Shootings, Skittles, and Black Lives Matter
Author’s Note: This is the final in a three-part series written to recognize Black History Month and the martyred who helped make it so. Warning: Graphic descriptions of violence contained herein.
Like many folks, I have woken up several mornings to the news of a terrible death. On November 22, 1963, I woke up to my mother’s screams because her idol, John F. Kennedy, had been shot. Through her tears, she tried to help me get ready for school while she talked about him – the first president who was Roman Catholic, the first president who seemed so stylish, the first president who was so approachable, one of many presidents who was a war hero. According to testimony from the Warren Commission Hearings on the assassination, when the shooting began Mrs. Kennedy began trying to crawl toward the back of the car. After the shooting, Mrs. Kennedy, now blood-spattered, began crawling back into her seat. Texas Governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie, heard Mrs. Kennedy repeatedly saying: “They have killed my husband. I have his brains in my hand.” I went to school that day, but we were sent home early. I was in first grade.
As a child living in the segregated South, I did not know very much about Malcolm X, but his was the next assassination. On my mother’s birthday, February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was brutally murdered. Years later, I read his autobiography and was horrified to learn that he and his family, including his children, were often the targets of intimidation and violence, culminating with the arson and bombing of their brand-new home. In several interviews throughout 1964 and 1965, prior to his assassination, he told interviewers that he was a “marked man.” According to the coroner, his body had 21 gunshot wounds. He was 39 years old.
But 1968 was the worst. By then I was 11 years old and fancied myself a little hippie. I had become politically active and enjoyed reading the newspaper and watching news reports on TV. On April 4, 1968, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. I now often watched the nightly news with my parents, and that night my father, a man who was raised to be a racist in the deep south in the 1940s, began shaking his head during the coverage and said, “No man deserves to be shot down like a dog like that. No man deserves that.” My mom and I cried even harder.
The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. was a hero. A man devoted to peace, a man who eschewed violence even for a good cause, a man who walked the walk and talked the talk, his was a legacy of inclusivity. He understood the relationships among and the global effects of racism, poverty, illiteracy, ignorance, and disease. He was pure inspiration for me, so in 1999 as I was just beginning my doctoral program, I applied for and was granted an unrestricted research grant from the King Center, located near his childhood home and family church in “Sweet Auburn,” a traditionally African American neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia. It was a transformative experience. When I walked into the cavernous main hall and looked down, there were a series of bronze sculptures called “Marching Toward Freedom.” They were humans all walking toward the “March in Washington.” This is a paltry description. Many were limping on crutches. Some were being pushed in wheelchairs. They wore rags. They wore suits. There were men and women and children. But all their heads were up as they looked forward hopefully, many smiling. Just remembering it now brings tears to my eyes, and just like now I was overcome with emotion. I ran outside. I hid on the side of the King Center and cried like a baby. When I returned, I found the docent I had been in contact with, he ushered me into the archives, and I was left in what was Dr. King’s office. I had access to files full of all the letters he had written, all his sermons arranged in folders by date, and boxes of old photographs. But it wasn’t just seeing all his speeches typed up; it was the revelation of his brilliance. For example, on an old yellow stained coffee napkin he had written “The Negro has been issued a bad check.” Then, behind it, the handwritten sermon that extended the metaphor. Finally, the neatly typed, double-spaced pages that he would bring to the pulpit, to the microphone, to us. I could remember him speaking those words in front of thousands of people. The catch of a phrase, the turn of someone’s head in the street, and there would be a corresponding speech. It was pure genius.
And then, the unthinkable happened, again. And this time I was watching it LIVE. I was transfixed by Robert F. Kennedy and so excited about his contemplated run for the White House. He was young, liberal, and he understood the issues that were important to me. Even though I wasn’t old enough to vote yet, I watched the coverage of his successful California primary win. While they were hustling him down the hallway of the Ambassador Hotel, he was shot. This time, I began screaming. Decades later when I visited Los Angeles, I had to go to the Ambassador. I didn’t scream, but I sure did cry a lot.
These were all horrible, transformative events, with more shootings, killings, and assassinations yet to come, but these were all grown men who had chosen a public life. They were not children. I never thought I’d live to see a teenage child wearing a hoodie shot over a bag of Skittles while cutting through a neighbor’s yard. The shooting of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of his murderer, George Zimmerman, is generally considered the beginning of the movement now known as Black Lives Matter (BLM), started by three Black organizers, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi. And they do matter. All these deaths matter. But the multiple systemic murders of black and brown skinned human beings continue, and thus, the non-violent protests of BLM also continue. It is one of the largest protest movements in our country’s history with over 15 million participants so far. Decentralized and grass-roots in nature, 81% of African Americans, 61% of Hispanics, and 63% of Asians still express support for BLM. Sadly, support among White Americans has declined.
The shootings of young people of all colors and creeds continue and become more deadly. Whether racialized discrimination, religious hatred, violence against women and children, or “school shooters,” February, the month we commemorate Black History, has become a month of protests and tears, retributions and fears. Each day the tale of yet another horrific act of violence overshadows the advances and accomplishments of people who arrived in this country as enslaved captives and now spearhead anti-violence movements, staff social service programs, and conduct church services at memorials at one of the worse shooting massacres in South Carolina – Charleston’s Mother Emanuel, the site where white racist Dylan Roof massacred church members who invited them to share their Bible Study. It’s also the month that we celebrate Valentine’s Day. Can’t we love a little more? Hate a little less? Can’t we at least try? Like the old song suggests, “put a little love in your heart… the world will be a better place… for you, and me, you just wait, and see… put a little love in your heart.” Black Lives Matter.
References
Cunningham Walker (nka Breede), D. & Schuh, C. (2002). Theorizing the transparent activist through reflective dialogue: Lessons learned at the King Center. National Communication Association Annual Conference, New Orleans, LA
Horowitz, Juliana Menasce; Kiley Hurst; Dana Braga (June 14, 2023). “Support for the Black Lives Matter Movement Has Dropped Considerably From Its Peak in 2020”. Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project. Retrieved July 4, 2023.
Myers, Randy & Holiday, Jimmy. (1969). Put a Little Love in Your Heart. First recorded by Jackie DeShannon. Liberty/UA, Inc.
Warren, Earl (1964). Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. United States Government Printing Office. ASIN B0065RJ63E.
