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Opinion Coastal Voices Guest Opinion: Spirit of the movement is alive today
Coastal Voices Guest Opinion: Spirit of the movement is alive today
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It is Sunday night, approaching midnight. I look out my window, down upon the courthouse I work in and beyond to a channel marker at sea. A fog horn barks across the moonlit swells, both steering the fisherman and their boats to and from the safety of the harbor, away from the rocks. I think about tomorrow’s anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther King, the greatest American of the second half of the 20th century, and the following day when Barack Obama will be inaugurated. I think of many things and people tonite, many of them ghosts. I recall growing up outside of Newark, N.J., and my father was arguing over my mother’s stated intent to take my kid sister and I to Drew University in Madison that night to see Martin Luther King speak. He had just won Time’s Man of The Year award and Mom was saying how she “wanted the kids to see him.” Hours later, Mom led us down a University path toward the gymnasium to see Dr. King. A young man, tall and sullen, was handing out pamphlets and thrust one into my mother’s hand, for which she thanked him with her charisteristic midwestern courtesy. Several steps later, after looking at the pamphlet of racist hatred disseminated by the local John Birch Society, a northern counterpart of their sheet-clad coward breathren in the South, my mother turned and walked back, politely thanked the young man and handed him back his pamphlet, telling him we didn’t have need for it. As she walked back to my sister and I, I heard a phrase for the first time, serpentine hissed, “nigger lover.” I saw a look on my mother’s face I’d never seen before, something combined of sadness, anger and resolve. She ordered me to take my sister’s hand and turned and walked slowly back. She addressed him face to face as she softly said, “I’m sorry you weren’t raised any better than that.” That night Dr. King gave what has come to be known as “The American Dream” speech. He said that “injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere” and that “we have developed a world neighborhood through science and must develop a world brotherhood through morals.” In answering questions from the floor, he noted that the Negro vote would be significant in the upcoming elections. Only later did I come to embrace the words I heard him speak that night, but the courage of one little woman, and her respect for common decency and humanity between people, was indelibly etched upon me. Four years later, I was a freshman in college in Lexington, Ky. I was standing on the steps of the library on April 4, 1968, when the word of Dr. King’s assassination at the Lorraine Motel was reported. Ignoring death threats, he had come to Memphis to lead a strike of sanitation workers, black and white. A young, local boy crowed about the event with laughter punctuated with racist epithets. The fact that the Lexington Herald Leader caught the story of the broken nose he sustained seconds later was the only thing that kept me in school — an act in direct contravention of what Dr. King stood for, which I’m ashamed of to this day. One year later, in mid-October 1969, I was sitting in the lounge of Henry Clay dormitory with my best friend, Bronson, when the radio reported millions of people were marching on Washington, D.C. to protest the Vietnam War. Nothing had to be said, given our local involvement in the anti-war movement. One hour later, four of us piled into my VW bus and drove east for D.C. Later that day, half a million of us marched in front of the White House to inform Richard Nixon of our beliefs and intent. I remember watching thousands march past a statue bearing the inscription, “What is past, is prologue.” Everyone from the Black Panthers to the American Friends Service Commitee, but especially young people from all across America, were bound by a belief that it was our country, that we could actually grab and direct the tiller off its course and that to sit on the sidelines was unacceptable. Somehow, I think that this past year witnessed the rebirth of that spirit. Three years later in 1972, I went to Oxford, Miss., and worked for George McGovern in his failed attempt to unseat Richard Nixon, who would resign in disgrace only a couple years later. I recall being on a construction site, attempting to register black voters and coming face to face with a two-by-four wielded by a young, white construction worker in the parking lot. I remember kneeling, holding my bleeding right eye and hearing the same phrase hurled at my mother 8 years earlier. To this day, I smile at the memory and a moniker I continue to wear with pride. Years passed and many miles and some bumps in the road found me in Laguna Beach. Not a few of the people I represented, and eventually I, myself, found their way to the door of Father Robert Cornellison, an Episcopal priest who ran a recovery home. A brilliant man, soft spoken and Christlike in his compassion for those afflicted with dependency or dying of AIDS, Cornellison House never turned away anyone,, and his pleas and orations to the courts on behalf of his flock were the stuff of legend in Orange County’s Harbor and South Courts. Several months ago, I received a call that “Father Bob” was dying of cancer. Although we’d kept in touch over the years since recovery and moving to Northern California, typically, he hadn’t seen fit to trouble me or others with his disease. Two weeks later, I flew back to Orange County to see my friend. His bed had been moved into his living room overlooking Blue Bird Canyon and the sea beyond. He was hooked up to a morphine pump and had little time left. We spoke of many things, and then he drifted off for a moment. I stood and looked at all of the framed pictures on his walls until one with a “Selma — City Limits” sign grabbed my eye. The picture was taken on March 9, 1965, as Martin Luther King led a march into Selma, Ala., protesting voting discrimination and the police riot there just two days earlier, which came to be known as Bloody Sunday, when John Lewis and others were severely beaten and jailed. There, caught in the grainy black and white photo, edges curled and yellowed, but capturing the courageous resolve of the marchers on the Pettus Bridge that day, locked arm in arm, were Dr. King, Ralph Abernathy, Josea Williams, and others. And there in the second row was a young white man, with the white collar and black clerical garb of his denomination, Father Robert Cornellison. I looked back at Father Bob, now awake and looking at me, as I choked out, “You were there, that day, on the bridge with them?” The pain that was wracking his body disappeared for a moment, as he bore this beatific smile and softly said, “Oh, yes.” He coughed for a bit, his body heaving as I took his hand, and he looked at me and said, “I hear that thousands of young people across the country are registering to vote for this young man, Barack Obama, is that true?” I told him it was. He squeezed my hand just a little tighter and then asked, in a voice wrapped with all the hope and belief in things good and decent that his life had been devoted to, “Do you believe that the Movement might return with them?” I told him I believed that it would. They tell me that he was dead two days later. As are my mother and Dr. King. But as I look down at the courthouse and further out to sea, I think I know better. For as long as the channel marker shines its light or the horn blows to those lost or returning home, yes, I know better. Jon Alexander is an attorney in Crescent City. |
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