The Question: The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 40 years ago. What are your memories of that day? What impact did it have on you? How is King relevant to you and to us today?
I was working in the downtown freight shed for the Canadian Pacific Railroad in Toronto when the news came in. (I was in what we call a 'gap year' between high school and starting as an undergraduate at Oxford.)
I have a vivid memory of that day in Toronto: an enormous crowd gathered spontaneously in Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto, where the (then) new City Hall is, with tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands all singing "We shall overcome", and people leaning out of office windows and the like all round. It was the first time I'd ever been part of that kind of event, and granted that it was 1968 with people like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in their heyday there was a sense which I suppose was a kind of secular analogue to what the early church felt about martyrdom -- the blood of the martyrs being the seed of the church, so the blood of MLK was the seed for an 'overcoming' -- though we were perhaps a little hazy as to what that might involve -- which would radically change the society we were in.
Forty years on it's very strange to reflect that though in some ways society has changed there are still several of the same problems exactly as they were -- but no Bob Dylan or Joan Baez to give voice and song to the new generation. The teenagers are perhaps mostly too busy at their computer screens.
I actually wrote a song myself, later that year, after the death of Bobby Kennedy -- what a time it was -- in which I pulled together JFK, MLK and RFK, and asked the question, "Tell me, America, where are you running to? Tell me, America, where will it end?" Forty years on, I'm still left asking the question -- with a great sense of sadness because I love America and admire it hugely and am awed and saddened at some of the things some American policies are leading to. I am, I hasten to add, similarly critical of my own country...
May he (MLK) rest in peace and rise in glory!
Easter greetings to one and all.
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