The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I

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. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:06Speaker 03

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:16Josh Clark?

  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.

• 1:32Speaker 04

  That's right. We haven't done a two parter in a while, but as we got into the originally one parter of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., you were like, man, there's a lot more here that we can just kind of explode this into a two parter.

• 1:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that was verbatim what I said.

• 1:50Speaker 04

  And I said, let's do it.

• 1:52Josh Clark?

  There was a ton of stuff that I did not know about MLK's assassination.

• 1:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, same.

• 1:58Josh Clark?

  James Earl Ray, like, there's a lot of stuff around it. And it's just a reminder that history gets so boiled down to like its, its bare essence, or even like a caricature of itself. And when you really dig into like a historical event, you just, you're just reminded that there's just so many people affected and involved. And it's not just, you know, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King Jr. And, you know, the world mourned.

• 2:30Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:30Josh Clark?

  That was all true, but there was just so much more to it. So hopefully we'll kind of get some of that across in this.

• 2:37Speaker 04

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

• 2:53Josh Clark?

  So let's talk MLK, 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. Remember that?

• 3:16Speaker 04

  That's right. 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 1968.

• 3:26Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 3:27Speaker 04

  So like you said, you know, 12-ish years earlier is when he really rose to prominence. And, and so much so that in February of 57, he was on the cover of Time Magazine.

• 3:39Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 3:40Speaker 04

  So in 1963, he was Time's Man of the Year after being on the cover just, you know, a handful of years earlier. And in 1964, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. So he was one of the most famous Americans by the early 1960s.

• 3:55Josh Clark?

  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.

• 4:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:08Josh Clark?

  Not just by white Americans, many of whom have been criticizing him all along, but by black Americans as well. There was a real division in the civil rights movement.

• 4:20Josh Clark?

  Between Martin Luther King's vision of his doctrine of nonviolence, 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 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 will 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 very much contrary to the other rival idea,

• 5:05Josh Clark?

  which was Malcolm X's idea.

• 5:07Speaker 04

  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 point.

• 5:15Josh Clark?

  For sure.

• 5:16Speaker 04

  But yes, this was, you know, sort of the other side of the coin. Malcolm X believed in black separatism. He was like, this nonviolent approach isn't, isn't working and, and black people 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 white people constantly. So it's time to fight back, like with fists and clubs and whatever else.

• 5:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And, and again, that's totally contrary to King's doctrine of nonviolence, which Malcolm X considered criminal, as he put it, in the face of just being beaten by whites just for, for marching in the streets peacefully. And a big portion of the people who are critical of King and his nonviolence doctrine were the younger generations. They tended to lean more militantly, more in Malcolm X's direction. And then in white America, with white Americans, he was basically never popular during his lifetime, at least with the majority of white Americans.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, and we know this because, you know, they did polls back then. There were Gallup polls that found. In 1963 through 1966, each year, found that fewer than 40% of white Americans viewed Martin Luther King Jr. favorably. So, one of the other things that didn't help, besides his work in civil rights, was his stance on Vietnam, the war in Vietnam. He was always against it, but really changed his stance in 1967, started being really, really vocal about it, as far as publicly condemning the war, started leading anti-war marches, giving speeches against the war. One very famous one was "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to

• 7:15Speaker 04

  Break the Silence," a speech he gave in New York City at Riverside Church in April, actually, exactly one year, April 4, 1967, 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, you know, kind of poor, black American boys to fight that war.

• 7:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And so, this was, it's really hard to overstate how controversial this speech was. Like, he just stopped mincing words and came out and said everything that needed to be said. And so, his alliance with Lyndon Bane Johnson, who was president at the time, was just shattered right then. LBJ stepped away from him, publicly broke with him. I think Laura helps us out with this. She found 168 newspapers issued editorials denouncing him for that speech. So, that, like, he was already not super popular with white Americans. He, his popularity was so-so with black Americans, and all Americans were

• 8:24Josh Clark?

  now mad at him 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 People's Campaign. Came up with an economic bill of rights that is essentially pretty socialist, I mean, at its core. And he also basically said, like, this campaign is also going to be a shift, not just in focus, but in potency.

• 9:07Josh Clark?

  Like, we're not going to be quite as peaceful as we were before. We're not going to go Malcolm X, like, full-on militant, but we're, you can expect, you know, I think he famously said 15% to 16% more militancy.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah, and, you know, this shift, 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 1968 rolls around, he's exhausted, he's tired, he's got people coming at him from every angle, even within his own camp, and he just wasn't at his peak personally or with his career.

• 9:53Josh Clark?

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

• 9:56Speaker 04

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

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• 13:12Josh Clark?

  So in the spring of 1968, Memphis, Tennessee, which had previously prided itself on its white community and black communities kind of, you know, fairly getting along, especially compared to some other places, like places in Alabama, it was by this time in high tension as a town. And it was largely because of the Memphis sanitation workers' strike. MLK became very interested in helping further the goals of the Memphis sanitation workers in their strike because he basically saw this as like, this is a perfect bridge between this transition from a focus just on civil rights to this larger focus on poor people

• 13:54Josh Clark?

  of all colors. Because like, 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, this is, 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 1968. And like I said, it was in a state of high tension because a couple of protests, marches essentially to support the workers,

• 14:39Josh Clark?

  had not really gone really well previously.

• 14:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, but before these marches, there was, you know, there was already a strike going on. It just wasn't, you know, full throttle at this point. 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 malfunctioned. They were trying to take shelter from the rain and were crushed by the truck. And the city didn't, 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.

• 15:24Speaker 04

  It's an opportunity for me as well, like you said, to sort of help me segue into this other movement. And there were a couple of different marches. On March 28th, he led a march of 5,000 people through Memphis. And almost right away, it turned violent, not by his hand, but it was a group called The Invaders. It was a militant group of young African Americans who were not on board with King. They were not on board with nonviolence, obviously, and they started looting. They started breaking windows in stores. Police came in and, you know, we all know the drill at this point. People scatter. Police are beating people, shooting at people.

• 16:07Speaker 04

  There was a 16-year-old named Larry Payne that was shot and killed by a police officer named Leslie Dean Jones. 60 people injured and then all of a sudden Memphis is under curfew and close to 4,000 National Guardsmen are brought in.

• 16:20Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and this was on the heels of another march the month before in February where protesters, including some ministers who were marching, were maced by police. So Memphis just like basically almost like throwing a switch, went from like a generally okay city as far as race relations were concerned to like the National Guard is now here keeping order in like a month. It just changed that quickly. And because he was leading the march on March 28th, King became totally, I don't want to say obsessed, but he was fully zeroed in on returning to Memphis to set things right.

• 17:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:04Josh Clark?

  Because that was a huge black 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.

• 17:25Josh Clark?

  And King just basically wanted to go give it another try and hopefully restore his reputation, hopefully restore the reputation of the civil rights movement he was leading. 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 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 he actually canceled that Africa trip and brought everyone back to Memphis. And he got back there on April 3rd. And that evening, he gave what's been known today as his "I've Been to the Mountain Top"

• 18:10Josh Clark?

  speech. 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 a previous assassination attempt that I had never heard of. Had you?

• 18:31Speaker 04

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

• 18:37Josh Clark?

  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 Azola Curry, stabbed in the chest with a seven-inch letter opener. And Azola Curry was convinced that civil rights organizations like MLK's were tracking her, had singled her out, were tracking her, preventing her from getting employment, just generally messing with her life. And the papers all reported that the surgeon who treated MLK, obviously he survived, was that the letter opener came so close to his heart that had he sneezed, it would have penetrated his aorta and killed him. So he really lucked out. And he talked about this in his "I've Been to the Mountain Top" speech.

• 19:22Josh Clark?

  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 speech.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I'll go ahead and read it. He, he talked about not being around. He said, "Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place, but I'm not concerned about that now. 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, a definite, sort of eerie thing to happen the night before his murder.

• 20:00Josh Clark?

  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, he just, I, I read that he sensed that he, he was not going to live much longer.

• 20:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, he had seen what happened with Kennedy, obviously what happened with Robert Kennedy afterward, but, um, yeah, it was, those kind of things, you know, very sadly, were, were just much more common back then.

• 20:31Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I, I was thinking about that, and just, like, living in an era of assassinations, like, successful assassinations of prominent political figures, one of whom was the president at the time. I just, that's just nuts that America went through that period.

• 20:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, King, Malcolm X, the two Kennedys. Yeah, it's just a very fraught, fraught time in our history, for sure.

• 20:56Josh Clark?

  For sure.

• 20:57Speaker 04

  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, um, he was actually meeting with them. One of the things he did there was meet with them and negotiate a, 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. Um, the march was actually planned for April 4th, um, and this is one of those sort of sliding doors thing. Um, it was actually put on hold because the city got an injunction to stop it from a federal court. And, uh, if that hadn't happened, and he would have

• 21:42Speaker 04

  been marching on April 4th, um, perhaps James O'Rey would have, uh, continued to sort of pursue King, because as we'll see, he had been following him around for about a month. Or maybe not, maybe that assassination never happens. But because of that injunction, the march was delayed from April 4th. King stayed in town to go to court to help appeal that injunction. Was in court on April 4th through the day. And then late that afternoon, the judges said, all right, we can do this march. It'll be next Monday. And King, so late that afternoon, the judges said, all right, the march can go forward, but it's going to go forward next Monday.

• 22:25Josh Clark?

  So that day on April 4th, it was the evening. It turns out Bono got it wrong in that song Pride. Cause he says early morning.

• 22:34Speaker 04

  Did you know they corrected it?

• 22:35Josh Clark?

  Did they?

• 22:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, they, I never listened to much of it, but they put out a like reimaginings of a bunch of their songs called Songs of Surrender. And like you said, it was early morning, April 4th, shot rings out in the Memphis sky and the song Pride and the Name of Love. And he changed it to in the evening, April 4th.

• 22:54Josh Clark?

  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 306 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 been owned by Walter Bailey and his wife Lori since the 1940s. 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 in Memphis.

• 23:40Josh Clark?

  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 ring out and it hit MLK in the face.

• 24:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, um, sort of in the chin and jaw area and that neckline. Um, there were, there's that very famous photograph of, um, 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, um, what was it? The Bessie what boarding house?

• 24:23Josh Clark?

  Bessie Brewers Boarding House?

• 24:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, Bessie Brewers Boarding House. And they were like, that's where the shot came from. Um, the picture was taken by a, a South African photographer named Joseph Lau, L O U W, uh, became one of the most famous, you know, photographs in American history, of course. And the gentleman kneeling, uh, attending to King, um, trying to do whatever he could, uh, that was, uh, that was a guy named, uh, Merrill McCullough, and he was an undercover cop who had infiltrated the invaders. So just by chance, uh, he was on hand as an undercover cop there, and he's the one that's, that's kneeling, kind of

• 25:03Speaker 04

  trying to tend to King. Um, again, he was shot at 6:01, um, was alive, uh, even at the hospital, barely, but he died just an hour later. He's pronounced dead at the age of 39 at 7:05 PM.

• 25:19Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Um, and a doctor named Jerry T. Francisco, uh, was the medical examiner at Shelby County at the time, and he conducted an autopsy. Um, and he concluded that Martin Luther King was killed by a gunshot wound to the chin and neck with a total transaction of the lower cervical and upper thoracic spinal cord and other structures of the neck. Um, I read somewhere that, that Martin Luther King probably didn't even hear the shot that, that, um, killed him. It just hit him so fast. It was shot from a high-powered rifle at, you know, close enough by that, like it would have, he just wouldn't have

• 26:04Josh Clark?

  heard it. And I was thinking it was possible that he died almost instantly. Were you, had you read that he was still alive for a period, like when he got to the hospital?

• 26:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, they, they, 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.

• 26:23Josh Clark?

  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.

• 26:38Speaker 04

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

• 27:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 04

  But right after the shooting, like literally the minutes right afterward, there were two men in that boarding house who saw a guy leaving with a suitcase and like a blanket bundled up that had a bunch of stuff in it, big enough 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 A N I P E, canip or canip?

• 27:31Josh Clark?

  Kneeps, that's what I'm going with.

• 27:34Speaker 04

  Okay, Kneeps, Kneeps Amusement Company. And just dropped 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 a portable radio. They found some brand new binoculars, a couple of cans of beer and precisely a 30 ounce six Remington 760 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.

• 28:14Josh Clark?

  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 were staying there later told police that they heard people, or at least someone maybe going back and forth to the bathroom. This is a boarding house, so obviously there was a shared bathroom rather than a bathroom in each room. And somebody kept going to the bathroom, hanging out in the bathroom, coming out of the bathroom, going back to the bathroom. And the cops who investigated found scuff marks in the bathtub, obviously left by somebody's shoes.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:53Josh Clark?

  And the bathtub was where you would have had to stood to see out the window to have a shot at Martin Luther King on the balcony.

• 29:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:03Josh Clark?

  So the, 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.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  Also, like two minutes later, the shooting had been radioed into the police. And just five minutes later, at 6:08, the owner of that amusement company told police that he saw a white man running through the alley and like actually saw him drop that bundle and then flee the scene in a white Ford Mustang.

• 29:32Josh Clark?

  Yeah, we'll talk about the investigation and everything like that in part two. But I say we take our second break and come back and talk about what happened after MLK died.

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• 32:40Speaker 04

  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 7th, the National Day of Mourning. Flags went to half-staff, a lot of businesses around the country closed for the day. And he said, Johnson said on TV, "The dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 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."

• 33:18Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So, yeah, like you said, the National Day of Mourning was April 7th, but throughout that whole period from the day that his assassination took place to his funeral, there was a lot of places closed down.

• 33:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:35Josh Clark?

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

• 33:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:42Josh Clark?

  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 of the Pirates said, "Well, we're not playing today. It's Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral."

• 34:01Speaker 04

  That's great.

• 34:02Josh Clark?

  And 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.

• 34:15Speaker 04

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

• 34:20Josh Clark?

  Yep, that was a good one.

• 34:21Speaker 04

  So, all across the country.

• 34:26Speaker 04

  You know, people react with extreme upset, which led to violence and some rioting and uprising in like 125 cities over the course of a few days. Thirty-nine people were killed. Thirty-five hundred people were injured. Fifty thousand federal troops, you know, dispatched all over the country, basically, except New York and Los Angeles. They were a couple of the only major cities that they managed to kind of talk people down.

• 34:55Josh Clark?

  Atlanta, too.

• 34:56Speaker 04

  Oh, Atlanta as well?

• 34:57Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:58Speaker 04

  That's great. 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 nonviolence by literally dying by a bullet, a nonviolent man.

• 35:22Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:23Speaker 04

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

• 35:33Josh Clark?

  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.

• 35:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:51Josh Clark?

  Because there'd been a ton of riots nationwide in cities like Detroit. There was five days of rioting. It just kept happening all over the place in black communities around the United 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 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

• 36:32Josh Clark?

  city itself didn't usually maintain stuff there, so it was crumbling and deteriorating. So there was a ton of frustration already, and there had been riots already, but there were a ton of them after MLK passed as well.

• 36:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, and, you know, there was a- A legitimate fear that a race war 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, 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.

• 37:27Speaker 04

  And, looking back, it's looked as, basically, it was just a harassment campaign that made things worse.

• 37:33Josh Clark?

  Yeah, the mayor was like, okay, you guys can leave pretty shortly after things calmed down, but the governor was like, no, we're gonna stay, we're gonna keep them here. For a year. It was very odd. It was the longest occupation of any American city ever, which is, I mean, you just don't think of Wilmington, Delaware, stuff like that happening to Wilmington, Delaware.

• 37:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. One of the 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 8th. She did lead that, lead that march with her four small kids, along with 40,000 other people, in a silent march. And that was King, you know, Martin Luther King was so adamant about going back to Memphis and having a nonviolent march, so it was, you know, special that she was able to see that through.

• 38:31Josh Clark?

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

• 38:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:38Josh Clark?

  So the following day after Coretta Scott King led the Memphis march that MLK had set out to lead, his funeral was held in Atlanta, Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he had been a preacher. And I think his father was the preacher there at the time, is that right?

• 38:57Speaker 04

  Uh, I'm not sure. It's like, four miles from my house, right in the middle of Atlanta. I don't know.

• 39:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I was gonna say later, but that that whole area that's called the Sweet Auburn Community.

• 39:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's awesome.

• 39:09Josh Clark?

  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. The National Park Service has preserved it. 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.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:37Josh Clark?

  It's under protection.

• 39:38Speaker 04

  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. You're like, what's going on? And you're like, oh, yeah, yeah. National, National Historic Site. So that makes sense.

• 39:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah, you just assume they're lost.

• 39:52Speaker 04

  But the, that's the place that I always recommend when, you know, stuff you should know, people write in or saying they're coming to Atlanta.

• 39:59Josh Clark?

  No, that's a good one.

• 39:59Speaker 04

  And like, what, what should they do? 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 of, I think I've talked about it before, a very sort of chilling, single thing at the King Center, which is just a lone case with the Room 306 Lorraine Motel Hotel Key sitting in it with nothing else around it. It's just sort of speaks for itself.

• 40:30Josh Clark?

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

• 40:35Speaker 04

  Right. I'm glad you got a good joke in this one. God bless you.

• 40:40Josh Clark?

  Thank you. So his funeral, I looked up a picture of it. There, he 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 100,000 people in this procession, not including people lined up on either side of the street as it passed, in a, in a procession behind his casket, 100,000.

• 41:13Josh Clark?

  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 the photographer could capture, there's a stream of people filling the road entirely, following his casket in procession. And I was heartened to see when I zoomed in that like it wasn't 50 50, but it wasn't completely lopsided.

• 41:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:40Josh Clark?

  The, um, the number of white faces and black faces in the photograph, all marching together, uh, mourning MLK.

• 41:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure.

• 41:49Josh Clark?

  When it happened, you know?

• 41:50Speaker 04

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

• 41:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 41:56Speaker 04

  Uh, Benjamin, uh, Mays delivered the eulogy. He was the president of Morehouse University and, um, Morehouse would have their own ceremony. Uh, I believe a day later on their campus, uh, which by the way, uh, Martin Luther King Jr. Was a student at Morehouse at 15 years old. So let that sink in for a second. Uh, and Mays predicted in that, uh, eulogy that, um, here's the quote that King would probably say that if death had to come, I'm sure there was no greater cause to die than to get a just wage for garbage collectors.

• 42:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 42:31Speaker 04

  Pretty powerful stuff.

• 42:32Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Um, so the Lorraine Motel has become the National Civil Rights Museum, but, uh, after King's assassination, Walter Bailey kept it open for years, but he never rented room 306 again, and he didn't touch it. He left it exactly as it was when MLK, um, as MLK had left it when he was assassinated. Um, but Walter Bailey's story was, um, additionally sad. He was a very proud hotel owner, um, to have MLK stay every, every time he came into Memphis. Um, so it was bad enough that Martin Luther King was assassinated at his motel, but he also, um, his wife Lori, who the motel was named after, um, she had a stroke.

• 43:16Josh Clark?

  In all of the commotion and the, the horrificness of what had happened, uh, right after, um, MLK was assassinated. And she died five days later.

• 43:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:26Josh Clark?

  And so, over the years, I'm sure after Walter Bailey passed, the motel started to fall into disrepair and it finally closed in 1988. But it was purchased and refurbished and preserved and turned into the National Civil Rights Museum, like I said, which is, I have not been there, but it looks like a world-class museum. And it looks amazing. And they've preserved room 306, just as King left it as well.

• 43:51Speaker 04

  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, you know, 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 Records and Beale Street. It's just, you can easily find like three days of great, fun stuff to do in Memphis.

• 44:21Josh Clark?

  Very nice.

• 44:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:22Josh Clark?

  Memphis, where it's at.

• 44:24Speaker 04

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

• 44:32Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I figured we would.

• 44:34Speaker 04

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

• 44:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:37Speaker 04

  I don't do that, do I?

• 44:39Josh Clark?

  No, you don't. Even, even though we're not gonna read listener mail, if you want to send us a listener mail in the future, you can send it off to [email protected].

• 44:52Speaker 03

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, MyHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 45:08Josh Clark?

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