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South Toward Home. The flurry of Negro outrage that followed the murder in Memphis was conducted mostly by high-spirited youths—and was more than compensated for in solemn grief. As soon as he learned of the shooting, Atlanta's Mayor Ivan Allen Jr., one of the South's best-accredited white civil rights advocates, called Mrs. Coretta King—who only last January had undergone major surgery—and arranged a flight to Memphis. At the Atlanta terminal, Allen received word that King had died at the hospital, and he broke the news to the widow in the foyer of the ladies' rest room. Mrs. King returned to the family's modest home on the edge of Atlanta's Vine City, a middle-class Negro neighborhood, where the phone was already ringing with calls from across the country. On hand to help answer was Mrs. Eugene McCarthy, wife of the Minnesota Senator, who had long worked with Mrs. King in ecumenical church affairs. One caller was New York's Senator Robert Kennedy, who had come to King's aid in 1960 when he was in jail for his Atlanta sit-ins. R.F.K. promised to send a plane to transport the leader's body back to Atlanta.
To many whites, the subsequent mourning might have seemed unbearably emotional. In Memphis, before it was carried south toward home, King's body lay in state at the R. S. Lewis & Sons Funeral Home in an open bronze casket, the black suit tidily pressed, the wound in the throat now all but invisible. Many of those who filed past could not control their tears. Some kissed King's lips; others reverently touched his face. A few women threw their hands in the air and cried aloud in ululating agony. Mrs. King was a dry-eyed frieze of heartbreak. At the funeral this week, to be attended by many of the nation's and the world's great men, her composure will be hard to match.
Highest Priority. For all the sense of personal loss that pervaded the nation with his death, Martin Luther King's heritage of nonviolence seemed to have endured its architect's demise. Those who predicted that racial pacifism had passed with him were contradicted last week from Harlem to Watts, in Northern ghettos and Southern grit towns, where black leaders and youths in great numbers took to the tense streets and urged their brothers to "cool it for the Doc." Mississippi's Charles Evers curbed a Jackson rising with Kingly oratory. Even such hardcore militants as Harlem Mau Mau Leader Charles 37X Kenyatta and Los Angeles' Ron Karenga, the shaven-skulled boss of "US," manned sound trucks and passed resolutions calling for calm. Yet in the unhappy racial climate of the U.S. today, that forbearance could unravel with calamitous speed.
If the murder of Martin Luther King is not to further polarize the racism, both black and white—decried only last month by the President's riot commission—the nation will have to accept the need for new programs, new laws and new attitudes toward the Negro. As the commission concluded, "There can be no higher priority for national action and no higher claim on the nation's conscience."
*Lead, lead, lead me on to the Land, Oh, oh, oh, take my hand, Precious Lord, And lead your child on home.