The recent high school massacre in Florida has made us witnesses to the hairpin turns that a young person's life can take after a brush with tragedy or death itself.
The senses are heightened. Memories pile into the file stored deep in the brain that’s marked “Do Not Delete.” Life trajectories are altered.
Skeptics exist, of course, but the data overwhelm. We are our experiences. If you doubt it, ask one of your older friends where he or she was on April 4, 1968.
***
On the day Martin Luther King Jr. was killed 50 years ago, Shirley Clarke was a 22-year-old, soon-to-be graduate of Howard University, making her first visit to Atlanta.
She’d completed her coursework, and grad school lay ahead. To fill the gap, she’d taken a low-level job in D.C. compiling statistics for the U.S. Labor Department. She’d never been south of Washington, so she decided to precede a work trip to a textile mill in North Carolina with a quick jaunt to Atlanta.
That Thursday afternoon, Clarke was at the Birdcage, a jazz club on the edge of Atlanta University, with a couple of Labor Department co-workers — one of them named David. As she left the table for a trip to the ladies’ room, she passed the bar and a TV that had begun blaring the news of the assassination in Memphis.
“When I came back, I told them that Dr. King had been shot. And they didn’t believe me,” she said. “I attribute that to just men not always believing women.”
Clarke would stay the entire week in Atlanta. She watched the mule train and walked down what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. She was on the Morehouse College campus for the massive public memorial service.
She found being here something of a comfort. “People here were obviously distraught but also celebratory about Dr. King’s life,” she remembered. An image that still sticks out: two men celebrating in what might be described as the New Orleans-style of mourning — one dressed hat-to-shoes in bright green, his companion in bright yellow.
“I was not in a city that was burning, that was rioting. I was in a city that was coming together to pay homage to Dr. King,” she said. “And that was really my introduction to the South — how, out of this great sense of pain, you could have gratitude and thanksgiving.
“It informed what I think about Atlanta,” the former young lady said this week. Clarke would not return to the city for another four years, by which time she had married the fellow who accompanied her to the Birdcage the day King died.
David Franklin would become the pre-eminent strategist in the rising world of black politics in Atlanta. Shirley Franklin would be elected mayor of the city in 2001.
***
When Martin Luther King Jr. was slain in west Tennessee that afternoon, it was already Friday morning in Vietnam. Larry Burrows, who had already made a name for himself as a photographer for Life magazine, stood at the edge of a bomb crater left by a B-52.
Inside that crater was a tall, beefy 25-year-old Army captain from Lithonia, Ga., who broke off his furious effort to dig his foxhole even deeper. “How’s it going?” Max Cleland asked.
“Not enough action,” the photographer said.
Four members of Cleland’s outfit had been killed in a terrifying rocket attack the day before. “I just turned around and kept on digging,” Cleland said. And he silently cursed the man who had just wished for an interesting day.
The siege of Khe Sanh was one of the longest battles of the conflict. Cleland’s relief battalion was on the cusp of victory, within 2,000 yards of the embattled Marines. A small army of journalists had tagged along.
At a campfire that morning — it was a Sterno fire, really — breakfast was being heated up when Cleland plucked from the ground a telegram discarded by a reporter. “Khe Sanh relief not main news. MLK assassination pre-empts,” it read.
In that single message, Cleland learned of the King assassination and America’s inward turn. It would be months before he found out the details.
Khe Sanh would be relieved 48 hours later. Cleland, a communications officer, was sent out to establish a radio relay station. Upon jumping out of a helicopter that Sunday, Cleland looked down on the ground and saw the live grenade dropped by a companion. He was reaching for it when it exploded.
Cleland’s right arm and both legs were shredded, and he would ultimately lose all three. His windpipe was opened up, and he could only hiss. A Marine named David Lloyd was the first to reach him, sacrificing his ammunition belt as a tourniquet for what was left of Cleland’s left leg.
You know that Cleland would go on to become a state senator, the head of the U.S. Veterans Administration, the Georgia secretary of state and a U.S. senator. He is retired now, but on Saturday he will celebrate his 50th “Alive Day” — marking that time when “by the grace of God and the help of friends, I was able to survive.”
He’ll take the Marine who sacrificed his ammunition belt out to dinner.
That Cleland survived this trauma a half-century ago is remarkable enough. But in his telling of the tale, what struck me most was the detail: Despite the avalanche of terrible things that came in the hours that followed, Cleland still remembers picking up that telegram.
***
And me? I was a mere 12-year-old pup in the College Park High School auditorium, dragged to a bad talent show that Thursday night.
Before the lights could even come up, I discovered that news could be an observable phenomenon. Like a wave coursing through water, I could see word of King’s death travel row by row, sweeping past us and on toward the stage.
It was hypnotizing — I’d never seen anything like it.
I was a seventh-grader at the Meadows Elementary School off Old National Highway, an institution just on the verge of bowing to the demands of integration. The next morning must have been chilly because the cool guys were sitting on top of the heaters that lined the classroom windows in the minutes before the bell rang.
“My daddy says Martin Luther King is going to be the head black devil in hell,” one of my classmates declared. Except he didn’t say “black,” of course.
I had already developed the habit of walking away from unpleasant situations rather than speaking up, a continuing character flaw. But I was stopped by a good friend.
“I don’t know why they killed him. He never hurt anybody,” he confessed. We did not talk politics at home. My friend was the first white person, adult or child, who had given voice to what I was processing. It was a kindness I’ve never forgotten.
Which is what happens on a day like that.
About the Author
