NOT FIT FOR A KING

Today the worrisome winds of 1968 are once again blowing cold over our nation ...

You had to be alive in 1968 to believe it even happened.

I was a sandy-haired lad growing up in a Northern New Jersey suburb at the time, comfortably tucked into a commuter neighborhood where the uneven sidewalks got all the traffic and led to the train stations, stores, schools and churches.

I attended Evergreen Elementary School, and lived on Cedar Brook Road. And if that sounds idyllic that’s because it was, even if you could occasionally feel the bite of an unnerving breeze that was blowing across America at the time.

Evergreen School was predominantly Black, but since my sample size of life could fill a shot glass, I figured that was pretty normal in America. I did find it confusing that all the TV shows I was watching like Leave it to Beaver, The Brady Bunch, and Mayberry RFD never featured anybody that looked like the kids I went to school with.

While I didn't quite get that, I wasn’t doing a lot of deep thinking about life back then, just living it. I figured my country was a diverse place, where the white people did all the TV shows, and the people like us did all the regular living.

Besides, every day those sidewalks opened a path to new possibilities and adventures, and except for the homework that tried to slow me down, I raced along at a happy clip.

Still, something was becoming increasingly wrong in my classrooms in 1968, and that unnerving breeze was suddenly blowing in something that smelled like danger. Tired, suddenly troubled kids were getting agitated, and teachers were spending more time fretting about the worrisome things happening around us than they were teaching about them.

One day, my friend, Curtis, got into it with my teacher Miss Plachette. Whatever she asked Curtis to do that morning, the answer was a decided, no. I wasn't sure why Curtis, who was Black, was so damn mad that day, but 57 years later, I’ve never forgotten what happened.

By the time Miss Plachette became thoroughly frustrated with Curtis’s angry disregard, she announced she was calling the principal to deal with it all. That’s when Curtis promptly got up from his desk, walked to the window, opened it, and jumped out.

My classroom was on the second floor …

Now all of us ran to the window, and were not only relieved to find that Curtis had somehow survived the jump, but was now tearing across the playground leaving a trail of dust and Evergreen School behind him.

To this day I don’t how Curtis survived that fall, but as a man who has evolved toward considering things, I have no doubt something had broken in Curtis’s life long before he jumped.

I never saw him again, but I have always hoped Curtis was able to outrun his troubles.

Curtis’s exit coincided with the racial riots that had been brewing across America and had now arrived in my idyllic town of Plainfield, New Jersey.

That's when 1968 began its long, slow burn.

By now my parents had caught my teachers’ fret, and my mom in particular was flashing regular signs of worry. My mother was a tall, strong woman. She was a righteous, hardcore liberal, who wore her heart on her sleeve. Soon her worry became despair when I awoke one spring morning to find her sobbing in the kitchen.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed the night before. I knew of King, but my mother’s watery eyes told me I could never know enough about this great man.

King’s shooting started the great unraveling.

Just two months later, the only guy who from my limited view seemed capable of quieting everything down was also shot dead, because apparently that was how the evil people in my country extinguished the good. Only five years earlier, Robert Kennedy’s brother, John, had also been taken out by a bad man with a gun.

In 1968, student protests had erupted over the Vietnam War, where thousands of kids not much older than me were returning home in body bags. There were now more than a half-million young men fighting in that damn war, and it’s impossible to imagine that even one person thought at the time it would end well.

By the fall, those evil winds had blown in all kinds of hell across America, and it was hard to hide from even in my pristine neighborhood on Cedar Brook Road. As the fires closed in, my mom and dad formulated an escape plan.

That terrible autumn a terrible man became our new president. Richard Nixon was a dishonest phony who was elected for many of the same reasons another once-defeated Republican was just two months ago.

The only differences between the two lousy men I can see is that one at least recognized all the trouble we were in, while the other is doing everything he can to cause it.

So today’s another very sad day in America, and I have lived long enough to tell you with certainty that we’ve been to a place like this before.

If you are asking me what I most remember from 1968, it was the killing of King, and the good and bad that followed.

The good flashed hope when thousands of people in my town of all colors and creeds put aside their differences and assembled at the approximate center of Plainfield, the hulking Crescent Avenue Presbyterian Church, and marched hand in hand through our simmering city celebrating the life of a true King.

We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome, someday

Oh, deep in my heart
I know that I do believe
We shall overcome, someday …

The bad was everything else that followed in the wake of Dr. King’s death culminating with Nixon’s impeachment six years later, and the end of his narcissistic thrashing of America.

That’s a far different legacy than King, who by words, spirit and his audacity of hope, lit a flame for good that burns as hot and bright as any other American’s in the history of this confounding nation.

I will spend the day thinking about him, and people like Curtis. I will consider how far we’ve come, and how damn far we have left to go. I will do my best to ignore the onerous breeze gusting in from Washington, because I know through experience it portends nothing but plenty of hurt and sorrow …

It has never been more important to stay together, lift our heads up, and defiantly walk those sidewalks toward hope.

It’s what Dr. King would have wanted.

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.)