FORT COLLINS COLORADOAN z SPECIAL SUBSCRIBER SECTION
SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2018 z THE USA TODAY NETWORK
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50 years gone REFLECTING ON THE LEGACY OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. arrives at the Memphis airport April 3, 1968, with aides, from left, Andrew Young, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy and Bernard Lee. WILLIAM LEAPTROTT/COURTESY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS LIBRARIES
Mark Russell Executive Editor | The Commercial Appeal, Memphis
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ifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Memphis, Tennessee, to rally the city’s striking sanitation workers as they fought for better pay and working conditions after two co-workers
were crushed to death in the belly of a malfunctioning garbage truck. z King’s support of the strikers became a launching point for his Poor People’s Campaign, set for later that spring in Washington, D.C. z But on April 4, 1968, King was assassinated — shot by a sniper while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Many believe the struggle for civil rights died that day, too. z These stories highlight King’s legacy and trace the lives of people touched by the iconic leader. With them, we offer a window into the meaning and purpose of King as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death.
Above: King, seated with aide Jesse Jackson, arrives at the Mason Temple in Memphis on April 3, 1968. KEN ROSS/MEMPHIS PRESS-SCIMITAR
National Guardsmen stand watch outside a warehouse fire in Memphis on April 6, 1968. King’s assassination touched off rioting nationwide. SAM MELHORN/THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
Left: The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson and others stand on the Lorraine Motel balcony and point in the direction of gunshots that killed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who lies at their feet. JOSEPH LOUW/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY
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A strike that changed history Black sanitation workers remember their fight for dignity that brought King to Memphis in 1968
Sanitation worker Otto Carnes participates in a march on March 29, 1968. The city was taking no chances on a repeat of the previous day’s violence. National Guardsmen in armored personnel carriers equipped with 50-caliber machine guns escorted marchers. BARNEY SELLERS/THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
Tonyaa Weathersbee The Commercial Appeal | USA TODAY NETWORK - Tennessee
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hen Elmore Nickleberry went to collect garbage in Memphis, Tennessee, in the 1960s, he had to tolerate two kinds of vermin. z One was the maggots and ooze that flowed onto his back and shoulders from the old,
leaky containers he carried on his head. The other was his white bosses who believed that his health and dignity weren’t worth the money to buy new tubs. z “I toted that tub on my head,” recalled Nickleberry, who joined the 1968 sanitation strike that drew Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis that March — the city where he would be killed a month later helping them fight for their civil rights. “Lots of times, I had to use the same tub, and stuff used to come down on you. I couldn’t ride the bus home because I stunk so bad. … I had to take a shower as soon as I got home.” Nickleberry wasn’t alone. “When we went home, we couldn’t even go in the house,” said the Rev. Leslie Moore, a former Memphis sanitation worker. “We’d pull our shirts off, our shoes off, and maggots would fall out. … “Making those backyard pickups, toting that garbage on your head, sometimes our On next page
“I remember that violent march, during that time, they started throwing stuff, and the police started whupping us. I got hit hard.” Elmore Nickleberry
A Memphis sanitation employee for 63 years who was involved in the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike
Elmore Nickleberry, 86, has worked for the Memphis sanitation department for 63 years but may retire this year. YALONDA M. JAMES/THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
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The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, right, and Bishop Julian Smith, left, flank Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during a civil rights march in Memphis on March 28, 1968. JACK THORNELL/AP
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tub would get a hole in it, and many times that water and maggots would be falling all down on us, but (sanitation boss) Dutch Goodman didn’t give you no tub until he got ready.” Yet for Nickleberry, 86, and Moore, 70, two surviving sanitation workers who participated in the strike, fighting to change those conditions required them to summon their strength as men. Their strength, slated to be memorialized in the interactive I AM A MAN Plaza next to Clayborn Temple in Memphis, inspired the formation of public employee unions in Memphis. Bill Lucy, the highest-ranking black official in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said the strike fueled a “new kind of respect and a new kind of recognition for sanitation workers” across the country. Such a legacy is one that the surviving striking workers are well pleased with. “I want you to know, before I go any further, that I didn’t regret nary a minute of being a sanitation worker,” Moore said. “… I hung in there, and so you see those signs that we were wearing when we were marching up and down Main Street, ‘I Am A Man’? Well, we had some real men back then ... .” The slogan “I Am A Man” was the statement that many of the 1,300 striking sanitation workers wore as placards as they marched down Beale Street on March 28, 1968 — a march that began peacefully but wound up being disrupted by looters, violence and tear gas.
A statement of black masculinity It was Lucy who coined the strikers’ slogan, “I Am A Man,” at a union meeting — one in which he took aim at Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb’s condescending language aimed at the black sanitation workers, wrote Steve Estes, author of
the 2000 article “I Am a Man! Race, Masculinity and the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike,” in the journal Labor History. “The mayor still referred to black Memphians as his Negroes when he spoke to the press, and observers characterized his vision of race relations as reminiscent of a plantation mentality,” Estes wrote. “Strike leaders focused much of their rhetoric on Loeb’s paternalism and denial of the strikers’ manhood.”
“We’d pull our shirts off, our shoes off, and maggots would fall out…” Rev. Leslie Moore
Former Memphis sanitation worker
Dignity vs. sustenance To get a deeper look at what the striking sanitation workers experienced while trying to assert their dignity and manhood during a time when African-Americans weren’t viewed as worthy of either, The Commercial Appeal interviewed five of the surviving strikers, including Nickleberry and Moore. The times were difficult — especially since after enduring all those indignities, many of them had to get an extra job. “If I can remember right, I believe I was making a dollar and three cents an hour,” said H.B. Crockett. “The pay was low, I can tell you that,” said Baxter Leach. “I made seventy-something dollars every three weeks. … I also did mechanic work, and I picked cotton. My wife was working, and we kept food — although sometimes we didn’t have enough.” There came a turning point, though. Some say that came on Feb. 1, 1968. On that rainy day two black sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were sitting in the back of one of the decrepit garbage trucks to keep dry when an electrical short in the wiring caused the compressor to start running. It crushed them to death. The city further added to the tragedy and indignity by offering Cole and Walker’s families only a month’s worth of their pay and $500 for funeral expenses.
The Rev. Leslie Moore, 70, participated in the 1968 sanitation strike, which pushed Memphis into the forefront of the civil rights struggle. YALONDA M. JAMES/THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
But for Crockett and Moore, the turning point was wider. “When they told us they were going to give us five cents (a raise),” Crockett said. “Five cents. Nothing but five cents.” “We decided that we went through so much, we decided to get together and not take no more,” Moore said. “We didn’t care what they were going to do to us, because we wanted things to get better. … So, we stood up. We had a union director, and they had a lot of power, and they weren’t scared of the white folks.” Leach, however, remembers how everyone wasn’t on board. “(Union organizer) T.O. Jones in 1968 said we were going to march,” Leach said. “They told me, ‘How you’re going to march? You don’t have no On next page
Online Hear the strikers
A nonviolent march down Beale Street led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on March 28, 1968, turned to chaos after youths broke windows and looting spread. Police responded with force. JACK THORNELL/AP
Listen to the men who participated in the 1968 sanitation workers strike as they share their thoughts on the action and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s involvement at memne.ws/ 2IfHgYu
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The strike commences On Feb. 12, after failing to reach an agreement with the city, the workers went on strike. Two days later, newspapers reported that some 10,000 pounds of garbage had piled up. Loeb was continually at odds with the sanitation workers, issuing back-to-work ultimatums. That month, the sanitation workers began picketing, attracting not just the support of union organizers, but of the NAACP and local black ministers, who called on their congregations to boycott and to march. Students also demonstrated, and the sanitation workers’ resiliency continued to build. During their first march, on Feb. 23, the sanitation workers were attacked by police wielding batons and mace. But at their March 28 demonstration, one that was led by King and members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, some strike supporters began to smash windows, which led the police to retaliate with mace, tear gas and gunfire. Hundreds were arrested, and a 16-year-old, Larry Payne, was fatally shot. “I remember that violent march, during that time, they started throwing stuff, and the police started whupping us,” Nickleberry said. “I got hit hard.” Sanitation workers began picketing in February 1968, attracting the support of union organizers, the NAACP and local black ministers. JAMES R. REID/MEMPHIS PRESS-SCIMITAR
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contract?’ I said, ‘That’s why we’re marching, so that we can get a contract.’ “That night I cried, because it hurt me so bad that they couldn’t see that we were trying to get something better for ourselves and our families. So, some of them come with me, some of them didn’t. Some of them went back to work. I got fired.” Armed with anger and determination, the sanitation workers began a rebellion that would inspire downtrodden workers everywhere.
The aftermath When that demonstration was met with resistance, and when King’s life was snuffed out seven days later, it left some of the strikers in despair. “(It told me) that they didn’t care anything about blacks,” Ozell Ueal said. “It (King’s assassination) was tough.” But, the workers said, King’s influence was ultimately felt by everyone. “Everybody says he came here for the sanitation workers,” Leach said. “I say he came here for everybody. He came for white and black, because if it wasn’t for Martin Luther King, some of these white folks wouldn’t have the jobs they have now, and some of the black folks wouldn’t have the jobs they have now.” To settle the strike, in 1968 the workers chose Social Security benefits instead of a pension. But with other unions forming, the city ulti-
“I’d like to be remembered as helping somebody, because when we started there wasn’t no unions, no school unions, no fire or police unions.” Ozell Ueal
Former sanitation worker
Former sanitation worker Baxter Leach, 78, also did mechanic work and picked cotton to help make ends meet. YALONDA M. JAMES/THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
“That night I cried, because it hurt me so bad that they couldn’t see that we were trying to get something better for ourselves and our families.” Baxter Leach
Former sanitation worker
mately increased pension benefits. That created a gap between what the sanitation retirees were earning in comparison to other city workers. To right that wrong, on July 11, 2017, the city agreed to pay 26 surviving strikers $70,000 in grants. “It could be better,” said Nickleberry, who is still working 63 years after joining the sanitation department.
Their place in history So, how would they like to be remembered? “I’d like to be remembered as helping somebody, because when we started there wasn’t no unions, no school unions, no fire or police unions,” Ueal said. The sanitation workers said as tough as their job was, they have no regrets. That’s because they fought to not allow their lives to be viewed as disposable as the trash they were picking up — because while it took a lot of strength to endure those indignities, it took more strength to end them. And now, everyone knows: They are men.
The tragic tally of March 28, 1968: one killed, 62 injured. John Gaston Hospital was crowded with victims of the violence that erupted during a march led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on behalf of striking sanitation workers. BARNEY SELLERS/THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
Ozell Ueal, 78, is a former Memphis sanitation worker. “(It told me) that they didn’t care anything about blacks,” Ueal said about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. YALONDA M. JAMES/THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
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A song for a King In a chance encounter, a college choir from Texas performed ‘Alleluia’ for a weary King after midnight on a March day in Memphis. Just two weeks later, the civil rights icon would be dead and the students’ lives forever changed.
MERRY ECCLES/USA TODAY NETWORK
Marc Perrusquia The Commercial Appeal | USA TODAY NETWORK - Tennessee
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e looked so tired. Could it really be Dr. King? z Tom Jones had seen Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. many times before, on flickering television screens and in newspaper photos from far-off places like Birmingham, Montgomery and Selma, civil rights battlegrounds that had made the charismatic leader a bigger-than-life icon. But now
here he was, slumped in a folding chair, an arm’s reach away: Eyes puffy. Necktie undone. His face so lined, so weary — so very human. Starstruck, Jones, then a 20-year-old college sophomore, could think of nothing to say. “Dr. King,’’ he said finally, reaching into his pocket. “Will you autograph my dollar bill?’’ Jones couldn’t believe he was here — or that he was about to sing for the man who changed America, the man he so admired. “It was way late in the evening,’’ says Jones, now 70, recalling in a wistful, scratchy voice the sensations of that night 50 years ago — the haze of cigarette smoke roiling through the room, the bright lights, the raw energy that buzzed around King. As a featured bass-baritone vocalist for the heralded a cappella concert choir at Prairie View A&M, a historically black college near Houston, Jones was used to performing on big stages. He and the traveling coed Prairie View choir had wowed audiences with breathtaking shows sung in coattails and ballroom gowns: operatic choruses by Verdi, Puccini and Mozart, stirring spirituals, and Broadway tunes like “I Got Plenty of Nothing” from “Porgy and Bess.”
Yet the biggest performance of their lives came here, after midnight, dressed in blue jeans and bathrobes in a chance encounter in a cramped meeting room at Memphis’ Lorraine Motel, where King would be shot and killed just days later. “We walked in and there he was,’’ bass singer Bob Duckens recalls of that fateful night when the choir crossed paths with King while rambling across America on its annual spring concert tour. “Man, I’m telling you. Everybody screamed and hollered and ran and shook his hand. And hugged him.’’ The improbable scene unfolds on a long-forgotten video shot by a documentary film crew: There is King, sitting in a folding chair, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy beside him. Through clouds of cigarette smoke, other famous faces can be seen, too — James Bevel, Bill Rutherford and various other members of King’s staff. Here, in this living room-sized area above the lobby of the Lorraine, the Southern Christian Leadership ConOn next page
Online Watch the choir perform for King Go behind the scenes in exclusive USA TODAY NETWORK footage to see and hear the choir perform “Alleluia” for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. days before he was assassinated at memne.ws/ 2IfHgYu.
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Tom Jones, a former member of the Prairie View A&M choir, visits a vacant building he hopes to convert into a home for homeless veterans in Houston. In 1968, Jones and the choir sang for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel two weeks before King’s assassination. PHOTOS BY YALONDA M. JAMES/THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
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ference executives had been making plans for the Poor People’s Campaign, King’s last great crusade, the one he’d never live to see. The civil rights crusaders took a break to hear the choir. “When we began to sing,’’ Jones says as he watches a digital version of the film, “I could see the expression on Dr. King’s face. It was as if he had just been transformed — transported into another dimension. “You feel like you did something to make his life a little bit more palatable,’’ Jones says with satisfaction. “You brought some joy right into his face.’’ The obscure film clip lasts just a minute and 48 seconds. Yet it captures the hopes and fears of a generation. Like countless other young adults who witnessed the tumult of April 4, 1968, the choir members saw King’s assassination as a pivotal moment for their generation. After graduation, they would venture into a divided nation, finding King’s dream only partially realized — a smattering of social and economic progress blunted by old-school racism and heartbreaking setbacks.
‘Faith on a collision course with opportunity’ There’s Larry White, singing tenor in the front. Like too many African-American men he would die way too young — only 38 — after a long illness. Nearby is Ernestine Ware Odom, a gifted soprano. She sidestepped the blatant discrimination awaiting many peers who began teaching in the nation’s early integrated schools, trying her hand at banking before courageously drifting back to her “calling” — music education. Duckens, too, felt a belated call to service. He would find success as a corporate executive, giving up his lucrative career to become a preacher ministering to inmates and ex-convicts. Inspired by King’s message, he teams with a former death row inmate, waging a personal war on mass incarceration, a concern many consider one of the pressing civil rights issues of our time. There, too, is Jones, a skinny kid in a plaid shirt, singing his heart out. Today, he volunteers for the homeless in Houston, never forgetting his own impoverished youth and that pivotal night he sang for King. “He was one of the most interesting, excit-
“You feel like you did something to make his life a little bit more palatable. You brought some joy right into his face.’’ Tom Jones
About singing for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in 1968
Pastor Bob Duckens, 71, leads a Sunday school class at Rock of Faith Baptist Church in Columbus, Ohio. Duckens is a former corporate executive who also ministers to inmates and ex-convicts.
Tom Jones assists Enrique Alva, left, after a visit to Fleming Middle School in Houston.
ing individuals that I’ve ever had a chance to meet face to face,’’ says Jones. “I wanted to be able to get involved in that movement, whatever it was. It was faith on a collision course with opportunity. And it came with that chance meeting in Memphis.’’
Choir’s work was hard and important — but fun, too Jones traveled a rocky path to Prairie View and that extraordinary encounter in Memphis. One of nine children, he recalls long days picking cotton on the sweltering delta near Lake Providence, Louisiana. At night came relief. On the radio he found the soothing voice of Paul Robeson, the famed actor-singer whose politics made him a constant target of the FBI, but whose rich bass voice won over millions with songs like “Ol’ Man River” from the musical “Show Boat.” “I hoped to be a concert artist similar to Paul Robeson,’’ Jones says, recalling how his early childhood singing in church led to a series of opportunities. His first big break came in 1961 when his family fled the delta for Houston. He was 14. Jones competed in high school in the Texas Interscholastic League, a state music competition hosted at Prairie View, the venerable historically black college that opened in 1876 on the rolling plains some 50 miles northwest of Houston. As a high school senior in 1966, Jones sang an old spiritual, “Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego,” catching the attention of Prairie View’s charismatic choir director, Dr. H. Edison Anderson. He offered Jones a scholarship to study music performance. Then came the hard part: getting on the a cappella choir. As many as 140 students would try out — 40 would make it. Getting in drew perks, like travel. The year before the choir sang for King, it On next page
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had traveled out west, through New Mexico, where it toured Carlsbad Caverns, and Nevada, where some members first heard the jingle of slot machines, and on to Los Angeles and San Diego. It was great fun — but important work, too. Much as Nashville’s historically black Fisk University used its Jubilee Singers in the 19th century to raise funds, Prairie View dispatched its famed a cappella concert choir across America. Traveling to big cities like New York, Chicago and Detroit and countless smaller venues along the way, the students slept in borrowed college dormitory beds or in the homes of alumni and supporters. For Anderson, a classically trained tenor who studied at Columbia University, the choir was his family, governed by discipline and tough love. “He would push you to the limit,’’ Duckens recalls. Singing for Anderson meant rising at 5 in the morning. It meant grueling rehearsals and climbing up and down one monotonous vocal scale after another. It meant studying the native tongue of the composer — Italian, German and French — to get the diction just right. “Of course, you had to do that,’’ Jones recalls, “in order to convince an audience you know what you’re talking about. Or singing about.’’ But, then, the payoff: spectacular performances. Whether performing Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” or selections from “The Marriage of Figaro” or Puccini’s “La Boheme,” Anderson’s small chamber choir sang with power, mezzo forte — loud — like a full chorus. “Dr. Anderson’s thing was you start out and sing as loud as you can and go from there,’’ bass Richard Perkins recalls. That booming style served Perkins well. Often, Anderson called on the deep-voiced singer to solo. His specialty — Robeson’s “Ol’ Man River.” Like Jones, Perkins grew up listening to Robeson along with an array of others, bluesmen like B.B. King and Bobby “Blue’’ Bland as well as James Brown, Nat King Cole and a variety of white artists. “People would ask me for years, ‘Where in the world did you get interested in classical music? Where did you hear (Italian opera singer) Ezio Pinza? Where did you hear Paul Robeson?’ I heard him on recordings,’’ Perkins says of an eclectic musical taste typical of the Prairie View singers. “My mother listened to the radio when she was home. She didn’t just listen to the R&B station. She listened to the station that played Tony Bennett, that played Andy Williams, that played Perry Como. That played Frank Sinatra. I grew up singing ‘I Left My Heart in San Fran-
cisco’ and all those kinds of moonlight and starlight and all these big-band numbers. I grew up knowing those songs.’’ So it was, with the suave of Sinatra and the verve of James Brown, that the Prairie View a cappella concert choir headed off on its 1968 spring tour, brimming with confidence, talent and insatiable curiosity. “Dr. Anderson knew he had a good product,” Jones recalls, “and he wanted to showcase them.”
A plea from a friend changes King’s plans The afternoon of Sunday, March 17, unfolded quietly. Days earlier, Jones and 37 choir mates had piled into a chartered bus, rumbling up through Middle America. They’d given a series of concerts in small Texas towns. Now, as the bus rolled across Arkansas, headed for the next gig in Kentucky, it was getting late. When they crossed the Mississippi River at Memphis they found the bright flashing neon of the Lorraine. The motel’s old bound registry — the “Lister Book’’ — tells the story. A desk clerk’s florid handwriting splashed in blue ink across Page 19 shows several students took rooms in the motel’s first and second floors. Anderson checked into Room 214, under the balcony where King was later assassinated. As they settled in, King still was 1,800 miles away, in Los Angeles. It’d been a rough week for him. Touring the country, he was heckled viciously. He’d come out against the Vietnam War a year earlier, an unpopular move his detractors wouldn’t let go. Demonstrators in Detroit nearly brought his speech there to a halt, shouting “Commie!’’ and “traitor!’’ Then, on this Sunday afternoon, King got a phone call at his Los Angeles hotel. His old friend, the Rev. James Lawson of Memphis, had a proposition — he knew King would be passing through the Memphis area that week. Would he have time to give a speech for the city’s striking sanitation workers? The garbage men, nearly all of them black, were a snake-bitten lot. Overworked and underpaid, they’d walked off the job after two colleagues were crushed to death in a malfunctioning packer. It was the sort of injustice King was instinctively drawn to — but he was incredibly busy. He was organizing his Poor People’s Campaign, a plan to take thousands of impoverished citizens to Washington to camp, to protest — to disrupt government operations if necessary — to force serious relief to the nation’s poor. He planned to travel through North Mississippi later that week to recruit poor families for the initiative. King’s staff objected to a Memphis detour.
Student Bob Duckens and choir director Dr. H. Edison Anderson tour with the Prairie View A&M a cappella concert choir in 1968. “He would push you to the limit,” Duckens said of Anderson. JUDY LUSK
But Lawson’s plea was more than the civil rights leader could resist: He changed plans. He’d spend the night of Monday, March 18, at the Lorraine.
Dr. King is here Monday morning started gloriously. Judy Lusk, a soprano in the choir, recalls it was a bright, inviting day. She took a walk. Her enthusiasm soon gave way to disgust — the disruption of the sanitation strike was in a full, pungent bloom. “We kept noticing that the garbage cans were stacked up high. There was garbage everywhere,’’ she said. “I said to my friend, ‘This is a filthy city.’ ’’ Lusk was only 18, a freshman unattuned to the grown-up world of politics and struggle. Years later, she would put it all together: The stress King faced. The wrath of his enemies. The volatility of his struggle. “I’m not so sure,’’ she says now, “that all of that hit me then.’’ On next page
“Dr. Anderson’s thing was you start out and sing as loud as you can and go from there.” Richard Perkins
About Dr. H. Edison Anderson, director of the a cappella concert choir at Prairie View A&M
Pastor Bob Duckens prays with his congregation during a Sunday morning service July 16 at Rock of Faith Baptist Church in Columbus, Ohio. The former Prairie View A&M choir member said he was inspired by the message of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He now teams with a former death row inmate to wage a personal war on mass incarceration, a concern many consider one of the pressing civil rights issues of our time. YALONDA M. JAMES/THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
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James E. “Chuck’’ Wilson, an ex-convict whose 1970 death sentence for murder was converted to life before he was paroled in 2007, sits inside Rock of Faith Baptist Church in Columbus, Ohio, on July 17. Wilson runs a prison ministry with evangelist Bob Duckens in London, Ohio. YALONDA M. JAMES/THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
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No one in the choir was really sure, either, just when King arrived that day. But soon the Lorraine was buzzing. “Word got around,’’ says Jones’ choir roommate, Joe Berry, recalling the pulsing energy. Dr. King is here. Upstairs. In a room along the balcony. When Anderson asked King if the students could sing for him, he agreed. But his busy schedule detained him deep into the night. “It is criminal,’’ he told a large, enthusiastic crowd that night at Mason Temple, “to have people working on a full-time basis, to have a full-time job, getting part-time income.’’ The energy was so electric, he agreed to return later that month to lead a march. As King addressed the crowd, some on his staff stayed behind at the Lorraine, working on the Poor People’s Campaign set to launch in four short weeks. A film crew captured the exchange. “We may need more than one of these sites,’’ says SCLC Executive Director Bill Rutherford as cameras roll. Spread before him are architect drawing-sized papers — plans for the Poor People’s encampment King intends to open on the National Mall. They’re expecting thousands of people.
House coats, humility and a haunting song Filming the discussion is a crew from the Public Broadcasting Laboratory, a forerunner of the Public Broadcasting Service. They’ve been following King around for weeks now, shooting a documentary on the campaign, King’s great venture into radical economics — a mass plea for redistribution of wealth to America’s desperately poor. “When we come to Washington in this campaign, we’re coming to get our check,’’ King told a gathering in February as the crew filmed. Again, in March, as King toured the squalor of the Mississippi Delta, the crew captures him: “We are going to demand that the government do something about these conditions.’’ The film crew was positioned near King that night at the Lorraine when he finally returned after midnight and the students filed in to sing for him. They had risen quickly. Some arrive in house coats and slippers, even hair rollers. Blinking into bright Klieg lights, they spot King. Their enthusiasm spills into a frenzied circle around him. On next page
“When we come to Washington in this campaign, we’re coming to get our check.’’ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
About his Poor People’s Campaign to take thousands of impoverished citizens to Washington
Screenshots from the 1968 film “Free at Last” show the chance encounter between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the a cappella choir of Prairie View A&M. Here, King signs autographs for the students.
An unidentified Prairie View student snaps pictures of King before the choir performs. To his right is Larry White, then a promising tenor and actor. White would die young — at just 38 — succumbing to a long illness in 1988.
Dr. H. Edison Anderson directs the choir as King’s staff watches. King and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy are off camera to the left.
King listens as the choir performs Randall Thompson’s “Alleluia.” The piece was one of choir director Anderson’s favorites. COURTESY OF WNET/NEW YORK
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“He asked us questions,’’ Jones recalled of King’s down-home friendliness and renowned humility. “He wanted to know where we were from.’’ Time allowed just one song. Anderson chose a favorite: Randall Thompson’s “Alleluia.” It’s a haunting, simplistic song: one word — Allelulia — repeated over and over. Simplistic, yes, but difficult to master. Thompson, a choral composer who taught at Harvard, wrote the anthem as a somber ray of trepidation and hope at the dawn of World War II. Now, Anderson makes it his own. Arms raised, swaying, the conductor adds his own styling: sharp staccato runs and bursts of enthusiasm. “You can see his passion for his music,’’ Lusk says. “He liked to add his own flavor.’’ For a time, as the song nears a climax, the camera focuses on King. His eyes are intent. They squint. They dart. Sixteen days later when he was shot just across the courtyard, when the light left those eyes, King fell into the camera’s frame one last time.
A light of hope goes out Joseph Louw, a South African member of the Public Broadcasting crew, was there when the bullet struck. Hustling out onto the balcony, he took that famous news photo — King lying mortally wounded along the railing as Andrew Young and others desperately point in the direction of the shot. The documentary was rushed onto the air on April 7, focusing on King’s final days, the footage of the Prairie View choir included in the 90-minute program. The film would spend years in studio vaults before it eventually was rediscovered. “Every time I look at that piece now I see a man who’s just in awe about what he was hearing,’’ Jones reflects about that night with King. “I think more than that he was inspired.’’ Days after the choir returned from its tour, television screens lit up: King had been shot on the balcony at the Lorraine — the very balcony where the students had laughed and frolicked that night. More than anything, that’s what really hurt, what made it stick. Even those like soprano Joan Hubert, who didn’t make the tour, would be forever moved by it. “The whole campus was in shock,’’ she said. “Because he was the hope for the future.’’
A mixed message of progress and poverty Jones has been many things since that pivotal night: Schoolteacher. Nonprofit executive. Semi-professional singer. Now, in retirement, he devotes much of his time to the needy. On any given Sunday, he can be seen in his Ford F-150 pickup roaring down Interstate 69 in Houston, on his way to church, where he volunteers with the homeless. This is St. John’s United Methodist, a rambling brick
sanctuary in downtown’s southern reaches. Beyoncé called this her home church as a child. Jones never had children of his own, but he’s forged bonds here with men like Don Bradley, 73, an ex-Marine who spent much of his life in prison before winning release in 2012, only to find himself sleeping on a park bench, homeless. Known as “The City with No Limits,’’ Houston can be inhospitable — completely offlimits for men like Bradley, whose felony record kept him from finding work or an apartment. “It’s a systematic way of excluding poor folk,’’ says Bradley, who firmly believes, 50 years after the Poor People’s Campaign, that King’s dream remains unfulfilled. Nationally, homelessness afflicts AfricanAmericans in far greater proportions than whites, study after study has shown. Still, it’s just one data point in a sea of numbers that equate to a mixed message of progress and poverty since the days of King. The black middle class has grown sharply since the civil rights movement first awakened. Yet, for those locked in poverty, conditions in many ways are even worse now. Income inequality remains daunting. According to the Pew Research Center, the median household income gap between white and black America widened more than 40 percent from 1967 to 2011. “It’s like half the dream has been realized. The other half is still like before he had the dream,’’ Bradley says. “So we’re kind of like stuck in between now.’’ Jones agrees, offering his own assessment on the state of King’s dream. Has America lived up to it? “I say only partially,’’ he says with a sharp nod, “and not very much.’’
The fight against mass incarceration Twelve hundred miles away, in Columbus, Ohio, former choir member Duckens wrestles with another pressing issue, mass incarceration. “It is a tremendous civil rights issue. Because, when you think about it, it’s cheap labor,’’ Duckens says, contending far too many nonviolent offenders are imprisoned and used as inexpensive labor to make furniture and other commodities for state governments. “Now that’s slavery, man.’’ An evangelist, Duckens, 71, heads a small Baptist congregation from the towering shell of an abandoned Catholic church. For decades, he ran a halfway house here, helping ex-offenders find jobs to re-enter society. When a soured economy dried up funding, he refocused his attention on a prison ministry he now runs with James E. “Chuck’’ Wilson, an ex-convict whose 1970 death sentence for murder was reduced to life before he was paroled in 2007. “He saved a wretch like me,’’ Wilson says on a sticky July day, preaching to about 80 in-
Prairie View choir member Shirley Haynes stands on the steps of the Lorraine Motel in March 1968. JUDY LUSK
mates at London Correctional Institution near Columbus. To shouts of “Have mercy!’’ and “Say it! Say it!’’ Wilson offers hope: “He comes to save the lost. He’s waiting for you.’’ When Duckens speaks the crowd is fired up. He’s not your typical theatrical evangelist. He’s no screamer. Like Wilson, he speaks softly about what matters most to him — the loss of wife JoAnn in 2010, his enduring faith. “You can go to prison,’’ he offers, “and still be acceptable to God.’’ Later, in an interview, Duckens says these inmates need more than God — they need respect and understanding. In his view, America is quick to incarcerate but slow to deal with underlying issues — poverty, addictions and mental health concerns — that drive many people into crime. “Now, most of these people are just sick and need treatment and need help,’’ he says. “But you put them in a prison with criminals, they will turn out to be a criminal.’’ According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the United States is “the world’s leading jailer,’’ containing 5 percent of the world’s population but a quarter of its inmates — 2.2 million people incarcerated at a cost of $80 billion a year. Many are poor, nonviolent offenders, men like Emmanuel Wright, who’s serving 10 years and six months at London for theft, burglary and passing bad checks. “They have no kind of education for them,’’ says Wright, 48, a drummer in the prison band, explaining how so many young, disadvantaged men find their way from poor schools into crime. Another inmate, rapper Charles “C-Will” Williams, 29, performed a recitation in King’s honor. Serving 15 years to life for a murder he says he didn’t commit, Williams is among a group of incarcerated musicians who’ve contributed to “Die Jim Crow,’’ an online album casting attention on mass incarceration. “I think King would do that now,’’ Williams says. “He’d march. He’d protest.’’
Disaffection and disillusionment
“It’s like half the dream has been realized. The other half is still like before he had the dream.” Don Bradley
An ex-Marine who spent much of his life in prison, on the state of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream
Incarceration is a concern that hits close to home for Duckens. Richard Perkins, his old choir road trip roommate, served a series of On next page
Adjunct professor Joan Hubert guides student Carlisia Newton in voice instruction at Texas Southern University in Houston. Hubert was a member of the 1968 Prairie View A&M choir but couldn’t make the trip to Memphis during which the group sang for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. YALONDA M. JAMES/THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
COLORADOAN.COM z SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2018 z 11P
Tom Jones talks to students during a visit to Fleming Middle School in Houston. In the 50 years since he performed in the Prairie View A&M choir, Jones has been a schoolteacher, a nonprofit executive, a semi-professional singer and an advocate for the homeless. PHOTOS BY YALONDA M. JAMES/THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL Continued from Page 10
stints in state and federal prisons on drug-related offenses after college while struggling with addiction. “I’ve done time in three different states,’’ Perkins readily admits during a get-together back at Prairie View. “That’s not a thing that I’m ashamed to say because through some higher power’s mercy and grace, I’m still sitting here, 70 years old. I should have been dead a hundred times over, man.’’ Larry White wasn’t so fortunate. In that shadowy video made the night the choir sang for King, you can see him clearly — just 18 and baby-faced. A struggling actor, White died in 1988 after an unknown illness. “It was tragic,’’ said his friend Judy Lusk, who still recalls White as a young, exuberant man who was so moved after the assassination, he recited King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on campus. “He was very strong in his presentation.” Unlike White, Perkins didn’t lionize King. Disillusioned by the mainstream movement, he was drawn in the late ‘60s to the Nation of Islam, to its gospel of black separatism. His disaffection grew, in part, because of limited opportunities as a black operatic-styled singer. Though he sang for a time in New York and in Europe, he found fewer opportunities at
An inmate reads a passage from the Book of Romans in the Bible as Pastor Bob Duckens delivers a message to prisoners at the London Correctional Institution in London, Ohio.
“I’ve done time in three different states. That’s not a thing that I’m ashamed to say because through some higher power’s mercy and grace, I’m still sitting here, 70 years old.” Richard Perkins
Former member of the Prairie View A&M choir
home in Texas. “The white opera companies didn’t want to hire black performers,’’ Jones interjects, recalling how Prairie View alumni helped found the Houston Ebony Opera Guild to help compensate for the lack of opportunity for AfricanAmerican singers. “... Unless you’re Leontyne Price or Grace Bumbry, William Warfield, Simon Estes,’’ he says, referring to some AfricanAmerican virtuosos, “then you don’t get a chance to cross over into those roles.’’ Discrimination limited roles for AfricanAmericans, Joan Hubert agrees. But then, too, opera is a tough business. It’s all about “being at the right place at the right time,’’ she says. Though Hubert wasn’t willing to relocate to opera’s epicenter, New York, she found part-time work with the Houston Grand Opera, singing in the chorus and tagging along on traveling shows. She was content to teach in Texas’ pub-
lic schools, something she did for more than 35 years. As she tells her story, Hubert sits on a piano bench at historically black Texas Southern University, where she’s an adjunct professor. At 71, she’s still doing what she loves most — leading a young voice student through a series of drills, passing on her passion for opera and classical music. “Make it beautiful,’’ Hubert tells Carlisia Newton, 22. And she does. In an angelic soprano, Newton sings Franz Schubert’s classic “Nacht und Traume,” followed by 20th-century composer Moses Hogan’s soulful arrangement of an old spiritual, “Give Me Jesus.” Moments like these encourage Hubert. Speaking later at a friend’s home, she and her old choir mate, Ernestine Odom, agree education is the critical concern facing black youth today. “The kids that I work with every day, they have no clue about this subtlety that is working against them. They’re just walking right into a Harvey,” Hubert says as Odom nods to her reference to the hurricane that struck Houston last year. “It’s a big storm that is going to erupt. And that’s where it’s going to be chaos in America.” As for the continuing education of Perkins, he traveled with Jones in 2008 to Memphis for the 40th anniversary of King’s assassination. With two other Prairie View graduates, they performed as a quartet, the Thundering Basses, singing once again at the Lorraine, now the National Civil Rights Museum. “Now, I’m getting it. It makes more sense,’’ Perkins says of King’s importance. “... The concepts were good — high-quality concepts of human character, and nothing to do with skin or race or none of that kind of stuff. Just the character of the human being.’’