I've been reading some very eloquent articles today about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. today. I wish I could write one.
Dr. King was not all that visible on my personal radar in 1968 when his life was tragically ended at the age of 39. I knew him as a symbol of equal rights, and I have never not been in favor of them but I wasn't much into the specifics of that struggle. I remember hearing someone on TV (not Dr. King, obviously) once say, "I will never discriminate and I will never allow discrimination around me. More than that, I cannot do. If everyone would just do that, there would be no discrimination." I suppose that was my credo then…but as I later came to realize, it was nowhere near enough. Everyone else was not going to adopt it.
I was in high school at the time and still more politically conservative than any reader of this blog is likely to believe. Actually, I suppose I didn't like Democrats or Republicans very much and didn't see any leader anywhere that I thought was worth following. Even when someone said things with which I agreed, they said or did other things that killed my enthusiasm for them.
Dr. King was assassinated on a Thursday, as I recall. On Friday, not a lot of lesson plans were followed at University High School. I believe the principal (or someone) had told all the teachers to put that kind of thing aside and just try to have some sort of "dialogue" among the students. We did not have a lot of black kids on campus but we had several black teachers and enough Hispanic and Asian students to feel like a racially diverse mix. I do not recall any racial tensions at that school during my three years there except perhaps on that Friday.
It was in a class called (I think) U.S. Government that the "dialogue" we were supposed to have got a wee bit testy. The teacher was Mr. Kivel, a white, doughy-faced gent who was maybe forty years old at the time. As I think of him now, he reminds me of Chris Christie back when that man seemed like kind of a nice guy to even his political opponents — the Chris Christie who hugged Barack Obama after the hurricane, not the Chris Christie who began working hard for the votes of those who hated Barack Obama.
Mr. Kivel got into a very real, intense debate with a student whose name I recall as Jesus. It may not have been but that's what I remember. He was of Mexican ancestry and was heavily involved in some way with "inner city" groups and gangs and what we then called — because they called themselves that — Negroes. He was not himself black but it did not seem wrong that Jesus spoke about how they felt, what they wanted, etc. It was pretty much the same thing his people wanted.
It was even what all the white folks in the room wanted: Everyone is equal, everyone has equal opportunity, race doesn't matter in anyone's pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. The debate was over how soon one could reasonably expect that to get there.
Jesus said it had to happen immediately. Mr. Kivel said it can't. These things take time. A lot of minds have to be changed. Jesus said they need to change A.S.A.P. because summer is coming and this town is like a powder keg waiting to explode. Most cities in America are powder kegs waiting to explode and the murder of Dr. King has lit the fuse.
This was less than three years after we had the Watts Riots in Los Angeles and we all still remembered the looting and burning…so it was a scary conversation. But it was also a healthy conversation because while there was considerable emotion between Mr. Kivel, Jesus and a few others who chimed in, everyone was friends at the end and you heard the phrase "I see your point" a lot. I would guess that if we could replay it now and compare it to what has happened since then in this country, we would find that each of them was about half-right.
What you would not hear on that replay is me saying anything. I remember a bit of an inner jolt as I realized I had absolutely nothing to contribute to this conversation — no insights, no opinions, no suggestions…not even a coherent question to ask. It was obviously an important topic in the world in which I lived but I didn't know enough about it to have a thought that was more than about a quarter-inch deep.
That night, since the newspapers and TV screens were filled with stories about Dr. King and his causes, I took the opportunity to learn a little about him and them. I was too far back to get completely up to speed but I'd like to think I made a decent start. I'd also like to think that I wasn't the only one who made that effort.