Stories come to me in the late hours of the night. My brain picks up a crumb and then all the neurons chase after it for sometimes many sleepless nights flipping words from one place to another, changing sentence structure, substituting one word for another until finally I get out of bed, climb up the stairs and put it fully formed into print. Then I can sleep. This past Wednesday I started musing on my prideful youth, and all the things that I had done and some of the seminal things I had witnessed. My prideful youth took its last breath this week. So let me tell you a story about a young man. He was of average height and build, the only exceptional thing about him being unusual hazel eyes. Sadly he was a PK (Pastor’s Kid), who with the exception of TK’s (Teacher’s Kids) tend to be at high risk of becoming rebellious rulebreakers. He followed an exceptionally bright older sister thru school and was told many times by teachers that he was stupid, or they expected him in jail soon, or that they would read in the newpaper his just about timely death from some trouble he had gotten into. He joined a gang. Carried brass knuckles and a knife…sometimes other more dangerous things and with the exception of Sunday morning when he was expected to be in the front pew of Forest Glen Baptist Church with a shirt and tie on he usually favored a leather jacket with the gang insignia on the back and steel toed boots. He scraped by with not much room to spare and graduated from Carl Schurz High School in Chicago, Illinois. I saw it once when I was younger…it was a red brick building that looked like a prison and to the left of it was a dirt area which served as the football field. Fast forward to college. By this time he had met a cute little blonde who convinced him that he should go try his hand at further schooling rather than work the rest of his life ladling hot glass at the Johnson Glass Factory on the South Side. He eventually ended up at the University of Illinois and since making the acquaintance of a teacher, who recognized he had something more to offer, had become very interested in History. One day in class, in 1959, his teacher told the students that he was going to the black section of town on Sunday to hear a very talented speaker he had heard about. The young man and the teacher ended up being the only two willing to traverse thru very poor and dangerous areas to where this man would be giving a sermon in The Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago. When the two arrived the hall was already filling up, but they managed to secure themselves a spot on the back wall. Many people that day ended up listening on makeshift speakers set up so that those outside could hear as well. The pair couldn’t help but notice as the room became more and more packed that they were the only two not of color. The speaker spoke eloquently and forcefully and it was like nothing most of the crowd had ever heard. Every ear, every eye was aware and every body was still. Apparently at some point in the speech the two men of my story had been noticed by those associated with him and as he wrapped up his speech he said to the crowd in his booming voice, “I hear we have two white brothers who have come to join us today. I would like to ask them to join us on stage as we close with the hymn, “We Shall Overcome.” They did, and it was one of only four times Martin Luther King came to Chicago and the speech was to become over and over again one of the most famous of this great man’s. I urge you to listen to it. Oh, and the young man was my Dad. youtube/watch?v=130J-FdZDtY
Posted on: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 05:03:52 +0000