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?
My memories of the night of Martin Luther King's assassination, and the days of rage that followed in Washington, are indelible. I was a young reporter for The Washington Post, and when I stepped into a cab to get to the office as early as possible the next morning, my black taxi driver turned around and said, "I want you to know that if I didn't need the money, I wouldn't pick up any white passenger today." At that moment, I understood that King had been indispensible--the only man, at the time, who was capable of bridging the vast, generally unacknowledged gap between black and white America and a leader who was uniquely capable of reaching "the better angels of our nature."
I think that the removal of King's voice from the public square at the tragically young age of 39 was a terrible turning point in our history, because it deprived America of the one black voice that commanded respect from many (though not all) segments of the population.He was irreplaceable. In the decades that followed, no other African-American leader could reach the conscience of white America as King had been able to do.
It is difficult for anyone who lived through those days not to think of the murders of King and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy as part of a continuum of violence and anti-rationalism. That night I heard Kennedy announce King's death to a brokenhearted, predominantly black crowd in Indianapolis. Kennedy quoted Aeschylus: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget/falls drop by drop unpon the heart/until, in our own despair, against our will,/comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." I wept all night, and I wept more after my taxi driver turned on me in anger the next morning. I realized that voices of sanity, compassion, and reason were going to be silent for quite some time.
As a secularist, I also want to point out that the power of King's moral appeal, while rooted in his own faith, transcended all religions. He welcomed the support of atheists, Jews, and people of every religious and nonreligious background. His closest white friend was a Jewish lawyer--and an atheist. Martin Luther King did not ask for a faith-based dole from the government to appeal to the conscience of a nation. Instead, he made his moral case--and built his
movement--from outside government. King understood that morality did not depend on Christianity or any religion. Indeed, the only Americans he wasn't able to reach were the hard-core right-wing, almost entirely Christian, white segregationists whose response to the civil rights movement was to build up a separatist network of white Christian right-wing schools in the South.
I have never gotten over King's assassination. I look back at that event every year with immense sorrow and a profound sense of loss. Whether our nation will fully incorporate his legacy remains to be seen. I would so like to live in a nation in which all men and women are judged "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
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