Kindle Notes & Highlights
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February 1 - March 10, 2024
Why Ray killed King probably will always remain a mystery. He was a virulent racist. Perhaps that was motive enough.
No longer was he seeking only an end to racial segregation and discrimination, the cause that had consumed him for more than a decade. He was striving to end poverty in America, once and for all.
Local historian Joan Beifuss would write that the conflict over the strike had quickly stripped away “the thin veneer of dialogue and handshakes and politeness and kindly interest” and exposed such a “depth of ill will” and “intensity of hostility” as to declare that “the bitterness had always lain somewhere close to the surface.”
He was pushing himself to the brink of collapse. His doctors had hospitalized him or ordered him to days of bed rest for exhaustion on at least four occasions over the previous four years (in October 1964, February 1965, August 1966, and April 1967).
And I submit this afternoon that we can end poverty in the United States. Our nation has the resources to do it. —MLK, speech at Stanford University, April 14, 1967
“The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich. The betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother. Whatever affects one affects all.”
He denounced Lyndon Johnson’s policy as morally unjust and strategically flawed. He said the war was draining the US treasury of money that could have funded antipoverty programs and that it was impressing black soldiers into Vietnam service in disproportionate numbers.
To respond to Black Power, King was rolling out the Poor People’s Campaign as a massive, militant, though nonviolent, alternative.
His voice would resound with emotional fervor, attuned to the religious convictions of his listeners. In Waycross he hit that pious note, saying that poor people, as God’s children, were no less deserving than other Americans of jobs and income.12
To see a movie at a segregated Malco theater, Kyles, a film buff, would have had to climb a fire escape stairway and sit in the balcony section for African Americans (the “buzzard’s roost,” he called it). He refused. Instead he called M. A. Lightman, owner of the Malco. Kyles and Lightman devised a scheme to desegregate the theater quietly. Kyles and his wife slipped into the whites-only section for a midday showing of To Kill a Mockingbird. There were about a dozen whites in the theater. “I don’t think they even knew [the sit-in] was happening,” Kyles would recount.
Stopped from entering one day when the zoo was closed to blacks, Matthews did not merely turn around and go home. She sued. Her lawsuit forced the city to desegregate not just the zoo but also the nearby municipal park and golf course.
There comes a time when one [must] take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular. —MLK, sermon at the National Cathedral, Washington, DC, March 31, 1968
The Lorraine had been a sixteen-room hotel that had fallen into disrepair until 1955, when Walter and Lorene Bailey bought it. In earlier years Walter had been a Pullman porter.
As a black-owned motel located near Beale Street, the Lorraine became known as the place to stay for African American visitors to the city. Among the notables who spent a night there during the Jim Crow era were music greats Ray Charles, Louis Armstrong, and B. B. King.
If the warning stuck with King until April 1968, he did not heed it. Precautions did not interest him because he did not think anything or anybody could protect him against a determined assassin.
That the staff was headstrong and arrogant was hardly surprising. To join the SCLC staff meant forsaking, or at least delaying, a stable career and comfortable life. It meant running the risk of potential physical harm and possible death. No mild-mannered, submissive person was likely to enlist in the SCLC, and King was savvy enough to know it.
