In April 1968 King was in Memphis, supporting a two-month-old strike by 1,300 garbage men, most of them black. Newspapers had taunted him for staying at a plush Holiday Inn, paying $29 a night there, so he moved to a $13-a-night room in the Negro-owned Lorraine Motel. Before dinner on April 4 he was leaning on the second-floor iron railing outside room number 306 talking to fellow workers below. In a nondescript rooming house across the street a sniper crouched with a scope-sighted 30.06 Remington pump rifle. He fired one shot. It penetrated King’s neck and exploded against his jaw, cutting his spinal column. He fell away from the rail and against the motel’s wall, his hands rigid, reaching for his head.
Martin Luther King had been the greatest prophet of nonviolence since Gandhi, and it was the final irony of his life that the end of it should touch off the worst outburst of arson, looting, and criminal activity in the nation’s history. In all, 168 cities and towns were stricken. Washington was the worst hit. An incredible 711 fires were set there. “Get your gun,” Stokely Carmichael told blacks, and many did. There were ten deaths in the capital alone, one of them a white man who was dragged from his car and stabbed. President Johnson ordered the flag at half-mast on all federal buildings, the first time this had been done for a Negro, but the terror continued. Buildings within a few blocks of the White House were put to the torch. Nationwide, 2,600 fires were set, 2,600 people were arrested and 21,270 injured. To restore order 55,000 soldiers were required—ten times the number of marines defending Khe Sanh.
Accompanied by the music of spirituals and the tolling of church bells, Martin Luther King’s coffin was transported to the grave on an old farm cart drawn by two mules. An estimated 120 million Americans watched the funeral march on television. There were between 50,000 and 100,000 marchers, including most of the nation’s leaders, among them Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, Nelson Rockefeller, and Hubert Humphrey. Governor Lester Maddox of Georgia did not attend, although the funeral was in his state. Maddox refused to close the schools and protested lowering the flag to half-staff. But the man he refused to honor could never again be hurt by bigotry. The words of his epitaph, hewn in his tomb of Georgia marble, were from an old slave hymn; he had used them to close his oration at the Washington march five years before:
Free at last, free at last;
Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.
John Willard, the name the sniper had used in renting the room from which he fired the shot, was an alias for Eric Starvo Galt, which also turned out to be an alias. Witnesses at the scene of the assassination had seen him race off in a white Mustang bearing Alabama license plates and Mexican tourist stickers. The car was found abandoned in Atlanta, Georgia. The FBI learned that he had bought it for $2,000—cash—using the Galt name. A fugitive now, sought by police around the world, he fled to Toronto. There he adopted a new alias, Ramon George Sneyd, and acquired a Canadian passport by the only procedure necessary—swearing that was his name. Buying a $345 excursion ticket to Europe, he spent two days in Portugal before flying to London. There he vanished, no doubt he thought for good.
But he had made one irrevocable error. His fingerprints had been found in the Memphis rooming house. After a fifteen-day search in the 53,000 prints of wanted men in the Department of Justice, the FBI identified him as James Earl Ray. He had a long record of convictions for forgery, car theft, and armed robbery. In April 1967 Ray had escaped from the Missouri state penitentiary. Now Canadian Mounties picked up his trail from the FBI, and customs officials throughout Europe were alerted to be on the lookout for Ramon G. Sneyd. On June 8 he was picked up at London’s Heathrow Airport. Extradited and handcuffed, he was flown back wearing a bulletproof vest, his legs encased in armored trousers; no one wanted another Oswald. He was transported to the Memphis jail in a six-and-a-half-ton truck. Heavy steel plates blocked his cell window. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ninety-nine years. The source of his money was never discovered.
***
Almost two months to the day after Martin Luther King was struck down, and the same week that Ray was arrested, another act of mindless violence cut down the front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. “An assassin never changed the course of history,” Robert Kennedy had said after his brother’s death in Dallas, but it wasn’t true; that one had, and now his did, too. He had beaten Eugene McCarthy in the Indiana primary, 42 percent to 27, and in Nebraska 51 to 31. On this day, Tuesday, June 4, 1968, he had defeated both Hubert Humphrey—in Humphrey’s native state, South Dakota—and McCarthy in the biggest of all the primaries, California.
Kennedy had spent that morning on a beach near Los Angeles with six of his ten children and his wife Ethel, who was pregnant with their eleventh. He followed election reports in suite 512 of the city’s Ambassador Hotel. At midnight he took the elevator down to his headquarters in the hotel’s Embassy Room and spoke briefly to the elated volunteers there. At the end he said: “So my thanks to all of you and it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there.” Friends and members of his immediate entourage mimicked his accent, saying: “And it’s on to The Factory,” that being the name of the popular discotheque where they were going to celebrate with him. But first he had to say a few words in the press room. The crowd was so dense between the rostrum and the Embassy Room’s entrance that one member of the party suggested that they leave by a back passageway. Bill Barry, the former FBI agent who was Kennedy’s bodyguard, objected. He didn’t like the idea. But the senator said, “It’s all right,” and they stepped into a hot, smelly corridor. Kennedy paused there to shake hands with a seventeen-year-old busboy, Jesus Perez, and answer a question about Humphrey: “It just goes back to the struggle for it—”
He never finished. A Pasadena reporter saw an arm and a gun come out of a knot of spectators. The assassin propped his right elbow on a serving counter and fired at Kennedy, just four feet away. He pumped off all eight shots in the snub-nosed Iver-Johnson revolver before Rafer Johnson, an Olympic champion and a Kennedy friend, could knock the pistol out of his hand. Six men lay bleeding on the floor of the hall, five with slight injuries. The sixth, Kennedy, was wounded mortally. One of the two bullets which had hit him was relatively harmless, but the other had pierced his skull and entered his brain. Ethel knelt beside him. Bobby asked for water. Then he asked, “Is everybody safe?” The busboy gave him a crucifix. Bobby’s fingers held the beads, and Ethel prayed, and Roosevelt Grier, the three-hundred-pound Los Angeles Rams’ lineman, held the slight, dark assassin in a bear hug.
“Why did you do it?” one member of the party yelled. The killer screamed, “I can explain! Let me explain!” Jesse Unruh, leader of California Democrats, shouted at him, “Why him? Why him?” The gunman answered: “I did it for my country.” That seemed preposterous. Then the truth began to emerge. In his psychotic way he really believed he was being patriotic. To everyone else in Los Angeles this had been the day of the California primary, but to Kennedy’s murderer it was the first anniversary of the Israeli-Arab six-day war. His name was Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, he was a native of Jordan, and he hated Israel, which Kennedy admired. On the surface that appeared to be the only motive the swarthy little Arab had.
The dying Kennedy was first taken to the Central Receiving Hospital and then to the larger Good Samaritan Hospital. Kept alive by adrenalin injections and by cardiac massage, he underwent surgery almost at once. But it was hopeless. At 1:44, after a few flutterings of life, he died. Lyndon Johnson denounced the country’s “insane traffic” in guns. Then he sent a presidential jet to bring the body home, and once more the Kennedys and their friends flew eastward with a coffin in a Boeing 707. The United Nations lowered its flag to half-mast, an unprecedented tribute to one who had never been a chief of state. When the plane arrived in New York ten thousand people had already lined up outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral to say goodbye. Candles were placed at each corner of the catafalque, and friends took turns standing vigil. Ted Kennedy, the surviving Kennedy brother, acted as paterfam
ilias, delivering the eulogy in a trembling voice.
Richard Cardinal Cushing presided. Andy Williams sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”; the choir, the Hallelujah Chorus. Then the motorcade proceeded to Pennsylvania Station, where a special train waited, drawn by two black engines. Its destination was Washington, but the crowds standing by the tracks along the way were so great that the trip took eight hours. By then it was night in the capital. With only streetlamps as illumination, the cavalcade wound past the city’s huge dark government buildings and across the Potomac, to Arlington. There Bob’s grave waited, a dark scar beneath a magnolia tree a few feet from his brother’s tombstone. After a brief, simple service there the flag was folded in a triangle and presented to Ethel. The band played:
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee!
And crown thy good with brotherhood,
From sea to shining sea!
Between January 1 and June 15 of 1968 there were 221 major demonstrations, involving nearly 39,000 students, on 101 American campuses. Buildings were dynamited, college presidents and deans were roughed up, obscenities were painted on walls and shouted at policemen, sometimes by well-bred daughters of good families at the ivied Seven Sister colleges for women. Among the institutions of higher learning disrupted by student violence during those months were Temple in Philadelphia, the State University of New York in Buffalo, Oberlin, Princeton, Duke, Chicago’s Roosevelt University, Southern Illinois University, Boston University, Marquette, Tufts, Stanford, Colgate, Howard, the University of Oregon, Northwestern, Ohio State, Barnard, Mills College, the University of Connecticut, Trinity, Tuskegee, the University of Chicago, Bowie State in Maryland, UCLA, the University of Miami—
And, of course, Columbia.
Until the third week after the assassination of Martin Luther King the newsiest event on the Morningside Heights campus was its reversal of a decision, made the year before, to accept a gift of royalties from the leasing of a new cigarette filter invented by Robert Strickman, an industrial chemist. That had brought much unwelcome publicity, but the Columbia uprising of April 1968 was much worse. It was the biggest campus confrontation since the Berkeley turmoil four years earlier, and in a way it was more significant, for it marked the emergence of the Students for a Democratic Society. Until then SDS was known to the public as merely one more campus political student organization. After eight years it had 5,500 members, chapters at 200 colleges, and a characteristic student distaste for centralization. In the mid-Sixties SDS had become committed to militancy, however. Its leaders were avowed enemies of oppression, racism, and imperialism, all three of them as defined by SDS. It held that American universities had become corrupted by them, and that Columbia was especially wicked.
A college marching song popular among undergraduates on Morningside Heights in merrier days went:
Who owns New York?
Who owns New York?
Why, we own New York!
Why, we own New York!
Who?
C-O-L-U-M-B-I-A!
The SDS reminded fellow students that in fact the university did own 230 million dollars’ worth of real estate in Manhattan, including the land under Rockefeller Center, and that much of it was occupied by deteriorating Harlem tenements nearby, making Columbia, in effect, a big slumlord. Six years earlier the university had unwittingly provided the fuel for an eventual explosion by leasing from the city an additional 2.1 acres of nearby Morningside Heights Park’s thirty acres. The idea was to build a magnificent 11.6-million-dollar gymnasium there. Negroes living in the adjacent, bottle-strewn Harlem slum would be welcome to enjoy a free gym and swimming pool on the ground floor; the university’s department of physical education would use the upper floors. Since the neighborhood was at present infested with prostitutes and drug addicts, with one of the highest crime rates in the city, Columbia’s trustees assumed that every resident with a spark of civic pride would embrace the project. They were wrong.
Protesting tenants called the plan “a land grab,” and “a desecration of a public park.” At that point the university’s administration blundered. An architect’s conception of the gym was published showing an elaborate, expensive entrance facing the campus and a small, plain door facing Harlem. Leaders of the community group denounced the “separate but unequal facilities,” the chairman of the Harlem CORE angrily charged that “This community is being raped,” and one hundred and fifty demonstrators shouting “Gym Crow must go!” marched to the gymnasium site and tore down a section of fence. White participants included Mark Rudd, the chairman of Columbia’s SDS, and as many followers as he had been able to muster.
Rudd was the kind of New Leftist that J. Edgar Hoover dreamed about. Hoover had just described the SDS as “a militant youth group which receives support from the Communist Party, and which in turn supports Communist objectives and tactics.” Columbia students said sarcastically, “The Communists can’t take over SDS—they can’t find it.” It did in fact have few members there. However, their penchant for outrageous words and for outrages themselves gave them, in a phrase of the time, a high profile. Rudd was particularly noisy. On the day that the balloon went up over Morningside Heights he had just returned from a three-week visit to Castro’s Cuba. As if to confirm Hoover, he praised it as an “extremely humanistic society.”
His opposite number was Columbia’s president, sixty-four-year-old Grayson Kirk, aloof, frosty, and a poor administrator. Later a commission headed by Archibald Cox would conclude that under Kirk the administration conveyed “an attitude of authoritarianism and invited mistrust.” Kirk had been unresponsive earlier in April when SDS collected 1,500 signatures to a petition demanding that Columbia withdraw from the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), an organization of researchers working for the Pentagon on twelve campuses. SDS charged that IDA projects were “aimed at the oppression of the people in Vietnam” and included “riot equipment to commit mass genocide against black people” in the United States.
Leaving the downed fence at the putative gym site that Tuesday, Rudd and his band marched on ivy-covered Hamilton Hall, the headquarters of Columbia College. There, to their surprise, they were met by a conciliatory acting dean, who said that although he had “no intention of meeting any demands under a situation such as this,” both the gym and IDA membership were negotiable issues. SDS wasn’t interested in that now. Having tasted victory, the insurgents retained momentum by imprisoning the acting dean and two other officials for twenty-six hours. The siege of Columbia had begun.
During the first night the white students discovered something else: black power. The sixty Negro students among them demanded that the whites leave. SDS, they said, wasn’t militant enough for them. One version had it that the blacks were carrying guns and planned a shoot-out with policemen. Their white soul brothers didn’t think the gym was as bad as that. Some of them felt hurt. “Why should they run this thing?” one of them asked. “There’s enough division and polarization in this country as it is.” In any event, at 6 A.M. on the second day, Wednesday, April 24, Rudd announced that the whites weren’t wanted in Hamilton Hall. Leaving it to the blacks, he and his honkies took over Low Library, where they put up a notice: “Liberated Area. Be Free to Join Us.” President Kirk’s office was in the library. They broke into it and ransacked it, photographing letters and documents, throwing others away, smoking his cigars, and drinking his sherry. And they had just begun. To reporters they said that they believed they were right in disrupting the university. They cited principles established at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. Columbia’s administration under Kirk, they said, was as bad as the Nazis.
There were seven hundred of them now. On Thursday a hundred seized Fayerweather Hall, the social science building. Another hundred took over Avery Hall, the architecture center, and on Friday a fifth hall was invaded. Over the balcony of that one they hung a banner: “Rudd Hall, Liberated Zone No. 5.” They set up a command post and mimeographed pr
oclamations. One demanded amnesty for all of them, but Kirk refused, saying that failure to take disciplinary action would “destroy the whole fabric of the university community.” For a while it looked as though another group of students, the athletes, would evict the rebels. (“If this is a barbarian society,” a wrestler said, “then it’s survival of the fittest—and we’re the fittest.”) Kirk wanted no more violence, and he restrained them. He also made a concession: all work on the gymnasium was suspended. Not enough, the demonstrators shouted from the halls; they demanded secession from IDA and a lot of other things they had just thought up. Runners brought them food, blankets, and jars of vaseline. They wanted the vaseline because they had heard that it was protection from Mace. They expected Mace, fired by police.
They were right about the police coming. When the first detachment arrived on Morningside Heights, thirty members of Columbia’s junior faculty barred the entrance to Low Hall. It was a deadlock. But then the university’s trustees voted “to affirmatively direct” Kirk “to maintain the ultimate disciplinary power over the conduct of students.” Thereupon he made what he later called “the most painful” decision of his life, to clear the buildings with force, if necessary—a thousand policemen in flying wedges. Hamilton Hall came first. The Negro students were docile. Black lawyers were there to represent them, and black police officers supervised the operation. After the Negroes left quietly, the building was found to be tidy.
The buildings occupied by whites were another matter. Whatever the provocation, the cops there clubbed, kicked, and punched the students, hurling them down concrete stairways. The police had assured spectators—there were several thousand of them—that they would be safe if they remained behind police barricades, but when it became clear that the spectators were prostudent, they, too were charged and beaten. All in all, 698 were arrested. Rudd and 72 other students were suspended for a year. Cox was asked to investigate the disorders. After twenty-one days of testimony from seventy-nine witnesses, he and four colleagues issued a 222-page report which was highly critical of both the university administration and the police. While holding no brief for the student ringleaders, the report found that their behavior “was in no way commensurate with the [police] brutality,” which had “caused violence on a harrowing scale.” Kirk and his staff had “regularly put the students at the bottom” of their priorities, the commission found, concluding that the gym and the IDA issue had in fact been mere surface manifestations of deep student dissatisfaction with the Vietnam War and racism in the United States.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 170