culture

What would Dr. King say to us today? We have a tendency to sanitize his memory, to remember the Dr. King who fought the evil of state-mandated segregation, the Dr. King who marched on Washington in 1963, the Dr. King with whom all Americans say they (now) agree. But there was another Dr. King –…

Periodically, I get a phone call from my grandmother that begins with her saying, “Listen to this,” or simply with her reading aloud a vignette she’d just written about her life in Newark, N.J. Usually, I tell her the brief tales sound good and encourage her to keep writing. “I’m leaving all this stuff for…

The day after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot, I went out into the riot-torn Washington, D.C. streets and into schools in those neighborhoods scorched by flames to talk to the children. I went to tell them not to loot and raid, so that they would not get arrested and ruin their futures. A…

I am a child of the black middle class. I wasn’t quite a teenager when Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. But I have always known that I am one of the millions of beneficiaries of his sacrifice. Middle class. I have spent a career considering the term as it relates to black people. In…

If you liked music, then the Johnson home was the place to be in the late ’60s. My brother Phillip always had the latest Motown or Stax singles. My sister Phyllis (yes, they’re twins) played the Beatles, and the Stones, and of course Sly and the Family Stone. When he was home from college, my…

Forty years later there are two particularly poignant and enduring images associated with Dr. King’s assassination. The first is the circle of men surrounding Martin’s body on that Memphis balcony as they point in the direction of the shooter. The second is Coretta Scott King’s mournful and resolute face beneath her widow’s black veil. Both…

They told us to stay in the dorms that Thursday night, so we hit the streets as soon as the hall monitors closed their doors. We slipped off the Howard University campus and headed down Georgia Avenue/Seventh Street, toward the smoke and flames and unceasing sirens that started soon after news hit that Martin Luther…

Recently, I was part of a group of public interest lawyers sponsoring a free housing seminar in Maryland, where we listened to dozens of homeowners who came out on a chilly, damp weeknight because they were almost all facing foreclosure. Most of the homeowners needing help that night were either African American or Latino. Almost…

Forget the conspiracy theories that claim Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination was the result of a government plot. Lyndon Johnson, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the FBI had nothing to do with it. James Earl Ray killed King. If any organization was involved, it was more likely the KKK than the CIA. That’s the…

Martin Luther King once said “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I often wonder what life would be like if Dr. King had not been snatched away from us 40 years ago. I know one thing, for sure, would be at the top of his agenda for justice…