After I posted a link to Aurin Squire’s piece on the forgotten women of Black History Month and the death of Martin Luther King Jr’s mother, Alberta, in 1973, I got into a twitter exchange with my friend Eric Umansky about what counts as an ‘assassination’. The dictionary doesn’t provide us too much guidance. Webster’s defines it as “to kill (someone, such as a famous or important person) usually for political reasons.” Webster’s also refers to the importance of “suddenness and secrecy”. That gives us some direction but still leaves the borders of the definition vague. The question interests me because by using the word we clearly signify that some killings have more public consequence than others. Or to be more specific, I think we mean that some killings go beyond the desire to end one particular person’s life but rather to make some larger public statement, a public act. Put baldly, the ‘assassination’ label amounts to the promotion of the significance of some deaths over others, if not at a human level then a public one.
The murder of prominent politicians is treated as by definition an assassination. But the the motives are often not clearly political. The attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan is maybe the clearest example. Was John Lennon assassinated? I would say he was not simply because he was so prominent but because he was killed as a public figure, for that reason, to trigger the effect the killing had. Few, I think, would question that Malcolm X was assassinated, even though he held no political office and was still a relatively obscure figure at the time of his death, certainly to white America. What’s more he was killed over factional disputes emerging out of the Nation of Islam, which he had recently left.
Then you have murdered abortion doctors. Assassinations? Im not sure. Certainly these killings fit some of the qualifications, even though in many cases very few people had even heard of the people before they died.
Then there’s the case of the two NYPD officers gunned down in December in New York City. Virtually none of us had ever heard of these men, individually. And the shooter was clearly deranged at some level. But the killings, albeit it through a grotesquely distorted lens, were political. The killer made that clear out of his own virtual mouth.
Eric’s point regarding Alberta King was that she was not killed by a white supremacist. She was in fact killed by a 23 year old black man named Marcus Wayne Chenault from Ohio. Chenault had originally targeted King’s father, Martin Luther King Sr. But when he got there, Alberta King was apparently easier to get a shot at. The fact that Chenault was black, on the one hand, takes King’s death out of the narrative of her son’s death. But she wasn’t killed at random. Chenault, clearly deranged at some level, believed black activist clergy, civil rights activists were a danger to black people. Certainly, there were black clergy in Ohio. So the King family specifically was a critical element of the crime.
