KING'S FINAL YEARS

摘要

Forty years ago this winter, I was an 8-year-old boy growing up on the North Side of Chicago. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had moved into a slum in the impoverished West Side neighborhood of North Lawndale to dramatize the conditions of what were then known as "Northern Negroes." King was scheduled to visit the home of a local politician to raise money for his cash-strapped movement from white "lakefront liberals." But the politician, caught between his personal sympathies for King and his allegiance to Mayor Richard J. Daley, who was no fan of the civil-rights leader, felt uncomfortable hostihg the party. So he called up my parents and, to my delight, the event was moved to our house at the last minute. The fund-raising was "disappointing," according to my father's diary, and King spent most of the evening on our telephone. But I got the great man's autograph and we heard him deliver an eloquent talk while standing in front of several dozen guests in our living room. At such events that year, King would sometimes scrawl a reminder to himself: "Ad lib 'We Shall Overcome'."