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What they were doing. What it meant.
BARBARA BUSH: Leading ‘awful garbage strikes.’ This was a very interesting time to be living in Washington. The Vietnam War was debated at all the dinner parties, and the whole country worried about racial and student unrest. Here is part of my diary entry from April 5, 1968, to show a little of what it…
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Honoring King is Not Enough
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…
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A Brick City Record
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…
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The Dream Heard ‘Round the World
“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places shall be made plain, and the crooked places shall be made straight and the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope.…
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How the Talented Tenth Got Over
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…
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King: The Soundtrack
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…
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Color, Character, Content: At play in the new “post-racial” politics
It seems like a lifetime ago when some black people were asking if Barack Obama was “black enough” and some white people were insisting that he was “not really black.” Those silly debates seem quaint in retrospect. Back then, people were merely having trouble wrapping their minds around Sen. Obama’s biracial heritage and itinerant upbringing,…
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This Old Housing Crisis
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…
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Behind Coretta's Veil: Black Women and the Burdens of Loss
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…
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Another Independence Day for Zimbabwe?
Historic change is in the air with tension and uncertainty mounting as Robert Mugabe’s government suffers its first major defeat since he came to power almost three decades ago. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change has won the lower house of Parliament and is set to force a runoff for the presidency. This is the…