King's Last March

Not since the funeral of John F. Kennedy had the nation so deeply involved itself in mourning. Streets customarily thronged with busy city traffic echoed eerily and emptily under sunny skies; banks and department stores, their windows unlit, were closed all or most of the day; schools in many cities were shuttered in tribute. As is their wont in time of national tragedy, the American people turned to their television sets. An estimated 120 million watched a funeral march that lasted more than three hours, twice as long as that for President Kennedy.

Instead of the rolling rifle volleys and guttural drums that accompanied the President's obsequies, Martin Luther King's funeral in Atlanta was counterpointed by resonant spirituals and the elegiac toll of mourning bells. The difference was essentially that between black and white, Baptist and Catholic, soul and suzerainty. There were the predictable and publicized responses--the Academy Awards were postponed so that Negro entertainers could attend the funeral; baseball's major leagues likewise delayed their opening day--and a degree of political grandstanding. But the tributes rendered last week to King nonetheless added up to a moment in the national life that will not soon be forgotten.

The march King led in death through Atlanta proved grander--both in attendance and dedication to his ideals--than any he had led in life. Fully 200,000 Americans, black and white, walked the sun-beaten streets of the Peach State's capital in temperatures that reached 82DEG F. By 10:30 a.m., the nominal starting time, more than 35,000 Negroes and whites from as far away as Los Angeles and Boston had packed the side streets around the red brick Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue, where King had served as co-pastor with his father for eight years.

Majestic Wake. It was a humbling experience for some of the 60 U.S. Congressmen who attended the funeral, and found themselves forced to wait outside. "I'm Fred Schwengel," announced the Iowa Representative. "What's your business?" came the curious reply. Illinois' Senator Charles Percy, Maine's Edmund Muskie and Texas' Ralph Yarborough had to stay outside the church. Auto Workers Boss Walter Reuther was shoved brusquely aside with the rest when a burly Negro marched through crying: "Make way for Wilt, everybody, let Wilt come through." Into the church, his faintly smiling face high in the breeze, stalked Basketball Star Wilt ('The Stilt") Chamberlain, 7 ft. 1 in., and invited. Football's Jim Brown, Baseball's Jackie Robinson and Olympic Decathlon Star Rafer Johnson followed in The Stilt's majestic wake.

No such indignities beset such guests as Singer Harry Belafonte, who had brought Mrs. King back from Memphis on his chartered plane, and sat in a front row, as did Black Comedian Dick Gregory. Before the service, Richard Nixon leaned over to whisper hello to Jacqueline Kennedy, black-draped in the pew ahead, and received an icy stare in return. Such soulful spirituals as My Heavenly Father, Watch Over Me and If I Can Help Somebody were rendered so poignantly by Contralto Mary Gurley and Mrs. Jimmie Thomas, a soprano, of the Ebenezer Church Choir that Singer Mahalia Jackson, the misty mistress of mourning, began to weep silently in her pew.

Dark Decorum. That mood was reinforced by the dignity of King's closest associates. His children--with the exception of five-year-old Bernice Albertine, who toyed uncertainly with her Topsy-twisted hairdo and stared wonderingly at her mother--were models of decorum. Elder Daughter Yolanda, 12, whom King called "Yoki," played a coy game of blindman's buff with her handkerchief at one point, and Son Martin III, 10, wept briefly, his tears illuminated by the bright TV lights. Dr. Ralph Abernathy, 42, King's chosen successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, wore scuffed, thong-laced "marching boots" under his red-slashed ministerial robes.

The only jarring note at the church service came when Coretta King unexpectedly requested that a tape of her husband's last sermon delivered in the church be played in memoriam. The mournful mood of the moment was shattered by King's unquenchable rhetoric. "If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don't want a long funeral," bellowed the voice on the tape. "Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize. That isn't important. I'd like somebody to mention that Martin Luther King Junior tried to love somebody. That I did try to feed the hungry, that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked, that I tried to love and serve humanity."

How Long & How Well. As the cherry-wood casket was removed from beneath the stained-glass gaze of a white Christ and an electrically illuminated cross, Black Power Advocate Stokely Carmichael, wearing black suit, dark blue Mao shirt, shades and zippered suede diddybop boots, darted down to Coretta King and began a whispered conversation. Mrs. King listened for several minutes and, after sipping briefly from a Coca-Cola glass of iced water, dismissed him. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, on hand as the President's special representative, stared tight-lipped from his seat less than a coffin-length away.

Then followed a four-mile march to the campus of Morehouse College, one of countless processions that Americans undertook last week in King's honor. On a sharecropper's cart drawn by a brace of mules called Ada and Agnes, King's coffin, followed by his Atlanta mourners, passed the helmeted, machine-gun-armed cops of Governor Lester Maddox at the Georgia Statehouse. Maddox had refused to close schools on the funeral day and later protested the lowering of the flag to half-staff. The procession terminated at the Negro college where King graduated at the age of 19.

There, on a quadrangle crowded with 100,000 mourners, Morehouse President Emeritus Benjamin E. Mays, 72, eulogized the man whose eloquence he had expected to ease his own passage. The two ministers had agreed that the one who survived would deliver the last verdict on the other. "Too bad, you say, Martin Luther King Jr. died so young," preached Mays. "Jesus died at 33, Joan of Arc at 19, Byron and Burns at 36. And Martin Luther King Jr. at 39. It isn't how long but how well."

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