For many years he had dealt openly with that fear. During his earliest civil rights leadership, in Montgomery, his front porch had been bombed. He proclaimed defiantly at a rally soon afterward: “Tell Montgomery that they can keep bombing, and I’m going to stand up to them. If I had to die tomorrow morning, I would die happy because I’ve been to the Mountaintop, and I’ve seen the Promised Land, and it’s going to be here in Montgomery.”11 In other speeches, memorably in Demopolis, Alabama, during the Selma-to-Montgomery march of 1965, he had spoken about his fear that he might be killed. For years he felt a gnawing doubt that he would live to the age of forty. “I’ll never live to be forty. I’ll never make it,” he told his lawyer, Chauncey Eskridge.12
By early 1968, as he entered his fortieth year, the fear was seizing him with fierce intensity. In a Sunday sermon on February 4 at Ebenezer, he dwelled on the prospect of his early death, effectively preaching his own eulogy. No need to catalog all the honors bestowed on him, he said. Rather, he said, “I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others . . . [that he] was a drum major for justice.”13
Not long after, on March 12, he sent synthetic red carnations to his wife. Until then all the flowers he had ever given her had been real. In justifying his choice of flowers, he told Coretta: “I wanted to give you something that you could always keep.”14 In late March, as he girded himself for the return to Memphis, he confided to his parents that they ought to brace for his death at any time.15
Now, as he concluded his speech at Mason Temple, he seemed to be coming to terms with death to an extent that he had not voiced publicly before.
His voice rose to its highest pitch yet. His eyes blinked rapidly, as he turned his head from side to side. He acknowledged that he wanted to live a long life but that he was resigned to whatever might happen. He said that God had allowed him to reach the mountaintop and see the Promised Land. Then he vowed resolutely, nobly: “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know, tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”
He ended with an utterance of religious fervor, saying that he was not worried, that he did not fear anybody, exclaiming in a final flourish, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
That borrowing from the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was a staple of his oratory. The words, penned by Julia Ward Howe in 1861, venerate a fierce fight to the death in the name of freedom for American slaves. It is a call to abolitionists to follow Jesus in sacrificing themselves for a righteous cause. If King had completed the stanza, he would have added: “The truth is marching on.” But he did not. His wife, Coretta, reading his words spoken at Mason Temple, would think that he had become so overcome by emotion that he could not finish the stanza.16
Coming to terms with the prospect of his death and his own sacrifice, King was approaching grandiosity. He was comparing himself to Jesus and Moses—to the Jesus heralded in the “Battle Hymn” and to the Old Testament’s celebration of the Moses who had led his people toward the Promised Land.
Other speeches had drawn the parallel between the civil rights movement and the Exodus story. Now he was adding a new element. As Moses was to the Israelites’ struggle for freedom, he seemed to be saying, he was to African Americans’ struggle for freedom. As he stared at the face of death, he was portraying himself as the Moses of his time.
He had talked for forty-three minutes. Spent by the exertion, tears welling in his eyes, he turned and staggered toward his chair on the podium. Wobbly, he seemed to lose his footing. Ralph Abernathy caught him and steered him into the chair. “It was as though somebody had taken a beach ball and pulled the plug out, as if all his energy had been sucked out,” the lawyer Mike Cody recalled.17
As King collapsed into his chair, the crowd rose up from theirs, roaring and clapping. Historian Joan Beifuss would describe the crowd as “caught between tears and applause.”18
Even among the ministers in the auditorium who knew King’s oratory well, the emotional charge of his words provoked shivers. “I’d never heard the intensity or the passion or the drama in his voice, in how he was delivering it, and he kept getting stronger and stronger,” Billy Kyles would say.19 He would add that King seemed to be preparing for his death by purging publicly “the fear. He had to get rid of it. He had to let all that go.” Abernathy would write in his memoir: “I had heard him hit high notes before, but never any higher.”20 Jesse Jackson would call his wife to tell her “Martin had given the most brilliant speech of his life [and say] that he was lifted up and had some mysterious aura around him.”21 Years later, Jackson would note: “What I thought was so different about that sermon, I saw men crying,” not something that happens usually in church.22 By the end, Kyles would say, “We were on our feet clapping and hollering.”23
As often happened at the end of a compelling speech by King, the crowd surged toward him. Rather than allow a crowd to crush him, he usually exited quickly. “But that night he just didn’t want to leave,” Beifuss would quote a local minister as saying. “He just wanted to stay there and meet people
