Bill Kurtis: What it was like to see Chicago burning

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited excerpt from former WBBM-Ch. 2 anchor Bill Kurtis’ new book “ Whirlwind ,” published by Plainspoken Books, an imprint of the University Press of Kansas.

On April 4, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was standing on the balcony outside his second-story room in Memphis at the Lorraine Motel. He was there to march in support of a sanitation workers’ strike and seemed to be relaxed as he surveyed the parking lot and beyond it a forested rise toward a brick building. He was waiting for others, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, to accompany him to dinner, but he didn’t see James Earl Ray sighting in on him with a .30-06 Remington hunting rifle. A bullet severed King’s spinal cord after traveling through his jaw. He was dead on arrival at a Memphis h