An interesting question has been raised by CNN: Where were you when you learned that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot? And how did the assassination impact your life? What follows is my personal account. I invite others to make their contribution.
Robert Newby
That is a moment I will never forget. At the time I was the director of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission (MCRC) regional office in Battle Creek, Michigan. On April 4, 1968, I was in Detroit for a staff meeting of all regional directors.
After work, about 15 MCRC staff members went to a bar near the office that served the best hamburgers in the city, The Checker Bar. Over our beer and burgers we were having a jovial time. As I recall, around 7:00p this very nice white man came to our table and said, “Did you know that Martin Luther King was just assassinated?” Immediately, someone at the table attacked him by saying: “Why did you tell US that?” In his retreat, he said, meekly: “You just looked like a group that would want to know.” What he was making reference to was that we were a racially mixed group that seemed to be bonded as a group. A major feature of the Commission staff was that it modeled what a workplace SHOULD look like in 1968.
I was assigned the task of seeking validity of story. I called the city desk at the Detroit Free Press. I inquired as to whether it was true that King had been shot. What a got was very gruff and seemingly hostile voice on the other end of the phone that responded with just two words: “He’s dead!!!” I then returned to the table to inform my co-workers the sad news. Stunned as we were we then left the bar in disbelief.
My first stop was a co-worker's apartment. Her husband who was a school teacher in Detroit at the time repeatedly raised with me: “What you gonna do, Newby?” We were all dumbfounded.
Unlike other cities, Detroit did not burn that night. Detroit had experienced its trauma the summer before. In fact just a few days before that fateful day, March 28, 1968, the Kerner Commission had released its report on that long hot summer in which about the Detroit rebellion and the over 130 cities that had their own burnings. The Report concluded that "the nation is moving toward two societies black, white separate and unequal."
In Battle Creek, on that Monday following the assassination of King, the black students at the junior high school decided to wear black arm bands to mourn the tragedy. In his infinite wisdom, the principal of the school suspended 14 black students stating that the arm bands was an act of inciting to riot. The black community then demanded his firing and refused to take no for an answer. The School Board held a hearing and removed the principal. Their victory resulted in an accusation by the School Boards that I was complicitous in the community’s demand. I was transferred to the Detroit office with an eye toward a career change.
I owe my graduate education to the sacrifice of King and about 8 weeks later, the assassination of Robert Kennedy. These national traumas resulted in a fundamental change in race relations in America. From these crises, opportunities opened up that many of African Americans were able to take advantage of. The first major initiative was Harvard’s School of Education which offered its Kennedy-King fellowships for graduate education. While I did not get into Harvard in its first cohort, I was later accepted into a graduate program at Brandies but decided to take advantage of a Ford Fellowship at Stanford. To be sure, this national crisis of the assassinations of King and Kennedy opened what Andrew Billingsley had referred to as opposed to “doors” but “screens” of opportunity.
