Last Words: ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’ — Martin Luther King, Jr in Memphis

In 1967, after reaching the heights of social and political influence in 1963, after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and having been instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr watched his popular support fall precipitously away. He had reached the lowest point of his life on the public stage, with fully two-thirds of Americans disapproving of him.

King’s rousing vision of nonviolence — of racial coexistence within a community defined by mutuality, interdependence and love — seemed to be growing ever more remote following the landmark civil rights legislation. The Black Power movement was gaining influence, and in 1967 alone there had been 76 violent riots across major American cities.

Then, in April 1967, King denounced the US military involvement in Vietnam — a war that was wildly popular with the vast majority of Americans. For his supporters, it was strategically counterproductive to so connect the cause of civil rights with the goals of peace activists; while Barry Goldwater, the standard bearer of a kind of atavistic conservatism, characterised King’s words as treasonous.

King had also grown concerned that the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts represented, for many Americans, the end of their concern. This legislation had ushered in a kind of complacency that absolved them from any further inconvenience or moral concern.

Now that Black people had been granted equality de jure, what was needed was for them to be accorded equality de facto — especially in education, employment and housing, and not only in the South. Therefore, in the autumn of 1967 King launched what would be known as the Poor People’s Campaign, which was meant to culminate in a new march on Washington DC in the spring of 1968.

But disagreement with the ambitions and unruliness of the campaign from within, coupled with outright antipathy from the Johnson administration due to his opposition to the war in Vietnam, plunged King into a condition of deepening despair. Even as he gave himself with increasing desperation to the cause, and tried to rally support for the Poor People’s Campaign across the South, he suffered from a growing sense of futility. The constant threat of being killed did nothing to alleviate his depression. According to those closest to King, he was physically, emotionally, spiritually exhausted.

In March 1968, King received a request from Memphis, Tennessee, to offer his support for the 1,300 of the city’s sanitation workers, who had gone on strike for better pay, the ability to organise and improved working conditions after two of their number had been killed on the job. King accepted the invitation, believing that Memphis would mark the beginning of a nationwide campaign against poverty and housing discrimination.

In Memphis, he and his team met with reticence among their own number and political opposition to mass demonstrations — including a federal injunction obtained by the city prohibiting any demonstrations for ten days, after one such march had been derailed by violence. On the evening of 3 April, King was scheduled to speak at Bishop Charles Mason Temple. Because of severe storms, King believed turnout would be suppressed. He was, moreover, sick with the flu and asked Ralph Abernathy, whom he described as “the best friend that I have in the world”, to speak in his stead. But when Abernathy saw the church was filled to capacity, with more than 3,300 people packed into the building, they sent word back to King telling him the people needed to hear King speak, even if briefly.

Once King arrived, Abernathy gave an unusually long introduction — close to 30 minutes — in order to minimise the strain on King himself. King spoke without notes, and was evidently unprepared. He habitually started his speeches slowly, haltingly, in order to allow them to reach a series of rhetorical peaks. But his weariness on this occasion was evident from th