Page 45 - DENG105_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_II

Elective English–II

Notes On the evening of 4 April, after a pre-dinner organizational meeting, King stepped onto the
balcony of his second floor motel room. He talked with friends on the ground below. After a
few moments, a loud sound, like that of a firecracker, was heard, and King slammed against
the wall behind him. From the rooming-house across the way, a sniper had shot King in the
neck and head, and King died within the hour at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Memphis.

Notes Shuttles worth was a minister in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, when the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, of which he was secretary, began to oversee the
protests there that soon gained national attention.

The alleged assassin, James Earl Ray, was apprehended a month later in Heathrow Airport in
London. He confessed to the killing, but retracted his confession after he had been imprisoned.
There is much speculation that the FBI was involved in King’s death.
Upon news of the assassination, riots erupted nation-wide. President Johnson declared 7 April
a national day of mourning–but mourning in many places took the form of violence and arson.
The number of riots totalled 168; the number of arrests, 3000; the number of injuries, over
20,000; and the number of soldiers called in to restore order, 55,000.
Funeral services were held at Ebenezer Church in Atlanta, which held 750 of the 150,000
people who appeared to pay their last respects. Robert, Ethel, and Jacqueline Kennedy visited
Atlanta, as did Richard Nixon. Burgeoning television star Bill Cosby came and spent time with
King’s children. King was buried near his grandparents in the all-black South View Cemetery.
But King’s death did not prevent the realization of his planned protests. Thousands of supporters
came from miles around, flooding Memphis and making the sanitation workers’ strike a success.
That summer, the Poor People’s March took place without King, though on a smaller scale
than he had imagined. The SCLC and Coretta Scott King continued much of what King had
begun.

But King’s major legacy was the pieces of federal legislation passed in 1964 and 1965. In his
final years, King had failed somewhat to engage the broad-based support he had earlier
enjoyed: while the Christian socialist vision of his later period proved too radical to affect
white mainstream Americans, his non-violent tactics had remained too peaceful to satisfy the
rising tide of black militancy. However, the fact remained that King, more than any other
leader, had been responsible for both abstract and concrete achievements of the Civil Rights
Movement. King had dreamed and had acted.
Amercian minorities enjoyed an initial flurry of political empowerment in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, when the Voting Rights Act of 1965 began to affect local elections. However, after
this progress started to slow, and has remained comparatively sluggish. The “white flight”
from cities to suburbs has left behind decaying neighbourhoods with weak tax bases and de
facto segregated schools. Affirmative action programmes have come under attack, especially
by right-wing politicians. Celebrations of King often downplay his radical economic vision
while highlighting his moments of upbeat–and unthreatening–liberal rhetoric. The irony of his
treatment as a national hero was perhaps most evident in the establishment of the holiday
honouring him–effected as it was by the staunchly anti-communist Reagan Administration.

3.5 Textual Analysis

The spirit of revolutionary change, which has long been disturbing sleeping societies, shakes
the core of what Martin Luther King Jr. calls “obnoxious negative peace.” King’s legacy of

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