I Remember Meeting Martin Luther King

I remember meeting Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King when I was quite young. King came to a local college that started with a K (Kiota College?) near my village, Mac Dougall, New York, which was really a wide spot in the road.

What I noticed about Martin Luther King was that he was very nervous. I don’t think I made him particularly nervous as I shook his hand. However, my mother, who was behind me, made him more nervous, and I understood why. Mom was always nervous when meeting new people, particularly famous people. King was sweating and apprehensive. I realize now that he knew he was going to be assassinated. He scanned the faces of people in line, waiting to shake his hand. I wanted to explain to him that Mom was always nervous, and his fame made her more so.

Mom’s relationship to African-Americans was complicated, but I didn’t realize that until later. She was born in the South, but not the Deep South. She was born in Norfolk, Virginia near Hampton Roads, Virginia, where her father was a naval architect. She lived in a big white house and the family had at least one black maid, Nancy.

Mom’s mother, Minerva Benjamin, died when Mom was only nine years old. The family’s maid and a series of apparently wicked step-mothers raised and neglected her. She told us that she went from being a cosseted child to having nits in her hair.

All I know about Nancy is that she used to threaten my Mom by saying in a high-pitched voice, “I’m gonna frail you good, girl!”

The threat apparently referred to a deferred beating. I doubt that Nancy actually beat the white girl who was part of her work load for the exorbitant salary of $4.00 a week. I hope I have the pay wrong, but that’s what Mom told me she was paid.

One bright spot in her young life was that Mom and her two older brothers were good singers and often sang in harmony at black churches in the South. I assume that was because they went to church with Nancy and her family when Mom’s two brothers, Dicky Dave and Philly Ben, weren’t attending the Virginia Military Institute (VMI).

We thought Mom wasn’t racist, since she sang in black churches and took us to meet Martin Luther King, but she had some startling reactions to my middle sister’s decision to date a young black man in college or law school. Mom flipped out. Not for any good reason, but just because he was black. We were astonished.

All I can remember about my sister’s boyfriend was that Milton Friedman was his intellectual and academic mentor. I also remember how he told my sister about the day in his early childhood when he realized he was black and had an inkling of what that might mean in a racist society.

Then there was the summer that that same sister wanted to work for civil rights in Mississippi. It was some time after June 21-22, 1964, when James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) were murdered by the White Knights of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan, the Neshoba County, Mississippi Sheriff’s Department, and a cast of other racist, evil white people in the area. Chaney, a black man, and Goodman and Schwerner, both white men from New York City, were shot at close range and their bodies ended up encased in an earthen dam. It took decades to solve the case, and other murdered bodies were found during the investigation.

Mom flipped out again because it was so dangerous to work for civil rights in Mississippi. I don’t think my sister went to Mississippi, but I’m not sure.

I’ll never forget that Republican Ronald Reagan began his presidential bid, his only successful presidential bid, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where those three young men and others lost their lives working for civil rights, registering black people to vote. What was Reagan trying to say to his Republican base in his speech about “states’ rights”?

When Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, why did he turn to his aides and say, “There goes the South for a generation”? Why did all the Southern Democrats, known as Dixiecrats, become Republicans? They’re not the Republicans that Abraham Lincoln was. They’re the Republicans that Ronald Reagan was.

I see the struggle for civil rights playing out still in the arguments over whether police officers have the right to kill black men and get off scot free for doing so. My personal opinion is that the grand jury that refused to indict the Staten Island police officers who put an illegal chokehold on Eric Garner and sat on him en masse until he died, basically signed the death warrants of two innocent New York City cops who were family men and did not deserve to die when they were shot down by some whacko in Brooklyn. Given the injustice of the grand jury refusing to indict the Staten Island cops, an aggrieved whacko with a desire for vengeance was bound to come out of the woodwork and shoot a cop or two. The Brooklyn shootings of New York City police officers Rafael Ramos, 40, who had been with the NYPD two years, and Wenjian Liu, 32, who had been with the NYPD seven years, were wrong and yet inevitable.

The video a citizen took of exactly what happened to Eric Garner proves that the grand jury was wrong when they failed to indict the Staten Island police. Anyone who thinks differently and backs the cops in this case has got to be a racist, in my humble opinion. I don’t know about Michael Brown. There’s no video of the entire incident that I’m aware of. How can we be sure of exactly what went down? I do know the Ferguson, Missouri police were incredibly insensitive and racist to leave Michael Brown’s body lying in the street for at least four hours. I do know that the firepower the Ferguson police came back with to deal with the crowds of protestors was unwise and ill-conceived.

We still have a race problem, and defending out-of-control police officers and racist grand juries no matter how unjust they are isn’t going to solve it. It’s only going to fan the flames.