Everything seemed to be normal the night of April 4, 1968. My grandmother was home with her only son at the time. When asked how Memphis was before the assassination, she said that Memphis was just like any normal big city. She said that the African Americans were the majority, but that it didn't bother her. My grandmother was twenty-eight and married at the time of the assassination, and she was working part-time as a secretary. Her typical day would have been taking care of her only son at the time, and she went to work two to three times a week.
When my grandma heard the news about Martin Luther King Junior being assassinated, she said she immediately froze. She said that she did not know what to think. One thing that she kept saying over and over again throughout her entire interview was that fear kept taking over. My grandma is one of the most religious people that I know, and she said that the night of the assassination was one of the nights where she just kept asking God why. She did not know why something tragic like this could happen.
My grandma said that the night that MLK died, the city of Memphis shut down. There was a curfew for the people that were brave enough to go out and that most people in the city did not get much sleep at all that night. She stated that there was a fear in Memphis that she had not seen before. It was like there was another war coming to town. Everyone in the entire city was in panic mode, and nobody knew how to react to such a terrible tragedy.
My grandmother said that the assassination changed the city of Memphis. She no longer lives here, but she comes and visits all the time and she told me that she can see the differences. I asked her what things were different and she said social media. She said that social media has changed our world. She said that the addition of twenty-four hour news has also made the city of Memphis different. My grandmother also stated that the news in Memphis is almost always negative, and that it has a negative affect on the people in the city.
"After the assassination of MLK, racial issues became more and more public," said my now seventy-four year old grandmother. She thinks that the biggest change after he was killed was racial issues. She believes that everyone was created equal - black, white, tall, short, fat, skinny. Like I wrote earlier, she is extremely spiritual and therefore, she believes that God created everyone to be equal and she wishes that humanity would understand that. No man is better than any other man.
My grandmother stated that, "MLK wanted racial equality and so did I." She said that her opinion of him did not change after he was shot, because she felt the same way all along. She knew that what he was fighting for was right, and she was just glad that someone had the courage to stand up and fight for racial equality. She liked Martin Luther King Junior from the beginning because he knew exactly what he wanted, and he knew what was best for the people. He may not have accomplished everything that he wanted to in his life that was cut short, but he definitely did more than most will do in an entire lifetime.