Holding Onto Hope

Remembering the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, 50 years later.

by

Editor's Note: Larry Conley served as editor of Memphis magazine from 1985 to 1990. This article was originally published in our April 2018 issue.

It’s the photo that I remember the most. That haunts me.

The stark, black-and-white image shows people standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel pointing in the direction from which the shot came, the shot that felled the dreamer. Martin Luther King Jr., who dreamed of a color-blind nation, lay dying at their feet.

It was April 4, 1968. The dreamer was dead and the nation wondered if his dream died with him.  

My life, in an eerie way, seems connected with King’s death. In 1968 I was a black teenager living in Memphis when King was killed here. Fifty years later, I’m living out my retirement in Atlanta, where King is buried. I spend my days now volunteering for a charity that grew out of a church congregation that provided housing and meals for visitors during King’s funeral.

Had he lived, King would see a nation still struggling to come to grips with his dream. On one hand, progress is unmistakable. My youngest brother, for example, was born just three days after King’s death. Now, 50 years later, he is the embodiment of King’s dream. He lives with his family in a prosperous Memphis suburb — manicured lawns, two-car garages, over-priced lattes, the works.

Yet, when I was in Memphis recently, I was stopped by a white policeman near my brother’s home one night. I made sure to keep my hands in sight. And I asked for permission before retrieving my driver’s license. Philando Castile, killed by a policeman while reaching for his own license, wasn’t so lucky.

On another front, I take it as a sign of progress that Memphis, an overwhelmingly black city, now has both a white mayor and a white congressman. To be successful — and to keep their jobs — Jim Strickland and Steve Cohen must answer to all their constituents, black and white. Anyone living in Memphis in 1968, when Henry Loeb was mayor, knows that this wasn’t always true. Loeb’s intransigence against striking black garbage workers helped lead to King’s fatal trip to Memphis. 

On the national level, it’s the same dilemma: Is the glass half full or half empty? I wept in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected the first black president, a historic moment that I wouldn’t have dreamed of in 1968. The nation, it seemed, had turned a corner on the road to King’s dream of a color-blind society.

Yet, Strickland and Cohen’s black constituents today fare far worse than their white counterparts. According to the 2015 U.S. Census Bureau’s Statistical Atlas, the median household income for blacks in Memphis, $30,300, is barely half that of whites, $52,500. Fifty years after King, while elections may occasionally belie the color line, money apparently still doesn’t.

Widening the focus to all of Shelby County, the picture is just as bleak. According to a report recently released by the National Civil Rights Museum and the University of Memphis, African Americans lag behind whites in Shelby County in virtually every measure.

In 2016, median household income for whites in the county was $70,000, compared to $36,000 for African Americans. Overall, 8 percent of white county residents live in poverty, compared to 29 percent for African Americans. And a stunning 48.3 percent of African-American children in Shelby County live in poverty; for white children, the percentage is 11.4. 

On the national level, it’s the same dilemma: Is the glass half full or half empty? I wept in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected the first black president, a historic moment that I wouldn’t have dreamed of in 1968. The nation, it seemed, had turned a corner on the road to King’s dream of a color-blind society.

Then came Donald Trump. It’s inexplicable to me how a nation that twice elected a black president could turn around and elect a man whose first political act was to front a vile, racist lie. Trump pedaled the Kenya birther lie before he ran for president and initially held onto it even after he announced his candidacy.

This lie, portraying the first black president as “The Other” — alien, illegitimate — should have automatically disqualified Trump from holding any office, let alone the highest office in the land. Yet millions of voters, my fellow Americans, simply shrugged.

What am I, a black man, to make of this? How can I reconcile such an unconscionable betrayal with any notion of King’s dream?

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I choose to believe. That most Americans want to make a country worthy of King’s sacrifice, and that the good people in this country will win out in the end. And that Dr. King was right.

Faced with such contradictions, both in Memphis and the nation, my first reaction was to throw up my hands, to give up. To hell with it, I thought. King’s dream is just that, an impossible dream never to be fulfilled.

But then something strange happened. As I was preparing to write this essay I was also reading the latest book by a young black author whose skill as a writer I greatly admire. The book is a collection of articles and essays about race/race relations written during the eight years of the Obama administration. It is full of the fire and uncompromising condemnation of white America for which this author is well-known.

I could barely finish the book. It was just too much — too harsh, too negative, too hopeless. Mind you, there was a time when I was much like this young writer. I shared his outrage, his cynicism, his contempt. And I wasn’t shy about it. In various venues, including several pieces published in this magazine, I railed at white injustice.      

So what happened? Sure, maybe I’ve just grown old, no longer capable of sustaining the passion of righteous youth. But what I really think is that I simply don’t want to be that person anymore. At my age, shouting “J’accuse!” into the wind seems empty, hollow. I want something more; I want hope.   

So I’ve made a decision. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I choose to believe. Despite Trayvon Martin (murdered by a white vigilante) and Walter Scott (murdered by a white policeman) and Dylann Roof (a white supremacist who murdered nine black people as they sat in church). Despite all of them and all of it, I choose to believe. That most Americans want to make a country worthy of King’s sacrifice, and that the good people in this country will win out in the end. And that Dr. King was right.

In making this choice, I know I’m taking a chance. It’s the same chance that Martin Luther King took — hunted down and eventually murdered by white hatred — when he unfailingly challenged America to live up to its proclaimed ideals.

Taking this chance, I feel like a man venturing into a dark tunnel knowing there might be a bear waiting at the end — fearful, but holding onto hope. It reminds me of the ending of an old film noir, Detective Story (1951). A grizzled cop (William Bendix) chooses, against the odds, to give a repentant thief a second chance. As he releases the young man, the cop issues a stern warning, the same plea I make, desperately, to all my countrymen: “Don’t make a monkey outta me.”  

A Memphis native and a graduate of Dartmouth College and the Columbia University School of Journalism, Larry Conley returned home in 1976 to work at The Commercial Appeal. In 1985, he became editor of Memphis magazine, the first African American in the country to serve as the editor of a city magazine. Conley moved to the Detroit Free Press in 1990, and joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1993, where he worked for more than 15 years in a variety of editorial and supervisory positions. He still resides in Atlanta, where he is actively involved with adult literacy programs in that city.