On April 4, 1968, the United States was shaken to its core by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the country’s preeminent civil rights leader. In desperation and rage, more than 100 U.S. cities erupted in arson, looting, and violence. In a display of deep respect for King’s commitment to nonviolent protest, his hometown, Atlanta, remained calm, and it was to that city that tens of thousands came to pay their respects to the fallen leader on April 9, when his funeral rites were observed. In the days before the commemoration, King’s body had lain in state at Spelman College. The day of commemoration began with a private service at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King had been co-pastor with his father. Some 1,300 mourners were sandwiched inside the church, while tens of thousands of others listened to the service over loudspeakers outside, and millions watched on television. When the private service was over, King’s casket was carried through the crowd to a waiting mule-drawn wagon to be pulled through the city’s streets to Morehouse College, where a public commemoration was held. En route as many as 100,000 people joined the solemn procession. Among the mourners in the church and on the streets was an astounding assemblage of prominent civil rights leaders, politicians, public servants, and celebrities from the worlds of arts, entertainment, and sports. Here are some them.
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Politicians, Public Servants, and Diplomats
The array of politicians present included the two men who would represent the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively, in the 1968 presidential election: then Vice Pres. Hubert Humphrey and the future president Richard Nixon. Other presidential candidates in attendance included Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (the victim of an assassin just some two months later), Sen. Eugene McCarthy, New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, and Michigan Gov. George Romney. Also there were U.S. Senators Jacob Javits, Edward Brooke, Walter Mondale, and Ted Kennedy, as well as Pres. John F. Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline Kennedy. Pres. Lyndon Johnson’s cabinet was represented by Attorney General Ramsey Clark and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Robert Weaver. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (who had argued Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka before the Supreme Court as a lawyer) was there, and so were UN official Ralph Bunche and the first two African Americans to be elected mayor of a major U.S. city—Carl Stokes of Cleveland and Richard Hatcher of Gary, Indiana. Most prominent among a host of foreign ambassadors and dignitaries was Haile Selassie I, the ruler of Ethiopia.
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Civil Rights Leaders
In addition to King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, who would become an important civil rights leader in her own right (her funeral, in 2006, would be attended by Pres. George W. Bush and former U.S. presidents Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton), King’s essential collaborators from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were present: Ralph David Abernathy accompanied Mrs. King during the procession, and Andrew Young, Hosea Williams, and Jesse Jackson walked near King’s casket. John Lewis, who had played a key role in the March on Washington and the Selma March, and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), who succeeded Lewis as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), were there too, as were James Farmer, leader of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and organizer of the Freedom Rides, and Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat initiated the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
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Movie Stars
The 40th Academy Awards ceremony was scheduled to be held the night before King’s funeral, but Sammy Davis, Jr., and a number of other celebrities who were scheduled to take part indicated that they would not come unless the ceremony was postponed. Prominent among that group—which also included Louis Armstrong, Diahann Carroll, and Rod Steiger—was Sidney Poitier, the star of two of the films nominated for Best Picture that year, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, both of which revolved around race-related issues. The Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences took the unprecedented step of postponing the Oscars. Davis, Poitier, and Carroll all attended the ceremonies in Atlanta, as did Harry Belafonte (a close associate of the King family), Eartha Kitt, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Marlon Brando, Bill Cosby, Paul Newman, and comedian Dick Gregory.
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Musicians
Motown was well represented in Atlanta by its president, Berry Gordy, Jr., Diana Ross and the Supremes, and Stevie Wonder. (The latter would play an instrumental role in the creation of Martin Luther King, Jr., Day as a national holiday, largely through his song “Happy Birthday,” which took those who opposed the holiday to task:”You know it doesn’t make much sense / There ought to be a law against / Anyone who takes offense / At a day in your celebration.”) Also on hand were jazz great Dizzie Gillespie (who played “Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen” during the ceremonies), “Queen of Soul” Aretha Franklin, and King’s favorite singer, Mahalia Jackson, who sang the gospel standard “Precious Lord, Take My Hand" at the public ceremony. James Brown, the “Godfather of Soul,” was not there, but, by allowing his concert in Boston the night after King’s assassination to be shown on local public television, he helped keep the lid on post-shooting violence in Boston.
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Writers and Poets
At least three prominent African American literary figures were firsthand witnesses to King’s funeral ceremonies. Poet and novelist Alice Walker was pregnant when she and her husband traveled from Jackson, Mississippi, to walk in the procession behind King’s coffin. The experience so drained her emotionally that she miscarried. In the essay that he wrote in Esquire in April 1972 about attending the ceremony in Atlanta, novelist James Baldwin reflected on emerging from the private service at Ebenezer Baptist Church and being brought to tears by the sight of black people standing in silence everywhere he looked. Nikki Giovanni, who was a 24-year-old student when she joined the procession, found inspiration in the experience for her poem The Funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Athletes
One the eve of the funeral ceremony, there was uncertainty about whether the first game of the playoff series between the Boston Celtics and the Philadelphia 76ers of the National Basketball Association would be postponed. It wasn’t, and its two larger-than-life African American stars, Philadelphia’s mostly apolitical Wilt Chamberlain and Boston’s radicalized Bill Russell, met in the latest chapter of their ongoing titanic struggle and then attended the ceremonies in Atlanta together. Among the other famous athletes on hand were onetime heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson, football great and activist Jim Brown, and baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson, who broke the color line in the national pastime.