It seems like heresy to say it, but on April 4, 1968, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was not a big influence on my life. Funny, Dr. King was only 39 when an assassin’s bullet tore through him as he stood on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Mo
That means he was younger than my oldest son when he helped lead the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, and he was 35 when he became the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. But in 1968, for a lot of young, Black youth, King was old school. He was talking about integration and pacifism and calling on God to remind white folks that they should do better by Black people.
Many young people didn’t want to hear that. Oh, I knew who he was, and I knew about his Nobel Peace Prize and his speech during the March on Washington in 1963. I considered him an old-head Black leader (I was 14) who didn’t know what was going on in the hood. Some of us had gone through serious urban disturbances in our communities.
We had watched the scenes from the South as water hoses and police dogs were unleashed on non-violent demonstrators. We knew about church bombings and the murder of Medgar Evers. And we watched scenes close to home, in our own cities, where “up-South” policemen were not above snarling a racial epithet while handcuffing a suspect, and didn’t hide their belief that ALL of us were suspects.
We saw that discrimination did not respect the Mason-Dixon Line and we weren’t going to take it anymore. There were other voices out there, besides Dr. King’s. Stokely Carmichael was more strident and spoke to a sensibility that held that we were wrong to try to assimilate into the racist culture.
That view said we would lose our own culture by assimilating and we would become something that we are not. Black Panthers were doing positive things in the community, but they were armed because they were convinced, to paraphrase Frederick Douglas, that power concedes nothing without pushing back.
They, and other folks, were getting ready for the “revolution” or so we thought, and my adolescent mind was much more in tune with their nationalistic and not-so-passive resistance. And then, on April 4, Dr. King was shot.
I remember my mother crying and my father shaking his head. I remember being angry, not because I was a fan of Dr. King, but because here was a man who never advocated violence, who didn’t want to hurt anyone, who would not take up arms and who would turn the other cheek. And they killed him. Of course, our “they” was white people, the white establishment, the government%uFFFD it was all the same thing.
“They” silenced him and he wasn’t a firebrand. “They” shot him and he wasn’t advocating violence in the streets. “They” killed him and he was the “safe” Negro, not an angry Black man. It was that anger that spilled out onto the streets of so many American cities, including here in Chicago. Folks took to the streets to act out that anger, and anguish, and it ended up destroying several neighborhoods.
Photos of the conflagration rarely capture the entire story because Chicago burned, and in some neighborhoods, it is still smoldering. The same conditions still apply, and those neighborhoods still bear the scars of that insurrection 40 years ago. The scars are also evident in the polemics delivered by Black preachers and other leaders, young and old, who have not forgotten that anger and anguish.
That anger has dissipated over the years, and as I’ve become an old-head, I recognize the tremendous impact that Dr. King has had on this nation, and, this old-head. I’m no longer an advocate of going to the streets. I’d rather go to the polls. I want judges to sentence police officers who see me as a suspect just because I’m Black.
I want the schools to stay OPEN on his birthday. I want young people to stop acting like suspects, and glorifying gangs and guns and bling. I want more people to adopt the stance that Dr. King took now that I know who he is.
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