Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever (6 page)

On April 3, 1968, King gave his last speech. The setting was the Mason Temple in Memphis, a vast concrete building built between 1940 and 1945. At dusk, a violent storm hit the city. Kyles remembered sirens going off, warning of possible tornadoes, and lightning filling the sky. The rain was so hard that King decided nobody would be out on such a night and decided to stay back at the Lorraine Hotel, sending Kyles and Abernathy in his stead. When the leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference reached the Mason Temple, though, they found a crowd of three thousand waiting for King, and only King, to speak. Abernathy called the civil rights leader back at the hotel, telling him to hurry over. The people would only be satisfied by his presence.

For what became such a memorable, often-quoted speech, King initially got off to a rocky start that evening. The winds outside buffeted the shutters of the Mason Temple, causing loud creaks to echo through the vast two-level interior, followed by loud bangs of the shutters slamming back against the walls. With almost every outburst, King would flinch, sometimes glancing over his shoulder. “Martin had been under so many death threats at the time,” said Kyles, who asked a custodian to secure the shutters, quieting them. “His plane out of Atlanta had been under guard.”

Speaking without notes, King told his listeners that there would be “difficult days ahead.” But he soon added that such things didn’t “matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop.”

With that King had found his rhythm and the speech’s cadence began to accelerate and flow through the crowd that was now hanging on his every word.

“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life,” King told them. “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.”

That last line got Kyles’s attention. Years later, he believes that King “smoothed it out” for everyone in attendance that evening. “In looking back at that time, I realize he knew that his time on earth was growing short,” Kyles said. “He said, ‘I may not get there with you’ when he knew full well that he would not. He talked more about death that night than he had in a long time.... That evening at the Mason Temple he somehow found a way to preach his way past those fears, the fear of dying.”

King’s closing flourish brought the crowd to its feet: “But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. 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.”

To loud applause, King stepped down from the pulpit and collapsed into Abernathy’s arms.

The next afternoon, King and his entourage gathered at the Lorraine Hotel. During the day, Andrew Young, another member of King’s inner circle, had been in court, seeing to it that an injunction was lifted so another march could be held in Memphis. The route was planned to go by the downtown State Theater, where the marquee boasted Elvis Presley’s newest film,
Stay Away, Joe
. When Young arrived at the room that King and Abernathy shared, Room 306, he found a lighthearted King, who was so happy the march could now go ahead that he started a pillow fight with Young and others. “It was sort of like after you make a touchdown and everybody piles on everybody,” Young said. “It was just throwing pillows at each other, piling atop each other and laughing.”

Dinner that evening was at Kyles’s home. He had just bought a new house nearby and King’s group gathered at the Lorraine to drive over. Dinner was scheduled for five, but earlier in the afternoon King had called to the Kyles’s residence and talked with another family member, who told him that dinner was at six. So it made no difference when Kyles arrived to drive King and Abernathy over. The civil rights leader believed he had an extra hour and, as was his wont, he wasn’t in any hurry.

Kyles waited with King and Abernathy in Room 306 as they dressed. Any time Kyles tried to hurry things along, King told him he had been told dinner was at six. Several times Kyles began to argue the point—after all the dinner was at his house, he would know—and King simply replied, “Six.”

“I was frustrated at the time,” Kyles said, “because I wanted to get going. But in looking back on it, I realize what a blessing it was. I was able to spend that last hour of his life with him.”

About six that evening, King and Kyles went out on to the balcony that still overlooks a small parking lot. Back in the room Abernathy was finishing shaving. As King waited for his friend, he lingered on the balcony outside the room, resting his arms on the balcony rail. Kyles, Young, and others had noticed that King appeared more at peace, even teasing coworkers, after his speech at the Mason Temple. Back in the room, Abernathy was about ready. King called out to Jesse Jackson and others in the parking lot and Kyles began to walk down the stairs to his car. Finally, as Young later remembered, the group was prepared to “have us a dinner.”

A moment later, a blast echoed through the Lorraine Hotel courtyard. Kyles and Abernathy found King lying on the balcony landing, the right side of his face ripped open and his head beginning to rest in a halo of blood. He had been stuck down by a .30–06 caliber bullet.

Kyles ran back inside Room 306 and tried to call an ambulance—an attempt that was stymied when the hotel switchboard went dead because the operator had raced into the courtyard to see what had happened. Amid the chaos, Abernathy attempted to speak with King but received no answer. Kyles remembered there was so much blood. He found a sheet to cover his friend’s body.

King died hours later and across the country cities began to burn in protest, with more than one hundred American cities soon erupting in flame. In Washington, D.C., smoke could be seen only a few blocks from the White House. Just days before, President Lyndon Johnson had announced that he wouldn’t run for reelection. The move seemingly gained him traction for ongoing efforts to end the war in Vietnam and settling things on the domestic front. Yet as the reports of rioting came in, the president realized that any political momentum he had gained in recent days was now lost forever.

In Indianapolis, presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was about to speak from the back of a flatbed truck to a predominately black crowd at a campaign stop when he received the news that King had been assassinated. In what would later be looked back on as the second of two extraordinary speeches in as many days, and a stunning example of the healing power that words can offer, Kennedy told his audience about King’s death. For most of them it was the first they had heard of the tragic news.

After asking many in the crowd to lower their signs, Kennedy said, “I have some very sad news for all of you and I think some sad news for all our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world. And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.”

A gasp ran through the crowd, followed by shouts of “No!” and “Black Power!” Indianapolis, like so many cities across the nation, seemed ready to come apart at the seams. But here Kennedy, speaking only from a few scribbled notes, and beginning in a trembling, halting voice, slowly brought the people back around and somehow held them together.

“Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings,” Kennedy said. “He died in the cause of that effort . . . ”

Listening to the speech decades later, you can hear the crowd soon become still, ready to hear the candidate out. Speaking from the heart, Kennedy told the crowd how he “had a member of my family killed”—a reference to his brother, of course, who had been assassinated less than five years before.

“But we have to make an effort in the United States,” the younger Kennedy continued, “we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times.

“My favorite poem, my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote: ‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget/ falls drop by drop upon the heart,/ until, in our own despair,/ against our will,/ comes wisdom / through the awful grace of God.”

A few minutes later, Kennedy closed by telling the crowd, “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”

Indianapolis was one of the few cities that didn’t burn that evening in April 1968, or in the days ahead.

Memphis didn’t burn that night, either. Hours after King’s death, Kyles, Abernathy, Young and many of their group were back at the Lorraine Hotel, counseling their followers not to fall into violence. “As you can imagine, it was a very, very difficult evening,” Kyles said. “I have never felt so sad, so angry, so lonely in all of my life. But we found a way to carry on. We knew it was important to carry on Dr. King’s message to the world. We decided that night that you can kill the dreamer, but you cannot kill the dream.”

Back at Kyle’s home, the home-cooked food that had been laid out for that evening’s dinner still sat on the table. Kyles’s youngest son, Dwain, couldn’t bring himself to eat any of it. He made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead.

The next morning, in St. Petersburg, Florida, the Cardinals’ spring training camp was like most places in America: the King assassination the major topic of conversation. Gibson was devastated by the news and got into a heated exchange with his catcher, Tim McCarver. After telling McCarver that he couldn’t possibly comprehend what it was like to be a black person on this morning, and that it was impossible for whites, no matter how well intentioned, to totally overcome prejudice, Gibson turned his back on his batterymate.

To McCarver’s credit, he didn’t let the situation go. Undoubtedly, he realized that the last person Gibson wanted to hear from at that moment was a white man, who had grown up in Memphis of all places. Yet McCarver told Gibson that it was possible for people to change. If anything, he was Exhibit A. Back when McCarver was new to the team, Gibson and Curt Flood had ribbed him about his reluctance to share a sip of soda offered by a black man. McCarver had seen a lot of truth in their teasing. Perhaps that’s why he wouldn’t let things drop after King’s death. In talking with Gibson, McCarver found himself in “the unfamiliar position of arguing that the races were equal and that we were all the same.”

Years later, McCarver wrote that “Bob and I reached a meeting of the minds that morning. That was the kind of talk we often had on the Cardinals.”

Of course, baseball wasn’t the only sport in America reeling after King’s assassination. The civil rights leader’s death occurred just before the opening of the National Basketball Association’s Eastern Division Finals between the Philadelphia 76ers and the Boston Celtics. The year before, Philadelphia had eliminated the Celtics, who had won nine titles in the past ten seasons. In 1968, the 76ers continued their newfound dominance, winning a league-best sixty-two games and finishing eight games ahead of Boston in the Eastern Division. Philadelphia center Wilt Chamberlain was the league’s MVP, averaging an astounding 24.3 points and 23.8 rebounds per game.

“Everywhere we went, especially in Philadelphia, they had a chant, ‘Boston’s Dead. Boston’s Dead.’ The dynasty is over,” recalled John Havlicek, the Celtics’ Hall of Fame forward. “You’d hear it at the airport when you got off the plane in Philadelphia. The cab drivers would be on you, riding you a little. Everywhere you went, the fans were real vocal.”

After King’s death, Chamberlain and Bill Russell, the Celtics’ player-coach and the only African American coach in U.S. sports that year, met before Game One of that best-of-seven series. The decision was made to play on, with the second contest delayed from Sunday to the following Wednesday. Not that it seemed to matter, at least for Boston’s chances.

Even though the Celtics took the opener, the 76ers proceeded to run off with the series, winning three consecutive victories to take a 3–1 lead. Indeed, the chant appeared to be correct: it was the end of Boston’s epic run. Even Celtics’ general manager Red Auerbach sensed the series was perhaps over. Before the next game in Philadelphia, he nodded at Russell, saying, “There are some people who have already forgotten how great that man really was.”

Despite being down three games to one, Russell and the Celtics battled back to deadlock the series. The Celtics’ Larry Siegfried remembered Russell as a man of few words. But when the player-coach spoke, he was “direct and precise.” When the team fell behind to Wilt Chamberlain and the 76ers, Russell simply told his team, “We’ve come so far and I don’t want to go home now.”

The Celtics rallied to take Game Five in Philadelphia, 122–104, and Game Six back home in Boston, 114–106.

Before the 1967–1968 regular season began, Russell had gathered together a half-dozen of the team’s veterans during an exhibition tour in Puerto Rico. “He wanted our help—he wanted to tap that knowledge,” John Havlicek later told George Plimpton of
Sports Illustrated
. “Of course he told us that his would be the final decision. It helped a lot. He told us to criticize him if we felt he warranted it.”