Fifty years ago, in the early evening of a Thursday I was at
home. Eleven years old I sat watching
TV. My parents were out. My guess is that mom was at the Lady Rebekah’s
and my dad was at an Oddfellows meeting.
I was watching some program, maybe Bewitched when the scroll began across
the bottom of the screen.
In 1968 we knew well the scroll. On a black and white TV, the scroll was a gray
shaded band with contrasting letters that carried news of great importance across
the bottom inch of the screen. Disasters and crisis moments were highlighted by
the scroll. The scroll was often a stalling tactic while ABC, NBC and CBS got
their news staffs into the studio to begin an ad hoc broadcast based on
whatever they could confirm by phone and wire.
On that spring Thursday night, the scroll at the bottom of
the screen announced that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot. Quickly the scroll changed to announce that
Dr. King had been killed. Once Dr. King’s death was confirmed the scroll disappeared.
Every network broke into their primetime programs with coverage of the Noble
laureate’s death.
On that day the world changed, America changed. A gunman with a scope took down the hopes of
so many who had wanted American to move forward toward a non-racial progressive
democracy. An angry man afraid of losing
his privileges, those that belonged to him because of his membership card of white
skin, killed a dark-skinned preacher whose life had been focused on nonviolent
but seismic change.
Cities burned in the aftermath of the wanton killing of that
man of peace. In the fear spawned that
summer we lost focus on what really mattered.
We for forgot or let slide the concept of equality. Simple truths, easy to be spoken but hard make
reality, became seemingly unobtainable. One person is entitled to equal rights
under the law. One person is entitled to
live where they desire and can afford not where they are steered. One person is entitled to be judged on the
merits of their skill and knowledge and not historically biased perceptions of
what “their people” were like. Visible marks of difference such as skin color, sex
and traditional garb need to be ignored.
We never got our footing back in the march for a better
world. We Americans threw in with a new
law and order regime. Seemingly we
accepted that the silent majority wanted stability more than anything
else. As a result, instead of getting
visionaries like Dr. King we got instead a President who flaunts his ethnocentric
bias saying things like, ““They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime.
They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” about the Mexican
people. We are led by a man who refuses
to acknowledge the dark racial component of white supremacy present in Charlottesville.
There are choices we will have to make again and again going
forward to promote equality and justice for all. Standing up for the right thing will probably
get us pilloried by both the hard left and the hard right. But even an old soul like me knows that if we
don’t stand up and say no more to laws and procedures designed to
disenfranchise the different and the poor, the ideals of what America is and
what it should be will die just like Dr. King did. Hate swings with a vengeance. We must be prepared to fight, and we must be
prepared to take the body blows that speaking truth to power will bring. We must
stay focused and stay strong.
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