On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was at his home in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, Coretta. He was 34 years old. News came over the television that the President of the United States had been shot in Dallas, Texas.
King watched the reports. He had been leading the civil rights movement through some of its most violent and consequential moments. He had been stabbed, bombed, jailed, and surveilled. He had received more death threats than he could count. He had buried colleagues and friends.
As he watched the television confirm the death of John F. Kennedy, King turned to Coretta and said something she would record in her memoirs and that history would never forget.
Coretta Scott King preserved her husband's private words in her memoir, "My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr.," published in 1969, one year after King's own assassination. 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 are among the most painful and quietest 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 end.
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 had he 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 not harmed. The bomb was meant for King.
During the years between the Montgomery bombing and November 1963, the threats did not diminish. They intensified. As King's prominence grew, and as the civil rights movement moved from Montgomery to Birmingham to Washington, the volume and specificity of the threats against him increased.
His home telephone was wiretapped 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 known to the public 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 mere fear. He was speaking from a specific, documented reality lived daily under threat.
He had been stabbed. His home had been bombed. His phones were tapped. His colleagues were under surveillance. He had watched fellow civil rights workers 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 at midday. 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 did not escape Martin Luther King.
"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, communities and their structures, and 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 a disease 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 killing 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, and it evolved significantly during 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 in Kennedy's estimation and enormous in King's.
In October 1960, King was arrested in Georgia on a minor traffic charge and sentenced to four months of hard labor in a 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 colleagues feared for his safety.
Kennedy, then a senator campaigning 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 issued King's sentence, and King was released the next day.
A previously unheard recording of King speaking about Kennedy, discovered in the attic of a Tennessee home and later donated to the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, documents King discussing how Kennedy called Coretta and how Robert Kennedy called the Georgia judge. The recording, which was verified and first published in 2014, shows King's awareness of the personal and political significance of what Kennedy did.
About 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 controlled key committee chairmanships in Congress, 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.
The Birmingham campaign forced a turning point. On June 11, 1963, the same day 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 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 by senators from Southern states. To build popular 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 of that meeting show the two men, the president and the advocate, with a formality and caution 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 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, at the moment of Kennedy's assassination, was an unfinished item on a fallen 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 and the two of them watching together, that revealed what King truly felt when the cameras were off and the public statement had not yet been written.
Those private words carried 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 rally 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 course of what those efforts made possible.
Four years later, the fear King expressed to Coretta became a tragic reality. 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 understood with painful clarity that the assassination of a president was not entirely separate from the America he had been dealing with throughout his 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 subject 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.