On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. sat in his Atlanta home with his wife, Coretta Scott King, watching the television reports crackle with the unthinkable: President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas.
King was 34 years old. He had spent years leading the civil rights movement through its most violent and consequential chapters. He had been stabbed, bombed, jailed, and surveilled.
He had received more death threats than he could count. He had buried colleagues and friends.
He understood, perhaps more than any living American, the cost of political violence.
And as the television confirmed Kennedy’s death, King turned to Coretta and said something she would document in her memoir and that history would never forget.
Coretta Scott King preserved her husband’s private words in her 1969 memoir, “My Life with Martin Luther King Jr. ,” published one year after King himself was assassinated. She recorded that after watching the television reports of Kennedy’s death, King turned to her and said: “This is what is going to happen to me also.
I keep telling you, this is a sick society.”
Those two sentences stand among the most painful and quiet words in the record of the civil rights era. A man watching a president die on television and seeing in that death the outline of his own ending.
This was not a new fear. King had been living with the certain knowledge that he was a target for years.
In September 1958, a woman named Izola Curry approached King at a book signing in Harlem and stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener. The blade settled near his aorta. Surgeons later told him that if he had sneezed, he would have drowned in his own blood.
In 1956, before he became nationally famous, the front porch of his home in Montgomery, Alabama, was bombed while Coretta and their infant daughter Yolanda were inside. They were unharmed. The bomb was meant for King.
Through the years between the Montgomery bombing and November 1963, the threats did not diminish. They intensified. As King’s profile grew and the civil rights movement moved from Montgomery to Birmingham to Washington, the volume and specificity of the threats against him increased.
His home phone was tapped by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, who imposed intense surveillance on King. Hoover considered King a radical and a threat.
By October 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy had authorized the FBI to wiretap King’s home phone. The surveillance was extensive and deeply intrusive. King and his aides knew they were being watched, though the full extent of that surveillance was not publicly known at the time.
So when King turned to Coretta on November 22, 1963, and said, “This is what is going to happen to me also,” he was not speaking from abstract fear. He was speaking from a specific, documented, daily-lived reality under threat. He had been stabbed.
His home had been bombed. His phones were tapped. His associates were under surveillance.
He had watched colleagues in the civil rights movement face violence and death.
And now the president of the United States had been shot, surrounded by Secret Service agents, in an open motorcade in the middle of a major American city in broad daylight. If the president could be killed that way in front of the entire world, the implicit message about the safety of a civil rights leader who had been receiving death threats for years was not lost on Martin Luther King Jr.
“I keep telling you, this is a sick society.” That second sentence matters just as much. It was not merely an expression of personal fear.
It was a moral diagnosis.
King was a trained theologian, raised in the Black Baptist church and holding a doctorate in systematic theology from Boston University. He thought in terms of moral systems, of communities and their structures, of the relationship between individual acts of violence and the broader conditions that make such acts possible. When he described American society as sick, he meant it in the specific sense that a society producing this kind of violence suffers from an illness whose symptoms are not random but systemic.
His later writings made clear that he did not see the Kennedy assassination as an isolated event but as part of a broader culture of violence and hatred. In an article he wrote in the weeks following the assassination, later cited by civil rights historians, King argued explicitly that the murder could not simply be dismissed as the act of a deranged individual alone.
To understand the full weight of the private words Coretta later documented, one must understand what John F. Kennedy meant to the civil rights movement, and what the civil rights movement meant to Kennedy. The relationship between the two men was documented and complex, evolving significantly over Kennedy’s thousand days in office.
The relationship between Kennedy and King began in 1960 during the presidential campaign with a gesture that seemed small to Kennedy and enormous to King. In October 1960, King was arrested in Georgia on a minor traffic charge and sentenced to four months of hard labor in state prison. It was widely understood that the sentence was a pretext.
King’s civil rights work was the real reason for his imprisonment. His family and associates feared for his safety.
Kennedy, then a senator running against Richard Nixon for the presidency, called Coretta Scott King to express his personal concern. His brother, Robert Kennedy, called the Georgia judge who had sentenced King, and King was released the next day.
A previously unheard recording of King speaking about Kennedy, discovered in an attic in Tennessee and later donated to the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, documents King’s account of how Kennedy called Coretta and how Robert Kennedy called the Georgia judge. The recording, verified and first published in 2014, shows King’s awareness of the personal and political significance of what Kennedy had done. Approximately 70 percent of Black voters chose Kennedy in the 1960 election, a margin that certainly contributed to his narrow victory over Nixon.
But the relationship between King and Kennedy after the election was more complicated than simple gratitude and alliance. Kennedy moved cautiously on civil rights during his first two years as president. He was constrained by the political reality that Southern Democratic senators chaired vital congressional committees, and that pressing hard on civil rights legislation could derail his entire legislative agenda.
King and his fellow civil rights leaders were frustrated by this caution. They needed presidential leadership. They did not get it as quickly or as fully as the urgency of the moment demanded.
The Birmingham campaign in the spring of 1963 changed that dynamic. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference launched a campaign of direct action in Birmingham, Alabama, described at the time as the most segregated city in the country. Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor met demonstrators, including children, with fire hoses and police dogs.
Those images were broadcast nationally and shocked the country. King was arrested and wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail from his cell, one of the defining documents of the civil rights movement.
Birmingham forced a turning point. On June 11, 1963, the same day that Governor George Wallace stood literally in the doorway of the University of Alabama to block the enrollment of two Black students, Kennedy appeared on national television and delivered what many historians consider the most important civil rights speech of his presidency. He declared: “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue.
It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.” He announced he would send comprehensive civil rights legislation to Congress.
King’s documented reaction to the June 11 speech was one of genuine and significant approval. Civil rights leader John Lewis, who worked closely with King, recalled that King was deeply moved by President Kennedy’s June 11, 1963, speech, when he said that the civil rights issue was a moral issue. This was the language of King’s own movement, the language of moral urgency and Christian conscience applied to racial equality, now spoken by the president of the United States from the Oval Office.
For King, who had been pressing Kennedy toward this kind of commitment for more than two years, the June 11 speech represented a real shift. Kennedy moved from caution toward a much stronger public commitment to civil rights.
Kennedy submitted the civil rights bill to Congress in June 1963. The bill faced a filibuster from Southern senators. To build public pressure for its passage, King and other civil rights leaders organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, held on August 28, 1963.
More than 200,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in one of the largest political demonstrations in American history. King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the memorial.
After the March on Washington, civil rights leaders, including King, met with Kennedy in the Oval Office. Photographs from that meeting show the two men, the president and the advocate, with a formality, caution, and reserve toward each other even in this moment of apparent shared purpose. Their relationship was cordial but not close.
They were two men who needed each other politically and respected each other’s power without the close personal bond that King had, for example, with Kennedy’s brother, Robert.
The civil rights bill Kennedy submitted in June 1963 was still stalled in Congress when he was killed in November. Kennedy had not been able to break the Southern filibuster, and the bill had not passed. One of the central legislative goals of the civil rights movement was, at the moment of Kennedy’s assassination, an unfinished item on a dead president’s agenda.
King issued a formal public statement on November 22, 1963, preserved at the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. The statement was measured and expressed sorrow at Kennedy’s death and support for his successor.
But it was Coretta’s documented account of that private moment, with the television on, the two of them watching together, and King turning to say, “This is what is going to happen to me also,” that revealed what King truly felt when the cameras were off and the public statement had not yet been written.
Those private words carried within them a fear that was tragically confirmed four years and four months later. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, when a bullet fired by James Earl Ray struck his jaw and severed his spinal cord.
He died at St. Joseph’s Hospital at 7:05 p. m.
He was 39 years old.
The civil rights bill Kennedy had submitted and failed to pass in his lifetime was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on July 2, 1964, seven months after Kennedy’s assassination. Johnson invoked Kennedy’s memory to build support for the legislation and pushed the bill through a Congress that had resisted it for months. The Senate Historical Office specifically documents Johnson’s urging of Congress to honor Kennedy’s memory by passing civil rights legislation.
The Voting Rights Act followed in 1965.
These were the legislative achievements that the relationship between King and Kennedy, despite its documented complexities and the distances of caution between them, had been working toward. Kennedy did not live to see either signed. King did not live to see the full arc of what those efforts made possible.
Four years later, the fear King expressed to Coretta became a tragic fact. The private words Coretta later documented, “This is what is going to happen to me also,” were spoken by a man who had lived the reality of American political violence for years and who understood with painful clarity that the assassination of a president was not entirely separate from the America he had been navigating his entire adult life.
His later writings made clear that he did not see the killing as an incidental event but as a symptom of something deeper in American society, a theme he had already named while standing in his living room with Coretta on that evening of November 22, 1963, in the private words she preserved and history has never forgotten.