American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Part 12

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Part 12 of this Series

Groton, Massachusetts, February 1963

“What happens to a dream deferred?”

- Langston Hughes

In February 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. spent two days at a boys boarding school in rural Massachusetts, where he had been invited to visit with the school’s 200 students and faculty. It was still relatively early in the 1960s civil rights movement, and on this issue the school was ahead of its time. Two years earlier, the first Freedom Riders (seven blacks and six whites) had boarded two Greyhound buses in Washington, D.C. and headed south. The farther they traveled into the Deep South, the more violent the resistance they met. Just outside Anniston, Alabama, Klansmen firebombed the bus, tried to keep the riders from getting off, and brutally beat them when they finally did. In the face of such horrendous violence and police collusion, James Farmer of CORE ended the campaign, but neither the violence would explode soon again. (Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the town’s citizens, a Monsanto plant had been poisoning their land and water since 1935.)

In February 1963, Selma’s “Bloody Sunday” was still two years away; Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, who would be murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi in June 1964, were very much alive; as were Addie Mae Collins (age 14), Denise McNair (14), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (11), who would die that September in the rubble of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church; Addie's sister Sarah still had both eyes.

On Saturday evening, when he spoke to the whole school, as well as members from the surrounding community, Martin Luther King had just turned 34. It was an extraordinary talk, filled with the sonorous cadences of the Baptist church into which Dr. King had been ordained. I was 18 years old, and I’d never heard anything like it. And I have never forgotten it. I learned later that the speech we had heard was an early version – a kind of rehearsal, really – of one he would give six months later on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

August 28th, 1963, Looking out from the Lincoln Memorial

He spoke to 250,000 people who had come for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. A little more than five years later, on the evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 39 years old.