Fri
Apr 4 2008
11:48 am
Forty Years Gone
By: Bbeanster

Sean Braisted has a moving tribute to MLK:

(link...)

I was at the Roman Room when I heard the news that Martin Luther King had been shot. I was eight months pregnant with Rachael (I know, sounds bad, being in a smoke-filled barroom when I was that pregnant), and Ruby, the waitress (she wouldn't have called herself a server) announced "They've shot Martin Luther King!"

This moment left a scar on my heart that I carry to this day, and will to the grave.

And the frat boys at the table next to us started cheering. I thought I was going to pass out. Seriously. I couldn't catch my breath. They were calling him Martin Luther Coon, and having a big time. My husband, Joe, was trying to get me to calm down, but soon as I could, I stood up and started cussing them.

Joe, who was afraid I was going to go into labor, cajoled, pleaded, dragged me out of the place, finally. I cannot recall being angrier, sadder or more outraged at anything, ever in my life.

Rachael was born in May, and Joe, who had just finished college and gotten drafted, was shipped overseas and didn't get to see her until she was two months old. By December, he was dead. Our son, Joey, was born the following July.

(With apologies to my daughter for giving away her age)

Topics:
bill young's picture

MLK

Submitted by bill young on Fri, 2008/04/04 - 5:23pm.

I was walking thru the living room.My dad was watching TV.

We interupt this program for a special report

Dr Martin Luther King,Jr.was shot & killed today in Memphis Tn.

My dad said"What on earth is happening in this country?"

I was in the 9th grade in Athens Georgia

& intergration had just barely begun..

maybe 5-10 black kids in the whole school.

The next day not much if anything was said.

I was a paperboy delivered the Atl Journal.I read it every day.

The Mayor of Atlanta,Ivan Allen,Jr.,was helping the King family.

The racist Governor,Lester Maddox

saw the flags around the capital at half-staff.

Maddox was furiouse & ordered them raised.

My history teacher was a young black women,the only black teacher in the school.

The day of King's funeral..the school day was like any other school day in the 9th grade..

horseing around..talking about the Braves game..boys & girls going steady & holding hands..passing notes & boring classes.

Except in this young black teacher's class.

In her class we watched the mule drawn farm wagon bearing King's casket winding thru Atlanta..

passing the State Capital..flags fluttering high..with state troopers surrounding it.

I can't say I was outraged..I really didn't understand..

I was a 14 year old kid & in Georgia Dixie was played all the time & Confederate flags were a staple.

UGA professers were genial segregationist.

Wallace bumper stickers were on cars in the
suburbs.

the only contact I had with blacks was the black lady named Daisy May that kept my 4 year old sister & in the summer when the black maids & gardeners kids would come with them & we would play

& a black man named Fillmore that cleaned the YMCA.

But It did strike me that something was really wrong.

Why was this young black teacher the only one in the whole school watching the funeral all day long?

And to everybody else it was just another school day.

Wishing the 3:30 bell would ring & we could play baseball.

Anonymous's picture

Just letting you know I have

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 2008/04/04 - 5:09pm.

Just letting you know I have a moving tribute to King as well.
Sharon Cobb
(link...)

knoxvegas99's picture

Recommended reading

Submitted by knoxvegas99 on Fri, 2008/04/04 - 5:33pm.

Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters. King was so much more than the two-dimensional soundbites you get from network news.

I had just turned 18 when King was assassinated. Annus horribilis. The Tet offensive, King, RFK, the Chicago Democratic convention, a year never to be forgotten.

Larry Van Guilder

Rachel's picture

Annus horribilis indeed. I

Submitted by Rachel on Fri, 2008/04/04 - 7:40pm.

Annus horribilis indeed. I was 16 in '68. On top of everything else that happened that year, my dad had a near fatal stroke.

To say it was a year that changed my life is an understatement.

Mike Cohen's picture

Betty Bean on King

Submitted by Mike Cohen on Fri, 2008/04/04 - 5:57pm.

Good for you for saying something, Betty.

WhitesCreek's picture

My family had just moved

Submitted by WhitesCreek on Fri, 2008/04/04 - 7:04pm.

My family had just moved from Memphis and I was at Ga. Tech when King Died. My paper route in Memphis had been about a half mile from the motel where he was killed.

Kennedy, King, and another Kennedy...What a time to be a teenager.

And then there was the war. We all had friends that were dead, by then. Every time we learned of another name that would eventually be chiselled on that monument, we felt more guilty for still being alive.

Memphis was such a strange place then. A crazy mayor and incredible music. I remember going to an Otis Redding concert at the Memphis Colosseum with 5000 National Guard troops outside, several of whom warned me not to go in because there could be trouble. There wasn't... It was a great show...I danced in the aisles with everybody else.

It was a terrible time... It was wonderful. I still have friends from that time that don't look like me, and it matters less and less every hour that passes.

Bill Lyons's picture

Tough Memories

Submitted by Bill Lyons on Fri, 2008/04/04 - 7:38pm.

Whitescreek and I went to the same schools in Memphis.... Snowden Jr. High and Central High School in the heart of town. I was there the whole time. By 1968 I was working my way through college in Memphis and got a call at work at a retail establishment. The owner said "Martin Luther King has been shot. There is a curfew. Lock up and go home." That night was incredibly tense, with fires and gunshots all over.

A few of us had both been at a number of protests in re: garbage strike. It was awful. Those folks were treated very badly and Jerry Wurf of the ASFCME was in town and despised by the Mayor (Henry Loeb... still remember that guy) and the strikebreakers on the trucks had been accompanied by police cars. Loeb was not going to make any concessions, and the idea of this union was, well.. you can imagine.

My friend and I marched in the parade - two rows behind Dr. Spock -- that followed and were spit on by spectators. I had my "I am a Man" sign for years until my mom -bless her Heart- threw it away from the attic along with my baseball card collection for the fifties. In those days the racial divisions were so great that my best friend was booted out of his house by his dad for being in the march. His dad had a store that had been looted and burned near downtown. Tanks and National Guard were all over town. We lived in a pretty integrated section of town and did not ever have a single problem. But we were pretty scared when we could see smoke and hear shots.

We really thought that the end of society as we knew it was around the corner. When Bobby Kennedy was killed after all the energy that McCarthy had put in the primary battles, followed by the riots around the country and the 1968 convention disaster.. well I changed my major, for better or worse, from math to political science. There is no way to explain the incredible presence of Dr. King. I heard him speak at least four times. You can multiply what the impact is on film by a factor of ten.

The soul of Memphis was seared and in many ways it never has recovered.

Average Guy's picture

Movin' On

Submitted by Average Guy on Tue, 2008/04/08 - 6:18pm.

Kennedy, King, and another Kennedy...What a time to be a teenager.

Although I'm generally regarded as angry, tin foil guy (admittedly well earned) on this blog, I really have a need for answers about how one moves on from historical events such as this.

With the all the issues around the JFK assassination, and the King family publicly stating the government story about Ray was bogus, and the recent forensic evidence of more shots fired in the RFK assassination than Sirhan had bullets - how does one just move on?

My trust of our government never seems to increase. I look for evidence of it being worthy of trust, but rarely find it. I guess my question is this; Do generations keep moving on because it's human nature to do so or because real change seems unsurmountable?

bill young's picture

you said it,man

Submitted by bill young on Sat, 2008/04/05 - 12:18pm.

Bill,I agree.

Nobody calls Memphis

Soulsville,USA

anymore.

Elrod's picture

Cheered?

Submitted by Elrod on Tue, 2008/04/08 - 12:19am.

What kind of white trash cheered MLK's assassination?

Bbeanster's picture

What kind of white trash

Submitted by Bbeanster on Tue, 2008/04/08 - 7:08am.
What kind of white trash cheered MLK's assassination?

This particular white trash was a bunch of frat boys, but that reaction was pretty damn common all over the South, near as I can tell.

Rachel's picture

You know, I was thinking

Submitted by Rachel on Tue, 2008/04/08 - 6:58pm.

You know, I was thinking about this and I can't remember anyone in my small middle Tennessee town cheering - or anything like it.

What I do remember was fear. The white folks just didn't know what kind of sparks the King assassination was going to set off. And they were really afraid. It was just in the air - even in my small town, which was maybe 5% African-American, if that.

I hadn't thought about that feeling in a really long time. It's hard to reconstruct that kind of fear sitting here 40 years later.

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