A Meditation on the Death of Martin Luther King

Fifty years ago today I was in 8th grade. I was living in Los Angeles. No that’s not right. I was living in Beverly Hills. My father was a writer, my mom had been an actress but was taking time off to raise two kids.

My parents were liberals—moral, funny, kind. They believed in equal rights for everyone. They tried to impart their worldview to my brother and me. They were successful in that I am told when I was 3 years old I said when I grow up I'm going to make you both happy and marry a black man.

I don’t remember saying that but I do remember thinking racism made no sense.

I remember the Watts Riots. I remember the March on Washington. I remember reading the autobiography of Malcolm X and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. And I remember the day that Martin Luther King was assassinated. Not murdered, not killed—assassinated.

But as I said, I grew up in Beverly Hills, so back then friends of color were few and far between. The day Martin Luther King was gunned down on the balcony of a Memphis motel I had walked home from school and found Nellie Finlay crying in our kitchen.

Nellie Finlay, the woman who had worked for my family once a week, cleaning our house for the past four years.

Nellie Finlay, with whom I shared a love of The Supremes, who felt that Diana Ross should put on a little weight and would worry about her being too thin.

Nellie Finlay, who today if I were 13 I would call Mrs. Finlay but back then I called Nellie because that’s the way things were in 1968. Because she worked for my parents and she was African-American and even liberal white folk bungled the ball on that one—letting their teenage children call an adult by their first name—if the adult was a cleaning lady, as we used to say back in the day. If the adult was Black.

I remember Nellie standing in our kitchen, all alone. My parents were out. My brother was out. The radio was on but I couldn’t make out what the newscaster was saying. I said, “Nellie what’s wrong?” I thought maybe something had happened to her husband or her son. She said, "Dr. King is dead.”

And I said, “What?” And I said, “No.” And she said, “Yes, someone shot him.”

I remember standing there, alone in the kitchen, with her. And then we were holding each other. Like magnets pulled together by grief. We were crying, our arms around each other.

And there was nothing I could say, and I knew it. And there was nothing I could do, and I knew that too. So I just held on to her for as long as I could. And then I said, do you want to go home now? And she said, not just yet. And we didn’t say much after that. I stayed with her though, and we folded the laundry together and I worked with her, for her. And then after a while she said, I think I’ll go home now. And I said, “I’m sorry.”

And two months later we were crying again, this time because Robert Kennedy had been shot. Killed. Assassinated.

And Kennedy’s death seemed to be the end of something, but Dr. King’s death seemed like midnight followed by the dawn of something unstoppable. And though his death will never make sense, will never be OK, it was the beginning of his legacy that continues today. The inevitable tide of equality for all.

And so, fellow white people, wherever you are today, take a moment to remember Dr. King. We’ve come a long way since 1968 but we still have a long way to go.