-- Martin Luther King Jr., April 3, 1968
Thanks to his pack-a-day smoking habit, Martin Luther King Jr. is alive and well on his 79th birthday.
Forty years ago, like the sudden prompting of the Holy Ghost, his smoker's hack came at the right moment. He coughed, bent over -- and narrowly dodged a speeding bullet from a high-powered rifle. Forty years after the assassination attempt, he can still feel it grazing his right cheek.
Startled at having missed, the assassin wasn't able to get off another shot before his intended victim leaped for cover.
Moving with agility he had never displayed in his 39 years, Martin Luther King rolled across the balcony of the Lorraine Motel like a bobcat lathered in grease. An astonished Ralph Abernathy opened the screen door to the room they shared when he saw him hugging the ground.
"What are you doing, M.L.?"
"Someone's shooting at me."
Abernathy pulled him into the room while Andrew Young closed the curtain. Abernathy was already calling the Memphis police. A minute later, there was banging at the door.
"Open up! It's me, " the gospel musician Ben Branch shouted. "I have Jesse with me. He's been shot."
Later, the commission investigating the events of April 4, 1968, determined that Jesse Jackson's non-fatal flesh wound was caused by the ricocheting bullet that missed King.
It was Jesse Jackson's bad luck to be standing in the motel parking lot under M.L.'s balcony when the shot rang out.
Jackson's bloody shirt, which he refused to part with, provided the media with an irresistible image when he called a news conference at St. Joseph's Hospital to assure the world that he'd survived the attempt on his boss's life.
Because the FBI knew everything that happened in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, they were aware of the assassination attempt. Agents were dispatched to the site before local police knew what happened.
When the shooter emerged from a rundown house on Mulberry Street with his rifle in hand, he was surrounded by federal agents. He died in a fusillade of bullets before he was interrogated. Case closed.
Coretta decided she couldn't deal with another assassination attempt. She told him she was tired of being married to a man obliged to risk his life by racing from one racial drama to another. She wanted him to let others assume the weight of the movement or he would surely lose her and the children.
Weary from their constant battles, he readily agreed to her terms. It was easy to do because Robert Kennedy handily defeated Richard Nixon for the presidency in late 1968.
His sabbatical was supposed to be a temporary respite. Forty years later, only Coretta's death made him consider a return to public life.
How quickly the world had forgotten him. The "I Have a Dream" speech continued to have cultural resonance during Black History Month, but over the years, he had become about as relevant to black America as the Harlem Globetrotters.
He wrote books that sold modestly and op-eds bemoaning the superficiality of the movement for a day to honor Biggie and Tupac, but all it elicited were yawns. Few political figures sought his counsel. He once sent a telegram to Sen. Barack Obama, congratulating him for his 2004 Democratic Convention speech.
He bumped into his old protege backstage at the NAACP Image Awards. It was the first time he'd seen Jesse Jackson in years.
"How are you doing, man?"
"I'm blessed, M.L. Life's been good. Yourself?"
"Can't complain. The great-grandkids are keeping me busy. I miss Coretta terribly, though, but she's in a better place."
"I wish I could've been at her funeral, Doc, but I was in North Korea negotiating the release of that captured American submarine crew."
"Jesse, when are you going to stop apologizing for doing what God wants you to do?" They embraced awkwardly.
"Do you ever wonder what would've happened had you been shot that day instead of me?"
"Of course I do, Jesse. I don't think it would have mattered much, to tell the truth. I'm a minor figure on the fringes of history. Life goes on."
"Maybe you're right, Doc," he said. "Maybe we are living in the best of all possible worlds."
First Published: January 22, 2008, 5:00 a.m.
