastors in Miami in February 1968, the FBI received a bomb threat, so armed guards were stationed outside King’s room. Miami police insisted King stay out of sight during the five-day conference.
In March, the announcement that King would address the Human Relations Council of Grosse Pointe, Michigan., an affluent Detroit suburb, produced a rash of threats. To protect King, the police chief sat on his lap in the car carrying King to the high school where he spoke.
Might such incidents have set King to worrying that he wouldn’t live to see the results of the anti-poverty campaign he was struggling to organize?
On March 3, he preached a sermon titled “Unfulfilled Dreams” at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, which he pastored. Referencing the Old Testament, and noting that King David hadn’t seen his dream of a Jerusalem temple realized, he preached: “Life is a continual story of shattered dreams.”
King’s “Unfulfilled Dreams” sermon was a callback to his 1963 March on Washington, where he had delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech that inspired legislation aimed at Jim Crow, the systematic discrimination suffered by blacks in the South. But having concluded that political equality was meaningless without a measure of economic equality, on Dec. 4, 1967, King announced he would lead a new march on Washington in the spring of the following year.
Demonstrators for the “Poor People’s Campaign” would set up a tenant farmer’s shack in front of one of the buildings of the Smithsonian Institution, a group of museums commemorating America’s achievements.
“We will go there, we will demand to be heard, and we will stay until America responds,” King proclaimed. “If it means jail, we accept it willingly, for the millions of poor already are imprisoned by exploitation and discrimination.”
Those words drew a firestorm of opposition, even from King’s loyal supporters. Bayard Rustin, who organized the earlier march, was opposed to a new one. So, too, was Jesse Jackson, another rising civil rights leader in King’s circle.
King’s critics must have been on his mind on Feb. 4, 1968, when he delivered a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist. It was a riff on a biblical story about “an itinerant preacher,” as King put it, “who just went around serving and doing good.”
But when that preacher was 33, “the tide of public opinion turned against him,” King noted. “His friends turned him over to (his enemies) … and while he was dying the people who killed him gambled for his clothing.”
King’s opponents saw his proposed march as an invitation to rioting. In the 1960s, one inner city after another had exploded in deadly and destructive riots. King explained the violence with a metaphor: “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
The Tribune rejected that argument in a Jan. 21, 1968, editorial: “Every time there is a riot in the streets you can count on a flock of sociologists rushing forward to excuse the rioters.” King’s “nonviolence,” the Tribune added, “is designed to goad others into violence.”
“We always knew this could happen,” said Coretta Scott King after she was told her husband was dead.
Five days later, enormous crowds lined the route of King’s funeral procession through the streets of Atlanta.
Famous names were among the mourners — professional athletes, celebrated entertainers, senators, governors and presidential candidates. It was an election year. But the procession also bore witness to the struggles of the little people for whom King fought.
His casket was carried on a farm cart pulled by two mules.