Jason Sokol - The Heavens Might Crack

B EFORE THE EVENING performance of April 4, 1968, conductor Robert Shaw put down his baton and stood to address the Atlanta Symphony audience. He announced that Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed. The concertgoers gasped and moaned. A Roman Catholic priest prayed for King and exclaimed, The king is dead! Long live the king!

On the opposite side of the country, author James Baldwin sat by a Palm Springs swimming pool with the actor Billy Dee Williams. The phone rang, and a friend told Baldwin of the tragedy in Memphis. It took awhile before the sound of his voiceI dont mean the sound of his voice, something in his voicegot through to me. At first, Baldwin felt numb. Then an unbelieving wonder overtook him. He wept briefly, and finally succumbed to a shocked and helpless rage. For years, that evening would remain a blur in Baldwins memory. Its retired into some deep cavern in my mind.

In Blacksburg, Virginia, hundreds of college students had packed an auditorium to watch Senator Strom Thurmond, the longtime segregationist from South Carolina, debate the liberal satirist Harry Golden. A Virginia Tech dean interrupted the debate to inform the audience that King had been assassinated. Though the student body was almost all white, no Negro audience could have been more shocked by the news, Golden recounted. I heard groans of despair. The dean asked

The fatal shot rang out in Memphis, and it quickly rippled across the nation and the world. News of Kings murder stopped people in their tracks and rendered them speechless, moved many to tears and others to celebration, drove some to violence and still others to political activism.

African Americans were overcome with grief and gripped by rage. Despair seized Dorothy Newby, an eighteen-year-old who attended Hamilton High School in Memphis. I wanted the world to end completely I felt there was no reason to continue living, and above all I wanted to kill myself. If such a foul deed could occur in this world, she wanted to opt out of it. Her classmate, seventeen-year-old Frankie Gross, broke down in tears. Gross knew that people all over the world mourned his death, and I felt better knowing it. At the same time, he realized that a violent anger was surging through the black neighborhoods of Memphis. You could see and feel the hate in the Negro community after the assassination. People took guns to work the next day just waiting for any white person to do anything wrong. The actions of law enforcement officials only intensified their fury. The National Guard rolled through the city in tanks and attempted to seal off African American neighborhoods. Black Memphians felt doubly victimized. Their leader was slaughtered by a white assailant and then they were treated as criminals.

Clarence Coe, an African American who worked at Memphiss Firestone factory, believed the race war had finally arrived. On Thursday evening, April 4, Coes foreman advised him that the plant was closing

Martin Luther King was in Memphis to stand with striking sanitation workers, 1,300 black men whose struggle for dignity dovetailed with Kings own Poor Peoples Campaign. King spent the final months of his life waging that fight against economic inequality. He envisioned masses of the nations poor, black and white and Latino, converging on the Washington Mall in a show of nonviolent civil disobedience. After Kings death, many African Americans in Memphis felt an unspeakable sense of loss. They were ashamed by the thought that their own community had failed to shelter him. They were also enragedangry with Mayor Henry Loeb for bitterly opposing the sanitation strike, and infuriated at Memphiss white citizens for denigrating King and denouncing the strikers. They were incensed that FBI officials could seemingly spy on King at all hours, yet fail to protect him from an assassins bullet and then allow the shooter to flee the city. Like African Americans across the country, they were outraged at the many whites who had given encouragementtacit as well as explicitto all of the King-haters and created a favorable climate for the assassin.