By BOB HERBERT
"I am going to keep on marching for justice, equality, peace and reconciliation of the human family until I am called home."
— Coretta Scott King
I remember that April evening so clearly. My father was coming out of one of his upholstery shops in suburban New Jersey when I walked up. I'd just heard the news on the radio and was anxious to tell him.
"Martin Luther King got shot," I said.
An odd look crossed my old man's face, like he'd been punched unexpectedly and was trying not to show that it had hurt. "Where?" he asked.
It was not a geography question. "In the head," I said.
My father turned around and walked back into the store.
Dr. King's message of peaceful change notwithstanding, there is nothing more American than brutal violence. The country was built on it, revels in it and shows every evidence of clinging to it with the crazed, destructive strength of an obsessive lover.
The cities of Newark and Detroit had gone up in smoke less than a year before the rifle shot from James Earl Ray took out Dr. King. Riots broke out in more than 100 cities on the night that Dr. King died. Buildings went up in flames. Motorists were pulled from vehicles and beaten. Rioters were slain by the police and soldiers of the National Guard.
Two months later Bobby Kennedy, who had called for calm on the night of Dr. King's death, was murdered in Los Angeles. Through all of this, the mindless orgy of violence in Vietnam continued without respite.
Dr. King understood with unusual clarity the price to be paid for the terrible belief that every problem could be settled by a bullet or a bomb. He warned his followers and the nation as a whole to avoid the "quicksand" of violence and hatred. He urged blacks to remain nonviolent in the face of horrendous injustices, and he spoke out boldly against the war in Vietnam.
He might as well have been whispering into a hurricane.
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Bob Herbert Violence MLK Coretta Scott King Civil Rights Herbert
