Apr 4, 2018 4 min read

April 5, 1968, fell on a Friday. It was a 40-degree day, and just the evening before, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis, Tenn.

One thing still stands out about that day for Phyllis Waller.

She was a student at Patten Elementary School in South Strabane Township. A little more than four years before, when President John F. Kennedy was killed, a teacher at the school mourned and discussed the murder. When King died, the same teacher was silent.

“Nothing was said,” recalled Waller, who is now the president of the Washington branch of the NAACP.

Wednesday was the 50th anniversary of King’s murder, an event that was commemorated in a variety of ways around the country, from his image being projected on the Arch at Washington Square Park in New York, to a wreath-laying at his grave in Atlanta, Ga. The remembrances underscored the extent to which King has been venerated over the last half-century, with a national holiday in his honor and a memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

As Waller pointed out, however, he was a much more controversial figure when he was killed at the age of 39.

Now “he’s considered a legend,” she said. “But everybody didn’t feel that way at the time. He believed in equal rights and social justice. He died too early.”

Waller’s parents, Louis and Shirley Waller, met King in Atlanta, and they were activists for civil rights in Washington, leading marches and agitating against the everyday indignities African-Americans faced in this region, whether it was being forced to sit in the balcony at movie theaters or being asked to produce “health certificates” before they could swim at public pools. On the Sunday after King’s death, Waller’s father led a march from Washington’s Citizens Library to the county courthouse for a tribute service. It was attended by the county’s commissioners and Charles L. Mayer, Washington’s mayor, who ordered the city’s flags to fly at half staff in King’s honor.

The day after King’s death, the Observer-Reporter headlined a story about President Lyndon Johnson urging calm in the wake of the assassination, and stating the country should be ruled by “ballots not bullets.” The front page of the newspaper also featured an Associated Press story saying that death had been “dogging King since he assumed Negro leadership in 1955.”

The following Monday, the Observer-Reporter editorialized that King’s murder was “a senseless act,” and “akin to kicking one of the supports loose from the very foundation of this country.”

It continued, “(King) had, in his time as a civil rights leader, shown the courage, perception, patience and even tolerance in an intolerant situation, to be the leader the civil rights movement needed.”

On the day King died, Monongahela resident George Simmons was teaching at the youth development center in Canonsburg and living in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood. He saw King when he appeared at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Pittsburgh a few years before. A former vice president of the Pittsburgh chapter of the NAACP, Simmons was attending California State College before it became California University of Pennsylvania when he saw King. He perceived King then as “a frustrated black preacher.”

“At the same time, I was reading Malcolm X and a lot of the other activists, and we didn’t know which way to turn,” Simmons recalled.

In fact, a documentary that premiered on HBO this week, “King in the Wilderness,” highlights how King was at a crossroads at the time of his death. While he had made his name fighting the deprivations and indignities African-Americans faced in the Deep South, King was turning his focus to discrimination in the North, the Vietnam War and issues surrounding poverty in 1968. His method of approaching oppression with nonviolence was also being challenged by activists within the burgeoning Black Power movement.

According to Waller, “If he had lived 20, 30 or 40 more years, what would he have accomplished? And how would he feel now? We’ve come a long way, but I don’t think he’d be too happy.”