I had this post today at Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn in my native borough:
I can remember exactly where I was around on the Thursday evening forty years ago when, as a 16-year-old high school senior, I heard the news that Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. It was around 7:20 p.m. and I was lying on the floor of my tiny bedroom in our house in Flatlands, my loose-leaf notebook in front of me, half-trying to answer some end-of-chapter questions for my social studies class (History of Latin America) at Midwood, half-watching channel 2’s CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
The day’s main news over, they’d switched to a human interest story about a carpenter in England who’d designed a table he thought could be used at the Paris peace talks on Vietnam. The talks had been stalled for months on the famous “shape of the table,” how to seat all the parties: the U.S., North Vietnam, South Vietnam and the Viet Cong.
Suddenly the filmed report (no videotape back in 1968) stopped in the middle and Walter Cronkite was onscreen, reading wire copy of the breaking news of Dr. King’s assassination in Memphis.
As I’d done five years before when, home sick from school, watching Nancy and Grandpa Hughes on “As the World Turns” when it got interrupted by Cronkite in shirtsleeves and wearing unfamiliar clunky black-framed glasses, shakily announcing the shooting in Dallas, I screamed for my parents.
As a kid, I worshipped Martin Luther King Jr. A couple of summers before, working as the cashier in my uncle’s pants store on Fulton Street, I sold pen-and-ink drawings of Dr. King I’d made, amateurish copies of a Time Magazine cover done by Ben Shahn, to some of our customers. (See “The Boy Who Could Draw Dr. King”).
As I write in that piece, King’s assassination devastated me:
I was depressed and too scared to go to school for the next week. There were riots. For some reason I wrote a letter expressing my sorrow and fear and sent it to Percy Sutton, the Manhattan borough president and the top black official in the city. His chief of staff called my mother while I was out and told her I’d written a beautiful letter. All I can remember about it is that I ended by quoting a corny speech from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” (I’d read it in Mrs. Sanjour’s ninth grade English class at Meyer Levin Junior High) that went:
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world “This was a man!”
This morning I read the rave review of the new Lincoln Center production of one of my favorite musicals, “South Pacific.” The summer before King’s assassination, on July 4, my parents took me and my brothers, who were 12 and 6, to a holiday matinee of Lincoln Center’s last production of “South Pacific.”
We sat in the third row center of the New York State Theatre’s orchestra, close enough that I could see that the star, Florence Henderson as Nellie Forbush, had cellulite on the back of her thighs. For me, every song in that show is a classic, but I mostly remember Henderson’s real shampoo in “Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair,” Giorgio Tozzi’s operatic “Some Enchanted Evening” and David Doyle’s comic turn as Luther Billis, cavorting in drag in grass skirt with coconut breasts.
But forty years after April 4, 1968, most of all I can recall the young actor playing Lt. Cable’s rendition of what at 16 I thought of as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s corniest song:
You've got to be taught to hate and fear
You've got to be taught from year to year
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught. . .
You've got to be taught before it's too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You've got to be carefully taught
When I read the hateful posts on Arizona conservative political blogs like Seeing Red AZ and Sonoran Alliance, demonizing immigrants, Hispanics, Muslims, gays, lesbians and other people the Cactus State's mean-spirited Republican activists see as less than human, Rodgers and Hammerstein's song seems more relevant than corny.
To his credit, Rep. Jeff Flake has not indulged in this kind of bigotry. But for forty years -- ever since Martin Luther King was killed on April 4, 1968, conservatives and their doctrines have dominated the United States. Here's today's E. J. Dionne column from the Washington Post:
From the death of John F. Kennedy in November 1963 until the congressional elections of November 1966, liberals were triumphant, and what they did changed the world. Civil rights and voting rights, Medicare and Medicaid, clean air and clean water legislation, Head Start, the Job Corps and federal aid to schools had their roots in the liberal wave that began to ebb when Lyndon Johnson's Democrats suffered broad losses in the 1966 voting. The decline that 1966 signaled was sealed after April 4, 1968.
Liberals themselves share blame for the waning of their movement. Just because right-wing politicians used "law and order" as a code for race did not mean that concern about crime was illegitimate. On the contrary, the country was in the opening stages of a serious crime wave and had good reason to worry about rising violence.
Liberalism itself was cracking up in 1968. Liberals had turned on each other over Johnson's Vietnam policy. The old civil rights coalition splintered as advocates of racial integration warred with defenders of Black Power, a slogan voiced in 1966 by a young activist named Stokely Carmichael.
Martin Luther King left this earth at a moment of gloom, at least about the short term. "I feel this summer will not only be as bad but worse than last time," he said, four days before his death, in a sermon at Washington's National Cathedral. He was referring to the urban riots of the previous summer. And then came the days of chaos that followed his assassination.
"For those who had dreamed the dreams of the New Frontier, and shared the hopes of a Great Society, this was perhaps the darkest moment of the entire decade," wrote Godfrey Hodgson, a British journalist who stands as one of the wisest chroniclers of the 1960s.
Forty years later, is it possible to recapture the hope and energy of the days and years before that April 4? Has liberalism spent enough time in purgatory for the country to revisit how much was accomplished in its name and to acknowledge that the nation is better off for what the liberals did?
In "The Liberal Hour," an important new history of the '60s that will be published in July, Colby College scholars G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert S. Weisbrot note that for all its deficiencies, the period of liberal sway "demonstrated what democratic politics can produce when public consensus crescendos, when coherent majorities prevail, and when skilled leaders provide direction, inspiration, and relentless energy."
For decades before the 1960s, conservatism was held in contempt by large swaths of the intellectual and political class. It was one of the great achievements of William F. Buckley Jr., whose death we mourned a few weeks ago [and whose memorial service was this morning at St. Patrick's Cathedral], to insist that respect be paid to the great tradition whose cause he championed.
Now is the moment to put an end to our contempt for liberalism. There was business left unfinished on that fateful day in 1968, and it is time to take it up again.
Amen.
Had he lived, Martin Luther King Jr. might have become the most powerful, dynamic leader in the U.S. since he was not only leading the movement for civil rights but had also moved to take leadership of the struggles of poor people and workers (he was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers) and of the struggle against a war in Vietnam that was every bit as misguided and seemingly endless as our current fiasco in Iraq.
It's time for a change.
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