Then he said, "Come on. You have to leave the park. It's closed after sunset." Then, a little more kindly, he added, "Anyhow, you can't sleep here. It's raining."
I said I didn't have anywhere to go, and he said, "Well, you could sleep in the jail, but I'd have to arrest you to put you in a cell. You'd be charged with vagrancy, but in the morning we can rip up the ticket and let you go."
It sounded like a good deal to me, so I followed him to his squad car and we rode to the jail. While it wasn't the same Concord police station that would have been there in Thoreau's time, I realized that the jail I was being brought to was the direct linear descendant of the jail in which Thoreau had spent a night for his tax refusal. That is where Thoreau was famously visited by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who reportedly said, "Henry, I'm sorry to find you here," to which Thoreau replied, "Mr. Emerson, why are you not here?"
My own night in the cell was largely uneventful, except for a disturbing snippet of conversation between two of the cops on the night shift, whom I overheard discussing the King assassination.
"That's King's widow on the radio, talking about her husband," said one cop.
"Yeah, they finally killed that n-word," said the other.
Clearly, I thought to myself, this country has a lo-o-o-ong way to go.
It still does.
That night, I sat in my cell on a hard bench that served as the bed, locked inside in accordance with jail rules, and hungrily ate the peanut-butter and white bread sandwiches offered to me by my racist jailers, while I wrote my paper which, at that point, came easily to me.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was dead, but the movement to create a peaceful society and a peaceful world where people are not oppressed or exploited, and where every child of every race and nationality can grow to her or his full potential continues as his legacy, half a century later.
No one, including Dr. King, ever said it would be easy.
DAVE LINDORFF is a member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, JESS GUH, GARY LINDORFF, ALFREDO LOPEZ, LINN WASHINGTON, JR. and the late CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net
(Article changed on April 5, 2018 at 20:55)
(Article changed on April 5, 2018 at 21:40)
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