Here is the promised excerpt of the Baldwin article I was talking about yesterday. For the sake of time I have skipped some important parts and I excluded the second half of the article, so if this sparks your interest, let me know and I'll give you the rest. The article first appeared in the April 1969 (I think, better check) edition of Esquire magazine. Also, I just want to point out that the gammar and punctuation used here is true to the original.

"Very shortly before [King's] death, I had to appear with Martin at Carnegie Hall, in New York. Having been on the Coast so long, I had nothing suitable to wear for my Carnegie Hall gig, and so I rushed out, got a dark suit, got it fitted, and made my appearance. Something like two weeks later, I wore this same suit to Martin's funeral; returned to Hollywood; presntly, had to come East again, on business. I ran into Leonard Lyons one night, and I told him that I would never be able to wear that suit again. Leonard put this in his column. I went back to Hollywood....

"You can certainly see why I tended to avoid my old school chum. But I called him, of course. I thought that he probably needed money, because that was the only thing, by now, that I could possibly hope to give him. But, no. He, or his wife, or a relative, had read the Leonard Lyons column and knew that I had a suit I wasn't wearing, and--as he remembered in one way and I in quite another--he was just my size.

"Now, for me, that suit was drenched in the blood of all the crimes of my country. If I had said to Leonard, somewhat dramatically, no doubt, that I could never wearit again, I was, just the same, being honest. I simply could not put it on, or look at it, without thinking of Martin, and Martin's end, of what he had meant to me, and to so many. I could not put it on without a bleak, pale, cold wonder about the future. I could not, in short, live with it, it was too heavey a garment. Yet--it was only a suit, worn, at most, three times. It was not a very expensive suit, but it was still more expensive than any my friend could buy. He could not afford to have suits in his closet which he didn't wear, he couldn't afford to throw suits away--he couldn't, in short, afford my elegant despair. Martin was dead, but he was living, he needed a suit, and--I was just his size. He invited me to dinner that evening, and I said that I would bring him the suit....

"For that bloody suit was their suit, after all, it had been bought for them, it had even been bought by them: they had created Martin, he had not created them, and the blood in which the fabric of that suit was stiffening was theirs. The distance between us, and I had never thought of this before, was that they did not know this, and now I dared to realize that I loved them more than they loved me. And I do not mean that my love was greater: Who dares judge the inexpressible expense another pays for his life? Who knows how much one is loved, by whom, or what that love may be called on to do? No, the way the cards had fallen meant that I had to face more about them than they could know about me, knew their rent, whereas they did not know mine, and was condemned to make them uncomfortable. For, on the other hand, they certainly wanted that freedom which they thought was mine--that frightening limousine, for example, or the power to give away a suit, or my increasingly terrifying transatlantic journeys. How can one say that freedom is taken, not given, and that no one is free until all are free? and that the price is high.

"My friend tried on the suit, a perfect fit, and they all admired him in it, and I went home."