On April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a group of sanitation workers in Memphis,
Tennessee.
The address, known as his "Mountaintop Speech," would be his last.
"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,"
Fifty years later, the memory of King's assassination is still fresh in the mind of civil rights
leader Rev. Jesse Jackson, who saw it unfold.
We spoke to Jackson at his Rainbow PUSH Coalition headquarters about King's death and the violence
that plagued the civil rights movement.
How present was death and violence when you all were marching, when you all were being
jailed, when you all were fighting for equality.
In reading about martin luther king, jr., I found his relationship with death very interesting.
In the book "April 4, 1968' by Michael Eric Dyson, it says how King had a few brushes
with death.
I wanted to know was he, during the tail-end of his life, was he obsessed with his own death?
In that same book, they talk about how he used gallows humor to overcome whatever he
was feeling about death.
There's a portion that says, "king and his comrades often preached mock funerals for
one another." Is that something that you all did?