by Brian Thomas

One of my earliest memories of the Civil Rights Movement I had as a child, or being in the midst of Black History, or as I like to call it, “American History,” was seeing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. dead in repose. Dr. King lay in his casket at the Black-owned R.S. Lewis & Sons Funeral Home in Memphis the day after he was assassinated. That image of the impressively vibrant, sonorous, and charismatic leader laying still as if asleep was incomprehensible.

Back in 1968, I starkly remember turning six-years-old just a few weeks before King’s death. It was a pretty big birthday, but not as big as turning five the year before, which came with a special cake -- yellow cake with hints of lemon and deep, rich chocolate frosting made by the ‘Cake Lady’ Mrs. Jacks. We as a family rationed those moments throughout the year because we had to, just like Dr. King’s family waited in photographs for his big funeral; there weren't always enough celebrations to go around in our family, not much to commemorate.

The juxtaposition of being a witness of history and the mundaneness of life like a child’s birthday cake is what celebrating Black History Month is all about to me. Expecting some leavening of the tensions of what the former Stanford Dean, memoir writer, and author of Real Americans, Julie Lythcott-Haims, calls one of the most difficult ‘self-chosen’ circumstances to be born into–being Black in America. 

Perhaps that is why some people celebrate this one month out of the year, celebrating our difficult circumstance to be born into, which serves to remind ourselves and others that we do in fact exist. That we do matter, even when indications abound that we don’t. 

I hold very complicated feelings about Black History Month, if you couldn’t tell.

When I return to my six-year-old self, Dr. King’s death was unlike any other that I had experienced–before or since. Most importantly, King’s death was different because it happened at a time when I and others my age could feel and think and process our reality. After all, that is what being human is all about, living one’s life and then telling others about it or having others tell about it. 

According to newspaper accounts in 2018 commemorating the 50 years since Dr. King’s Death in 1968, the Memphis funeral owner Robert Stevenson Lewis had spoken to Dr. King the day before he was shot and killed. Lewis offered Dr. King one of his limousines to use while he was in Memphis. Lewis wanted things to be just a little easier for King while he was in Memphis protesting in support of the city’s sanitation workers who carried signs that said, “I AM A MAN.” 

As you might recall from your history books, Dr. King was making a comeback from the brutalizing he was taking in the mainstream press and the distancing he was getting from members and close associates in the Black community due to King coming out against the War in Vietnam. Dr. King had also launched an effort for a guaranteed living wage with a new poor people’s march on Washington that would be like the first poor people’s march in 1963 where King gave his much remembered and often quoted, “I Have a Dream” speech. But it was Dr. King’s stance against the War in Vietnam that gave him a negative approval rating of 75% from all Americans. Unfortunately, depending on your own view of history, the “Dream” speech was what pinned Dr. King to his place in history, less like all of the other greats, but more like a butterfly in a collector’s curio cabinet. 

Less than 24-hours after their first encounter of R.S. Lewis’ offer to take Dr. King around in a limo in style, Lewis and his brother Clarence E. Lewis prepared the great Civil Rights leader’s reconstructed face for a public viewing in front of thousands of mourners who wanted to see for themselves–like Emmett Till’s open casket thirteen years before. 

On the day after King’s murder, Memphians began lining up for blocks and blocks, snaking their way through the streets of their fair city so that they could get a better view of the slain leader whose face had been patched back together to “look normal” because the bullet had blown a whole through his chin and neck. 

That’s what I saw on television as a newly turned six year old–the beautifully prepared and reconstructed face of an icon, the calm and placid demeanor of a man gone home to rest, his black suit crisply pressed, and the starched white shirt that gleamed on the television - in black and white - on April 5th, or the day after. There were no visible signs of his death as was the case with Till.

People came from all over to view King’s body, which was the precursor of the grand funeral that would be held days later in Dr. King’s hometown of Atlanta, GA. Those of us who watched in black and white felt the dispossession that Dr. King also first spoke about thirteen years earlier in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955.

I am no longer six but nearly ten times six come the middle of next month. I majored in history at Yale. I suspect King’s assassination provoked the conscience of and hastened the actions of those who stood in the way of progress to get me into college.

I don’t go out of my way to celebrate Black History Month, which sprang from Carter G. Woodson’s Negro History Week, because to segregate the history of Black people like it is “separate but equal,” rankles. I am perturbed by the four hundred years of mental pictures and thoughts of loss, hardness, and lynchings that over-power those images, ideas, and riotous acts of joy, progress, and redemption. I am a realist, too, understanding that Black boys and girls and grandmothers and everybody else need time - perhaps a month - to focus their energy and attention on the contributions that people who were once considered three-fifths of a human are indeed whole folks, even as we continue to work on the psychic fragmentations of and within our very souls.

My six-year old mind does perseverate on the features of Dr. King. Often. My older brain fills in the picture, fixing my own face for the history that is still to come year round. 

—-----

Brian Thomas, lives in Andover, New Hampshire and is the Head of School at Proctor Academy