Pouya Dianat

Portraits: General

"Sir, is there anything you can do about his jaw?" Xernona Clayton said she questioned King's mortician. Clayton recalls pulling out powders, mixing up a little roux and toning down the wound as his casket lay in Spelman College.
   
"He knew that something was going to happen. That was the last time I saw him alive. That was the last Friday night he lived," recalled Juanita Abernathy, widow of the Rev. Ralph Abernathy.
   
"It was like I was asking why to God," said Elder Bernice King, King's youngest child. "To Daddy, why did you leave me? To God, why did you take him?"
     
  
State representative Tyrone Brooks grappled with feelings of anger and trying to honor King's memory by promoting non-violence. "They said King was dead, and pretty soon we were going to be dead with that nonviolent teaching."
   
Then a rookie New York Times reporter Earl Caldwell reporting his first story in the South Caldwell recalls, "I said, 'What happened? What happened?' I turned around, then I could see. Dr. King is laying there on the balcony."
   
"I said 'Coretta, M.L. has already preached his eulogy," said King's sister Christine King Farris. "He did that 'drum major' speech back in February...When Martin got [home] he said, 'I might have preached my eulogy.' "
     
  
Former Associated Press reporter Kathryn Johnson mentioned, "[King] said often that he expected death to come at any time. He had given her plastic flowers for something. She told me about that. She said, What did you give me plastic flowers for?' He said, 'To remember me by.'"
   
"Why King? Why the Prince of Peace?" asked Samuel "Billy" Kyles of himself in his sermons in the weeks that followed the assassination.
   
"To see him there, I knew then that it was an end of a chapter in American history," said Rep. John Lewis. Weeks later Lewis witness the murder of his other mentor Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago.
     
  
Rev. Joseph Lowery reflected, "I miss him now, 40 years later, just as much as I did 40 minutes after I learned of his death."
   
"Mother said, 'Daddy has gone home to be with God.'" recounted Martin Luther King III.
   
"When I got to the top of the stairs, he was flat on his back in a pool of blood," remembers Ambassador Andrew Young. Minutes earlier Young was involved in a playful pillow fight with King and other colleagues.