Rant #2,117: Man Against the World

April 4, 1968 was a Thursday and like most Thursdays in my home, it was a school day and a work day, a day to get even closer to the weekend.

I don't remember everything about that day, but I probably went to school, perhaps afterwards went to Hebrew School, did my homework, and that was that.

Then the evening came, and it was time to slow down a bit.

I remember being in the living room with my parents and my sister, and our old Dumont TV was on, and we were watching Channel 2, the local CBS outlet in New York, just going about our evening when, quite frankly, our world and the world in general changed right then and there.

Whatever we were watching on the TV was suddenly interrupted by a news bulletin, which said something like, "Reports are that civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed by an assassin while in Memphis, Tenn. More information later."

My 10-and nearly-11-year-old-mind knew that this wasn't good, but I got the real, true feeling that this was not good by looking at my mother, who turned as white as a sheet as the announcement was being made.

"That is the end of this place," she said, referring to where we lived, and in a certain prophetic way, she was right on, at least for our family and thousands of other families in the development.

We lived in Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, New York at the time, a mixed-race development that was smack-dab in the middle of the one of the longest-lasting minority communities in America.

Many people on the outside did not want our development built for a variety of reasons, and the unfortunate death of Martin Luther King Jr. gave them a clearer rallying point to get rid of us. It also gave many families in the development a clear reason to leave the area for good.

And they did.

From 1968 to my family's last year there in 1971, things became impossible. The very next day, we were shepherded from school when the Black Panthers demanded that our school be renamed "The Martin Luther King School," and if their demands were not met, they would blow up the school (the demands were never met, and the school was never blown up).

Kids were being attacked left and right, and parents were thinking about not sending their kids to school that following Monday, and for the entire week.

I can tell you that things were never the same in our community after the assassination, and this incident, along with other incidents--teachers strikes and the overall dropoff of the educational level there, muggings, fear, and safety issues--doomed that place for us and for so many others.

It took pretty much about 10-12 years, but "White Flight" prevailed, and Rochdale Village was no longer a mixed race development. It continues to stand as one of the largest minority housing developments not only in New York but probably in the country.

But for us, one of the of the thousands of original tenants, Dr. King's death was the tipping point.

You can argue left and right, up and down about this, say it was as much "our" fault as it was "their" fault that the place did not continue to be the "Garden of Eden" we all thought it would be forever before this incident, you can say that the cracks were already there (they were), you can say what you want, but life changed forever in our community after Dr. King's completely senseless murder.

And another interesting aspect of this is that if I remember correctly, Dr. King had on his agenda a visit to our community mere weeks after that fateful day.

Rochdale Village, I believe, was what Dr. King had in mind, a vision of racial harmony where blacks lived with whites in, well, perfect harmony, proving that it could be done.

It would have been a day that we would be telling our kids and grandkids about if Dr. King had been able to visit us, but alas, it simply was not meant to be.

I only bring up Dr. King's murder a day late because I wanted to speak to my parents about it, to see what they remembered from that fateful time period, and I did that last night.

They agreed that after his murder, things were never the same in our community.

In fact, my mother told a story about that time period which I didn't remember until it was told to me again last night.

In mid 1971, my parents bought a house on Long Island, and we knew that we would be moving away from Rochdale Village that summer.

My mother was speaking with a friend's mother, who happened to be a black woman, and I only mention that to empathize what was going on there in the aftermath of this horrid event, even three years after the fact.

Anyway, my mother spoke with the woman, who I also knew quite well as the receptionist in my orthodontist's office. She was a nice, very kind woman, who kind of looked out for me when I had an appointment there, because the doctor was a bit of a tough customer when dealing with me and my teeth.

When my mother told her that we were moving, the woman congratulated my mother, and then said, "You are lucky. Where are we supposed to go?"

"We" is the operative word here. Good people in that development of all backgrounds were moving out in droves, but where was a black family to go during that time period? The suburbs?

No, Dr. King's vision had not yet stretched that far yet.

So say what you want, but Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination was a turning point in my life, and our nation.

Fifty years later, Dr, King's message still reverberates, both positively and negatively, through this country.

But for this then 10-year-old kid who would turn 11 years old in a matter of days, things were simply never the same in the old neighborhood.

The air was sucked out of the balloon, and to me, it never was inflated again, never able to take flight again.

And that is sad.