A half century has passed since Civil Rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, as he stood on a third-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.
As community leaders reflect on the personal impact of King’s legacy, many are still left with questions about perceptions of ongoing hatred and injustice today.
Black Lives Matter Gary draws inspiration from the era of King’s Poor Peoples’ Campaign, according to its co-organizer Lorrell Kilpatrick.
“We take on a lot of the issues that King talked about then, that are (currently) being dealt with in Gary and in Northwest Indiana: Underemployment, sub-par education, food deserts, low or no public works, the alarmingly few amounts of public school options that are available.,” she said. “A lot of these services that were supposed to be automatic, are not. The people who suffer the most are the poor and working class populations.”
In April 1968, just before his death, King was preparing for another important March in Washington on behalf of the Poor People’s Campaign. His original March on Washington in 1963 is where he gave the “I Have a Dream” speech, a thunderclap for the Civil Rights movement.
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“The Poor People’s Campaign is where Martin Luther King Jr., got into peoples’ lives — employment, wage equity, unionization, the right to strike without being penalized or brutalized,” said Kilpatrick who said she thinks the Poor Peoples movement is making a resurgence.
King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, ultimately led the Poor Peoples March on Mother’s Day, Sunday, May 12, 1968.
For Gary Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson, it was King’s role as a young husband and father, that struck her strongly when she learned of his death. King, who was 39 when he died, had four children, Yolanda, Martin, Dexter and Bernice.
“I was 8 — (an age when) you know death exists — but, I had not lost anyone who was close to me,” said Freeman-Wilson. “What did strike me — when they held his funeral — was to see his children, especially Bernice King. Her daddy had died and that struck me because I was a little girl who thought the sun rose and set on my daddy. How would I feel if that happened to my dad?”
Freeman-Wilson would grow up to become a judge, Indiana Attorney General under Gov. Frank O’Bannon and Deputy CEO and General Counsel to the Democratic National Convention before being elected the first female mayor of Gary.
“This is probably the first time in over five decades since he passed that I worry we are not making progress in terms of how we communicate and how we relate to each other,” Freeman-Wilson said. “It has caused me to reexamine why.
“When we corrected wrongs done, it was through litigation and different legislation, and I don’t know that we ever got to the core that certain folks thought they were superior to others or why people thought it was OK to treat people like they are not human beings. What is it that allows us to behave in a way that folks are less than human beings and what role does race play in that?”
Her thoughts on litigated and legislated corrections of wrongs done, echoed a comment made by King during his visit to Gary in 1959, following the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott. The 30-year-old minister talked about integration and defined it as “intergroup and interpersonal living which is accepted by all because it is right and natural and not because it is the law,” according to a Post-Tribune story from April 23, 1959. During the visit, Gary Mayor George Chacharis gave King a key to the city.
The young minister returned to Gary in June 1962 to speak at the Citywide Freedom Rally, an event sponsored by the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance at the Memorial Auditorium. More than 1,500 came to hear him speak. He told the crowd that lynching in the South had almost been erased, but other injustices — just as bad — were happening. Those included bombings of homes, schools and churches as well as unfair voters’ registration practices and the lack of attention given to eliminate the causes of segregation.
King visited Gary again in 1966 when he spoke to 275 clergymen of various faiths at St. John the Baptist Church, 2457 Massachusetts St. The pastor, the Rev. Julius James, was a classmate and longtime friend of King’s from Morehouse College. At the event, King was introduced by Bishop Andrew Grutka of the Gary Roman Catholic Diocese as a “man who is desperately trying to make us all good neighbors.”
King called on the group to support a major freedom rally — “a bi-racial nonviolent assault on the problems of second class citizenship” — to take place in Soldier Field in Chicago and told the group that Gary and Chicago are interrelated because residents live in one city and work in the other, according to a July 8, 1966 story in the Post-Tribune.
Valparaiso Councilman Robert Cotton, D-2nd, was 10 and living in Chicago when King was assassinated. He said he recalls how profoundly sad he was when it happened. He remembers that it was sad and tragic to walk down Chicago streets and see how much damage was done during the riots there.
The following year, his family moved to Valparaiso.
“There has obviously been noteworthy progress, not nearly enough, and perhaps just enough to create misconception the struggle is over,” said Cotton.
Nancy Coltun Webster is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.