Harold Titus's Blog, page 20

Recent Presidential Elections

Recent Presidential Elections Chronology

GOP’s Ugly Evolution – Part One
GOP’s Ugly Evolution – Part Two

2000 Election:
Results, the Campaigns
Character Assassination
Florida – Disenfranchisement
Florida – Chaotic Returns
Florida – Lawyering, Supreme Court Decision

2004 Election:
Overview
Freak Show
Bush and the Air National Guard
Swift Boat Veterans for Truth
Jim Rassmann
Why Kerry Lost
Election Stolen?

2008 Election:
Results, Pre-Conventions Smears
Reverend Wright, Campaigns
The Heart of the Campaigns
The Debates, Why Obama Won

2012 Election:
Results
Obama’s First Term: Disenfranchisement, Vilification
Obama’s First Term: Obstruction, Achievements
First Term Accomplishments, Campaigns Begin
The Debates
Why Obama Won
Attempted Rigging?

2016 Election:
Results
Trump Voter Characteristics
Liar, Liar
Campaigns, Cheating
The Debates
Why Trump Won:
Russian Interference
Anti-Hillary Sentiment
Substantial Disenfranchisement
Other Opinions

Civil Rights Events -- Robert Kennedy Assassination

“Now it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there!” The senator had won the California primary, a crucial step before the Democratic National Convention just two months away in Chicago. In the early morning hours of June 5, 1968, Kennedy held up his index and middle finger, flashing a “V” for victory sign at the crowd, and departed the stage of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles to the sound of chants.

Within minutes, cheers gave way to screams (Shalby 1).

RFK’s assassination took place shortly after midnight on Wednesday, June 5, 1968, as RFK walked through a crowded food preparation area (better known as the kitchen pantry) in the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, CA. This hotel was closed in 1989 and torn down in 2005. Six public schools, named the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools, now stand on the site.

The alleged assassin, Sirhan B. Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestine-born non-Muslim with Jordanian citizenship, was one of approximately 77 persons in the pantry waiting for RFK to pass through on his way to a press conference. When the senator entered, Sirhan pulled out an eight-shot .22 caliber revolver, pointed it at the senator and fired eight times (Wilkes 3).

Wikipedia offers this detail.

He was on his way to another gathering of supporters elsewhere in the hotel. Reporters wanted a press conference, and campaign aide Fred Dutton decided that Kennedy would forgo the second gathering and instead go through the hotel's kitchen and pantry area behind the ballroom to the press area. Kennedy finished speaking and started to exit when William Barry stopped him and said, "No, it's been changed. We're going this way." Barry and Dutton began clearing a way for Kennedy to go left through swinging doors to the kitchen corridor, but Kennedy was hemmed in by the crowd and followed maître d'hôtel Karl Uecker through a back exit.

Uecker led Kennedy through the kitchen area, holding his right wrist, but frequently releasing it as Kennedy shook hands with people whom he encountered. Uecker and Kennedy started down a passageway narrowed by an ice machine against the right wall and a steam table to the left. Kennedy turned to his left and shook hands with busboy Juan Romero, just as Sirhan Sirhan stepped down from a low tray-stacker beside the ice machine, rushed past Uecker, and repeatedly fired an eight-shot .22 Long Rifle caliber Iver Johnson Cadet 55-A revolver.

Kennedy fell to the floor, and bodyguard William Barry hit Sirhan twice in the face while others, including writer George Plimpton and football player Rosey Grier, forced him against the steam table and disarmed him, as he continued firing his gun in random directions. Five other people were wounded in addition to Kennedy: William Weisel of ABC News, Paul Schrade of the United Automobile Workers union, Democratic Party activist Elizabeth Evans, Ira Goldstein of the Continental News Service, and Kennedy campaign volunteer Irwin Stroll.

After a minute, Sirhan wrestled free and grabbed the revolver again, but he had already fired all the bullets and was subdued. Barry went to Kennedy and placed his jacket under the candidate's head, later recalling: "I knew immediately it was a .22, a small caliber, so I hoped it wouldn't be so bad, but then I saw the hole in the Senator's head, and I knew".

Reporters and photographers rushed into the area from both directions, contributing to the confusion and chaos. As Kennedy lay wounded, Juan Romero cradled his head and placed a rosary in his hand. Kennedy asked Romero, "Is everybody OK?" and Romero responded, "Yes, everybody's OK." Kennedy then turned away and said, "Everything's going to be OK."

This moment was captured by Life photographer Bill Eppridge and Boris Yaro of the Los Angeles Times and became the iconic image of the assassination.

There was some initial confusion concerning who was shot, one witness believing that the primary victim was Kennedy's campaign manager and brother-in-law Stephen Edward Smith. Another witness stated that a female in a polka-dot dress had exclaimed repeatedly, "We killed him," before running away. Video footage of the witness's testimony can be seen in the Netflix series “Bobby Kennedy for President.”

Kennedy's wife Ethel was three months pregnant; she stood outside the crush of people at the scene seeking help. She was soon led to her husband and knelt beside him. He turned his head and seemed to recognize her. Smith promptly appeared on television and calmly asked for a doctor. Friend and journalist Pete Hamill recalled that Kennedy had "a kind of sweet accepting smile on his face, as if he knew it would all end this way".

After several minutes, medical attendants arrived and lifted Kennedy onto a stretcher, prompting him to whisper, "Don't lift me", which were his last words, as he lost consciousness shortly after. He was taken a mile away to Central Receiving Hospital, where he arrived near death. One doctor slapped his face, calling, "Bob, Bob", while another doctor manually massaged his heart. After obtaining a good heartbeat, doctors handed a stethoscope to Ethel so that she could hear his heart beating.

After about 30 minutes, Kennedy was transferred several blocks to the Hospital of the Good Samaritan to undergo surgery (Assassination 4-5).

These are the recorded words of Mutual Broadcasting System reporter Andrew West:

Senator Kennedy has been … Senator Kennedy has been shot! Is that possible? It is possible, ladies and gentlemen! It is possible! He has … Not only Senator Kennedy! Oh my God! … I am right here, and Rafer Johnson has hold of the man who apparently fired the shot! He still has the gun! The gun is pointed at me right this moment! Get the gun! Get the gun! Get the gun! Stay away from the guy! Get his thumb! Get his thumb! Break it if you have to! Get the gun, Rafer [Johnson]! Hold him! We don’t want another Oswald (Kilgore 1).

Another eye-witness, Ivor Davis:

Suddenly, I heard balloons popping. One, two, three, four, five and six.

Then screams. I stepped into the pantry — and there on the concrete floor lay the candidate. Blood gushed from a head wound.

The scene was sheer bedlam.

“Get the gun,” yelled a radio newsman.

“Give him air,” screamed Ethel, cushioning her husband’s head on a straw hat on the floor.

“Not again,” shrieked a Bobby supporter (Davis 4-5).

Sirhan [had been] … seized by bystanders, wrestled to the floor and turned over to police when they arrived (Wilkes 3).

… No fewer than five physicians were in attendance at the California presidential primary, including a trauma surgeon. Within minutes of the shooting, the senator was already receiving medical care. RFK was in a semi-conscious state, lying on the kitchen floor for 17 minutes as paramedics were en route. His left eye was shut, his right eye open, but with the pupil shifted to the right. Kennedy was still able to move all four of his limbs.

But then Kennedy began to lose consciousness, prompting one of the doctors, a radiologist named Stanley Abo, to examine the senator’s head wound. A small blood clot had formed at the site of the bullet hole, so Abo inserted his finger into the hole to disrupt the clot. “With that action, the clot dislodged, blood flowed freely from the bullet hole, and Kennedy’s consciousness briefly improved,”…

By 12:32 am, RFK was on a stretcher and on his way to LA’s Central Receiving Hospital, arriving at 12:45 am. He was immediately cared for by Dr. V. Faustin Bazilauskas. At this stage, Kennedy’s gaze became fixed, he wasn’t breathing, and his pulse was almost impossible to detect. The medical staff hooked him up to an IV, inserted an oral airway, placed a respirator mask on his face, and started compressions, which went on for 10 minutes. They also gave him some adrenaline and other medications. Eventually, the senator’s blood pressure returned. It soon became obvious to Bazilauskas and his colleague Dr. Albert Holt that they weren’t able to offer the care required to treat Kennedy’s injuries, so they transferred him to the Good Samaritan Hospital. … the delay in getting the senator to the appropriate hospital was the biggest mistake made that evening—a problem caused when the initial call for ambulance was made, and the nature of Kennedy’s injuries was not fully disclosed.

“If the dispatcher had known the injury was a gunshot to the head, the ambulance driver would likely have been instructed to bypass the smaller hospital and go directly to the nearby 400-bed Good Samaritan Hospital,”…

… the delay ultimately didn’t have an effect on the final outcome.

Once at the ICU unit of the new hospital and placed under the care of Drs. Paul A. Ironside and Hubert Humble, RFK was disrobed so that his other two wounds could be inspected. He had a gunshot wound on the right side of his back, with X-rays showing a bullet lodged in his neck; the injury was not considered life threatening. He also had a wound on his right shoulder, but no other bullets were found lodged within his body.

The senator was now in very bad shape, and he was no longer responding to pain. At 2:45 am, Kennedy was transferred to the operating room where he received an emergency craniotomy. In 1968, doctors did not have the benefit of modern medical tools such as computed tomography (CT) scans, but they did have X-rays, and they were able to perform brain surgery, and in a manner similar to how it’s still done today.

Over the course of the three hour and 45 minute long craniotomy, the doctors worked to remove as many bits of bone and bullet fragments as possible. After the surgery, RFK regained some motor activity on the right side of his body, as shown by his response to a pin prick.

…

RFK remained relatively stable in the hours following the surgery, but by 6:00 pm on June 5, about 12 hours after the craniotomy, his condition began to deteriorate. The pressure in his brain began to rise, his electroencephalogram readings became flat, and he stopped breathing. Kennedy never regained consciousness, and he was pronounced dead at 1:44 am local time on June 6, 1968 (Dvorsky 2-4).

Here are additional recollections of individuals who were present at the hotel.

Boris Yaro had arrived at the Ambassador Hotel at 10:30 the night of June 4. The Los Angeles Times reporter was off-duty and hoping to grab a photo of Kennedy. Hours later, after Kennedy took the stage and addressed the crowd, Yaro shouted at the senator to hold up two fingers. He missed the shot.

Yaro saw an opening to the kitchen. Maybe now he’d get his chance.

Gunshots rang out.

Six people were wounded by the gunfire. Only one would die.

“The reaction I had was, ‘My God, not again.’”

Yaro saw Kennedy slip to the floor as bystanders grabbed the shooter and slammed his hand down on a freezer top, knocking the gun loose.

“I reached out and picked up that revolver,” Yaro said. “I remember the grip was still warm.”

William Barry, Kennedy’s bodyguard and a former FBI agent, grabbed the gun. Rosey Grier, the football player, reportedly sat on the gunman until police arrived.

Kennedy was on his back, drenched in blood. Yaro took six frames.

He headed to The Times’ office. He turned over his film and, after describing what he had seen to the reporter writing the story, went into the darkroom to see the images.

There, in the darkness, he wept (Shalby 1-2).

Juan Romero is 17, working as a busboy. He hears that Bobby Kennedy has won the California Democratic primary in a bid for the presidency of the United States. Romero rushes to the food service area Kennedy is passing through and reaches out to congratulate the man he had met the night before while delivering room service.

And then the shots, the screams, the commotion.

Kennedy goes down, flat on his back, a ghostly look in his eyes. Romero crouches to help, and the black-and-white photographs freeze forever the image of a young immigrant laborer at the side of fallen American aristocracy.

…

He’d grown up in Mexico, moved to the U.S. at 10, began getting into trouble while going to Hollenbeck Middle School and then Roosevelt High in Boyle Heights. His unfailingly strict stepfather worked at the Ambassador and helped Romero get a job as a busboy to keep him off the street. Romero lifted a pair of rosary beads from the glove compartment of his mother’s car and carried them in his pocket to ward off the temptation to miss school or be late for work.

Bobby Kennedy, candidate for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States, checked into the hotel at the end of the California primary. Romero, who recalled homes in Mexico with photos of the pope and of John F. Kennedy, badly wanted to meet a Kennedy. He told other busboys he’d do anything for them if they let him take a room service call from the candidate.

Romero and a waiter knocked at the door, then pushed two food carts into the room. Several people were present. Kennedy stood at a bay window, finished up a phone call and turned to the visitors.

“He said, ‘Come on in, boys,’” Romero recalls, the memory bringing a smile to his face.

“I remember staring at him with my mouth open, and I see him shaking the hand of a waiter and then reaching out to me. I remember him grabbing my hand and he gave me a two-handed shake,” said Romero.

“He had piercing blue eyes, and he looked right at you. You knew he was looking at you and not through you … I remember walking out of that room … feeling 10 feet tall, feeling like an American.… I didn’t feel like I was Mexican, and I didn’t feel like I was a busboy, and I didn’t feel like I was 17 years old. I felt like I was right there with him.”

The next night, when Kennedy won the primary and made his victory speech at the Ambassador, Romero pushed through the crowd, eager to congratulate him, and to shake his hand once more.

He reached out, and the bullets tore into Kennedy. Romero took out his rosary beads and tried to press them into Kennedy’s hand (Lopez 1-2, 4-5).

SMCC student, Vince Dipierro:

"I couldn't eat for two days. I still get a sick feeling when I'm near the place where he was shot . . . when they brought me home from the first FBI interrogation, there were five police cars parked in front of my place. I felt like a star witness! As it turned out I was the only one who actually saw the first fatal shot fired at Robert Kennedy."

It all started as Vince, a part time Ambassador Hotel waiter, was standing five feet from Kennedy: Sirhan's sickly smile, a smiling girl in a polka dot dress, a quickly raised pistol, and bang! bang! bang! bang! and bang! Fifth Shot. It was the fifth shot that, according to FBI investigators, could have hit Vince in the neck if he hadn't been knocked to the floor by the men wounded on each side of him. "I was scared and numb, never so scared in my life. I trembled for the next two days, couldn't work for ten days. I was still upset when I went back to work." …

… "Sirhan knew exactly what he was doing. That smile on his face; he thought he was making a hero out of himself. He deserves the death penalty. "You know, I'll never forget the feel of Kennedy's blood as it splattered gently on the side of my face. Like someone had dipped his hand in warm water and flicked his fingers at me . . . and the ten hours of questioning by the LAPD and the FBI . . . the lie detector test a month later ... to prove that I had really seen the girl in the polka dot dress . . . and the four days in court as a prosecution witness." … (RFK 1-2).

"I have those dreams of seeing Bobby’s body fall down," Corbett said Tuesday. "It’s very strong, and it doesn’t go away. Despite 50 years behind me, I still replay those memories in slow motion."

Dick Corbett was Kennedy’s presidential campaign head of finance. Corbett remembers passing rows of stainless steel work tables littered with dirty dishes and Kennedy shaking the hand of a skinny busboy.

Then, a small man with a .22-caliber revolver stepped out from behind a rack of trays.

Corbett was standing over Kennedy’s right shoulder and saw the gun but didn’t react. It didn’t seem real. By the time the shooter was done, Kennedy was hit three times — once behind his ear, once in his chest and once in the back of his neck. Three other people also had been hit.

Kennedy crumpled to the floor, and the busboy — Juan Modesto [actually Romero], now 67 and living in Modesto, Calif. — found himself cradling Kennedy’s bleeding head in his hands. Corbett remembers bending down and loosening Kennedy’s tie. Blood and the smell of gunpowder was everywhere.

Kennedy was pronounced dead at 1:44 a.m. at Good Samaritan hospital. The family wanted somebody they knew and trusted to remain with the body as an autopsy was performed.

"So I stayed in the morgue, in the basement, the whole night. I watched the coroner perform the autopsy," Corbett said. "The smell of embalming fluid still turns my stomach."

Two days later, Corbett was part of the funeral train that traveled from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

…

"It was a complete change in my life. All the starry-eyed excitement of youth, when you are following somebody who had such an important cause, just dimmed. Bobby’s death killed me" (Fanning 1-3).

Sirhan’s California state court trial for the murder of RFK began on Feb. 13, 1969, and ended two months later on Apr. 17, when the jury found Sirhan guilty. The trial judge imposed a death sentence, reduced to life imprisonment by the California Supreme Court in 1972. Incarcerated now for 51 years, Sirhan is still serving that sentence.

The official government version of the RFK assassination—the stated view of the FBI, the Los Angeles Police Department and prosecutors in the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office—is that Sirhan was the lone assassin, that Sirhan fired all the shots in the pantry and that there was no conspiracy. According to the official narrative of the assassination, therefore, a single assassin acting alone slew RFK.

However, for persons who have scrutinized the facts surrounding the RFK assassination, or examined the quality of the official investigation, the official account lacks credibility.

Today, it is evident that there are glaring weaknesses in the official account—particularly its no-conspiracy contention. Major discrepancies exist between the official account and the actual evidence. The official probe of the murder was substandard and amounted to a cover-up. There is ballistics and autopsy evidence establishing the existence of a conspiracy (Wilkes 3).

Critics of the police investigation have alleged the following. There had been a second shooter, possibly a woman in a polka-dot dress or the man allegedly seen accompanying her, both supposedly seen with Sirhan several days earlier. Sirhan may have been hypnotized. At least 13 shots had been fired; Sirhan’s pistol had had no more than 8 bullets. The three bullets that had struck Kennedy had come from behind him, not from the front of him.

A 2018 medical research team from Duke University School of Medicine, after reviewing a number of sources while conducting its review of the assassination -- including eyewitness accounts, various medical records, and the autopsy report itself – did concluded that Sirhan’s bullets struck Kennedy and that he was the lone shooter.

… many people witnessed the shooting. Much has been made of the fact that the assassin approached Kennedy from the front, but the gunshot wounds were in the back. Several witnesses documented that Kennedy’s head was turned to his left as he was shot, which explains the trajectory of the bullets. In addition, witnesses claim that Sirhan came no closer than a foot from Kennedy when the shooting occurred, but the autopsy report estimates that the gun was within inches of the skin based on the presence of gunpowder in the wound. The same witnesses did not see another shooter. Despite concern over the trajectory of the bullet and controversy about gunpowder on the skin, there was never clear evidence of conspiracy and Sirhan was ruled the lone gunman (Dvorsky 6).

You may read a detailed argument for a second shooter by accessing https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Rob...

Inside St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, before 2,100 people wearing black, the last surviving Kennedy brother, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, began his unannounced eulogy for Bobby.

“On behalf of Mrs. Kennedy, her children, the parents and sisters of Robert Kennedy, I want to express what we feel to those who mourn with us today in this Cathedral and around the world,” the young senator from Massachusetts said on June 8, 1968. “We loved him as a brother, and as a father, and as a son.”

…

“He gave us strength in time of trouble, wisdom in time of uncertainty, and sharing in time of happiness. He will always be by our side,” Ted Kennedy said at the funeral. “Love is not an easy feeling to put into words. Nor is loyalty, or trust, or joy. But he was all of these. He loved life completely and he lived it intensely.”

…

“My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it,” he said. “Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him.”

He paused, regaining his composure to quote Bobby a final time: “Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not” (Mettler 1, 2, 4).


Works cited:

“Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.” Wikipedia. Web. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassi...


Davis, Ivor. “The Night Bobby Kennedy Was Shot – An Eyewitness Account 50 Years Later.” The Wrap. June 5, 2018. Web. https://www.thewrap.com/night-bobby-k...


Dvorsky, George. “New Medical Analysis Shows What Really Happened on the Night Robert F. Kennedy Was Assassinated.” Gizmodo. June 19, 2018. Web. https://gizmodo.com/new-medical-analy...

Fanning, Ed. “Dick Corbett of Tampa, Witness to RFK Assassination, Still Feels the Loss Every Day.” Tampa Bay Times. June 5, 2018. Web. https://www.tampabay.com/news/Dick-Co...


Kilgore, Ed. “The Powerful Myth of Would-Be President RFK, 50 Years Later.” Intelligencer. June 5, 2018. Web. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/0...


Lopez, Steve. “Column: 50 Years Later, the RFK Busboy Still Waits on Someone to Follow in Kennedy’s Footsteps.” Los Angeles Times. June 2, 2018. Web. https://www.latimes.com/local/califor...


Mettler, Katie. “‘Those He Youched’: Ted Kennedy’s Heartbreaking Eulogy for His Slain Brother, Bobby.” The Washington Post. June 8, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/r...


“RFK Assassination Eyewitness Recalls Horror Of June 6,1968.” California Digital Newspaper Collection. April 30, 1969. Web. https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=CRS19...


Shalby, Colleen. “The Assassination of Robert Kennedy, as Told 50 Years Later.” Los Angeles Times. June 4, 2018. Web. https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-n...

Wilkes Jr., Donald E. “The Real Story of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.” Flagpole. June 19, 2019. Web. https://flagpole.com/news/news-featur...

Civil Rights Events -- Robert Kennedy -- Presidential Campaign

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

In 1968, America was a wounded nation. The wounds were moral ones; the Vietnam War and three summers of inner-city riots had inflicted them on the national soul, challenging Americans’ belief that they were a uniquely noble and honorable people. Americans saw news footage from South Vietnam, such as the 1965 film of U.S. Marines setting fire to thatched huts in the village of Cam Ne with cigarette lighters and flamethrowers, and realized that they were capable of committing atrocities once considered the province of their enemies. They saw federal troops patrolling the streets of American cities and asked themselves how this could be happening in their City upon a Hill (Clarke 2).

Fifty years ago this week [2018], Robert Kennedy declared his candidacy for president. In the wake of Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary, Kennedy’s candidacy was not greeted with universal acclaim — that would grow over time. Although some considered it a political crusade, to others, it smacked of rank political opportunism.

Over the years, the perception of Kennedy as a candidate and his place in the liberal tradition of the Democratic Party have been framed more by the untimely end of his crusade than by the decision to embark on it in the first place. But there are clear lessons that prospective candidates can draw from Kennedy’s vacillation and eventual campaign. To triumph, candidates must plunge in, innovate, inspire and unify their parties — things Kennedy only partially succeeded in doing.

As early as 1962, Kennedy was considered a future presidential candidate. But when anti-Vietnam War activist Allard Lowenstein approached him about running in September 1967, Kennedy declined, despite growing disenchantment with his party’s positions on inner cities and Vietnam. Lowenstein then persuaded McCarthy to run, setting up a future conflict between the McCarthy and Kennedy camps (Bradshaw 1).

Bobby deputed his brother [Ted] to meet with McCarthy. If he would agree to add poverty amelioration to his agenda, RFK might remain on the sidelines. But McCarthy “just was basically uninterested” in the deal, Teddy reported.

Edward Kennedy urged his brother to wait until 1972 to try to restore Camelot. Johnson would be in retirement, and the path back to the White House for the Kennedys might be clearer. Moreover, both Teddy and his sister-in-law Jackie feared for Bobby’s safety on the presidential campaign trail. “A feeling of dread” is how Teddy’s chief of staff described the senator’s premonition of doom (Perry 3).

Over the winter of 1967-1968, Kennedy agonized over whether to run or to wait. Some advisers, including his brother Ted, argued that challenging an incumbent from one’s own party was madness and would lead to a GOP victory in the general election. Others countered that Kennedy was the only candidate who would halt the Vietnam War and address the poverty and race issues articulated by the Kerner Commission (Bradshaw 2).

One might have thought that Ethel Kennedy—who knew that during her husband’s term as attorney general the telephones at Hickory Hill, the Kennedys’ home in McLean, Virginia, had rung with threats such as “We know where your kids go to school and we know how they get there” and “Do you know what hydrochloric acid can do to your eyes?”—would be the last person to want Bobby to run (Clarke 4). But she did.

Kennedy and his advisers were concerned that had he been the first to challenge President Lyndon B. Johnson, he would have exacerbated the perception that he was ruthless, in part because of the longtime feud that existed between Johnson and Kennedy. But his late entry into the contest triggered consternation and grumbling anyway, because McCarthy had become the darling of the left and student activists, both constituencies Kennedy saw as naturally his. Detractors labeled him “Bobby come lately,” and infuriated columnist Murray Kempton cabled Ted Kennedy, “Your brother’s announcement makes clear that St. Patrick did not drive all the snakes out of Ireland.”

Kennedy’s vacillation owed both to political and policy calculations. Pushing him to run was concern about potential damage to the United States if policies were not changed. More selfishly, he wondered if passing on a run might freeze him out of the White House until at least 1980 should Johnson win reelection — as the professional political operators on Kennedy’s team assumed — and anoint his preferred successor in 1972, presumably Vice President Hubert Humphrey (Bradshaw 2-3).

Kennedy was concerned that, if he ran, an increasingly unstable Lyndon Johnson might “wag the dog,” provoking an international crisis or even starting a war to upstage the challenger’s candidacy. In late 1967, as Kennedy was completing Thirteen Days, his account of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, he had told Adam Walinsky, “You know, we had 13 people in that room [the Cabinet Room in the White House], and if any one of 8 of them had been President, we would have had a nuclear war.” During the same conversation, he said, “The problem is that if I run against Johnson, I don’t know what he’s going to do.” Kennedy told Walinsky that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had also served in J.F.K.’s administration and who initially did not encourage Bobby’s running in 1968, stoked his fears, perhaps on purpose, by recounting conversations during which Johnson had spoken about possible, and frightening, countermoves against North Vietnam and China. The fear that Johnson’s obsessive hatred for him might prompt Johnson to act irrationally had also inhibited Kennedy’s criticism of the president’s Vietnam policies. “I’m afraid that by speaking out I just make Lyndon do the opposite,” he once told the Village Voice reporter Jack Newfield. “He hates me so much that if I asked for snow, he would make rain, just because it was me” (Clarke 3).

But it was political calculation that initially kept Kennedy out of the race. He cited Johnson’s ability to control events; the fickle nature of opinion polls — which showed him ahead of Johnson for most of 1967; and the adverse mathematical calculations for delegate selection. This latter element was important in the pre-reform era of fewer primaries and party boss control. Kennedy concluded that a winning campaign “simply could not be put together” and said as much publicly in early 1968.

But then, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote, the Tet offensive, launched by the North Vietnamese in late January, “changed everything” for Kennedy, altering his careful calculations about both politics and the greater good. When the administration rejected Kennedy’s idea of a commission to investigate the U.S. commitment in Vietnam, Kennedy reversed himself (Bradshaw 3).

Richard Nixon, who had lost the presidency to J.F.K. in 1960, watched Kennedy’s announcement from a hotel room in Portland, Oregon. John Ehrlichman, one of several aides in the room with Nixon, later wrote, “When it was over and the hotel-room TV was turned off, Nixon sat and looked at the blank screen for a long time, saying nothing. Finally, he shook his head slowly. ‘We’ve just seen some very terrible forces unleashed,’ he said. ‘Something bad is going to come of this.’ He pointed at the screen, ‘God knows where this is going to lead.’ ” Meanwhile, by one account, Kennedy was telling Nicole Salinger, the wife of J.F.K.’s press secretary Pierre Salinger, “I’m sleeping well for the first time in months. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but at least I’m at peace with myself” (Clarke 3).

Kennedy's plan was to win the nomination through popular support in the primaries. He delivered his first campaign speech on March 18 at Kansas State University, where he had agreed to give a lecture honoring former Kansas governor and former Republican Presidential candidate Alfred Landon. At Kansas State, Kennedy spoke to a crowd of 14,500 students. In his speech, Kennedy apologized for early mistakes and attacked President Johnson's Vietnam policy saying, "I was involved in many of the early decisions on Vietnam, decisions which helped set us on our present path," but he added that "past error is not excuse for its own perpetration." Later that day at the University of Kansas, Kennedy spoke to another crowd of 19,000. He said, "I don't think that we have to shoot each other, to beat each other, to curse each other and criticize each other, I think that we can do better in this country. And that is why I run for President of the United States."

Kennedy went on to campaign in the Democratic primaries in Indiana, Washington, D.C., Nebraska, Oregon, South Dakota, and California. His speeches emphasized racial equality, non-aggression in foreign policy, and social improvement. His campaign attracted support among America's youth, while it did not engender support from the business community. Businesses leaders criticized him for the tax increases that would be necessary to fund Kennedy's proposed social programs. During a speech given at the Indiana University Medical School, Kennedy was asked, "Where are we going to get the money to pay for all these new programs you're proposing?" Kennedy referred to the medical students and said "From you."

Although he enjoyed support from many in the anti-war movement, Kennedy did not express support for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. military personnel from Vietnam or an immediate end to the conflict. He said that he wanted to end the conflict by strengthening the South Vietnamese military and reducing corruption within the South Vietnamese government. He supported a peace settlement between North and South Vietnam.(1968 2-3).

“Black Bobby,” as his own family once called him in reference to the brooding, bitter, pragmatic enforcer who scoffed at liberals as impractical, even weak, dreamers—had evolved into a sad-eyed and genuinely empathetic champion of Americans who had been left behind: black people living in squalid urban ghettos, Latino immigrants laboring for pennies in California’s vineyards, poor white residents of Appalachian coal towns that had long ago been stripped to their veins.

At frantic rallies and in frenzied motorcade swings through black and Latino neighborhoods, Kennedy transformed into something bordering between Christ-like and celebrity. “The crowds were savage,” one of his advisers remembered. “They pulled off his cufflinks, tore off his clothes, tore ours. In bigger towns with bigger crowds, it was frightening.” Kennedy would stand in an open-topped convertible, a young aide kneeling with his arm wrapped around the candidate, who wore a weary half smile as residents reached out to touch his limp arms and hands or tear off a piece of clothing as a keepsake. “It was like he wasn’t there,” another aide observed. “His stare was vacant.”

Bobby veered sharply between preaching a message of reconciliation and lobbing bruising attacks on those representing wealth, privilege and power (he was never so effective as when those attacks were aimed at his nemesis, President Johnson). To the black and brown voters who composed the base of his support, he seemed a savior. But to many middle-class white Democrats, Kennedy’s rallies and motorcades were unsettling. In their heat and intensity, they seemed eerily of a piece with violent antiwar protests and urban riots that defined that most disorderly time. “You have to turn it down,” implored Ted Sorensen, a longtime Kennedy family confidant. “We can’t,” Bobby replied. “It’s too late.”

The myth of Kennedy’s interracial appeal was born in Indiana, where the candidate trounced his cooler, more professorial rival, Eugene McCarthy. In the immediate aftermath of the primary, the influential political columnists Robert Novak and Rowland Evans noted that in Gary, “while Negro precincts were delivering about 90 percent for Kennedy, he was running 2 to 1 ahead in some Polish districts.” Such findings quickly formed the basis of Bobby’s image as a candidate of racial reconciliation. He was a tough, Irish Catholic Democrat with unimpeachable credentials as a Cold Warrior and law enforcer. But he was also the preferred candidate of the urban ghetto—a truth speaker on racial and economic injustice. “Kennedy’s Indiana Victory Proves His Appeal Defuses Backlash Voting,” one headline declared.

Historians and political scientists see the matter differently today. Kennedy’s own vote counters later conceded that he lost 59 out of 70 white precincts in Gary. While Kennedy’s internal polls showed him faring better than might be expected among former supporters of George Wallace’s bid for the Democratic nomination four years earlier, he nevertheless struggled to retain working-class, white ethnic voters and relied instead on robust turnout in minority neighborhoods for his electoral cushion.

… Kennedy and his team instinctively understood that their real base was among people of color. As early precincts from Gary reported on May 7, opening up a wide gap in what early returns had shown to be an unexpectedly close race against McCarthy, Ethel Kennedy, the candidate’s wife, crowed, “Don’t you just wish that everyone was black?”

What does seem clear is that Kennedy struggled with educated white professionals, a group central to the Democratic Party’s ambitions in 2018 and beyond. The journalist David Halberstam attributed much of the problem to style. Kennedy’s motorcades and rallies captured the very fever that many suburbanites hoped to quell. “There would be two minutes of television each night of Robert Kennedy being mauled, losing his shoes, and then there would be 15 free—that was painful—minutes of Gene McCarthy talking leisurely and seriously about the issues” (Zeitz 5-6).

In primary after primary that year, Bobby was showing an ability to reach beyond his comfort zone and across normal political boundaries. … In Nebraska, an impressive 51.7% of Democratic Cornhuskers pulled their levers for Bobby, compared with McCarthy’s 31.2%, Humphrey’s 7.4%, and 5.6% for former president Lyndon Johnson. Even in South Dakota, Humphrey’s birthplace, the results were encouraging: 49.5% for Bobby, 30.1% for the vice president, and 20.4% for McCarthy (Tye 2).

Kennedy was successful in four state primaries: Indiana, Nebraska, South Dakota, and California; as well as Washington D.C. McCarthy won six state primaries: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Oregon, New Jersey, and Illinois. Of the state primaries in which they campaigned directly against one another, Kennedy won three (Indiana, Nebraska, and California) while McCarthy was only successful in one (Oregon) (1968 4).

Heading into the Oregon primary, Bobby rued that “it’s all white Protestants. There’s nothing for me to grab a hold of.” On the eve of the ballot, the candidate turned to his aide, Joe Dolan, and observed, “You think I’m going to lose.” “I know you are,” replied Dolan. “We don’t have blacks and Chicanos, and we do have gun nuts.” (Kennedy became an early gun safety supporter after his brother’s assassination, a position that was no more popular in certain pockets then than it is now.) (Zeitz 7).

The Oregon primary posed several challenges to Kennedy's campaign. His platform, which called for an end to poverty and hunger, and which focused on minority issues, did not resonate with Oregon voters. The Kennedy campaign pointed out that McCarthy had voted against a minimum wage law and repeal of the poll tax in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The McCarthy campaign responded with charges that Kennedy illegally taped Martin Luther King, Jr. as United States Attorney General. On May 28, McCarthy won the Oregon primary with 44.7 percent; Kennedy received 38.8 percent of vote.

After losing momentum in Oregon, Kennedy hoped to take the California and South Dakota primaries on June 4. The demographics of California appeared to be right for his voter-appeal. But McCarthy's California campaign was well-funded and organized and a defeat would have been a serious blow to his hopes of winning the nomination. Kennedy had some disadvantages in the South Dakota primary. McCarthy was a Senator in neighboring Minnesota and Humphrey had been raised in South Dakota.

On June 1, during the final days of the California campaign, Kennedy and McCarthy met for a televised debate. The debate turned out to be a draw, but after the debate, undecided voters favored Kennedy over McCarthy by a 2 to 1 margin. Kennedy's campaign was nothing if not energetic and on June 3, Kennedy traveled to San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Long Beach. He told Theodore H. White on June 4 that he believed that he could sway Democratic Party leaders with wins in both California and South Dakota (1968 5-6).

Kennedy won the South Dakota primary, beating McCarthy, 50 percent to 20 percent of the vote.

In the California primary, … Bobby was buoyed by unprecedented turnouts and majorities in black and Mexican American districts. He won 46.3% of the vote, compared to McCarthy’s 41.8% and 12% for an unpledged slate headed by Thomas C. Lynch. The trend was encouraging enough for Bobby to go on TV and quietly claim victory, for journalists and friends gathered across the hall at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel to start the party, and for America to imagine what it might be like to have another Kennedy in the White House (Tye 3).

The Netflix documentary, “Bobby Kennedy for President,” opens with bracing—almost jaw-dropping—footage of Bobby campaigning in open-topped convertibles throughout California. It was days after his defeat in Oregon, and he was in the fight of his life. The crowds are interracial, to be sure, but upon close examination, they are composed of people of color in sharp disproportion to the state’s population in 1968. We don’t know how Kennedy might have fared among working-class whites if he had survived into the fall. But it’s fair to say that he was one of the first national Democrats in the aftermath of the Voting Rights Act to solidify the loyalty of black and Latino voters in large and meaningful numbers (Zeitz 5-7).

… in the words of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy had run "an uproarious campaign, filled with enthusiasm and fun... It [had been] … also a campaign moving in its sweep and passion." Indeed, he [had] challenged the complacent in American society and [had] sought to bridge the great divides in American life - between the races, between the poor and the affluent, between young and old, between order and dissent. His 1968 campaign [had] brought hope to an American people troubled by discontent and violence at home and war in Vietnam. … (Robert 3).

…

… Bobby Kennedy ran for president at the high-water mark of white backlash, in a year when America seemed at war with itself. It’s possible that no candidate—even one so apparently hard-wired for the challenge—could have bridged racial and class divides. (Another candidate, Richard Nixon, knew how to profit from them.)

…

… Ultimately, the 1968 election results were painfully close, with Nixon taking 43.4 percent of the popular vote to 42.7 percent for Humphrey and 13.5 percent for George Wallace. It’s not impossible to believe that he [Kennedy] might have shaved off enough points from Wallace among white-ethnic and blue-collar workers in key East Coast and Midwestern states to win the race.

…

… Robert Kennedy in his final years had indeed transformed himself into a rare and noble voice for America’s forgotten communities. He preached a vital message of reconciliation and appealed to people’s better nature. There’s much to admire, and even venerate, in that legacy (Zeitz 12-13).



Works cited:

“1968: Robert Kennedy’s Presidential Campaign.” Live Journal. April 9, 2018. Web. https://potus-geeks.livejournal.com/9...


Bradshaw, Chris. “What Robert Kennedy’s Presidential Campaign Can Teach Democrats for 2020.” The Washington Post. March 18, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/m...


Clarke, Thurston. “The Last Good Campaign.” Vanity Fair. May 1, 2008. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/...


Perry, Barbara A. “What If Bobby Kennedy Had Skipped the 1968 Race, as Brother Teddy Advised?” The Hill. Web. https://thehill.com/opinion/white-hou...


“Robert F. Kennedy.” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Web. https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/abou...


Tye, Larry. “Robert Kennedy Was a Raw Idealist Cut Down Just When the Presidency Seemed within Reach.” USA Today. June 5, 2018. Web. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinio...


Zeitz, Joshua. “The Bobby Kennedy Myth.” Politico Magazine. June 5, 2018. Web. https://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...

Civil Rights Events -- Poor People's Campaign

“I choose to identify with the underprivileged. I choose to identify with the poor. I choose to give my life for the hungry. I choose to give my life for those who have been left out…This is the way I’m going.” -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Civil Rights Movement had led to landmark legislation. Public opinion had shifted to support Civil Rights, and King had a Nobel Prize. And yet the tide was rolling out again rapidly. At the time of his death, King faced a fierce backlash — including from many of his former allies — for his criticism of the war in Vietnam, and of the ravages of economic inequality.

On the other hand, younger, more radical activists had grown tired of the Civil Rights mainstream’s ongoing commitment to nonviolent resistance as white supremacists continued to maim and kill, and much of the general white populace persistently rejected integration in practice even while praising it in theory. The younger activists wanted to shift energies toward building black self-determination under the banner of “Black Power.” In the midst of all this conflict, the man Nina Simone referred to as the King of Love was murdered, and conflagration spread across America (Perry 1-2).

Dr. King and his organization were embarking on one of their boldest projects yet, a Poor People’s Campaign that would bring a multiracial coalition to the nation’s capital to demand federal funding for full employment, a guaranteed annual income, anti-poverty programs, and housing for the poor. Announcing their new initiative, King said, “The Southern Christian Leadership Conference [SCLC] will lead waves of the nation’s poor and disinherited to Washington, D.C., next spring to demand redress of their grievances by the United States government and to secure at least jobs or income for all.”

The idea for the Poor People’s Campaign had been sparked by Senator Robert Kennedy, in a simple message passed by Marian Wright (later Marian Wright Edelman) to King months earlier. At the close of a conversation between Kennedy and Wright, the senator had said, “Tell Dr. King to bring the people to Washington.”

If Kennedy’s comment provided a final catalyst, the seeds of the Poor People’s Campaign can be found a year earlier in the Mississippi Delta. In June 1966 King and his closest associate, Reverend Ralph Abernathy, were visiting a Head Start daycare in Marks, Mississippi, a tiny town in Quitman County—the poorest county in the country. It took them a moment to notice that the bright-eyed children were malnourished. At lunchtime, the teacher brought out a brown paper bag of apples and a box of crackers.


When she cut an apple into quarters, and gave one slice, and four or five crackers, to each of the waiting, hungry students, King and Abernathy exchanged solemn glances. This was all the children had for lunch, they realized with shock. Neither man had ever seen poverty like this. Dr. King began weeping, and had to leave the classroom. That night, lying on a motel bed and staring at the ceiling, King said, “Ralph, I can’t get those children out of my mind.”

For the next year, King weathered setbacks in Chicago, challenges to his leadership from the emerging advocates of the Black Power movement, questions about the relevance of nonviolence in the face of increasing urban rebellions, and a storm of controversy over his stand against the war in Vietnam. But the issue of poverty never left his mind (Dellinger 1-2).

One day in early December 1967, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. laid out his vision for the Poor People’s Campaign, his next protest in Washington, D.C.,: “This will be no mere one-day march in Washington, but a trek to the nation’s capital by suffering and outraged citizens who will go to stay until some definite and positive active is taken to provide jobs and income for the poor.”

… Seeing how poverty cut across race and geography, King called for representatives of American Indian, Mexican-American, Appalachian populations and other supporters to join him on the National Mall in May 1968. He sought coalition for the Poor People’s Campaign that would “demand federal funding for full employment, a guaranteed annual income, anti-poverty programs, and housing for the poor” (Diamond 1).

"For King and many others, there's a very depressing realization in 1965 that what they thought would represent victory turns out not really to represent anywhere near the degree of fundamental change that they previously had imagined it would," David Garrow, author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference said in an interview with American Radio Works.

According to Stanford University's Martin Luther King Research and Education Institute, King believed that African Americans and other minorities would never truly achieve full citizenship until they had economic security (Desmond-Harris 4).

As a first step in building the power needed to achieve the goal of a radical redistribution of political and economic power King, along with other leaders of the poor …, helped work out the major elements of the platform for the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. An important aspect of the Campaign was to petition the government to pass an Economic Bill of Rights as a step to lift the load of poverty.

$30 billion annual appropriation for a real war on poverty

Congressional passage of full employment and guaranteed income legislation [a guaranteed annual wage]

Construction of 500,000 low-cost housing units per year until slums were eliminated

The Campaign was organized into three phases. The first was to construct a shantytown, to become known as Resurrection City, on the National Mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. With permits from the National Park Service, Resurrection City was to house anywhere from 1,500 to 3,000 Campaign participants. Additional participants would be housed in other group and family residences around the metropolitan area. The next phase was to begin public demonstrations, mass nonviolent civil disobedience, and mass arrests to protest the plight of poverty in this country. The third and final phase of the Campaign was to launch a nationwide boycott of major industries and shopping areas to prompt business leaders to pressure Congress into meeting the demands of the Campaign.

Although Rev. Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, on April 29, 1968, the Poor People’s Campaign went forward. It began in Washington where key leaders of the campaign gathered for lobbying efforts and media events before dispersing around the country to formally launch the nine regional caravans bringing the thousands of participants to Washington: the “Eastern Caravan,” the “Appalachia Trail,” the “Southern Caravan,” the “Midwest Caravan,” the “Indian Trail,” the “San Francisco Caravan,” the “Western Caravan,” the “Mule Train,” and the “Freedom Train.”

The efforts of the Poor People’s Campaign climaxed in the Solidarity Day Rally for Jobs, Peace, and Freedom on June 19, 1968. Fifty thousand people joined the 3,000 participants living at Resurrection City to rally around the demands of the Poor People’s Campaign on Solidarity Day. This was the first and only massive mobilization to take place during the Poor People’s Campaign (Vision 2-4).

Lenneal Henderson , a student at University of California, Berkeley, was one of the activists who traveled to Resurrection City.

I was raised in the housing projects of New Orleans and San Francisco, and my parents were very strong community advocates. I also witnessed the Black Panther Party emerge in Oakland in 1966. Stokely Carmichael's call for Black Power focused on the need to transform our communities first in order to get ourselves out of poverty.

I took a Greyhound bus from San Francisco. But I diverted to New Orleans to see my relatives. I was there when King was assassinated and the very next day, I got back on the Greyhound bus and headed to Washington. From the perimeter of the town, I could see the flames and the smoke of the city going up and the rioting that was taking place. It was pretty sobering. I stayed with a family in D.C. until the Resurrection City was ready to move into (Diamond 2).



At its peak, the number of protestors reached nearly 7,000 but still far short of the expectation of 50,000 people (Cho 1).

Lenneal Henderson:

Life in the camp was kind of frenzied; it was very, very busy. There were things going on every day, there were people going back and forth, not only organized demonstrations, but to meet with agencies like the Department of Agriculture, Labor and [Housing and Urban Development]. I went to about seven or eight different agency meetings.

I went to some meetings of the D.C. government, and I also went to meetings of D.C.-based organizations that were part of the coalition of the Poor People's Campaign like the United Planning Organization and the Washington branch of The National Urban League. At the camp, we also had something called The University, which was a sort of spontaneous, makeshift higher education clearing house that we put together at the camp for students who were coming from different colleges and universities both, from HBCUs and majority universities (Diamond 2).


[Jesse] Jackson became mayor of the encampment, which was called Resurrection City. Conditions were miserable.

"You know, what I remember I suppose the most about it was that we set the tents up at the foot of Lincoln's memorial," he [Jackson] says. "It seemed to rain without ceasing and became muddy and people were hurt, and we were still traumatized by Dr. King's assassination. Then while [we were] in the Resurrection City, Robert Kennedy was killed."

The demonstrators were discouraged and disheartened, says Jackson, so he tried to give them hope through words.

"I am. Somebody," he told protestors. "I am. God's child. I may not have a job, but I am somebody" (Lohr 2).

Lenneal Henderson:

I was there all 42 days, and it rained 29 of them. It got to be a muddy mess after a while. And with such basic accommodations, tensions are inevitable. Sometimes there were fights and conflicts between and among people. But it was an incredible experience, almost indescribable. While we were all in a kind of depressed state about the assassinations of King and RFK, we were trying to keep our spirits up, and keep focused on King’s ideals of humanitarian issues, the elimination of poverty and freedom. It was exciting to be part of something that potentially, at least, could make a difference in the lives of so many people who were in poverty around the country.

I saw Jesse Jackson, who was then about 26 years old, with these rambunctious, young African-American men, who wanted to exact some vengeance for the assassination of King. Jackson sat them down and said, "This is just not the way, brothers. It's just not the way." The he went further and said, “Look, you've got to pledge to me and to yourself that when you go back to wherever you live, before the year is out you're going to do two things to make a difference in your neighborhood." It was an impressive moment of leadership (Diamond 3).


Resurrection City closed June 19, 1968.

Henderson recalled: The closing was sort of unceremonious. When the demonstrators’ permit expired on June 23, some [members of the House of] Representatives, mostly white Southerners, called for immediate removal. So the next day, about 1,000 police officers arrived to clear the camp up of its last few residents. Ultimately, they arrested 288 people, including [civil rights leader and minister Ralph] Abernathy (Diamond 3)


… regarding the Poor People’s March and demands for economic equity, it’s … important to note the following: it is the simple profound statement that the reason people are treated differently by those in power is generally for profit. So that would include racism and economic inequities. King was attempting to change that equation by striving to give workers more power. He was about to threaten the profit accumulation by taking a forthright stance on the side of economic equity for the black community overall. This was compounded by his planning to bring the massive civil rights community and activists with him to Washington to make these economic demands. King was stepping on dangerous ground. It is not ironic that he was killed in Memphis while demanding rights for garbage workers (IBW21 4).

Perhaps part of the reason we don't talk as much about the Poor People's Campaign when commemorating King's life is that there's no real consensus about whether it was a success.

The demonstrations fizzled out when the encampment's permit expired on June 24, 1968, shortly after a confrontation between police and some of the inhabitants of Resurrection City led to a tear gas attack on the remaining people there. Some refused to leave, and a total of 288 protesters were jailed — making July 13 the anticlimactic official end of the campaign.

In a 2014 reflection on the effort, NPR dubbed it "a dream unfulfilled," noting that many participants deemed it a failure because they didn't see immediate changes. And there's no question that the demands were never met, and that Americans continue to live in poverty

The other view is that of SCLC co-founder Rev. Joseph Lowery, who said that as a result of the effort, "the nation became conscious of the fact that it has an expanding poor population."

As a historian assessing the campaign, [Michael] Jeffries said he chooses to defer to organizer Marian Wright Edelman, who saw it as a success. "She has said the campaign itself and the pressure that was bought to bear on the federal government resulted in major federal investment and, at minimum, nationwide nutrition programs. Food stamps. School lunches. Did it end poverty? Obviously not. Was it ever going to? No. But did it succeed in bringing attention to poverty in American and did it result in some federal intervention to alleviate the terrible conditions that so many were facing in America? Yes, it did" (Desmond-Harris 8).

Lenneal Henderson:

Even though the Economic Bill of Rights we were pressing for was never passed, I think it was successful in many ways. For one, the relationships that those folks built with one another carried on way beyond 1968 (Diamond 4).


Works cited:

Cho, Nancy. “Poor People’s Campaign (December 4, 1967 – June 19, 1968).” BlackPast. November 22, 2009. Web. https://www.blackpast.org/african-ame...


Dellinger, Drew. “The Last March of Martin Luther King Jr.” The Atlantic. April 4, 2018. Web. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...


Desmond-Harris, Jenee. “The Poor People's Campaign: the Little-Known Protest MLK Was Planning When He Died.” Vox. April 4, 2016. Web. https://www.vox.com/2015/1/18/7548453...


Diamond, Anna. “Fifty Years Later, Remembering Resurrection City and the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968.” Smithsonian Magazine. May 2018. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...


“Dr. King’s Vision: The Poor People’s Campaign of 1967-68.” Poor People’s Campaign. Web. https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/h...


IBW21. “King’s Poor People’s Campaign.” The Institute of the Black World 21st Century. September 4, 2018. Web. https://ibw21.org/commentary/kings-po...


Lohr, Kathy. “Poor People's Campaign: A Dream Unfulfilled.” NPR. June 19, 2008. Web. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...


Perry, Imani. “For the Poor People’s Campaign, the Moonshot Was Less Than a Triumph.” The New York Times. July 16, 2019. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/us...

Civil Rights Events -- Martin Luther King Assassination -- RFK's Empathetic Speech, MLK's Funeral

As darkness took hold on April 4, 1968, newly declared presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy stepped in front of a microphone atop a flatbed truck in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood in Indianapolis.

Looking out onto the crowd, Kennedy turned and quietly asked a city official, “Do they know about Martin Luther King?”

The civil rights leader had been shot a few hours earlier, though the news that he was dead hadn’t reached everyone yet.

“We’ve left it up to you,” the official said (Rosenwald 1).

The news of April 4, 1968, was like a body blow to Senator Robert Kennedy. He “seemed to shrink back,” said John J. Lindsay, a Newsweek reporter traveling with the Democratic presidential candidate. For Kennedy, King’s slaying served as an intersection between past and future. It kindled memories of one of the worst days of his life, November 22, 1963, when J. Edgar Hoover coldly told him that his brother, President John F. Kennedy, had been shot and killed in Dallas. Furthermore, it shook Kennedy’s belief in what lay ahead. He sometimes received death threats and lived in anticipation of gunshots.

…

Climbing onto a flatbed truck and wearing his slain brother’s overcoat, Kennedy looked at the crowd. Through the cold, smoky air, he saw faces upturned optimistically and knew they soon would be frozen in horror.

At first, he struggled to gain his rhetorical feet. Then, one of the most eloquent extemporaneous speeches of the 20th century tumbled from his lips. During the heartfelt speech, Kennedy shared feelings about his brother’s assassination—something he had avoided expressing, even to his staff. The pain was too great.

Clutching scribbled notes made in his car, RFK began simply: “I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.” Gasps and shrieks met his words. “Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in” (George 1-2).

Kennedy … quoted the Greek playwright Aeschylus — “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart …” — and to the astonishment of his aides, the audience and even his own family, the senator referenced his brother’s murder for the first time.

“For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling,” Kennedy said. “I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”

That night, amid one of the most chaotic years in American history, the country burned. Riots broke out in more than 100 cities, including Washington, where at least a dozen people died.

“I was upset, to put it mildly,” said Abie Washington, then 26 and just out of the Navy, who stood that evening in the crowd listening to Kennedy. “I was pissed. Something needed to be done and I wanted to do it.”

But as Kennedy kept speaking, something came over him.

“My level of emotion went from one extreme to another,” Washington said. “He had empathy. He knew what it felt like. Why create more violence?”

There was no rioting in Indianapolis.

They pleaded with Kennedy not to go — campaign aides, the police chief, his wife Ethel.

It was too dangerous, they said. Residents near the rally site had seen angry men carrying weapons and cans of gas.

“The black people in this neighborhood,” one resident told historian Thurston Clarke, “were going to burn the city down.”

…

… Kennedy had come to greatly respect King, his campaign echoing the concerns of the civil rights leader for the poor and disenfranchised.

Kennedy learned that King had been shot as he boarded a plane for Indianapolis. When it landed, a reporter told Kennedy that King was dead.

“Kennedy’s face went blank and he jerked his head backward, as if the bullet struck him, too,” Clarke wrote in “The Last Campaign,” an account of Kennedy’s 82-day run for president. “Then he covered his face with his hands and murmured, ‘Oh God, when is this violence going to stop?’”

One of Kennedy’s campaign staffers was John Lewis, who had already risked his life to defy segregation alongside King and would later become a congressman from Georgia. Lewis urged Kennedy not to cancel the speech.

“I thought Bobby Kennedy coming would have a cooling impact on the audience,” Lewis said in an interview. “He appealed to the hearts and the minds and souls of the people there — black and white.”

On the car ride over, Kennedy was nearly silent, staring out the window and undoubtedly, his aides said later, thinking about his brother.

Arriving at the park, he was greeted with jeers.

“What are you doing here, whitey?” someone shouted.

And then Kennedy began speaking.

…

King’s death, Kennedy said, left the black community with a choice about how to respond, whether to seek revenge.

“We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization … black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another,” Kennedy said. “Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love.”

“What we need in the United States,” he continued, “is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”

A sense of grace washed over the crowd.

Two Purdue University speech professors later interviewed audience members and published a paper examining the shift in the crowd. One man told the professors that Kennedy had “tears in his eyes, I saw it, he felt it man, he cried.”

But how, the professors asked, could they relate to a white rich man?


“We black people remember his brother,” one person interviewed said. “We know what trouble is, we had all kinds of it.”

Another man said, “The cat tell the truth like it is.”

The threat of violence subsided. Everyone went home (Rosenwald 1-5).

When Kennedy reached his hotel, he called King’s widow Coretta Scott King in Atlanta. She said she needed a plane to carry her husband’s body from Memphis to Atlanta, and he immediately promised to provide her one.


As the night proceeded, a restive Kennedy visited several campaign staffers. When he talked to speechwriters Adam Walinsky and Jeff Greenfield, he made a rare reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, saying JFK’s assassin had unleashed a flood of violence. He reportedly told “Kennedy for California” organizer Joan Braden, “it could have been me.”

The next day, he prepared for an appearance in Cleveland, while his staff worried about his safety. When a possible gunman was reported atop a nearby building, an aide closed the blinds, but Kennedy ordered them opened. “If they’re going to shoot, they’ll shoot,” he said. Speaking in Cleveland, he asked, “What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by his assassin’s bullet.”


Meanwhile, African-American anger erupted in rioting across more than 100 American cities, with deaths totaling 39 and injuries 2,500. After the senator finished his campaign swing, he returned to Washington. From the air, he could see smoke hovering over city neighborhoods. Ignoring his staff’s pleas, he visited riot-ravaged streets. At home, he watched riot footage on TV alongside his 8-year-old daughter, Kerry, and told her that he understood African-American frustration, but the rioters were “bad” (George 2).

President Johnson designated Sunday, April 7, as a national day of mourning.

On April 8, the [Memphis] march that King promised to lead commenced as scheduled. But it was Coretta Scott King at the head of it, as a tribute to her husband (Suggs 16).

On April 9, she was back in Atlanta for her husband’s funeral.

"We did a lot of behind-the-scenes work to keep things calm," Eldrin Bell, a police detective at the time, told Atlanta magazine in 2008. "We were walking up and down the streets all hours of the day to [prevent] riots."

King's funeral was held on April 9, 1968, five days after his death. Until then, the reverend was laid in state at the Sisters Chapel at Spelman College in Atlanta. Tens of thousands of mourners streamed into the chapel to pay their respects. Meanwhile, even more people poured into Atlanta. The small city was overwhelmed. The transit system provided free rides from the airport and train stations to downtown to keep things moving. When the hotels ran out of space for visitors, colleges, churches, and private homes opened their doors. When local radio stations put out a call for help or food, people eagerly answered. "It was a marvelous thing, everyone coming together," civil rights leader Xernona Clayton told Atlanta magazine. "I don't think anybody paid for food in this city for two or three days."

The day of the funeral, the front of City Hall was draped in black and city schools were closed so kids could attend the service. But there was tension in the air, too. Gov. Lester Maddox had barricaded himself inside the State Capital, not far from City Hall. Maddox surrounded his building with state troopers and reportedly ordered them to "shoot them down and stack them up," if needed. But there wasn't any need. The city, its leaders, the police, and the people were cooperative and respectful for King.

A packed private service was held at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King and his father had served as pastors. King's longtime friend Rev. Ralph Abernathy began the service, calling the event "one of the darkest hours of mankind." At the request of Coretta Scott King, the last sermon King gave, a prescient reflection on his own funeral, was played on a tape recorder.

"Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice," King said. "Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness."

King's coffin was transferred to a wooden mule-drawn wagon, which called to mind royal funerals with their horse-drawn coaches. But King's version was chosen specifically for being so worn down and rugged — representative of the grounded work and people King lived and died for. The wagon, followed by King's family, friends, and fellow civil rights leaders, walked the four-mile route from the church to the campus of Morehouse College, King's alma mater. An estimated 150,000 people fanned out behind them in a solemn processional. Thousands more lined the streets to watch the coffin pass. Though the crowd occasionally broke out into song, the afternoon was remarkably quiet and peaceful, with just the sound of feet on pavement filling the air (Hansen 1-3).

Jacqueline [, Ethel] and Bobby Kennedy were there, as were a host of other celebs and major political figures. The Kennedys met privately with Coretta, she and Ethel upon meeting hugging.

Morehouse President Benjamin Mays, King’s great mentor, gave the eulogy.

“He was not ahead of his time. No man is ahead of his time. Every man is within his star, each in his time. Each man must respond to the call of God in his lifetime and not in somebody else’s time,” Mays said. “If physical death was the price he had to pay to rid America of prejudice and injustice, nothing could be more redemptive” (Suggs 16).


The youngest of Coretta and Martin Luther King Jr.’s four children, Bernice [King] had just turned five-years-old two weeks earlier.

But there she was, in a packed Ebenezer Baptist Church, dressed in a white dress and draped across her mother’s knees.

Her mother wore a black dress and mourning veil. Her father was in a casket fewer than five feet away.

Bernice King’s eyes seemed distant, not noticing or caring that photographer Moneta Sleet Jr. was capturing her most vulnerable moment.

Maybe she was thinking about the times she would jump off the refrigerator into her father’s arms, terrifying her mother.

Or maybe she was thinking about how her father would pick up green onions at the dinner table and chew them like celery.

Maybe she was thinking about the kissing game, where she and each of her siblings were assigned a spot to kiss their father when he came home.

Bernice’s spot was her father’s forehead.

“That was my bonding and identification with him,” Bernice King would say later. “I thought it was so important because without that, I literally would have no memories of my father. But I remember that like it was yesterday.”(Suggs “Bernice” 1-2).

By May 1968, the remaining members of the SCLC embarked on the Poor People’s Campaign and erected Resurrection City in Washington. Hundreds camped out and tried to meet with congress for several weeks. But without King, it barely made a dent.

“If Martin Luther King had lived and been able to implement and carry out that unbelievable effort, bringing hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens to Washington D.C, it would have had a profound impact on the American community,” said U.S. Rep. John Lewis. “[It would have had a profound impact] on the powers that be, on the members of congress, on the President of the United States, to do something about poverty. About hunger” (Suggs 16).


Works cited:

George, Alice. “When Robert Kennedy Delivered the News of Martin Luther King’s Assassination.” Smithsonian. April 2, 2018. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smiths...


Hansen, Lauren. “Keeping the Peace for Martin Luther King, Jr.” The Week. Web. https://theweek.com/captured/673288/k...


Rosenwald, Michael S. “‘That Stain of Bloodshed’: After King’s Assassination, RFK Calmed an Angry Crowd with an Unforgettable Speech.” The Washington Post. April 4, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/r...


Suggs, Ernie. “Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” AJC: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Web. http://honoringmlk.com/


Suggs, Ernie. “Martin Luther King Jr.'s Funeral Was Turning Point for Young Bernice King.” AJC: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. March 31, 2018. Web. https://www.ajc.com/news/martin-luthe...

Civil Rights Events -- Martin Luther King Jr. Murdered

King and his entourage arrived in Memphis for the third time on April 3.

R.S. Lewis, director of the most significant black funeral home in Memphis at the time, was idly sitting at a red light when a car pulled up next to him driven by James Lawson, who was his pastor at Centenary Methodist.

“Robert,” Lawson yelled. “I want you to meet Dr. King.”

Lewis agree to provide a driver and a new Cadillac to get King around Memphis during his stay. King arrived at the Lorraine Motel with the intention to rest. The march had been planned for April 8, but the mayor had won an injunction to stop it, because he feared that it would again turn violent.

King was set to deliver a speech at Mason Temple that night but begged off. He was tired. A storm was coming and tornado sirens were blaring throughout downtown Memphis.

King thought the weather would keep people away, and “he said I don’t feel like talking,” [Jesse] Jackson said. Jackson and Abernathy were sent to speak instead, but the crowd didn’t want them. They wanted King.

Once King arrived, Abernathy gave a long enough introduction to allow him to collect his thoughts. Photos from that night show Jackson “debriefing” King on the pulpit as they waited for Abernathy to finish.

When he stepped to the pulpit, King began his 45 minute extemporaneous speech by calling Abernathy “the best friend that I have in the world.”

Scholars who have studied King said with all of the pressures on him in the last year of his life, the possibility that he would be assassinated weighed heavily on him. On several occasions during his ministry King spoke of death and how it should not be feared.

“He was in my house in Birmingham a few weeks before Memphis,” said the Rev. Joseph Lowery. “He said to me on more than one occasion that he wouldn’t live to be 40. I told him that he would be around until his beard was on the ground. But it never caused him to detour from his road toward liberation and the struggle.

That night in Memphis, his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech seems in retrospect both fatalistic and prophetic. He spoke of his own mortality and how he was at peace with dying.

“I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead,” King said.

At that point, King pauses briefly as a pained look blankets his face.

“But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

Drenched, emotionally and spiritually drained, King turns around and collapses in Abernathy’s arms (Suggs 11-12).

Andrew Young, King's executive assistant, says the references to death did not surprise him or King's other associates. "Most of it we'd heard before," Young says. In a way, King was reassuring himself by talking openly about the threats against him (that morning, King's plane from Atlanta had been delayed by a bomb threat; no explosive was found). "He preached himself through his nervousness," Young says. "Preaching was the way he affirmed his faith" (King’s 6).

In the days before King stepped out on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel at 406 Mulberry Street, he had been tired and quick to anger.

In fact, the SCLC staff had noticed that over the last three months, he had been prone to lose his temper more. The night before, he had delivered what some would call his greatest speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”

…

King had been at odds with the staff and some members of the SCLC board, who saw Memphis as an unneeded distraction from their next big thing — the Poor People’s Campaign. Earlier that day he fought with Hosea Williams, after the hard-charging aide suggested they hire a field worker who did not fully subscribe to non-violence.

Now it was time for Andrew Young, the yin to Williams’ yang, to feel the wrath.

Young had been in court all day trying to get an injunction overturned so that they would have permission to march on April 8. Young hadn’t called in all day and when he finally arrived at the Lorraine, King pounced on him.

“Where have you been? Why didn’t you call and let me know what’s going on? I am the leader of this movement! You have to keep me informed,” Young said, recalling the encounter with King. “We’re sitting here all day long waiting for you and you didn’t call.”

Young, in retelling the story, said he was taken aback until he noticed a slight smile on King’s face.

King picked up a pillow and threw it at Young.

Young threw it back.

“The next thing I knew everybody was grabbing pillows. A group of 30 and 40 year old men having a pillow fight,” Young said. “Which ended up with me down between the two beds with all the pillows and everybody piling on top of me.”

When they composed themselves, they each rushed to their rooms to dress for dinner at Billy Kyles’ home.

Abernathy was still in the room when King walked out on the balcony and looked down on the men who had so faithfully followed him. There was no hint of animosity.

Just a bunch of black men laughing and playing the dozens. Andy Young and James Orange slap boxed and King told Young not to hurt the massively imposing but gentle Orange. In a nod to his generation, Jesse Jackson was wearing a turtleneck, when King playfully yelled at him to put on a tie.

Solomon Jones, a driver from the local funeral home who would chauffeur King in a white Cadillac, told King the Memphis night would get chilly and urged him to get a coat.

Before King could respond, a shot rang out (Suggs 3-4).

James Earl Ray was born in 1928 and grew up outside St. Louis. His chosen profession was theft and armed robbery, and after his third felony conviction in 1959, he was sentenced to 20 years in the Missouri State Penitentiary. He escaped from the prison in April 1967, and some believe he had help from prison authorities, as part of the opening stanza of the conspiracy.

Ray moved around while on the lam, staying in Chicago, Los Angeles, Mexico and Canada over the next year. He has claimed that while in Montreal he met a man named Raul, of varying physical descriptions over the years, who enlisted him in several small gunrunning schemes, and instructed him to buy a rifle in Birmingham, Ala.

On the afternoon of April 4, Ray checked into a boardinghouse in Memphis, with a bar called Jim’s Grill on the first floor. He paid $8.50 for a week’s stay. The rear of the boardinghouse faced the Lorraine Motel across Mulberry Street.

King was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine outside room 306 when a single rifle bullet was fired into his lower jaw at 6:01 p.m. He died an hour later at St. Joseph’s Hospital. The rifle Ray had purchased in Birmingham was found near the front of the boardinghouse with Ray’s fingerprints on it. Those are about the only facts that aren’t in dispute.

According to the criminal justice system of the state of Tennessee, James Earl Ray fired the shot from the second-floor bathroom of the boardinghouse. He then grabbed some belongings in a blanket, stashed the rifle in it, left the building and dropped the bundle in the doorway of a nearby building.

He drove away in a white Ford Mustang before the area was barricaded, went to Atlanta and then to Canada and England before being arrested in July 1968.

Ray pleaded guilty to the murder of King on March 10, 1969. He signed a detailed stipulation of facts to the shooting, having had weeks to review it, asking only that a reference to his activities for [ex-Governor George] Wallace be deleted.

In court, Ray answered the standard series of questions about whether he was knowingly and voluntarily admitting he committed murder. In exchange for his plea, prosecutors did not seek the death penalty and Ray was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Officially: Case closed (Jackman 7-8).

By the time they realized what happened, it was bedlam at the Lorraine Motel.

“The next few minutes, it was difficult,” Jackson said. “I am looking on the balcony and his leg on the railing. It is trauma. You can’t replicate that, you can’t plan it.”

King’s younger brother, A.D. King, was inconsolable, crying, “They got my brother.”

The hotel operator, Lorraine Bailey, had a heart attack upon seeing King and later died.

And there is the famous Joseph Louw photo from Life Magazine of Young, Abernathy and Jackson pointing to where they think the bullet came from while a mortally wounded King lay at their feet. A towel was draped across the right side of King’s face.

Abernathy cradled his best friend’s head while he cried for an ambulance.

The assassin’s bullet had “hit the tip of his chin and just took half of his neck off,” Young said.

The shot blew the knot of King’s necktie, which he had delicately placed moments earlier, completely off.

“I don’t even think he heard the shot or felt any pain,” Young said. “It was obvious to me that he was gone.”

Jackson called King’s wife, Coretta and told her to “take the next thing smokin’.”

Abernathy watched doctors work on King in the emergency room and when he died, identified the body.

R.S. Lewis, who had met King for the first time the day before, and who had offered his fleet of Cadillacs and drivers to King, drove a white 1966 Cadillac Superior Royale Coach hearse with a black top to St. Joseph’s Hospital to pick up King’s body to take to his funeral home.

King’s body was to be prepared in Memphis before returning home to Atlanta. His face was so mangled that there was a discussion that his funeral would have to be closed casket. But Robert Stevenson Lewis, who had but one arm, said no. He and his brother Clarence E. Lewis worked on King’s body for 13 hours, bought him a suit and placed him in an open casket. They never presented a bill to anyone.

While Memphis was preparing King’s body, Atlanta was preparing for a funeral.

Bernice King, who had just celebrated her 5th birthday with her father, had never heard the word “casket” before. When she and her family arrived at the Atlanta airport to retrieve King’s body, she asked her mother where her daddy was.

“He’s in his casket in the back of the plane. Sleep,” Coretta Scott King said.

Bernice was confused. She said she heard her father in the back breathing. Or snoring. It was the hum of the plane.

“I think she was trying to prepare me. She didn’t want me to be in shock when I am asking where is my daddy and the next thing I see is him in a casket,” Bernice King said. Later, she would ask, “How is daddy going to eat?”

“God is going to take care of that,” Coretta King said. “Mommy loves you.”

It rained on the day that King’s body was ready for viewing in Atlanta. Xernona Clayton, the loyal family friend, had helped Coretta Scott King shop for a funeral outfit and now they were getting the program together and for the first time, viewing the body.

A large crowd had already gathered outside of Spelman College’s Sister Chapel. Coretta Scott King wanted to let the crowd in, but Clayton urged her to wait.

“No,” Clayton told King. “You should see him first.”

When they got here, they were joined by several family members and Harry Belafonte and his wife. Clayton stood back, as King walked up to her husband’s body.

“He looked awful. There was a big blob on his right cheek,” Clayton said. “Red as the red clay of Georgia. I felt so pained by the way he looked.”

Clayton borrowed the facial powder of King’s mother, who was dark skinned and Belafonte’s wife, who was white, and mixed them up to make a bronze.

“Belafonte placed his handkerchief around [King’s] neck and I toned him down with the powder that I had mixed up,” Clayton said. “It made such a difference and Coretta smiled.”

President Johnson designated Sunday, April 7, as a national day of mourning (Suggs 13-15).

For the King family and others in the civil rights movement, the FBI’s obsession with King in the years leading up to his slaying in Memphis on April 4, 1968 — pervasive surveillance, a malicious disinformation campaign and open denunciations by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover — laid the groundwork for their belief that he was the target of a plot.

“It pains my heart,” said Bernice King, 55, the youngest of Martin Luther King’s four children and the executive director of the King Center in Atlanta, “that James Earl Ray had to spend his life in prison paying for things he didn’t do.”

Until her own death in 2006, Coretta Scott King, who endured the FBI’s campaign to discredit her husband, was open in her belief that a conspiracy led to the assassination. Her family filed a civil suit in 1999 to force more information into the public eye, and a Memphis jury ruled that the local, state and federal governments were liable for King’s death. …

“There is abundant evidence,” Coretta King said after the verdict, “of a major, high-level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband.” The jury found the mafia and various government agencies “were deeply involved in the assassination. … Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame.”

But nothing changed afterward. No vast sums of money were awarded (the Kings sought only $100), and Ray was not exonerated.

King’s two other surviving children, Dexter, 57, and Martin III, 60, fully agree that Ray was innocent. And their view of the case is shared by other respected black leaders.

“I think there was a major conspiracy to remove Doctor King from the American scene,” said Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a 78-year-old civil rights icon. …

Andrew Young, the former U.N. ambassador and Atlanta mayor who was at the Lorraine Motel with King when he was shot there, agrees. “I would not accept the fact that James Earl Ray pulled the trigger, and that’s all that matters,” said Young, who noted that King’s death came after the killings of John F. Kennedy and Malcolm X and just months before the slaying of Robert F. Kennedy.

…

Even those who believe that Ray, who died in prison in 1998, killed King tend to think that he received assistance from someone, whether it was his two brothers or the FBI or the mafia.

…

Astride all this controversy for the last 40 years has been William Pepper, a New York lawyer and civil rights activist who knew and worked with King. …

…

In recent years, Pepper has tracked down witnesses in Memphis who support his theory of the case: that J. Edgar Hoover used his longtime assistant, Clyde Tolson, to deliver cash to members of the Memphis underworld, that those shadowy figures then hired a sharpshooting Memphis police officer, and that officer — not Ray — fired the fatal shot.

…

“I believe that’s exactly what happened,” said Martin King III. “Hoover was so angry, he had hate in his heart. Certainly he hated Dad. He had a vehement hatred of folks of color.”

Not everyone in the Kings’ circle agrees with the full extent of Pepper’s investigation, but they agree that Ray was framed.

“It’s still a mystery to me,” Bernice King said. “I don’t believe James Earl Ray killed my father. It’s hard to know exactly who. I’m certainly clear that there has been a conspiracy, from the government down to the mafia … there had to be more than one person involved in all of this. I think it was all planned.” (Jackman 1-3; 10-11).



Works cited:

Jackman, Tom. “Who Killed Martin Luther King Jr.? His Family Believes James Earl Ray Was Framed.” The Washington Post. March 30, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/r...


“King’s Last March.” APM Reports. Web. https://features.apmreports.org/arw/k...


Suggs, Ernie. “Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” AJC: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Web. http://honoringmlk.com/

Civil Rights Events -- MLK and RFK -- Momentous Decisions

King saw Memphis as economic justice for the underpaid sanitation workers and argued that it all tied in to the Poor People’s Campaign. Some of the SCLC staff begged him not to go and continue planning for Washington.

They arrived in Memphis on March 18 (Suggs 8).

King spoke to more than 25,000 people gathered at the Bishop Charles Mason Temple.

“You are reminding, not only Memphis, but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages,” King told the crowd.

King insisted that there could be no civil rights without economic equality. “You are here tonight to demand that Memphis do something about the conditions that our brothers face, as they work day in and day out for the well-being of the total community. You are here to demand that Memphis will see the poor” (Brown 5).

King based part of his speech on the New Testament parable of Dives (pronounced DYE-veez) and Lazarus. King's point was that white Memphians were willfully indifferent to the suffering of the city's black working poor. One day these whites would suffer for their blindness, he warned.

Historian Michael Honey, author of Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign, says the issues in Memphis aligned perfectly with broader themes King was addressing in the Poor People's Campaign. "He came in and gave a speech saying, 'All labor has dignity,'" Honey says. He says King "reminded people, not only in Memphis but all over the country, that it's a crime for people to live in this country and work at starvation wages."

To get middle-class white people in Memphis to see their working poor neighbors, King told his Mason Temple audience to "escalate the struggle a bit." King called for a general work stoppage. "Not a Negro in this city will go to any job downtown," King said. The Mason Temple crowd - estimated at 12-14,000 people - erupted in cheers and foot-stomping (King’s 1-2).

At the end of his speech, almost as an impromptu ad-lib, King promised to come back and lead a march.

He returned 10 days later on March 28 to lead 6,000 protesters through the streets of Memphis.

“This was the first movement that we had been in that turned violent. And it turned violent because somebody paid some kids to disrupt it,” [Andrew] Young said (Suggs 8).

The marchers paraded down Beale Street, the famed Memphis thoroughfare where musician W.C. Handy pioneered the blues. King was at the head of the column. Then, a number of young African Americans began breaking storefront windows. James Lawson was leading the march with King. When they turned onto Main, Lawson says, they saw "lengths of police in riot gear across the street."

Remembering a violent crackdown by Memphis police during a February protest march, Lawson feared the police would attack again. He recalls telling King, "You must leave. They are going to break up the march and go after you more than anyone." A reluctant King was led away. The marchers turned around. Then, police attacked with tear gas and clubs. Peaceful marchers were caught up in the same violence as youthful looters. One teenager, a suspected looter, was shot to death. Dozens of protesters were injured and nearly 300 black people arrested. Stores in the black section of town got looted and burned (King’s 3). Police ran after protesters who had gathered at Clayborn Temple church and threw tear gas into the sanctuary. Police beat demonstrators with billy clubs as they fell to the floor to escape the tear gas (Brown 6).

Journalists captured the debacle on film and broadcasted it live on local radio

Mayor Loeb declared martial law and called in the National Guard. The next day, more than 200 sanitation workers marched, carrying signs stating “I Am a Man.”

King hunkered down with his aides at a local hotel. He was deeply depressed by the events. It was the first time that marchers led by King had become violent.

At the top of King's mind was how the disastrous march would affect the Poor People's Campaign. In a phone conversation with adviser Stanley Levison in New York (wiretapped by the FBI), King gloomily considered calling off the Washington march. "He felt great guilt, as King was wont to do, that somehow he had failed, that it was his fault, that he had let the movement down," [the historian] Honey says. "He knew also that the FBI and the news media would go on the attack against him as a leader and against the Poor People's Campaign."

The next day, King faced sharp questions from reporters about whether he would be able to keep a protest in Washington by thousands of poor people peaceful. King responded that black people were not automatically given to nonviolence. They were willing to observe "tactical nonviolence," he said, when they were part of a well-disciplined march led by seasoned leaders of nonviolent protests. King vowed that the SCLC had the experience and the staff to keep the Poor People's Campaign nonviolent (King’s 4).

… King said that he had been unaware of the divisions within the community, particularly of the presence of a black youth group committed to “Black Power” called the Invaders, who were accused of starting the violence (Memphis 3).

... King denied charges that he abandoned the Memphis march when the going got rough.

Reporters pressed him to predict whether the coming summer would see more violence in urban ghettos.

After the press conference King was still despondent. He told Levison about meeting some of the rebellious young militants who took part in the Memphis melee and said that he was thinking of going on a Gandhi-style fast to unify the movement. For the Washington march to go forward, King said, he would have to return to Memphis and prove again that he could lead a nonviolent protest (King’s 5).

“… I thought he would never get over this,” said King’s older sister Christine King Farris.

[Author Joseph] Rosenbloom would describe that day as the beginning of King’s lowest point, as his reputation was at stake and he was being blamed for the violence.

But there was at least one highlight.

March 28 was also the 5th birthday of King’s youngest daughter, Bernice. They celebrated her birthday on March 29.

Bernice King was born in 1963, just as King’s profile was rising and he was on the road more.

“The first 3.5 years of my life, the relationship between the two of us was distant,” Bernice King said in a 2008 interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He was away from home so much. Going into my fourth year, I began to warm up to him.”

The day after Bernice’s party, on March 30, King gathered the SCLC staff for a tense meeting. They fought him. Not only about King’s suggestion to return to Memphis, but also about the Poor People’s Campaign, which was now scheduled to start in late April.

Young didn’t want to go back to Memphis. Jackson, who was more interested in Operation Breadbasket, thought Memphis was a waste of time. Bevel wanted to focus more on Vietnam.

“They couldn’t afford the time,” Rosenbloom said. “You can question how clearly King was thinking. But he was following his instincts.”

Rosenbloom said Jackson was adamant about his disagreements, leading to a loud showdown.

“If things keep going the way they’re going now, it’s not SCLC but the whole country that’s in trouble. I’m not asking ‘support me.’ I don’t need this,” King told Jackson. “But if you are so interested in doing your own thing that you can’t do what this organization’s structured to do, if you want to carve out your own niche in society, go ahead. But for God’s sake, don’t bother me” (Suggs 8-10).

There was no secret about how RFK felt about LBJ (and vice versa)—they hated each other.

…

This was more than the “mutual contempt” of Jeff Shesol’s great book on the RFK-LBJ feud. The Vietnam War was taking hundreds of American and countless Vietnamese lives a week, to no clear purpose. Back home, the country’s racial divisions were turning violent every summer. In Kennedy’s view, Johnson was simply unable to deal with the sense that things were spinning out of control. At times, he questioned whether four more years of Johnson would wreak permanent damage on the fabric of the country. He knew that both the polls and voices he respected … were beseeching him to run, warning that not to would cost him a part of his soul.

But then there was the harsh political reality: A sitting president had not been denied the nomination of his party since Chester A. Arthur in 1884. His Senate colleagues, including some who had turned hard against the war, like Wisconsin’s Gaylord Nelson and South Dakota’s George McGovern, were urging him not to run, fearing that a divided Democratic Party would only hand the reins of power to Richard Nixon. His advisers from JFK’s days, and his own brother Ted, were offering the same guidance—noting that in most of the big, delegate-rich states there were no primaries; the delegates were controlled by White House loyalists, making an insurgent run highly improbable. Their voices carried more weight than those of his Senate staffers—Adam Walinsky, Peter Edelman, Frank Mankiewicz—who were saying, in effect, “you have to run” (as a 24-year-old staff assistant eight months out of law school I was not exactly a key voice in these deliberations).

So it was not a shock when Kennedy told a breakfast of Washington journalists on January 30, 1968, that “under no foreseeable circumstances” would he run for president. …

But Kennedy soon changed his mind—why? In the accepted narrative, the deciding factor was Eugene McCarthy’s New Hampshire primary showing, and there is a good amount of truth in that view. RFK and McCarthy held each other, as the British might put it, in “minimum high regard.” McCarthy saw the Kennedys as exemplars of wealth and privilege, while Kennedy saw McCarthy as an indolent elitist, marginally concerned at best with the plight of the poor. At the start of McCarthy’s campaign, Kennedy said, “He’s running to increase his lecture fees.”

But as primary day grew closer, it was clear McCarthy had tapped into a powerful sense of discontent with the war. … it was enough to suggest that LBJ was about to receive a political shock. … That possibility, added to Kennedy’s own instincts, turned him around before the New Hampshire primary votes were cast.

President Johnson won the March 12 primary. McCarthy received 42 percent of the vote.

What was it that ultimately persuaded Kennedy to enter the race? His admirers will say he felt he had no choice; detractors will say it was an overweening sense of entitlement. I would add one more factor. At the 1960 convention, RFK had struggled very hard to persuade his brother not to put LBJ on the ticket; it helped turn the mutual dislike that stretched back to Senate days into something much more intense. In failing to keep Johnson off the ticket, Kennedy held himself personally responsible for what he saw as Johnson’s feckless, even cowardly leadership. Running against him was, in this sense, an act of expiation for his own earlier failure (Greenfield 1-5).

Kennedy announced his candidacy March 16 in Washington, D. C.

I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man but to propose new policies. I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I'm obliged to do all that I can.

I run to seek new policies - policies to end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our cities, policies to close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old, in this country and around the rest of the world.

I run for the presidency because I want the Democratic Party and the United States of America to stand for hope instead of despair, for reconciliation of men instead of the growing risk of world war.

I run because it is now unmistakably clear that we can change these disastrous, divisive policies only by changing the men who are now making them. For the reality of recent events in Vietnam has been glossed over with illusions.

The Report of the Riot Commission has been largely ignored.

The crisis in gold, the crisis in our cities, the crisis in our farms and in our ghettos have all been met with too little and too late.

No one knows what I know about the extraordinary demands of the presidency ….

…

As a member of the cabinet and member of the Senate I have seen the inexcusable and ugly deprivation which causes children to starve in Mississippi, black citizens to riot in Watts; young Indians to commit suicide on their reservations because they've lacked all hope and they feel they have no future, and proud and able-bodied families to wait our their lives in empty idleness in eastern Kentucky.

I have traveled and I have listened to the young people of our nation and felt their anger about the war that they are sent to fight and about the world they are about to inherit.

…

I cannot stand aside from the contest that will decide our nation's future and our children's future.

…

I do not lightly dismiss the dangers and the difficulties of challenging an incumbent President. But these are not ordinary times and this is not an ordinary election.

At stake is not simply the leadership of our party and even our country. It is our right to moral leadership of this planet (Announcement 1-2).

Two weeks later Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for a second term.


Works cited:

“Announcement of Candidacy for President.” Kennedy for President. Web. http://www.4president.org/speeches/rf...


Brown, DaNeen L. “‘I Am a Man’: The Ugly Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike that Led to MLK’s Assassination” The Washington Post. February 12, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/r...


Greenfield, Jeff. “When Bobby Decided to Run.” Politico Magazine. March 17, 2018. Web. https://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...


“King’s Last March.” APM Reports. Web. https://features.apmreports.org/arw/k...


“Memphis Sanitation Workers' Strike.” Stanford: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Web. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/en...


Suggs, Ernie. “Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” AJC: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Web. http://honoringmlk.com/

Civil Rights Events -- MLK and RFK -- Early 1968

… King saw, at least as early as the 1963 March on Washington, that the movement needed to expand beyond anti-discrimination and into areas like economic equality. That tied into his anger over Vietnam and the wasted resources he said would be of better use at home fighting poverty.

“He was trying to regain something. He was deeply concerned about the direction of the country and his movement,” said Joseph Rosenbloom, in his book, Redemption: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last 31 Hours. “He was trying to revitalize the movement. He thought the war was a huge mistake and was draining resources from far more important causes. He thought that the most critical issue facing the country was poverty.

The Vietnam speech and King’s efforts to address poverty was a stark shift in his thinking and marked a sharp contrast to the optimism of the “I Have a Dream” speech just four years earlier.

“He was trying to recruit thousands of poor people and convince them to come to Washington, possibly for months, to engage in a series of protests demanding a legislative response to the problems of poverty,” Rosenbloom said. “They would need to be brought to Washington. Housed in Washington. fed and organized. That would have to go on in a controlled fashion for an unpredictable long time. All that was an enormous task.”

About 60 people gathered in the basement of Ebenezer Baptist Church in January 1968 for a party that would celebrate King’s last birthday. He would turn 39….

If the birthday party served as a reprieve, it was only briefly.

King immediately got back to work planning the Poor People’s Campaign while fighting with his own doubts.

“Over the last three months, Doc is in a shakier emotional state than he had ever been before,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Garrow. “It was a combination of exhaustion and the political pessimism.”

At that point, King had been under an intense spotlight for 12 years with nonstop travel and his mood had become increasingly despondent.

“But it was not just external pressures,” Rosenbloom said. “He suffered from chronic insomnia. He was on the road all the time and he was utterly exhausted. And physically, he wasn’t always in terrific shape.”

[Jesse] Jackson said at times King talked about giving it all up to spend his time writing, traveling and making speeches. Even perhaps being president of Morehouse College.

“He was trying to figure it out,” Jackson said. “He was preaching through his pain.”

But it was becoming painfully clear that the planning for the Poor People’s Campaign was not going well, even to the point where it was fracturing the already tender SCLC. Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young and James Bevel all questioned some aspect of why they were doing it.

“It was not very well organized and it doesn’t seem that it is gonna draw folks to D.C.,” said Garrow, the author of “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “He is very much behind the 8 ball because everything is running behind.”

On Feb. 1, two weeks after his birthday party, two Memphis sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning compactor in a garbage truck where they were taking shelter from the rain. Their deaths led to a massive strike, peppered with spates of violence and police confrontations.

As the impasse tightened, almost in desperation, James Lawson, the pastor of Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, called King and asked him to help put pressure on the mayor (Suggs 6-7).

The rain was torrential, flooding streets and overflowing sewers. Still, the Memphis public works department required its sanitation workers — all black men — to continue to work in the downpour Feb. 1, 1968.

That day, two sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, took shelter from the rain in the back of their garbage truck. As Cole and Walker rode in the back of the truck, an electrical switch malfunctioned. The compactor turned on.

Cole and Walker were crushed by the garbage truck compactor. The public works department refused to compensate their families.

Eleven days after their deaths, as many as 1,300 black sanitation workers in Memphis walked off the job, protesting horrible working conditions, abuse, racism and discrimination by the city …

…

The men …worked in filth, dragging heavy tubs of garbage onto trucks.

“Most of the tubs had holes in them,” sanitation worker Taylor Rogers, recalled in the documentary “At the River I Stand.” “Garbage would be leaking. When you went home, you had to stop at the door to pull off your clothes. Maggots would fall out on you.”

The men worked long hours for low wages, with no overtime pay and no paid sick leave. Injuries on the job could lead to their getting fired. If they didn’t work, they didn’t get paid. Most of them made 65 cents per hour.

“We felt we would have to let the city know that because we were sanitation workers, we were human beings. The signs we were carrying said ‘I Am a Man,’ ” James Douglas, a sanitation worker, recalled …. “And we were going to demand to have the same dignity and the same courtesy any other citizen of Memphis has.”

Led by T.O. Jones, a sanitation worker who had attempted to organize the workers in a strike years earlier, and supported by the AFSCME, the men demanded the city recognize their union, increase wages and improve inhumane conditions for sanitation workers.

…

Memphis’s then-mayor, Henry Loeb III, refused the demands of the sanitation workers union, Local 1733, refusing to take malfunctioning trucks off routes, refusing to pay overtime and refusing to improve conditions.

“It has been held that all employees of a municipality may not strike for any purpose,” Loeb said in a 1968 news conference …. “Public employees cannot strike against your employer. I suggested to these men you go back to work.”

On Feb. 14, 1968, Loeb issued an ultimatum, telling the men to return to work by 7 a.m.

Some men returned to work under police escort. Negotiations between the majority of strikers and the city failed. More than 10,000 tons of garbage had piled up in Memphis….

The Rev. James Lawson, a King ally, said at a news conference: “When a public official orders a group of men to ‘get back to work and then we’ll talk’ and treats them as though they are not men, that is a racist point of view. And no matter how you dress it up in terms of whether or not a union can organize it, it is still racism. At the heart of racism is the idea ‘A man is not a man.’ ”

On Feb. 19, 1968, the NAACP and protesters organized an all-night sit-in at Memphis City Hall. The next day, the NAACP and the union called for a citywide boycott of downtown businesses.

…

On March 18, 1968, King, who was in the midst of working on the Poor People’s Campaign, flew into Memphis (Brown 1-4).


Robert F. Kennedy toured eastern Kentucky on February 13 and 14, 1968, landing at Lexington 's Bluegrass Airport and traveling over two hundred miles in those two days. At the same time, in Vietnam, the Tet Offensive was still underway - marking a major turning point in both the war and in attitudes toward it. Less than a month later, RFK would announce his candidacy for presidency.

Kennedy's purpose in touring eastern Kentucky was to examine the outcomes of the first wave of "war on poverty" legislation with the people it most affected - previous trips of inquiry were made to the San Joaquin Valley of California, the Mississippi Delta, northern New Mexico, and the hills of western Pennsylvania.

… Kennedy held field hearings for the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower and Poverty in two locations during the tour, in Vortex and Fleming-Neon, taking testimony that would be entered into the Congressional Record. RFK also visited individual homes, schoolhouses, and county centers during his tour, focusing on the needs of children and young people, asking questions about what they had eaten that day, and viewing for himself the effects of both poverty and the federal efforts to combat it.

The schedule of the tour was grueling: Kennedy met dozens of people individually, spoke to thousands, and traveled over rough mountain roads, starting with a hearing in Vortex at a one room schoolhouse whose entire student body consisted of the children of one rural family; on to another one room school in Barwick, where the teacher, Bonnie Jean Carroll cooked a hot meal for her students on a pot-bellied stove everyday; on to Hazard, where he toured the African American neighborhood, Liberty Street; to a strip mining site where he viewed for himself the physical destruction produced by surface mining …

Advance man Peter Edelman would write: In nearly every place, especially rural communities, where we found a severe unwillingness to help the poor, we also found, and not always because of ethnic differences, a pocket of feudalism in America: a local power structure committed to perpetuating itself at all costs and unwilling to countenance the slightest improvement in the lives of the excluded, for fear they would gain the confidence and the wherewithal to overturn the status quo at the ballot box. Elected officials, judges, police officers and sheriffs, and local bankers and business people were always ready to use any tool necessary to quash dissidence whenever it appeared. This was true in Cesar Chavez's world in California, in the Rio Grande valley in south Texas, in Mississippi, and in Appalachia (About 1-3).

The boy was 11 years old and had never seen a man in the middle of winter with a suntan and such straight teeth in his corner of the United States, the small towns baked into the impoverished hills of eastern Kentucky.

But here was Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in February of 1968, in a gray coat and dark, narrow tie, his sandy brown hair falling over his forehead. The senator stood on the steps of the Letcher County courthouse, a horde of citizens gazing in wonder at him and the ungainly caravan of reporters documenting his every step in those days when everyone expected him to announce his candidacy for president.

“I stood really close to him — I was able to do that — and that was the first time I’d seen someone with a suntan in winter,” Benjamin Gish, now 61, said 50 years later. “I asked my mom how was that possible? And she said, ‘Only wealthy people can have suntans in February.’ It was like a big star had come to town. I was amazed just seeing him there.”

In those months before he ran for president, Kennedy commanded public attention opposing the Vietnam War and criticizing President Lyndon Johnson.

But he was also preoccupied with the scourge of poverty and hunger, a focus that had taken him to Bedford-Stuyvesant, a poor neighborhood in Brooklyn, and to the Mississippi Delta, where he was seen wiping away tears after venturing into a family’s shack and meeting a child with a distended stomach who was listless from malnourishment.

Now, a year later, Kennedy [had] traveled to eastern Kentucky’s coal country, a region that one local leader told him accounted for 20 of the nation’s 30 poorest counties; where a doctor told Kennedy that 18 percent of the population was underweight and 50 percent suffered from intestinal parasites; where one man, Clister Johnson of Partridge, Ky., told him that he, his wife and nine children survived on a monthly income of $60.

“They’re desperate and filled with despair,” Kennedy told a television reporter. “It seems to me that in this country, as wealthy as we are, this is an intolerable condition. It reflects on all of us. We can do things all over the rest of the world but I think we should do things for people in our own country.”

Over the course of two days, Kennedy traveled 300 miles in Appalachia, stopping in towns with names such as Neon and Hazard and Pippa Passes. He held two public hearings, one of them in a one-room schoolhouse, visited people in their beat-up homes and tapped into a “deep vein of disillusionment,” as described at the time by William Greider, then a reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal.

“Don’t Give Us Anymore Promises,” read a banner at one stop. “We Can’t Eat Your Fancy Promises.”

…

Greider, who would later write for The Washington Post, Rolling Stone and the Nation, said he was “put off by the theatrics and manipulation” as he approached the trip, a sense that Kennedy was stringing along the public and the press, which was awaiting word on whether he would run.

Yet Greider said he saw something during those two days in Kentucky that “captured me and changed my mind a little bit about Bobby Kennedy.” It occurred at a schoolhouse, where the senator and his entourage arrived to find six or eight students and their teacher “who were in shock when we stormed in. Terrified. They didn’t know what this was, they had never heard of Bobby Kennedy or national politics.”

“These kids were hunkered down at their desks, hoping that this storm would pass, and he grasped immediately that this was a horror show,” Greider said. “He went around, one by one, kneeling by their desks. He didn’t say very much. He nodded at them, talked to them in whispers, held their hands. It was such a human response. This was a side of the politician you don’t see very often” (Schwartzman 1-4).


Works cited:

“About RFK's 1968 Tour.” The Robert F. Kennedy Performance Project. Web. http://rfkineky.org/1968-tour.htm


Brown, DaNeen L. “‘I Am a Man’: The Ugly Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike that Led to MLK’s Assassination” The Washington Post. February 12, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/r...


Schwartzman, Paul. “They Were Kentucky’s Poorest, Most Desperate People. And He Was a Kennedy with an Entourage.” The Washington Post. February 212, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/r...


Suggs, Ernie. “Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” AJC: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Web. http://honoringmlk.com/

Civil Rights Events -- Urban Blacks and Law Enforcement

Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, 37, a social psychologist with Wayne State University’s Lafayette Clinic, conducted [between November 1967 and February 1968[ the study in which 286 Detroit policemen, including 36 Negro officers, were interviewed in their homes by 20 clinic staff members

The 4,800-man force is 92 per cent white, Mendelsohn noted, adding that the potential for racial conflict could not be exaggerated.

His study concludes:

--Most white policemen reject the idea that Negroes are victims of social injustice.

--Few white officers believe that good will come of the 1967 Detroit riot, and those who do believe so say it will be a form of appeasement.

--Most white patrolmen have little knowledge of the law-abiding Negro community in Detroit, although their superiors have a “higher evaluation” of the black community, possibly because they come into contact with all its elements, “not just persons involved with possible criminal offenses.”

To many white patrolmen, Mendelsohn says, an upheaval like the riot is proof that Negroes as anti-social and lawless people is correct. And so some, he says, disturbances represent justification for “taking revenge” against Negroes.

White and Negro officers, Mendelsohn said, disagree only on questions involving race. They were in substantial agreement, he said on issues limited to police work – the need for more money, the fact that Detroit police did a good job in policing the riot and that looters, not innocent bystanders, were arrested.

Among lower echelon white officers, the study says Negroes are considered a “privileged minority, susceptible to the influence of agitators,” who, the white police believe, are capable of galvanizing blacks into violent action even though the Negroes “are without grievances.”

The study reveals that the majority of white policemen feel blacks are treated either the same as whites or favored by schools, welfare agencies, stores and law enforcement agencies and in the area of jobs. Housing is the only area where a substantial number of white patrolmen see discrimination.

Nearly 25 per cent of the white officers interviewed said rioters should be shot, which 8.3 per cent of the Negro men on the force believed so.

Close to 90 per cent of Negro officers said they felt blacks were treated unfairly by the police, compared with the 16 per cent of white inspectors and 7 per cent of white patrolmen who felt this is the case.

Mendelsohn says the views held by the officers tend to correspond with those held by the society from which they come – generally, the working class.

Police officers’ attitudes are formed well before they become police officers, Mendelsohn says, adding that the attitudes of the societies from which they come “remain of considerable influence through the rest of their lives” (Psychologist’s Study 13).


There were positive signs on the racial front in 1967. Congress had recently passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. On June 12, the Supreme Court ended state bans on interracial marriage. On Aug. 30, Thurgood Marshall was confirmed by the Senate as the first African-American on the Supreme Court. In the fall, Carl Stokes won election as the first African-American mayor of a major U.S. city, in Cleveland.

Yet the rioting of '67 showed with vivid clarity how far America had to go and how dangerous the racial climate had become. In this sense, '67 was a harbinger, marked by riots July 12-17 in Newark, New Jersey, where 26 people died, July 14 in Plainfield, New Jersey, July 19 in Minneapolis, July 23-27 in Detroit, July 20-Aug. 3 in Milwaukee, just to name a few (Walsh 2).

In her new book, “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime,” …, Harvard historian Elizabeth Hinton pinpoints the moment when things started to go sour.

…

Demographic forces were in part to blame …. After World War II, black migration out of the South accelerated — between 1940 and 1980, roughly 5 million black Southerners moved to cities in the North and West. Places like Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia and Harlem grew into major black metropolises. Economists Robert Fairlie and William Sundstrom estimate that the South lost about 17 percent of its workforce between 1940 and 1960 alone.

But as they arrived in the North starting in the 1940s, black workers learned that jobs weren’t as plentiful as they had hoped. Fairlie and Sundstrom say that between 1880 and 1940, the unemployment rate for black and white men was more or less the same. After 1940, their fates began to diverge. In 1950, the white unemployment rate was around 4 percent, but the black unemployment rate was around 7 percent. That inequality has persisted to this day.

In the early 1960s, politicians began to describe the concentration of black urban poverty as “social dynamite.” …

… As Hinton writes, Johnson’s War on Poverty “is best understood not as an effort to broadly uplift communities or as a moral crusade to transform society by combating inequality or want, but as a manifestation of fear about urban disorder and about the behavior of young people, particularly young African Americans.”

…

… For urban African Americans, the War on Poverty could better be described as a war on the culture of poverty. Politicians did see the connection between poverty and crime. They recognized how one fed the other, and vice versa. But instead of trying to create jobs or substantially increase welfare payments to families, they fixated on what the influential Moynihan report, echoing the views of many social scientists, called in 1965 the “social pathologies” of black urban life.

“In a word, a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure,” concluded the report. “The object should be to strengthen the Negro family so as to enable it to raise and support its members as do other families.” For all its good intentions, the Moynihan report reinforced the idea that there was something particularly wrong with black America — that centuries of slavery and oppression had inculcated dangerous habits.

…

“Negro poverty is not white poverty,” Johnson said. “Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences — deep, corrosive, obstinate differences — radiating painful roots into the community, and into the family, and the nature of the individual.”

Johnson’s War on Poverty had a fatal fixation with reforming individuals instead of addressing the larger economic problems, Hinton says. In the book, she describes it as a short-sighted approach, “committing to vocational training and remedial education programs in the absence of job creation measures or an overhaul of urban public schools.” …

… Starting in the summer of 1964, race riots ripped through Northern cities including New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Rochester, N.Y. Hundreds of people were injured, and thousands were arrested. The riots began with clashes between police and black citizens. In New York City, for instance, 15-year-old James Powell was killed by an off-duty white police officer, which led to six violent days of marching, looting and vandalism in Harlem. “The ‘social dynamite’ that had worried policymakers and officials at the outset of the decade had finally exploded, despite the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ prevention efforts,” Hinton writes.

By 1965, Johnson had formulated a new initiative, what he called a “War on Crime.” He sent to Congress a sweeping new bill that would bulk up police forces with federal money and intensify patrols in urban areas. This would be the first significant intrusion of the federal government into local law enforcement, and it was the beginning of a long saga of escalating surveillance and control in urban areas.

In particular, Johnson played up the military flavor of the reforms. “We are today fighting a war within our own boundaries,” he said in 1966, likening the black urban unrest to a domestic Vietnam. His initiatives provided money for police to arm themselves with military equipment — “military-grade rifles, tanks, riot gear, walkie-talkies, helicopters, and bulletproof vests,” Hinton writes. As the riots intensified through the rest of the ’60s — some estimate over 700 incidents occurred between 1964 and 1971 — the administration increasingly began to shift money away from the War on Poverty and toward the War on Crime. “Policy makers really feared a large-scale urban rebellion,” Hinton says. “They were really worried about black youth, and had a number of racist notions about their propensities for crime and drug addiction.”

These same ideas permeated Johnson’s anti-poverty efforts. … Both programs were propelled by concerns about civil unrest in black communities, and both were influenced by the administration’s opinion that poor urban black people suffered from a cultural deficit, even if it wasn’t of their own making.

Subsequent administrations expanded and intensified the crime-fighting programs that Johnson had created. They sent undercover officers to go into black neighborhoods and ensnare criminals. They camped out in black communities waiting for crime to happen. They funded the creation of special-tactics forces — SWAT teams — in part out of fear of race riots and the Black Panthers. The War on Drugs, which began under Nixon but reached its height under Reagan, added hundreds of thousands of people to the correctional system. Intensified policing created a growing population of prisoners, which set off a boom in prison construction.

…

… Both the left and the right were unwilling … to make the drastic investments in jobs, housing and human development that black urban communities demanded and needed.

In 1967, Johnson set up a mostly liberal task force to investigate the race riots. The Kerner Commission, as it was called, handed back a white-hot report that blamed the uprisings on the dearth of economic opportunity in poor black neighborhoods. Johnson’s War on Poverty, they said, was hardly doing enough. “To pursue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values,” the report warned.

The commission argued for “national action on an unprecedented scale”: among other things, the immediate creation of 2 million jobs, the establishment of a basic minimum income and the allocation of 6 million units of affordable housing within five years. Essentially, Hinton says, it was a Marshall Plan for black America — a mind-bogglingly huge investment in a distressed community.

Obviously, those economic reforms didn’t happen. Instead, the Johnson administration continued to treat urban black poverty and urban black unrest as a problem of discipline, not a problem of denied opportunity (Guo 1-10).

Black supporters … did not envision that their short-term calls for law enforcement solutions to crime and violence would become the sole response, while the long-term solution of addressing the social problems that gave rise to the problems in the first place would not follow. …


African Americans wanted more law enforcement, but they didn’t want only law enforcement. Many adopted what we might think of as an all-of-the-above strategy. ... But because African Americans are a minority nationally, they needed help to win national action against poverty, joblessness, segregation, and other root causes of crime. The help never arrived. .... So African Americans never got the Marshall Plan — just the tough-on-crime laws.

… One of the major goals of the civil rights movement was to enlist black police officers. The purpose was twofold: to end discrimination in the police force and to curb police brutality against the black community. However, neither goal was realized. …

Professor James Forman, author of Locking Up Our Own, wrote: “The case for black police had always been premised on the unquestioned assumption of racial solidarity between black citizens and black officers.” However, Forman’s account reveals that the “blacks who joined police departments had a far more complicated set of attitudes, motivations, and incentives than those pushing for black police had assumed. The reality of employment discrimination meant that many black officers signed up to obtain a good job that was stable, secure, and offered good benefits. These officers did not conceive of their role within the police departments as an extension of the civil rights movement. Indeed, according to Forman, some did not view their work as racially significant.

Forman also highlights the racism that many black officers faced in the department. … Both the racism that limited the job prospects of blacks and the racism that existed within police forces “made it less likely that [black officers] would do what many reformers hoped they would: buck the famously powerful police culture. The few who tried paid a high price.” “Even those black officers inclined to use their political capital to fight police brutality would often find themselves in the minority. Most of their colleagues — black or white — wanted to fight for wages, benefits, and an equal shot at promotions.”

… Forman illuminates the influence of class differences within black communities. He argues that middle-class blacks would often advocate for more policing against the lower-class blacks who were engaged in crime. Citing a handful of studies showing that black police were just as physically abusive as their white colleagues and sometimes even harsher, Forman concludes that “[i]t turned out that a surprising number of black officers simply didn’t like other black people — at least not the poor blacks they tended to police.” … He notes that “[w]hen some blacks (usually middle class) demanded action against others (usually poor), many ‘pro-black’ officers responded with special enthusiasm.” … Forman is entirely right to note that black-on-black policing was not characterized by intraracial harmony. The end result was that while many police forces eventually integrated, the goal of reducing police violence against black communities was largely unattained (Carbado and Richardson 8-10).

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, otherwise known as the Black Panther Party (BPP), was established in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. The two leading revolutionary men created the national organization as a way to collectively combat white oppression. After constantly seeing black people suffer from the torturous practices of police officers around the nation, Newton and Seale helped to form the pioneering black liberation group to help build community and confront corrupt systems of power.

The Black Panthers established a unified platform and their goals for the party were outlined in a 10-point plan that included demands for freedom, land, housing, employment and education, among other important objectives.

In 1966, police violence ran rampant in Los Angeles and the need to protect black men and women from state-sanctioned violence was crucial. Armed Black Panther members would show up during police arrests of black men and women, stand at a legal distance and surveil their interactions. It was “to make sure there was no brutality,” Newton said in archival footage …. Both Black Panther members and officers would stand facing one another armed with guns, an act that agreed with the open carry law in California at the time. These confrontations, in many ways, allowed the Panthers to protect their communities and police the police.

The party’s goal in increasing membership wasn’t aimed at recruiting churchgoers … but to recruit the everyday black person who faced police brutality. When black people across the nation saw the Panthers’ efforts in the media, especially after they stormed the state capitol with guns in Sacramento in 1967, more men and women became interested in joining. The group also took on issues like housing, welfare and health, which made it relatable to black people everywhere. The party grew rapidly — and didn’t instill a screening process because a priority, at the time, was to recruit as many people as possible.

In 1967, Newton was charged in the fatal shooting of a 23-year-old police officer, John Frey, during a traffic stop. After the shooting, Newton was hospitalized with critical injuries while handcuffed to a gurney in a room that was heavily guarded by cops. As a result of his hospitalization and arrest, Eldrige Cleaver took leadership of the Panthers and demanded that “Huey must be set free.” The phrase was eventually shortened to “Free Huey,” two words which galvanized a movement demanding for Huey’s release.

The sight of black men and women unapologetically sporting their afros, berets and leather jackets had a special appeal to many black Americans at the time. It reflected a new portrayal of self for black people in the 1960s in a way that attracted many young black kids to want to join the party — some even wrote letters to Newton asking to join. …

The Black Panthers furthered their agenda by appealing to what they believed journalists and photographers sought after to cover in the news. “They were able to establish their legitimacy as a voice of protest,” journalist Jim Dunbar said [in a documentary]. They leveraged their voices and imprinted their images in newspapers, magazines and television programs.

The party saw a serious need to nurture black kids in disenfranchised communities, so they spent about two hours each morning cooking breakfast for children in poor neighborhoods before school. “Studies came out saying that children who didn’t have a good breakfast in the morning were less attentive in school and less inclined to do well and suffered from fatigue,” former party member David Lemieux said in the documentary. “We just simply took that information and a program was developed to serve breakfast to children,” he added. “We were showing love for our people.” The party served about 20,000 meals a week and it became the party’s most successful program of their 35 survival programs.

Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover feared the rise of the Black Panther Party so he created COINTELPRO, a secret operation, to discredit black nationalists groups. The Counterintelligence Program’s purpose was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” black nationalists’ activities. “We were followed everyday, we were harassed, our phones were tapped, our families were harassed,” former Black Panther member Ericka Huggins, whose parents were visited by the FBI, said in the film. Hoover regularly sent police officers letters encouraging them to come up with new ways to cripple the Black Panther Party. Though COINTELPRO didn’t make the party their only targets, 245 out of 290 of their actions were directed at the Black Panthers.

Hoover feared any growth of the movement and especially feared young white allies who united with black activists to support the movement. Through COINTELPRO, Hoover found ways to track, stalk and dig up information on the party, including planting FBI Informants throughout the party (Workneh and Finley 1-4).




Works cited:

Carbado, Devon W. and Richardson, L. Song. “The Black Police: Policing Our Own.” Harvard Law Review. May 10, 2018. Web. https://harvardlawreview.org/2018/05/...


Guo, Jeff. “America’s Tough Approach to Policing Black Communities Began as a Liberal Idea.” The Washington Post. May 2, 2016. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/w...


“Psychologist’s Study Show Needs of the Black Community.” Hillsdale Daily News. February 24, 1969. Web. https://newspaperarchive.com/hillsdal...


Walsh, Kenneth T. “50 Years after Race Riots, Issues Remain the Same.” U. S. News. July 12, 2017. Web. https://www.usnews.com/news/national-...


Workneh, Lilly, and Finley, Taryn. “27 Important Facts Everyone Should Know about the Black Panthers.” HUFFPOST. February 19, 2018. Web. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/27-imp...

Civil Rights Events -- Detroit Riots, 1967 -- Algiers Motel Murders

The Algiers Motel, despite its mystical sounding name, was a far cry from the palm trees and tropical fronds that adorned its rustic sign off Woodward. Built in 1952 when Detroit was at its apex, the clientele were initially weary business men in need of a roof before jetting home. As Detroit began to suffer the sting of economic decline, the Algiers slowly drifted into disrepair and with it came a shady reputation.

The Algiers had indeed gained a dubious reputation. By the time of the riot, Detroit police referred to the Algiers as “flypaper for dope dealers, prostitutes and petty hoods.” The now outmoded Algiers had become primarily a home for transients with no place else to go. Located at 8301 Woodward Ave., the Algiers backs up to the Virginia Park subdivision which sported cavernous three story homes from the early 1900s. When the house at 51 Virginia Park, i.e. directly behind the Algiers Motel, went up for sale, the owners of the Algiers bought it and turned it into an annex to the motel.

When the riot started a number of individuals, desperate to get off the street and thus out of harms way, took up residence in the annex of the Algiers. All total there were nine people, seven black males and two white females …

…

Detroit police officer Jerome Olshove, the only Detroit police officer to die during the riot, was shot to death by a looter only hours before the Algiers incident. Olshove was well respected throughout the department. His father was career DPD, as was his brother. After seven years on the job, he had planned on leaving the department and pursue a career at IBM. His last day was to be Thursday. He was killed on Tuesday. His death was announced at roll call. The room was full of ominous groans and open weeping. (Anarchy 1-2, 3).


On July 26, 1967, the third day of one of the worst riots of the 20th century, Detroit police, the National Guard and Michigan State Police responded to a report of a sniper at the Algiers Motel and Manor House annex (Brown 1). The Detroit officers in charge of the raid were David Senak, Ronald August, and Robert Paille. Aubrey Pollard, 19, Carl Cooper, 17, and Fred Temple, 18, were shot to death inside the motel (Ausgood 1).


They, four black youths, and two 18-year-old white girls had been staying inside the motel waiting out the course of the riot. According to testimony, black youths Cooper, Michael Clark, 21, and Lee Forsythe, 20, and the two white females, Julie Ann Hysell and Karen Malloy had been listening to music in a third-floor room of the annex. Apparently wanting to show off, 17-year-old Cooper had pulled out a starter pistol and, with possibly a friend or two, had shot blanks in the air, drawing attention from law enforcement personnel who had been already dealing with the sound of gunfire throughout the area. One of the Algiers Motel windows had then been shot at and shattered—from the outside. Alarmed and frightened, the occupants had fled to other rooms as law enforcement personnel had rushed into the annex.


Officers …appeared outside. Upon seeing occupants at the windows, police warnings were given to stay back. One or more shots were fired at the house. Panic ensued. Carl Cooper, hopelessly trapped on the main floor in a no-mans-land between the front door and the rear, was the first person the authorities encountered as the back doors on the northeast part of the annex were kicked in. Crucial decisions were made in the milliseconds which followed. Was Cooper a sniper? Did he have a weapon or look like he was reaching for one? … Multiple shot guns blasts killed him instantly (Anarchy 4).


[Michael] Clark, [Lee] Forsythe, [Julie] Hysell and [Karen] Molloy, and other guests including 19-year-old Aubrey Pollard, a 26-year-old Vietnam veteran Robert Greene, 18-year-old Larry Reed, lead singer for the Rhythm and Blues group the Dramatics, [James Sortor], and band road manager, 18-year-old Fred Temple, were rounded up by Detroit police officers and faced against a downstairs hall wall. Hysell and Molloy were pulled out of the lineup and stripped naked. At some point Melvin Dismukes, a black security guard for a nearby store, entered the annex while the police held the guests against the wall (Momodu 1).

Aubrey Pollard had gone home from the motel the day before, Tuesday morning. His sister, Thelma, said later, “… my mom noticed that he had been in some sort of confrontation. So he explained to her that he had gotten into a confrontation with the police officers at some sort of motel that he was hanging in.”

Thelma Pollard says Aubrey had been beaten up pretty badly. He had bruises on his face and arms. And his mother warned him not to go back to that motel. “She said, ‘If they beat you up the night before, they’ll come back tonight and kill you.’” But Aubrey Pollard did go back. And it cost him his life (Ausgood 2).
Thelma recalled later:

“I was 16. The riots had gone on for several days and the police were out of control. From the front porch, I could see the National Guard and the army ride up and down the street in tanks and the smoke from the fires. There was a curfew, so I didn’t go out. Racial tensions had always been high in Detroit. My oldest brother used to say the police used to pull him over and tell him, “Run, nigger”.

…

“I never knew anything about the Algiers Motel before that,” Pollard-Gardner recalls. “It was a place for my brother and his friends to go…a hangout. Proximity wise, they could walk there. There was gambling and drinking. My brother did not drink and did not have weed. That part of the movie [“Detroit”] was embellished, but he did gamble and for me, he was a protector, but if you said something he didn’t like, he might hit you” (Family 2-3).
An aggressive interrogation began about the reported sniper shots with the lifeless body of Carl Cooper only feet away in the next room. When no answers were forthcoming, a pistol whipping of the suspects began. Still no answers. With the atmosphere growing thick with anger, police began to turn the screws harder (Anarchy 5).

Julie Hysell Delaney was 18 when she traveled from her home in Ohio to Detroit "to follow a band, basically, an R&B group we had met in Columbus."

She recalls that she and the friend who accompanied her, Karen Malloy, had about $12 for the trip, but "$2 worth of gas would take you 500 miles back then," says Delaney. They were staying at the Algiers Motel because it didn't cost much. With a curfew in place, they couldn't go out in the evening.

"The house where the murders took place had kitchens, you know, like an extended-stay (motel), so to speak," she says, describing the annex where the tragedy unfolded. "We went back ... to the pool, and some of the guys were there. They said, 'Well, Carl's got food. We'll go up there.' "

Reports of sniper fire prompted members of the Detroit Police Department, the State Police, the National Guard and a private security guard to raid the motel annex. By the time the confrontation was over, Carl Cooper, 17; Aubrey Pollard, 19, and Fred Temple, 18, had been shot at close range and killed.
The other men, Delaney and Malloy made it out alive, but not before being forced to line up against a hallway wall by the police and [be] hit and terrorized with slurs and threats.

The … interrogation tactic [used] … involved taking the men, one at a time, inside a room and firing a weapon near them in order to pretend they had been shot and killed for refusing to talk.

As Delaney told the Los Angeles Times in one of several interviews she has done with the media, “People were begging for their lives. I just kept thinking, ‘They killed three people, and there’s one person they haven’t taken, then I’m next.’ I remember the voices of the cops yelling, again and again and again” (Hinds 3-4).


Karen Malloy recounted that the hell began with the officers beating and pistol-whipping the men down the line, repeatedly hitting them and making them get up. One of the cops then threw a knife and told the men, “here, defend yourself…pick it up so I can blow your goddamn head off.” None of the men would pick the knife up, knowing full well that if they had, they would be killed on a trumped up charge of self-defense.


While the men were wise not to take the bait on the knife, they endured severe beatings for their refusal. Lee Forsythe was noted by Cooper’s mother as having wounds so deep in his head, she could see his skull.

“They were going to shoot us one at a time” Michael Clark would later testify. After the efforts to get the men to pick up the knife so the officers could have a reason to murder them in cold blood, they amped up the interrogation tactics.

Officer Senak began the show of cruelty by first taking the two white women out of the line and tearing their clothes off. “Why you got to fuck them? what’s wrong with us, you nigger lovers!” Senak yelled. Senak made the women pull each other’s clothes off of one another, tearing at them himself as he got frustrated with their stalling. Before moving on, the women were left tattered in nothing but their underwear.

As Senak, Paille and August continued their abuse of the women, more officers from the national guard began spilling into the motel. [James] Sortor testified that the men in uniform were not only stripping women down and beating the men, “some of them were just standing back. Laughing at us.” After the women were stripped down and denigrated, the officers began what was known as the “death game.” Lee Forsythe stated, “They started killing us, one by one.”

Officer Senak began with Roderick Davis, dragging him into one of the rooms and closed the door behind them. Warrant Officer Theodore Thomas followed Senak in. Thomas testified “Senak told the man to lay on the floor and he fired a round through the wall…he didn’t shoot him, he scared him…then he winked at me.” Davis was then told not to move or they would kill him, leaving him alone in the room afterward. As Warrant Officer Thomas walked out of the room, he was asked if Senak killed the man; “yes,” he replied.

“Want to kill one?” an officer then asked Warrant Officer Thomas.


“Yes” Thomas stated, as he knew the point of the game was to scare the people left in line in the hallway behind them.

Michael Clark was next. “Let’s see, (Ronald) August told the officer to take me in the room and shoot me.”

Thomas took Clark into the room, laid him down, and fired a shot out the window, telling him if he moved, he would be killed. After Clark, Pollard would be the next target and the “death game” would become a cruel execution for men and women left with the officers.

Senak then handed a pistol to August, saying “Do you want to kill one now?”

Ronald August grabbed hold of the gun and then dragged Aubrey Pollard into a rear room of the Motel. “I can’t recall what was said (between Senak and August) as he gave him the gun…this was supposed to scare them” Officer Thomas later testified.

Officer August apparently did not understand the ‘game’ with Pollard though. After tossing Pollard to the ground, Pollard screamed out “Don’t shoot!” A shot was heard. Pollard was dead (Mitchell 3-5).


[Survivor] Lee Forsythe was staying at the motel when the police stormed the building. He says he ducked into a room and hollered out to let officers know he was there. What happened next, he says, was terrifying.

“I could see him [a police officer] kicking the door open and firing shots” Forsythe says. “And all of a sudden, he got to me, and he opened the door, and he pointed the shotgun at me, and…it..it just didn’t fire. He was…it didn’t have a shell.”


Forsythe says he was taken out of the room and led down the stairs where he saw the body of 17-year-old Carl Cooper.


“This was my friend, this was my best friend,” Forsythe says. “So I break over to see Carl, and like I was telling you, I heard his last breath.”


Forsythe remembers being lined up against the wall with some other people, taunted and tortured by the police. He says an officer took him inside a room and told him to scream like he was being beaten badly. Forsythe was sent out of the room. Then it was Aubrey Pollard’s turn. He was taken into the room, but he didn’t come out.


“Aubrey was saying, ‘Mister, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ because he had broke his rifle hitting Aubrey,” Forsythe says. “And he say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ But…then we heard a boom. And then we didn’t hear Aubrey no more.”


Forsythe says the police came out of the room and whispered to one another before telling everybody to leave. Forsythe says, Fred Temple, 18, asked to go back to his room and get his shoes. Officers told him he could and Temple walked off. It was the last time anyone would see him alive. (Ausgood 1-3).


According to later testimony, Detroit police officers most likely shot and killed Cooper who ran downstairs with his pistol when they entered the building. Detroit police later would claim that they found Cooper already dead in a first-floor room when they entered the building. No one was ever charged with the death of Carl Cooper, the youngest victim, who was 17.


The next youth to be killed, Pollard, was shot and killed by officer Ronald August after he took him into Annex Room A-3. August later admitted to the killing but claimed it was in self-defense. [“Guardsman Ted Thomas testified that he heard no words or signs of a struggle between Officer August and Pollard before seeing "a flash of clothing, heard a shotgun blast and saw Pollard's body fall" (Detroit 8).] The third person to die, Temple, was shot by Detroit Police Officer Robert Paille who also claimed he killed him in self-defense. Despite the three deceased bodies in the Motel Annex, the Detroit police officers on the scene, Paille, August, and David Senak, did not report any of the deaths to the Detroit Police Homicide Bureau as required. Instead they left the annex after demanding that the survivors keep quiet about the incident.


The next day Charles Hendrix, who provided security for the motel, found the bodies and reported the deaths to the Wayne County Morgue which in turn called the Detroit Police Homicide Bureau. … (Momodu 1-2).


Author John Hersey conducted numerous interviews before writing his enlightening book The Algiers Motel Incident. From the transcripts of Hersey's interviews with each of the participants, only one of the three Detroit policemen involved in the affair, Patrolman David Senak, would seem capable of the kind of thinking which could produce the savage beatings and indiscriminate killing that resulted from the discovery of eleven black men and two white women in the same part of a motel.

The 24-year-old Senak, nicknamed "Snake," had been working on the vice squad for two months in July, 1967. He was devoted to police work, but the nature of his job had had an effect on him.


"I think one bad aspect of my life as far as the Police Department goes is that I never really fell in love with any girls up to the point where I joined the Police Department. And then afterward, the type of work I did on the force reflected a sort of bad attitude toward w-o men in general.

"... I know all women aren't prostitutes,... but I think subconsciously it affects me."


"Do you think," I [Hersey] asked him, "that this has made you think of women as essentially evil, or more apt to be criminal than men?"

His answer was: "Who gave who the apple?"


Senak had shot and killed two men that Tuesday before being called to the Algiers Motel.

The two other policemen seemed to be typical normal products--young, competent, with fairly strong controls on the latent racism which is bred into most white Americans from birth. Ronald August had always seemed "quiet and respectable" to his fellow policemen.
…

Yet it was August who confessed to the murder of one of the blacks, Auburey Pollard Jr.--the only one of the murders which can be ascribed to a definite killer. …

[Eventually] one of the other officers then asked August, "Do you want to kill one now?" August answered, "Yes," and, not being aware of the nature of the "game," took Aubury Pollard into one of the motel rooms and killed him with a shotgun blast at close range.

Why did Patrolman August say "Yes"? What destroyed the controls August had carefully built up? Was he just especially susceptible to the heady power granted by a gun and a badge, or would most whites react in the same fashion in a similar situation (Hagen 2-3)?

Hersey was able to elicit from Patrolman Paille this comment: “these people here, a good part of them are immoral. Any policeman knows that, in those areas” (Leary 4).

Melvin [Dismukes] says that he went to the police station to share his side of the story, but he got everything turned around on him and was charged with first-degree murder. In the end, the police tried to pin a felonious assault charge on Melvin in connection with the beating of two of the motel's occupants, Michael Clark and James Sortor, in the first-floor hallway. Melvin had been guarding a store across the street from the Algiers before he entered the motel to help.

According to Melvin, he tried to play peacemaker. "I just hoped to calm the situation down that was going on in the lobby," says Melvin. "I wanted to help people stay alive, so I did my best to do what I thought would protect them." He was the first to be tried and was acquitted of the charge. It took only 13 minutes for the all-white jury to come back with a verdict of not guilty (Detroit 11).

The Wayne County medical examiner agreed that Temple and Pollard were shot while kneeling or lying down. All three of the black youths had been shot dead with buckshot, at close range. … first-degree murder charges were filed against Detroit Police officers Ronald August and Robert Paille. August originally lied about what happened, but would later claim he killed Aubrey Pollard in self-defense. Paille would make statements implicating him in the murders. Those statements were eventually thrown out as inadmissible, because the homicide detectives had failed to read him his rights. The charges against Paille were dropped.

No one would ever be charged in the deaths of Carl Cooper and Fred Temple. It was never determined who killed them. The National Guard, state troopers, and Detroit Police gave conflicting statements as to who was at the motel first and who did what.

The Ronald August case received so much attention in the black community that defense attorneys filed a motion for a change of venue. The state supreme court appointed Oakland County Circuit Court Judge William Beer to the case. Beer filed a motion to try the case in Mason, Michigan, a town with a mostly white population. The trial lasted nearly six weeks. [Judge William Beer … told the all-white jury that their options were to either convict Ronald August of first-degree murder or acquit him, never instructing them that verdicts of second-degree murder or manslaughter were options too (Detroit 12)]

The jury found Ronald August not guilty. The Algiers Motel Incident helped change the city of Detroit. It galvanized the black community and spearheaded a political activism that would result in the election of Coleman Young as Detroit’s first black mayor in 1973 (Ausgood 5).


But the guilt and fear remains. To this day she [Julie Hysell] freezes up when seeing the lights of a police car. Hysell has found other ways to cope.


“I wonder: Is this why I drank and have been in AA for 22 years?” says Hysell. “Is this why I’ve been married three times? Did I have PTSD?”

She also struggled with coming to terms with what role her race played in enraging the police officers. Did they turn violent at the sight of white women hanging out with black men? “I felt guilty because I was a white person and the black people were the ones who got killed,” she says. “If we’d been two black girls, maybe none of this would have happened.”

…

… Each time there’s a shooting of an unarmed black man, be it Trayvon Martin or Freddie Gray, it stirs up her frustrations that the racial tensions that exploded in a Detroit motel five decades ago are still being sparked across America’s cities and towns (Lang 2).


What greater – or more bitter – irony could there be then that the three boys at the Algiers may have been executed as snipers because one of them, satirizing the uniformed men who had made them all laugh in the midst of their fear during the search that morning, had been playing with a pistol designed to start foot races, from which it was not even possible to shoot bullets?

Except, of course, that as it turned out the boys were not executed as snipers at all. They were executed for being thought to be pimps, for being considered punks, for making out with white girls, for being in some vague way killers of a white cop named Jerry Olshove, for running riot – for being, after all and all, black young men and part of the black rage of the time (Hersey 195).


Works cited:
“Anarchy at the Algiers.” Detroit’s Great Rebellion. Web. http://www.detroits-great-rebellion.c...

Ausgood, Heidi. “Detroit Police Officers Charged in 1967 after Algiers Motel Incident.” Wdet: Detroit’s NPR Station. July 24, 2017. Web. https://wdet.org/posts/2017/07/24/854...


Brown, DeNeen L. ‘Detroit’ and the Police Brutality that Left Three Black Teens Dead at the Algiers Motel.” The Washington Post. August 4, 2017. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/r...


“Detroit Movie vs. the True Story of the Algiers Motel Killings.” History Hollywood. Web. http://www.historyvshollywood.com/ree...


“Family Survivor Recalls Tragic Algiers Motel Story Retold in Kathryn Bigelow’s “Detroit.” L. A. Focus on the Word.” August 7, 2017. Web. https://lafocusnewspaper.com/item/fam...


Hagen, Charles M. “The Algiers Motel: The Algiers Motel Incident.” The Harvard Crimson. July 12, 1968. Web. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/19...


Hersey, John. The Algiers Motel Incident. Bantam Books, New York, July 1968. Print.


Hinds, Julie. “Eyewitness to Horrific Night Depicted in ‘Detroit’ Movie Shares Story.” Detroit Free Press. August 4, 2017. Web. https://www.freep.com/story/entertain...


Lang, Brent. “How Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘Detroit’ Helped Police Attack Victim Julie Hysell Heal.” Variety. August 1, 2017. Web. https://variety.com/2017/film/news/de...



Leary, John Patrick. “Not Tragedy, but Atrocity.” Guernica. July 25, 2017. Web. https://www.guernicamag.com/not-trage...


Mitchell, Scott. “The Algiers Motel Incident. II: Hell in the Algiers.” Show. Web. https://algiersmemory.wordpress.com/h...



Momodu, Samuel. “Algiers Motel Incident (1967).” BLACKPAST. August 7, 2017. Web. https://www.blackpast.org/african-ame...