Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. led the American civil rights movement from a city bus boycott in 1955 to the eve of a poor people's march in 1968, when he was assassinated in Memphis at thirty-nine. James Baldwin met him at the start of that arc, profiled him for Harper's in 1961, and spent the rest of his own life writing in the shadow of the ending — King's murder is the last of the three deaths around which No Name in the Street is built.

Atlanta to Montgomery

King was born on 15 January 1929 in Atlanta, into the pulpit: his grandfather and father both pastored Ebenezer Baptist Church. He entered Morehouse College at fifteen, took a divinity degree at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, and finished a doctorate in theology at Boston University in 1955. In 1953 he married Coretta Scott, a music student from Alabama; they had four children. In 1954, at twenty-five, he took his first pulpit — Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, a few blocks from the Alabama state capitol.

Rosa Parks was arrested on 1 December 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat, and Montgomery's Black leadership chose the new minister to front the boycott. It lasted 381 days. King's house was bombed with his wife and infant daughter inside; he was jailed, indicted, and threatened daily; and in November 1956 the Supreme Court's Browder v. Gayle ruling desegregated the buses. He was twenty-seven, and the movement had its voice.

The movement years

In 1957 King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and began carrying the Montgomery method — disciplined, publicized nonviolence — across the South. The decade that followed ran through a Harlem department store in 1958, where a deranged woman stabbed him with a letter opener; through Albany, Georgia, where the method stalled; and into Birmingham in the spring of 1963, where it broke segregation's back on television. Jailed there, he wrote the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in the margins of a newspaper, answering white clergymen who had counseled patience.

On 28 August 1963 he closed the March on Washington before some 250,000 people with "I Have a Dream." Time named him Man of the Year; in December 1964, at thirty-five, he became the youngest man yet awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Selma campaign followed in 1965 — he led the completed march to Montgomery after state troopers had beaten the first one back at the Edmund Pettus Bridge — and the Voting Rights Act was signed that August. Two acts of Congress in two years, each with a campaign of his behind it.

The last three years

The final years were harder and less celebrated. The Chicago campaign of 1966 took the movement north against housing segregation and met mobs as vicious as any in Mississippi. On 4 April 1967 at Riverside Church he came out against the Vietnam War — "Beyond Vietnam" cost him the White House's ear and much of the press — and he began organizing a Poor People's Campaign to bring an army of the poor to Washington. In the spring of 1968 he detoured to Memphis to support 1,300 striking sanitation workers. On 3 April he told a church audience he had been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land. It was his last speech.

The assassination

At 6:01 the next evening, 4 April 1968, King was standing on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel when a single rifle bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. He was pronounced dead at St. Joseph's Hospital an hour later. Riots broke out in more than a hundred American cities. James Earl Ray, an escaped convict, pleaded guilty in March 1969 and was sentenced to ninety-nine years; he recanted days later and spent the rest of his life seeking the trial he had waived.

The funeral in Atlanta on 9 April moved from Ebenezer Baptist Church through the streets behind a mule-drawn farm wagon. King is buried beside the church, at what is now the King Center, and the federal holiday bearing his name was first observed in 1986.

King and James Baldwin

Baldwin met King in Atlanta in 1957, on his first reporting trip through the South, and heard him preach at Dexter Avenue in Montgomery. Harper's commissioned a profile, and "The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King" ran in February 1961 — a former boy preacher's account of a young minister carrying a movement, now collected in The Price of the Ticket. Baldwin stood in the crowd at the March on Washington in 1963, though he was not among the day's speakers.

On 4 April 1968 Baldwin was at a rented house in Palm Springs, working on the Malcolm X screenplay that became One Day When I Was Lost, when the news came from Memphis. He flew to Atlanta for the funeral and wrote afterward that it was the silence of the crowd outside Ebenezer that undid him. The three murders — Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, King — became the architecture of No Name in the Street, and King is the last of the three men of Remember This House, the unfinished manuscript that became the documentary I Am Not Your Negro.