Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

 I have a small personal footnote on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the national hero who is being honored today.

I was 12, living in Memphis, Tenn., when Dr. King was assassinated. My family had a guest in the house that day. My parents, focused on company, had turned off the radio and TV. They might have unplugged the phone.

The next morning, I saw tanks of the Tennessee National Guard headed down Central Avenue, in front of our house. They were going downtown. I could see smoke on the skyline.

I suspected, as only a 12 year-old-boy can suspect, that the world I had grown up in was not going to be the world I would live in as a man. I understood little then, but I knew that Black people were treated unjustly, and that the injustice was widespread. I didn’t understand what “systemic” meant then, but I could see that racism was evil. I could also see there were no extenuating circumstances, nothing that could make that injustice acceptable. 

Our country has changed since 1968, but not enough.