Remembering Martin Luther King Jr.
And, of course, in Los Angeles and Memphis, the cities where the year's turbulence was punctuated with the sound of an assassin's bullets cutting down Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King.
King would have turned 77 today. He died at a time when youth was paramount, but it still seems hard to believe that he was only 39 when killed. For those of a certain age, it seems hard to believe that he is now part of history, no longer of current events.
How King will go down in history is an ongoing struggle. One of the major protagonists is Taylor Branch, the Mount Washington resident who is now publishing At Canaan's Edge. The third installment of his massive King trilogy, it covers the last several years of King's life, 1965-1968. More than a biography, these books are what Branch calls an account of "America in the King Years."
In this and his previous volumes - Pillar of Fire and Parting the Waters - Branch makes clear that the civil rights movement that orbited about King's powerful nucleus was not the simple morality play it is often portrayed as today. It was a confused journey that took many paths as courageous and conflicted men and women, battling a brutal and often deadly enemy, improvised like jazz musicians on the far reaches of an avant-garde riff.
As such, the civil rights movement provides fodder for an array of potential portrayals - from the anger of those who see the current state of racial inequality in America and say that its fundamental missions are unfulfilled, to the opposite, those who say that the movement met its goals and that any attempt to further such an agenda today means abandoning the movement's goal of a colorblind America.
"There is an old adage," Columbia University historian Eric Foner says of his trade. "All history is contemporary history. In other words, you write for the moment you are living in. That does not mean you are trying to distort, but the assumptions you use are the assumptions of your own time."
Ronald Walters, director of the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland, College Park, says this is evident in the way King is memorialized. "I think what has happened to the memory of King is that Americans have slowly but surely shaped a vision of King that they can be comfortable with," he says.
Walters points to the part of the speech King gave at the 1963 march on Washington that is always heard on the commemoration of his birthday, the "I have a dream" part - what Walters calls "the mystical aspect" of the speech.
"The real reason for that speech is very seldom played: somebody coming to Washington to demand the cashing of a check marked 'insufficient funds,' the criticism of the extent of racism in American society," Walters says. "Those things are tossed by the wayside while the mystical vision is played over and over again."
The part that Walters refers to comes early in King's speech. Few Americans have probably ever heard it.
"In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check," King said, describing "the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence" as "a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir."
"It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned," King went on. "Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
Jane Dailey, a Johns Hopkins University historian, says too much attention is paid to that speech.
"King said a lot of other things," she says. "His memory tends to get distorted by the over-reliance on that one text, which is actually much less revolutionary than some of his other texts."
Says Foner: "Unfortunately, on Martin Luther King Day, King dies in 1963 because all people remember is the march on Washington. He actually dies in Memphis leading a strike of sanitation workers. Poverty and economic justice, the redistribution of wealth - that's what King was talking about then.
"If you consider that a part of the civil rights movement, then it becomes a more radical challenge to the structure of American society and it didn't succeed nearly as much as people like to believe," he says. "The battle over the memory of the civil rights movement is really a battle over defining what that movement was."
Jonathan Holloway, a historian at Yale University, says the narrative currently institutionalized ends in victory. "It is a story of American exceptionalism, that we the people rose up, really over ourselves, and chose the high ground, joined with King to make all these great things happen," he says. "That really couldn't be any further from the truth."
The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, with its black/white dividing line determining who was most victimized by the storm, brought race back into the national conversation at a volume rarely heard since civil rights days. King is regularly on record decrying not only the South's Jim Crow laws that he successfully fought, but also the economic condition of American blacks of the type revealed by Katrina.
It was after the 1965 Voting Rights act signaled victory in the Jim Crow battle that King turned his focus primarily to economic issues, which led him to shine a light on the condition of blacks in the North with a lengthy campaign in Chicago. These are the problems that many say remain unsolved.