Reuben, thank you for sharing your story.

Hey, welcome to my life, Anon 7:14 p.m. Every time I visit this board, I’m rattled by some of the racist statements. At first I thought, am I the only black reader? Could it be true that my neighbors are hiding some of these feelings under the surface? It made me absolutely depressed to visit here and see how many perfectly reasonable posts would eventually devolve into racial stereotyping.

And then I realized that racism by white people was the least of my worries; black people are more than willing to talk about all those OTHER animalistic black people (who are, of course, not them.) Black people are saying some of the worst things about their fellow humans — but of course, it’s “okay” for black people to say these things, because they’re black too.

Not.

Maybe all the posts have had the unintendend, but appropriate, effect: it allows us to reflect, on this day, how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go.

Anyway: Reuben, beautiful post. Thank you.

’cause that would be so cool.

Guiness is a jackass, no question, unable to see past their navel they truly can’t fathom that TIMES HAVE CHANGED and that currently riots are really bad, but back then the culture was so wildly different that African-American people, even in DC, literally were told to sit down and shut up so many times every day and they had virtually no outlet for anything (imagine three all-white TV news teams on at 11pm with one reporter on each channel covering a “Negro” story each day. And even then it wasn’t news, it was just something about poverty. If you weren’t a criminal or in sports you weren’t on TV. Imagine all-white top 40 radio like WPGC. I’ve got tapes of DC pop radio in the 60s and there is not soul on the tapes. One has the Beatles followed by Frank Sinatra. Is that how you imagine rock and roll radio? That’s how it was in real life.

My mother and her friends always told the story that after the 1963 MLK speech that no taxi would take them back to Connecticut Avenue until they took all the buttons off their coats and put head scarves on, because EVERYONE IN DC HATED BLACK PEOPLE. And a white person who went to the I Have a Dream speech was not getting a ride home.

My father’s secretary used to do this- when she was invited to lunch, she would have to wear an African scarf and speak French when walking into a restaurant otherwise the DC lunch counters would NOT SERVE AN INTERRACIAL OFFICE GROUP! And my father didn’t move here until 1963, well into the 60s.

Now, Stoakely Carmichel, the guy who started the riots, he wasn’t a nice man. He was an outsider who burnt down someone else’s city. But that doesn’t mean that 40 years later we can dismiss

Watch a movie called Revolution ’67 about the Newark riots of 1967 to get a really good understanding of what life was actually like under Jim Crow fascism. It’s so different from today it’s scarcely to be believed!

Thank you so much for sharing your personal story of that day. Martin Luther King affected so many of us. I am grateful he was here for the time we had him and that many of us are still affected by his mission and message. Because of him a young country girl from southern Missouri learned about respect and peace. The response to his death that day, in my mind, is that of soul rending grief – we all express that in different ways.