The Death of Innocence

Martin understood that his death could only be redemptive if it forced our nation to concede the idiocy of racial hatred.

The death of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4th, 1968, when I was 9 years old, was the death of my innocence. Of all the events which have shaken my world, few have conspired to alter radically the shape and content of my awareness as this event, writ large on my mind as a verdict: "You are no longer innocent; you are condemned to awareness."

I was sitting on the living room floor watching television when suddenly a news bulletin interrupted the regular program. The reporter's voice, a usual lesson in impeccable cadence and inflection, now dragged in somber monotone. "Martin Luther King Jr. has just been shot in Memphis, Tennessee," he managed.

Behind me, sitting in his favorite chair, my father offered a seemingly involuntary response that summed up the whole matter in one word, a hurting "humh." That "humh," ejaculated in the midst of strained disbelief and shock, became an unknowing utterance of eventual grief. Indeed, my father's reaction gathered into its dismal tone the horror black America felt about the loss of this black prophet.

King's mellifluous baritone voice was stilled by a piece of metal which traveled with ungodly speed and precision to explode its message of death inside his neck. After a few words by the reporter indicating that Martin was not dead, but seriously wounded, and that he was shot on a hotel balcony (an unholy shrine to the senseless murder of our dreams and hopes), the television permitted us to hear what became his last speech.

"I just want to do God's will," he declared. "And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've se-e-en the promised land." The audience, now sensing the imminent climax of Martin's powerful speech, swelled its chorus of vocal support, perforating his oration with shouts of "Yes sir, oh yes!" "Go ahead, yes doctor."

"And I'm happy tonight," Martin continued, recognizing he and his audience were now united in a spiritual, almost mystical bond. "I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. 'Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.'" The audience on film, and in my heart, responded with thunderous applause to this powerfully persuasive ebony seer whose words were containers, filled, even crammed, with the pathos and poetry of the black American experience. After showing the film, the television resumed its regular program, but my attention had been completely diverted.

I had been electrified. Even then, the hair on my limbs stood at attention when that voice like a trumpet blew a clarion call for freedom. His charisma was intoxicating, and I immediately felt a fraternal sympathy for him, an instant allegiance to the cause he so eloquently articulated. It was merely a matter of moments before the reporter again broke faith with the scheduled program and inserted the final note of tragedy. "Martin Luther King Jr. has been assassinated at 39 years old."

MARTIN'S DEATH WAS A TRAUMATIC climax to a period of harsh history for black Americans, especially in my birthplace, the alternately famed and infamous "Motor City," Detroit. The riot of the summer of '67 had undermined the already tentative peace that marked the relationship between the black and white communities, a microcosmic reflection of the Kerner Commission's incisive words about America's two societies -- one black, one white.

At such a time, the death of Martin Luther King Jr. imposed itself on my world. Already sensitive to the tension and turmoil of the riot, I found that Martin's death brought into sharp focus the repulsive reality whose bare outline had taken form for me in the anarchy of the riot: Race is an explosive, volatile issue in America.

Thus my cocoon was assaulted, broken into, and the butterfly of consciousness yanked from its comfortable resting in innocence. It was a painful awakening, the same kind suffered by all black people at one time or another.

In a sense it is this same painful awakening being forced upon many in 1988, exactly 20 years since Martin's assassination. In fact, the period between his death in 1968 and the conspicuous reappearance of racism in the last few years (symbolized by Howard Beach, the Citadel, and Forsyth County) has witnessed a subversive shift in the modus operandi of American racism. Often no longer able openly to express racial hatred through barbaric deeds, racists have found subtle and insidious forms of expression.

What's more, in a cruelly ironic twist, the success of the civil rights movement has been turned in on itself. An unfortunate consequence of the civil rights movement's commitment to vanquish every visible sign of racism is that racism has gone underground. A subterranean network of slippery attitudes, ambiguous actions, and equivocal meanings, which can accommodate racist intent and concomitantly permit the semblance of racial fairness, is in operation in most segments of American society.

The result is a colossal effort to deny the existence of racism. Incidents such as the one that occurred in Howard Beach are often explained on the basis of statistical infrequency to be aberrations from the norm of racial tranquility. Since little "concrete" evidence can be evinced to substantiate the existence of racism, it is supposed to be gone. Out of sight, out of mind. Thus, the whole matter is now ensconced in an obfuscating demand to provide '60s-style proof for '80s-style racism.

IN TIMES LIKE THESE, what can Martin's death mean for us? The brilliant and beautiful dream he articulated with intelligent fire was almost dead before he was, maimed by the intransigent refusal of America to see his vision and heed his voice. And while the King Holiday is extremely important, one can almost hear Martin warning us from his grave not to be seduced by the display of unity that his birthday celebration rallies, if the rest of the year the acrimonious legacy of racial bigotry continues to pollute the air of common life in America.

Martin understood that often the only reward for speaking the unadorned truth, voicing the uncomfortable reality, and painting the plain picture is a bullet. But he also understood that his death could only be redemptive if it forced our nation to concede the idiocy of racial hatred, and if it brought the liberation of Americans, black and white, one day nearer.

Given our present circumstances, however, Martin's death is in danger of being banalized, flattened out by the forces of historical regression in regard to race. The only way Martin's death can be rescued from the infamy of national neglect of his challenging meaning is for us to engage in the moral act of occupying our living, doing, and thinking with the goals and purposes for which he sacrificed his life.

We must balance our quotidian quest for peace and sanity with the perennial pursuit of cosmic love and justice. Otherwise we prevent the redemptive meaning Martin believed could come with the loss of his life, and his death will become ours.

Michael Eric Dyson was a Baptist pastor and assistant master at Mathey College when this article appeared.