Dr. King’s battle against an epidemic of hatred

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Dr. Martin Luther King in Chicago in 1966. | Sun-Times Library

Hate. I’m talking about blind, unthinking bigotry. The sort of disease that not only rots the innards of individual humans but also is passed down generation to generation until it destroys entire countries and cultures.

Martin Luther King Jr. had a knack for exposing it, whether he was being attacked by police dogs or pummeled with jets of water from fire hoses.

OPINION

It has been 50 years today since he was murdered by an assassin’s bullet.

It has been 52 years since King changed my life.

We never met. I was just a kid growing up in an all-white neighborhood called Scottsdale on the Far Southwest Side of Chicago. It was about three miles from Marquette Park, which featured a terrific lagoon where kids could go fishing in the summer.

The kids in my neighborhood preferred the city streets for football and baseball, although Scottsdale was actually more of a suburb than typical Chicago neighborhood.

The dads were almost all World War II veterans. Most of the moms stayed at home to raise the kids.

In August in 1966, as I recall, we were playing baseball in the street when someone broke out a chant that the rest of us took up right away. We sang it to the tune of an Oscar Mayer hot dog jingle that was popular on TV.

“I wish I was an Alabama trooper, that is what I really want to be, ’cause if I was an Alabama trooper, I could kill the n—–s legally.”

Just American kids having fun on a summer’s day.

I hope that image makes you cringe. I hope you remember it the next time someone says they want to make “America great again.”

King was coming to Chicago’s Southwest Side. I had heard our neighbors talking about it while sitting on their porches in the evening.

King, who had been to Alabama and Mississippi, was coming Marquette Park, they said. The name King was preceded by a racial slur and followed by profanity.

The following day the chant began, and one of my childhood pals suggested we get on our bikes and ride over to Marquette Park because King was “going to get it.”

“You are not going,” my mother said when she heard our plan. And that was the end of the discussion.

That day hundreds of angry white people greeted King and his open housing marchers near Marquette Park with racial slurs, hurling bottles, bricks and stones.

A rock hit King in the head and sent him down to one knee. The march ended.

“I’ve been in many demonstrations across the South, but I can say that I have never seen – even in Mississippi and Alabama – mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’ve seen here in Chicago,” King would later say.

King’s stay in Chicago would be called one of his greatest failures. People in my neighborhood cheered what they considered a victory. Chicago taught him a lesson, they said. It was while listening to them that I decided something was wrong with their thinking. It was King who made me realize racism was evil. It was one of his many unnoticed victories.

I would cover several race riots in Marquette Park as a newspaper reporter, interview neo-Nazi leaders whose headquarters were nearby, write hundreds of columns about the unfair treatment of minority suburbs in Cook County, and maybe a thousand columns about the government sanctioned bigotry that has created separate and unequal school systems that have destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of black children in this state.

I think of Dr. King today, but that’s nothing special. I’ve thought about him for most of my life. His “failure” changed me forever. He may never have gotten to the promised land, but he saw it clearly and shared that vision with the rest of us.

As he once said, “Right, temporarily defeated, is always stronger than evil triumphant.”

Email: philkadner@gmail.com

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