In 2018, WHRO’s Another View featured former PBS “Frontline” investigative reporter Joseph Rosenbloom, author of "Redemption: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Last 31 Hours,” a researched account of what happened leading up to King’s death in 1968.
King was assassinated April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tenn. while in town to participate in a march for local sanitation workers on strike. He was 39 years old and spent his adult life advocating for civil rights for Black Americans.
It regularly put him in harm’s way, like the time his Atlanta home was bombed in 1956 or when a member of the American Nazi party assaulted King in Alabama.
As Rosenbloom told Another View host Barbara Hamm Lee, King knew his work put him in danger. By 1968, King seemed to know his time was limited.
Below is an excerpt of Rosenbloom and Hamm Lee’s conversation, and the entire episode is here.
BARBARA HAMM LEE: Can you give us a sense of, even at that point, what was Memphis like? What do you remember about that time and how that juxtaposes with what you were able to find out through your research?
JOSEPH ROSENBLOOM: Well, Memphis was still recovering from the shock of King's assassination, and it was in the air there. You could sense that there was still a kind of dismay at what had happened in the city. People's memory was still very fresh then, and Memphis was emerging from the Jim Crow era. The desegregation had started in the early ’60s, but you could still sense that many of the vestiges of the segregated era were still present in Memphis, and I remember sensing that there was still quite a racial divide in the city at that time.
BHL: So your perspective on his assassination, was it different in Jackson, say, than what you experienced in Memphis?
JR: I can't say there was any stark difference between what the feeling was in my hometown of Jackson (Mississippi) as compared to what was happening in Memphis. Of course, Memphis is a much larger city, and there's a very different urban environment there, but in many respects, they're both part of the Deep South, and they share some common traits.
BHL: In your book in “Redemption,” you really take the time to not only tell us what was happening almost moment by moment, but also you give the background and perspective of each of the characters in the book, each of the people who were involved in the Poor People's Campaign, who were with Dr. King during that time. What did writing this book do for your understanding of Dr. King?
JR: Well, you get to know someone pretty well, at least. You feel that you do when you work on a biography for years and years, as I did, and when you have the opportunity to talk to people who knew him well and were with him in 1968 especially.
So my sense of him is that on the one hand, he had a kind of public image as a serious advocate for civil rights, as a somewhat formal and solemn man. But underneath that, when people got to know him, he was very humble, really, and light hearted. He told great stories and jokes, and so there was another whole side to him other than that public image.
BHL: It struck me that while he was in Memphis, he really had a sense that the end was pretty near. I don't think he could have predicted the day, but he had a lot of melancholy hanging over him. He said he was feeling something.
JR: Absolutely. He was terrified that he would die at any minute, that someone would kill him. He had been the target of threats for a long time, and he'd actually been attacked a few times, his house in Montgomery, Alabama had been firebombed, so he already had experienced a lot of alarm about the chance that he might be killed.
But by ’68 the fear was all the more intense, and … in his mind it wasn't a question of if he would be killed, it was only a question of when. And they thought it could happen at any moment.
BHL: It's interesting, because the persona that most people had of Dr. King through the years was that he was fearless and that he understood that this was his calling. But in fact, he was very much a very real human being with very real emotions.
JR: That's right. I mean, he had a sense of fatalism about it. That is, he didn't think there was much he could do and I think that may have conveyed to people the sense that he was relaxed about it and resigned about it, but underneath, he was terrified.
He really thought that he would die. He didn't want to die at a young age, but he felt it was a certainty. And so there was a kind of resignation on his part that it would happen, and there was nothing he could do about it, and he was determined to go on with his movement.
BHL: Joseph, paint a picture for us. Let's start with (Dr. King) getting on the plane in Atlanta to go back (to Memphis) on the third since we're talking about the last 31 hours of his life, starting with his flight from Atlanta to Memphis. What happened?
JR: He was on the Eastern Airlines Flight 381 from Atlanta to Memphis, and the plane was still in Atlanta that morning of April 3 when there was a bomb threat against it, and it was directed specifically at King, so the plane's passengers were evacuated. Dogs were brought in, and it turned out to be a false alarm, but when the passengers were evacuated, there's a story there about how King’s aides – he had four of his aides with him — were rushing to get off the plane.
Dorothy Cotton was one of his aides (and) was sitting right next to him, and she said she stepped on King's foot as she was rushing to get past him to get out of the plane before some bomb might explode. And then Bernard Lee, who was sort of an aide de camp to King, and who traveled with him and served as a kind of bodyguard, although he wasn't ever armed, was even faster getting off the plane, and yet, King just sort of meandered off the plane, was in no rush, and he later joked that Bernard Lee, his bodyguard, was not doing much to protect him because he left. …
BHL: Based on your investigations and all the people you talked with and so forth, what do you think Dr. King would have done differently if he had had a chance to do Memphis all over again? Do you think he had done it any differently?
JR: That's an interesting question. I obviously think he would avoid going to Memphis, or at least conducting himself in Memphis in a way that exposed himself to an assassin. But I think he was quite certain that it was the right decision.
He disregarded the advice of a lot of his aides that he shouldn't go to Memphis, Andrew Young in particular. (King) thought it was essential that he'd go to Memphis, and as I explained, to lead another march to show that he had control of his movement, that it remained nonviolent and he thought that was an important prerequisite for the Poor People's Campaign, because his image as a nonviolent leader. He thought it was critical for recruiting people who would participate in that Campaign, and also for the legitimacy of the campaign once he was in Washington.
