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| MLK Memorial in DC |
Fifty years ago today, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis.
It was a Thursday. It was a beautiful Spring day in Detroit with the temperature hitting 68. It was a few days before Palm Sunday.
I was finishing up 9th Grade at Cadillac Junior High School and thinking about high school not yet sure if I was going to Cooley High School which was two blocks from our house or Cass Tech downtown. It was a crazy time in Detroit, it was only nine months after the 1967 Riots which rocked the city putting it on a path of white flight and a gradual slide that led to the insolvency of the once great city. Because the city was still in the aftershock of the Riots, Detroit Public Schools decided to close schools on April 5th. I am not sure if they did out of fear that racial tensions in schools might erupt into violence or if it was to be day of mourning for the slain civil rights icon. I am going with the former.
April 5th, the day off from school, was a good 25 degrees cooler. I looked it up because I recalled that it was a warmer day than that. When we learned school was out, a group of us that had played pick-up baseball games for years, decided to meet at Cooley High School and play another. I do not even remember who all showed up, but I remember playing. We played on the big high school diamond and not on a side field where we had always played. We were kids bordering on becoming young men. We did not talk much about the assassination. We did not feel scared at all. It was a peaceful day. That might have been the last pick-up baseball game I ever played.
There was a moment, however, when the reality of what had happened in Memphis and what might happen as a result became quite real. In the midst of our baseball, I looked over and saw a National Guard Jeep driving down Chalfonte. It was one of those Jeeps with a machine gun mounted in the rear. Two guardsmen were in the Jeep. One was driving and the other standing up with his hands on the machine gun. The pulled into the school parking lot, did a loop, and drove off. The whole thing might have only been a minute long, but it had an impact. Whatever idyllic world I had grown up in was over. America had changed. Of course, America was always changing during my entire life from the McCarthy Era to JFK’s assassination to the Vietnam War to the Civil Rights Movement and on that day in April, the assassination of Marin Luther King. This may well have been the inflection point from the Wonder Years to adulthood for me.
The Detroit Tigers had yet to open their season. The opener was on April 10th and they would go on to win the pennant and the World Series. That World Series Championship and graduating from Cadillac Junior High made the year magical. The 1967 Riots, the assassination of King, the June assassination of Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, the craziness of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, the on-going Vietnam War, and the election of Richard Nixon in November made for a most turbulent time to be coming of age. It will be the 50th year for all of these events as well.
And what did my almost 15-year-old self think about the assassination of Martin Luther King? Sadly, until I saw the National Guard Jeep with the machine gun drive by, I did not give it much thought. I was not treating the day off with the joy that a snow day would have brought. I knew the assassination was a important, shocking, and sad. But, I did not fully understand the impact of Martin Luther King and Civil Rights Movement.
I was influenced by my surroundings and upbringing. The world was more racially segregated than I knew or suspected. I was under the naïve belief that after the Civil War, everyone had the same chances and opportunities. I was a Boy Scout, after all. I was also the recipient, directly or indirectly, of J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign to paint King as a anti-American and a communist. I had only recently fully understood what communism was supposed to be and how the Soviets usurped it. It was the beginning of an awakening and enlightenment that lasts to this day.
I actually blogged twice on Martin Luther King on the holiday that commemorates his birth: Perhaps the impact came when I read the following poem from Haki Madubhubuti, nee Don L. Lee, that helped me see this more from the Black perspective and which resonated very well with my Armenian perspective.
Assassination
it was wild.
the bullet hit high.
(the throat-neck)
&from everywhere:
the motel, from under blushes and cars,
from around corners and across streets,
out of the garbage cans and from rat holes
in the earth
they came running.
with
guns
drawn
they came running
toward the King--
all of them
fast and sure--
as if
the King
was going to fire back.
they came running,
fast and sure,
in the
wrong
direction.
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