A Martyr in Memphis

dr. elsewhere here

This morning, after a long weekend at the Media Reform Conference in Memphis, Democracy Now broadcast from that city, interviewing several men who had participated in the sanitation workers’ protests (“I AM A MAN”), and had known Martin Luther King, Jr. They even visited the Lorraine Motel where he was shot, which has been converted to a Civil Rights Museum. The hour included some vintage footage of his last speech, so defiant and oh so prescient.

Thirty-nine years ago, I was a college freshman at a liberal arts college in Memphis, Tennessessee. On April 4th of that year – I believe it was a Thursday – I was hanging out with my boyfriend at the time (who would later marry me and father my daughter) in an apartment not far from my campus in what was unceremoniously referred to as midtown. We were planning dinner with his roommates and had the radio on when the announcement came.

I’d been a freshman in high school when JFK was shot. I was rehearsing a play, and had just had to kiss my leading man (a senior who years later went on to brutally stab his wife to death in their shower and then claimed a black intruder did it; go figure). It was my second kiss ever, but my very first assassination announcement.
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All we could feel then was overwhelming confusion. At that time, I only had the vaguest notion of what was going on in the world. Vietnam was not yet a huge public issue, although Diem had just been overthrown and killed earlier that same month, sparking chaos and a string of coups, all of which apparently shocked Kennedy into wanting to get us out and bring our “advisors” home. Which adds interest to the timing of his own murder; Johnson announced the US would continue to support South Vietnam the day after Kennedy’s death. My father was a pilot for the Air Force, flying C-130s all over the world, including the Berlin corridor, and he retired before the end of that fateful year. I do remember feeling profound anguish (though deep relief about my father’s retirement) when the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was passed less than a year later, even though I was not yet 15, because the implications of that escalation by then had become so intensely obvious.

But when JFK was killed, those implications just did not register. Why would anyone assassinate the President? That may have been the first time I’d ever heard that word. How could something like this happen in my world, ruled at that time by Dion and Dick Van Dyke? There was simply no place to put that event that covered and consumed us all for so long after, no category or familiar slot to slide it into. It was unique in our experience, nothing like it historically for a century, and nothing like it ever for our emotions.

Until, that is, the Ed Sullivan Show the following February. My adolescent heart leapt at the chance; I could relate to Beatlemania in a way that brought excitement and life and hope where a despairing and empty hole had been blast less than twelve weeks prior.

But from the moment of JFK’s murder, my heart had begun its long journey of education and toughening by the time King was killed. The Civil Rights Movement had picked up steam, and in the deep south where I lived, the tension was palpable. My father, a racist despite his many good qualities, forbade me from attending a Peter, Paul, and Mary concert because of their activism. George Wallace had become a hero, and though for a time I tried to justify his states rights position to appease my father, the plight of the black community was just too stark to ignore. I still remembered the Whites Only signs, and the awful way these people were marginalized, just above dog status. The white community was strangely aristocratic and entitled about the way they kept their superior position above the colored folk and “niggras,” who kept their "place" if they were smart. Even white trash somehow took on this imperious attitude, and may well have been worse in their cruelty than the well-to-do, true to the rules of the pecking order. There was so much hatred for no reason whatsoever, and I was perpetually dumbfounded that so few black people did anything to change it.

So in the four years from being a freshman in high school to becoming a freshman in college, I’d glimpsed a little more about the workings of the world, about the brutal realities and harsh truths of wars and racism and murder. Homer and Shakespeare’s histories were invading my Mary Poppins world.

And I’d watched how Martin Luther King, Jr., was doing so much to change it. He got me interested in Gandhi, and from there, other religions, where I noticed that holy men of truth did not study war.

It is so hard to speak what was felt that day. That moment, the shock was so devastating that I could not even find a way to conceive it, until I remembered JFK and all the evil that had happened in the world since he was assassinated.

The moment of King’s death galvanized the many suspicions we had all been entertaining, quietly or not, suspicions of the sinister workings of our government that was supposed to be WE, the People. It was arresting, and we all stood frozen for an unblinking, unbelieving moment that stretched beyond history.

Until someone in that room in Memphis in 1968 realized what it meant to be there on the ground, just maybe five miles away from the crime. I was whisked back to campus, and the dorm was locked down. It was hard to sleep, from anguish and fear, and from the sniper fire that popped all night from the park across the street.

The city was under martial law.

It was a dark time. A few weeks later we attended a dance at a ballroom in the Peabody Hotel, then still a rundown grey ghost of its glorious past, and nothing resembling its opulent future, now present. There were National Guardsmen everywhere, and tanks were still in the streets. Impossible to feel festive, I remember how surreal it all seemed.

And then, exactly two months after King was shot, to the day, Bobby was shot in Los Angeles.

That did it. Our innocence thoroughly raped, the American people – slowly at first – began to awaken to the violence being done, not just in our names, but to our own. The riots of the Democratic Convention that August confirmed our worst fears about how far the government would go to suppress dissent, but it also confirmed our resolve and showed how big a noise we could make.

Some might say that it often takes such heinous events, especially the murders of beloved leaders, to awaken a people. That is the opening point of Joe’s post below. History would certainly support such a notion, though one should never interpret the truth of it to mean an endorse of it.

Still, enormous changes did emerge from that horrible day, as the men on this morning's show testified. When I visit Memphis now, though problems remain in a deeply insidious way, it is far better than it was then. Blacks own property, go to and teach in good schools, perform in and patronize restaurants and bars along with whites, and participate in the governmental process. Memphis has had the same black mayor since 1991. King would be proud, for the most part, but he would still be working to make it even better.

Our greatest leaders have always recognized that these changes would only come when the people themselves took charge of their fate. The fact that we now have no leaders of the caliber and charisma King and the Kennedy’s possessed should give us great concern but even greater resolve.

Now there is no one person they can shoot down who represents the masses that they think can be silenced by martyring their heroes. We all lament our lack of heroes from time to time these days, but there is an upside to it.

They must now confront the lot of us, each and every one of us. And we will always always outnumber them.