Fifty years is a long time in an individual life but a short time in the life of a nation.
Fifty years ago Monday, on March 19, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited Greenwood for the last time, just a little over two weeks before an assassin’s bullet killed him in Memphis on April 4.
Many who were at Jennings Temple Christian Methodist Episcopal Church that day have passed on. Some remember the day well, and others, if they are honest, admit their memories are foggy all these years later.
King was in Greenwood briefly that day, at the corner of Avenue G and Ash Street, asking the people of the city whose lives had been shaped by the events of Freedom Summer, just four years prior, to join him in what would be his last social campaign, the Poor People’s Campaign and a March on Washington, scheduled for late April.
At the end of his life, Dr. King hoped the nation would join together to cure poverty, and Mississippi was where he witnessed the worst of it.
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King’s final campaign sweep in the month prior to his death was pre-dated by an August 1967 speech in Atlanta in which he laid out the cause he would fight for until he died — raising up the poor from dire poverty in America and closing the inequality gap.
He acknowledged poverty and the class divide were pervasive and elusive targets, unlike the pursuit of voting rights or the struggle toward desegregation of public schools just a few years earlier.
Those actions required government action in the form of laws that would force the issue. Ending poverty and viewing all people as equals, on the other hand, could not be legally mandated and required a change of heart.
“With all the struggle and all the achievements, we must face the fact that the Negro still lives in the basement of the Great Society,” King said in his speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
“He is still at the bottom, despite the few who have penetrated to slightly higher levels. ... Negroes are still impoverished aliens in an affluent society. They are too poor even to rise with the society, too impoverished by the ages to be able to ascend by using their own resources.”
On the backs of enslaved black people, he said, America “became the richest, most powerful society in the history of man, but it left the Negro far behind.”
At the time King envisioned and organized his Poor People’s Campaign, the nation had been long embroiled in a deadly, costly and increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam that he openly opposed, causing open rifts with leadership in Washington.
Still, he planned a Poor People’s March on Washington in the spring of 1968, an occasion when the nation’s poor of all colors would camp at the Capitol and force lawmakers to hear their needs and demands for a better life.
Organizers were frustrated in the ensuing months by what they perceived as detours — occasions when King was called off the course of the Poor People’s Campaign to attend to other problems, such as the sanitation workers’ struggle in Memphis that came to a head in March 1968.
Barnstorming across America, meeting with workers in migrant labor camps in California, on Indian reservations and in poor communities everywhere from Appalachia to Detroit, King paused to focus on Memphis when he was summoned there by a friend, the Rev. James Lawson.
Lawson argued that the monthlong garbage workers’ strike in Memphis perfectly illustrated the juncture of poverty and race that the Poor People’s Campaign represented.
On March 18, King addressed a throng of some 15,000 at the Mason Temple in Memphis.
“You are here to demand that Memphis will see the poor,” he said to the crowded hall. “Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality.”
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The next day, King made an exhausting sweep through Mississippi in search of financial support for the upcoming Poor People’s March and commitments by poor people to come to Washington with him.
He started the morning in Batesville and then went west to Marks, where he was brought to tears by stories from young mothers who said they could not feed their children.
Also in Marks, he was unsettled by a visibly troubled elderly white man who barged up to the podium where King was speaking and waved a $100 bill in the preacher’s face before dropping it in the collection plate.
The man was upset about claims that Mississippians didn’t have enough to eat, saying it wasn’t true. A visibly shaken King thanked him for his gift.
On the way from Marks to Clarksdale, he told his lieutenants that a mule train headed for Washington would originate in Marks, representing the roots of poverty in America.
He told some 600 gathered in Clarksdale about his decision and asked for volunteers to join him, but just a few hands went up.
From there, King’s entourage headed to Greenwood and arrived two hours later than scheduled, late in the afternoon at Jennings Temple C.M.E. Church.
The waiting crowd overflowed from the small church, out its opened windows and into the surrounding streets.
Lillie Shotwell Russell, then a 24-year-old wife, mother and student, was there.
“It was an experience that I treasure,” Russell said. “It will always stay with those of us who were there.”
Russell and some 200 to 300 others who couldn’t fit into the small church stood outside, jammed shoulder to shoulder, listening to King’s speech over speakers and through open windows.
“I didn’t even get close to him, but I was close enough to hear his message that to effect change, you’ve got to participate,” Russell said.
She said she was aware that many local churches wanted to make donations to King’s cause but feared that something might happen to their church.
“One of the things I learned from Dr. King is that if you want to see change, you’ve got to get up and do something about it. You can’t just wait for someone else to change things,” Russell said.
“He had done so much for us, to get us the things that we had been denied.”
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Extreme caution was exercised everywhere King went. Threats against his life came almost daily near the end, and what happened in Memphis on April 4, at the hands of a lone gunman, had been forewarned numerous times as he criss-crossed the country.
In Greenwood a few years before, when King was scheduled to lead a planned march, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan published and distributed a flier around town that, according to the King archives, “caused civil unrest in Leflore County and Greenwood.”
It ridiculed King, referring to him as “the Right Rev. Riot Inciter,” on a mission to bilk money from black people (referred to by the N-word), and “to bring riot, strife and turmoil to Greenwood ... a citadel of endeavor” whose citizens had suffered beneath these “communist designed onslaughts.”
The flier urged white citizens to stay home from work and huddle around their children. Men should be prepared to take up arms and go out to stop rioting and violence in its tracks, if and when it erupted.
“In a short while, the local n____ will be out of money, Martin Luther King will be gone, and peace and tranquility will return to Greenwood,” the flier said. “The local n_____s will go back to the cotton fields to make back the money Martin Luther King took from them.”
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When King came to Greenwood on March 19, 1968, the event didn’t draw even a paragraph of coverage in the Commonwealth.
Christine Jordan, a young teacher whose husband, David Jordan, also a young teacher and family man, helped organize the gathering at Jennings Temple. She arrived at the church with friends in tow, only to find there was no room inside.
Christine Jordan remembers seeing people climb up on the window frames to peek inside.
“When they brought Dr. King outside, he was surrounded for protection by a lot of young people,” she remembered. “I remember one person, a man we knew from Carroll County, had his arms stretched all the way around him. Somebody was on the sides and in front and in back of him to put him in his car, because they feared for his life.”
She said it was very exciting, but when she heard in the next few weeks that he was gone, “it was just too much.”
Her husband would go on to be elected both to the City Council of Greenwood and to the state Senate, where he still serves. He’ll be the first to say he attributes those successes to the brave work of King and others.
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Methodist churches and clergy were instrumental in the civil rights struggles in Greenwood, hosting events such as King’s last speech in Greenwood.
When King came in 1968, the Rev. William Walker of Jennings Temple and the Rev. Donald Tucker of Turner Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church were both involved with Father Nathaniel Machesky of St. Francis Catholic Church in organizing an economic boycott of white businesses in Greenwood, demanding that basic dignities afforded to whites be extended to black customers.
Wesley United Methodist Church was also a frequent site of meetings such as the one at Jennings Temple on March 19.
The Rev. Willie Jones is the pastor at Jennings Temple these days. He preaches from the pulpit in a new, larger building next door to the older, smaller church where Dr. King spoke.
The neighborhood surrounding the new building is rife with boarded-up houses and signs of persisting poverty.
“I was not here at the time, and I didn’t realize until I came to the church and started digging into its history that Dr. King had spoken there,” Jones said.
Knowing that King was here, he said, affirms the work God has given him to do, promoting education among his congregants and the community, to disrupt the cycle of poverty.
“It makes me want to do a better job at ministry as a whole,” he said.
Those who heard Dr. King speak in Greenwood agree that looking around the city now, it’s clear there is still much work to be done.
Stopping to remember the example of Dr. King as the 50th anniversary of his death approaches is an opportunity to reflect on where to go from here and on what came before.
Lillie Russell, who still lives in the same Greenwood neighborhood she lived in when King came in 1968, said it’s hard to see where we are now when you think about all of those, like King, who put their lives on the line.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody like him since then.”
Note: Details of the last year of King’s life are drawn from Taylor Branch’s “At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965-58.”
•Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
