April 5, 2018--My Martin Luther King Story

Fifty yeas ago last night I was a junior faculty member at Queens College in New York City and one of my classes scheduled for that evening was an interdisciplinary seminar in literature and the arts for a carefully selected group of community leaders, mainly adults from the black ghetto of Jamaica, Queens. This meant that all 25 of the students in the class were African American.

We were well into a discussion about Jonathan Swift when a late-arriving student, Alan Jenkins, burst into the classroom.

Struggling to catch his breath, he finally gasped, "He's been shot," as if we knew who the "he" was. Sensing this, he added, "Martin. Martin Luther King. In Memphis."

"Is he . . . ?"

"I don't know. I was driving here and on the radio heard the report about the shooting. But not about his condition."

By then many of the students were quietly sobbing.  From their experience they knew the news would turn out to be devastating. It would not be that he was "just" shot. They had lived too long with violence in their lives to not immediately sense the truth.

A number of the students held hands and, kneeling, prayed. Others, clinging to each other, softly began to sing, including psalms and the civil rights anthem, "We Shall Overcome."

Grieving, supporting myself on the lectern, feeling estranged, denying what was occurring, I tried to convince myself that if I behaved "normally," got us back to Swift, reality itself would revert to where it had been only minutes before when we had talked together, dispassionately, about Gulliver.  

Then slowly it occurred to me I was the only white person in the room. I am not sure from where that feeling originated. It was not quite from feeling danger, but something close to that. Some primal recidivism close to tribalism, some self-protective reflex wired in my DNA. 

"Do you think you might drive me home?" Whispering was the most academically promising of my students, Nellie McKay.

By then Alan had come back from listening to the radio in his car. He trembled as he told us that it was over. King was dead. Shot down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The news, he said, was now turning to reports from inner cities across the country. Dozens were already in flames, stores and houses were set on fire by rampaging street gangs crazed with rage and fear.

"I'm afraid," Nellie said, "And about you . . . I don't think it's safe for you . . . to be driving home alone . . . the only . . . person in the area."

She meant white person. She asked me to drive her home not so much because of her fear but because she was concerned about me. White people out and about, well after dark, on the evening Martin Luther King was assassinated, would, she felt, not be safe. Being in the car with me would give me a margin of safety. She knew from inner-city uprisings during the previous few years that some white car and truck drivers had been ripped from their vehicles, beaten and even killed, as the riots spiraled out of control.

Opting to think less about myself I tried to concentrate on how I might provide safety for her--she commuted to the college by local buses. 

By then all the other students in ones and twos had departed. Nellie and I were the only ones remaining and we walked to the parking lot, clinging to each other.

In my car, a conspicuously yellow Opal, we headed south, needing to drive through segregated Jamaica, out toward where she lived in an integrated neighborhood near the bay.

Buildings were on fire all along the way. As I slowed to stop for a red light Nellie told me to ignore it, to keep moving, as it would be unsafe if we stopped.

To distract me from the news crackling on the radio she told me about her dreams--for her teenage son, it meat helping him get though his adolescence intact. By that she meant alive, out of the clutches and demands of violent street gangs. He was very bright, she said, but was already showing signs of succumbing to the allure of street life.

"I'm thinking of sending him to live with my mother, in Mississippi. Believe it or not, it's safer there. Even with Jim Crow."

"And what about you? You're a terrific student. Especially of literature. Are you thinking . . . ? We heard gunshots and saw a car a block ahead of us burst into flames and explode when the fire reached the gas tank.

"Turn that way," Nellie instructed me. "Quickly. Down there," she pointed to a one-way street where we would have to drive into oncoming traffic. "I know it's a one-way against us but it takes us to what I'm sure will be a safer route."

I followed her directions and at the end of one block we came to a cross street of abandoned houses and undeveloped lots where there were no signs of life or disorder. I began to breath more normally. 

"I am thinking about graduate school," Nellie said, resuming her story as if nothing unusual was happening, "Perhaps even working on a PhD. I know I'm a little old for that, but it's my dream. To be like you. A college professor." She smiled.

"We're getting close," she continued. "You are welcome to stay with me. But I know you live in Brooklyn and are married. Your wife will be worried about you."

I almost told her our marriage was on the rocks and that I would prefer to stay with her. But those emotions, if we survived, were perhaps for another day. 

At her house I got out to open her car door and, on the sidewalk, sobbing, we embraced for what felt like not enough time. As if we would not see each other again. That we were saying goodbye forever.

"We'll be all right," she said. "America will recover and be all right. You will be all right. And so will I."

With that she ran to the steps that led to her house and disappeared behind her aluminum front door.

I got home safely and the following week classes resumed. We all knew we were living in a changed America. Two months later Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Swift and Jane Austen lost some of their importance.

Nellie's son did well, eventually becoming a social worker, and after Queens College, Nellie pursued her dream. She was admitted to graduate school at Harvard where she eventually earned her doctorate. After Harvard, Nellie began a distinguished career as a professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin.

I reencountered her when she approached the Ford Foundation, seeking a grant to support her work. I was happy to be able to assist. 

Nellie McKay, at only 76, died in 2006.

November 21, 2017--Civil Wrongs and Rights

Though I know at least half the books about the Kennedys are hagiographies, about Camelot and all that, and half of the other half are about their dark side--their involvement with the Mafia, Cuba, and the women (Marilyn and dozens of others)--still when another Kennedy book comes along before I come up for air I'm halfway through it and the tears are already flowing about what was (Jack's presidency) and what might have been (Bobby and Teddy's thwarted White House aspirations).

So, I'm more than halfway through Chris Matthews's Bobby softball biography, Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit. It's no more than halfway decent but, for the Kennedy junkie that I am, that's enough. More stitched together and racing along in jump cuts it lacks the flow and insight of his book about Kennedy and Nixon, Kennedy & Nixon, for me still the best explication of Nixon's turbulent inner world as exposed by his complicated feelings about the Kennedys, especially Jack.

This son of a grocer from dusty Yorba Linda, California, Nixon was no Kennedy. And, sadly, he was daily aware of that more than anyone.

The good Bobby, the one that emerged later in life a year or two after his brother was assassinated, devoted his last years to calling for equal treatment of all Americans, especially the forgotten ones in impoverished Appalachia, sharecroppers' hardscrabble farms in the Black Belt of the Mississippi Delta, the migrant worker camps in the steaming valleys of California, and the churning inner cities.

The tears flowed for me for the first time when Matthews wrote about the integration of the University of Alabama in June, 1963. It was Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General who mobilized the forces to implement the court order to allow two black students to register. The iconic scene etched in most American's memories was of the diminutive Alabama governor George Wallace, surrounded by state troopers, standing in the doorway to thwart their enrollment.

In the close background the millions who watched this confrontation on live TV, could see the fury, the hatred on the faces of local Alabamans who gathered to bring the threat of violence to the situation.

Also watching this on television were the Kennedy brothers. 

Jack soon had enough and told Bobby and his staff to arrange for a primetime half hour with the three networks for later that evening. He intended to make a speech about what he was witnessing and feeling.

That night, to the nation, he said--

I hope that every American, regardless of where he lives, will stop and examine his conscience about this and other related incidents. . . . 

This nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened. . . . 

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

Five months later Jack was shot dead in Dallas and almost exactly five years after that Bobby was gunned down in Los Angeles on the night he won the California primary, which likely would have led to his nomination to face Nixon for the presidency, as his brother had in 1960.

With this era in mind and especially thinking about the Trump presidency and racial strife, which continues even after eight years of Barak Obama's presidency, Rona suggested we see the new movie a friend, Jonathan Sanger, produced, Marshall, about a case that Thurgood Marshall tried in 1940 some years before he became the first Negro to be appointed to the Supreme Court.

It is a very good movie which I urge you to see before it disappears into Netflix.

It is about an actual trial during which Marshall takes the lead in defending a black man accused of raping a white woman. On the surface, sadly familiar territory, but in this film, based on an actual case, the events and trial are not set in Mississippi or Alabama (as, for example, is To Kill A Mockingbird) but in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

The script is tight, the acting and direction generally flawless, the story upsetting and riveting, but, stepping back for a moment, most remarkable and important is to be reminded that this trial took place in the Northeast. 

For those of us who like to think of ourselves as a bit superior to those in the middle of the country, it is good to be reminded that less than an hour from New York City, not so many years ago, things were not so different when it came to what used to be called "race relations."

Both the Matthews' book and Marshall are vivid reminders of that.

September 1, 2016--Political Poetry

Reading Larry Tye's rather good new biography of Robert Kennedy, Robert Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon, I realized that one critical thing missing from the current contest for the presidency is poetry.

This year's campaign is being conducted exclusively in prose.

As Mario Cuomo said, "You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose." He of the 1984 convention speech, "City On the Hill," knew what he was taking about.

The closest thing to poetry we have had was Donald Trump's spritz-rapping during the Republican primaries. In a burst of hyperbole I may have compared him to Lenny Bruce.

Forgive me Lenny on the 50th anniversary of your OD death.

Hillary is not about poetry--she is already governing--and should be commended for no longer using black dialect when addressing African-American audiences nor getting someone with the talent of Ted Sorenson to write speeches for her full of quotes from Albert Camus or Aeschylus.

Tye writes that after the assassination of Bobby's brother, Jack, he sank into a nearly yearlong depression, roused from it largely by reading Greek literature and existentialist or absurdist authors such as Camus.

From this he learned about the meaning that can only come from tragic suffering and the dangers lurking within if we let hubris take us over.

God knows what Trump reads--just Tweets most likely--or Hillary for that matter. One suspects policy papers.

But Bobby Kennedy was comfortable with poetry--he carried with him biblical and literary quotes that he found inspiring and frequently threaded them into his public utterances. Very much including during his remarkable four-day visit to South Africa in 1966, fully 28 years before the end of apartheid.

Speaking to a mixed-race gathering of students at the University of Cape Town, he began--

I came here because of my deep interest [in] and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier . . . a land which once imported slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America.

It was not unusual for him to begin speeches this way--leading listeners in one direction and then shifting perspective.

He continued, now in more ode-like cadences--

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation. 

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance . . . . 

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly. It is this new idealism which is also, I believe, the common heritage of a generation which has learned that while efficiency can lead to the camps at Auschwitz, or the streets of Budapest, only the ideals of humanity and love can climb the hills of the Acropolis.

In Soweto