The March on Washington 60 years ago...8/28/63
 

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Charlton Heston, James Baldwin, Marlon Brando & Harry Belafonte at The March On Washington

Reckon what caused Chuck to move from this to his exalted membership in a racist cult?

Right now, I'm listening to the audiobook "King: A Life," the recent released and definitive biography of MLK by Jonathan Eig. Really good (the narrator is truly excellent). While I superficially knew all the important events in the civil rights struggle covered in the book, I didn't fully grasp how they all fit together. Highly recommended.

His formative years in the struggle in Montgomery and Birmingham were quite something. Bombings, violence, imprisonment and indignities galore, but he kept on keepin' on. A remarkable man.

To this day, it's impossible to stand on the top step of the Lincoln Memorial (which I do with some frequency) without thinking of his "I Have a Dream Speech." He first touched on the theme (and used the memorable words) of this speech a few months earlier in Detroit and didn't have them included in the original draft of the speech that he prepared late the night before. The most memorable passages came at the end of the speech after a long pause and were not planned, but ad-libbed and yet became among the most memorable pieces of oratory in American history.

It's a long story...I may have already posted already but here it is again ...the blonde was an elementary school teacher on Chicago's west side in 1968. She was 22 years old. Just before lunch on April 5th the Chicago rioting broke out. It took a coupe of hours before instructions came down that school was to be evacuated. She hopped into our Opel Kadett, and the clutch cable snapped just a block from the school, as she was about to turn on to the entrance ramp to the Eisenhower Expy. Right in front of a little service station. Three old black fellas (probably the age I am now) saw her standing terrified next to the car. They came over, pushed the car into the station and hid her in the restroom until one of her colleagues, one of the last out of the school, picked her up. This was right in the middle of the worst of it, buldings already on fire, people being pulled out of their cars and assaulted, gunfire...these guys may very well have saved her life. And they apologized for what was going on in their neighborhood and for how terrified she was. She said they were absolutely dismayed at what was happening all around them. Just incredible as their neighborhood was being decimated. They installed a new cable, and a few days later when we went to pick up the car they refused to take any money. I asked to use the restroom and left a couple of 20's on the desk, and we took off. The national guard was still at every exit and entrance up and down I-290 there on the west side.

Just our little piece of history from the days after Dr. King was shot.