Violent deaths revisited

Two dramas, both based on real life; two deaths by shotgun; two black men destroyed at their peak (although both plays seemed intent on suggesting that their destruction came just as their powers were failing). Radio Four has been reliving the events of 1968, and on Saturday Jon Sen’s play focused on the assassination of Martin Luther King on the fourth of April in that extraordinarily violent and disruptive year. 4.4.68 took us to Memphis, Tennessee — smashing glass, police sirens, crowds shouting and rushing through the streets as the black workers in the sanitation works protested about their low wages and horrible working conditions. King was shot in the cheek while standing on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Hotel, having flown in specially to inspire and support the strikers. It was five years since his ‘I have a dream’ speech in Washington DC and 13 years since the Alabama bus strike where he had first lit upon his mission to lead the black people of the South out of their American apartheid.