There are so many things I could have done, would have done but didn’t do.
Sixty years ago tomorrow was one of them, maybe the most significant historical event of my life that I could easily have attending, but as far as I can remember, never even considered.
On August 28, 1963, I was living in Fairfax, Virginia, maybe 15 or 16 miles from the Lincoln Memorial.
I lived in an all-white neighborhood, I attended an all-white church and I was about to start high school at a school that would enroll its first black student in two years. As best as I could recall, I had had personal contact with exactly two black people in my life.
When we lived in Ohio, the woman who came during the day to baby-sit my preschool siblings was black. And when my grandfather had taken me to a baseball game in Cleveland to see Detroit play the Indians, he introduced me to Detroit’s Gates Brown, who was from my grandparents’ hometown of Crestline.
Aside from that, I might as well have been living in Mayberry.
But on this day, 60 years ago, history was happening less than an hour away.
I am relatively certain, as much as I could be across 60 years, , that I never even considered the possibility of going. For one thing, my parents would never have allowed it. I was 13 going on 10 as far as they were concerned. Even five or six years later, when I was in college, they were nervous about their white-bread son and his white-bread friends crossing the line into Georgetown to go to nightclubs.
Living outside the nation’s capital, it’s actually amazinf how few big events I was part of. I hear President Johnson speak at the Lincoln Memorial in December 1963 and I attended his inauguration a month later. I was on the fringes of the Moratorium in November 1969 and I got teargassed at an antiwar protest in May 1971.
By then Dr. King was dead and we were in a decline that would take us from Nixon to Reagan to Bust to Bush to Trump, From a president like John Kennedy who inspired us with soaring rhetoric and someone like Dr. King with his song about what a wondrous country this could be to the disaster of a Donald Trump who inspires his minions by telling them, “I am your vengeance,” on thing is definitely true.
Only the good die young.
I wish I had heard him speak.