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Bernice—had been put to bed, though only Bernice was actually asleep. Yolanda was speaking to someone on the phone, but she hung up and followed Coretta as she walked to her bedroom. “Mommy, should I hate the man who killed my daddy?” she asked. Coretta replied, “No, darling, your daddy wouldn’t want you to do that.” Going into the boys’ room, she had to steel herself against breaking down when seven-year-old Dexter asked her when his daddy would return. She told her son only that his father had been badly hurt. He accepted this and went to sleep. The night got no easier. Dr. King’s parents were devastated when they heard the news. Martin Luther King, Sr., a prominent Baptist minister and respected black leader in Atlanta, could not believe his son was dead. “I always felt I would go first,” the elder King lamented to Coretta. The King family’s telephone rang continually for hours. President Lyndon Johnson called to express his condolences, as did Senator Robert Kennedy, brother of the late President John F. Kennedy. Several years before, President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, then U.S. attorney general, had helped protect Dr. King and his followers during their protests. A phone call from Robert Kennedy back in 1960 had helped gain King’s release from prison after he was arrested for refusing to give his seat to a white person at a lunch counter. (Coretta did not learn until many years later that, as attorney general, Bobby Kennedy had reluctantly approved the request of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover to bug Dr. King’s telephones and various hotel rooms.) Coretta knew that she had to fly to Memphis to bring her husband’s body home. Senator Kennedy offered to provide a plane. He also ordered that three additional telephones be installed in the King home immediately so that Coretta and her family could respond to the flood of phone calls coming in as the news of Dr. King’s death spread.

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