In 1968, I was 26 years old. We were just average folks with little children, trying to make a living. I lived in mid Shelby County in a nice, big house on a big lot, with a big pecan tree in the yard. It was a typical 3 bedroom house, with a garage, a kitchen, and everything else you would expect. Memphis stood out as being one of the cleanest cities in the United States. Crime was relatively low, and kids could walk to and from school without fear. Memphis was a nice place to live. I was the mother of two young children, ages four and seven, and I worked at Allstate Insurance. Every day, I would wake up, get the children dressed and ready for school, one of which was at Harding, go to work, come home, cook dinner, and help the children with homework, play with the baby, and things like that. It was a great time to be alive.
I thought Dr. King was a great orator. His speeches were fine, but i do not think that rioting and marching is the right way to solve an issue, and I could not understand his involvement in that, especially as he was supposedly from the clergy.
Because he was supposed to be a peaceful preacher, I felt that the black community did him a grave injustice by allowing the violence that erupted prior to his coming here. Of course, I don’t want to see anyone murdered. I do not believe that Martin Luther King was assassinated, he was just murdered, which is a terrible thing. I was never wholly convinced, and still am not, that James Earl Ray was solely responsible for the crime. Actually, I thought he got help from someone within Dr. King’s party, because how would Ray know that King was going to go out on the balcony? James Earl Ray was supposedly in a separate building with a high powered rifle to shoot him, and unless he was told by someone that King would be there that night and that his tendency would be to go out on the balcony, it just seems strange to me that it would have occurred without some inside help.
I do not remember exactly what I was doing when Martin Luther King was killed, but I know from when it was that I would have been at work. Of course, it was immediately on the phone that he had been shot. There had already been a lot of unrest in the city because of some disagreements with the sanitation workers, which caused marches with the “I am a man” signs and things, but that was not going anywhere. When he was found dead, it did not directly affect the area in which we lived, because it was more of a rural area. In fact, it did not even affect the area in which I worked, which was East Memphis. Around downtown and a lot of the North Memphis area, however, there was rioting and shooting and looting and things of that sort. Most people in my circle of friends did not understand how looting and rioting would help anything. There wasn’t but one fatality, but several were injured. I remember seeing the police in the riot gear on T.V., but I don’t think that the unrest got much farther than Union Avenue. I stayed home the night that King was shot, and the next day was given as a work holiday, because they did not want people out on the streets.
After he died, people were much more hostile. Interestingly though, just a few days after his death, the sanitation strike was settled. He was here to help them to assist in their march against the city of Memphis, to get what they wanted in a settlement from the city, with wage hike and working conditions and so forth. Perhaps on some level, it had some affect on that, perhaps it didn’t, I simply don’t know, but it was just a few days after he had died.