Touched By Two Heroes, One Famous, One Less So

Today I write about the two men who had the greatest influence on my adolescence. One was black, the other white. I wept at both their funerals.

One was my father, the other the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. King’s birthday was Wednesday; it will be celebrated officially Monday. Some question honoring Dr. King at the level of Lincoln and Washington, ahead of Jefferson, the Roosevelts or any of our military heroes.

Perhaps someday they will get a chance to read his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” Or his “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Or his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” sermon the night before he was slain by an assassin in Memphis.

What is so compelling about Dr. King’s chosen path is what he rejected to take it. Dr. King received his doctor of divinity degree from Boston University. A grand future lay before him in the religious hierarchy. He would have been embraced by a number of major churches.

But Dr. King chose to return to his native South, to preach his ministry on the front lines of the civil rights movement. His followers became enamored not just of his majestic oratory, but of his courage.

He was stabbed, beaten, arrested more than a dozen times for seeking rights so utterly basic we all take them for granted today. His house was bombed when he led the fight against segregated bus seating in Montgomery, Ala. The motel room where he stayed was destroyed by a bomb during the marches he led against segregated public accommodations in Birmingham, Ala. Death threats were a given wherever he took on a cause.

I was a high school sophomore in southern Indiana when the murder of Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers awakened me to the world beyond the borders of the Wabash and Ohio rivers. The first book I read about civil rights was Dr. King’s “Stride Toward Freedom.” But it was Dr. King’s letter from that Birmingham jail cell, written three years before, that captivated me.

Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, who was Dr. King’s protege then, repeats part of that jailhouse message in his new book, “An Easy Burden”: “We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.”

On Thursday, April 4, 1968, I was in Indianapolis to write for my college newspaper at Indiana University about Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign stop in a poor section of the city. Kennedy called those of us from the local media onto his plane. He informed us that Dr. King had been slain on the eve of his second march in Memphis. He had been there on behalf of striking garbage workers.

The speech Kennedy gave that night has often been quoted. He talked about the killing of his own brother, John.

That weekend I went to my parents’ home. I wanted to talk with my father about the historic events of the week and how they affected me. But he was enraptured by his two granddaughters, who were visiting. He was about to take them to the park that Sunday when I knew I couldn’t wait any longer. I blurted out that I was leaving, to go to Atlanta for Dr. King’s funeral.

I was very young and immature, and I knew this would become a difficult moment between us. Though we agreed on many issues, my father was always baffled about my devotion to Dr. King. This time I had his full attention. I told him I planned to hitchhike the 480 miles to Atlanta.

“You are not going to hitchhike,” my father said firmly. “But I will pay your way.”

He looked up the bus schedules for me and sat down and traced out a timetable so I could get to the funeral on time.

The following Tuesday, I approached the Ebenezer Baptist Church in the shadows of downtown Atlanta--where Dr. King had preached, and his father and his grandfather had preached before him. The line of people still hoping to pay their respects at his open coffin went on for blocks. After the private service, which I watched on TV from an annex next door, I walked several minutes ahead of the funeral procession along the six miles to Morehouse College, Dr. King’s alma mater, for the public memorial service.

It was the most amazing walk of my life. Black Americans by the tens of thousands lined the roadway, faces of pain and sadness. It was like seeing America for the first time through different eyes. I’d never thought of Dr. King as a hero to black people, but as someone trying to save America for all of us.

At Morehouse, Mahalia Jackson sang and the masses wept. Bobby Kennedy, who would become the victim of a crazed man’s bullet two months later, passed by me with his shirt sleeves rolled up from the long walk. Robert Culp of “I Spy” TV fame stood in front of me on the Morehouse lawn, clutching hands with his wife at the time, France Nuyen, and muttering “Dear God, dear God.”

En route home later, my mind was a jumble of all I had witnessed, and I said a silent thank you to my father for making the attempt to understand his confused son.

And later: I cannot explain it, but once people milling about the Morehouse grounds saw the funeral procession arriving, they began to form rows for the service. And somehow I got pushed up front. For some reason, a TV cameraman chose to concentrate on my tear-streaked face during one of the prayers.

That brought instant recognition among my college friends watching on TV; in my small hometown, word spread quickly about Clarence Hicks’ boy. Included in that TV audience was my fiancee at the time, who thought I was home studying. To her this was impulsive, bizarre behavior; we soon went our separate ways.

In the railroad yards where my father worked, a few white co-workers told him they understood: that it was just hard to control kids nowadays. He would needle them by boasting that he had paid my way. Black co-workers he knew only in passing suddenly befriended him. “If you’d told me, Clarence, your boy could have stayed with my sister in Atlanta,” one of them told him.

Both my heroes were truly beloved. When my father died of cancer just over a year ago, attendance at his wake was beyond anything I had expected. So many of these good people told me stories about my father I’d never heard, but was glad to know about. In his own way, he had touched a lot of lives too.