King Holiday Recalls a Time of Anguish in Atlanta

It was a warm evening on April 8, nearly 21 years ago, and Chattanooga was an eerie ghost town--not a person in sight or a car on the street.

Two blocks from its drab, nearly empty bus station, I was stopped by a policeman in a squad car. I told him I had a 1 hour stopover and was looking for a restaurant. He politely ordered me back to my bus. He said the city was under a curfew because of race riots.

I was a college student from a small town in Indiana, on my way to a funeral in Atlanta. The funeral and the riots were related.

The next morning, at Ebenezer Baptist Church, a large but unpretentious brick structure in downtown Atlanta, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lay in state beneath the pulpit where he had preached many times. Where his father had preached before him and his maternal grandfather before that.

Just 3 weeks earlier, King had given a speech in Anaheim, to the California Democratic Council, about injustice in the land and how we all must participate in the struggle for equality. Two days later he was in Memphis, Tenn., to lend support to striking garbage workers.

Cities across the country erupted in flames after King’s assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968. But in Atlanta, on this day, the outlet for despair was more grief than anger.

It was an unforgettable assembly of tribute.

The line outside the church ran for blocks and blocks. People had waited for hours just to pay a brief moment of respect and then dab at their eyes and choke on their words as they left the church.

“They done slew the King, that’s what they done,” I remember an old man saying as he stood in line just off the church steps.

I stood outside with the throng during the morning service and listened as King’s own recorded words filled the loudspeaker. I walked a few minutes ahead of the funeral cortege, which would wind its way 5 miles across the city to Morehouse College, King’s alma mater, for an outdoor service.

The memory moves me still today. The complete route, from the church door to the white-columned portico of Morehouse’s Harkness Hall, was lined with people, in many places four and five deep, mourning the loss of a leader.

I’d had no idea. What I knew about King and the civil rights struggle had come through the news media. These people had lived it with him.

I saw the pain in Bobby Kennedy’s face as he made his way along the route in shirt-sleeves. I saw the King children and recalled reading King’s account of how the joy of taking them to an amusement park was thwarted by the whites-only restrictions in effect on weekends.

I remember Mahalia Jackson’s moving rendition of “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and how first one, then another around me fainted as she sang. It was a combination of the unseasonable heat and the emotion she wrung from the song.

I remember Harry Belafonte’s tears and the masses singing “We Shall Overcome.” On the first note, a young black woman next to me put her hand in mine and nodded for me to take the hand of the man to my left. I thought of the sadness around me and wondered what awaited all of us in the next few years.

Today is a national holiday, in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. My son sees it as a day off from school. That’s OK. He’s 6 years old. But many Americans remain puzzled about why Martin Luther King should be specially honored.

I wish they could have been there that day in Atlanta.