A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.
Three days in spring that I’ll never forget began on the evening of 31 March 1968. Then college students on spring break, we were driving west, nearing Duluth-Superior after a week spent campaigning for Eugene McCarthy in Wisconsin, listening to President Johnson’s speech on our Ford’s radio. Without warning, Johnson announced he would not seek re-election. Somehow I kept the car on the road as we cheered the news.
Two days later, McCarthy won the Winconsin primary. Two days after that, on 4 April, James Earl Ray murdered Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, TN. Race riots followed, dishonoring King’s practice of nonviolent civil disobedience. Burning and looting paralyzed several major cities including Washington, D.C., where flames were visible from the White House (see Clay Risen’s A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination).
That was 48 years ago. To me, those events remain as vivid as they were on the days they occurred. But today, no one under 60 remembers those times as current events. For Black Lives Matter’s generation, they’re stories in films and history books, the stuff of lectures and concerts, recollections of aging parents and relatives, even proof that the baby boomers and greatest generation despoiled paradise, proving their unfitness to lead.
I now think of the riots following King’s murder as the events that put Richard Nixon in the White House. Safety first is humankind’s most powerful instinct: extinguish the fires, incarcerate the rioters, beef up the police force, then we can discuss reform. Nixon cleverly exploited the fears generated by the riots. James Earl Ray accomplished more than he may have realized or intended.
If the Ferguson, MO, and Baltimore, MD, riots become an issue in this year’s election, only Republicans will benefit.
Meeting note. Love Lives Here in the Flathead Valley’s annual Martin Luther King event, An Experiment in Love: Is Nonviolence the Answer?, begins at 1930 on Tuesday, 19 January, in the Flathead High School Auditorium. It’s worth attending.