10:30pm: Remembering Martin Luther King
"I Have a Dream" speech, Aug. 28, 1963.
Many of you were not yet born, so it is not a fair question; maybe you were not even yet born when John Lennon was shot in front of his home at The Dakota, here on West 72nd Street. I went there that night, Dec. 8 of '80, was one of the earliest to arrive at what would become an all-night vigil as we gathered at the gate where he was shot, singing "Give Peace A Chance" and hoping for news that it was all a mistake, that somehow he had survived the senseless shooting by a crazed lunatic. But he had not. Yet it was necessary, even after the announcement of his death during a radio broadcast of Monday Night Football, to be there. I was not the only one, there were hundreds of us, we are there even still, and you can see the tears whenever a news station hauls out the videos of that dreadful night to revisit the painful past.
I was not in Memphis in April, 1968, although if I had lived close enough it is possible I would have found a way to get there. I was not yet grown, a green 14 year-old high school freshman in Falmouth, Maine, still trying to feel my way through the labyrinth of life, playing with the band at Friday night dances (a lot of Beatles songs, too). The news hit me quite hard, even at that young age, for in '68 the John Lennon that would one day personify peace, love and understanding had not yet crystallized, while in Martin Luther King it had long before taken full flower. They say the '60s really spanned the time from Kennedy's assassination to the end of the Vietnam War, the decade from '63 to '73, but it's roots can more probably be traced to the August '63 March on Washington led by Martin Luther King, and highlighted by his keynote "I Have A Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It was not by accident that spoke that day in the shadow of the Great Emancipator, as Lincoln has been called, a historic reference to his Emancipation Proclamation which freed the slaves and ended hundreds of years of legalized inhumanity, mistreatment and degradation.
Of course, these social diseases flourished well into the '60s, and even in quasi-legal form. The 1896Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson upheld the state-sanctioned segregation of railroad cars in Louisiana. This doctrine of "separate but equal" was soon expanded to other public places, including restaurants, rest rooms, theatres, hotels, public schools, and professional sports. The lone dissenting vote on that Court was Justice John Harlan, whose dissenting opinion forsaw a change in the judicial landscape, though it would be sixty years before Brown v. Board of Education would declare "separate but equal" unconstitutional.
I watched the living history of the civil rights movement as it was being written and rewritten on a daily basis by Martin Luther King and his followers. What prevailed most upon the sensibilities of a young boy was his devotion to nonviolence in a time when friends and neighbors were coming home from Southeast Asia in body bags every week. Violence was running rampant, both at home and abroad: the Vietnam War was being waged on the six o'clock news for everyone to watch in all its horror, the Watts riots in Los Angeles in '65, the '68 Chicago Democratic National Convention, the Stones concert at Altamont Speedway outside San Francisco in '69, the Black Panthers, the killing of Black Panther Fred Hampton by Chicago Police in Dec. '69, and on and on. People remember the flower children of the '60s, but it was a violent period which included the assassinations of J.F.K. in '63, and Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy within 2 months of each other in '68, and ending with the killing of four youths by the National Guard at Kent State University in May of '70. Martin Luther King was himself the victim of countless acts of violence, both official and otherwise. He was arrested, assaulted, harrassed and abused by officials of every jurisdiction in which he appeared to help further the civil rights movement. He was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, and made the subject of unlawful wiretaps and surveillance. He was punched, kicked, handcuffed, and stoned, and never once wavered in his belief in nonviolent demonstration.
The Civil Rights Movement made great strides during the turbulent '60s, including the signing by Lyndon Johnson of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, L.B.J.'s greatest legacy. But there is still so much hatred and bigotry in the world, still so much inhumanity and mistreatment and degradation. It seems there was so much progress made with Martin Luther King at the helm. Everyone lost a hero that night in Memphis, including a boy in Falmouth, Maine, who was getting his first taste of how mean the world was going to be.
Posted by cronish at April 04, 2002 11:45 PM