The Time I Saw Martin Luther King

I don't know what it is about old white men (I am one), but I'll bet they look at the picture of Andy, Barney, Opie, and Aunt Bea and recall that time as the "good old days". Well, I guess, I agree to part of that. I still watch the reruns - they are on TV everyday.  The Andy Griffith Show began in 1960 and reflected life in Mayberry, North Carolina, a fictional town with very nice white folks.

I was thirteen years old in 1960 and remember watching Andy and loving it. I never thought too much about there never (in the beginning) seeing any black characters. I guess they didn't have any black characters (or black actors) in the 1960s. Oh wait, they did have black actors. My mistake. 

I grew up in the western suburbs of Denver in the 1950s. I remember watching another Andy. He was the chubby black man with the cigar in the Amos 'N' Andy TV program. The show took place in Harlem and had the funniest characters and lines. I howled with delight when I watched these guys. I never thought of the show as black stereo-typing. There were no other black characters on TV back in the 1950s that I remember. I would see a black performer on the Ed Sullivan Show or maybe in a movie, but they were few.

There were no black people in my suburb or in my grade school, junior high, or high school.  Blacks were not allowed to live in Jefferson County, Colorado back then. It was the law. Subdivisions had restrictive covenants that disallowed non-whites to live in specific areas. There weren't any Mexicans either - well, one. A boy names Lupe was in my high school. Years later when I was a young gay adult lawyer in Denver, my Realtor told me and my partner that we could not buy a house in the Hilltop area because of restrictive covenants which disallowed non-married single people to buy houses together. This was in the early 1980s. I did not test it. It made me mad as hell. I had always been privileged. Now I was a victim of bias.

During the late fifties I watched the evening news on TV.  Douglas Edwards at CBS was my main source for news. Walter Cronkite replaced Edwards in 1962. The news wasn't any better then than it is now. In fact the news back then really rattled my forming brain as I was disturbed when I saw grainy black and white film of racial violence. Later videotape replaced the film. The violence was delivered to TV more quickly, but it was the same. It was always white government or white protesters assaulting black people or black people marching with signs. Or little black girls getting murdered in Sunday School. That kind of violence.

Two years later in Selma, Alabama this happened. I was in high school and could not imagine cops in Denver beating anybody up with  a baton for marching for Civil Rights. The march was peaceful. It was the government out of control.  America saw this on the nightly news.

Martin Luther King, Jr. became the leading Civil Rights figure of the twentieth century. He gave a voice and a presence that no other person has achieved - before or since. I got a chance to see him in person in Chicago in 1967 at the National Conference on New Politics. I wrote an entire blog about that event CLICK HERE.

On Monday night Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the speaker at a large old auditorium far away from the Palmer House Hotel where the conference was held. We had heard rumors all day long about some serious threats having been made against Dr. King.  It was feared Stokely Carmichael would disrupt the speech.  Carmichael was the leader of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and was also a part of the NCNP, but he was not supposed to be a part of King's speech.  My buddy and I arrived very early so we could sit up close to the stage. I think we were in the first or second row. I will never forget that night.  The Internet is a repository of all kinds of information.  I found that speech which you can listen to if you CLICK HERE.

The speech lasted about forty minutes. Dr. King referred to his "I Have a Dream" speech.  He spoke of racism, militarism, poverty, the unending War in Viet Nam. The speech I heard was not memorable in itself except that I got to see and hear him and watch up close at the look in his eyes when all hell broke loose at the back of the auditorium. He had been looking around the room as if he was expecting trouble.  About thirty minutes or so into the speech there was a clamor at the rear of the auditorium. I said the hall was old. It had panic doors with glass windows with wire to protect against breakage. The doors had those metal push bars to permit quit exit.  The doors were thrust open and people at the rear made a lot of noise. I looked back but could not see what was going on. I could tell some people tried to force their way inside. But they were forced back and not allowed to enter. That was the end of it.  Dr. King continued with his speech unphased except that he looked grateful that nothing more serious happened.  Of course, we all now what happened a year later.

And after King's death, President Lyndon Johnson got the Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act along with other legislation that established a lot of entitlement programs designed to help the all persons. In 2013 the Supreme Court struck down the coverage formula in the Civil Rights Act as unconstitutional, reasoning that it was no longer responsive to current conditions which made much of the act unenforceable.

During the following fifty years (yes fifty plus years) various politicians and groups have been doing their best to undo what King inspired and what Johnson achieved.