By Lynn Ray Ellison, Ed.D, Commissioner Emeritus
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It was a recent Wednesday afternoon, and I was sitting in a local restaurant on Palmer Highway thinking about local and national events that are approaching in regard to the celebration of the holiday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
As I was sitting there, my only concern was not whether I was going to be served, but merely how long it would be before the waitress brought me my order. As I waited, I looked out the windows at people of all races going to and fro, and my thoughts raced back some 63 years to one of the many incidents that happened to me and nine other members of the Huston-Tillotson College track team as we were traveling from Austin across east Texas to Grambling College in Louisiana for their annual relays in 1959. On the trip was our coach, a trainer, and seven team members.
What you have to keep in mind — for those of you too young to remember — was that all public eating and sleeping places were segregated (off limits to blacks). That simply meant you did not stop to eat, sleep or carry on an interaction with any other citizens.
Blacks had to look for places to sleep and eat across the tracks, in the quarters over in “Bucktown” or continue to travel until they reached their destination.
We had been traveling for 10 hours. Nine people stuffed in a station wagon. We traveled almost non-stop because people, other than a few, would most always meet us with insults and embarrassing incidents.
We were in Louisiana, tired, hungry and sleepy. The car needed gas, and we had to stop as we drove toward Shreveport.
The only place we found open was the bus station on Texas Street. As we got out in the early morning and approached the entrance, we were met with shouts from the night manager and waitress.
“Get out! Get out! We don’t serve (expletive deleted) around here!”
Before we could load up again, we were surrounded by local lawmen, and for more than an hour, we were searched and talked to very degradingly simply because we were trying to get something to eat and gas up.
I can remember this as if it were yesterday, and the memory prompted me to think further about who really killed Dr. King?
*Who really killed the dreamer? Was it really the bullet squeezed from the 30.06 rifle of James Earl Ray? Or was it Shontu of the Bantu tribe, who sold the first Africans into slavery?
*Was it Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves? Or was it a new way of southern life that the South could not face after the Civil War?
*Was it Jim Crow laws, Black Codes, the Ku Klux Klan, or other laws set up to keep the freedmen down? Was it the reconstructed South that failed to grant ex-slaves all of their privledges under the Constitution?
*Was it the United States Supreme Court that handed down a landmark decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson that created a separate and unequal way of life? Was it colored restrooms, entrances, water fountains and sitting in the back of the bus, sitting in “Jim Crow nests?” I’m asking you, as I eat this fish, who really killed the dreamer?
*Was it the successful bus boycott in Montgomery that lasted for 385 days that bankrupted the bus company and made them adhere to the demands of all riders? Was it the March on Birmingham where “Bull” Connor vowed that the city would never integrate?
*Was it the sit-ins, freedom riders, the March on Washington in August 1963 where King spoke in front of 250,000 people about his dream, that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed?
*Was it his famous letter from the Birmingham jail, his march on Selma to register black voters, winning the Nobel Peace Prize, his drive in Chicago to make it an open city?
*Was it J.Edgar Hoover, the FBI or the CIA who turned a deaf ear on black protesters, thus declaring open season on them?
*Was it the soft justice in the deaths of Emmitt Teal, Medgar Evans, the three little black choir girls who were bombed in their church by Dynamite Bob, paving the way for more violence?
*Was it the thousands of black men and women who failed to get involved in the struggle for equality? Their fare on the ship of freedom was included, anyhow.
As I have lost my appetite and get up to leave, I ask one last time:
Who killed the dreamer?
