Books |
Nothing Like Sunshine: A Story in the Aftermath of the MLK Assassination
Ben Kamin
By
Published: Jan 16, 2012
Category:
Memoir
I saw a Sears commercial last night that announced an “MLK Day Sale.” Well it has been 43 years since Dr. King was assassinated — time blurs things. And now, I see, it also trivializes them.
Not one word in “Nothing Like Sunshine: A Story in the Aftermath of the MLK Assassination” is trivial. That is because Ben Kamin, a rabbi and author of seven books, tells a personal story mostly from the point-of-view of the 15-year-old kid he was in 1968.
As you surely know: If you want to hear the truth unvarnished, ask a kid. [To read an excerpt from “Nothing Like Sunshine,” click here. To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here.]
“It’s hard to remember anything before November 22, 1963,” he writes, and if you are of AARP age, you know exactly what he means. The Kennedy assassination was a national trauma, but it cut even deeper on children who had no experience with tragedy on the grand scale. “There was my mother in her gray Dodge Lancer with the push-button transmission,” Kamin writes. “The breeze picked up and seemed to start howling and the skies turned dark as I sat in the seat and realized that she was sobbing.”
Five years later, the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. cut just as deep. Only this time Kamin was a tenth grader at Woodward High School in Cincinnati. That school packed 3,600 students in grades seven to 12 in a building so big that “wandering thieves and thugs…pounced upon innocent little seventh graders.” Smoking in the men’s room? Always. A black eleventh grader punching a seventh grader in the throat and then, a day later, ransacking his locker? It happened.
But when he heard that Dr. King had been shot, Ben Kamin — a Boy Scout, a past president of the Yavneh Day School Junior Congregation — thought immediately of Clifton Fleetwood, his friend from the marching band. Well, not perhaps a real friend. Clifton was black; they had a “daytime, Monday-Friday” friendship.
And on the day after Dr. King was shot, did white kids have black friends?
Until the assassination, black and white kids had pretty much the same agenda: “car keys and conquests.” Racial tension was real, but kids worked on it. “During a decade unique in American history and social cataclysm, a group of students became colorblind,” he says. “Being together — around a Bunsen burner, on the raw tiles of a locker room and shower, in the heaving hallways of a Friday morning pep rally, at a lunchroom strike protesting lousy food — precipitated some level of tolerance.”
But on the day after the assassination, a friend of Kamin’s “saw a white female ninth grader in a wheelchair upended and whipped in the hallway by four black boys.” And a black kid told Kamin, “You whitey Jews ought to clear out of here. You all killed Dr. King. We’re going to break up the stores across the street.”
Then Kamin saw Clifton Fleetwood.
“No, man, this is not for you,” Fleetwood said, and walked on.
Decades pass. Race haunts Ben Kamin. He goes to Memphis, tours the Civil Rights Museum, thinks often of Clifton Fleetwood.
Kamin says a remark Clifton Fleetwood made in high school has stuck with him; indeed, it’s been more powerful than anything he’d go on to read in the Talmud. “Attitude, bro,” Fleetwood said. “Attitude.”
And so, in 2006, Kamin goes looking for his high school friend.
Clifton Fleetwood still lived in his parents’ house in Cincinnati. The number was unlisted. Kamin wrote letters. They were no answered. So Kamin flew from his home in Southern California to knock on Fleetwood’s door.
Who is Clifton Fleetwood today? The book is just 130 pages; I don’t want to spoil it. But how much, the book asks, does who we become matter? Memories, dreams, reflections. Four decades of stuff. These distant things — random comments, small experiences, almost forgotten moments of revelation — also shape us.
If we push hard, a door opens, and suddenly we’re much closer to reality. It’s not a painless exercise, but Rabbi Kamin pushed. If you’re looking for a definition of “mensch,” you can start here.
