Personal Memories of 43 Years Ago

I remember the evening of April 4, 1968, like it was yesterday. I was in my bedroom doing my homework when I heard my mother scream "Oh My Lord No"! We ran to the living room and watched TV in horror.

I remember thinking, "not again", referring to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. We watched the replay of Dr. Martin Luther King's "I've Been to the Mountain Top Speech". We watched as a young minister we knew personally shook Dr. King's hand after he finished the speech.

I remember my youngest sibling proclaiming "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I'm free at last" in front of the television.

I didn't want to go to school the next day but my parents made me. I was one of 12 African American students in a student body of about 500. I remember walking into the predominately white high school on April 5, 1968, to find the students and most of the faculty members celebrating the death of Dr. King with a Pep Rally complete with hundreds of Confederate Flags waving and the band playing Dixie. Some of my classmate's fathers  were members the Alabama National Guard bragged their fathers were going to Memphis to kill some N's. I remember being glad when the school day was finally over.
I will be glad when this day is over because it still feels like yesterday.

Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. is fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers' strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival at a Memphis hospital. He was 39 years old.
In the months before his assassination, Martin Luther King became increasingly concerned with the problem of economic inequality in America. He organized a Poor People's Campaign to focus on the issue, including an interracial poor people's march on Washington, and in March 1968 traveled to Memphis in support of poorly treated African-American sanitation workers. On March 28, a workers' protest march led by King ended in violence and the death of an African-American teenager. King left the city but vowed to return in early April to lead another demonstration.

On April 3, back in Memphis, King gave his last sermon, saying, "We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop...And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."

One day after speaking those words, Dr. King was shot and killed by a sniper. As word of the assassination spread, riots broke out in cities all across the United States and National Guard troops were deployed in Memphis and Washington, D.C. On April 9, King was laid to rest in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets to pay tribute to King's casket as it passed by in a wooden farm cart drawn by two mules.

On the 43th anniversary of that terrible and tragic day in our history, let's not forget why Dr. King was in Memphis in the first place. He was there fighting for economic justice for trash collectors in the city of Memphis. Fighting a battle for people who were downtrodden, overlooked and spit on by a city, and the white power structure that ran it.