Candidates mark King’s assassination

Forty years after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the race-infused 2008 presidential election campaign came Friday to the motel where the civil rights icon was gunned down.

But in an example of how this campaign has challenged traditional notions of race and politics, the only candidates who made the pilgrimage to the Lorraine Motel were Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain.

Sen. Barack Obama, vying to become the first black U.S. president, marked the solemn anniversary nearly 600 miles away in Fort Wayne, Ind., where he carefully invoked King’s economic message as much as his racial one.

“It’s worth reflecting on what Martin Luther King was doing in Memphis 40 years ago,” Obama said at a racially mixed town-hall meeting, reminding the crowd of King’s support for striking sanitation workers. “It was a struggle for economic justice.”

Clinton and McCain also talked Friday of King’s broader legacy. And McCain pointedly apologized for opposing a federal holiday honoring King when he was a young congressman.

But it was the distance from Fort Wayne to Memphis that delineated the new contours of this presidential contest.

“You can’t imagine a black candidate like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton not being in Memphis to give a speech,” said Joe Hicks, the former head of the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Just a year ago, Obama took a very different approach, making a point of going to Selma, Ala., to commemorate the anniversary of the 1965 civil rights march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

In Selma, Obama, the son of a white mother and a Kenyan father, pronounced himself “the offspring of the movement” as he sought to build support in the African American community.

Since then, the Illinois senator has become the front-runner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in large part by presenting himself as a candidate who transcends race. He also is working to get past the uproar that arose from the racially divisive comments of his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

And he is campaigning hard to get the support of white working-class voters in Pennsylvania and other states where Clinton is currently leading.

“Obama is going back to the larger strategy he used up until Rev. Wright, which is to downplay race,” said Shelby Steele, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who has written extensively about race and just published a book about Obama’s candidacy.

“He knows if there is this backdrop of black protest and anger, the white working-class voters he is trying to pull his way are going to peel away,” Steele said. “His whole strategy is to relieve the anxiety by saying he is not interested in race, that he is transcending race.”

On Friday, Clinton, not Obama, drew a deeply personal link to the civil rights movement, to King and to the rage that followed his assassination.

“I will never forget where I was when I heard Dr. King had been killed,” Clinton told a largely black audience at Memphis’ Mason Temple Church of God in Christ, where King preached his final sermon the night before he was assassinated.

“It felt like everything had been shattered, like we would never be able to put the pieces together again,” the New York senator said, recalling how she hurled her book bag across her dorm room in despair and then joined a protest march in Boston.

For Clinton, the visit to Memphis offered an opportunity to repair some of the rifts that have opened up between her and portions of the black community since she and her supporters made a number of comments that seemed to diminish Obama’s accomplishments.

McCain, who in 1983 voted against legislation to create a federal holiday on King’s birthday, also drew on his memory of King’s death, which he learned about while in a prisoner-of-war camp in North Vietnam.

The Arizona senator said he felt “just as everyone else did back home, only perhaps even more uncertain and alarmed for my country in the darkness that was then enclosed around me and my fellow captives. . . . The enemy had correctly calculated that the news from Memphis would deeply wound morale and leave us worried and afraid for our country.”

McCain apologized Friday for his vote 25 years ago, explaining: “We can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing.”

Discussing his vote earlier this week aboard his campaign plane, McCain said he changed his position after studying King’s legacy and learning that King was “a transcendent figure in American history; he deserved to be honored.”

Obama, who was a 6-year-old boy living with his mother in Indonesia when King was shot, offered no personal reminiscences Friday.

Nor did he discuss any sadness or anger that he or his family may have felt at the time.

Rather, in discussing the turmoil that followed King’s death, Obama focused on the work of another transcendent figure of the age, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who, while campaigning for president in Indiana on the day King was shot, helped calm crowds in Indianapolis.

“Kennedy reminded them of Dr. King’s compassion and his love, and on a night when cities across the nation were alight with violence, all was quiet in Indianapolis,” Obama said.

And he went on to invoke King’s unifying message.

“We all hope that we can find a job that pays a decent wage, that there will be affordable healthcare when we get sick, that we’ll be able to send our kids to college, and that after a lifetime of hard work, we’ll be able to retire with security,” Obama said. “They are common hopes, modest dreams, and they are at the heart of the struggle for freedom, dignity and humanity that Dr. King began.”

U.S. Rep. Melvin Watt (D-N.C.), a founding member and former head of the Congressional Black Caucus, noted that Obama’s focus on the economic message echoed where King was going in 1968. “He was transitioning from the leader of a racial movement to the leader of an economic movement and a peace movement,” Watt said.

Watt also cautioned against reading too much into Obama’s decision not to go to Memphis.

So did several of Obama’s supporters in Memphis, who said they understood he needed to campaign.

Gloria Tenney, a 64-year-old retired teacher from Atlanta who was buying an Obama T-shirt, said she believed her candidate was not “desperate.”

“I think he pretty much knows he has the black votes, so why do this for political reasons?” Tenney said.

Obama has won the support of 90% of black voters in Democratic primaries.

Obama himself reminded reporters on his campaign plane Friday that he spoke at King’s church in Atlanta in January to mark King’s birthday and gave a major speech on race last month to address the criticism of Wright’s sermons.

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noam.levey@latimes.com

maeve.reston@latimes.com

Levey reported from Washington and Reston from Memphis.