It was 1968 and I was still only 14. I was upstairs doing homework, became hungry, and went downstairs to the kitchen to get a snack. On the way, I went through the den, where my father was watching TV.
There seemed to be a lot of commotion going on, a lot of screaming, and a lot of urgency in the voices of the broadcasters.
“What’s going on?” I asked, feigning curiosity at what I saw before me.
“Martin Luther King was just killed,” came my father’s casual (at least to me) reply.”
I won’t lie and say I was very precocious when it came to current events when I was 14. I liked to read crime stories in the newspaper, follow the Red Sox, and listen to the Beatles — not always in that order.
I had this vague uneasiness about Vietnam, because I could subtract, and the difference between 18 and 14 was — as we all know — four. But beyond that, I was pretty innocent.
And pretty sheltered. I hadn’t even heard of LSD until the summer of ’67, when I saw a sign at Fenway Park saying Eddie Stankey (Chicago White Sox manager) was on it.
But King’s assassination jerked me awake, in more ways than one. Of course, I knew who Martin Luther King was. I’d seen footage of equal-rights demonstrations, and he always seemed to be in the thick of those. Still, the assassination of Malcolm X, only three years earlier, had barely registered on my radar screen.
I was a kid who lived in the far reaches of West Lynn — almost in Saugus, really — and the closest I got to the world of snarling dogs, fire hoses, and faces twisted in bigotry and hate was my living-room sofa. And it was very easy for me to piously claim, as I did often, that there should be no distinction between black and white. We were all equal in God’s eyes, and that should settle it as far as anyone else was concerned.
A lot of water has flowed under that bridge since then. King’s death kind of started that process along for me. But it all came under the same heading: a semi-suburban white guy for whom taking a moral stance such as the one expressed above involved no sacrifice, or no realization of what that actually meant.
The penny didn’t even drop in college, when, at Northeastern, I encountered Black anger for the first time. I didn’t understand it, and what do you do when confronted with things you don’t understand? I lashed out against it. The tipping point came in 1974 when I was assigned as part of the team for the old United Press International, where I was a NU co-op intern, to cover the implementation of forced busing in South Boston.
There were plenty of prominent whites in Boston — that alleged bastion of liberalism — who spent days and weeks egging on the citizens of Southie to react aggressively against busing. And these people were ready when those first buses containing Black boys and girls rolled up to what is now known as Excel High School and faced vicious, racially-charged jeering from people in the streets. I actually saw a TV cameraman get hit on the head with a brick someone had thrown at a bus. I won’t forget the egg-shaped lump on his head, and the way the sweat was pouring off his face when he crumpled to the ground (he was OK, but that nauseous feeling remained with me for most of the day).
Two years later, the anti-busing sentiment hadn’t died down totally when I was standing on the outer fringes of Government Center plaza — quite by accident — just in time to see a bunch of ignorant teens using the pointed end of an American flag staff, with the flag still attached, to attack Theodore Landsmark.
I say these things not to try to apply salve to anything that has happened in the last few months, or to compare incidents. They are uniformly awful, and to me have no common context other than the fact hate is central to all of them.
I say these things because they taught me that hate exists and that white supremacy is an ongoing issue that needs to be eradicated. And also that charismatic people don’t grow on trees. Dr. King was one such person, and he died more than 50 years ago. There have been plenty of civil rights leaders since Dr. King, of course, but none with the requisite charisma to pull people together and point them in the same direction. What made him that way, and others, well intentioned as they might have been, not like that is a mystery.
But on the day we’ve set aside to honor the birthday of the late Dr. King, it is necessary to ask ourselves why, in the year 2021, we still even need such a unifying force to make us wake up to these ongoing issues. They should be plainly obvious.
