Martin Luther King Day 2004

Posted on January 19, 2004 in Festivals Neighborhood

Around 2 am, I lay in bed, reading a book about Basque history. I stopped when I finished the chapter about Ignatius Loyola and listened. A slow rain fell. A drop at a time. I took up a pen and pad, wrote my two page summation of the day. When I finished, I listened again. The rain came harder. One loud drop was followed by a quieter second drop now. I turned over and went to sleep.

Two cracks woke me. I started and sat up straight. A black and white image of a cluster of African American men wearing business suits pointing from a balcony towards the air wrapped itself around Memory’s eyes. Then: My family gathering in the living room watching the reports and then, over the next few days, the news of riots in the big cities of the East and the South. Now: “Happy Martin Luther King Day!” cried a gaggle of white boys in t-shirts and jeans from the street. How inappropriate! Was that firecracker meant to commemorate James Earl Ray? I thought for a second. No. It was a school holiday. The kids celebrated a day off from regimentation.

Somewhere a crowd of African Americans who’d taken a vacation day off from work walked slowly down a broad avenue singing We shall overcome. Here on a hilltop in Orange County, school children danced in the name of freedom from their teachers and chanted the name of Dr. Martin Luther King as their savior. In most other places, European, Asian, Latino, Native, and some African Americans who didn’t get the day off kept the fool-sacred economy going. “Dr. King?” they might have said if you’d asked them about it. “He was just some fellow. He hadn’t even been elected president.”