DEL MAR -- Don McEvoy was 30 minutes from landing in Atlanta when he heard the pilot ask for everybody's attention. Martin Luther King Jr., he announced, had been shot.

The news that day -- April 4, 1968 -- was shocking but not a complete surprise to McEvoy, who just the night before had cautioned King against going to Memphis because it would be too dangerous.

Also shocking, but again not surprising, was the reaction from his fellow passengers on the flight from New York. Thirty-seven years later, as he sits in his Del Mar apartment, McEvoy's eyes still glaze over as he remembers.

"Cheers," he said. "Rebel yells."

Remembering MLK

The passengers' appalling behavior would be unthinkable today. King's name is revered, his memory celebrated with a national holiday and his stature elevated to a point that surprises even McEvoy, who knew King as a modest family man and preacher as well as a courageous civil rights leader.

McEvoy, for 20 years the director of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, took up acting after retiring in 1992 and will present a one-man show about King at 7 p.m. Jan. 21 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of San Dieguito, 1036 Solana Drive, Solana Beach.

The performance is a fundraiser for the fellowship. Admission is $15 for individuals, $25 for couples and $35 for families. Call (858) 755-9225.

McEvoy's performance begins with his first meeting with King at Fisk University in 1956, when King was 26. He was just emerging as a national spokesman and civil rights leader working to abolish segregated seating on buses in Montgomery, Ala.

"There have been incidents of young Negroes throwing bottles and bricks at passing buses and, on one occasion, the police," McEvoy said, re-creating a question he asked King as a workshop on race relations at the university. "I want to know whether or not you feel any sense of personal responsibility for those kinds of acts, which are stimulated by the boycott campaign started by you and Rosa Parks and the NAACP?"

McEvoy recalls the encounter as "the first of many stupid questions I put to him over the next decade."

King answered no, then issued a challenge: He wouldn't blame McEvoy for violence by whites if McEvoy agreed to work to promote nonviolence against blacks, just as King was working to keep blacks from violent retaliation against those who oppressed and abused them.

The challenge may have been off the cuff, but it also was prophetic. McEvoy at the time was a 32-year-old Protestant minister from Oklahoma, but his interest in civil rights called him away from the church in 1959 and to the National Conference of Christians and Jews in Chicago. In 1961, he became the leader of the conference's human rights and human relations agency in Atlanta and Birmingham, Ala., putting him at ground zero of the civil-rights movement.

"The national president couldn't tell the difference between my Oklahoma accent and a Southern accent, so they sent me to Atlanta," McEvoy said.

Behind the scenes

In his role with the NCCJ, McEvoy was not on the front lines of the civil rights movement, but rather in the back rooms, often working as a shuttle diplomat between sides.

"I never went to jail," he said. "I never got cattle-prodded or fire-hosed or anything. One time I got real maudlin in a conversation with Dr. King, feeling I wasn't doing enough."

But King assured him that his work behind the scenes was vital.

"I don't know if it was him or me who came up with it, but white liberals like me were called 'termites for justice,' working from the inside out to get them access."

McEvoy said he ran "quiet, Kissinger-type diplomacy" between King and Eugene "Bull" Connor, a staunch segregationist and public safety commissioner of Birmingham, who ordered police dogs used against black demonstrators. Behind closed doors, he said, he often heard white leaders call King a communist agitator or say he must be part white because he was too smart to be black.

McEvoy admits his view from the inside wasn't always the same as King's. He did not go with King to Washington, D.C., to see his famous "I have a dream" speech -- "I told him it would be a nice walk in the afternoon, but it wouldn't have any impact on national policy," he said -- and he discouraged him from a monthlong demonstration in Birmingham.

"It was like looking at a painting," he said. "I was up close, looking at these brush strokes, and he was standing back, looking at the whole picture."

King, the man

"I think he was a very quiet man," McEvoy said. "He had a delightful sense of humor. A lot of times, it was gallows."

McEvoy recalled a time when King and his family arrived late at his house for dinner. When King arrived, he apologized and explained he'd had trouble finding the right house.

"I sent Coretta to your neighbors," King said. "But don't worry. They just thought you were hiring a maid."

Another example of King's wit came when McEvoy took him to dinner at one of Atlanta's nicest restaurants after desegregation.

"The manager himself came to the table to take care of us," McEvoy said. "They were on pins and needles. Martin looked at the menu and said, 'I don't see any turnip greens or chitlins.' He turned to me and said, 'Don, I told you they weren't ready for desegregation.' "

By 1968, McEvoy was working in the New York office of the National Conference of Christians and Jews and had offered to provide diplomacy in a labor dispute involving Memphis sanitation workers. Because almost all the workers were black, the dispute was as much a racial as a labor issue, and the workers appealed to King for help.

"I had a sense it was getting out of hand," McEvoy said about the dispute. A March 28 demonstration already had collapsed in disorder, and King flew to Memphis with plans for a better-organized demonstration.

King gave his last speech April 3 at the Memphis Temple. He was shot on the balcony of his motel the next night.

McEvoy learned that King had not survived the shooting after his plane landed in Atlanta.

"Martin and Coretta had both known from the time he accepted leadership in the Montgomery bus boycott that death was a possibility," he said. "When I saw Coretta on the plane at the Memphis airport, waiting for his body to come back, she was as serene and composed as I'd ever seen her. Then it dawned on me she had been rehearsing that moment more than a decade."

The legacy

Martin Luther King "was not a plaster saint," McEvoy said. "He was a man."

But McEvoy said King was also the most courageous man he had ever met, and even from the beginning, he recognized that the black community saw something profound in his leadership.

"At one of the first rallies, I saw him at a pulpit, and most of the crowd was chanting, 'Black Moses,'" he said. "One little old lady was saying, 'Jesus, Jesus, I knew you'd come back. Jesus, Jesus, I knew you'd be black.'"

King would have been 76 years old on Jan. 15. At 81, McEvoy finds himself in the peculiar position of being older than a historical figure.

"Kids particularly find it hard to believe that anybody would be alive who actually knew Martin Luther King," he said. "But it doesn't seem so long ago."

Contact staff writer Gary Warth at gwarth@nctimes.com or (760) 740-5410. To comment, go to www.nctimes.com.

To learn more about Martin Luther King Jr. and the proposed national monument honoring him, visit www.mlkmemorial.org.

To learn more about the National Conference of Christians and Jews, visit www.nccj.org.