The Color Barrier

This past weekend I visited the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee.

The Lorraine Hotel is the place where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Martin Luther King had come to Memphis to lead a march of sanitation workers protesting against low wages and working conditions. All the sanitations workers were people of color- all were African American.

Dr. King, who was a minister, was shot in the neck as he stood on the hotel balcony. He was shot by a white man. Dr. King, unlike Malcolm X, who competed with him for leadership of the civil rights movement, stood for non-violence, peaceful civil disobedience, and integration with the mainstream white developed culture that predominates in the United States.

When I was at the adjacent National Civil Rights Museum, next to the Lorraine Hotel, a hotel that just a few short years earlier had ignored the segregation laws of Tennessee to allow blacks to stay there, I looked at the exhibits showing the struggle of black people in the U.S. to obtain civil rights and equality with whites.

I was born in 1958. My earliest childhood memory is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I remember being sent home from school. I remember the whole nation, every American, watching the funeral of the President of the United States- the elected leader of our people; us Americans.

I also remember the night Martin Luther King was assassinated. It was 10 years later. That night, for the second time, there were riots in the street in the city I am from, Peekskill, New York. The windows in my father’s clothing store were broken. The black woman who worked for my family and who helped raise me, Mrs. Hull, told my parents that if our family felt threatened in our home, we could come stay with her and her family, that they would ensure our safety. But the riots, as usual, never made it to the suburbs, we were safe. It was the downtown, were black people lived that was in peril, that’s where it was dangerous- as it always could be.

The museum’s exhibits to me were not historical in the sense of reading about someone else’s history, from some distant time. I was delving into my own personal history. It was like psychotherapy. I was acknowledging that the person who I am, what I live for, what I believe, the job I chose, who I married, what my children look like and believe- all came from Dr. Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement and their call for justice, equality, decency and humanity.

I taught in Harlem because of Dr. Martin Luther King and the influence of the civil rights movement.

I lived in Harlem because of Dr. Martin Luther King.

I traveled through Africa for one year because of Dr. Martin Luther King.

I married a woman of color because of Dr. Martin Luther King.

What my children look like is due to the influence Dr. Martin Luther King.

I went to law school because of Dr. Martin Luther King.

I became an immigration lawyer because of Dr. Martin Luther King.

I am on the radio, TV, and the Web because of Dr. Martin Luther King

I am very dissatisfied with my life because I could not make any contribution to the world nearly as worthy as Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.

I then thought that my children, or perhaps anyone born after 1965, could never understand how history and one’s own life march on together, how growing up and sharing consciousness with a historical period could occur. My personal consciousness and social consciousness of what transpired all around me were one. No one born into the more stable historical period that followed could ever understand how history and yourself can share a day- in fact many days, together; how one actually lives and breathes the history going on all around them. Most people don’t feel this truth; that the onward march of history includes all of our individual lives- that we are all a part of history.

Often people today do not feel the idealism and the attempt to kill that idealism that we felt. We saw an unjust world, we believed, like Martin Luther King Jr, that black and white people were deciding for or against equality and fairness, believing that we must make the world right. We spent, or at least I spent, the rest of my life believing that idealism and justice (along with the love of family) are the only things worth pursuing and living for, the only things that are eternal.

I also realized why I love government. In spite of all the failed attempts at social engineering to help poor black people that have unfortunately proved a failure, a failure of both government and the people themselves, it was the government, and specifically the federal government- certainly not the states- that fought for and brought equality and justice to the races and to poor people. For this reason I will always believe in the federal government of the United States of America, in a way younger people and people of less good-will may never understand.