Howard Dodson

The Crushing Tragedies of 1968

Everything came crashing down in 1968. April of 1968 to be exact. I had been on the high of highs since 1964. Took my first airplane ride that year.  Flew from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Los Angeles, California.  Flew from 4° temperatures and snow in Philly to lovely LA and 75°.  Hating the cold as I did, I swore that I’d never live in cold weather again.

Spent three months at UCLA and a month in Puerto Rico before being shipped off to Ecuador, where I would spend two years of the most rewarding and transformative experiences of my life as a Peace Corps volunteer. New worlds, new people, new societies, new languages, new me! I had an incredibly successful tenure as a volunteer, organizing credit unions throughout coastal Ecuador. Organized 15. Twelve were still operating when I last checked a few years ago – 40 years later!!

I returned to Peace Corps headquarters in Washington in D.C. in 1966 and became one of the best Peace Corps recruiters in history.  Promoted to Director of Minority and Specialized Recruiting and Deputy Director of Peace Corps Recruiting nationally, I was at the top of my game. I had been offered jobs overseas with the Peace Corps and the USIA. My future was at its brightest. And then it happened on that memorable day on April 4, 1968. They killed Martin Luther King, Jr. and turned my life upside down.

I was running a recruiting campaign for Peace Corps in Philadelphia when I heard that King had been shot and killed. I took the first train smoking back to D.C. the next morning.

I made my way to Peace Corps Washington headquarters from Union Station. The fires and gunshots had already started and the city was in a total state of panic. The Peace Corps office was located at Connecticut and H Streets, two blocks from the White House and three blocks from “K” Street. “K” Street, a major thoroughfare and route to Virginia, had turned into a giant parking lot. Cars were parked-on the street, on the sidewalks, in the medians-engines running, doors open, passengers gone-gone walking-headed out of Washington. Smoke was seen at a distance in all directions. The crackle of gunfire, heard within earshot of the White House.

Within less than twenty-four hours, the U.S. military had occupied “Chocolate City.”  “Peacekeepers” with tanks and automatic rifles were stationed at checkpoints around the city- peacekeepers with weapons of war in the nation’s capital, trying to contain the rage and put out the fires ignited by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man of peace.

I managed to make my way through the roadblocks and spend the night with my roommate and some friends in Maryland, just across the D.C. border. When I returned the following morning, the occupational force was at full strength. The fires were still burning and the guns were still crackling in random rhythms against the silence.

Wanted to help. Help in any way I could. Needed to do something to break the funk-to fill the void, the emptiness.  Needed to help make peace.

Made my way to a church that had been set up as a relief headquarters.  Emergency calls for food, clothing and sometimes medical care were being directed there. I needed to help make peace-to be of service. I volunteered again and took an assignment in the city.

Virtually everyone at the Church was white. The calls for help were coming from the black areas of the city where the fires were still smoldering and where gunshots still crackled. Someone was needed to make deliveries. I either volunteered or was drafted to run the military roadblocks and deliver food, clothing or other goods to those in need who had called. I made several runs in the white truck with the Red Cross sign on both sides.  I was stopped at several checkpoints by young, deathly scared, white National Guardsmen with weapons of war who thought I was a looter.

I made my way through the occupation and the funeral-King’s funeral-before I realized how deeply I had fallen-how much I had crashed. Trying to dig myself out, I started working on the Poor People’s Campaign and promised to join the Bobby Kennedy campaign as soon as I had finished a Peace Corps training project. The rains came and stymied the Poor Peoples Campaign. Another assassin’s bullet killed Bobby, and for all intents and purposes, my season of hope ended.

I was crushed by the accumulation of tragedies in 1968. The assassination of King, and the racial conflagration that followed it; the dashed hopes of the Poor People’s Campaign; the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and the prospects of a Nixon Presidency all combined to plunge me into a deeper state of depression. At first I ran- took a flight to Hawaii to put some distance between me and the Kennedy assassination in June. A week or so on the beaches of Hawaii didn’t pull me out. I returned to Washington later in the month, still searching for a way out.

A chance encounter with a new television series started me on the path to recovery. In response to the King assassination and the turmoil that followed, CBS television sponsored a series of 120 half-hour programs on black history. Vincent Harding, a Columbia University Ph.D. history professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, Ga. and the memorable John Henrick Clarke, Harlem’s dean of lay historians of the black experience, co-produced the “Black Heritage” television series.  Even though it aired at ungodly hours in the morning (5 and 6 a.m.), I made it my business to watch every episode I could. Something about this plunge into the black past salved my psychic and spiritual wounds. I craved more.

I had been collecting copies of paperback books on black history since I started recruiting for Peace Corps in 1966. Every campus I went to, I made visits to the campus bookstores a must. Paperback books were still relatively new and cheap, especially if they were used.  I gobbled them up-books about black folk that I hadn’t known existed during my undergraduate and masters level studies. By 1968, I had a pretty good collection-most of them unread.

The television series convinced me that I might be able to find my sanity in our historic past if I immersed myself in these books. I shipped them off to Puerto Rico-over twenty boxes of them-and took off for San Juan. Spent a couple of months there and moved to the mountains in Mayaguez on the western side of the island-searching for my sanity, searching for meaning and renewed purpose in life, searching in the black past.

My unquenched quest in Puerto Rico led me to a new Ph.D. program in the History of Black People and Race Relations at the University of California at Berkeley. A “year abroad” in Atlanta, Georgia at the Institute of the Black World (in 1970-1971) transformed my sanity search into a sense of purpose and a vocation. My search for purpose and meaning of the traumas of 1968 put me on the path that would prepare me for my life’s work as Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Howard Dodson, Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library since 1984, is a specialist in African-American history as well as a noted lecturer and consultant.  His publications include Jubilee: The Emergence of African American Culture (National Geographic Press, 2002), In Motion: The African American Migration Experience (National Geographic Press, 2004) and Becoming American: The African American Journey (Sterling Publishing, Inc., 2009).

Learn more about the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library.

Reverend Dr. Susan Newman

The Day the Dream Died

Thursday, April 4, 1968, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. I was in the fifth grade at Adams Elementary School in Washington, D.C. The teachers began crying and screaming as they huddled together in the hallway, holding each other. We were told that Dr. King had been shot and we were sent home early.

As night fell and news of Dr. King’s death came across the radio and television, all of the clothing stores in black neighborhoods were in flames. Angry crowds of people ran up and down the streets, breaking windows of businesses-looting and running off with whatever they could carry. Black owners of barbershops, liquor stores, and other businesses spray painted “Soul Brother” on the front of their doors so the angry mobs would not steal and destroy their life’s investments.

President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the National Guard to keep peace and order in the streets. The city was under curfew. No one could be outside of their homes between 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.  This was the first time I ever remember seeing my father cry, as he and my mother sat with us on the sofa, listening to the news in tragic disbelief. Political and racial tensions in this majority black city were high. Washington was changing, and so was I.

A significant impression was made upon my heart during those days of grief, as people searched for the meaning of this tragedy. This man did something so wonderful, so meaningful with his life that everyone in the world seemed to be moved by his death.

During the days approaching his funeral, newscasters kept playing a clip from a speech Dr. King delivered the night before his assassination. He had gone to Memphis, Tennessee to support African-American sanitation workers who’d been on strike protesting unequal wages and working conditions. The look in Dr. King’s eyes, and the conviction in his voice stayed with me from that day on when he said:

“I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land! And so I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

There was something birthed into my spirit that shaped my calling into ministry-do something that I felt so passionately about, that I was willing to live unafraid of dying.  And, thanks in large part to the unforgettable Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I am.

The Reverend Dr. Susan Newman has had a 33-year career as a pastor, a community advocate, a teacher, a chaplain, and author. She is the President of Sincerely Susan Ministries, and is an Adjunct Minister of Peoples Congregational United Church of Christ, Washington, DC. She is an inspirational, motivating and humorous speaker whose soul-stirring, thought-provoking insights on healthy relationships from a spiritual perspective have garnered nationwide attention and acclaim. Hailed by Ebony Magazine as one of the Top Black Women Preachers in America, She has been called “down-to-earth,” powerful,” “life-changing,” and “a reality check for the church.”

Learn more about Dr. Newman.

Esther Iverem

‘Bewitched’ and Bare Feet: Philadelphia Memories in Prime Time

Growing up in Philadelphia during 1968, most of my world revolved around attending Mrs. Johnson’s second-grade class at Harrison Elementary School, traveling on Sundays to my Uncle Jimmy’s church in South Jersey, riding my bike in the neighborhood and watching TV-lots of TV. So it figures that news of the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King came to me while I was watching “Bewitched.”

Amid what must have been another episode about the modern-day witch Samantha and her doofus husband Darren, I remember a ribbon scrolling at the bottom of the screen that said something like, “THE REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING HAS BEEN SHOT AND KILLED IN MEMPHIS…” I was sitting with my older sister Elaine and I remember that we immediately jumped up and told our parents. We were ruling the TV and we had gotten the word first.

Though I was only eight years old, I was very aware that King’s death pertained to me and my blackness. I realize now that I was a sensitive child and in my young mind, racism (usually discussed in terms of “white people”) and injustice loomed large as an issue that adults talked about with knowledge and passion in homes, bars, sometimes  at church and on WDAS (AM and FM), one of two local black radio stations.

I lived in a somewhat racially-charged environment, with Frank Rizzo, the city’s police chief, always locked in controversy about the brutality of white officers in the black community. Philadelphia is a Northern city but, at that time, there were deep divisions between the city’s black community and some of its white, working class ethnic enclaves. (Two years after King’s death, not far from my home, Rizzo’s officers would conduct the infamous strip search of members of the Black Panther Party, large photos of which I saw in The Philadelphia Daily News delivered to our house.

And I had my own sense of the importance of King as a sort of royal man who was on TV speaking on these race issues of the day. I thought of him like an actual king.  He was pointed to as an example of the importance of education, reading well and speaking well.  But he was also a representative of very proper, middle class Negroes, which we were not. I remember my mother taking exception to one of his speeches we heard on the radio, when he seemed to mock preachers who were perhaps less eloquent than him and more filled with spirit in their delivery. She took his comments as a slap against more charismatic churches and denominations such as hers.

Much of what I understood about King, his death and his legacy came though the news and TV. But one lasting personal experience I will never forget after King’s death is approaching my elementary school and seeing, about a block away, a massive march of humanity spilling down the wide Girard Avenue. I ran toward it and watched from the sidewalk. My memory is that someone told me that the march was related to the Poor People’s March that occurred after King’s death, or that it was a march in remembrance of King. I remember being struck by the presence of so many white people in the March; some people were walking in their bare feet. I knew something had shifted in the world. I knew that something had changed.

Esther Iverem is a journalist and author whose most recent book is We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006 (Thunder’s Mouth Press/De Capo). A former staff writer for several newspapers, including The Washington Post and New York Newsday, she is founder of SeeingBlack.com, a Web site for black critical voices on arts, media and politics. Iverem is a member of both the Alliance of Women Film Journalists and the Washington Area Film Critics Association. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship, a National Arts Journalism Fellowship and an artist’s fellowship from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She is also the author of two books of poems.

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