A thin red line...

On this date, in 1968, I was living in New Brunswick, New Jersey while my then-husband attended grad school at Rutgers. I don't know what the city is like now, but in 1968 it was a terrible place: so polluted by factory waste that I never saw the sun in a year's time, so crime-ridden I was afraid to leave my apartment, and with such filthy air that even children had acne. I was very young and, try as I might, I couldn't see the least possibility of happiness there, and sank into a self-centered misery.

At first, I was treated for a variety of ailments, until I was diagnosed with clinical depression. Thanks to drug therapy, then a spanking-new treatment, I got better until I felt something I could name as hope. With my dopomines nicely adjusted, I imagined a better future far away from New Brunswick, and, in doing that, I began to write once more.

That same year, living on my husband's student grant, we were horribly poor. We didn't have a refrigerator, a television, or even a phone, but we did have a radio, and that was how we heard Martin Luther King was killed, assassinated in Memphis. I remember I groaned, Oh, noooooooo! And I remember how my legs gave way, and I dropped to the floor in a sorrowful heap.

An hour or so after the announcement, we heard gunfire. Riots started in the city that day; later we would discover the entire East Coast had erupted. Looking out my tiny kitchen window, I saw a thin red line on the horizon, one that grew in length as the fires spread.

I think the entire world went mad that day.

Five years earlier, in 1963, while visiting my father in DC, I had happened to switch on the TV. It was the day King delivered his I Have A Dream speech to the enormous crowd massed around the reflecting pool. I had never heard of Martin Luther King until that day. I'd spent my life in southern suburbs and the evening news never included reports of racial unrest. I didn't know about dogs set on unarmed people, fire hoses turned on school children, or voting rights workers who were murdered.

As I listened to King, I felt sickened by my own ignorance and at my own complacency. Dimly, I understood that I was watching the raw stuff of history. And I realized that I was sitting in a comfortable living room, in suburban Virginia where I had always sat, self-satisfied and indifferent. That day, I promised myself I would find out about the times I lived in. And I promised that when action presented itself, I would act.

I would like to report that I became a tireless activist for any good cause. As it turned out, I wasn't that sort of person at all. I was only ordinary, not a hero, just someone who performed small actions, wrote letters, and spoke out when it was possible.

Still, after hearing King, I knew I could never again say, But I didn't know. I didn't know what what happening. And I never have.