9781422277768

to her children’s entreaties, with her husband’s blessing. With everything else the children faced—including long separations from their father and even bombings of their home—she had decided to spare them from feeling left out at Easter services, where everyone would be displaying their new finery. Coretta and Yolanda went shopping in downtown Atlanta that afternoon, enjoying a pleasant mother-daughter outing. They had just come home when the telephone rang. Jesse Jackson—a young minister from Chicago and a rising voice in the civil rights movement who considered Dr. King his mentor—was on the line. “Coretta, Doc just got shot,” Jackson said. “I would advise you to take the next thing smoking.” Coretta’s heart stood still as she feared the worst. Jackson, “trying to spare me,” Coretta later said, told her that Martin had been shot in the shoulder and had been taken St. Joseph’s Hospital in Memphis. Coretta hung up the phone and called her best friend, Dora McDonald, to come over and be with her. She then made arrangements to catch the next plane to Memphis, which was scheduled to depart at 8:25. A few minutes later, at about 7:15, Andrew Young, another minister, called Coretta from Memphis. Reverends Young, Jackson, and Ralph Abernathy, who had planned to take part in the protest march, had all been with Dr. King at his motel, where the shooting had taken place on the balcony. Young’s news about Martin’s condition was more accurate than Jackson’s had been: Although Dr. King wasn’t dead, he was in very serious condition with a gunshot wound to the neck. Young advised Coretta to have her friend accompany her to Memphis. Coretta decided to ask Juanita Abernathy, Ralph’s wife, as well. Coretta turned on the TV in her living room—as didmillions of other Americans, who flocked to their televisions and radios to learn the details of the tragic event. The news of the shooting was almost as important to the nation as it was to Dr. King’s family. For 12 years Martin Luther King, Jr., had led a nonviolent protest movement

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C I V I L R I G H T S L E A D E R S : C O R E T TA S C O T T K I N G