Sweet Auburn.
At one time, Fortune magazine hailed it as "the richest Negro street in the world." But, on April 9, 1968, that community in Atlanta was the saddest on the globe. Bernard Lafayette, a civil rights pioneer, knows first hand. He was running late on that Tuesday in April. By the time he reached the steps of his destination, acclaimed actor Marlon Brando was exiting Ebenezer Baptist Church.
Then Lafayette saw Harry Belafonte, then Sidney Poitier, then Sammy Davis Jr, then James Baldwin, the internationally renowned author.
The funeral for Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had just ended; mourners were filing out.
And Lafayette missed it.
Because of grief and overzealousness by others.
On the 50th remembrance of King's assassination, Lafayette vividly recalled the day King was laid to rest in Atlanta's Sweet Auburn community, known for "the best and the brightest" in professional black America because of its vast array of doctors, lawyers, dentists, bankers, restaurateurs, insurance managers, etc., ... and, of course, Dr. King.
On the way to a packed Ebenezer, Lafayette had to walk past the national headquarters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights organization led by the transformational King, who five days earlier was shot by a sniper, a white man named James Earl Ray.
However, on this day, Lafayette faced a tricky conundrum, as he noticed some mourners went rummaging. "You had so many people grieving over Dr. King's death," Lafayette, a top lieutenant in the SCLC, said. "They just wanted something in their hands to remember Dr. King by. I had to be gentle with them; I understood how they felt. But they had to stop taking things _- the pictures off the walls, the ornaments on the shelves and papers off the desks."
The charismatic King was revered by a mosaic of demographic groups _- especially black folk _- because he was at the forefront of the civil rights movement for 13 years, fighting for unalienable rights and against the shackles of forced segregation.
That's why King often pleaded to the U.S. establishment in speeches around the country, "All we say to America is, 'Be true to what you said on paper."'
In one of the most horrific moments in world history, King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, while standing on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tenn.
"I didn't know that some people had that much hatred for Dr. King," key SCLC leader Dorothy Cotton said. "I guess some people didn't want someone to move the culture forward, move the world forward."
Cotton, 88, was the highest-ranking woman in King's SCLC, as director of the group's Citizenship Education Program.
After King's death, Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, King's right-hand man, immediately assumed command of the SCLC.
And therefore King's desk.
King and Abernathy were relatively short in height, about 5-foot-6 to 5-8. They both wore elevator shoes to appear taller during certain public functions. And they would slip off those shoes and place them under their desks.
Except ...
"These people probably thought they were getting Dr. King's shoes," said the 78-year-old Lafayette of the pilferers, "but they were really Abernathy's shoes."
Lafayette's intervention at the SCLC building, of course, caused him to miss a moving service officiated by Abernathy inside Ebenezer.
Abernathy's opening remarks honored King as a "leader to heal the white man's sickness and the black man's slavery." Abernathy called King a rare icon because he was "willing to die but not willing to kill."
When King was killed, many idealistic Americans _- black and white _- asked, in exasperation, what can possibly go wrong next?
Rita Schwerner Bender, now 76, was a white woman from New York who journeyed to Mississippi to help black folk register to vote in 1964 during "Freedom Summer." She explained her feelings in 1968 upon hearing about King's death: "I remember the sense of not again; I was thinking about all of the people who were part of the movement who had been beaten or killed through the years."
The most enduring scene from King's funeral was "The Photo." It was a black-and-white image of King's deeply saddened widow, a veiled Coretta Scott King, clutching her fidgety 5-year-old daughter, Bernice, in her arms. The photographer was Ebony magazine's Moneta Sleet, who subsequently won a Pulitzer Prize for that picture.
The backstory, according to the Newseum in Washington, D.C.: The original media pool for King's funeral didn't include any black photographers. When Coretta Scott King was apprised of that omission, she let it be known to all relevant parties: If Sleet wasn't allowed into the church, there would be no photographers, period.
The most poignant segment of the funeral was the eulogy.
Who would be the speaker for such a historic task?
Dr. King himself, as per the request of Coretta Scott King.
King's voice boomed over the church loud-speakers in a recording of a speech he delivered on Feb. 4, 1968. The end of the speech, titled "Drum Major Instinct," focused on an introspective King imagining his own funeral.
One of King's key passages:
"Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize _ that isn't important.
"I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others ... "
After the formal funeral at Ebenezer, King's casket was placed in a sharecropper's wooden wagon. It was painted pale green. Two mules representing poverty _- one named Ada and the other Belle and guided by SCLC members _- pulled the wagon the three-mile stretch to Morehouse College, King's alma mater, for a public memorial service.
Though Atlanta maintained an uneasy calm on the day of King's funeral, race riots swirled at night in other cities.
Washington was one of the hardest hit; at least 1,000 buildings were burned and/or looted, mostly by young black males. William Duvall, 88, operated a seven-chair barber shop at the time in northeast Washington, which featured several Jewish-owned food, clothing and appliance businesses in predominantly black neighborhoods.
"Some of those better stores had good-paying jobs for black men; some of them armed themselves with pistols and shotguns to protect the stores," Duvall, who is black, said.
Those scenes in April '68 wholly represented the paradox of the times: The nation's Prince of Peace died violently, followed by even more turmoil and tumult in retaliation for his assassination. So, 50 years later, we still remember King's buoyant message:
As King said in his prophetic eulogy, "Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that's all I want to say."
