Taking time to remember what MLK Day is all about

Life's Tidbits

By: Larry Burge

Posted: 1/18/08

Not so long ago, and within my lifetime, blacks were not welcomed in Northwest Arkansas by all white folks. It was a place where "Whites Only" signs restricted where a black person might go and what a black person could do even 50 years ago. I remember during the mid-1950s through the late 1960s that a few black people were in attendance at some UA sports events, but I never saw them outside Fayetteville in Benton or Washington Counties.

I grew up in Sulphur Springs, which lies on the extreme northwest corner of Benton County, within four miles of Missouri's southwest border. I don't believe I ever heard of any black people living in any small town in Benton County. If they had, they most likely would have, at some time or another, feared for their lives.

From 1960 through 1964, I drove from Sulphur Springs across the Missouri line to attend Noel High School. After school, I would usually meet my schoolmates in the back of the drug store on Main Street. The store's owner, a pharmacist, had built a place for us to hang out, which had a wooden dance floor with six restaurant-style booths placed on three of its sides. If you ever watched the TV show "Happy Days," it was just like the hangout of Fonzie, Richie and the other characters on the show.

One afternoon in 1963, a story of the day's happenings on Main Street in Noel surfaced among our teen group. What happened that day was not unlike what was happening across the country, but I thought it unusual for a town of about 1,200 residents to experience it, as well. Even as I write about it here, I get a negative feeling in my heart chakra that grinds in my craw about man's continued inhuman treatment of their fellow humans.

The story, as I remember it, went something like this. The Noel marshal, his deputies and the most prominent male town city council members surrounded a group of college-aged kids on west Main Street. I don't remember if anyone said where the kids were from, but they had rolled into town in two separate cars. I remember the group was of mixed color, blacks and whites.

Someone said the kids got out of their cars down by the Butler Creek bridge at the west end of Main Street, huddled around a leader, and were about to march up Main Street in Noel holding signs in protest of segregation, when the Noel marshal and his friends met them with unfriendly motives. I've often wondered since where those kids came from, and I like to think they were from the UA.

As was the custom in small towns in the South, the protesters met with anticipated resistance, but the town marshal and his men clutched guns in their hands when the two groups met. Rumor was the shell clips were full, with one shell shoved in the breach, loaded, in ready position for the men to pull the hammer back and to fire at will. To my knowledge, the marshal and his men acted on their own with little backing from the town's folks.

Around the dance floor that day, my school friends who said they witnessed the incident told the story about how the vigilante group of men escorted the protesters to their cars and used the business end of a gun to persuade the kids to get out of town fast and not to come back.

I also remember that the protesters talked back to the marshal and his men. They tried to educate the men, whose stern warning told much more about the men's prejudicial natures than the whole of the community's thoughts and beliefs. The protesters had simply tried to explain to the marshal that Missouri was part of America, and the U.S Constitution gave them the right to march in protest along any public street, including the one in Noel. That argument did not settle with the men at all.

When the protesters tried to exercise their rights and refused to leave, the men agreed that if they weren't out of town by the time the quickly setting sun went down behind the hill, their bodies might never be found. The kids left town because they knew the threats were real and likely to be carried out as the men's warning had implied.

I for one, am glad those men have passed away. And if they ever reincarnate, I wish them to return with a much-improved attitude about what it means to be a part of the human race. Whether we like it, scientists have proven that we all came from the same source, and our bodies were built with the same strands of DNA. That makes us all brothers and sisters, which I believe we surely are.

Well, brothers and sisters, Monday is a special day set aside by our legislative body to commemorate the gift of a special person, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Back in '63, I watched the civil rights marches on my family's black and white TV with as much attention as you younger students today watch the news about Britney Spears or the latest police chase scenes. I saw how the Alabama State Police beat protesters with sticks and shot at them with their guns, and how others who walked on behalf of all black people were abused by their fellow man.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy soon followed the racial riots and marches for freedom in 1963, then the death of his brother Bobby, and King became the last victim. Anyone who has followed the news in the last months about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan might in a small way sense what it was like during the freedom movement and what its supporters had to endure to gain their constitutional rights in 1960s America.

The Noel incident above was a sample of what was going on in many parts of the nation back then. The movement, first escalated by the 1957 Little Rock Central High School desegregation issue and white Southerners' resistance to ending school segregation, divided the American people.

The UA will close on Monday to allow students to celebrate the life of a great man, a brave soul that happened to inhabit a black man's body for a short time on this Earth. A black man with the name of Martin Luther King, Jr. The man who tried his best to teach every person - black, white or another color - to lay down their prejudices and learn the first life lesson: that we all came from the same source and, because of that, we are all brothers and sisters.

On the front page of the UA Web site, there is a green sign with the heading "Living the Dream in the 21st Century." Click on it, and you'll find no less than 14 events scheduled to commemorate the life of King.

Attend one of the events. And while you're there, spend a few minutes in thought, and celebrate that the human family, like Humpty Dumpty, can be put back together again if we come together, find the right glue and take the chance to make the needed changes and do the hard work it will take to put the Earth's people together again.

Larry Burge is a senior staff writer for The Arkansas Traveler. His column appears every other Friday.