MLK is Murdered

MLK is Murdered

APRIL 4, 1968

Philadelphia, PA

I am 12 years old and sitting at home with my family, watching television.  Our show is interrupted for a special announcement: Martin Luther King had just been shot and killed.  My mother gasped, in horror,  and we sit and watch a nation erupt right before us.  I have heard of King but I am not completely aware of his work, his mission and his views on white people.  The television media offers me an overdose of the violence and riots in Chicago, LA, Detroit and in the South.  It looks to me as if Black people are out to harm white people. These scenes on the TV scare me.

My mother now worries about my father who is teaching a night class at Drexel University.  She wants him to get home.  And he does finally arrive, earlier than usual.  He is unsettled about this murder.  “As soon as I heard, I just dismissed class.  I told everyone to just get home right away,” he tells my mother.  “I got in my car and I didn’t stop.  I didn’t stop for any red light.  I just figured, if a cop saw me, I would let him follow me home and I would just pay the ticket.  I was not going to hang around in that black neighborhood and get beaten up,” he says with a tone of relief.

For the next few days, we are bombarded with TV coverage of riots, louting, gun shots, police, tear gas, anger and broken cities and I fear that Black people are going to come to our house and hurt us.