It Was the Silence That Undid Me

James Baldwin's dispatch from Dr King's funeral:

On the morning of Tuesday, April 9, Baldwin left his Atlanta hotel and walked toward Ebenezer Baptist Church. Throngs of people stretched in every direction. Baldwin squeezed his way closer to the church, inch by inch, until an impenetrable wall of humanity finally stopped him in his tracks. The people “were like rows of poppies,” recalled June Dobbs, a lifelong friend of King’s. 

Outside the church, Baldwin leaned up against a Cadillac carrying football star Jim Brown, but Brown did not see him. Baldwin gesticulated wildly until someone on the church steps recognized him, pushed toward the Cadillac, and “sort of lifted me over.” He followed his escort into the church and found a seat among the 1,000 souls pressed into Ebenezer. The pew in front of him held a lineup of celebrity entertainers: Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis Jr., Eartha Kitt, and Sidney Poitier. Harry Belafonte sat up front, alongside Coretta Scott King. Ralph Abernathy occupied the pulpit. “The atmosphere was black,” Baldwin wrote, “with a tension indescribable—as though something, perhaps the heavens, perhaps the earth, might crack.”

As the service began, Baldwin tried to keep himself together. “I did not want to weep for Martin, tears seemed futile.” His death was too terrible, the void too deep. “I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, that if I began to weep I would not be able to stop.”

Read the whole thing.

Selah.