Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 4, 1993 TAG: 9304040289
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By CHRISTOPHER SULLIVAN THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: MEMPHIS, TENN. LENGTH: Long
DID KING'S DREAM DIE THAT DAY? 3 WITH HIM DIFFER ON THE ANSWER
Beneath the Lorraine Motel balcony where the Rev. Martin Luther King was mortally wounded 25 years ago today, a memorial plaque quotes Genesis:"They said one to another, Behold, here cometh the dreamer . . . Let us slay him . . . And we shall see what will become of his dreams."
The inscription begs a question, and three civil rights leaders who were there at 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968, offer varying replies: The Lorraine balcony was surely a nightmarish ending, they agree, but they differ on whether it also was a new start toward King's dream.
The Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles, with whom King planned to dine that night, recalls the necktie torn and twisted by the bullet, but also that a march King was planning as he died went ahead.
The Rev. Hosea Williams, one of King's lieutenants, remembers his rage in that moment, his questioning of the non-violence credo. In the end, he says King's team and its focus shattered.
Andrew Young, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, feared that King's death might end his work, but instead spurred an evolution of the civil rights movement.
Summoning the memory of that cool Memphis evening, Kyles said he entered King's room at the Lorraine around 5 p.m., impatient to get him home for dinner at 6. "I picked out his tie," he said. As King finished dressing, he bantered with Kyles and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, King's second in command.
"He was in good spirits," Kyles recalled. There were none of the dark tones of a speech the night before in which King dismissed threats.
"It really doesn't matter to me now," King had said. "Because I've been to the mountaintop. . . . 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."
When the fatal shot came, Kyles was on the balcony and had just turned away from King. "When I looked back, the bullet had knocked him kind of sideways," he said. "And the tie that I had picked out for him - I remember that so vividly - the impact of the shot had severed his tie and turned the knot upside down."
Waiting for an ambulance, he remembered the change in his own father's color as he died. "And I saw that change in Martin," he said.
King's lieutenants were stunned, of course, but Kyles noted they were not paralyzed. Within hours, they had recommitted themselves to the Poor People's Campaign he had been planning, and it went forward.
"It simply does not seem like 25 years," said Kyles, a Baptist pastor who lately has led an effort, which angers some black city officials, to block Memphis' consideration for a National Football League franchise because of what he calls continuing racial divisions here.
While noting America's growing black professional class and greater minority representation in government, he said nonetheless that many of the people King worked for remain far behind.
"We're still, 25 years later, talking about things that we ought to be way past, and standing on common ground," Kyles said. "So much of Martin's dream has been realized. Much has not."
Williams was in the courtyard below the Lorraine balcony when he heard what sounded like a firecracker, then King's heavy fall.
"Immediately," he recalls, "I ran back up, and when I got to Dr. King, Abernathy was holding his head, Andy [Young] was there, and Abernathy yelled to Andy, `Get a towel, get a towel!' "
Afterward, Williams could not contain his confusion and rage:
"I was walking around that yard, and - I'm an ex-scientist, I was a research chemist . . . plus I fought in World War II - I was wishing I could pull some molecules out of the air and make me a weapon and just wipe out every white person near, because I thought they had shot Dr. King at that time."
He continued: "I said to myself, `America, racists, economic exploiters, you sure have messed up now . . . because there lies the only one among us, the main one, who has tried to keep us calm. Now you've killed him.' . . . I was just so convinced, we are going to set America straight now."
Non-violence, King's guiding principle, suddenly seemed impossible. Having grown up orphaned on the streets, Williams had sublimated that violent past to organize peaceful marches across the South for King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
"Then I started thinking, `If Dr. King was here, what would he say?' I kept going back to that, because I know I'd been so violent all my life."
Williams pledged to support King's successor, Abernathy, and to carry on his non-violent work. But the shot on the Lorraine balcony marked the end of King's dream, he said, because it fragmented his lieutenants.
Young would leave to form his own group, as would Jesse Jackson, and King's widow, Coretta Scott King.
"All of these organizations, collectively, have the power of a mean dog that has no teeth," Williams said at his home outside Atlanta. "They have a bark, but no bite."
Andrew Young says the opposite - that King's assassination helped free his followers to take new directions as the civil rights movement evolved.
"It was the beginning almost of a new movement," said Young, who also served in Congress and as mayor of Atlanta. He now is an executive of an international law and engineering firm and an organizer of Atlanta's 1996 Olympics.
Young attributes increased recruitment of blacks by universities and corporations partly to their desire to respond to King's death. And the tragedy turned some, including himself, toward elected office.
"While we failed in our efforts for the poor, in my opinion, I think the other stream, of taking the movement into politics, has succeeded dramatically," said Young, terming political power a necessary foundation for building King's other goals.
Still, 25 years ago, as Young rushed with a towel across the balcony, he feared King's work was dying with him.
"Frankly I could not imagine how we could move forward without him," he said. "It meant that you had to take up his work."