American conflict
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Tennessee 40 years ago today. We owe a great debt of gratitude in this country for his extraordinary commitment to the healing of a crippled public conscience, still on-going, and for the personal sacrifice it came to.
In the last few weeks The Baltimore Sun has been running a number of articles about the events of urban upheaval that followed King's killing. Stories, photos, & video looking back at the destruction in Baltimore and at societal & individual change that accompanied are collected here.
Also in the Sun a couple of weeks ago, one account of the very different scene that week in the state capital, Annapolis, twenty miles south of Baltimore. The article covers the first showing of a film about the consequences of the unusual friendship between Roger Moyer, mayor of Annapolis in '68, and Joseph Simms, a black man with whom Moyer had had a basketball rivalry during high school, in prison for theft in April of '68. Take a look at the film's site: Pip & Zastrow, An American Friendship.
In the last few weeks The Baltimore Sun has been running a number of articles about the events of urban upheaval that followed King's killing. Stories, photos, & video looking back at the destruction in Baltimore and at societal & individual change that accompanied are collected here.
Also in the Sun a couple of weeks ago, one account of the very different scene that week in the state capital, Annapolis, twenty miles south of Baltimore. The article covers the first showing of a film about the consequences of the unusual friendship between Roger Moyer, mayor of Annapolis in '68, and Joseph Simms, a black man with whom Moyer had had a basketball rivalry during high school, in prison for theft in April of '68. Take a look at the film's site: Pip & Zastrow, An American Friendship.Labels: people, sociopoliticoeconomicocultural
posted by paul bowman at
12:00 PM
3 Comments:
Being in Japan, I didn't even realize it was the anniversery this week until I read your blog. Since then I've seen it on a couple of other sources as well of course.
Because I learned about Dr. King in school, it always seemed like ancient history to me. It's amazing to think he died only 10 years before I was born.
bbc radio 4 has been having a 1968 season recently and to coincide with king's assassination there was a radio-documentary. plenty of other things happened in '68; the paris general strike and riots, the prague spring, etc. etc.
i wonder how memorable 2008 will be in forty years?
The whole post-war period of most intense civil-rights/anti-segregation struggle, with MLK's role in it, was treated a bit like ancient history through most of my upbringing, too — and I was born in '70. Of course, until you start getting out in the world as a teenager or young adult and confront other people as they see themselves in some alternative unfolding history, everything pre-dating your own existence seems far off, more or less irrelevant to making your own way. But I'd say, even so, that in the environment I was brought up in there was certainly a failure to convey to the next generation anything like the weight of meanings in what was, for my parents' generation & their parents', such recent experience. Social integration & general human equality seemed just established moral fact, sort of — not really a story to be told or inhabited.
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I have the impression, from things I've read or heard here & there, that the European 1968 made a sharper imprint, on the whole, than the American. (Recalling, for instance, hearing somewhere several years ago the major figures of the last German government — Schroeder, Fischer, et al. — referred to as "the '68ers." Not an expression that would've worked with any comparable players here, I think.) I wonder how much there is in looking for links between the American & the European events of the time.
... And now I've just looked up the BBC Radio 4 series you mention, where I see there's going to be something on "The Sixty-Eighters at Sixty" in August. I'll take a closer look. Thanks for mentioning it, Chris.
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