Here’s my latest #LIHerald column, “The New York Times, a historical treasure trove”:
By Scott A. Brinton
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson were chatting, King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., and Jackson in the parking lot below, when the shot rang out. King “toppled to the concrete second-floor walkway. Blood gushed from the right jaw and neck. His necktie had been ripped off by the blast.”
That’s according to the New York Times’s April 5, 1968, account of King’s assassination, “Martin Luther King Is Slain in Memphis; A White Is Suspected; Guard Called Out,” by Earl Caldwell.
The account is found in The New York Times’s “Book of Politics: 167 Years of Covering the State of the Union” (Sterling, 2018), with select Times articles covering “Presidents and their Elections,” “War,” “The Economy,” “Race and Civil Rights,” “Other Hot-Button Issues,” “The Rise of the Right,” and “Political Scandals.” Times columnist Maureen Dowd, a Pulitzer Prize winner who famously said her job is “to pique power,” wrote the foreword.
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