On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was at his home in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, Coretta. The news broke on television: President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas.
King was 34 years old. He had been leading the civil rights movement through some of its most violent and consequential moments. He had been stabbed, his home bombed, and he had been jailed and surveilled. He had received more death threats than he could count. He had buried colleagues and friends.
As he watched the television reports confirming Kennedy’s death, King turned to Coretta and said something she would later document in her memoir. The words were: “This is what is going to happen to me also. I keep telling you, this is a sick society.”
Coretta Scott King recorded those words in her 1969 memoir, “My Life with Martin Luther King Jr.,” published one year after King’s own assassination. The two sentences are among the most painful and quietly prophetic in the record of the civil rights era. A man watched a president die on television and saw in that death the outline of his own.
This was not a new fear. King had lived with the certainty that he was a target for years. In September 1958, a woman named Izola Curry approached him at a book signing in Harlem and stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener. The blade came to rest near his aorta. Surgeons later told him that if he had sneezed, he would have drowned in his own blood.
In 1956, before he was 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.
Between the Montgomery bombing and November 1963, the threats did not diminish. They intensified. As King’s profile grew, and as the movement moved from Montgomery to Birmingham to Washington, the volume and specificity of threats against him increased. His home phone was tapped by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, who considered King a threat. By October 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy had authorized the FBI to wiretap King’s home phone.
King and his aides were aware they were being watched, though the full extent of the surveillance was not public knowledge 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 documented, lived reality of 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. Now the President of the United States had been shot dead, surrounded by Secret Service agents, in a major American city in the middle of the day.
If the President could be killed that way, in front of the world, the implicit message about the safety of a civil rights leader who had received death threats for years was not lost on King.
The second sentence was just as important. “I keep telling you, this is a sick society.” That was not merely a personal expression of fear. It was a moral diagnosis. King was a trained theologian, raised in the Black Baptist church, with a doctorate in systematic theology from Boston University. He thought in terms of moral systems, societies 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 a specific sense: a society that produces 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 Kennedy’s assassination as an isolated event, but as part of a broader culture of violence and hatred. In an essay written in the weeks after the assassination, King argued explicitly that the killing could not simply be dismissed as the act of a deranged individual.
To understand the full weight of the private words Coretta later documented, it helps to understand what John F. Kennedy meant to the civil rights movement, and what the 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.
It began in 1960, during the presidential campaign, with a gesture that seemed small to Kennedy’s team and enormous to King’s. In October 1960, King was arrested in Georgia on a minor traffic violation 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 running against Richard Nixon, called Coretta Scott King to express his personal concern. His brother, Robert Kennedy, called the Georgia judge who had issued the sentence. King was released the next day.
A previously unheard recording of King speaking about Kennedy, discovered in a Tennessee attic 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, verified and first published in 2014, shows King’s awareness of the personal and political significance of what Kennedy had done.
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 gratitude and alliance.
Kennedy moved cautiously on civil rights during his first two years in office. He was constrained by the political reality that Southern Democratic senators controlled key committee chairmanships in Congress, and that pressing too hard on civil rights legislation could derail his entire legislative agenda. King and his colleagues in the movement were frustrated by that 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 direct action campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, then described as the most segregated city in the country. Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor confronted 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 literally stood 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 the speech. This was the language of King’s own movement: the language of moral urgency, of Christian conscience applied to the question of 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 had moved from caution toward a far more forceful public commitment to civil rights.
Kennedy introduced the Civil Rights Act to Congress in June 1963. It 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, civil rights leaders, including King, met with Kennedy in the White House. Photographs of that meeting show the two men, the president and the preacher, with gravity, formality, and caution toward one another even in a 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 Robert Kennedy.
The Civil Rights Act Kennedy introduced 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 the agenda of a slain president.
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 him in the 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 Act that Kennedy had introduced 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 documents Johnson urging 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 King-Kennedy relationship, despite its documented complexities and cautious distances, had been working toward. Kennedy did not live to see either one 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 with the reality of American political violence for years and who understood, with painful clarity, that the assassination of the president was not entirely separate from the America he had been dealing with his entire adult life. His later writings made clear that he did not see that killing as an accident, but as a symptom of something deeper in American society. It was a theme he had already named, standing in his living room with Coretta on the evening of November 22, 1963, in those private words she preserved and history has never forgotten.