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Martin Luther King
& the burning of Washington
by Martin Brossman
Someone asked me if
I was in Washington DC when King was shot and
Washington DC seemed to be on fire. I remembered my experience as a
youth when King was shot very clearly. Martin Luther
King Jr. was my personal hero. My skin
is white and I was raised in Washington DC, where
almost all of my school mates skin was black. I
remember the day Martin Luther King Jr. was shot as
if it was yesterday. One of my class mates stood up
and said in rage how angry he was about the white
man killing their peaceful leader and that all white
men were rotten. I was as angry as he was and agreed
(not remembering the color of my own skin). He then
turned to me and corrected himself and said not all
white people are bad.
They let us out of
school early that day (in downtown Washington DC)
and I was walking to the bus stop. A gang of boys,
coming down the street towards me, said, “look a
Honkey, lets get him”, I looked at the gang like a
stunned deer. My friends seeing me, standing alone
across the street, ran over to me and said, “lets
go”. We ran as fast as we could to my bus stop and I
got safely on the bus. When I arrived home my
mother met me at the door, I could tell she was very
scared. She had bags packed as the door and said
“Washington is being burned, we may have to leave.”
She then stated in a very serious voice, “I want
you to understand something that this is not what
Martin Luther King Jr. stood for and black people
are not violent they are just very scared and
upset.” She was very supportive of Martin Luther
King Jr. and did not want me make a generalization
about the riots toward all African Americans. Of
course this was funny, in a way, because I was as
angry about the death as those rioting. What I did
not realize then was I had become racist against
white people.
There was another
hero of this time period that not many people know
of, Pete Green, an African American. He got on the
radio and started talking to the people who were
burning the city. Openly admitting, in what was
called jive, that he had spent time in prison, Pete
spoke to the people stating that their action did
not honor the life of Martin Luther King Jr. He
stayed on the radio repeating the same basic message
for hours. The burning ended, this man had single
handily stopped the violence & burning in Washington
through non-violent means. He was applying the words
of our hero and leader, proving that Martin Luther
King Jr's message was still alive even though he
wasn't. This had a profound effect on me that I did
not truly realize until later in life.
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