Maybe it’s me, but certain events are frozen in my memory, and I remember them as though it was yesterday.
As I recall, I was reading my brand new The Sporting News, the weekly sports newspaper that we used to read before ESPN or the internet. My parents had given me a birthday subscription, and I loved rushing to the mailbox to consume every bit of information.
At I read all of the columns, I asked myself the classic pre-season questions: would Yaz and the 1967 Miracle Red Sox repeat?
Are the Cardinals now a dynasty?
After all, St. Louis had won the World Series in 1964 and 1967 and had Bob Gibson on top of their rotation.
And then the phone rang. It was my school buddy Harvey with the news that Dr. Martin Luther King had been shot in Memphis.
Then President Johnson spoke to the nation! By a crazy coincidence, he had just announced days before that he would not be running for re-election in 1968.
Then all hell broke loose. Cities were burning from coast to coast. I shared the frustration about Dr. King’s assassination but did not understand what looting businesses had to do with the shooting. My guess is that all of the chaos boosted Governor Wallace’s campaign, or the “law and order” man that election.
Over the last years, we’ve created a national holiday to remember Dr. King, and his words are heard over and over again.
Nevertheless, I’ve asked myself a simple question: what would Dr. King say of the state of black America today? the collapse of the black family? the black on-black crime? the terrible black Democrat leadership that runs cities like Baltimore and Chicago? the dependence on government programs?
We will never know, but I’ll submit that Dr. King would have mixed emotions. Yes, lots of progress here and there, but too many problems everywhere.
I can’t believe Dr. King would be very happy looking at the state of black America today. I’m sure he’d be reminding the “identity politics” Democrats to judge people on their character, not the color of their skin.
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