Martin Luther King, Jr. -- Fifty Years Later

4/3/2018

Recent photo by Maria Saporta, https://saportareport.com

I am reminded of driving north from spring training that day, with black friends and white friends in two cars -- the looks of terror at some Holiday Inn in east Georgia, when they thought we were Freedom Riders rather than tired travelers, in psychic shock. How they hustled to accommodate us!

In January, Black History Month, I wrote an essay about Martin Luther King, Jr. -- based on a radio documentary about King's connection to music, by his fellow Morehouse alumnus,Terrance McKnight of WQXR-FM in New York.
That link is repeated as we approach the 50th anniversary of his death on April 4:

www.georgevecsey.com/home/what-if-martin-luther-king-jr-were-alive-today

Other people are remembering Dr. King this week. My friend Maria Saporta, who grew up with the King children in Atlanta, now issues the Saporta Report, about the business and life of Atlanta. She was previously the business columnist at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Saporta recently ventured to Memphis, where her friends' father was assassinated Her touching essay is linked here:

https://saportareport.com/still-missing-martin-luther-king-jr-after-all-these-years/

And Lonnie Shalton, a "mostly retired lawyer from Kansas City who writes about baseball and other assorted topics," and is a good friend of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in that city, wrote about Dr. King.
From Lonnie Shalton:

I felt the need today to take a break from my Hot Stove baseball posts.

Fifty years ago today, Martin Luther King delivered his last speech: “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” The following day, he was assassinated.

I have written annual messages for the MLK holiday since 2002, and the one I sent in 2012 was about this speech.

(Lonnie mentions a 2009 trip to Jordan, going to Mount Nebo, where Moses is said to have stood to view the Promised Land.)

Fast forward from biblical times to April 3, 1968. Martin Luther King was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers who were marching with a simple message: “I AM A MAN.”

That night, at the Mason Temple, King gave what would be his last speech: "I've Been to the Mountaintop." King prophetically spoke of his likely early death and that he would not get to see the full fruits of his labor in the Civil Rights Movement. "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."

One of the Memphis hosts for that speech at the Mason Temple was Reverend Billy Kyles. The next day, Kyles drove to the Lorraine Motel to pick up King to take him to dinner. He joined King in his 2nd-floor room with Ralph Abernathy and went with King to the balcony to speak to supporters in the parking lot. A few seconds after Kyles left King alone on the balcony, James Earl Ray fired his shot.

In the summer of 2011, Rita and I were in Memphis with our friends Larry and Diana Brewer. We visited the Lorraine Motel, which is now the "National Civil Rights Museum" featuring excellent exhibits on major milestones of the Civil Rights Movement. A compelling reminder of the times is a city bus that you can board, and when you sit near Rosa Parks, a recording is activated to tell you to move to the back of the bus.

The museum tour begins with an introductory movie narrated by Reverend Kyles. At the end of the movie, we were informed that Kyles was in the building filming a piece with CNN newsman T.J. Holmes in anticipation of the opening of the MLK Memorial in Washington. We went to the second floor to watch the filming and then had the opportunity to visit with the gracious Reverend Kyles at almost the exact spot where he had been at that fateful moment in 1968. In the photo below, T.J. Holmes is on the left, Kyles is in the center and the two gentlemen on the right are retired sanitation workers who were among those 1968 marchers wearing "I AM A MAN" placards.

The museum continues across the street to the rooming house from which James Earl Ray fired his shot. There are exhibits related to Ray's planning and capture, and we were reminded that Ray at the time was a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary.

You can hear and read the speech at this link.

Thanks to Terrance McKnight, Maria Saporta and Lonnie Shalton, for caring.

bruce

4/3/2018 07:17:07 pm

george,

another fine piece.
obviously king lived with the very real awareness that he could be murdered at any time by any one of the many crazies, racists or right wing nutbar.
i was at a school play at dundas district high school when it was announced that king had been murdered.
shock, but not really.
i stood up in history class the next morning and said i was ashamed to be white.
our 'people' have caused a great deal of harm to many non caucasians throughout the centuries.
we're not alone but we've done a lot of harm to others.
and then two months later my father woke me at 630 EST to tell me about bobby kennedy--who did such an incredible job calming the crowds in indianapolis after he announced MLKs murder.
made it hard to concentrate on my english exam at 9 a.m., i was writing an english exam--seems english exams are tied into kennedy assassinations in my life--at greensville school when our teacher/principal announced to the class that the governor of texas had been assassinated and president kennedy wounded.
she came back with the correction a few minutes later.
more shock.
as were medgar evers and malcolm X.
incidentally, i misunderstood your JCSS email. i thought you were actually going to see it live. not watch it on the toob.
bruce

Brian Savin

4/4/2018 08:53:14 pm

I get it. Still, I’m not one who remembers deaths. I can’t name the dates of any of my beloved late family, including my parents. Life is the subject of celebration. It’s all we have. I remember I was in Geography when JFK was shot, though not the date. I remember I was in bed listening to the California returns when RFK was shot, hoping he would lose and Gene McCarthy would be the Presidential nominee. I was so disgusted that year I voted for Nixon, who turned out to be our last truly liberal President. Part of my disgust was the MLK assassination. But more importantly I read his letter from the Birmingham prison to my young kids every year on his holiday. Still one of the best Holy Epistles ever written. He lives.

Alan Rubin link

4/7/2018 10:33:40 am

I'm researching the history of the FBI and the United States intelligence community for an adult education course I will be teaching in the spring of 2019. I was amazed, but not surprised, that Hoover had a huge dossier on MLK for the purpose of harassing and discrediting him. One aspect was to pressure MLK into committing suicide.

J. Edger Hoover was, along with many things, a deceitful and vindictive individual who used the power of the FBI to control members of congress and other powerful individuals.

No question that the FBI has been a great service to our country and has had terrific PR, but their not as well known dark side tips the scales too much in the wrong direction.

The little that is know about their role, along with Comey, in the 2016 presidential election did not surprise me.

An interesting period to look at is 1918-20 and how Hoover became the FBI director. He rode the crest of the Palmer raids and red scare with thousands of innocent immigrants from ethnic and labor organizations were illegally arrested and less than a hundred were found guilty.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Martin Luther King, Jr. -- Fifty Years Later

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