News broadcasts that the civil rights leader the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, reached Bermuda on the evening of April 4, 1968.

Among the people who heard of Dr King’s death was local activist Florenz Maxwell, who was cooking supper in her kitchen with her radio on in the background.

“People were horrified,” recalled Ms Maxwell, who less than a decade earlier had fought segregation at home with the Progressive Group.

Educated in the United States at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, Ms Maxwell had learnt of the clergyman activist before many of her contemporaries back home.

“All my life I had spoken up about social justice, even as a child,” she said.

“Bermuda at the time was heavily censored and very few people kicked off about racial matters.”

As a college student, Ms Maxwell happened upon a mid-1950s broadcast about a young preacher organising bus boycotts while visiting a friend’s house.

“Her mother told me to come in, that there was this young man ‘talking just like you, this nonsense about boycotts’,” she said.

“He hadn’t become famous yet. That was my introduction to Dr King. I was fascinated.”

By the time of his death, Dr King had become the voice for a movement, but in the early days “most Bermudians didn’t know much about him”, Ms Maxwell said.

“At the time, the powers of the day were careful about exposing Bermudians to information they felt might incite riots.”

Bermuda’s landmark boycotts in 1959 against segregated cinemas, quietly organised by the Progressive Group, were “not influenced” by events such as the Montgomery bus boycotts several years earlier. Come 1968, Dr King was a Nobel Peace Prize laureate devoted to nonviolence. He was 39 when he was assassinated.

“I couldn’t believe it; everybody was in shock because he was so well liked,” Ms Maxwell said.

However, not everyone embraced the clergyman’s tactics. Ms Maxwell recalled many young people saw nonviolence as “cowardly — it was the same thing we ran in to with the Progressive Group, because we pushed non-violence”.

Ms Maxwell added: “For some reason, people want martyrs. They don’t want to be the one, but they don’t mind if someone else is. We want the drama of violence.”

While she said that “deep down, Bermudians do not tend to be really violent”, Ms Maxwell said that local activists such as the Progressive Group, whose identities were not divulged, found safety in secrecy.

“The powers that were couldn’t find us,” she said.

“There were no leaders to pick on. They thought we were foreign and communists. In the US, they knew who Martin Luther King was. Once they can find somebody, they can assassinate that person.”

As the news swept the island, the Progressive Labour Party happened to be holding a meeting near Bailey’s Bay, at Cripple Gate School, where an audience of about 80 people packed the hall.

According to the next day’s The Royal Gazette, Walter Robinson, a founding PLP member, broke the news, calling on the gathering to “pray with me that Dr King has not been fatally wounded, and that he will go from strength to strength and survive this criminal act”.

Informed of Dr King’s death, party member Arthur Hodgson, later a minister, recalled hearing Malcolm X speak at Oxford Unity.

The late civil rights leader, who had rejected integration earlier in his career, had been assassinated four years earlier.

Mr Hodgson told that night’s meeting that both men had been “giants”, saying Dr King had “walked the streets of Mississippi and was set upon by police dogs, and every form of scorn was heaped upon him, but he kept on preaching non-violence”.

He added: “Tonight, Martin Luther King is dead.

“It seems that we are caught up in a sort of vicious circle. If it appears that you are going to win according to one set of rules, the rules are changed. It does not matter how you stand, you are going to be shot down. This is a tragedy.”

Last night, Mr Hodgson said he remembered the night well.

“Dr King was considered a moderate and Malcolm X was considered extremist,” Mr Hodgson said. “I remember saying that it didn’t really matter, you were going to get shot down.”

Ms Maxwell said that by his death, Dr King had become “something personal to me”.

“I kept a close interest in everything that he did. Very few people talked about racial issues, and definitely not in Bermuda.”

She still identifies as “strictly nonviolent” and calls violence “a primitive way of solving problems, when you can find so many ways of communicating”.