LOST DREAMS

Friday, April 5, 1968 seemed a day like any other. I made my way to school, where I was attending the fifth grade, on an uncommonly mild early spring morning. Before our classes convened, children of all grades were burning off a little excess energy on the playground, as usual. I had yet to know that this would be a morning unlike any other I had ever known.

At the tender age of 10, I had been accustomed to being exposed to the dire narratives that characterized the time. Vietnam. The summer urban riots, which had been gaining intensity since the early 1960s. The typical anxiety-laden broadcasts that accompany in any presidential campaign year. I understood, as far as any 10-year-old could have, the importance of the news headlines that attended each of these events.

On that particular Friday morning, I knew that something awful had happened the day before. What I did not know was how the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would affect me: a white, second-generation offspring of Sicilian immigrants to Middletown.

The imposing hill upon which my elementary school stood, separated the working-poor neighborhoods — populated by all manner of ethnic groups, from Polish to Italian to African-American to Irish and Jewish — from the newer, suburban streets to which my parents had fled some 10 years before, just after I was born into that same neighborhood. Kids from my neighborhood knew kids from what we called the “other side,” particularly those who engaged in playground sports, as I so often did. I had friends from that other side. Perhaps we did not know very much about one another, but in those days, unsupervised sports bred in us an ability to gain and give respect.

Across town, where the neighborhoods where many children of color lived the local elementary school had been closed to make way for a new post office. The students had been placed in several other neighborhood schools, including mine. There were white and Black boys and girls integrated into the classrooms and on the playground.

That morning before classes started, the Black children — all of whom I knew at this point — were in apparent great distress. They cried out “You killed King.” Their pain and sense of loss was palpable and left a deep and lasting impression on me. I could not have fully understood it then, nor could I have tried to articulate what they were feeling. But I was struck by more than their depth of understanding of the social and political impact that Dr. King’s assassination would have on the country. They had been robbed of something far more elemental to human nature. The one individual who had offered