I was not quite eight years old when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in April of 1968, and consequently, my memories of the event are hazy at best.
There were vague rumblings of uncertainty expressed by my parents and their peers as rioting broke out in cities across the United States, to be interpreted primarily through the images and testimony provided by network news reporters on the black and white television set in the living room.
It was obvious that something important was happening, but even if I had been old enough to grasp what it was, I’m unlikely to have been offered a clear explanation — owing not so much to malicious intent as simple ignorance.
Being charitable, I suppose it isn’t easy for parents to admit to what they don’t know.
From what I can remember, my upbringing in Georgetown was not tainted by overt racism. If anything, rather along the lines of the “birds and bees” chat that I’m still waiting to receive from one of my parents, both of whom are dead, there was no discussion of the topic of race at all, up or down, for or against.
Silence reigned.
My sporting fanatic father never uttered foolishness along the lines of the famed Al Campanis remarks in 1987, and he seemed to admire anyone who excelled in basketball or baseball, irrespective of race. But had he ever competed against black athletes, either while living here in Southern Indiana or while serving in the United States Marine Corps?
I never thought to ask him.
In the 1960’s, my dad worked for a dairy, delivering milk to grocery stores throughout Louisville, so at least he had some contact with the urban world at large. Like many country boys, he did not appreciate big, claustrophobic cities filled with people, cars and noise, although he never specified any particular source for his discontent.
My mother was teaching school, first at Georgetown High School, then later at Floyd Central; she’d attended college at the University of Kentucky, fifteen or more years before Adolph Rupp’s basketball program finally was integrated. I cannot recall her stating an opinion on the subject of race when I was young.
Of course, it should suffice to say that outside of New Albany, Floyd County had yet to be integrated when I was growing up.
My only point in citing these remembrances is to note that I was raised in a place, and in an atmosphere, where diversity meant buying whichever of the three major cola brands happened to be on sale during the weekly trip to the supermarket.
In my own home, the notion of learning about other races and creeds attracted neither negative nor positive energy. It generated no comment at all, as though entirely irrelevant to our daily existence.
Perhaps it wasn’t, and as was the case with a complete absence of religious instruction during my childhood—something I’m extremely thankful to have been spared—perhaps ultimately it is less damaging to possess a relatively clean conceptual slate than to be encumbered with indefensible prejudices and petty hatreds, growing into adulthood while never understanding why you feel a certain way, then having to pull those weeds out by their roots.
Twenty years ago I concluded almost a year’s sporadic efforts by reading the final volume (of three, totaling 3,000 pages in all) of Shelby Foote’s acclaimed The Civil War: A Narrative, and I can remember lingering over the postscript, which describes the unofficial suspension of Reconstruction, circa 1877, and the deferment of any effort to make sense of the war’s raison d’être until Dr. King’s era, almost a century later.
In 2005 I wandered into a souvenir shop in Savannah, Georgia, and saw racks filled with items displaying the Confederate battle flag. It was disgusting. State’s rights? No, clearly state’s wrongs. History is so very unfashionable that nowadays I might see the same flags in Michigan or Massachusetts.
For a timely reminder of what the War of Southern Aggression really meant, read this essay by James M. McPherson from 1989.
The catalyst that turned what some called the Palmetto insane asylum into the Confederate States of America was the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. This “Black Republican” had pronounced slavery “a moral wrong and injustice,” and had called upon Americans to restrict its further expansion as a first step toward its “ultimate extinction” sometime in the twentieth century. To escape this fate, the South declared its independence and fired on American soldiers at Fort Sumter in the Charleston harbor, thereby provoking a war that cost more American lives, soldier and civilian, than all of the country’s other wars combined.
I’m now drawing social security, which is a reminder, however unwelcome, of my personal chronology. My chronology is a further reminder that 58 years have passed since Dr. King’s assassination, and I still have a great many more questions about Americanism than answers.
One will suffice: How much of what we accept as true actually is real?
My hope is that in a time when so many white Americans have reassured themselves by imagining the sun rising gloriously from the west, the important questions are still being asked.
