Forty years ago today, a man was shot, and for many, his dream of equality died with him. Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., where he had traveled in support of striking black sanitation workers. He was 39.

Five days after King’s death, President Lyndon Johnson declared a national day of mourning, and an estimated 300,000 people attended the funeral.
“(It) was like the light went out on all the dreams and hopes and actions we’d been working for,” said Joe Morse, a Winona, Minn., native who worked for three years in the 1960s organizing black voters in Meridian, Miss. “African American people and those of us in the civil rights movement were very demoralized.”

Morse, now 64, left Mississippi in early 1968 because state laws wouldn’t allow a white man like him to marry the woman he loved, who was black. He was living in Chicago and learning to drive a truck when he heard the news over the radio.

“He was a drum major for justice,” Morse said. “He was the soul of our country.”

Taryish Kinard, owner of Rosemary’s Diner, was just 7 years old when King was shot, but his family was active in the civil rights movement, and Taryish already was going along on marches.

He remembers the family gathered in the dining room of their Cairo, Ill., home. His mother was watching television in the next room.

“She had screamed and hollered ‘Martin Luther King has been killed,’” he said. The news seemed to cast a pall over the family.

Roberta Stevens is president of the La Crosse County branch of the NAACP.

In 1968, she was a 20-year-old college student in Buffalo, N.Y.

“We felt as though we had lost a loved one in our own families,” she said.

For African Americans, she said, the assassination “brought a lot home just how much people hated black folk.”

Most agree that the nonviolent civil rights movement died with King. And though black Americans are far better off than they were then, the country has a long way to go.

“The violence of his death set America on a path that we’re still suffering from,” said John Medinger, a La Crosse County Board member who was a student at the time and later worked as a volunteer helping poor black residents of Virginia. “After the assassination, riots broke out. People looked at violence as the solution to their problems. In some senses we’ve never recovered.”

There’s been “a lot of change, but a long ways to go,” Morse said. “I frankly don’t think we’re doing all that well.”

In 1968, La Crosse attorney James Birnbaum was a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He later worked for state and federal equal employment agencies.

“I think we’ve come a long way in La Crosse,” said Birnbaum, whose law practice is based largely on fair employment suits.

But there’s no time for self-congratulation, he said. “If I’ve learned anything in almost 40 years in the civil rights field, the battle is never over.”

Chris Hubbuch can be reached at (608) 791-8217 or at chubbuch@lacrossetribune.com.

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