Unfortunately, I got a late start on this; there aren't a lot of links. But this isn't a 'breaking' or 'news' story; it's an extremely personal (and, I'm afraid, long) one. Regardless, I feel compelled to share it; it's the most vivid childhood memory I have, the primary event that 'shaped' me, politically, and this is the day, and the blog, where this story belongs, IMNSHO.
I was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee (and, as I love to say, finally fled in my mid-thirties to quit being raised). Because I was 'smart', I was enrolled in school a year early, but my small size and social ineptness more than made up for any smarts I may have had. I was more than one teacher's pet - and the first victim of every bully I ever shared a classroom (or, in some cases, even a SCHOOL) with, at least until HS. My youthful interests were math and science - anything 'social' either bored me, or seemed irrelevant.
Before 1968, living in then-lily-white east Memphis, the eldest of three boys, each born 2 years apart to massively over-protective parents, I only saw African-Americans in two settings: the maid we had 3 days a week, and the men who picked up the garbage once a week. That was it. The public grade school I attended, the Methodist church I attended, non-voluntarily, every Sunday ('Methodist', NOT 'United Methodist' - African-Americans weren't welcome in the Methodist church then, at least not in the 'Bible Belt', and my parents fled that church when it went 'United' when the split occurred), the church baseball league I played in (the ENTIRE LEAGUE), the public swimming pool and park I practically lived in during the Summer - all lily-white. 100%.
I suppose there were a FEW African-Americans on TV then, but not many, of course, and likely the shows they were on weren't the ones we watched; my parents maintained tight control over the 'remote', which of course was connected to the TV in those days. As a kid I watched a LOT of cartoons, Captain Kangeroo, Gunsmoke, Walt Disney every Sunday evening; that kind of thing. I'm sure many of my era get the picture (no pun intended). I don't remember my parents watching much TV news back then; if they did, it didn't interest me. My protected little world was THE world, in my eyes, at the time.
As a child, I got what I asked for for Christmas every single year I can remember (I knew my world well enough to keep my requests modest), with one exception: 1967. For Christmas, 1967, I'd asked for a BB-gun. In that time and place, a BB-gun was a right of passage for an 11-year-old. I was shocked and deeply hurt that Christmas morning when no gun showed up. I was later told, "I wasn't mature enough for a gun." The following Christmas my younger brother got a .22 rifle for Christmas; while certainly no more 'mature' than I, he was, and is to this day, his father's spitting image, in every way. But that's another story, and not really one for DKos.
In 1968, my father was a traveling salesman for a transportation company. He, like his father, spent his entire career in transportation; he never worked a day in his life outside the industry. His territory was North Carolina. He'd leave every Sunday afternoon, driving 600+ miles each way, spend the entire week in NC, and return late Friday, handing my mother a week's worth of dirty, salesman-dressy clothes upon his return for her to wash and repack by Sunday afternoon. Every week. This was a tense and difficult time for my family.
On Saturday evening, March 30, 1968, my father, who'd 3 months prior refused my request for a BB-gun, 'taught' me, in our living room, how to operate his 16-gauge automatic shotgun. Obviously, I couldn't even actually fire the weapon in the living room; he simply taught me how to load it, clear a jammed, half-ejected shell, how the 'safety' worked, and that I didn't need to 'aim' - simply 'point' this weapon I could barely lift. Why would a man do something so bizarre?
It seems there was a 'rabble-rouser' whose name I'd never heard before, named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He'd visited Memphis a couple of times prior during the strike that was underway at the time by the "garbage men", as they were then referred to, and was making another visit on April 3rd to join in some of the almost-daily marches the strikers were conducting (my parents had insulated me well from most, if not all, of this). Dr. King was heading back to town, in my father's words, to "stir up a pot of shit." While I'd not heard enough about the strike to have ANY understanding of the gravity of what was happening (what little I did hear, I probably heard at school, and the issue seemed 'foreign' to me), I DID know that garbage was piling up everywhere, and was at least vaguely aware of some marches, and 'skirmishes' (AKA 'minor' riots) that had been and were occurring. I later learned that of the roughly 1200 sanitation workers in Memphis then, only about 200 scabs and replacement workers were on the job during the strike.
By late March the strike was almost 7 weeks old, having begun on Feb. 12. Here are some informative photos, and a terrific, don't-miss, synopsis of the entire strike. The latter link notes that the first reported public singing of the song "We Shall Overcome" occurred during these marches; it also contains numerous photos of, amoung other things, the marches, and Army tanks riding the streets of downtown Memphis (I never saw any tanks in Memphis, on TV or otherwise). The 'standard' protest poster held by marchers was "I AM A MAN". I have NO recall of most of these things. Being in sales, my father was of course quite anti-union; I didn't have the foggiest notion what unions were, either, but that was my parents' rationale for objecting to the strike, and to Dr. King's final, fateful, fatal flight to Memphis.
My father "couldn't" (of COURSE) actually cancel his weekly business trip (God forbid), but he obviously anticipated trouble. To this day, I don't know why this particular week was the one he chose to hand me his gun. Dr. King had been to Memphis at least twice already, and one of the main reasons he agreed to become involved was the non-violent atmosphere of the strike. Regular marches had been ongoing for weeks, and several small riots had already occurred, mostly window-breaking by non-marchers, and limited to downtown businesses and the 'ghettos'. Again, I knew little-to-nothing of all this at the time - but apparently, he DID expect 'trouble'.
Three months after telling me I was "too immature" to own a BB-gun, I was told that, in his absence, I was "the man of the house" (LOL), and that I was only to get the gun out "if the j*ng**b*nn**s came rushing up the front yard to come rape (my) mom." Our front yard was maybe 20 feet deep; I guess I was expected to move quickly. Nice, massively over-protected kid that I was, I had no idea who or what either these people, or rape, for that matter, were. Further, I was always the smallest kid in class, K-12. I realised a few years later, during the short period when I did a bit of hunting on my own, that had I actually discharged that weapon in 1968, the recoil would've most likely blown the gun right out of my hands, its payload going in who-knows what direction. The noise would've likely freaked me out, as well. Thinking today about what would've happened had a riot actually reached our neighborhood, and a short, skinny 11-yr-old kid appeared at his doorway with a shotgun in his hands, terrifies me almost as much as I was terrified then.
My father left town, Dr. King came to town, on Wednesday, April 3rd, and, 40 years ago today, of course, was assassinated on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Riots broke out, of course, but they never got close to east Memphis. I like to say I was 11 years old and 11 miles away when Dr. King was assassinated (the "11 miles" part might not be exact, but it IS close). And, in 1968, few African-Americans (and certainly VERY few from the ghettos) owned cars. The city knew exactly how to keep the riots from spreading beyond downtown and the ghettos; they simply shut down the excuse for a mass transit system (buses) Memphis had. Any African-American man seen WALKING within 5 miles of our house would've been reported and arrested, pronto, during this tense period.
FWIW, I've visited that now-shrine personally, with my then-8-yr-old daughter in tow. I wanted to be sure, before I left Memphis, permanently, as it turned out, that she was exposed to the site and the senseless violence that had occurred there; it clearly had a strong effect on her.
King's assassination, obviously, caused a massive reaction in Memphis - moreso, probably, than anywhere else. It was the main topic of conversation, everywhere, by everyone. I began watching the news, and reading that formerly "boring" newspaper my parents got every day, whose contents I'd only been previously interested in for baseball linescores. I quickly became aware that there was a world MUCH larger than the 1-sq-mile section of the Earth that had, to that point, BEEN 'my world.' I discovered the editorial page. While I wasn't capable of absorbing all its contents at first, I realised in a matter of weeks, if not days, the true reasons my parents had been so opposed to the strike, and to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
My attitude toward the parents I'd always viewed as gods quickly soured. I began a habit, which became a lifelong one, until the advent of the Internet, of reading the newspaper, daily, pretty much cover-to-cover. I started watching the news whenever I could; with one TV in a 5-person household, that wasn't always feasible, making the newspaper all the more important. Vietnam became an obsession - the daily body counts that are today suppressed were at that time reported in the upper corner of the front page of the local paper - it was the 1st thing you saw, every single day. In 6 months, I went from not being able to define the word 'politics', to a political animal, albeit a young one. Being rather socially inept, organizing, much less running for office, has never been my thing, but I do what I feel comfortable doing - voting and participating at DailyKos being the prime examples today.
The TV was on in my household from the moment we got home from school until bedtime every single day. Following a hugely well-received one-time special on Sept. 9, 1967, on Jan. 22, 1968, a new show hit the airwaves; it became an instant, groundbreaking smash hit. That show was, of course, "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In". IIRC, my parents initially attempted to prevent their kids from viewing this show, but it became such a huge hit so fast, the other networks didn't even attempt to compete; there was little ELSE worth watching, and, again, the TV was ALWAYS on at our house. Even with its often-controversial content, my parents probably laughed as hard as (or harder than; they understood a lot more of the inuendo) we kids did from 8 to 9 PM every Monday night for most of its 5+ year run.
While I developed an instant, HUGE crush on Goldie Hawn (one which I'm not sure ever really ended ;) ), and I can't even type the name Lily Tomlin without laughing at the 'phone company', two other cast members became quick favorites, as well: Flip Wilson, and Sammy Davis, Jr. While there wasn't really a cast member I didn't like, they gave me a view of African-Americans I'd never been exposed to; a VERY positive one.
In August, 1968, my family moved. I found out many years later the real impetus for the move: an African-American family had moved into the 'neighborhood'. In reality, they were probably 2 miles away, but of course my father, the economic guru, wanted to get out before the neighborhood 'turned'. We moved to the northeastern suburbs, slightly outside the city limits, to a neighborhood that was also lily-white at the time. My parents blatantly lied to me about what school I would be attending; the one I'd been led to believe I'd be going to was a well-known, 'cool' school (and probably 95%+ white, even though it was one of the largest schools in the county). The one I actually was assigned to was fairly small, VERY old, and so inconspicuous I'd never even heard of it.
What my father did NOT realise was that the school I was assigned to encompassed an area that, on the opposite side of its territory, included a large amount of Section 8 (subsidized) housing. Every single kid at my 6th-grade graduation was Causcasian; I started the 7th grade at a school that was about 35% African-American. Care of my social ineptness, I was instantly shunned by the 'cool' white kids - as were the African-Americans. I didn't care what about anyone's race; I simply wanted someone who accepted me for me. I made fast friends with a good number of African-Americans.
I was, however (very likely, in part, because of my association with non-Caucasians) the immediate target of a horrific bully who weighed 200+ lbs in the 7th grade, although he was no taller than I. Additionally, my relationship with my parents continued to decline as I began to develop a set of values at odds with theirs.
Fortunately, that school only went through the 8th grade. There was a new high school that had opened in my district the year I was i the 8th grade; they started with a 9th-grade class only, and added one grade a year, so that no one would have to be pulled from their existing school. When I started, it was all 9th and 10th graders, in a large, half-empty school. NO hazing; indeed, our two classes quickly formed a bond that never dissolved, and the school was probably close to 40% non-white. We were like one class as the other classes came in behind us, We quickly developed several reputations (all highly accurate) as the best school in the county in several areas, namely (a) academics - we had more NSF (National Science Foundation) award winners than any other school in the county all 4 years I was there, (b) drugs (OK, maybe not 'good' unless you're talking about quality ;) ), and (c) race relations so good they were rarely an issue - in one of the most racially polarized cities in the US, then and now. I reveled and excelled in all three areas. Some of my social ineptness eased. I found a few friends in every corner - geeks, heads, African-Americans, a few Greek and Asian friends, in particular, and quite a few that either fit into none of these 'categories', or into several.
By 1972, I'd become a die-hard liberal, in pretty much every way. Although too young to vote, I was a RABID McGovern supporter in 1972; it was the first election I cared about, and I was devastated when he lost in a landslide. I turned 16 the week after the election, and Vietnam was issue #1. When the draft lottery for my birth year was held, my birthday was the 3rd ball pulled from the "keno machine." For those too young to remember, there was an annual 'draft lottery' held in those days, based on your birthday, in order to keep the draft 'fair' (sic). If the draft had been reactivated, I'd have been drafted instantly. Luckily, the active draft ended 18 months before I turned 18, but I was still very wary of ending up in a rice paddy with a rifle in my hand - Nixon was a highly unpredictable time bomb who could've restarted that madness at any time, and I wouldn't have trusted ANYONE who followed him. Gerald Ford seemed innocuous enough, but he was a complete unknown, having assumed the Vice-Presidency only 9 months before becoming President. Luckily, Ford, unlike Nixon, was actually sane.
I've said MANY times since (I imagine more than a few can understand, at least to a degree): "It seems like EVERY US Presidential election is a rerun of 1972." Of the 8 elections since 1972, I've been let down 5 times, most of them devastatingly so in races that looked close (and, in hindsight, let down by the man who won 2 of the 3 others). But win or lose, I'll die a progressive/liberal, and for that, more than any other single human being, I thank you, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I still miss your leadership, wisdom, and charisma, and I'm positive I'm far from alone in that regard.