05/29/2026
Coretta called a photographer before her husband's body was cold.A hundred cities were on fire. She was already building what the world would need to remember. Every private photo from that funeral exists because of one phone call from a widow. Coretta Scott King called the photographer before the body was cold. In the hours after her husband was shot on a motel balcony in Memphis on April 4, 1968, while more than a hundred cities burned and fifty thousand National Guard troops mobilized across the country, she picked up the phone and called Bob Fitch. She had known him for years. He had been the staff photographer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, traveling with her husband across the South, documenting voter registration campaigns and marches and the ordinary moments between the famous ones. Now she needed him for something else. She needed him to come to Atlanta and photograph everything, not just the funeral but the private grief, the children, the bedroom, the moments the cameras were not supposed to see. Think about what that phone call means. A woman whose husband has just been murdered is already thinking about what the world will need to remember. She was not falling apart. She was building. The next morning, April 5, she flew to Memphis on a plane Robert F. Kennedy had personally arranged. At the R.S. Lewis and Sons Funeral Home, she stood beside the open bronze casket while mourners filed past. Some kissed his lips. Others touched his face, and a few threw their hands into the air and cried aloud. Time magazine described Coretta as a dry-eyed frieze of heartbreak. She made one decision at that viewing that nobody talks about enough. She decided the casket would stay open for the funeral. She wanted the children to see their father's body so they would understand, finally and completely, that he was not coming home. That is not grief. That is architecture, the slow, deliberate construction of a truth that a five-year-old and a seven-year-old and a ten-year-old and a twelve-year-old would need for the rest of their lives. The body was flown to Atlanta and over the next three days it lay in state at Sisters Chapel on the Spelman College campus while thousands lined the sidewalks. President Lyndon Johnson had declared a national day of mourning two days before the funeral. The service was set for April 9. That morning, the sky over Atlanta broke pink, and azaleas and dogwoods were blooming across the city as if the season had not received the news. Inside the King home at 234 Sunset Avenue in Vine City, Coretta rose early to greet her parents. The children were getting dressed. Bernice, the youngest, five years old and called Bunny by the family, spilled orange juice on the skirt of her crisp white dress. A reporter who had been allowed inside the house washed the spot out and ironed the skirt so Bernice could be dressed in time. That is the kind of detail that disappears from history. A stranger's hands pressing a hot iron across the wet cotton of a child's dress on the morning of her father's funeral. Jacqueline Kennedy arrived at the house that morning. The two widows, both wearing black silk suits, clasped hands and moved slowly down the long hallway to the bedroom, where they spent five minutes in private conversation. Nobody knows what they said. But there was probably nothing left to say that the other did not already know. At 10:30 a.m., the private service began at Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue, where Martin and his father had served as co-pastors. About 1,300 mourners were packed inside, and tens of thousands more stood outside listening over loudspeakers. All four men running for president that year were in the church: Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, and Robert F. Kennedy, who would himself be dead in two months. Thurgood Marshall was there, and so was Rosa Parks. Harry Belafonte, Wilt Chamberlain, Jim Brown, Sammy Davis Jr., Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, Eartha Kitt, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee. The Academy Awards had been postponed for the first time in history because the ceremony was scheduled for the night before the funeral and too many of its participants refused to attend unless it was moved. Sidney Poitier was nominated that year for two films about race. He went to Atlanta instead. At Coretta's request, her husband delivered his own eulogy. A recording of his last sermon at Ebenezer, the Drum Major Instinct sermon from February 4, 1968, was played through the speakers. In that sermon, he had asked that at his funeral nobody mention his awards or his honors. He wanted people to say he tried to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, be right on the Vietnam war question, and love and serve humanity. When the recording played, the King children were seated in the front row near the casket. Bernice, five years old, heard her father's voice fill the church. She je**ed her head toward the casket. She was looking for him to come out. That image, a child snapping her neck toward a box because she heard her daddy speak, is the kind of thing that does not fit on a monument. It does not reduce to a quote or a lesson plan. It is just a five-year-old girl who does not yet understand that a voice can outlive the body it came from. After the church service, the casket was carried outside by members of Ebenezer and taken by SCLC leaders, who placed it onto a green wooden farm wagon. Not a hearse, not a polished carriage, but a wagon. This was Hosea Williams's doing. He had insisted on it when everyone else assumed there would be a hearse, because he wanted the wagon to represent the Poor People's Campaign, the demand for economic justice that King had been building when he was killed. They searched for one that looked right, one that could not be nice, that had to look rugged, worn, the kind of thing a sharecropper would have used to haul cotton to market. The mules that pulled it were named Belle and Ada. They came from Gee's Bend, Alabama. If you do not know Gee's Bend, you should. It is a community of Black families on a bend of the Alabama River in Wilcox County, most of them descendants of people enslaved on the same land they still farmed in the 1960s. When King visited Gee's Bend on February 16, 1965, Black people made up nearly eighty percent of Wilcox County's population, but the number of registered Black voters in the county was zero. King spoke to three hundred people at Pleasant Grove Baptist Church that night. After he left, the people of Gee's Bend began trying to register to vote. The white sheriff, a man named P.C. "Lummie" Jenkins, responded by shutting down the ferry that connected Gee's Bend to Camden, the county seat. His explanation was a sentence that belongs in a museum of American cruelty. He said they did not close the ferry because the people were Black. They closed it because they forgot they were Black. Without the ferry, a fifteen-minute crossing became a forty-mile drive over narrow rural roads. But the people of Gee's Bend hitched their mules to wagons and drove around the river anyway, because that is what mules and Black people in Alabama have always done when someone tries to close the road. Those same mules, Belle and Ada, were now in Atlanta, hitched to a green wooden wagon carrying the body of the man who had told them their vote mattered. A farmer from Clayton County named Edward Peeks drove the team. The procession began at Ebenezer and moved three and a half miles through the streets of Atlanta toward Morehouse College, King's alma mater. An estimated one hundred thousand people walked behind the wagon. Some sang freedom songs. Most said nothing at all. The city was so quiet that you could hear the hooves on the pavement. That clop, clop, clop was the sound of a hundred thousand people's grief, the rhythm of two mules from a place where Black people were not supposed to vote pulling the casket of a man who was not supposed to die. Fifty thousand more lined the sidewalks, crammed onto hillsides and park benches, and hung from streetlights. Robert Kennedy walked in the procession with his suit coat slung over his left shoulder, with sixty-one days left to live. Alice Walker, the novelist, walked in the procession while pregnant. The emotional toll was so devastating that she later miscarried. At Morehouse, Benjamin Mays, the college president who had given the benediction after the I Have a Dream speech five years earlier, delivered the eulogy. Mahalia Jackson sang Take My Hand, Precious Lord, the hymn King had asked musician Ben Branch to play at a meeting moments before the bullet found him. After the service, King's body was taken to South-View Cemetery, described by the UPI as the resting place of slaves. That evening, while Atlanta exhaled and the nation tried to figure out what had just happened, Bob Fitch was still working. Coretta had asked him to photograph what came after, too. The family at home, the children in rooms that were now permanently emptier. He photographed Coretta sitting with Bernice in her lap, the small body leaning into the larger one. He photographed Martin Luther King III sitting near a bed while his mother consulted with Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson in the background. He photographed Coretta on Robert Kennedy's jet, staring out the window, pensive, alone in a cabin full of people. He photographed Alberta King, the mother, and Martin Luther King Sr., the father, grieving their son at Morehouse. Alberta's face was a thing nobody should have to see. Six years later, she too would be shot, killed by a gunman while she sat at the organ of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the same church where her son's funeral had been held. Two months after the funeral, Fitch photographed Coretta again, this time leading songs at the Poor People's Campaign march on Washington that her husband had been building when he died. She stood where he would have stood and sang what he would have sung. She had already been doing that since the phone call. Since before the casket was closed, since the morning a stranger ironed orange juice out of a child's white dress and a five-year-old heard her father's voice and looked for him to rise. Those photographs, more than two hundred thousand images in the Bob Fitch archive, now sit in boxes at Stanford University's Department of Special Collections. They are the record of what Coretta knew the world would need before the world knew it needed anything. She made one phone call in the worst hours of her life, and because of it we can still see what grief looked like when it was private. We can see what courage looked like when it wore a black silk suit and did not cry. We can see a green wagon pulled by two mules from a place where Black people were told to remember that they were Black. And we can hear, if we listen carefully enough, the sound of hooves on pavement in a city that had run out of words. I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter. If you’d like to support the work, here’s the link: Every coffee helps me keep creating.Coretta called a photographer before her husband's body was cold.A hundred cities were on fire. She was already building what the world would need to remember.
Every private photo from that funeral exists because of one phone call from a widow.
Coretta Scott King called the photographer before the body was cold. In the hours after her husband was shot on a motel balcony in Memphis on April 4, 1968, while more than a hundred cities burned and fifty thousand National Guard troops mobilized across the country, she picked up the phone and called Bob Fitch.
She had known him for years. He had been the staff photographer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, traveling with her husband across the South, documenting voter registration campaigns and marches and the ordinary moments between the famous ones.
Now she needed him for something else. She needed him to come to Atlanta and photograph everything, not just the funeral but the private grief, the children, the bedroom, the moments the cameras were not supposed to see.
Think about what that phone call means. A woman whose husband has just been murdered is already thinking about what the world will need to remember.
She was not falling apart. She was building.
The next morning, April 5, she flew to Memphis on a plane Robert F. Kennedy had personally arranged. At the R.S. Lewis and Sons Funeral Home, she stood beside the open bronze casket while mourners filed past.
Some kissed his lips. Others touched his face, and a few threw their hands into the air and cried aloud.
Time magazine described Coretta as a dry-eyed frieze of heartbreak. She made one decision at that viewing that nobody talks about enough.
She decided the casket would stay open for the funeral. She wanted the children to see their father's body so they would understand, finally and completely, that he was not coming home.
That is not grief. That is architecture, the slow, deliberate construction of a truth that a five-year-old and a seven-year-old and a ten-year-old and a twelve-year-old would need for the rest of their lives.
The body was flown to Atlanta and over the next three days it lay in state at Sisters Chapel on the Spelman College campus while thousands lined the sidewalks. President Lyndon Johnson had declared a national day of mourning two days before the funeral.
The service was set for April 9. That morning, the sky over Atlanta broke pink, and azaleas and dogwoods were blooming across the city as if the season had not received the news.
Inside the King home at 234 Sunset Avenue in Vine City, Coretta rose early to greet her parents. The children were getting dressed.
Bernice, the youngest, five years old and called Bunny by the family, spilled orange juice on the skirt of her crisp white dress. A reporter who had been allowed inside the house washed the spot out and ironed the skirt so Bernice could be dressed in time.
That is the kind of detail that disappears from history. A stranger's hands pressing a hot iron across the wet cotton of a child's dress on the morning of her father's funeral.
Jacqueline Kennedy arrived at the house that morning. The two widows, both wearing black silk suits, clasped hands and moved slowly down the long hallway to the bedroom, where they spent five minutes in private conversation.
Nobody knows what they said. But there was probably nothing left to say that the other did not already know.
At 10:30 a.m., the private service began at Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue, where Martin and his father had served as co-pastors. About 1,300 mourners were packed inside, and tens of thousands more stood outside listening over loudspeakers.
All four men running for president that year were in the church: Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, and Robert F. Kennedy, who would himself be dead in two months. Thurgood Marshall was there, and so was Rosa Parks.
Harry Belafonte, Wilt Chamberlain, Jim Brown, Sammy Davis Jr., Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, Eartha Kitt, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee. The Academy Awards had been postponed for the first time in history because the ceremony was scheduled for the night before the funeral and too many of its participants refused to attend unless it was moved.
Sidney Poitier was nominated that year for two films about race. He went to Atlanta instead.
At Coretta's request, her husband delivered his own eulogy. A recording of his last sermon at Ebenezer, the Drum Major Instinct sermon from February 4, 1968, was played through the speakers.
In that sermon, he had asked that at his funeral nobody mention his awards or his honors. He wanted people to say he tried to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, be right on the Vietnam war question, and love and serve humanity.
When the recording played, the King children were seated in the front row near the casket. Bernice, five years old, heard her father's voice fill the church.
She je**ed her head toward the casket. She was looking for him to come out.
That image, a child snapping her neck toward a box because she heard her daddy speak, is the kind of thing that does not fit on a monument. It does not reduce to a quote or a lesson plan.
It is just a five-year-old girl who does not yet understand that a voice can outlive the body it came from.
After the church service, the casket was carried outside by members of Ebenezer and taken by SCLC leaders, who placed it onto a green wooden farm wagon. Not a hearse, not a polished carriage, but a wagon.
This was Hosea Williams's doing. He had insisted on it when everyone else assumed there would be a hearse, because he wanted the wagon to represent the Poor People's Campaign, the demand for economic justice that King had been building when he was killed.
They searched for one that looked right, one that could not be nice, that had to look rugged, worn, the kind of thing a sharecropper would have used to haul cotton to market. The mules that pulled it were named Belle and Ada.
They came from Gee's Bend, Alabama. If you do not know Gee's Bend, you should.
It is a community of Black families on a bend of the Alabama River in Wilcox County, most of them descendants of people enslaved on the same land they still farmed in the 1960s. When King visited Gee's Bend on February 16, 1965, Black people made up nearly eighty percent of Wilcox County's population, but the number of registered Black voters in the county was zero.
King spoke to three hundred people at Pleasant Grove Baptist Church that night. After he left, the people of Gee's Bend began trying to register to vote.
The white sheriff, a man named P.C. "Lummie" Jenkins, responded by shutting down the ferry that connected Gee's Bend to Camden, the county seat. His explanation was a sentence that belongs in a museum of American cruelty.
He said they did not close the ferry because the people were Black. They closed it because they forgot they were Black.
Without the ferry, a fifteen-minute crossing became a forty-mile drive over narrow rural roads. But the people of Gee's Bend hitched their mules to wagons and drove around the river anyway, because that is what mules and Black people in Alabama have always done when someone tries to close the road.
Those same mules, Belle and Ada, were now in Atlanta, hitched to a green wooden wagon carrying the body of the man who had told them their vote mattered. A farmer from Clayton County named Edward Peeks drove the team.
The procession began at Ebenezer and moved three and a half miles through the streets of Atlanta toward Morehouse College, King's alma mater. An estimated one hundred thousand people walked behind the wagon.
Some sang freedom songs. Most said nothing at all.
The city was so quiet that you could hear the hooves on the pavement. That clop, clop, clop was the sound of a hundred thousand people's grief, the rhythm of two mules from a place where Black people were not supposed to vote pulling the casket of a man who was not supposed to die.
Fifty thousand more lined the sidewalks, crammed onto hillsides and park benches, and hung from streetlights. Robert Kennedy walked in the procession with his suit coat slung over his left shoulder, with sixty-one days left to live.
Alice Walker, the novelist, walked in the procession while pregnant. The emotional toll was so devastating that she later miscarried.
At Morehouse, Benjamin Mays, the college president who had given the benediction after the I Have a Dream speech five years earlier, delivered the eulogy. Mahalia Jackson sang Take My Hand, Precious Lord, the hymn King had asked musician Ben Branch to play at a meeting moments before the bullet found him.
After the service, King's body was taken to South-View Cemetery, described by the UPI as the resting place of slaves. That evening, while Atlanta exhaled and the nation tried to figure out what had just happened, Bob Fitch was still working.
Coretta had asked him to photograph what came after, too. The family at home, the children in rooms that were now permanently emptier.
He photographed Coretta sitting with Bernice in her lap, the small body leaning into the larger one. He photographed Martin Luther King III sitting near a bed while his mother consulted with Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson in the background.
He photographed Coretta on Robert Kennedy's jet, staring out the window, pensive, alone in a cabin full of people. He photographed Alberta King, the mother, and Martin Luther King Sr., the father, grieving their son at Morehouse.
Alberta's face was a thing nobody should have to see. Six years later, she too would be shot, killed by a gunman while she sat at the organ of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the same church where her son's funeral had been held.
Two months after the funeral, Fitch photographed Coretta again, this time leading songs at the Poor People's Campaign march on Washington that her husband had been building when he died. She stood where he would have stood and sang what he would have sung.
She had already been doing that since the phone call. Since before the casket was closed, since the morning a stranger ironed orange juice out of a child's white dress and a five-year-old heard her father's voice and looked for him to rise.
Those photographs, more than two hundred thousand images in the Bob Fitch archive, now sit in boxes at Stanford University's Department of Special Collections. They are the record of what Coretta knew the world would need before the world knew it needed anything.
She made one phone call in the worst hours of her life, and because of it we can still see what grief looked like when it was private. We can see what courage looked like when it wore a black silk suit and did not cry.
We can see a green wagon pulled by two mules from a place where Black people were told to remember that they were Black. And we can hear, if we listen carefully enough, the sound of hooves on pavement in a city that had run out of words.
I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter. If you’d like to support the work, here’s the link:
https://ko-fi.com/blackhistorystories
Every coffee helps me keep creating.
