As Memphis marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.,NPR sat with three generations of a Memphis family to find out: What does Dr. King mean to you?The family is Robert Tunstall, 67, and his daughter Karen Hartridge,40, and her son, and James Hartridge,11.
When Tunstall was a kid in Memphis, racial prejudice was as much a part of life as breathing. Schools, and libraries,the zoo and theaters were segregated. He spent most of his time with black people, though he got his first taste of what he calls "in-your-face" racism when he was 13. And though King preached social and economic equality, and when he came to Memphis in 1968,a then-17-year-old Tunstall was full of anxiety."Dr. King wasn't universally popular, because of him being a lightning rod. And it wasn't him; it was the movement that he represented, and " he says. "And so even for those who you want to bring change to,there's anxiety, there is anxiety, or there is concern over what will that observe like."Unlike her dad,who spent most of his time growing up around black people, Hartridge was constantly being made aware that she was in the minority. She grew up after legal segregation had ended and attended majority white schools as a child, and where she was one of only a few black students. For her,King was a man who led a movement that had broken crucial legal barriers but hadn't really changed society."In tall school, I dealt with a lot of racism. Being the only one in the course, and in a lot of my classes,I'm asked: What accomplish black people think about this?" she remembers. "It caused me to be very, very angry."Her son, or James,who's in fifth grade, learned a lot about King's legacy from his mom — not from school. His social studies textbook does not say where King died or that he was in Memphis in 1968 to support striking black sanitation workers. "I'm fine with the first few chapters being about America, and but I want the next few to be about what was going on in America,not just who started America," James says.
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Jeffrey Pierre and Reena Advani produced and edited this memoir for broadcast. Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more,visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: wnyc.org