The Lone Journalist on the Scene When King Was Shot and the Newsroom He Rallied
'Earl Caldwell wrote history on the night of April 4, 1968, when he reported firsthand on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. for The New York Times. But he made history right before that, when he became the first black reporter The Times had assigned to follow the civil rights leader.
That night, Caldwell spearheaded the dozens of reporters, editors and photographers hastily assembled for the story — an additional first for a black journalist and, in a larger sense, another result of the campaign for greater black inclusion in American life that King had come to personify over the previous 13 years.
The milestones in King’s career — the Montgomery bus boycott, the protests in Birmingham, the marches on Washington and from Selma to Montgomery — had always been the province of white correspondents, principally native Southerners (Claude Sitton, Roy Reed, Gene Roberts and John Herbers, among them) steeped in racial matters for whom the major stops on the civil rights itinerary represented home turf. But that changed when King, in Memphis to support striking local sanitation workers, and Caldwell, there to follow him around, each checked into the Lorraine Motel on April 3.
Also always left to white reporters was the task of writing, and periodically updating, King’s obituary. The paper first prepared one in 1960, when King was all of 31 years old. Only the dateline and the lead paragraph, detailing the circumstances of his demise, were omitted. In this sense, The Times and King were congruent long before April 4, 1968: Each had anticipated his early, and violent, death. — David Margolick
Here’s a look at what happened inside and outside our newsroom that night, and in the days after — including a first-person account from Earl Caldwell, who is currently an assistant professor at the Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications at Hampton University in Hampton, Va. He declined to comment for this piece. The longer article from which it is excerpted, titled “7 Days That Shook the World and The Times” — written, without a byline, for an internal April 1968 Times publication, Times Talk — began with our coverage of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s surprise announcement, that same week, that he would not seek re-election.'>>>
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