Funeral
President Lyndon B. Johnson declared April 7 a national day of mourning for the lost civil rights leader. A crowd of 300,000 attended his funeral two days later, on April 9. Vice President Hubert Humphrey attended on behalf of Lyndon B. Johnson, who was at a meeting on the Vietnam War at Camp David. (There were fears that Johnson might be hit with protests and abuses over the war if he attended). At his widow's request, King eulogized himself: His last sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, a recording of his famous 'Drum Major' sermon, given on February 4, 1968, was played at the funeral. In that sermon he makes a request that at his funeral no mention of his awards and honors be made, but that it be said that he tried to "feed the hungry," "clothe the naked," "be right on the war question," and "love and serve humanity."
Read more about this topic: Assassination Of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Famous quotes containing the word funeral:
“I asked if I got sick and died, would you
With my black funeral go walking too,
If you’d stand close to hear them talk or pray
While I’m let down in that steep bank of clay.”
—J.M. (John Millington)
“A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Rome, the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)