On April 9, 1968, a seven-and-a-half-hour series of funeral rites took place in Atlanta honoring Martin Luther King Jr., who’d been assassinated five days earlier. This was the largest funeral ever staged for a private U.S. citizen. Broadcast live, the funeral was viewed by more than 120 million people across the United States and made international newspaper headlines. Images from the funeral dominated magazine covers.
Out of the massive coverage, news photographers and television videographers created a few particularly striking images, and a half-dozen of the most notable of those have shaped public memory: King’s colleagues standing on a Memphis motel balcony, gesturing toward the source of a gun’s blast; his widow, serene behind a black veil on the cover of Life magazine; his young daughter, cradled in her mother’s lap, gazing directly at the camera with deeply sad eyes; thousands of mourners marching through the streets of Atlanta behind a mule-drawn wagon bearing his coffin; white politicians (notably those with the last name Kennedy) paying their respects; and black residents of inner-city slums responding to the news of his death with angry riots.
The goal of Burial for a King is to explore what happened off-camera, at the edges of those massive crowd scenes before and after the photographers framed their shots. The events of King’s death and its aftermath are dramatic, but they did not all occur spontaneously, nor did they unfold precisely in the dramatic sequence that we see in documentaries and tribute issues of newspapers and magazines. Many of the images were the result of events orchestrated by King’s family, inner circle of colleagues, and the civic and business power brokers of his hometown.
In addition to being carefully staged, the events that commemorated King’s death contain an element of paradox. The rites conducted in his honor essentially amounted to a state funeral—for a private citizen. Hundreds of national politicians came to pay tribute—to a man who’d been actively protesting the country’s military and economic policies at the time he was killed. The funeral included one of the largest marches of the 1960s—in the absence of a man known for leading the decade’s massive protests. And the events honored a man who honed the philosophy of nonviolent civil disobedience—against a national backdrop of raging urban violence triggered by reaction to his death.
King’s assassination took place in the context of racial conflict, war protest, economic tension, urban unrest, and political maneuvering. In the days immediately following King’s death, the country went through even more upheaval as riots broke out in more than 110 cities. By the end of the week, some 57,500 National Guard troops had been dispatched to cities around the country, the largest force mobilized for any domestic situation. Dozens of people died, thousands of buildings burned, and millions of dollars in property was destroyed or looted.
In the midst of a national wave of urban violence, King’s hometown of Atlanta proved to be a notable exception. Television viewers who saw flaming city blocks in Chicago and Detroit were shown a peaceful mass of people marching behind King’s coffin in downtown Atlanta. The bitter contention of presidential politics was contrasted with the sight of candidates Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Eugene McCarthy, and Hubert Humphrey seated in the wooden pews of Ebenezer Baptist Church while King was being eulogized. The funeral events took on an almost surreal quality as news photographers captured images of King’s widow and children alongside celebrities ranging from Marlon Brando and Sammy Davis Jr. to Diana Ross and Sidney Poitier. Stokely Carmichael made a high-profile high-energy cameo appearance, while the men in King’s inner circle, especially his appointed successor, seemed worn and shaken.
At least 150,000 people walked through the streets of Atlanta behind King’s coffin as it was transported by mule-drawn wagon to the campus of Morehouse College. Television cameras captured the grief-stricken faces of King’s close colleagues: Jesse Jackson wearing the same jacket he’d had on when giving interviews the night King died; Hosea Williams in the denim overalls of the Poor People’s Campaign; Ralph Abernathy haggard and with sunken eyes. Robert, Jackie, Ethel, and Ted Kennedy were spotted at the church, and cameras caught Rabbi Abraham Heschel, the antiwar protestor who’d also marched at Selma. At Morehouse, Mahalia Jackson performed, Benjamin Mays preached, and hordes of onlookers crammed onto walls and balconies. “We Shall Overcome” was sung endlessly. Police, FBI, and Secret Service officers were everywhere. While all this was going on, King’s killer was still on the run.
Copyright Rebecca Burns, 2010