We went a through a period of time, when I was a kid, that we had no television. It sat, as a piece of furniture, because my parents couldn't afford to fix or replace it. In those times, we got our news mostly from the newspaper, radio or second hand. The telephone in our dining room rang fifty years ago tonight. My dad answered and sat down. I don't remember who he said had called, my sister or my brother in law. It was a quick call and Dad looked serious. He put the phone down and looked up at Mom and me. "Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis. He's dead. Black folks, all over the South, are coming out of their homes and spilling into the streets."
Well, that was half right. They were also spilling out into the streets in places like Newark, Detroit and Chicago. My reaction to the news was somber. King was a good guy on my black and white TV. True, I'd recently sensed some negativity after he'd denounced the Viet Nam War, but I knew that his side was right. Just as the Kent State killings would later turn me against the military and police, the sight of dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, and horses and whips at Selma, would forever make civil rights a righteous cause in my eyes.
He'd been shot! Just like President Kennedy. It was hard to fathom. I was only in sixth grade. I don't remember much else, but one incident stuck with me. The next day, April 5, I was out on the playground. A classmate, who I'd known since I was 5 or 6, came up to me. He said, "Well, I say, 'It's just another dead n----r.'" I was dumbstruck. I remember that to this day. I remember what shirt I was wearing. I remember that it was cloudy. And, this afternoon, I remembered that three days ago, on Easter Sunday, I parked my car on the exact same spot, on the old playground, that ----- ------- and I had that conversation, 50 years ago.
I used to believe Dr. King, that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Tonight as the bodies of unarmed black men shot by police pile higher, here at home, and the bodies of Palestinians and Yemenis pile higher abroad, I guess the emphasis must be that the arc is long, if it bends the right way at all. The three evils King warned of are ascendant again: racism, militarism and materialism. And that's the problem. Too many, tonight, look at the victims of police killings, of Israeli snipers and of Saudi bombers as 'just another dead n----r'.
