While the World Watched (16 page)

One day I was feeling overwhelmed by the torment I felt. I didn’t know what to do with the sense of hopelessness and despair that plagued me. So I scribbled this letter to God, imagining I was having a conversation with him:

“God, why didn’t you take me too? Why did you leave me here?”

“Carolyn,” I sensed God saying to me, “I needed Cynthia, Addie, Denise, and Carole to come. I needed you to stay.”

“But I don’t want to stay,” I pleaded. “I want to come too.”

“Carolyn, I still have something special for you to do. I need you to tell this story.”

“But I miss Cynthia so much. Could you just make the pain go away? It hurts to wake up in the morning, and I am so afraid.”

“I know you miss her, Carolyn. But she is just fine. Carolyn, don’t cry. And don’t be afraid. I love you, and I am always with you.”

“Will you let Cynthia know that I paid for her cap and shirt? I gave them both to her mom. And tell her I miss her and I’m sorry I didn’t get to say good-bye.”

“Carolyn, she is happy. She is fine. And you will see her and the other girls again. They will be waiting.”

And then I sensed God planting in me a vision for my future. “Carolyn, I need you to tell people that this is not about skin color or ethnicity or religion. It is about love, it is about forgiveness, it is about reconciliation. I need you to be my messenger, my ambassador. They will know I allowed you to live—I saved you so you could bear personal witness to my power to restore and forgive and draw people to me. Just lift me up.”

“Lift Him Up”—one of my very favorite hymns that we always sang at Granddaddy’s church. I got the message. God was showing me what he wanted me to do.

“Tell them about me. Tell them about Cynthia, Addie, Denise, and Carole. Tell them that when they are reconciled to me, they can be reconciled to each other.”

I wasn’t there yet, but I thanked God for holding me gently in his arms until I could find my way.

* * *

While at Fisk, I continued to drink to numb my inner pain, and gradually I began to need drinks of increasing strength. I began to look forward to my times alone to get my fix. My journal entries grew darker and more disturbing. I seemed to be on the periphery of life, not really a part of it. I felt as though I didn’t belong anywhere, as though I lived separated from life by a glass window. I stood on the outside of that window and looked in, not really part of anything.

“This is a time in American history,” I wrote one day, “when people say nothing. People are murdered, and no one says, ‘This is wrong’ or does anything about it.”

God gave me one unique gift during this time—my friend Mary Kate Bush. Mary Kate was also from Birmingham. I first met her when she and I had entered the Gaston spelling bee in the seventh grade. Like me, Mary Kate had suffered many wounds. She knew when I needed to be alone, and I knew when she needed to be alone. But when I needed to talk or cry, Mary Kate was always there to listen. The lives we had lived already, at such a young and tender age, gave way to many discussions about the future and what it held for us. Sometimes, it was hard to believe that the future held anything except more pain. It was providential that we would live together for those four years at college, and after graduation, we continued a friendship that was a healing balm. Through Mary Kate, God enabled me to understand true spiritual friendship. He blessed me with a “forever friend,” one who would always be there for me.

Chapter 17

The Deaths of the Dreamers

* * *

You see things, and you say “why?” But I dream things that never were, and I say “why not?”

George Bernard Shaw,
BACK TO METHUSELAH

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Martin Luther King Jr.

In the fall of 1982, Geraldine Watts Bell wrote an article in
Down Home
magazine (a new publication started by Denise’s father, Chris McNair) about the glaring absence of a memorial in Birmingham for the girls who had died in the church bombing.

Bell wrote, “The time is long overdue for Birmingham citizens to establish a perpetual commemoration in honor of the sacrifices made by these [girls’] families. Although there are several memorials to the deaths of these young people in other states, there has been no significant effort on the part of Birmingham and Alabama citizenry to remember these sacrifices appropriately.”

She continued, “It can be readily seen, then, that there is an urgent need for the citizens of Birmingham and the State of Alabama to seek some type of appropriate commemoration for this tragic act. . . . This one act awakened the conscience of the nation to the fact that something was not right in the way Black citizens are treated.”
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Several decades have passed. We’re still waiting.

* * *

By the late 1960s, a few things had changed in the South, thanks to some key leaders. Former all-white public schools had opened their doors to black students, as had department stores, restaurants, lunch counters, swimming pools, libraries, and other private and tax-supported facilities. African-Americans could now register to vote without undergoing ridiculous qualification games, taking difficult exams, experiencing Klan intimidation, and paying “blacks only” poll taxes.

But while visible changes had taken place, I noticed that the invisible changes came much more slowly.

We can, by law, change the outside
, I thought.
But we can’t so easily change people’s hearts. How do we change the inside?

* * *

On the night of April 4, 1968, I was studying in my dorm room at Fisk. Some fellow students ran through the halls and pounded on my door.

“Carolyn!” they screamed. “Dr. King’s been murdered in Memphis!”

“Dr. Martin Luther King?” I asked. “Are you sure?” I felt like someone had punched me in the heart.
Surely not!
Not Dr. King!

“Yes, Carolyn! Dr. King! And riots are happening everywhere—all over the entire country!” they shouted as they ran down the hall and pounded on more dorm doors. “Who knows what might happen before the night is over!”

A frightening thought entered my mind:
Racial wa
r
! It’s really happening! We’re all going to die because of this!

The other female students and I ran from our rooms and into the hall. We squatted on the floor with our backs pressed firmly against the wall, our knees pulled up to our chests, our heads lowered and protected by our crossed arms. We had practiced Fisk’s security drill many times. My whole body trembled. Students cried. We all feared the worst.

Minutes became hours. We sat in silence for a long time. Each of us had plenty of time to think and pray.

Here we go again
, I thought.
Why did I think racial problems here in Nashville would be any different from racial problems back in Birmingham? Maybe there is no escaping it. Ever.

That night I sat in the hallway in fear and thought about Dr. King. I remembered the many times I’d heard him speak from the pulpit of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He worked so hard to open up the doors that had been closed for so long to African-Americans. I recalled his leadership as we marched down the streets of Birmingham that May in 1963, when the pressure from the firefighters’ water hose had torn off part of my hair. I thought about Dr. King’s courage, his dedication to us, and his struggle for freedom. As I remembered him, I hummed some of the songs he’d encouraged us to sing during the days when so many of us had met in the church sanctuary and then marched down the streets of Birmingham:

Oh freedom!

Oh freedom!

Oh freedom over me

And before I’ll be a slave

I’ll be buried in my grave.

And go home to my Lord and be free.

As I softly sang the song, I thought,
Dr. King is free now. They cannot bother him anymore.

Then I remembered something I’d heard at one of the rallies:
Didn’t Reverend Shuttlesworth tell us that people might have to die in order to gain that freedom?

“And before I’ll be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave. And go home to my Lord and be free.”

At that moment I understood why Dr. King had encouraged us to sing. Surely the songs helped us understand that death may be necessary. Perhaps they gave us some kind of resolve as we sang them—and also the courage to face our own death someday, if that’s what was necessary for freedom.

I feared what might happen outside my dorm walls later that night, and I started to sing the song that had always given me strength in the midst of great fear:

All along this Christian journey,

I want Jesus to walk with me.

I want Jesus to walk with me.

All along this Christian journey,

I want Jesus to walk with me.

In my troubles, walk with me.

When I’m dying, walk with me.

All along this Christian journey,

I want Jesus to walk with me.

I want Jesus to walk with me.

That night, with my back pressed against the hard wall of my dorm hallway, I thought about the pain Dr. King must have felt when he heard that Sixteenth Street Baptist Church had been bombed and that four girls had died. People told me Dr. King’s eulogy for my slain friends had brought deep comfort to the girls’ families. I remembered how Dr. King had grieved that November 1963 when he learned President Kennedy had been shot and killed. Now Dr. King himself had been assassinated. I was devastated.

Dr. King
, I cried out silently,
I feel like I have lost a member of my own family.

I thought about a quote I’d heard by Dr. Cornell West, a professor at Princeton: “You cannot lead the people if you don’t love the people. And you can’t save the people if you’re not willing to serve the people.” Dr. King had been willing to do both.

* * *

“I wonder what’s happening outside.” My thoughts were interrupted by a fellow student who sat beside me in the hallway.

“I don’t know,” I whispered back. “The school officials told us to stay here in lockdown.”

Student leaders came to every dormitory and told us whatever messages they had been given—we didn’t have a PA system or a loudspeaker. “Do not go out of the building!” they warned us. “People are shooting each other out there!”

Shooting each other?

I thought about my mother, father, sister, and brothers.
Are they okay? Are they safe?
The one pay phone at the end of the hall wasn’t working, so I had no way to telephone them. During that long, tense night, back in my room, I lay still and quiet as my thoughts took me back to all the pain and horror and tragedy I had tried so hard to put behind me.

I thought,
A drink could blot out all the ugly and painful things around me.

As I waited, another terrifying thought came to mind:
What will happen now that Dr. King is dead?

Dr. King
, I whispered,
who will help us keep striving for your dream—our dream—of Birmingham’s black and white children walking hand in hand?

The next day I learned the tragic facts about Dr. King’s death. He had traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to support black sanitation workers who were being treated unfairly in their jobs. It was here that he made his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. After his speech the previous evening, April 4, he returned to his room at the Lorraine Motel on Mulberry Street to dress for dinner. He was running a little late. Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, and other Civil Rights leaders were waiting outside for him.

When Dr. King stepped out of his room, a white man—a petty criminal named James Earl Ray—shot him. The bullet entered King’s right jaw, traveled through his neck, severed his spinal cord, and stopped in his shoulder blade. He fell to the balcony floor. His friends rushed him to St. Joseph’s Hospital. He died at 7:05 that night.
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From Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” Speech

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee—the cry is always the same: “We want to be free.” . . .

We aren’t going to let any mace stop us. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don’t know what to do. I’ve seen them so often. I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there, we would move out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church day after day; by the hundreds we would move out. And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth, and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.”

Bull Connor next would say, “Turn the fire hoses on.” And as I said to you the other night, Bull Connor didn’t know history. He knew a kind of physics that somehow didn’t relate to the transphysics that we knew about. And that was the fact that there was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. And we went before the fire hoses; we had known water. If we were Baptist or some other denominations, we had been immersed. If we were Methodist, and some others, we had been sprinkled, but we knew water. That couldn’t stop us.

And we just went on before the dogs and we would look at them; and we’d go on before the water hoses and we would look at it, and we’d just go on singing, “Over my head I see freedom in the air.” And then we would be thrown in the paddy wagons, and sometimes we were stacked in there like sardines in a can. And they would throw us in, and old Bull would say, “Take ’em off,” and they did; and we would just go in the paddy wagon singing, “We Shall Overcome.” And every now and then we’d get in jail, and we’d see the jailers looking through the windows being moved by our prayers, and being moved by our words and our songs. And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn’t adjust to; and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham. . . .

We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.

And I don’t mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

And so I’m happy, tonight.

I’m not worried about anything.

I’m not fearing any man!

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!
[74]

Ray had fired the fatal shot from the bathroom of a nearby rooming house. Witnesses said that moments after the shooting, they saw Ray run from the building carrying a bundle (his gun).

Oh, the pain he must have suffered
, I thought when I heard how Dr. King had died.

Dr. King’s murder caused immediate riots in more than one hundred cities across the United States. Four thousand members of the National Guard landed in Memphis to help manage the angry, grief-stricken crowds. Officials ordered a dusk-to-dawn curfew to maintain order.
[75]
The entire nation was reeling.

British police finally located Ray at London’s Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968, and arrested him. Ray put his head in his hands and cried when they cuffed him. Investigators found Ray’s fingerprints on the rifle, scope, and binoculars. He pleaded guilty at his trial the following March. The judge sentenced him to ninety-nine years in prison.

After the sentencing, however, Ray recanted his guilty plea. He named who he claimed was the real shooter—a man he called “Raoul.” He suggested a conspiracy and government cover-up.

In 1997 Dr. King’s son Dexter visited James Earl Ray in prison. Ray convinced Dexter he was innocent, and the King family agreed with Dexter. A retrial was requested, but Ray, seventy, died of liver failure on April 23, 1998, before the new trial could take place.
[76]

After King’s assassination, I worried that the Civil Rights dream might end. But over the next few years, I saw how firmly Dr. King had planted the vision in people’s hearts, inspiring both black and white Americans to take up the torch and continue the fight for equal rights. King’s life ended, but his dream of freedom lived on.

* * *

On June 5, 1968, just sixty-two days after Dr. King’s murder, Robert F. Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles. He died twenty-six hours later. I could hardly believe the tragic news.

How many more people must die?
I asked myself.

I had admired and appreciated Bobby Kennedy. Like his brother John and Dr. King, Bobby had reached out to the poor and disenfranchised—especially inner-city, impoverished blacks. As attorney general and later as a senator, he had supported racial and educational equality—and asked the American people to do the same. The night Bobby Kennedy died, he had just won the California Democratic primary, which meant he had a strong chance to win the party’s presidential nomination. But as with his brother, Bobby’s time was cut short. “Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope,” RFK had said. “And crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
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