The Inside-Place.

So it is April 4th, a Memphis sky...Free at Last...The memory of  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,  and his assassination, is one of the "defining moments" in my own personal history. On my next day of school, after the shooting,  that I learned what the word prejudice meant. I learned how when people are hurt, they become angry, as did the folks I witnessed, pelting our car with bricks and rocks, as my young sister and I were told by our beloved mother, to "Get down girls; lie down on the floor of the backseat; we are going to play the quiet game. Whoever stays the quietest until we get home, wins."
I wasn't afraid; I just didn't understand.
"Mommy, why are the black people throwing rocks at us?"
"I'm going to explain when we get home, but I need you girls to behave, okay?"
So we dutifully lay down on the floor of the backseat, as mom revved the engine of our old Chevrolet, and pulled away quickly from the corner of the expensive parochial school we attended. Our Lady of Perpetual Help Academy was predominantly white, and also, Cuban. Situated in the heart of Tampa's "Ybor (pronounced eee-bohr) City", many new immigrants (escaping the fall of Batista, and the takeover by Fidel Castro) were enrolled at O.L.P H., many with scholarship assistance. Ybor City then, was little more than a slum. The school and the huge cathedral of Our Lady dominated the surroundings with ornate carvings, palm trees, and wealthy benefactors. Those who lived within walking distance of the school, were very poor, and black.
Once we arrived home, Mom carefully explained that "Someone great has died. He was a leader for peace, for all people."
"Like Jesus?" I asked.
"Yes, just like that," Mom said, while dabbing her by-now-red eyes.
The people throwing bricks and rocks, were angry, because he was killed by someone, and, well, it felt to them, like we had something to do with it."
"Well, Mom, tell them we didn't!", I offered with much frustration.
"Tell them that we are sad, too", I said earnestly.
"It's not that easy", said Mom with a sigh. "There's this thing called prejudice..."
"Prejuudee...?"
"Prejudice", she repeated.
She went on to explain it was about judging someone based on whether their skin was lighter or darker, which was very puzzling to me. I pointed out she had darker skin, and black curly hair, while Daddy had blond hair, blue eyes, and lighter skin.
"Yes, and some people don't like that."
We put the tv on, and when I saw the police confronting black people sitting quietly with signs, I asked Mom
"Why are the police spraying the black people with water, Mommy?"
"Because sometimes, the police are wrong..." her voice trailed off, as I quickly asked,
 "The police can be wrong?Then how do you know what's right?"
"In here. You know what's right, in here," she said, circling her chest. I knew that was where my heart--and likely--my soul--lived.
I suddenly understood that if everyone would listen to that inside-place, then the prejudice would not matter. It would not mater what anyone on the outside said, the prejudice would go away.

I'm still waiting for that day.
The day when we can all say,
"Free at Last, Thank God Almighty, I'm Free At Last."
Thank you, Dr. King.
And Thank You, Mom.
Peace, kids.

A Different Resurrection Story

Winter has gone. And here in Atlanta, Spring is not Spring, but Summer. 86 Degrees the past two days/daze...
I celebrated Easter by remembering not only "He Is Risen", but by commemorating the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assasination, which this year, fell on Easter Sunday.
I thought it would be meaningful to visit the church where Dr.King himself once preached, and I called and asked newfound(new being the past two years)eternal friend, Diane Davis Weeks, to accompany me.
We dressed up, and headed out to Ebenzer....
Ebenezer Baptist Church was filled with a rainbow of like-minded folks, and the songs, praise and liturgy that day, were breath-taking.
Pastor Ralph G. Warnock spoke bravely about politics, challenging us (as Christians, as people of faith) to remember the poor.
"No one talks about the poor anymore," he began, "Not even Democrats talk about the poor." He added,"We hate the poor. It's their fault,; they're not trying..."
He astutely pointed out that both Jesus and the Bible speak of comfort and great inheritance for the poor.
He then spoke of Jesus and his famous quote: "...the grain of wheat which dies, bears much fruit."
He pointed out, in a very accessible, folks-y way, that "God has you covered."
Pastor added:
"The seed of wheat is worth nothing until it's buried, when it can become more than itself."
Only in death, do we live, and bear fruit.
He ended with what I'd call a modern-day parable:
It seems a terrible forest fire happened out west, and the ranger was walking through the remains of a forest. At one point, he came upon a bird, standing upright, wings extended, burnt to a crisp. He thought it strange the bird would have held still, wings outstretched, and choose to die. He needed to move it out of the way, and so he gently kicked at the dead body, and suddenly there was an eruption of live, healthy baby chicks, which started out from under her wings.
She had endured death for those for whom she loved.
And life sprang forth, from death.
Peace, kids.

Dr. King, Civil Rights, and JOIN THE IMPACT!

I ALMOST POSTED U-2's "PRIDE".Yesterday, April 4th was the anniversary of the assasination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I nearly posted that U-2 song that begins: "April 4th, shots rang out, in the Memphis skyyyy..."
I didn't, because just listening to the song, made me cry. I did not want anyone else to cry.
I want us to celebrate this man's life, his achievements--if it weren't for Dr. King, we would not have the leadership we have in this country, right now. And I don't mean only our esteemed President Barack Obama, but all the people who've ascended to political positions that they were never given a chance at, in the past.
Today is April 5th. National Poetry Month is just beginning, and I think a great way to honor Dr. King is to link him with poetry. The man who ably spoke in the most poetic of terms, and spoke of righteousness as a duty, said "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we're free at last."
He wasn't referring only to people of color--but to all of us--free to support the civil rights of all.
With this in mind, I've also become a member of Join The Impact.
Check out their website, below, and become a member--it will take about three minutes of your time--for the next round of Civil Rights we must all fight for.
http://jointheimpact.wetpaint.com/?t=anon
Peace, kids.

Hi kids...It's nearly April 4th, 2008---it will be 40(forty!) years since he was assassinated.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. died on April 4th, 1968...
I was a very young girl when the Civil Rights movement was in full swing. I remember seeing on television, images of black people being sprayed with water-hoses by police officers, and asking my mom "Why are they spraying the black people, Mommy?".
My Mom got the same kind of look on her face that she did whenever I asked how it was we(the U.S.) always seemed to have fewer soldiers killed in the Vietnam War than the Viet Cong--their "count" was always higher; we always seemed to have fewer deaths. The same look she'd give me, when I insisted on watching the news, with Walter Cronkite sighing at times, and often looking like he might cry. My mother finally answered me, as I kept inquiring why the policemen would spray people, and beat people who were doing nothing but sitting down, allowing themselves to be arrested. "Sometimes, the police are wrong, Lisa."
"It sure looks that way," I said.
"Yes, honey."
Only hours after news of King's death, as my family was leaving my elementary school(I attended a great Catholic school, located in a poor, urban, at the time, predominantly African-American area of Tampa)our old brown Chevrolet was suddenly pelted with rocks, and even a brick was hurled at us. "Get down, girls," my mother ordered.
"Why are people throwing things at us, Mom?" I asked, as I noticed a large group of angry faces yelling at us.
"I'll explain later," my Mom said.
And she did. She told me that many people were upset, hurt that someone very important had been taken away from them, and from us...That we were seen as maybe having something to do with that loss, even though we certainly did not cause that loss. That we should pray for these people who were hurt, that we should pray for us, because we, too, were hurt by this man dying. This man's name was Dr. Martin Luther King, and we should be grateful that he had been here, and worked hard for us, for equal rights, for everyone....
I watched several dozen videos about Dr. King, and this one is absolutely the best. It happens to have French subtitles, but I don't think it will inhibit your experience of it. It's posted below...
And, for an account of what this world might be like, had Dr. King lived, read on.


If King Had Lived, What Now?
By ALLEN G. BREED, AP National Writer
The preacher in him would have continued speaking out against injustice, war and maybe even pop culture. He would likely not have run for president. He probably would have endured more harassment from J. Edgar Hoover.
Four decades after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. fell to an assassin's bullet, colleagues and biographers offer many answers to the question: What if he had lived?
For his children, however, the speculation is more personal. They know their lives would have turned out differently had they had their beloved father to guide and teach them.
Instead, history moves on, remaking the world in myriad ways. The nation has grappled with issues of race and inequity without the benefit of King's evolving wisdom. A generation has come of age celebrating him in a national holiday, like other figures of the frozen past.
But given the trajectory of his life — from his appearance on the national scene during the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott of 1955 to his death on a second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968 — some of those closest to him have a good idea what King might be doing now, and where we might be as a country.
In the months before his death, King was speaking out against the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam and was working with other civil rights leaders on a Poor People's Campaign, with a march on Washington scheduled for that May. He was in Memphis that spring day to support striking sanitation workers.
Were King alive today, the disciple of Mahatma Gandhi would most certainly be speaking out against the Iraq War, says King biographer David J. Garrow. However, citing the famous "Drum Major Instinct" sermon King delivered from the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta just two months before his death, Garrow says people might be surprised to hear echoes of presidential candidate Barack Obama's controversial former pastor.
"God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war," King said of the fighting in Vietnam. "And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it."
While King didn't go as far as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in suggesting that God "damn America," he predicted that the almighty might punish this country for "our pride and our arrogance."
"And if you don't stop your reckless course," he imagined the deity admonishing, "I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power."
Garrow and others feel comfortable saying that King would not have sought elective office.
In 1967, King was being courted by the "New Left" to make a third-party run for president on an anti-war ticket with the renowned pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin Spock. FBI wiretaps reveal that King gave serious thought to running, but ultimately decided that his role lay outside the political arena.
The Rev. Joseph Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King and marched alongside him, doesn't think time would have changed his friend's mind.
"I think Martin was a preacher, and I doubt very much if he would have wanted to subject himself to the need to compromise and play certain games that are requisite to political candidacy," says Lowery. "I think he would have preferred to do what he did best, and that was point out to ALL candidates and ALL officials ... `Thus sayeth the Lord.'"
Had he chosen that path, his enemies — chief among them FBI Director Hoover — would have laid bare potentially embarrassing details of King's personal life.
Then-U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy authorized the wiretapping of King's home and offices in a campaign to ferret out communists. The secret recording campaign failed to prove that King was a communist, but it did provide evidence of the civil rights leader's extramarital affairs.
William C. Sullivan, head of domestic intelligence under Hoover, told a congressional committee that King was subjected to the same tactics used against Soviet agents and, "No holds were barred."
Hoover's office was unable to marginalize King with his supporters or cow him into silence with threats of exposure. But how might King have fared in the Internet age, when every peccadillo is exposed and every word parsed in a 24-hour news cycle?
The late Hosea Williams, one of King's chief lieutenants, once told Martin Luther King III that his father was "unstoppable" because he had conquered the two things that made men most vulnerable: the fear of death and the love of wealth.
Some, however, feel King's influence was on the wane and that at the time of his death he had already reached the zenith of his public career. He had "run out of things to do," the late Chauncey Eskridge, a King attorney, told Garrow.
"The painful truth is that in his last two months or so before he was killed, King was so exhausted — emotionally, spiritually, physically — that a lot of the people closest ... to him were really worried about his survival, his survival in the sense of would he have some sort of breakdown," Garrow says. "It would be expecting something truly superhuman, literally superhuman, for King to have continued the pace of life he had lived over those 12 years for another 12 years, never mind for another 20 or 40 years."
Journalist, author and commentator Juan Williams wonders whether King would be able to connect in a meaningful way with today's youth.
Although he was just 39, the 1964 Nobel Peace laureate's insistence on nonviolence was bumping up against the burgeoning black power movement, says Williams, author of "Eyes on the Prize" and more recently "Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America_and What We Can Do About It."
"The big issue would be whether or not when he spoke out against the excesses of the rappers, for example, or when he spoke out on the high number of children born out of wedlock, whether or not he would be lumped in with the Bill Cosbys of the world ...," Williams says.
But he has no doubt King would be a force on the international stage.
"I don't think he'd be in the petty fray in the way that we think of some of these civil rights guys who are kind of ambulance chasers," says Williams. Instead, he sees an elder King as a man of "some standing, some stature, that people wait to hear from him... I think of Nelson Mandela in this way."
Lowery says that when King died, part of the nation's conscience died with him. Four young children lost something much more personal.
To Marty, Yolanda, Dexter and Bernice, the baby, Martin Luther King Jr. wasn't the icon or the dreamer. He was Daddy — the man who smelled of Magic Shave and Aramis and chlorine from the YMCA pool where he taught his sons to swim, and of the long-stemmed green onions that somehow fell outside the prohibition against eating before the evening blessing.
One of Bernice King's fondest memories is of the ritual she and her father shared when he'd return from a trip, like the time he came home for her fifth birthday party on March 29, 1968 — a day late because of a march in Memphis. She would jump into his arms for the "kissing game," in which each member of the family had a different spot on his face. Bernice's "designated spot" was his forehead.
Had her father lived, the 45-year-old minister is fairly certain she would be married and have children by now. But his graphic death and ponderous legacy, she fears, have made her a less than "viable candidate" for domestic bliss. Part of the problem is that her father set the bar so high. She remembers something her mother often said.
"She said, `I didn't marry a man. I married a mission,'" the daughter says. "So for me, a spouse is more than just a companion. It's someone to fulfill your destiny with. And I think in my case, because the destiny is so great, because you had a man whose life was cut short and there was some work that had to be completed, that you now have a responsibility to participate in, that makes it a little more difficult."
Martin III, likewise, feels he wouldn't be having his first child at age 50 had his father not been killed. "I wasn't clear that I even wanted to bring a child into the world," he says.
Both siblings are quite certain, however, that their father's death did not determine their career paths.
"I don't feel like I could have been exposed to what my father and mother were doing without being involved in this movement," says Martin King, president of the nonprofit group Realizing the Dream.
Each year as the assassination anniversary approaches, legions flock to the Lorraine Motel, which now houses the National Civil Rights Museum. Among those who made the pilgrimage last week were two lions of the civil rights movement — U.S. Rep. John Lewis and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
If King were alive today, Lewis has no doubt he would be speaking just as forcefully and with as much authority as ever about the issues that matter most to Americans, old and young.
"He would be the undisputed leader," the Georgia Democrat says. "Martin Luther King Jr. 40 years later would still be speaking out against poverty, hunger, against violence, against war."
Jackson, then 26 years old, was in the parking lot of the Lorraine that day, talking up to King when he was shot. During his recent visit, the aging activist stepped over a low wall meant to keep out ordinary tourists, climbed the stairs to the balcony where his mentor lay dying, and wept.
King would be 79 now, but Jackson feels his power to move would remain undiminished.
"He might not be leading the marches, but he would have set the frame of reference," says Jackson. "His voice would be a voice of great moral authority."
Of all the "might be's" and "what if's," MLK III feels sure of one thing. Had his father lived, the country would be closer to realizing the "beloved community" he'd envisioned.
Still, he feels his father's guiding force pulling us inexorably in that direction.
"From my perspective, his light still shines," he says. "His voice, his message, we're living every day. We're embracing more and more. We're not as close to it as I would like to see us, but we're still living it. We're still moving toward it."
So, in that way, he lives.
___
EDITOR'S NOTE: AP writers Woody Baird and Jason Bronis contributed to this report.