King’s work changed the world
“By November 1968, Americans were desperate for shelter from the year’s howling storms. Republican candidate Richard M. Nixon, whose career once seemed over, engineered one of the great resurrections in U.S. political history by divining the mood of millions of Americans who were outraged by violence and disorder. He won the presidency not so much by promising cures for the nation’s ills as simply by cataloging and decrying them.”
That was a paragraph from Time magazine’s hardcover book “1968,” whose paper covering, under a picture of Earth taken from space, described the year succinctly as “war abroad, riots at home, fallen leaders and lunar dreams: The Year That Changed the World.”
One of the fallen leaders of 1968 was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., described by Time as the “magnetic voice of the civil rights movement,” whose assassination that April resulted not only in many of the nation’s ghettos erupting in flames as Blacks vented fury, but also forcing America as a whole to look at itself and, when it did, it didn’t like what it saw.
Unfortunately, it was a long-overdue look — an examination of conscience that Little Rock, Ark., failed to initiate in 1957, when nine Black students were being barred from attending that city’s Central High School.
It was a long-overdue look that Selma, Ala., failed to initiate in 1965 when civil rights demonstrators heading to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in south Selma were attacked by police, with scores injured.
An article in the January-February 2018 issue of Smithsonian magazine described Memphis, Tenn., after King’s assassination on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel there, as a “place of diminished esteem … for people whose esteem was already suffering.”
Memphis experienced a long decline after King’s assassination.
“The Lorraine Motel declined as well, and was frequented by drug users and sex workers,” wrote Smithsonian in that 2018 issue marking the 50th anniversary of King’s death. “In 1982, the owner — who it is said never again rented out King’s room, 306 — declared bankruptcy. A ‘Save the Lorraine’ group, financed by the (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) union and the state, bought the motel at the last minute, hoping to turn it into a museum. The plan took nearly 10 years; the National Civil Rights Museum opened to the public on Sept. 28, 1991, completing the Lorraine’s transformation from killing floor to brothel to shrine.”
What a positive move compared with 1976, when the City of Memphis wanted to tear down the Lorraine and — as one description noted — forget that the King assassination ever happened there.
On this national holiday honoring King, it is right to think back to times of more than a half-century ago, when segregation in this country prevailed without a shred of a guilty conscience.
On this national holiday of respectful remembrance of King and what he sought to accomplish, and indeed accomplished, it is important to convey to one’s children the fact that America once was a very different place in terms of rights and in terms of friendships.
Hundreds of people gave their lives for the cause of equality during the early days of the civil rights movement, and King was a man who helped ignite that badly needed monumental change, even though he lived only to be 39 years old.
The significance of this national holiday must never be diminished.