Me in Memphis

I wrote my mom that we had been to Memphis on our Civil Rights Tour and that we had gone to visit the National Civil Rights museum which is housed in the Lorraine Motel -- the site where Dr. King was assassinated. I asked her if she remembered anything about that. She surprised me by writing back, "You might not remember it, but we were living in Memphis on Tahiti Lane when MLK was killed."

I don't remember that at all. I knew that we had lived in Memphis for a couple of years when I was little, but I hadn't worked out the dates to figure out that we were there when the assassination took place. It turns out I was six, the age I am in this picture of me and my Granny Mears. I guess I think of Dr. King as a kind of a super-human character, larger than life. Even though I know intellectually that his assassination took place during my lifetime, I always think of it as something that happened a long time ago in a place very different from any place I have been -- maybe another dimension. I don't think of him as a regular person.

Seeing this picture of myself at the age I was when he was killed, and finding out that I was living in the same city where he was killed, at the time that he was killed, changes my way of thinking about him. I feel a more concrete human connection. He was a "regular person" -- a human being -- like me. I think it is important for me to remember that my heroes are human beings like me. They live in the same cities where I live, and eat the same food, drink the same water. They probably got dorky pictures of themselves taken with their grannys. I should not make them "super-heroes from another dimension." That's a way of letting myself off the hook.