Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the mountaintop speech and an "inescapable web of mutuality.”

You're surely aware that Wednesday, April 4, marks 50 years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Although I wasn't yet 8 years of age, I remember it well. I especially remember the palpable sense of anxiety in Georgetown when urban rioting greeted the news of King's death.

We have not, in the past half century, had a year freighted with such emotional and historical heft, in part because we have not seen the convergence of so many defining issues—war, civil rights, populism, political realignment—in so short a timespan. Yet the singularity of 1968 does not diminish its pertinence to our present turmoil. This week, two events in particular are worth considering in tandem: one a cataclysm, the other a tragically predictive attempt to understand how such cataclysms occur.

King had gone to Memphis in support of a strike by sanitation workers. His last speech on April 3, 1968, came to be known as the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. In it, King made reference to a brush with death ten years earlier, when he'd been stabbed by a mentally ill woman named Izola Curry. She stabbed him with a letter opener, with the blade barely missing the aorta.

It came out in the New York Times the next morning, that if I had sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after the operation, after my chest had been opened, and the blade had been taken out, to move around in the wheel chair in the hospital. They allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and from all over the states, and the world, kind letters came in. I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. I had received one from the President and the Vice-President. I've forgotten what those telegrams said. I'd received a visit and a letter from the Governor of New York, but I've forgotten what the letter said. But there was another letter that came from a little girl, a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School. And I looked at that letter, and I'll never forget it. It said simply, "Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School." She said, "While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I'm simply writing you to say that I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze."

And I want to say tonight, I want to say that I am happy that I didn't sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream. And taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been down in Selma, Alabama, been in Memphis to see the community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I'm so happy that I didn't sneeze.

For fifty years, scholars and other interested parties have been trying to locate the "sneeze" letter to which King referred. Just last week, the Wall Street Journal claimed to have unraveled the story; it seems he got the quote correct, but misattributed it to a school girl rather than the letter's real author, an adult civil rights activist who died only three years after King.

You can follow the link to the story, which was suggested to me by an observant friend. It's worth considering when (or if) an otherwise harmless misstatement merits greater scrutiny. While it doesn't sound to me as if the WSJ is suggesting there is a major historical record in need of correction, perhaps the central point is that King didn't survive to correct his own memory lapse.

Found: The Long-Lost Link to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last Speech, by Cameron McWhirter

The night before his assassination 50 years ago, he built a theme of his “mountaintop” speech around a fan’s letter—which has never surfaced until now

... Several historians asked by the Journal to review Ms. Kepler’s 1958 letter said that they believe it is the one to which Dr. King refers in his 1968 speech. David J. Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Dr. King, said that he is “quite convinced” that Ms. Kepler’s letter is the one. “He remembers the language exactly but just got the I.D. wrong,” he said. Mr. Bass, the Westchester historian, agrees: “He basically took that great line and kind of spiced it up.” Others said that it wasn’t the only time that Dr. King had tapped material from memory and misattributed its source.

Lennon's murder: Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

(Originally published here in 2005, and repeated)

On the morning of December 9, 1980, I learned that John Lennon had been shot to death the previous night. Groggy and entirely unaware, I shuffled into the kitchen and looked down at the Louisville Courier-Journal lying atop the kitchen table. The headline was very clear. My reaction was anything but.

My mother was listening to the AM radio, as was her morning habit before going off to teach school, and as I listened to the news reports, my enthusiasm for attending morning classes at Indiana University Southeast quickly dissipated.

However, I wanted to be with friends, so I drove from our home in Georgetown to the Grant Line Road campus in a daze, thoughts swirling. FM radios everywhere were tuned to the inevitable all-day tributes. Chronologically, I was at the age of twenty, although on this day, matters still seemed far too painfully adolescent.

Apparently there had been too little of death in my upbringing, too few opportunities to learn how to handle grief. What was it about pop culture that made it easier to display emotion at the murder of an icon far, far away, even as it remained impossible to discuss feelings with one's own family?

My father and his schoolmates could easily remember where they were and what they were doing when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and in the 1960’s, a different generation reacted in similar fashion to the assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King.

When John Lennon was killed, I was quite certain something had come to an end. It was unclear to me exactly what it was. It was an emotion not to be experienced again until September 11, 2001.

On December 9, 1980, walking through the corridors at school, I met a friend named Sean, who had moved to Louisville from the East Coast a short time before. Sean was Irish, and a prodigious drinker. As we shared our mutual feelings about Lennon’s death, I was reminded that Sean’s father was an executive in the bourbon industry, something that loomed large considering our mutual desire to get drunk, and the fact that neither of us was 21.

The result? Two bottles of Old Yellowstone, artfully purloined from Sean's home.

I don’t recommend driving while drinking, but we did, listening to the music of Lennon and the Beatles, watching the Ohio River pass by, and wishing we had girlfriends. After Sean returned to campus to meet other friends, it was safe for me to sit alone in the parking lot and have a good cry when one of the FM deejays played “Beautiful Boy” from the Double Fantasy album.

Two or three days later, I saw a letter in one of the local newspapers, in which a fundamentalist Christian took offense at the widespread depth of feeling for John Lennon, preferring to view the slain musician as an immoral agent of Satan, out to subvert Christianity and promote sinful lifestyles. Incensed, I wrote a rebuttal, which was published … and I began to reflect on the hatred and spite that so often preface religious fanaticism.

Suddenly, I understood what had changed. On December 9, 1980, I abandoned the notion – admittedly, a tenuous one even then – that a world in which artists are violently struck down before their time, and the upwardly devout respond by piously sneering at the blood of the victim, has anything whatsoever to do with deities and the supernatural.

John Lennon’s brutal death wasn’t the only impetus for this conclusion. It was 1980, and the ascendancy of Jerry Falwell. Ronald Reagan was in the White House. There were many reasons for a young man to be angry before the morning when Lennon's music died.

35 years later, there remain such causes for anger … even though I’m no longer by any means young.

In recording these thoughts, honesty is my first aim. In the years since, we've arrived at a balanced portrait of Lennon, the man, which isn't always savory. He may (or may not) have addressed and conquered some of these issues during the last five years of his life, when he "had to let it go" professionally and did just that, watching the wheels go round and round until Sean was older and the musical bug bit again.

It would be much less jolting and far more pleasing to concentrate on remembrances of the good times when the music of Lennon and the Beatles filled my life – and indeed, there were many such times.

There will be more. I cherish them.

But the image of the newspaper headline won’t go away, and neither will the conclusions that the tragedy of Lennon’s death produced for me, in my life.

I miss his creativity, and my innocence. That's life, absent the simplistic blacks and whites. I'll always struggle with the grays.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

(Originally published here in 2005)

On the morning of December 9, 1980, I learned that John Lennon had been shot to death the previous night. Groggy and entirely unaware, I shuffled into the kitchen and looked down at the Louisville Courier-Journal lying atop the kitchen table. The headline was very clear. My reaction was anything but.

My mother was listening to the AM radio, as was her morning habit before going off to teach school, and as I listened to the news reports, my enthusiasm for attending morning classes at Indiana University Southeast quickly dissipated.

However, I wanted to be with friends, so I drove from our home in Georgetown to the Grant Line Road campus in a daze, thoughts swirling. FM radios everywhere were tuned to the inevitable all-day tributes. Chronologically, was at the age of twenty, although on this day, matters still seemed far too painfully adolescent.

Apparently there had been too little of death in my upbringing, too few opportunities to learn how to handle grief. What was it about pop culture that made it easier to display emotion at the murder of an icon far, far away, even as it remained impossible to discuss feelings with my own family?

My father and his schoolmates could easily remember where they were and what they were doing when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and in the 1960’s, a different generation reacted in similar fashion to the assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King.

When John Lennon was killed, I was quite certain something had come to an end. It was unclear to me exactly what it was. It was an emotion not to be experienced again until September 11, 2001.

On December 9, 1980, walking through the corridors at school, I met a friend named Sean, who had moved to Louisville from the East Coast a short time before. Sean was Irish, and a prodigious drinker. As we shared our mutual feelings about Lennon’s death, I was reminded that Sean’s father was an executive in the bourbon industry, something that loomed large considering our mutual desire to get drunk and the fact that neither of us was 21.

The result? Two bottles of Old Yellowstone, artfully purloined from Sean's home.

I don’t recommend driving while drinking, but we did, listening to the music of Lennon and the Beatles, watching the Ohio River pass by, and wishing we had girlfriends. After Sean returned to campus to meet other friends, it was safe for me to sit alone in the parking lot and have a good cry when one of the FM deejays played “Beautiful Boy” from the Double Fantasy album.

Two or three days later, I saw a letter in one of the local newspapers, in which a fundamentalist Christian took offense at the widespread depth of feeling for John Lennon, preferring to view the slain musician as an immoral agent of Satan, out to subvert Christianity and promote sinful lifestyles. Incensed, I wrote a rebuttal, which was published … and I began to reflect on the hatred and spite that so often preface religious fanaticism.

Suddenly, I understood what had changed. On December 9, 1980, I abandoned the notion – admittedly, a tenuous one even then – that a world in which artists are violently struck down before their time, and the upwardly devout respond by piously sneering at the blood of the victim, has anything whatsoever to do with deities and the supernatural.

John Lennon’s brutal death wasn’t the only impetus for this conclusion. It was 1980, and the ascendancy of Jerry Falwell. Ronald Reagan was in the White House. There were many reasons for a young man to be angry before the morning when his music died.

34 years later, there still remain these causes for anger … even though I’m no longer by any means young.

In recording these thoughts, honesty is my first aim. It would be much less jolting and far more pleasing to concentrate on remembrances of the good times when the music of Lennon and the Beatles filled my life – and indeed, there were many such times.

There will be more. I cherish them.

But the image of the newspaper headline won’t go away, and neither will the conclusions that the tragedy of Lennon’s death produced for me, in my life.

I miss his creativity, and my innocence.

"Bobby Kennedy: Democratic apostate, political opportunist, liberal idealist."

Yesterday was the 45th anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's assassination. At the website of The Guardian, Michael Cohen subjects the mythology to examination, with thought-provoking results.

Bobby Kennedy: Democratic apostate, political opportunist, liberal idealist … All of the above: the 45th anniversary of his death is a chance to peel away the myth of RFK and grasp his contradictory character

... Yet, it was precisely this type of apostasy that made Kennedy such a compelling and intriguing political figure: it was not his philosophical firmness, rather his ideological suppleness. He was a politician nearly impossible to pigeonhole with static labels like liberal, moderate or conservative. He was, at various times, all of the above.

Kennedy was the rare figure for whom, as his prospects for higher office grew, so, too, did his political personality evolve – and the two were in conflict until the day he died.