The Worst Week
Kennedy was scheduled to give a speech in a poor, black area in the inner city. The chief of police warned the Kennedy entourage to stay out of the ghetto; he refused to be responsible for their safety. Ethel begged her husband not to go, but he sent her back to the hotel and went ahead. The police escort peeled off as they entered an area of run-down buildings.
The night was cold and gray, but the crowd was in an almost-festive mood. Kennedy, clad in a dark overcoat with the collar turned up, climbed onto a flatbed truck. He pushed away a speech draft offered by his aide Adam Walinsky, and pulled out of his pocket some crumpled notes he had written himself.
In this pre-instant-news era, the crowd was ignorant of King's death. It fell to Kennedy to tell them. As the wind whipped at his hair (recently cut short, to signal he was no wild-eyed radical), he looked slightly hunched over and frail. "I have bad news for you," he began.
In the crowd, a Kennedy adviser named John Lewis anxiously watched the strange scene. Lewis was a hero and a martyr of the civil-rights movement. Practicing King's creed of nonviolent resistance, he had been beaten bloody as he knelt and prayed at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in March 1965. In March 1968, he had joined RFK's campaign because of Kennedy's concern for the "invisible poor" and his commitment to civil rights. "The America Bobby Kennedy envisioned sounded much like the Beloved Community I believed in," Lewis later wrote in his memoirs. Lewis had come to Indiana to help get out the black vote, and now, still reeling from the news of King's death, he watched transfixed as Kennedy's soft, weary voice rose over the crowd, which was still talking and laughing as Kennedy plunged ahead.
"I have bad news for you, for all our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world," said Kennedy. Lewis noticed that a few faces had gone somber in the front rows of the thousand or so people gathered there. "… [A]nd that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight."
"No!" gasped voices in the crowd. People began to weep and drop to their knees. Farther back, people were still talking and laughing, oblivious.
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Member Comments
Posted By: jiminchina @ 03/09/2008 4:54:54 AM
Comment: I live in China, now, so I don't always get Newsweek in a timely manner. I read this article closely because on April 4, 1968 I lived in Memphis where I worked for the IRS during the day and attended university at night. I belonged to the anti war group SDS and Although I am white I was friendly with the leaders of the Invaders. The description of how Dr. King was murdered is the "official" version. Most people familiar with the event ------
believe that Dr. King was murdered in a plot directed by J.Edgar Hoover. Too many strange things happened in the moments before the shot which killed Dr. King to lead to any other conclusion. James Earl Ray neve
r really got a trial which might have told us more about what really happened.
Posted By: zach55 @ 01/28/2008 9:42:53 PM
Comment: However, do you know more about Dr. King, some one has seen his profile on a senior dating site boomermingle.com, what shall he do on that site?
Posted By: numlock @ 01/26/2008 9:33:31 AM
Comment: By 1968 Dr. King was no longer an "A" list personality. His major contribution at that time was his stance against the Vietnam war, which is not even mentioned in this piece. Hving Dr. King come out against the war was a major contribution to the anti-war cause, greatly appreciated by anti-war demonstrators such as myself. His anit-war stance is rarely mentioned these days. But it was important at the time as most of mid america was still in favor of the war.