By Burt Ross
I have written before about how I was surprised that when I hosted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Harvard back in 1965, he was totally without protection from the time I picked him up at the airport in the morning to the time I dropped him off late at night at the train station. Just a little over three years later, he lay dead on the balcony floor of a Memphis hotel.
In his prophetic speech delivered less than 24 hours before his death, Dr. King said, “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life—longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now.” He never saw his 40th birthday. We in this country celebrate the birthdays of only four people—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Jesus Christ. Dr. King did not need longevity to make his mark.
Even though President Kennedy had been assassinated just four years earlier, we still tended to view political violence as an aberration, but when Senator Kennedy was killed just a few months after Dr. King was shot dead, our generation lost its innocence for all time.
I just finished reading an extremely well-written book, “Hellhound On His Trail” by Hampton Sides. It examines in detail the lives of Dr. King and James Earl Ray, his assassin, in the year leading up to Dr. King’s murder.
I discovered that James Earl Jones had escaped prison a year prior to his killing Dr. King, and even more astounding was the fact that after Jones was finally captured, convicted, and sent to prison for life, he once again escaped, and only after an exhaustive manhunt was finally returned to incarceration.