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| The street by my house where Dr. Martin Luther King marched in Chicago, during the summer of 1966. |
That is a very hard question to answer, since I have so many. If I start to recollect them, I may never stop. But I do recall one that’s very vivid, though, and that was when The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a march right down a street behind where I lived. The buzz this caused in the neighborhood was quite palpable; electrifying to say the very least.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of people turned out and lined the sidewalks as the marchers came right down the middle of 107th and Avenue M. People were shouting at him, some people yelling terrible things. One man came out on his front porch with a rifle and threatened to shoot him. The homeowner was immediately swarmed by Chicago police. I’ll never forget that scene and how brave those cops were, running up on that porch and wrestling the gun from the enraged man.
It was summer and I had just graduated 8th grade. Everyone really got caught up in the excitement, just trying to grab a glimpse of this man, King. I really just wondered if he looked like he did on TV, but I knew somewhere down deep in my own soul this was a momentous event I was witnessing. I was fascinated by his bravery to walk through a crowd who obviously hated him so much and all he stood for.
It was summer and I had just graduated 8th grade. Everyone really got caught up in the excitement, just trying to grab a glimpse of this man, King. I really just wondered if he looked like he did on TV, but I knew somewhere down deep in my own soul this was a momentous event I was witnessing. I was fascinated by his bravery to walk through a crowd who obviously hated him so much and all he stood for.
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| Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, avoiding rocks being thrown at him during one of his marches. |
We had no black people living on the East Side (the name of our neighborhood) at that time. Few worked there and if they did it was mostly at the local steel mills. There were no blacks who actually worked in any of our local stores. So seeing a black man in person was relatively new for me. The only time I had actually seen anyone who was black was when I went to Chicago White Sox baseball games. Some of the players were black then, not many, but a few. And there were black people, of course, in the stands.
This interaction through major league baseball, coupled with my dad’s introduction to an old black man by the name of Walter Washington, was my first exposure to African-Americans. Walter “lived” in the coal yard next to where my dad worked and my dad used to feed him and care for him, especially during the winter. As a matter of fact, one time during an especially cold winter, Walter had become badly burned when he had fallen asleep between two coal-fired salamanders. My dad found him outside when he came to work one day, laying there severely burned. Walter was taken to the Cook County Hospital Burn Ward and my dad visited him every day until Walter recovered and came back to live in the coal yard. I’ll never forget my dad’s compassion for this black man, something relatively unheard of at the time, or at the very least not something he boasted about to his friends, since my dad loathed those who participated in self-praise.
This interaction through major league baseball, coupled with my dad’s introduction to an old black man by the name of Walter Washington, was my first exposure to African-Americans. Walter “lived” in the coal yard next to where my dad worked and my dad used to feed him and care for him, especially during the winter. As a matter of fact, one time during an especially cold winter, Walter had become badly burned when he had fallen asleep between two coal-fired salamanders. My dad found him outside when he came to work one day, laying there severely burned. Walter was taken to the Cook County Hospital Burn Ward and my dad visited him every day until Walter recovered and came back to live in the coal yard. I’ll never forget my dad’s compassion for this black man, something relatively unheard of at the time, or at the very least not something he boasted about to his friends, since my dad loathed those who participated in self-praise.
When King marched it was as if an unlit stick of dynamite (maybe more like a case) had been thrown into the middle of our neighborhood. We all watched, waiting to see who was going to light the fuse certain to spark a riot. It was nothing less than electrifying and became an indelible memory of an event I’ll never forget. Dr. King went on to march in a number of other areas in and around Chicago during this time. He would go on to say in a later interview after those marches were over that he never had feared more for his life than when he marched in Chicago and had never experienced more hatred and bigotry than that showered down upon him there, hatred he had never before experienced even in the deep South.
I always felt a bit ashamed of that statement he made, always feeling like a black eye had been placed upon Chicago and with it our East Side. The irony of it all was that as kids growing up we always felt our neighborhood wasn’t anything very special in terms of its desirability to live in, so many of us used to wonder why anybody, even blacks, would want to move to the East Side, a part of the City of Chicago neglected by city mayors for so long a time. We always felt like we were second-class citizens of the Second City.
But the day King marched I'm sure the eyes of the whole world were upon us.
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