Echoes of 1968: Quad-Citians remember Martin Luther King Jr.
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By John Willard | Wednesday, April 09, 2008 |
Martin Luther King Jr., left, receives the Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award from St. Ambrose College in Davenport in 1965. (QUAD-CITY TIMES FILE PHOTO) Buy this Photo
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Forty years ago today, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on a balcony outside his motel room in Memphis, Tenn.
The murder of the 39-year-old Nobel Prize laureate and the father of nonviolence in the American civil rights movement sparked a wave of riots in major cities across the nation.
In the Quad-Cities, stunned residents banded together in prayer, marches and a resolve to adhere to the peaceful method of social change that King advocated.
Among them was Charles Toney, the president of the Catholic Interracial Council in Davenport.
“My only hope is that his death will not be in vain and that Americans of all races will rededicate themselves to eliminating bigotry in our country,” he said the day after King was felled by a sniper’s bullet on Thursday, April 4, 1968, while in Memphis to mediate a garbage collectors’ strike.
James Earl Ray, an escaped convict and small-time criminal, confessed to the killing but later claimed he was innocent. He died in 1998 while serving a 99-year prison term.
Toney, 94, of Coal Valley, Ill., retired in 1983 as director of affirmative action at Deere & Co. after 47 years with the company. He recently reflected on King’s legacy.
“He transcended race,” Toney said. “He touched everybody with that magnificent voice. The civil rights movement would not have come with the speed it did had it not been for his personal involvement.”
Three years before he was assassinated, King visited the Quad-Cities to receive the Catholic Interracial Council’s Pacem in Terris (Peace and Freedom) Award for humanitarian service.
The Baptist minister’s visit was fresh in the minds of many Quad-Citians as they mourned his death.
“I was too sad to be mad,” recalled William Cribbs, 80, who was the president of the adult division of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, at the time of King’s death.
Cribbs participated in a silent march from St. Anthony’s Catholic Church in downtown Davenport to Sacred Heart Cathedral at 10th and Iowa streets. So did John “Jack” Schneiders, who was the secretary of the Catholic Interracial Council and vice president of the NAACP.
“King wasn’t just for the rights of black people. He was for people’s rights, especially those of the poor and disadvantaged,” said Schneiders, 74, a retired Internal Revenue Service agent now living in Urbandale, Iowa.
During a memorial service April 5, 1968, at Davenport’s Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, clergy members from five denominations spoke. The Rev. Emmett Wiseman, pastor of Progressive Baptist Church in Davenport, told the assembly: “Dr. King would listen and then work out methods to move in a peaceful way.”
Wiseman, 71, who is now pastor at Bethel Baptist Church in Plant City, Fla., said he was returning to Davenport from a lecture in Nashville, Tenn., when he heard a report on his car radio that King had been slain.
“I classify him as a great American, not just for blacks but for all people who were struggling,” he said.
The events of that weekend remain vivid for Quad-Citians who experienced the trauma.
Monsignor Marvin Mottet, 77, retired pastor at Sacred Heart Cathedral and chaplain of the Catholic Interracial Council in the 1960s, said the civil rights movement was a revolution for the participants.
“Young people of today need to appreciate how much they suffered and sacrificed to make change,” he said.
Rock Island Mayor Mark Schwiebert, who was a senior at Rock Island High School when King was assassinated, said the tragedy tore the nation apart following the hope and enthusiasm that characterized John F. Kennedy’s presidency. “We’re seeing a rediscovery today of that spirit of hope of the early 1960s,” he said.
James Collins, 62, who retired in December as director of the Corporate Citizenship Center of Excellence at Deere & Co. and president of the John Deere Foundation, was a student at what was then called St. Ambrose College and a John Deere foundry worker when King was assassinated.
A direct result of the tragedy, he said, was the establishment of Project NOW, a community outreach agency of which he was the first full-time director.
“King represented a combination of commitment, passion, patience and perseverance,” Collins said.
Barbara Wommack, a neighborhood organizer at Davenport’s Friendly House at the time of King’s death, said “my world stopped” when she got the news.
“He paved the way for everyone, and he sacrificed his life,” she said. “But he did not die in vain.”
Bernice Jones, 81, the first woman president of the Davenport branch of the NAACP, said King lived by Christ’s principles.
(Editor’s note: 1968 was a watershed year for the United States: the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy within two months of each other, escalation of the Vietnam War, and racial and political turmoil that touched city streets, college campuses and even the sports world. This is the first in an occasional series looking back four decades at significant events of that year.)
“Even though he knew his life was in danger, he never backed off,” she said.
The city desk can be contacted at (563) 383-2450 or newsroom@qctimes.com.
1968 capsule
Here are some notable events that occurred during the first quarter of 1968:
Jan. 6: Dr. Norman E. Shumway of Stanford performs the first U.S. adult heart transplant; The Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour” album goes No. 1 and stays there for eight weeks.
Jan. 9: The Surveyor VII space probe makes a soft landing on the moon, marking the end of the American series of unmanned explorations of the lunar surface.
Jan. 14: The Green Bay Packers win Super Bowl II over the Oakland Raiders. It is Vince Lombardi’s last game as Packers coach.
Jan. 31: The North Vietnamese launch the Tet offensive at Nha Trang. The action, involving nearly 70,000 North Vietnamese troops, carries on for weeks. It is viewed as a major turning point for American attitudes toward the war.
Feb. 2: Richard Nixon enters the New Hampshire Primary and declares his presidential candidacy.
Feb. 8: George Wallace of Alabama enters the presidential race; at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, three black students are killed in a confrontation with highway patrol officers during a civil rights protest against a whites-only bowling alley. Nearly 50 are injured in what comes to be known as the Orangeburg Massacre.
Feb. 18: The U.S. State Department announces the highest U.S. casualty toll of the Vietnam War, with 543 Americans killed and 2,547 wounded during the previous week.
March 12: Eugene McCarthy comes within 230 votes of defeating President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire Primary.
March 16: Robert F. Kennedy announces he will enter the 1968 presidential race.
March 31: President Johnson addresses the nation and announces he will not seek re-election. The address also includes steps to de-escalate the Vietnam War.
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