WHERE WERE YOU WHEN “THE KING” WAS KILLED?

By Frederick A. Hurst

How many people remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in Memphis, Tennessee? Well, I know where I was and what I was doing. I was in Washington, D. C. sitting at my desk on the second floor of Riggs National Bank, where I was the supervisor of the reconciliation department, reconciling computer runs whose totals didn’t match the totals in the piles of checks they were supposed to represent.

My job was to find the errors and correct them, which is why the unit was called the reconciliation department. I performed my job so well over my three years of service while I was a college student at Howard University that I was promoted to supervisor and offered a manager’s job in the trust department upon my graduation from college in the summer of 1968.

It was an attractive offer that also included an offer to pay my way through law school. So, when one of my supervisees came running into the office screaming that Martin Luther King had just been assassinated, my future appeared set and looked pretty cozy, but her traumatic message turned everything upside down.

For the most part, until that moment, I had sat out the Civil Rights Movement. Sure, I took a couple of bus rides early on to help integrate Maryland. And I had the opportunity to meet and mingle with some of the greats – Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, Bayard Rustin, to name a few. But I was pretty much a passive participant. And I really never took to Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of passive resistance, although I admired the courage of those who did.

Unlike the aforementioned, I didn’t really have any deep philosophical commitments beyond eating and getting through college and getting on with a stable career during a time when all three were much tougher assignments (in Black America, especially) as compared to today.

Memories of growing up poor, working my way through college after experiencing coming to grips with the grim alternatives – hunger, working in a foundry and the stark realization that, as an independent adult, shelter and paying rent were inseparable, things like that – fueled my creative urges and, as far as I was concerned, I had bought and paid for my ticket to the future.

But the trauma that I felt at the slaughter of this noble man of peace changed all of that. I remember freezing in place at the gruesome news. Emotions in the room were running wild. Folks were making a lot of noise, exclaiming and crying, but I recall remaining frozen in place for several minutes until I heard the seemingly distant voice right next to me yelling my name and asking me what was wrong with me.

Well, I couldn’t really explain it to her but I knew instantly that my life had changed and I was engrossed in contemplating what that meant for my future. All of a sudden I cared about the struggle in a more deeply personal way. In an instant, I was radicalized. I knew that I could not bury myself in the secure corridors of Riggs National Bank for the rest of my life and I knew that the “Movement” had a new soldier. I just didn’t know what that meant at the time.

I sorted it all out as best I could before graduating that summer. I turned down Riggs’ offer and returned to my hometown in Springfield, Massachusetts and lived the life that Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination had influenced. I did some things right and other things wrong but, certainly, nothing was as it would have been if King had lived out his life and died of natural causes.

I never embraced passive resistance. To the contrary, I embraced Stokely Carmichael’s version of Black Power and remain committed to some version of it to this very day – as in Black political, economic and intellectual power. Imagine the irony!

The irony, of course, is that Riggs National Bank, at the time the most prestigious bank in Washington, D. C., was as lily White as White can be - in people and in culture - and I would have been the only management spook in the place. I won't even begin to try to describe the potential pitfalls of that type of isolation on the psyche, but suffice it to say that, even today, I have found it to be a wise precaution to prepare my kids for such an environment, even in this age of relative tolerance. Thanks to Martin Luther King, Jr., I remained comfortable in my Black skin and proud to promote and represent Afro-American causes and thankful to demonstrate, to whatever small degree, that Black pride and Black power are alive and well in this small corner of America.

So, where were you when “the King” was killed and how was your life affected by it?

We all know how the nation was affected by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And we all know that his martyrdom forever altered our collective consciousness about race matters, probably more so than if he had lived. But we hear so little about the impact of his life on the personal lives of individuals and that’s too bad because it would give most of us an even deeper appreciation for King’s greatness and his legacy.