The End of a Dream

I seem to recall we were watching television at the time a special news bulletin interrupted whatever it was we had on. To this day, special news bulletins fill me with anxiety, but then I was just eight years old and I really didn’t understand what had happened. I just saw what it did to my parents and knew this wasn’t good news.

April 4, 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot dead on a balcony at a motel in Memphis, Tennessee. My parent’s reaction was shock, profound sorrow and more than a little bit of fear. King was not the first Black leader to be killed. They remembered how Medger Evers had been gunned down in the driveway of his own home in Mississippi in 1963. The knew about the murder of Malcolm X, two years after Evers, three years before King. They understood the correlation between standing up for what you believed in and the danger in which it placed such leaders.

True to her nature, my mother tried to put a brave face on things. She has always kept her emotions close, needing to be strong for the whole family. As we watched the news reports all night she didn’t want us to worry. We did anyway.

The mayor of our city in upstate New York called my father and other Black leaders and asked them to come downtown to help calm some of the people who were upset over King’s death, to the point of rage. He was gone most of the night and by morning calm had been restored.

Other larger cities across the country were less fortunate. Rioting occurred in mostly Black neighborhoods in over 125 cities. Forty years later, some of those same communities have still not fully recovered.

In Vietnam, where the war King dared to publicly oppose was headed towards its bloodiest year, white soldiers openly celebrated King’s death. At Cam Ranh Bay, a group of white men wore Ku Klux Klan robes and paraded around the military base. At another compound, the Confederate flag was hoisted for three days.

In the days after his death and the nationwide memorial observances that followed, you could hear people of my parents generation quietly talking about what his assassination was doing to the movement for political change and civil rights he had led. It was causing people to look over their shoulders, to fear for their own safety, to openly wonder if progress was worth dying for.

The idea that one man, James Earl Ray, King’s accused and convicted assassin, acted alone may have been plausible in 1968, but in the years since, few believe he wasn’t part of some larger conspiracy, if he indeed had anything at all to do with it. We now know about the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation, their aggressive surveillance and attempts to discredit King.

It is certainly not implausible to believe this assassination was a deliberate act of domestic terrorism masterminded by or with the full knowledge of those at the highest levels of government, in an effort to maintain the status quo.

Thus to hear my parents and their friends openly sharing their fears suggests the terrorists had won.

A lot has happened in 40 years. Many things have changed, many have not. A Black man, for the first time in this nation’s history, has a realistic shot at becoming president. Yet the country still has a hard time having an honest and open discussion of race, power, privilege and the inequities of our political and economic system. When bold men, preachers even, dare to speak out, they may not be shot literally, but they are silenced and those in positions of power continue to exert their power.

Dr. King died before seeing his dream of racial equality realized. Forty years later, one more year than he lived, it is still a dream.

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