When he was murdered by an assassin’s bullet, MLK was going through a hard time in his life and many close to him say that he knew the end was near. But even he couldn’t have predicted the impact his death would have – good and ill – on the United States.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the focus of this two-part episode on MLK?
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And it's just the two of us today, which is fine because we need to keep our nose to the grindstone and really focus on a pair of really important episodes, which we kick off now.
That's right. We haven't done a two-parter in a while, but as we got into the originally one-parter of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., you were like, man, there's a lot more here that we can just kind of explode this into a two-parter.
Yeah, that was verbatim what I said. And I said, let's do it. There was a ton of stuff that I did not know about MLK's assassination.
Yeah, same.
James Earl Ray. Like, there's a lot of stuff around it. And it's just a reminder that history gets so boiled down to, like, its bare essence or even, like, a caricature of itself. Yeah. when you really dig into like a historical event, you're just reminded that there's just so many people affected and involved. And it's not just, you know, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King Jr.
and, you know, the world mourned. I mean, that was all true, but there was just so much more to it. So hopefully we'll kind of get some of that across in this. Yeah.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, we'll talk about it some, but I went to I've been to the King Center. I've been to the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis at the Lorraine Motel. And like I've thought I knew a lot about this stuff. But until we do our job like we do, I learned a lot more. So it's pretty great.
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Chapter 2: Why was Dr. King divided in his popularity during the 1960s?
So let's talk MLK, because he kind of skyrocketed to prominence from just the start. He became involved in the Montgomery bus boycott, which most people say kicked off the civil rights era in the United States, thanks to Rosa Parks. who we did an episode on, Rosa Parks' agent of change. You remember that one? That's right.
Yeah, for sure. And all this is just, you know, so we're setting the table kind of as a lead-in to where things were in April of 1968. Yes. So like you said, you know, 12-ish years earlier is when he really rose to prominence, and so much so that in February of 57— He was on the cover of Time magazine. Yeah.
So in 1963, he was Times Man of the Year after being on the cover just a handful of years earlier. And in 1964, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. So he was one of the most famous Americans by the early 1960s.
Yes. But one of the things you don't learn about these days as often is that he was, at that point, beginning to become widely criticized, not just by white Americans, many of whom have been criticizing him all along, but by black Americans as well. There was a real division in the civil rights movement.
between Martin Luther King's vision of his doctrine of nonviolence, which is basically saying like, hey, we're going to essentially do everything we can to show white Americans the problems that black Americans face just by being black in America. And no matter what they do to us, we're not going to fight back. And we're going to make an example of ourselves
that will hopefully set for them, and the ultimate goal was to integrate into America, to integrate black Americans into America so that there wasn't black America and white America. And that ran very much contrary to the other rival idea, which was Malcolm X's idea.
Yeah, and we haven't done one on Malcolm X yet, so maybe we should hit that up as a follow-up at some point.
For sure.
But, yes, this was, you know, sort of the other side of the coin. Malcolm X believed in black separatism. He was like this nonviolent approach isn't isn't working. And black people cannot integrate into white America. It's a racist society and it's just not possible. So we need.
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Chapter 3: What were the key events leading up to King's focus on Memphis?
Yeah, and again, that's totally contrary to King's doctrine of nonviolence, which Malcolm X considered criminal, as he put it, in the face of just being beaten by whites just for marching in the streets peacefully. And a big portion of the people who are critical of King and his nonviolence doctrine were the younger generations. They tended to lean more militantly, more in Malcolm X's direction.
And then in white America, with white Americans, He was basically never popular during his lifetime, at least with the majority of white Americans.
Yeah, I mean, and we know this because they did polls back then. There were Gallup polls that found in 1963 through 1966 each year found that fewer than 40 percent of white Americans viewed Martin Luther King Jr. favorably. So one of the other things that didn't help besides his work in civil rights was his stance on Vietnam and the war in Vietnam.
He was always against it, but really changed his stance in 1967, started being really, really vocal about it as far as publicly condemning the war. started leading anti-war marches, giving speeches against the war.
One very famous one was Beyond Vietnam, colon, A Time to Break the Silence, a speech he gave in New York City at Riverside Church in April, actually exactly one year, April 4th, 1967, before his murder. Mm-hmm. And it was a very controversial speech because it was his most adamant anti-war, anti-Vietnam speech yet. And he specifically called out America and the U.S.
military by sending a disproportionate number of, you know, kind of poor black American boys to fight that war.
Yeah. And so this was, it's really hard to oversee how controversial the speech was. Like he just stopped mincing words and came out and said everything that needed to be said. And so his alliance with Lyndon Bain Johnson, who was president at the time, was just shattered right then. LBJ stepped away from him, publicly broke with him. I think Laura helps us out with this.
She found 168 newspapers issued editorials denouncing him for that speech. So he was already not super popular with white Americans. His popularity was so-so with black Americans, and all Americans were now mad at him for his stance on Vietnam, or a ton of them were. And then one of the other things that really proved to be very difficult for him later in his life, later in his career—
was he shifted focus from strictly civil rights for black Americans to economic justice for poor Americans of all races. He created something called the Poor People's Campaign. came up with an economic bill of rights that is essentially pretty socialist, I mean, at its core. And he also basically said, like, this campaign is also going to be a shift, not just in focus, but in potency.
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Chapter 4: Why did the Memphis sanitation workers strike matter to Dr. King?
Chapter 5: How did Dr. King's stance on economic justice evolve?
He was always against it, but really changed his stance in 1967, started being really, really vocal about it as far as publicly condemning the war. started leading anti-war marches, giving speeches against the war.
One very famous one was Beyond Vietnam, colon, A Time to Break the Silence, a speech he gave in New York City at Riverside Church in April, actually exactly one year, April 4th, 1967, before his murder. Mm-hmm. And it was a very controversial speech because it was his most adamant anti-war, anti-Vietnam speech yet. And he specifically called out America and the U.S.
military by sending a disproportionate number of, you know, kind of poor black American boys to fight that war.
Yeah. And so this was, it's really hard to oversee how controversial the speech was. Like he just stopped mincing words and came out and said everything that needed to be said. And so his alliance with Lyndon Bain Johnson, who was president at the time, was just shattered right then. LBJ stepped away from him, publicly broke with him. I think Laura helps us out with this.
She found 168 newspapers issued editorials denouncing him for that speech. So he was already not super popular with white Americans. His popularity was so-so with black Americans, and all Americans were now mad at him for his stance on Vietnam, or a ton of them were. And then one of the other things that really proved to be very difficult for him later in his life, later in his career—
was he shifted focus from strictly civil rights for black Americans to economic justice for poor Americans of all races. He created something called the Poor People's Campaign. came up with an economic bill of rights that is essentially pretty socialist, I mean, at its core. And he also basically said, like, this campaign is also going to be a shift, not just in focus, but in potency.
Like, we're not going to be quite as peaceful as we were before. We're not going to go Malcolm X, like, full-on militant. But you can expect, you know, I think he famously said 15% to 16% more militancy.
Right. Yeah. And, you know, this ship. So he already had, you know, people coming at him from all sides. And now even within his own camp, they didn't love it either. His advisors and his staff didn't love this change of direction. So, you know, by the time April of 1968 rolls around. He's exhausted. He's tired. He's got people coming at him from every angle, even within his own camp.
And he just wasn't at his peak personally or with his career.
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Chapter 6: What was the significance of Dr. King's final speech?
Chapter 7: How did tension in Memphis escalate before Dr. King's assassination?
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Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok, you come across a video of a teenage girl, and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her.
And I was like, what? Like, it was him? I was like, oh my God.
It was shocking. It was very shocking. I'm Jen Swan. I'm a journalist in Los Angeles, and I've spent the past few years investigating the story behind the viral posts and the extraordinary events that followed. I started investing my time to get her justice.
They put out something on social media, so I'd get calls in the middle of the night all the time.
It's like, how do you think you're going to get away with something like this? Like, you killed somebody.
It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turned to social media to help track down their friend's killer. This is their story. This is my friend Daisy. Listen to My Friend Daisy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
So in the spring of 1968, Memphis, Tennessee, which had previously prided itself on its white community and black communities kind of, you know, fairly getting along, especially compared to some other places like places in Alabama, it was by this time in high tension as a town. And it was largely because of the Memphis sanitation workers' strike.
MLK became very interested in helping further the goals of the Memphis sanitation workers in their strike because he basically saw this as like, this is a perfect bridge between this transition from a focus just on civil rights to this larger focus on poor people of all colors. Because...
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