Fifty years ago, the United States shook with thunder and fury.
Not unlike the way it does today.
The Summer of Love, just one year prior, had turned into the Year of Chaos. Every corner of society contained an edge, every grainy black-and-white image on the TV news showed discontent and anger.
And that leads us to Monday – Martin Luther King Jr. Day – which marked the civil rights leader’s 89th birthday. It also provided a perfect launch pad for a column noting that a calendar filled with important dates – upcoming anniversaries of events that shaped our world and, to a certain degree, parallel much of what we see today – now hangs on refrigerators and sits on desktops throughout the country.
Merely saying “1968” brings visions of street protests and fighting, war and death. If you’re old enough to remember, you know the score, and if you’re not, you’ve read the narrative.
Right?
Start with King. He was born on Jan. 15, 1929, and by time the 1960s rolled in, he had nurtured a movement that he and a pair of African-American women – first, Claudette Colvin, next, Rosa Parks – had started the decade before. Neither woman would give up her seat to a white person while riding a city bus.
The nerve.
Their courageous stances helped end both segregation and legal discrimination, shed light on how George Wallace should be remembered in history and forced the country to look in the mirror.
April 4 will mark 50 years since James Earl Ray shot and killed King in Memphis. I was 8, more concerned with learning how to hit a fastball than what my parents were watching on television.
Then, in later years, I heard and read something about a dream.
King’s dream.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” King said, five years before his dream ended with an assassin’s bullet.
“I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
“I have a dream today.”
The 50th anniversary of King’s murder, less than three months away, will no doubt stir debates about race, where we are in our history connected to that subject, who we are, who we hope to be.
Those questions undoubtedly will be magnified given the current political climate, led by a president who felt the need to tell the media last Sunday, “I’m not a racist. I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed, that I can tell you.”
The violent tone for 1968 had been set Jan. 30 with the start of the Tet Offensive, a surprise attack by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces on South Vietnam and the United States.
The attack hammered home the notion that the U.S. was nowhere near victory in the Vietnam War, and, in fact, we might be facing a long, drawn-out fight. By the end of 1968, more than 16,000 American soldiers had been killed, the deadliest year for U.S. forces.
Eventually, America’s invincibility had been proved to be a myth, and the prolonged fighting, devoid of clear victory, reminds us of today’s War on Terror, its goals unclear, the enemy so very hard to find.
Next, on June 5, presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, fresh from his win in the California Primary, was shot three times in a hotel kitchen by Sirhan Sirhan.
He died the next morning, and the 50th anniversary of that dark two-day period is heading our way.
Kennedy’s death cast a shadow over the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 28 in Chicago, as did rioting that erupted as thousands of anti-war protesters fought street battles against the police, and news images that spread on rabbit-eared televisions furthered the country’s feelings that we were fighting an immoral war, with young people dying for unjustified reasons.
And then came the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City and an event captured in a famous photo on Oct. 16.
On that day, U.S. track stars Tommie Smith, the gold medal winner in the 200-meter run, and bronze medalist John Carlos stood on the podium and, with our national anthem playing, raised their black-gloved hands until the song had ended.
Later, Smith said the gesture was a human rights salute, not one geared toward Black Power, but the duo’s message was loud and clear, coming just one year after Muhammad Ali had been stripped of his heavyweight boxing championship, and less than seven months after King’s death.
Both runners were banned from the Olympic Village and sent home.
Looking back, the Smith-Carlos gestures were the building blocks of what happened recently, with NFL players kneeling during the anthem to protest what they saw as police brutality against the African-American community.
In many corners of the United States, those players are seen as unpatriotic, ungrateful troublemakers, same as many saw Smith and Carlos.
Good things, however, did happen 50 years ago, creating national pride. Like our first orbit around the moon, and the introduction of the Civil Rights Act.
But 1968 was known more as a divisive year in our history, and right now, not much has changed over the past five decades.
Or at least not enough.
(Ray Duckler can be reached at 369-3304, rduckler@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @rayduckler.)