When Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death on April 4, 1968, on a second-floorbalcony oftheLorraine Motel, only one photographer was on the scene.
The tragic image captured by South Africanjournalist Joseph Louw—King dead, his associates pointing in unison toward the origin of the single gunshot — would become one of the most recognizable and heart-rending photographs in American history.
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Today, disciples of the philosophy of nonviolence remain rare, but "reporters"are everywhere.
Wednesday, on the 50th anniversary of King's murder, hundreds of recording devices of all kinds were trained on that same fateful Lorraine Motel balcony,operated by professionals and amateurs alike.
The hours-long "Day of Remembrance" organized by the National Civil Rights Museum — the institution that incorporates the preserved front of the motel and King's attached Room 306 —attracted not just thousands of onlookers and such famous figures as civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, actor Chris Tucker and soul singer Al Green but amedia swarm.
MLK50:Reflecting on the Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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CBS,ABC,NBC. CNN. NPR. Fox,Al Jazeera. The BBC and its Canadian counterpart. Atlanta, Chicago,Dallas, Little Rock, Miami, Nashville, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Tokyo, Madrid... These were among the networks and cities represented by reporters and photographers Wednesday, according to Connie Dyson, communications manager for the civil rights museum.
But the "content"capturedby the high-tech hives of the satellite trucks and mediarisers at the museum's memorial eventrepresented just a portionof the King-related coverage harvested by out-of-town media representatives.
The spotlight trained on Memphis in the context of "MLK50" was wide and burned for many days. In some cases, the light was flattering; in others, harsh. Mostly, it represented a mix of skepticism and hope. It was — to use the problematic term — "balanced."
Reporting on Wednesday morning's march and rally, the Associated Press — in a story reproduced around the country — reported that "the rapper Common and pop singer Sheila E had the crowd dancing and bobbing their heads," before finding a cautious note with a quote from Rev. James Lawson, one of King's 1968 Memphis lieutenants: "The task is unfinished."
On his NBC Nightly News program, broadcast live from Memphis, anchor Lester Holt described the Lorraine as the place "where King died, but where the movement he led —and his dream —survives." (In addition to his anchor duties, Holt found time to visit Center Hill High School in Olive Branch, after students started a #HoltattheHill social media campaign.)
Noting that King was being memorialized across the country, CNN reported that "perhaps the grandest, most-sweeping memorial was in Memphis, where King was slain while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel."
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CNN emphasized the words of Rev. Michael Pfleger, a Chicago activist priest, who warned the crowed not to think of King's lifeas"some nostalgic or historic event, and then continue on with business as usual. Because if we do, then we become the present day co-conspirators of his assassination."
Many news media outlets — including The New York Times, NPR,the Washington Post and various overseas outlets —responded to the 50th anniversary of King's death with major think pieces and dedicated websitesrather than or in addition to on-the-ground deadline reports. Many seemed inspired by the title of King's final book, which also provided the civil rights museum for its "MLK50" theme: "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?"
Michael Donhauser with German news agency DPA wrote a lengthy piece about a visit to Memphis.
The story begins by contrasting the fancy homes of Central Gardens with the more modest neighborhood of Charlie Morris, an African-American man in his 90s who lives "ten minutes away by car" —the report doesn't say what neighborhood. Morris recallsthe horror of his brother's lynching and mutilation in 1939."They castrated him," he's quoted as saying.
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The lynching story, which Morris has told elsewhere, serves as a jumping-off place for understanding "the gap between black and white," Donhauser writes. He citesUniversity of Memphis professor Andre Johnson on how the legacy of slavery led to unequal wealth.
Donhauser wrote thatsome things have changed. "Whites listen to black music, allow black surgeons to operate on them, let black cooks spoil them and trust their money to black bankers," the German-language version says.An abbreviated version of the report is in English.
Raquel Godos traveled to Memphis forSpanish-language news agency Agencia EFE.
In one story, she describes Memphis as a city "frozen in time: empty streets, neglected buildings" and cites a report by University of Memphis professorElena Delavega that saysracially-associatedpovertyand income inequality persistin the areatoday."
Now online and on newsstands, a special issue of The Atlantic dedicated to the life and legacy of King includes a photo essay of aerial images by LaToya Ruby Frazier titled "The Geography of Oppression."
The essay describesthe "Memphis Pyramid" as "one of Tennessee's most famous buildings," overlookingthe Hernando DeSoto Bridge. "The bridge isan iconic symbol for Memphis, spanning the distance from Tennessee to Arkansas. That’s why Black Lives Matter protesters shut it down in 2016, echoingsanitation workers’ demands in 1968for economic justice and calling for an end to police brutality."
On March 30, The New York Times devoted much of its "Sunday Review" section to essaysrelated to King's legacy.
The most "Memphicentric," unsurprisingly, was by Wendi C. Thomas, former columnist with The Commercial Appeal, whoseongoing, extremely ambitious and Memphis-based "MLK50: Justice Through Journalism" project has beenentirely unbeholden to civic sloganeering.
The column was headlined "How Memphis Gave Up on Dr. King's Dream," a line echoed in the text: "Memphis today is a stark reminder of how much of Dr. King’s dream we’ve ignored."
Linking the anti-labor polices of Memphis' 1968 mayor, Henry Loeb, with the "low-wage labor" recruited by the Loeb Properties management and development company today, Thomasconcluded: "Inequality is created and maintained by those who benefit from the labor of underpaid workers."
On April 4, the front pageof The New York Times was dominated by a grid of four photographs of King-related locations inMemphis, including the Lorraine Motel and Mason Temple. The tourist-pretty effect of these images was contrasted by a two-page spread of 11 photos inside the front section, identified bysuch captions as "Debris in South Memphis" and "A Shuttered Grocery Store..." The headline over the brief essay accompanying the photos was "A Dampened Dream: Fifty years after the King assassination, Memphis is dogged by poverty, segregation and violence."
An April 4 essay in the Washington Post also isunlikely to be promotedby any Memphis tourism websites. Written by Leta McCollough Seletzky, the column was topped by this two-sentence headline: "I ran from Memphis. But I can't escape how it felt to grow up black there." Seletzky writes that as a childin Memphis, "I moved in the shadow of Jim Crow’s ragged, outstretched wings."
She concludesthat the Lorraine "isn’t just a landmark or a place where something terrible happened; it’s a wound from which the city never fully recovered — a gash in the civic soul that still aches, maybe even festers."
Writes Seletzky: "I’d run from Memphis, but hadn’t Memphis run from me, too?... And hadn’t it been running from itself, too, in concentric rings of white flight away from its center, toward its edges and beyond?"
