Martin Luther King: Talking to History

This might seem like another shameless plug for an article I've written, but it's not.

Truth is, I'm linking to the TIME.com project on Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination because I want everyone to know what it's like to have the people who were there take you back into history. I wrote it and did most of the interviews myself not knowing what I would be told, not realizing how powerful it is to just listen.

Yeah, I've been critical of Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young in this blog before, but let me tell you, having them tell me what it was like to be at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968 shook me down to my foundation. Journalists are supposed to be objective, true, but if you're lucky, you only get a few chances to witness history. You get fewer chances to talk to the witnesses.
It took days of interviewing, transcribing and working with my colleagues (thank God for them) to be able to put together something so dramatic. Jackson, Young, and also Revs. Billy Kyles and James Bevel allowed me to look at King as more than someone I would read about in a book.

When you talk to these figures, they are able to humanize King far beyond just some speech. It makes me feel lucky because he died before I was even born, and everyone in my generation benefited for his having lived. A couple years ago, I also had the good fortune of interviewing two of Malcolm X's daughters on the 40th anniversary of his passing. Dynamic sistas that they are, although they are too young to remember much detail about their father's work, talking to them gave me a chance to actually touch the brother in a way that would not otherwise be possible.

Now I'm not saying that you should just go out hunting for the families of slain civil rights icons and loading them up with thousands of questions. But many of us have people right in our own families that can tell us about those days. They can tell us where they were when they found out Malcolm, Martin or Medgar Evers was dead. They can tell us what it was like to be in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or participate in a sit-in. Maybe they could tell us what it was like to go to a Black Panthers meeting. Or what it was like to be the first person in their family to graduate college.

Before I went to do my interviews for the TIME story, I spoke to my parents about their reaction to King's death. What struck me pretty hard was that my mother remembered a woman just a few weeks prior, predicting a death in the black community that would hit us twice as hard as Kennedy's.

There are only a few things in life that are truly free. One of them is the knowledge that you get from your forebears about days gone by. A favorite website of mine is called Storycorps. It is an online labyrinth of the life experiences of ordinary people. Some old, some young. All races, all backgrounds. It is a chance for the to preserve their stories as they saw them. And there is nothing like history being told by the people who live it.

When Martin Luther King died, he was making plans to go to Washington to fight for the rights of the poor. In the years that went by afterward, new histories took place and younger people lived them. There's nothing stopping you from finding out what those histories are.

And there is nothing stopping you from living your own history now.

More King Coverage
+ Forty Years Later: Where Are We?
+ What if King had lived?
+ New Book: America 'After King'
+ Who Really killed MLK?