In Southern California, the Day After Martin Luther King Died

Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968. It was a warm spring-weather Thursday in my tiny Southern California town, a typical small town for that area of the country during the late 1960s. It was a community that was still completely confused and baffled about the meanings behind the Los Angeles Watts riots that glowed from our television screens in 1965, complete with burning buildings and inconceivable violence happening in the streets just 30 miles away.

I was in my late grade-school years when Martin Luther King Jr. died. I don't quite remember April 4, 1968, but I will never forget April 5 when my young world views were shattered. No, not 'shattered. My young world views were run over by a huge monstrous bright yellow bull-dozer of hatred, who never even knew that my dreams were crushed beyond hope in the dirty wake of its passing.

My little town was a community where black people all seemed to live below a certain street, white people all seemed to live above another street, and there was a racially and culturally mixed area between the two dividing lines where children of all colors lived and played together without giving our skin colors, or at times differing languages, any thought. This was my neighborhood, and these kids were my close friends.

On Friday morning, the day after the death of Martin Luther King, I called my close friend, like I did every morning, to see if this girl and her brother were ready to walk to school with me yet. I was shocked and hurt when she called me a name instead of giving me her normal cheery good morning banter. During the lunch recess I tried to talk to her to find out what I had done that made her act like she hated me. She threw a rock. I cried. I didn't want my long-time friend to hate me.
After school, as I was walking the short trip home, I heard people behind me and looked back. It was just some of the black kids from my neighborhood walking with their big brothers; I waved and continued walking while thinking hard about what I might have done to make my friend so mad. My thoughts were just turning to the possibility of asking Mom is she'd take the two of us somewhere fun the next morning so that we'd be friends again, when I was jumped by the group of adult-sized kids behind me.

While on the ground, with this big brother that I knew hitting me, I looked over to see my friend crying a short distance away from where I was laying. Through her tears, she was yelling at these people to kill me. I woke up in the hospital with a concussion. I was confused, afraid and totally crushed.

It took me years to completely understand what had happened to me on Friday, April 5, 1968, while growing up in my racially mixed area of town. But I understand now.

Nobody was mad at that young white girl being pounded on the sidewalk, and my friend, standing a little bit away from my beating, was crying for both of our worlds that were shattered when that hideous yellow bulldozer of hatred drove over our shared Martin Luther King guardian that we didn't know anything about.

The fists pounding me were listening to the drone of the television media, like a hypnotizing drum-beat, giving its step-by-step announcements of riotous acts being done in Los Angeles and other big cities. They were acts of anger, acts of frustration and acts of defeat. My main attacker wasn't mad at me. He was mad at my skin for ruining our sliver of world that was nestled somewhere between the streets that divided white from black.

The kids in my crowd didn't know that Martin Luther King was dreaming about our neighborhood: a place where little black hands held little white hands as sisters and brothers while crossing the busy streets; a place where sleepovers included little black heads and little white heads giggling close together in gossip after lights-out-time; a place where everybody under age 12 was happy.

No, we had no clue what we had until somebody took it away from us by killing the man that was hosting our dream world. After Martin Luther King died the, media was out in all small Southern California towns around Los Angeles combing for any racial act that they could get their hands on. This went on for days, and you couldn't turn on the television or radio without hearing the media harping on the bad things.

Our schools reacted in fear of more problems like the one that I had; they ended up talking some children into doing violent acts because they explained how they didn't want that specific and detailed accounts of activity to happen.

The more people talked about what the media was saying, the worse things got to be around my town. During the week after Martin Luther King's death a group of maybe 100 adults and older teens showed up at the junior high school, went out onto the athletic field, and divided sides by color to yell at each other. The police showed up before the television cameras, so everybody left before they could be seen on television.

And, that's what I remember about Martin Luther King's death. It was the day that changed my world, and the day that formed the opinion in my mind that we can all find my missing happy world if we just keep trying.