I was fortunate to live through the era shared by Dr. King and other giants of human rights. I won't pretend to have had any great insight into their work as a child, no great moment of youthful clarity when I realized what a difference they were making.
We moved a lot when I was young, living all across the country before settling in Virginia when I was nine. I went to Catholic schools until my junior year in high school, and the only African-Americans I knew were kids I met in those schools. Largely because of my parents and the teachers I had, those kids did not seem all that different to me. They were just kids.
I was ignorant of what their lives must have been like. I didn't even hear the N-word until I got to high school. My parents were very devout Catholics and, if anyone in my family had uttered such a word in front of them, there would have been hell to pay.
My family moved to Virginia a year before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. When we moved here, there were still separate drinking fountains for "whites" and "coloreds" at a department store we frequented. That landmark legislation got to President Lyndon Johnson's desk with the votes of just seven Democratic Congressmen and one Democratic Senator from the southern states. Not one Republican from a southern state voted for it.
My parents and my teachers had, by example more than words, instilled in me that we were all equal, created with the same possibilities, opportunities, and rights to achieve. That my country didn't feel the same way was a reality that took another year or two to comprehend. When one of my brothers wanted to marry a black woman and couldn't do it in Virginia because it was illegal, I began to realize life was a lot more complicated than the childhood I was enjoying.
The biggest turning point, for me and for America, was 1968. That year started with the Tet offensive in Vietnam and continued with political unrest, the assassinations of Dr. King...
Walter Cronkite reports the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King on the CBS Evening News.
... and Robert Kennedy, turmoil at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and finally ended in December with the first manned Apollo mission orbiting the moon. It was quite a year.
I'd gotten involved with the Eugene McCarthy campaign to unseat President Johnson because Johnson continued ensnaring us deeper in the Vietnam War, where a second brother of mine was serving in the Air Force. At 14, I might have been the youngest person in the Alexandria, Virginia, campaign office, but I was thrilled. I was involved. I felt like I might make a difference.
The night Dr. King died and the riots erupted, I began wondering what was happening to my country. Another brother of mine was in the Army, and he spent the next week or so guarding the streets of Washington, DC, from rioters and looters. (Ironically, he met his future wife while on duty there.) Two months later, Robert Kennedy was killed, and it seemed all might be lost.
Except it wasn't. Movements are always more than one person, no matter how heroic that one person may be. The battle King fought was righteous enough and its supporters dedicated enough to see through the pain and sorrow and view a better tomorrow.
Yet the struggle goes on. Republicans across the country are trying to enact new restrictive voter ID laws that target the same people who fought Jim Crow voting laws just a few decades earlier. Our first African-American president is vilified for his skin color; just this morning, a reporter told of a conversation with a South Carolina voter who said, without shame or embarrassment, "Oh, I couldn't vote for that black guy." At least the voter didn't use the N-word. Maybe that's progress.
I said earlier that Dr. King had liberated us all. His struggle not only brought civil rights to African-Americans, but also broke the chains of prejudice that held back white America for centuries -- if only we would let it.
In the 1980s, I had the distinct honor of photographing Coretta Scott King, Dr. King's widow, at his grave site in Atlanta. I still remember the serene grace in the way she carried herself. I never had the opportunity to meet Dr. King or hear him speak in person, but photographing Mrs. King was my own humble way to pay my respects. I've tried to live my life as a decent person to further honor his life.
On this day to honor and celebrate the life of Dr. King, perhaps his greatest legacy can be found in the crowds that visit his memorial on the National Mall in Washington.
When I visited the memorial the day before its scheduled dedication, I found hundreds of people of many colors, creeds, and nationalities. Many were elderly veterans of the struggle Dr. King epitomized, paying tribute to the man who had inspired and led them. There were large, extended families, with grandparents telling the smallest children what Dr. King had done to merit such a wonderful honor. And there were a lot of white people, too, there in the knowledge that what frees some of us, frees us all.
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