Today April 4 MLK’s Anniversary
Fifty-five years ago today I found out that Martin Luther King had been shot when I heard someone snickering and snorting. A man was walking by the hospital room of the friend I’d come to visit. We could hear the crackle of the transistor radio the guy was listening to, so my friend, a reporter, flipped on the radio next to his bed. The news was everywhere.
The snickerer was small and thin and weathered, and he was wearing a cowboy hat, which put him just one small step above the Negroes. What had delighted him would soon set Chicago on fire. The next day, my fellow secretaries at the Catholic School Board were tense and wary. Their husbands were firemen or policemen; their neighborhoods butted up against Black neighborhoods. By noon, Black high school kids had walked out of their schools.
Our one Black secretary stared into her typewriter in silence. She was tiny and until today perpetually cheerful, ready to laugh at the slightest joke, or even at no joke at all. Her job was to integrate the secretarial staff. “Head Ni—- Up Front” or HNUF was a term I had just learned from my Black boyfriend, whom I was trying to reach on the phone.
I finally got him to answer at the Black YMCA where he worked. Sears Roebuck’s Julius Rosenwald had donated enough money to fund a new, spacious Black Y on the South Side. YMCAs in Chicago were segregated, and Rosenwald’s gift let the organization sidestep the racial justice issue. Blacks didn’t know whether to love him or hate him, the kind of debate that they were forced into over and over.
“Hi,” I said, relieved, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he said flatly.
Then there was silence.
“I can’t talk now,” he said.
Then the line went dead.
We were dating across Chicago’s – indeed America’s — greatest fault line. We were more than dating and would be married in October of that year. Racism had roughed us up so often that I could make no sense of the fact that all Black people weren’t eaten alive by rage.
By 4:00 p.m. that day, the horizon, visible from the School Board’s 8th floor Michigan Avenue windows, was glowing red. It was fire, it was rage, it was exhaustion. It was despair.
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