Recently I recounted my feelings and more importantly the feelings of the most important woman in my life, my great-grandmother, the day President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot to death.
I grew up in the days prior to the world of instant messaging and the present social media era that dominates the lives of every child able to form a sentence. On Thursday April 4th 1968 at approximately six o’clock in the evening the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr was murdered. We played outdoors in those days, no IPhones, Facebook or 250 TV channels, I did not hear the news of his death until 8:15pm that evening.
Me, my best friend Albert and my friends played a makeshift basketball game, using the nonadjacent stop signs at opposite street corners as goals and a pale red rubber kickball that was readily available in 1968. My other friend Ronald who had always been a little more retrospective than most of us, had been eating dinner and talking with his family. He lived up the block. I remember seeing him walked down the side street that led to the corner where we were vying to become the next Walt “Clyde” Frazier or Earl “The Pearl” Monroe. I had never seen Ronald cry before, although his eyes were dry, the dry streaks of post tears stained his cheeks. We paused our game because the look he had distressed us, we thought someone in his family had died, as it turned out someone in all our families had died. “Man, someone killed Dr. King!”
I remember hearing the ball being idly dropped and dribble to a stop. The pounding sound of the ball on the pavement was more rapid and more faint, until the street fell silent except for a few sniffles and heavy breathing.
We were kids and immediately felt vulnerable, maybe a war against Blacks had started, afterall they had killed a saint, we could be next. We ran to our homes legs churning, arms flailing for safety. We were too young to completely understand the cultural under or overtones or its political effects. Martin Luther King Jr. to young Black boys like me, was the most visible beacon of hope and change I could have ever imagined. He spoke to the President, heads of State and to my great-grandmother’s heart. She had lived the indignities of the juxtaposition he iterated in the famous ‘I have a Dream’ speech. She worked tirelessly as the matriarch of her family and had to swallow the humiliation of being perceived as less than, when she walked out her front door. Unlike the tears she shed when President Kennedy was killed she took the news as if she expected it. She dried my tears, embraced me and said, “Dr. King gave his life, so you can live yours.”
I was no longer afraid, I was mad.
Why this man, why this day? He was 39 years old, had children a beautiful wife and died because he wanted America to, “live up to its creed.” So many had died, John, Malcom, now Martin. My Ma said, “we still had Robert Kennedy, thank God!”
Vote 2016