1968 - Mark Kurlansky [69]
He said that he was living in a “sick nation.” His speeches became morbidly focused on death. He compared himself to Moses, who led his people out of slavery but died on a mountaintop in Jordan in view of the promised land.
In the spring he was periodically spending time in Memphis to support a garbage workers’ strike. These segregated jobs for blacks paid only slightly above minimum wage, with no vacation or pensions—an example of how black people were kept from the prosperity of America. An attempted demonstration on March 28 was a disaster for King, with marchers turning to violence, battling police, and demolishing storefronts. On April 3 King returned to Memphis to try again and was greeted by a sarcastic and ridiculing press corps. On the evening of April 4 he was resting in his hotel, preparing his next week’s sermon at his church in Atlanta where his father had preached before him, a sermon titled “America May Go to Hell,” when he was shot in the right side of the face. He died minutes later.
April 7, 1968, in Washington, D.C., after the riots following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, assassination
(Photo by Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos)
The day of violence was indeed at hand, as King had predicted. As news spread that King had been killed by an escaped white convict named James Earl Ray, violence spread in the black sections of 120 American cities, with rioting reported in 40. The National Guard moved into many cities that were being burned and looted. That was when Chicago’s mayor Richard Daley gave his infamous “shoot to kill” order. Millions of dollars of property was destroyed in black neighborhoods, and black people were killed—twelve in Washington, D.C., alone. King, no longer a suspected Uncle Tom with a Nobel Prize, was dead, not yet forty, killed by a white man, at last an authentic black martyr. Stokely Carmichael said, “Now that they’ve taken Dr. King off, it’s time to end this nonviolence bullshit.”
CHAPTER 7
A POLISH
CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE
Gross: Good God! Don’t you make yourself sick?
Ballas: Do we make ourselves sick, Mr. P?
(Pillar shakes his head.)
Of course we don’t. When the good of Man is at stake nothing will make us sick.
—VáCLAV HAVEL, The Memorandum,
first performed in the United States in 1968
ON MARCH 8, several hundred University of Warsaw stu-dents, a demonstration so small it could have fit in one of the lecture halls, marched to the rector’s office, demanded to see him, and shouted, “No studies without freedom!” Then they marched through the gated campus. This would have seemed a minor incident on an American campus in 1968, where thousands were marching, seizing buildings, forcing schools to close, but nothing like this had happened in Poland before. Workers’ militia, trained to fend off any attempt at “counterrevolution,” about five hundred of them, arrived by truck in civilian clothes but wearing the red and white of the Polish flag on armbands. They said they wanted to talk to the students, but after a short time talking they took out clubs and in the presence of two hundred police officers chased the students through the campus, beating them while the police arrested those who attempted to flee.
The students were shocked by the brutality and by the unprovoked invasion of the campus in violation of all tradition. After years in which periodic dissident acts led by Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski had been able to attract only a handful of other dissidents, the government’s ruthlessness