My grandmother, Val C., was thirty years old when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. She and my grandfather, James, lived with their two children, my mom Trina and my Uncle Rusty in the Cherokee subdivision of what is now east Memphis. It was considered the outskirts of town when they moved there. She felt very safe in Memphis, the city was quiet and used to win awards for being so clean. People walked to the market and downtown was where people would dress up and go shopping. Her life was very different from now. She used to run my mom and uncle to and from school, my mom to skate practice, my grandfather to work, and my uncle to baseball and basketball practices and games. She also worked part-time. She is retired now and lives in a small town. Memphis was more segregated than now and her neighborhood was mostly white but there were some African-American families and there was never any trouble. Kids played together and parents were friendly.
My grandmother recalls being at the skating rink in Whitehaven for my mom’s practice when she heard of the attack. At first she thought it was like when James Meredith integrated Ole Miss and people were just protesting but once she talked to my grandfather and he told her that Dr. King had been shot with a large caliber rifle, she became concerned. She remembers a feeling of needing to get everyone home. Once she got everyone home, they watched the news on TV to see what was going on because all of the trouble was happening in a different part of the city about 20 miles from their house. It looked really terrible on TV and she even had some of her friends from St. Louis that had seen the images on TV call and ask she and my grandfather to bring the kids and come stay in St. Louis with them for a while until things settled down. The news kept showing fires and disturbances in the poor part of town and it made it seem like the whole city was on fire. She said it actually made very little difference to their lives in East Memphis. The first night was a little scary but the fighting and riots never really spread to other areas of Memphis so their lives went on with work and school the next day.
The longer term changed more. She believed the situation was ignorant, and knew it would cause more harm to the race relations. She thought whoever had done it had done a stupid thing because it only gave people a reason to hate. She thought Martin Luther King, Jr. was great inspiration for black people but not a real factor to most white people when he was alive.
Most white people didn't really think about him until after he was killed. She is sad that he was killed but especially sad that he was killed here because it gave Memphians a reason to fight among ourselves. His life and death didn’t have much effect on her because she had always tried to treat people fairly, regardless of who they were but she also thinks that people who were prejudiced before were probably prejudiced after and that didn’t change. She thinks there is more awareness of racial inequality now, so that is a good thing Dr. King accomplished.