Showing posts with label Martin Luther King Jr.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Martin Luther King Jr.. Show all posts

Thursday, August 06, 2015

Standing at the corner of Dumbass and Bigot


What's a fella gotta do to get a street named for him in St. Bernard Parish, La.?

You don't want to know.

You see, the president of the local chapter of the NAACP asked the parish council to rename Colonial Boulevard in the town of Violet for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As it happens, more than 80 percent of the households on the boulevard petitioned the parish to make the change.

As it also happens, lots of white people who don't live on Colonial Boulevard -- and lots who don't even live in Violet -- ardently oppose that. When the measure went before the parish planning board last month, the opposition went something like this:
“My experience is that streets that are named MLK has been crime-ridden, drug-infested and unfortunately, it’s known to be black populated."

I DON'T KNOW what one does with that. Fumigate the council chambers for fear the commenter might be contagious? Redouble your efforts to get the brain-eating amoeba out of your water supply?


Ultimately, the parish council punted, saying the street was under state, not parish, jurisdiction. Except that Colonial Boulevard is controlled by St. Bernard Parish. Channel 4 in New Orleans reports:
A proposal to rename a street is sparking strong emotions in St. Bernard Parish. On Tuesday night, the parish council claimed the state had jurisdiction over the roadway and tabled the issue.

"It's a nice boulevard to be living on," said Violet resident Terry Grant.

For a decade and a half, Grant has lived on Colonial Boulevard. He's raised kids and watched his grandchildren at his Violet home. The street sign has remained the same until now.

"With our young kids that don't understand or know about are black leaders, they lived and died for their voting rights. I don't see a problem with them changing the name into Mr. King," said Grant.

An ordinance is being proposed to rename Colonial Boulevard to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Rev. Kevin Gabriel with the St. Bernard Parish NAACP says 28 signatures from a total of 34 houses on the Boulevard were collected in favor of the name change.

"We really mean what we say. We want this street named Dr. Martin Luther King for the people of Colonial, not because it's black, not because it's white, but for the people. He was for all people," said Rev. Gabriel.

At Tuesday night's parish council meeting, opponents of the ordinance held up "say no" signs while the public got the chance to weigh-in.

"I grew up off of Colonial and 6th Street, from a little girl all the way through graduation until we lost the house because of Katrina. Colonial has a lot of good memories," said a woman attending the council meeting.

"Dr. Martin Luther King talked about peace, he brought people together. If we were naming one of these streets after someone who doesn't look like us in this community, it would not be a problem," said Violet resident Andrew Rhodes.

One group even claimed they'd collected more than 1,000 signatures parish-wide against replacing the Colonial Boulevard signage with the late civil rights' leader's name.

"Please do not let outsiders influence, break us down, divide us, nor force change in our community," said one woman attending the meeting.
THAT WOMAN must be related to this one who, at the planning board meeting, said this: “I mean, if the street’s name has to change, which is ridiculous, then name it after someone who’s done something for this parish."

This is where I point out that Colonial Boulevard intersects with East Judge Perez Drive. That used to be Goodchildren Drive until, in 1972, it was renamed to honor the late segregationist political boss of Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes, Judge Leander Perez.

How bad a segregationist was Leander Perez? Excommunicated by the Catholic Church bad, that's how bad. From Wikipedia:
In the 1950s and 1960s, Perez gained attention as a nationally prominent opponent of desegregation, taking a leadership role in the southern Massive Resistance to change, particularly following the 1954 US Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. Other nationally recognized figures who became known on this topic were Strom Thurmond, George Wallace (future governor of Alabama), and Ross Barnett of Mississippi. Perez was a member of the White Citizens Council and an organizer of the white supremacist Citizens Council of Greater New Orleans. Perez researched and wrote much of the legislation sponsored by Louisiana's Joint Legislative Committee on Segregation.

Perez tried to control the activities of civil rights workers by prohibiting outsiders from entering Plaquemines Parish via the bayou ferries, which were the chief way to cross rivers and enter the jurisdiction.

In 1960, while opposing desegregation of New Orleans public schools, Perez spoke provocatively at a rally in the city. His speech is credited with catalyzing a mob assault on the school administration building by some 2,000 white men, who were fought off by police using fire hoses. The mob ran through the city and attacked African Americans on the streets. When the schools were reopened, Perez organized a boycott by white residents. His group made threats to whites who allowed their children to attend desegregated schools. Perez arranged for poor whites to attend a segregated private school without charge , and he helped to establish a new whites-only private school in New Orleans. The Roman Catholic Church supported desegregation, and integrated its parochial schools. The bishop of New Orleans excommunicated Perez for his overt opposition to the church's teachings.
IN THE 1990s, the St. Bernard Parish Council rededicated Judge Perez Drive for Judge Melvin Perez, a state judge who served St. Bernard Parish, thereby distancing itself from the long-dead white supremacist, Leander. Then again, how many people do you reckon think of Melvin when you say "Judge Perez Drive"?

Obviously, the only thing as hard as naming a not-very-long street for Martin Luther King, Jr., in St. Bernard Parish is unnaming a major thoroughfare for a corrupt segregationist political boss. Here's more on Leander Perez from Wikipedia:
In 1919, Judge Perez launched a reign of bought elections and strictly enforced segregation. Laws were enacted on Perez's fiat and were rubber-stamped by the parish governing councils. Elections under Perez's reign were sometimes blatantly falsified, with voting records appearing in alphabetical order and names of national celebrities such as Babe Ruth, Charlie Chaplin, and Herbert Hoover appearing on the rolls. Perez-endorsed candidates often won with 90% or more of the ballots. Those who appeared to vote were intimidated by Perez's enforcers. He sent large tough men into the voting booths to "help" people vote. Many voters were bribed. Perez testified that he bribed voters $2, $5, and $10 to vote his way depending on who they are.

Perez took action to suppress African Americans from voting within his domain, but most were already disenfranchised due to the state constitution passed at the turn of the century, which added requirements for payment of poll taxes and passing literacy tests in order to register to vote. Subjective and discriminatory treatment by white registrars prevented most blacks from registering.
LOUISIANA: Home of both the "carefully taught" and the carefully bought.  Next parish council meeting should be another humdinger.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

The content of our character


Martin Luther King Jr., lived for the proposition that "all men were created equal," for the vision "that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

He also died for that proposition, that vision, that dream.

And it is for that "last full measure of devotion," to quote Abraham Lincoln, another great American who died because of a noble vision, that we honor Rev. King this time every year. To again borrow from our 16th president, King called us to heed "the better angels of our nature."

This trait in national leaders today is so rare that we are obligated to celebrate those who called us to transcend our fallen human nature all the more. It's important that we acknowledge that spark of the divine within us during an age when so much of the world seems to have gone to the devil.

Sadly, because we humans are a sad, sinful and petty lot overall, King's dream has yet to be fulfilled. Things are better, yes, than when an assassin cut down the civil-rights leader, but they're not good enough. Far too often, we judge one another by the color of our skin, not the content of our character.

That recently has been brought home right here . . . at home, in Omaha, Neb.

ENTER A small-time local Republican politician, Pat McPherson, recently elected to the state education board. McPherson seems to be one of those politicians who just can't help himself, or stay out of trouble. The content of the man's character seems to be, well, questionable.

More than a decade ago, there were allegations of groping a teenage girl dressed as the Red Robin mascot at a chain hamburger joint. McPherson, after a criminal trial, got out of that scrape, though not before he was pressured to resign as Douglas County election commissioner.

Now, after being elected to the Nebraska State Board of Education in November, McPherson is in trouble over his blog, The Objective Conservative. Several posts -- and McPherson has denied authorship or knowledge of the screeds . . . on his own blog -- refer to President Obama as "a half-breed," the latest coupling that derogatory reference with one to "our great Black Leader."
McPherson
Obama was described as a “half breed” in five separate postings on McPherson’s Objective Conservative blog — postings that McPherson said he did not author and that he disavowed after critics drew attention to them.

McPherson, a Republican, said they were posted by a contributor he would not name.

Three of the postings are written as if they reflect the opinion of the blog itself, which McPherson founded and said he co-edits. The three postings are listed as posted by Objective Conservative and are written with the pronoun “we.”

The three postings begin, “Frankly, we’ve had enough ...,” “We think Ted Nugent is cool ...” and “We are tired ...”

In one posting, the author jokes that the article may be their last because “we suspect the NSA has forwarded it to (Attorney General) Eric Holder for potential prosecution under hate-crime laws.”

The postings date back to May 11, 2011. McPherson said he deleted them from the site Tuesday. He declined to identify who wrote the blog posts, but he said he has expressed his disappointment to that person.

The chairman of the Nebraska Democratic Party said Tuesday that Ricketts “just flunked his first test as governor as he failed to ask for McPherson’s resignation.”

“How will Mr. Ricketts explain to schoolchildren and teachers why it’s OK with the governor for a State Board of Education member to have a racist blog?” Vince Powers asked.

Powers said McPherson either wrote the posts or is covering for the person who did.

He described the posts as “garbage.”

McPherson said Tuesday that he will “absolutely not” resign. He said he plans to shut down the blog and has blocked any new postings.

McPherson is a former Republican Party chairman in Douglas County who served as director of administrative services under former Omaha Mayor Hal Daub. He ran for the State Education Board on a conservative platform.

The blog, which claims to present a conservative view, is a hodge-podge of photos, articles and opinion. Much of the content needles Obama, Democrats and their policies.
ONE REFERS to an animal as a "half-breed." One does not respectfully refer to a human being that way. That, you could presume, goes double when the subject of your remarks is the president of the United States.

The term is biracial, one that could describe any number of McPherson's own constituents.

The temptation here is to launch into a grand dissertation about the wrongness of McPherson's views, the brazenness of his bile-spewing (and, seriously, no one really takes McPherson's disavowal of the contents of his own blog seriously) and how tragic it is that we Americans no longer can disagree with our fellow Americans without resorting to branding them as The Other. That ought to be bloody well self-evident.

The extent to which the obvious no longer is in this society is a direct indicator of how untenable it has become. Translation: We well may be on our last legs.

What else is self-evident -- or should be self-evident -- as this King Day winds down in Omaha is that Omaha-area voters messed up badly in electing not only a racist to public office but a man who didn't even have the decency to be a hypocrite about it on the Internet. A man whose public past ought to have given the electorate a pretty good idea about his public future.

Sadly, American voters oftentimes are just as foolish as those they put into office. Or bigoted, as the case may be.

FINALLY, it is self-evident that Pat McPherson is just another boil on the buttocks of American democracy. Worse, he is a cancer on the administration of Nebraska elementary and secondary education. It is a pity -- a tragedy, really -- that public disorders like McPherson are too often tougher to excise from the body politic than they are from the human body.

Martin Luther King's dream lives. But his work remains unfinished, thanks to human frailty, hearts of darkness and the politicians who exploit both.

In the name of King's dream and our future, we cannot afford to be content with characters like Pat McPherson. Either their day is done . . . or ours will be soon enough.

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

'Tell them about the dream, Martin'


From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:
Also participating was New Orleans’ Mahalia Jackson, who played a key role in later inspiring King at the podium. 

With input from advisers, King’s speech had been composed the night before at Washington’s Willard Hotel. As King delivered the prepared text — the original copy of which belongs to former college basketball coach George Raveling, who was at King’s side during the speech — Jackson prompted King to veer into an unscripted passage she might’ve heard him deliver in earlier appearances. 

“He was just reading, and she just shouted to him, ‘Tell them about the dream, Martin. Tell them about the dream,’” said Clarence Jones, an attorney and adviser to King who had contributed to King’s text. “I was standing about 50 feet behind him, to the right and to the rear, and I watched him — this is all happening in real time — just take the text of his speech and move it to the left side of the lectern, grab the lectern and look out. 

“One of the world’s greatest gospel singers shouting out to one of he world’s greatest Baptist preachers. She may have ignored the fact that there were almost 300,000 other people there, and she just shouted out to Martin, ‘Tell them about the dream.’ Anybody else who would yell at him, he probably would’ve ignored it. He didn’t ignore Mahalia Jackson. 

“I said to somebody standing next to me, ‘These people don’t know it, but they’re about ready to go to church.’” The words “I have a dream” do not appear in the text Raveling owns.

AND THAT'S the way it was, Wednesday, Aug. 28, 1963 . . . 50 years ago today.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Copping a feel


Because they're just a bunch of young anti- Americancommunistdirtysmellyweirdoanarcho-socialistdope-smokinghippiepinkofags, we can just do what we want to them, right?

Because, after all, they deserve it and are a threat to the American way of life. (No, look here, not at what's going on in corporate boardrooms. Tattoos! Look! Freak! Un-American!)

They're just a bunch of outside agitators, is what they are! Give the cops that 007 license to kill!


Police brutality good! Liberal wackos bad!


Let them eat cake! Or pepper spray. Whatever.

Corporations now! Corporations tomorrow! Corporations forever!

Monday, January 17, 2011

A revolution on hold


Martin Luther King Jr. was looking to lead a revolution in 1968, a "poor people's campaign."

He never got the chance. To paraphrase
Facebook, "Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and millions of other Americans like this."

The trouble is, what the great civil-rights leader said on March 31, 1968, at New York's Riverside Church probably is even more relevant now than it was then. Change the name of a place here and there, change the name of
la guerre du jour . . . and there you go.

Back in 1968, despite the war in Indochina, despite the spate of political assassination that was to begin with King's martyrdom, we still kind of believed in hope. We still
kind of trusted in "progress."

NOW, AFTER a decade of grinding war and a few years of a Great Recession, mass unemployment, foreclosures by the millions and empty state and municipal coffers . . . now, not so much.

In today's America, we find much of the middle class being systematically turned into potential candidates for a Martin Luther King-style poor-people's campaign.

Here, as we wrap up another commemoration of his birth, 82 years ago now, are some excerpts from an important address -- one which happened to be King's last Sunday sermon. It happens to be the declaration of a nonviolent revolution . . .
a revolution interrupted.

Viva la revolución.
There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution: that is, a technological revolution, with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution in weaponry, with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapons of warfare; then there is a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world. Yes, we do live in a period where changes are taking place. And there is still the voice crying through the vista of time saying, "Behold, I make all things new; former things are passed away."

Now whenever anything new comes into history it brings with it new challenges and new opportunities. And I would like to deal with the challenges that we face today as a result of this triple revolution that is taking place in the world today.

First, we are challenged to develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is geographically one. The challenge that we face today is to make it one in terms of brotherhood.

Now it is true that the geographical oneness of this age has come into being to a large extent through modern man’s scientific ingenuity. Modern man through his scientific genius has been able to dwarf distance and place time in chains. And our jet planes have compressed into minutes distances that once took weeks and even months. All of this tells us that our world is a neighborhood.

Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.

John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: "No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." And he goes on toward the end to say, "Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." We must see this, believe this, and live by it if we are to remain awake through a great revolution.

Secondly, we are challenged to eradicate the last vestiges of racial injustice from our nation. I must say this morning that racial injustice is still the black man’s burden and the white man’s shame.

It is an unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle—the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic. And I can see nothing more urgent than for America to work passionately and unrelentingly—to get rid of the disease of racism.

Something positive must be done. Everyone must share in the guilt as individuals and as institutions. The government must certainly share the guilt; individuals must share the guilt; even the church must share the guilt.

We must face the sad fact that at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning when we stand to sing "In Christ there is no East or West," we stand in the most segregated hour of America.

(snip)

Not only do we see poverty abroad, I would remind you that in our own nation there are about forty million people who are poverty-stricken. I have seen them here and there. I have seen them in the ghettos of the North; I have seen them in the rural areas of the South; I have seen them in Appalachia. I have just been in the process of touring many areas of our country and I must confess that in some situations I have literally found myself crying.

I was in Marks, Mississippi, the other day, which is in Whitman County, the poorest county in the United States. I tell you, I saw hundreds of little black boys and black girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear. I saw their mothers and fathers trying to carry on a little Head Start program, but they had no money. The federal government hadn’t funded them, but they were trying to carry on. They raised a little money here and there; trying to get a little food to feed the children; trying to teach them a little something.

And I saw mothers and fathers who said to me not only were they unemployed, they didn’t get any kind of income—no old-age pension, no welfare check, no anything. I said, "How do you live?" And they say, "Well, we go around, go around to the neighbors and ask them for a little something. When the berry season comes, we pick berries. When the rabbit season comes, we hunt and catch a few rabbits. And that’s about it."

And I was in Newark and Harlem just this week. And I walked into the homes of welfare mothers. I saw them in conditions—no, not with wall-to-wall carpet, but wall-to-wall rats and roaches. I stood in an apartment and this welfare mother said to me, "The landlord will not repair this place. I’ve been here two years and he hasn’t made a single repair." She pointed out the walls with all the ceiling falling through. She showed me the holes where the rats came in. She said night after night we have to stay awake to keep the rats and roaches from getting to the children. I said, "How much do you pay for this apartment?" She said, "a hundred and twenty-five dollars." I looked, and I thought, and said to myself, "It isn’t worth sixty dollars." Poor people are forced to pay more for less. Living in conditions day in and day out where the whole area is constantly drained without being replenished. It becomes a kind of domestic colony. And the tragedy is, so often these forty million people are invisible because America is so affluent, so rich. Because our expressways carry us from the ghetto, we don’t see the poor.

Jesus told a parable one day, and he reminded us that a man went to hell because he didn’t see the poor. His name was Dives. He was a rich man. And there was a man by the name of Lazarus who was a poor man, but not only was he poor, he was sick. Sores were all over his body, and he was so weak that he could hardly move. But he managed to get to the gate of Dives every day, wanting just to have the crumbs that would fall from his table. And Dives did nothing about it. And the parable ends saying, "Dives went to hell, and there were a fixed gulf now between Lazarus and Dives."

There is nothing in that parable that said Dives went to hell because he was rich. Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth. It is true that one day a rich young ruler came to him, and he advised him to sell all, but in that instance Jesus was prescribing individual surgery and not setting forth a universal diagnosis. And if you will look at that parable with all of its symbolism, you will remember that a conversation took place between heaven and hell, and on the other end of that long-distance call between heaven and hell was Abraham in heaven talking to Dives in hell.

Now Abraham was a very rich man. If you go back to the Old Testament, you see that he was the richest man of his day, so it was not a rich man in hell talking with a poor man in heaven; it was a little millionaire in hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich; Dives didn’t realize that his wealth was his opportunity. It was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he was passed by Lazarus every day and he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible. Dives went to hell because he maximized the minimum and minimized the maximum. Indeed, Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.

And this can happen to America, the richest nation in the world—and nothing’s wrong with that—this is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.

(snip)


One day a newsman came to me and said, "Dr. King, don’t you think you’re going to have to stop, now, opposing the war and move more in line with the administration’s policy? As I understand it, it has hurt the budget of your organization, and people who once respected you have lost respect for you. Don’t you feel that you’ve really got to change your position?" I looked at him and I had to say, "Sir, I’m sorry you don’t know me. I’m not a consensus leader. I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I’ve not taken a sort of Gallup Poll of the majority opinion." Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.

On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?

It's the big MLK Day blowout!


In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. took a .30-caliber slug in the throat so that, one day, we could buy lots and lots of crap we don't need in honor of his birthday.

After all, America's retailers have a dream today.

Fifteen-month, interest-free financing! Fifteen-month, interest-free financing! Thank God Almighty, we have 15-month, interest-free financing!

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

We are overcoming


You know, I was watching the inauguration today and thinking about Janice Grigsby.

And I started crying. By the time the Rev. Joseph Lowery -- the old lion of the civil-rights movement -- got out of his wheelchair and up to the rostrum to deliver the benediction, the tears were streaming down my face.

GOD BLESS HIM, at this moment, President Obama's politics are irrelevant. And my quite eclectic politics are irrelevant, and the evil (grin) Republicans' politics are irrelevant.

What's relevant is that I lived to see something -- something positive, at least -- that was unthinkable even 30 years ago.

What's relevant is that Barack Obama has overcome . . . that I have overcome . . . that, God willing, we have overcome.

I found myself wishing that Janice Grigsby would knock on my door so that I could give her a big, fat kiss on the lips, pick her up and spin her around and around.

Because the bastards didn't win, after all.

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

For Janice, wherever she might be


(OK, this post will have some rough language. And it will use the N-word. A lot. But to tell this story -- and to be true to the times I'm recalling -- it has to be done. Reader discretion is advised.)

* * *

I wrote this post more than a decade ago, and a version of it first appeared on this blog Dec. 16, 2006. It seems to me to be appropriate to run it again after the historic night we just experienced, a night when we learned Barack Obama, a black man, will be president and America's original sin seemed less onerous and more redeemable than it did a day ago.

Last night was for Janice Grigsby. This post is, too. God bless her, wherever she might be.

* * *

Joe's Barber Shop smelled of witch hazel, hot shaving cream and talcum powder. Of old magazines, the newsprint of strewn-about State-Times and Morning Advocates, and of sweat and cigarette smoke.

WHEN YOU OPENED the front door onto Scenic Highway, Mr. Joe's place might smell of complex hydrocarbons, too. The front gate of the Humble Oil and Refining Co.'s Baton Rouge complex sat slap-dab across the street.

One summer day in 1970, though, Mr. Joe's just smelled.

"My boy ain't goin' to school with no goddamn niggers," this fellow said from up in one of Mr. Joe's three barber chairs -- under the placard that proclaimed the establishment a proud "Union Shop" -- to expressions of sympathy from Mr. Joe, my old man and the rest. Fearing his son's life might be in mortal danger, the man was popping off about having his kid pack heat.

Blame it on the Feds. A federal judge had just ruled against East Baton Rouge Parish's grade-at-a-time "freedom of choice" school desegregation plan, which had taken effect in 1963, started with the 12th grade and worked its way down to the sixth grade. Starting in the fall, a "neighborhood school" plan would take over, coupled with voluntary majority-to-minority transfers. For the first time, all students in a school's attendance area -- black and white -- would go to the same school.

Not a popular concept in the all-white, working-class world of Joe's Barber Shop.

I was 9 years old.

Summer gave way to fall in 1970 -- to the surprise of many white folks (including, I imagine, the guy planning to arm his son), the world did not end -- and school opened, "integrated" under the neighborhood schools scheme.

"Integrated" Capitol High School was supposed to have 230 white students and 1,363 blacks. Five whites showed up for classes. And "integrated" McKinley High was supposed to have 81 whites and 1,051 black students. No whites showed up.

THAT FALL, I returned to suburban Red Oaks Elementary School, a sprawling, brick-and-concrete 1950s monument to homogeneity and bad taste that assaulted the eyes with its covered walkways and copious amounts of puke-green paint. My parents saw no need to place a snub-nose .38 in my book sack; there was little chance I'd face assault by some snarling black menace from "Bucktown."

Chances were much better that I'd be assaulted by gangs of snarling white menaces from North Red Oaks.

In the fall of 1970, I was starting fourth grade, and for the past three years I had hated all-white, de jure-segregated Red Oaks Elementary. The only thing worse than Red Oaks, I imagined, must be having to go to "the nigger school," which, I was assured, just might happen if I messed up bad enough.

In the fall of 1970, Janice Grigsby was starting fourth grade at Red Oaks, too. She hadn't had the opportunity to work up a good hate for the place; this was the first year she and her little brother could attend.

Janice was black, and though her family had lived just a few blocks from the school since before there was a school there -- before there was a neighborhood, even -- she had been barred from Red Oaks by force of law, relegated to "the nigger school."

I remember that Janice had skin the color of a Hershey bar, a pair of pigtails and a big smile. She was the first black person my own age I'd ever known. And despite almost a decade of racial indoctrination -- with warnings about "nigger music," "nigger rigs" and "nigger lovers," deliveries from "the drugstore nigger" and subtropical heat that left you "sweatin' like a nigger preacher" -- despite growing up with Jim Crow as the crazy uncle in the attic, I liked Janice. She was in Mrs. Anderson's class with me, and I found that I didn't care whether she was black, white, purple or green.

She was a friend.

I REMEMBER that Janice and I used to play together at recess. I'd pull her pigtails, she'd chase me, and we'd both have a grand time.

My folks had no real problem with this. Poor Southern kids during the Great Depression, they grew up around black folks. And the only difference between them and "the niggers" was a society and a legal system that placed blacks at the bottom of the pecking order and "white trash" a little bit above.

So, for some white folks, there was nothing overly unusual about playing with black kids. Or about being friendly -- not friends -- with blacks as an adult, so long as everyone remembered that God Almighty ordained that whites were the superior race.

On the other hand, you had problems if black folks got "uppity." Uppity included such concepts as sitting in the front of buses, voting and using the same restrooms as whites. Or going to school with whites.

I guess that, by 1970 standards, my parents were something less than white-supremacy hardliners. I know they weren't hot on the idea of racial integration, not by a long shot. But I suppose they figured that if the Feds were letting the "coloreds" (what polite white folks called blacks in 1970) into "white" schools, there was no use being mean to them, or in keeping your kid from playing with Janice Grigsby.

The powers-that-be at Red Oaks Elementary, however, didn't see things the same way.

MORE THAN three decades later, I remember one day when Janice and I were playing at recess, following the standard rituals of 9-year-old boys and girls. Soon enough, Mrs. Anderson got my attention, took me aside by a red-brick wing of classrooms and gave me a good talking to.

Maybe I ought not be playing with Janice, she gravely advised me. It didn't look right, she was worried about it, the Red Oaks administration was worried about it, and white boys hanging around with colored girls wasn't wise. In 1970, it seems, certain white adults were worried about miscegenation, even among the playground crowd.

Janice Grigsby, one of two lonely black children among hundreds of white faces at Red Oaks Elementary, was to be isolated. Blackness was akin to the mumps, and the authorities were worried about infection.

At day's end, I walked across the playground, then over the foot bridge of heavy timbers and the pungent smell of creosote, then across Darryl Drive and down the sidewalk to home. My mother was waiting, and I told her I couldn't play with Janice anymore.

She was outraged. To this day, I'm not sure where that outrage came from -- perhaps it was that defiant suspicion of authority bred into a class of white folk raised dirt poor and accustomed to being beaten down by the powers-that-be. Maybe it was a subconscious compulsion to do the right thing despite her own prejudices and enculturation. Maybe it was the invisible hand of God determined to see that such blatant injustice, such cruelty directed toward a 9-year-old girl, not pass unnoticed.

Whatever it was, it caused my mother to go straight to the phone book, look up the number of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pick up the telephone and give whomever answered at the NAACP an earful about the shenanigans going on at Red Oaks Elementary School.

IN AN OLD MOVIE, the outrage of the righteous would have come down foursquare upon the heads of Mrs. Anderson and her partners in crime, and Janice Grigsby would have lived happily ever after. But old movies are just that, and morality plays were long out of fashion by the dawn of the '70s.

Life did not get easier for Janice. Her black face stood out like a bulls eye in Red Oaks' lily-white world, and she took her shots from Mrs. Anderson, a surly, tanklike woman who had about as much business in the classroom as Pol Pot would have had on Amnesty International's board of directors.

No, for Janice, ridicule at Mrs. Anderson's beefy hands became a daily ritual.

For instance, every Monday was lunch-money day, and the proper procedure for paying for the week's meals involved paying separately for your lunch and for your milk -- or something like that. One Monday, Janice did something horrible. She brought a single check from home to pay for everything.

You would have thought Janice had just set fire to the classroom.

"What am I supposed to do with this!" Mrs. Anderson thundered. "Cut it in half?!?"

The classroom erupted with the laughter of small minds. The cruelty of a middle-aged teacher toward a little girl is really funny when you're 9, I guess.

But Janice just sat there. She just took it.

I am not sure why this is the incident that sticks in my mind after all these years and all these miles away from Baton Rouge. There were others, many others. But as the years have passed, those incidents have subsided into the fog of memory. All that remains is the surety of Mrs. Anderson's withering remarks, the hoots of my classmates and Janice just sitting there.

Taking it.

And I remember that I hated Mrs. Anderson. I really did, and I don't know that I'm sorry I hated her.

I left Red Oaks Elementary after the fall semester of 1970. Like Janice, I was the butt of many jokes and much abuse -- at the hands of Mrs. Anderson and little rednecks with littler minds. I didn't fit in, probably was too smart by half when being smart was a one-way ticket to Adolescent Hell, and I rebelled mightily.

I ended up at the next school over, Villa del Rey Elementary. It was a much better school, though I still had my problems.

My new fourth-grade teacher was Mrs. Hawkins. She was black, talented and a sweet soul amid a sea of, on average, slightly more affluent little rednecks. I spent a while catching up on my studies, thanks to the curricular deficiencies Mrs. Anderson brought to the classroom along with her sunny disposition.

In many ways, it was Mrs. Hawkins who caught hell at the hands of her students. More than once, students might be heard to mutter "nigger" under their breath after being disciplined. I know she had to have heard, but I don't remember her ever saying anything.

And I am ashamed to admit to being among those who muttered the N-word. Like they say, racism isn't congenital; it's learned. And oftentimes we learned all the wrong lessons.

I DIDN'T SEE Janice Grigsby again until seventh grade at Broadmoor Junior High, where there was just a small handful of black kids. We didn't hang out together anymore, but I did notice one thing about her -- it seemed that her smile wasn't so big anymore. At least not often.

The dresses she once wore, I recall, had given way to a denim jacket and pants. It was fitting; she seemed to me at the time as this James Deanlike loner amid the junior-high hustlin' mob. I don't think we spoke much, if at all, during those years. But then again, the black kids had their world, and we whites had ours. The teen-age rednecks and thugs ruled supreme -- and perhaps the Mrs. Andersons of the world had won our hearts and minds.

Too, somewhere along the way at Broadmoor, Janice had to repeat a grade. I wonder whether maybe she, at some point along the line, had bought into the subtext of Mrs. Anderson's daily barrage: Niggers are stupid. Niggers don't belong. You're stupid, Janice. You don't belong.

From time to time, I wonder whatever became of Janice. Did she graduate? Is she happy? Did she ever come to terms with how that old battle axe treated her?

Is she married now? Does she have kids of her own? Grandkids?

Is Janice alive?

Of one thing I am sure: Janice Grigsby was a real little girl who suffered in very real ways due to the aftershocks of America's Original Sins -- slavery and bigotry. One's dead and buried; the other's still alive, burrowed deep into the American psyche like a mutant gene unleashing deadly cancers.

Yes, I'd like to think things weren't as bleak as my 9-year-old eyes viewed them; at least I would like to think my memories of Red Oaks, and Janice, have been darkened, have been fogged over, by the jadedness of adulthood.

But I don't think so.

And I don't think things are as changed as lots of people -- lots of people white like me -- would have us all believe. Better, yes.

Good? Probably not.

It was four decades ago, now, that Martin Luther King Jr., died. He was a great man.

And somebody shot him dead. Shot him dead for his greatness.

Somebody'd probably shoot him dead today, too.

God help us. Lord, have mercy.

Saturday, April 05, 2008

3 Chords & the Truth: In the name of love

Forty years ago, I had no clue.

As a 7-year-old, I knew that a bad, bad thing had happened to an important man. I knew the man was dead. I knew people were rioting because he was dead.

BUT AS A Southern child growing up in a working-class, white and illiberal milieu, the only thing I knew about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was that he was not afforded the commonly benign label of "colored" and certainly not the formal moniker of "Negro" -- which you only heard on the TV and radio, anyway.

I had heard that he was something called a "communiss."

What I would find out later -- as I grew in knowledge and as my world grew in size and scope -- was that Martin Luther King Jr,. died not only so that African-Americans could be free in this "land of the free," but so that I might be free, too.

We may not be totally free yet, but we're getting there. And because one man obeyed his God all the way to his own Calvary, we -- all of us, black and white -- are a lot closer than we would be otherwise.

This week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth is dedicated to remembering and mourning what happened in Memphis, Tenn., four decades ago Friday. America is a much changed country for the assassinations of King and, a mere two months later, Sen. Robert Kennedy.

That change was a profoundly tragic one from which we've yet to recover. All these years later, the wounds still bleed.

But the Big Show also celebrates a momentous life -- and the profound difference it made in this country and in the world.

On this week's program, you won't hear me getting in the way of the music . . . or the message. Thus, I'll publish this week's playlist below.

Enjoy the show.

Say It (Over and Over Again)
John Coltrane Quartet
w/ McCoy Tyner (piano), Jimmy Garrison (bass),
Elvin Jones (drums)
1962

It Feels Like Rain
Aaron Neville
1991

Help Us, Somebody
Chris Thomas
1990

The Sky Is Crying
Elmore James
1960

Keep On Pushing
Curtis Mayfield & the Impressions
1964

Redemption Song
Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros
2003

Memphis Blues Again
Bob Dylan
1966

Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Green Day
2004

Inner City Blues
Dirty Dozen Brass Band
2006

Don't Burn Baby
Sly & the Family Stone
1968

We Gotta Live Together
Jimi Hendrix
1970

Motherless Child
Hootie & the Blowfish
1994

Nothing Lasts
Matthew Sweet
1991

Faithful To Me (Reprise)
Jennifer Knapp
1997

Lay My Burden Down
(feat. Mavis Staples & the Dirty Dozen Brass Band)
Dr. John
2004

Forever Young
Joan Baez
1974

Friday, April 04, 2008

I have been to the mountaintop. . . .


On April 3, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his last speech, in Memphis, Tenn.

HE WAS THERE in support of striking sanitation workers, who were protesting low pay and abysmal working conditions, and his oration that night -- prophetic, some called it -- would become one of his most famous.

Forty years ago today, on April 4, 1968, a bullet ripped into King's face and neck as he stood on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel.

It was about 5:45 p.m.

Doctors pronounced him dead about an hour and 15 minutes later. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was 39 years old.

From The Washington Post:

The Rev. Samuel "Billy" Kyles, a local minister and King friend who was there that night, believes King was forecasting his own death. "I am so certain he knew he would not get there," Kyles said. "He didn't want to say it to us, so he softened it -- that he may not get there." Later, Kyles would tell people that King "had preached himself through the fear of death."

What is often unremarked upon about that speech, however, is how resolute King was in his prescriptions for fighting the injustices suffered by the poor. He urged those at the meeting to tell their neighbors: Don't buy Coca-Cola, Sealtest milk and Wonder Bread. Up to now, only the garbage workers had been feeling pain, King noted. "Now we must kind of redistribute the pain."

The next day, King was in a good mood, almost giddy, Kyles remembered. Kyles was hosting a dinner for King at his home that evening. "I told him it was at 5 because he was never in a hurry." But when Kyles knocked on King's door, at Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, to hurry him along, King let him know he had uncovered the little ruse: He had found out the dinner was actually at 6. So they had some time, and King invited Kyles to sit down. Abernathy was there, too. King liked to eat and was anticipating a lavish soul-food feast, so he couldn't resist razzing Kyles. "I bet your wife can't cook," King told his friend. "She's too pretty."

Just to tease a little more, King asked Kyles: Didn't you just buy a new house? He then told the story of an Atlanta preacher who had purchased a big, fancy home and had King and Coretta over for dinner. "The Kool-Aid was hot, the ham was cold, the biscuits were hard," Kyles recalled King jiving. "If I go to your house and you don't have a decent dinner, I'm going to tell the networks that the Rev. Billy Kyles had a new house but couldn't afford to have a decent dinner."

It was about 5:45 when King and Kyles left the room and stepped onto the second-floor balcony. Abernathy stayed put. King leaned over the rail to gaze at a busy scene in the parking lot eight feet below, exchanging words with his young aide Jesse Jackson, among others. Kyles was just about to descend the steps, with King behind him, when he heard the shot. "And when I looked around, he had been knocked from the railing of the balcony back to the door," Kyles recalled. "I saw a gaping hole on the right side of his face."

Kyles ran back into the room and tried to call for an ambulance, but no one at the motel switchboard answered. He took a bedspread and draped it over King's body.

King was pronounced dead at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph's Hospital.

"Forty years ago, I had no words to express my feelings; I had stepped away from myself," recalled Kyles, now 73, the pastor at Monumental Baptist Church in Memphis. "Forty years later I still have no words to describe my feelings."

For years, Kyles struggled with an internal question: "Why was I there?" And at some point, he can't remember when, "God revealed to me, I was there to be a witness. Crucifixions have to have a witness."


Saturday, December 16, 2006

Yes, Martin Luther King Jr., was a great, great man


(OK, this post will have some rough language. And it will use the N-word. A lot. But to tell this story -- and to be true to the times I'm recalling -- it has to be done. Reader discretion is advised.)

* * *

The latest episode of the Revolution 21 Podcast spotlighting MLK and the Dreamers and their song "Great Man" has gotten me thinking . . . and remembering little slices of life from long, long ago (a couple of years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination) and far, far away (my hometown of Baton Rouge, La.).

On one hand, it seems like memories from an alien planet and an alternate timeline. On the other hand, hell no it doesn't. I find myself wishing I could impart what's in my heart and in my brain -- basically, the life experiences and heart of a middle-aged man who grew up in the segregated South and actually remembers that "great man," MLK Jr. -- to those Omaha teen-agers who decided to do a simple little song about the civil-rights leader.

Perhaps I can accomplish this a little by resurrecting -- and updating -- something I wrote almost 10 years ago. Here goes.


* * *

JOE'S BARBER SHOP smelled of witch hazel, hot shaving cream and talcum powder. Of old magazines, the newsprint of strewn-about State-Times and Morning Advocates, and of sweat and cigarette smoke.

When you opened the front door onto Scenic Highway, Mr. Joe's place might smell of complex hydrocarbons, too. The front gate of the Humble Oil and Refining Co.'s Baton Rouge complex sat slap-dab across the street.

One summer day in 1970, though, Mr. Joe's just smelled.

"My boy ain't goin' to school with no goddamn niggers," this fellow said from up in one of Mr. Joe's three barber chairs -- under the placard that proclaimed the establishment a proud "Union Shop" -- to expressions of sympathy from Mr. Joe, my old man and the rest. Fearing his son's life might be in mortal danger, the man was popping off about having his kid pack heat.

Blame it on the Feds. A federal judge had just ruled against East Baton Rouge Parish's grade-at-a-time "freedom of choice" school desegregation plan, which had taken effect in 1963, started with the 12th grade and worked its way down to the sixth grade. Starting in the fall, a "neighborhood school" plan would take over, coupled with voluntary majority-to-minority transfers. For the first time, all students in a school's attendance area -- black and white -- would go to the same school.

Not a popular concept in the all-white, working-class world of Joe's Barber Shop.

I was 9 years old.

Summer gave way to fall in 1970 -- to the surprise of many white folks (including, I imagine, the guy planning to arm his son), the world did not end -- and school opened, "integrated" under the neighborhood schools scheme.

"Integrated" Capitol High School was supposed to have 230 white students and 1,363 blacks. Five whites showed up for classes. And "integrated" McKinley High was supposed to have 81 whites and 1,051 black students. No whites showed up.

That fall, I returned to suburban Red Oaks Elementary School, a sprawling, brick-and-concrete 1950s monument to homogeneity and bad taste that assaulted the eyes with its covered walkways and copious amounts of puke-green paint. My parents saw no need to place a snub-nose .38 in my book sack; there was little chance I'd face assault by some snarling black menace from "Bucktown."

Chances were much better that I'd be assaulted by gangs of snarling white menaces from North Red Oaks.

In the fall of 1970, I was starting fourth grade, and for the past three years I had hated all-white, de jure-segregated Red Oaks Elementary. The only thing worse than Red Oaks, I imagined, must be having to go to "the nigger school," which, I was assured, just might happen if I messed up bad enough.

In the fall of 1970, Janice Grigsby was starting fourth grade at Red Oaks, too. She hadn't had the opportunity to work up a good hate for the place; this was the first year she and her little brother could attend.

Janice was black, and though her family had lived just a few blocks from the school since before there was a school there -- before there was a neighborhood, even -- she had been barred from Red Oaks by force of law, relegated to "the nigger school."

I remember that Janice had skin the color of a Hershey bar, a pair of pigtails and a big smile. She was the first black person my own age I'd ever known. And despite almost a decade of racial indoctrination -- with warnings about "nigger music," "nigger rigs" and "nigger lovers," deliveries from "the drugstore nigger" and subtropical heat that left you "sweatin' like a nigger preacher" -- despite growing up with Jim Crow as the crazy uncle in the attic, I liked Janice. She was in Mrs. Anderson's class with me, and I found that I didn't care whether she was black, white, purple or green.

She was a friend.

I remember that Janice and I used to play together at recess. I'd pull her pigtails, she'd chase me, and we'd both have a grand time.

My folks had no real problem with this. Poor Southern kids during the Great Depression, they grew up around black folks. And the only difference between them and "the niggers" was a society and a legal system that placed blacks at the bottom of the pecking order and "white trash" a little bit above.

So, for some white folks, there was nothing overly unusual about playing with black kids. Or about being friendly -- not friends -- with blacks as an adult, so long as everyone remembered that God Almighty ordained that whites were the superior race.

On the other hand, you had problems if black folks got "uppity." Uppity included such concepts as sitting in the front of buses, voting and using the same restrooms as whites. Or going to school with whites.

I guess that, by 1970 standards, my parents were something less than white-supremacy hardliners. I know they weren't hot on the idea of racial integration, not by a long shot. But I suppose they figured that if the Feds were letting the "coloreds" (what polite white folks called blacks in 1970) into "white" schools, there was no use being mean to them, or in keeping your kid from playing with Janice Grigsby.

The powers-that-be at Red Oaks Elementary, however, didn't see things the same way.

More than three decades later, I remember one day when Janice and I were playing at recess, following the standard rituals of 9-year-old boys and girls. Soon enough, Mrs. Anderson got my attention, took me aside by a red-brick wing of classrooms and gave me a good talking to.

Maybe I ought not be playing with Janice, she gravely advised me. It didn't look right, she was worried about it, the Red Oaks administration was worried about it, and white boys hanging around with colored girls wasn't wise. In 1970, it seems, certain white adults were worried about miscegenation, even among the playground crowd.

Janice Grigsby, one of two lonely black children among hundreds of white faces at Red Oaks Elementary, was to be isolated. Blackness was akin to the mumps, and the authorities were worried about infection.

At day's end, I walked across the playground, then over the foot bridge of heavy timbers and the pungent smell of creosote, then across Darryl Drive and down the sidewalk to home. My mother was waiting, and I told her I couldn't play with Janice anymore.

She was outraged. To this day, I'm not sure where that outrage came from -- perhaps it was that defiant suspicion of authority bred into a class of white folk raised dirt poor and accustomed to being beaten down by the powers-that-be. Maybe it was a subconscious compulsion to do the right thing despite her own prejudices and enculturation. Maybe it was the invisible hand of God determined to see that such blatant injustice, such cruelty directed toward a 9-year-old girl, not pass unnoticed.

Whatever it was, it caused my mother to go straight to the phone book, look up the number of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pick up the telephone and give whomever answered at the NAACP an earful about the shenanigans going on at Red Oaks Elementary School.

In an old movie, the outrage of the righteous would have come down foursquare upon the heads of Mrs. Anderson and her partners in crime, and Janice Grigsby would have lived happily ever after. But old movies are just that, and morality plays were long out of fashion by the dawn of the '70s.

Life did not get easier for Janice. Her black face stood out like a bulls eye in Red Oaks' lily-white world, and she took her shots from Mrs. Anderson, a surly, tanklike woman who had about as much business in the classroom as Pol Pot would have had on Amnesty International's board of directors.

No, for Janice, ridicule at Mrs. Anderson's beefy hands became a daily ritual.

For instance, every Monday was lunch-money day, and the proper procedure for paying for the week's meals involved paying separately for your lunch and for your milk -- or something like that. One Monday, Janice did something horrible. She brought a single check from home to pay for everything.

You would have thought Janice had just set fire to the classroom.

"What am I supposed to do with this!" Mrs. Anderson thundered. "Cut it in half?!?"

The classroom erupted with the laughter of small minds. The cruelty of a middle-aged teacher toward a little girl is really funny when you're 9, I guess.

But Janice just sat there. She just took it.

I am not sure why this is the incident that sticks in my mind after all these years and all these miles away from Baton Rouge. There were others, many others. But as the years have passed, those incidents have subsided into the fog of memory. All that remains is the surety of Mrs. Anderson's withering remarks, the hoots of my classmates and Janice just sitting there.

Taking it.

And I remember that I hated Mrs. Anderson. I really did, and I don't know that I'm sorry I hated her.

I left Red Oaks Elementary after the fall semester of 1970. Like Janice, I was the butt of many jokes and much abuse -- at the hands of Mrs. Anderson and little rednecks with littler minds. I didn't fit in, probably was too smart by half when being smart was a one-way ticket to Adolescent Hell, and I rebelled mightily.

I ended up at the next school over, Villa del Rey Elementary. It was a much better school, though I still had my problems.

My new fourth-grade teacher was Mrs. Hawkins. She was black, talented and a sweet soul amid a sea of, on average, slightly more affluent little rednecks. I spent a while catching up on my studies, thanks to the curricular deficiencies Mrs. Anderson brought to the classroom along with her sunny disposition.

In many ways, it was Mrs. Hawkins who caught hell at the hands of her students. More than once, students might be heard to mutter "nigger" under their breath after being disciplined. I know she had to have heard, but I don't remember her ever saying anything.

And I am ashamed to admit to being among those who muttered the N-word. Like they say, racism isn't congenital; it's learned. And oftentimes we learned all the wrong lessons.

I didn't see Janice Grigsby again until seventh grade at Broadmoor Junior High, where there was just a small handful of black kids. We didn't hang out together anymore, but I did notice one thing about her -- it seemed that her smile wasn't so big anymore. At least not often.

The dresses she once wore, I recall, had given way to a denim jacket and pants. It was fitting; she seemed to me at the time as this James Deanlike loner amid the junior-high hustlin' mob. I don't think we spoke much, if at all, during those years. But then again, the black kids had their world, and we whites had ours. The teen-age rednecks and thugs ruled supreme -- and perhaps the Mrs. Andersons of the world had won our hearts and minds.

Too, somewhere along the way at Broadmoor, Janice had to repeat a grade. I wonder whether maybe she, at some point along the line, had bought into the subtext of Mrs. Anderson's daily barrage: Niggers are stupid. Niggers don't belong. You're stupid, Janice. You don't belong.

From time to time, I wonder whatever became of Janice. Did she graduate? Is she happy? Did she ever come to terms with how that old battle axe treated her?

Is she married now? Does she have kids of her own? Grandkids?

Is Janice alive?

Of one thing I am sure: Janice Grigsby was a real little girl who suffered in very real ways due to the aftershocks of America's Original Sins -- slavery and bigotry. One's dead and buried; the other's still alive, burrowed deep into the American psyche like a mutant gene unleashing deadly cancers.

Yes, I'd like to think things weren't as bleak as my 9-year-old eyes viewed them; at least I would like to think my memories of Red Oaks, and Janice, have been darkened, have been fogged over, by the jadedness of adulthood.

But I don't think so.

And I don't think things are as changed as lots of people -- lots of people white like me -- would have us all believe. Better, yes.

Good? Probably not.

That bunch of teen-agers -- MLK and the Dreamers -- was 20 years from being born when Martin Luther King Jr., died. And they are right; he was a "great, great man."

And somebody shot him dead. Shot him dead for his greatness.

Somebody'd probably shoot him dead today, too.

God help us. Lord, have mercy.