Of King's death, Thomas O'Connor, Providence lawyer and former city councilman said, “I was angry, but eventually I learned to appreciate what he did for America. It spurred me to get into politics and try to change things.” The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

The bullet that killed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of a Memphis motel reverberated around the globe. It cast a pall on struggling black communities in the United States; neighborhoods erupted in riots, some wrapped themselves in grief and others sought succor and peace in carrying on King’s legacy.

The assassination occurred 40 years ago today, on April 4 in 1968, a year that would become one of the most tumultuous of the 20th century. To black Americans of a certain age, King’s death sears memory, marking the demise of the man — but not his ideas — who used the weapons of nonviolence and interracial cooperation to blunt the ferocity of segregation and led a movement to forge equality among the races.

Word spread quickly that day via the television screens that had brought King’s civil-rights movement into the living rooms of millions of Americans in the 1960s.

“I have never been so angry in my life, I just wanted to go out and punch white people,” recalls Clifford Montiero, 71, who, as a civil-rights advocate, went to the American South with King and served as one of his bodyguards in protest marches. He was working on fair-housing issues at the Providence office of the Rhode Island State Council of Churches when the news flashed over television.

40 years ago today

“Then I realized I had to channel my anger into something productive,” Montiero said in a recent interview. His devotion to fair housing became more fervent. In the aftermath of King’s death, lobbying by him and other civil-rights activists prodded the Rhode Island General Assembly into approving the nation’s strongest state law barring racial discrimination in housing.

Marguerite Russell, 86, of Providence, recalls finishing up a beef stew dinner and apple crisp dessert with her family and turning on television news. “I can visualize it exactly,” said Russell. “I have never been so floored in all my life. I’d been through a lot of segregation. … Martin Luther King wanted equality and he didn’t want violence. That’s what we all wanted.”

Thomas O’Connor, 61, a Providence lawyer and former City Council member, said he will never forget April 4, 1968. It was the day O’Connor, then a U.S. Marine, ended a year of combat in the jungles of Vietnam. He was accompanying home the body of his friend and fellow soldier, Laurence Lopes, who was killed in action in Vietnam.

“I remember arriving at an Air Force base in Anchorage, Alaska. There was a tiny, maybe a six-inch screen … black-and-white television on and the news of Doctor King’s death, murder actually, came across,” recalled O’Connor.

“At that point in my life, I was a Marine, I wasn’t a turn-the-other-cheek guy,” said O’Connor. “I was angry, but eventually I learned to appreciate what he did for America. It spurred me to get into politics and try to change things.”

The Rhode Islander closest to King was the Rev. Bernard Lafayette, 67, who now runs the Center for Non-Violence and Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island. Lafayette was a civil-rights activist and King confidante who met with him in Memphis on the morning of April 4.

After the meeting, Lafayette flew to Washington, D.C., at King’s direction to begin organizing for a march on the Capitol to dramatize poverty in the United States. Landing at National Airport, Lafayette had heard news of a shooting and called reporters he knew.

“The UPI man broke down when he told me that Martin was dead,” recalls Lafayette. “My anger became transformed into a passion” to carry on King’s work. “I have not stopped to grieve.”

In Rhode Island, the state’s white power structure paused to mourn. Then-Gov. John Chafee attended memorial services at Brown University and one at the State House that drew 3,000. He expressed sorrow and said, “it is saddening to realize that after so much progress, an event like this can take place in our country.”

The Roman Catholic Bishop of Providence, the Most Rev. Russell J. McVinney, said, “another noble soul has joined the ghostly company of martyrs.”

Clifford Montiero, 71, now president of the Providence branch of the NAACP, was a civil-rights advocate 40 years ago and went south to serve as a bodyguard for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in protest marches. “I have never been so angry in my life,” he said of the assassination. The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

Riots and looting burst out in 110 American cities, but Providence was spared the fire that enveloped cities from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. A multiracial coalition of street workers and political leaders kept the peace.

King visited Rhode Island three times in the 1960s, all at college campuses. In November of 1960, King spoke at Brown, pleading for an interracial civil-rights coalition and hailing the election of John F. Kennedy as a “great victory for tolerance and the nation.”

At the University of Rhode Island in 1966, he told an audience of 5,000 that he was concerned the country had “taken a swing to the reactionary” that would create new tensions and challenges for the civil-rights movement. His final appearance in the state came in April 1967, at Brown, when he gave an anti-Vietnam War talk at Sayles Hall.

In the 1960s, Rhode Island was not in the forefront of the civil-rights movement. As a Northern state, it had none of the odious symbols of Jim Crow segregation — the murderous lynchings, the separate water fountains, schools and parks.

Yet, blacks had little influence in the state. This lack of equal status was not completely driven by race. The state had a small black population.

Black people have lived in Rhode Island since the 1600s, but they never made up more than 2 percent of the population until 1970. Their densest concentration was in Providence, but even in the state’s largest city, they didn’t reach 9 percent of the citizenry until 1970.

Of the assassination, Marguerite Russell, a retired Providence business owner, said, “I have never been so floored in all my life. I’d been through a lot of segregation. … Martin Luther King wanted equality and he didn’t want violence. That’s what we all wanted.” The Providence Journal / Andrew Dickerman

Racism may have been more subtle in Rhode Island than in Southern states, but it was always there, recall blacks who were raised here. Blacks learned their place when they were young. Montiero and O’Connor remember the boundaries that defined life for blacks.

If you were black, you stayed in your neighborhood. Raised on the East Side on Benefit Street, Montiero recalls that nearby “Doyle Avenue was a white street, black people weren’t allowed to rent there.”

On the South Side of the city, O’Connor recalls, “there were places we couldn’t go, especially west of Broad Street, they didn’t want us over there.”

At the Strand Theater downtown, O’Connor said, black children attending the Saturday matinee were herded up into the balcony. “They wouldn’t let us sit anywhere else,” he said.

Blacks generally couldn’t get home mortgages. Few blacks had professional jobs. Providence had no black police officer until Al Lima was hired in 1947. Montiero didn’t have a black teacher in the public schools until he reached eighth grade, in 1952, when a black woman was a substitute.

Many blacks worked as maids for white people. A good job was as a Pullman porter on the railroad, as a stevedore, or as an elevator operator or janitor at the Outlet Department Store, a downtown store known for hiring blacks.

There were white Rhode Islanders who helped the civil-rights movement, including Providence lawyer Malcolm Farmer, who went south to represent civil-rights protesters, and the late Irving Fain, a prominent business leader who hired blacks and contributed money to King’s movement.

Marguerite Russell, who ran a catering business for many years, remembers her mother taking in laundry to support eight children after her father died at age 42. “She took in wash and ironed,” said Russell. “My mother worked very hard, she never would go on welfare.”

Russell says that if King were alive today he would be proud of the many occupational doors opened by the civil-rights movement. “But he was a nonviolent man and there is so much violence today with the young people, he would have been very upset about that.”

One of the most remarkable things about King, both his admirers and historians agree, was the way he changed his movement with the times. An inspiring speaker, King was also a shrewd political tactician. Demonstrating for civil rights, he chose venues controlled by the most violent of Southern lawmen.

King’s preaching was rooted in the Bible and he spoke with the call-and-response cadence of the Southern black church. Yet he was a sophisticated theologian who made his quest part of the civic language of the nation as he challenged whites to live up to such ideals from the American Revolution as equality for all.

“Not only did he see what segregation and discrimination was doing to black Americans, but he saw what it was doing to whites and the nation as a whole,” said the Rev. Carl H. Balark Jr., pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Providence.

King’s movement came of age about the same time as television began beaming the news into American homes. On television, the mayhem of Southern police — seen beating and clubbing protesters and soaking children with fire hoses — shocked whites and led to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination in housing and public accommodations.

Yet, black people still couldn’t vote in Southern states; it took King and his movement to Selma, Ala. in 1965 to prick the nation’s conscience and prod Congress to enact the Voting Rights Act, which finally gave black Southerners the right to vote.

By 1968, King had taken a radical turn. His opposition to the Vietnam War alienated him from some white allies in the labor movement, and most significantly, President Lyndon Johnson. And he branched out to become a voice for the poor of all races.

At his death, King was helping garbage collectors organize a union in Memphis over the strenuous objection of the mayor and the City Council.

King died without a will and left a net worth of less than $6,000. He was 39 when he was murdered. “What is remarkable is what he accomplished in such a short life,” Mr. Balark said.

Blacks have come a long way, even in Rhode Island, where they make up about 5 percent of the population. “Still there is a long way to go,” says Montiero, who is now president of the Providence branch of the NAACP.

According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median household income for a white Rhode Island family in 2006 was $70,468 and $43,517 for its black counterpart.

“I’m proud of what we accomplished. But if I had to do it all over again, I would have emphasized jobs,” Montiero said. “Advancement now is about education and economics. We are still behind on the quality of jobs and the quality of education.”

smackay@projo.com