Fifty Years Later

The memory of where I was the moment the news came over the car radio that Dr. King had been murdered in Memphis is as clear today as it was a week later. We were coming back from a long-defunct shopping center in Middletown, New York called Lloyds. My late mother was driving in the east-bound lane of Route 17 - known by locals as the "Quickway". We were just approaching Exit 122, the Fletcher Street exit where the local Catholic high school sits opposite. We were just heading up the ramp when the announcement was flashed to the world. Being a mere nine-years old on April 4, 1968, I had only a vague knowledge of who Martin Luther King was. I would learn a lot more in the days that followed. This was the event that turned me into a newspaper reader. The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy two months later only hardened my resolve to try and stay on top of things. If you're not old enough to remember, 1968 was that kind of year in America - not terribly different from 2018. In fact, I'm willing to make the argument that these times are far worse. Back then, it was only an occasional politician or civil rights leader being gunned down. Today it's whole classrooms of kids.

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Thinking back on that day fills me with ambivalence. Sure, we've come a long way as a nation since April 4, 1968; the eight-year-run of Barack Obama as our forty-fourth chief executive is all the proof you need that there has been a substantial evolution in our sociology in a half century. But then again, the very fact that the White House is today the home of Donald Trump, tells me that crucial segments of American society have gone backward to a degree that is astonishing. Fifty years ago, Barry Goldwater was as extreme-right-wing as any presidential candidate could possibly be. What a difference fifty years makes. Today he is starting to look reasonable in hindsight. In fact, he did turn out to be a pretty good senator. Although he was against the passage of the Civil Rights Act during the 1964 campaign, he later regretted his stand. At the end of his life he was a vocal proponent of gay rights. The dude evolved, no question about it. When he passed away twenty years ago next month, he was appalled at where the conservative movement - a movement he helped create - was taking the country he loved dearly. Maybe it's a blessing that old Barry didn't live to see the Trump administration.

As his ideological detractors just love to point out, Martin Luther King was far from perfect. All great men and women are greatly flawed. And yet the fact that this man walked among us for thirty-nine years is just one of the ways this great and greatly flawed nation has been truly blessed.

I have always been a vehement critic of the Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theories. While the Warren Commission might have gotten a few things wrong, the overwhelming majority of their conclusions they got emphatically right. But what puzzles me about the assassination of Martin Luther King is this:

How was an escaped convict, third-rate ne'er-do-well drifter like the man who killed him (whose name I shall forever refuse to mention) able to make it from Memphis to Montreal  to London? (where he was eventually arrested). Things just don't add up. I'll never be persuaded that there wasn't a much larger conspiracy involved in taking from us this truly great and decent American.
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Martin Luther King Jr. reminds us of America's potential. He was - he is - someone whose life inspires. We forget that in the final year of his life, he became persona non grata to much of America when he publically condemned the ongoing atrocity of America's involvement in Vietnam. The speech he gave at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967 probably sealed his fate. He told us on that day that a nation that spends more on weapons of death than it does on its own people was a nation approaching "spiritual doom". He was right, of course. He also would have agreed, I'm sure that a country that was willing to accept the mutilated corpses of twenty little boys and girls inside a Connecticut classroom in December 2012 as the price we must pay for our "freedoms" was a country that had hurled itself straight into the pit of hell.

And while we're on the subject, it is probably a good thing that Dr. King did not live to see the era of Donald Trump either. It's a pretty safe bet that he would not be pleased. That's just a silly hunch on my part. Pay it no mind

Has anybody here seen my old friend Martin?

Tom Degan
Goshen, NY

SUGGESTED LISTENING:

The two speeches that Dr. King is best remembered for are, of course, I Have  Dream (1964) and I've Been To The Mountaintop (1968). But the most important speech he ever made, in fact, one of the most important speeches of the entire troubled century he lived in, was the one he delivered exactly one year before he died. Here it is in its entirety:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC1Ru2p8OfU

Shh....listen.