I was a young (white) adult in Chicago. I think it was one of the saddest most depressing days of my life. It broke something that was growing and developing and I’m not 100% sure I’ve ever recovered. I drove out to the west side to pick up my wife who worked at a hospital there and whose safety was in question, since the west side of Chicago was a place where people were setting fire to things and…rioting. At one intersection, some black folks were walking across the street in front of my car and we looked at each other. I don’t know what they were thinking, but I remember thinking, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry - it wasn’t people like me - we’re not all like that.” I was so ashamed for the country.
King was shot at 6:01 pm, and pronounced dead at 7:05 pm, Memphis time, which is in the Central time zone. That would have been at 7:01 pm and 8:05 pm in the Eastern time zone, where your character is. The evening news programs of all three broadcast networks were over by then.
In your character’s newsroom, it would not be unusual for a television or radio to be on constantly during the day. Otherwise, the Teletype connected to the newsroom’s wire service (AP or UPI, probably) would ring a bell five times to signal major breaking news, as the story itself would come over the wire. The first report would be something brief like, “Bulletin: Report of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. shot at hotel in Memphis, Tenn. Condition unknown. More.” Meaning more to follow.
It seems unimaginable now, but back then much instant communications came from a quaint custom called “word of mouth.” That’s how many of us heard about the JFK assisination, the King assasination, and the attempts on Wallace, Ford and Reagan, to name a few.
One person listening to the radio or TV, gets on the phone, tells someone else, and the word spreads. Of course, by 1968, each person on the chain would immediately turn on their TV or radio.
When LBJ announced he would not run for re-election in 1968, I was doing my school musical. One of the extras was listening to a transistor radio backstage, so we high-school performers actually found out before our parents, who were sitting in the audience.
I also seem to recall an audio clip of Bobby Kennedy at a fund-raising dinner, announcing that Dr. King had been shot. The crowd reacted with gasps and shock.
Let’s not pretend that there weren’t a fair number of white Americans who cheered (at least to themselves) when King was shot. I remember where I was when I heard King had been shot. I was sitting in a barbershop in Bluffton, Ohio. The barber said, “If they didn’t kill him, I’ll be glad to shoot him again myself.”
Looking around the 'net, I found that Walter Cronkite announced the shooting near the end of his Evening News, although he wasn’t the first to do so. I’ve seen that footage, and it got me choked up. So that might give you a sense of what his broadcast was like. Your character would probably already know about it, but that’s one person’s response.
I should clarify that there were actually two CBS Evening News broadcasts every day, one done live at 6:30-7:00 pm ET for the Eastern and Central time zones, and then another done live at 7:30-8:00 pm ET for the Mountain and Pacific time zones. So, Walter Cronkite’s reportage of the shooting (which occurred at 7:01 pm ET) would have been on the later broadcast — not viewable for your New England newspaper reporter.
Correction to my last post. The second CBS Evening News program was taped at 7:00-7:30 pm ET and then broadcast an hour later for the Mountain and Pacific time zones.
Why not just re-broadcast a tape of the 6:30-7:00 pm program? Because CBS News liked the ability to revise and update stories from the earlier program, and add breaking stories (like the King assassination).
There were riots in Nashville.
I didn’t have a television and my father called from rural West Tennessee to tell me. His voice was very heavy. He said that something awful had happened and he told me. And he was concerned for my well-being since I lived alone. He told me not to go outside.
Friends of mine were at a PTA meeting in a difficult to access part of town. The only reasonable way back was through North Nashville where the rioting was. They had their cars rocked and shaken.
I didn’t know until the next morning when I saw the newspaper that someone that I had known when I was eighteen in 1961 had been with Dr. King when he was shot. It was the man who had taught me the song We Shall Overcome. That was the Rev. Andrew Young. That meant something to me. (There was a famous picture of some men standing over the body of Dr. King and pointing toward where the shots came from.)
The rest of what I felt was mostly like the earth had swallowed up all hope.
I knew there would be a lot of white people that would be glad and I was ashamed.
I was the staff duty officer at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, that night. A message came in early in the evening that Dr. King had been shot and that we, and I think Fort Campbell, Kentucky, were to muster our civil disorder force and stand by for further orders. All I did was phone the post chief of staff at his quarters and then stand back and stay out of the way. I think the message came in before the news was on the TV. I think that our single regular army engineer battalion was mounted and convoyed to someplace near Memphis that night but I’m not sure it was ever actually deployed on the streets of Memphis. The Army was certainly taking the whole thing very seriously.