Shot in the Dark

It Was Forty Years Ago Today

My dad doesn’t remember this – but I do.

We were driving down Sixth Street Southeast in Jamestown, heading toward the tracks.

Dad was listening to the radio (tuned in to KEYJ, naturally) in our old Mercury.  It was bright and clear outside.

And the announcer led with a story about “Martin Luther King” being shot.  It’d be absurd to say I knew what was going on – but I remember being familiar with the name.  He’d been on the TV a time or two.
And it seemed pretty obvious it was an important story.   I obviously didn’t know why – I was still probably ten years away from meeting my first black person.  Jamestown North Dakota was pretty white, back then.

More people remember.

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Mitch Berg

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One response to “It Was Forty Years Ago Today”

  1. peevish Avatar
    peevish

    It is a shame that we still insist on division, the left insists on ‘recognizing diversity’ and on affirmative action – aka counter discrimination. The right insists on veiled comments playing/pandering to latent racism to suggest that lazy (blacks) are the root of much social ill, and the genesis of ‘overtaxation’ to pay for needless social programs as a mechanism to push for lower taxes – normally resulting in lower taxes ONLY for the very richest of us.

    Dr. King asoused a color-blind society. When the left ceases insisting on separate but equal, and the right ceases on trying to blame a race, or just ‘minorities’ for all their own failures, perhaps we’ll finally realize a dream.

    I was 3 when Martin Luther King was shot. I remember Robert Kennedy’s assassination, and us walking on the moon. I don’t remember this day. I suspect that in a blue collar factory town in SW suburban Chicago there simply wasn’t much talk – that and my Dad was a travelling saleman and/or or worked a bazillion hours when he had work, so it would have been rare to ride anywhere other than maybe on a Saturday, with him. (No, not Sundays – He’s Unitarian, mom’s a Catholic, he didn’t go with us to church). It’s a shame, but we’re not much closer to that color-blind society. While the plight of blacks is far better (in terms of opportunity), it is also worse (in terms of economic vitality in their communities).

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