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PHILIP ROTH: Sense of foreboding and fear.   

…I was virtually the only customer eating an early dinner at Ballato's Restaurant on Houston Street when the news came over the radio that Martin Luther King had been shot. The owner, my friend the late John Ballato, a courtly gentleman, Sicilian-born and at one time a syndicalist in New York's Little Italy, brought his fist down violently on the table where we had been sitting and talking together. "Those sons of bitches!" John said angrily, his eyes filling with tears. "Those dogs!"I went to the phone and called May [Aldridge], who was working late at the Quaker Center. We agreed to meet back at her apartment, where we later sat up on the bed together and watched again and again the TV footage from Memphis, which never stopped being terrible or true no matter how many times it was played. I phoned friends. I phoned my father. "Newark's going to go up," he said, "you'll see." He said ti several times and of course he was right. Watching the television clips of King's great public moments, May sporadically began to cry. I didn't—for all his force, King, whom I had never met, had always struck me as personally remote, almost featureless, his moral self-conception on the scale of a mountain rather than of a man, and so what his death provoked in me wasn't tears of pity and grief but a sense of foreboding and fear: an unspeakable crime was going to cause unimaginable social disaster. (New York) 

---from The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography, by Philip Roth (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988) 

TIM RUSSERT:  Special assembly and Mass          

…on the evening of April 4…Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Dad took it very hard. South Buffalo wasn't known for its racial diversity, but Dad had made a point of teaching us that there was no place for prejudice in our hearts. The "N" word was frequently heard on the streets, but it was forbidden to be uttered in our house. … …….

The murder of King came as an enormous blow to our country. At Canisius [High School] we had a special assembly and a Mass for the slain leader. Riots broke out in many cities, including Buffalo, and when I took the bus from school to my afternoon job at St. Michael's [answering phones, handing out Mass cards, and counting collection money], the area was swarming with police. Fortunately, the church was untouched.

---from Big Russ & Me, by Tim Russert (Miramax/Hyperion, 2004)

CYBILL SHEPHERD: Schoolgirl in Memphis

 

In the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. brought his Poor People's Campaign to Memphis in support of the mostly black striking sanitation workers. Hundreds of men who hauled garbage and dug sewers gathered at a rally to hear him say,  "It is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages," and strikers wearing sandwich boards that read  i am a man were maced and tear-gassed on Main Street. Local news reports portrayed King as an irresponsible agitator who had goaded the rabble to violence. Shops were vandalized, and we heard that the train from Chicago to New Orleans passed through Memphis without stopping. ...

I was standing with friends on the colonnaded veranda of my high school in the late afternoon of April 4, just weeks before out graduation, when we heard that Dr. King had been shot, and within a few hours, the world way beyond Memphis knew that he was dead. The Lorraine Motel was a few miles away, too far to hear the firecracker blast of the assassin's bullet or to see Dr. King's friends trying to scrape his blood from the balcony, but too close for comfort to my family and a large part of the city's white population. My father made sure his luger was loaded, and Moma called to say that Da-Dee had moved a shotgun down to the front hall.

There was a pall over the city for weeks, a sense of fear and chaos, and stringent early curfews and the intensified presence of militia. ...

---from Cybill Disobedience, by Cybill Shepherd with Aime Lee Ball (HarperCollins, 2000)

REV. AL SHARPTON: Why mother cried.  

…Dr. King was killed. We were watching television that Thursday night when it came across the screen that he had been shot in Memphis. My mother started crying. I didn't understand why she was so upset, crying like he was a member of our family. I'd met Dr. King and admired him, but I didn't feel the personal connection. I asked my mother why she was taking it so hard, and she said that I would had had to grow up in Alabama, have had to spend my life going to the back of the bus, had had to travel miles holding my water when I needed a rest room while passing the facilities I was forbidden to use, if I wanted to understand the meaning and importance of Martin Luther King. That has always stayed with me. (New York)

----from Go and Tell Pharaoh: The Autobiography of the Reverend Al Sharpton, by Al Sharpton with Anthony Walton (Doubleday, 1996)

ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, Jr.: Increased hostility 

April 5 [1968] 

Martin Luther King murdered: what in hell is happening to this country? And I am not cheered by the reactions. A taxi driver last night, a postman bringing me a certified letter this morning—both took a line that the Negroes were the great threat, and the whites had to prepare to deal with them. JFK's death produced a wave of shame and guilt, but King's death,  as Alexandra [wife] said this morning, seems only to have increased hostility.  

---from Journals 1952-2000, by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (The Penguin Press, 2007)

Compiled by Toronto editor Dana Cook.

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OTHER NOTABLES REMEMBER APRIL 4, 1968:

Angela Davis, Hillary Clinton, Barbara Bush, Dizzy Gillespie, Rosemary Clooney

Anita Hill, Larry Hagman, Billy Graham, Michael Jackson and Roy Jenkins.

Coretta Scott King, Vernon Jordan, Miriam Makeba, Peggy Noonan, Robert Novak and Frank Rich

Philip Roth, Tim Russert, Cybill Shepherd, Al Sharpton, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Nina Simone, David Suzuki, Mary Wilson and Andrew Young

Hank Aaron, Ralph Abernathy, Joan Baez, Ben Bradlee and James Brown

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