Jesse Epps was to be in New York yesterday afternoon to speak about the future, carrying a credential from history.
He spent the late afternoon of April 4, 1968, in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis, Tennessee, talking with the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr about a march in support of the city's sanitation workers, who were striking for wages that would permit them to get off welfare and live in homes with indoor toilets. Just a week before, an earlier march turned into a bedlam, with stores looted, the crowd gassed, and King hustled into a car by aides. For King, the event had been an embarrassing, dispiriting rout. He came back to Memphis to salvage the strikers' cause and his reputation.
Seated in that US$13-a-day room, Epps assured King that this time all the churches in town were rallying behind the strikers.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
"We talked about the fact that the safety and security had come a long way from where we had begun," said Epps, a labor organizer who had been sent to Memphis by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
They wound up their meeting, and King declined an invitation to dine with Epps. He was already due at the home of a minister for supper. He washed up, knotted a fresh tie. A few of his people were in the parking lot outside, so he stepped onto the balcony outside Room 306 to tell them about the dinner plans. A single shot brought him down.
The echoes of that instant have carried 40 years. They can be heard around New York in the most casual of conversations about national politics, 2008: among strangers in a subway car, friends at dinner, people on their jobs. For some, the very strength of Senator Barack Obama's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has dragged the thought of violence out of the shadows of the unspeakable.
A church worker and military veteran who is rooting for Obama said last week in Harlem, "Obama, I hope you don't get a bullet."
A much younger man, Joseph Solomon Jones, 25, held in the same thought high hopes and pure fatalism about the Obama campaign.
"He's very educated, very fluent in what the people want," said Jones, a college student in Brooklyn. "Obama, I want him to be president. First black president, all right, I'll take that. Even though he's going to get shot after that."
Now 71, Epps, who was due to speak yesterday at a King commemoration at Trinity Church on Wall Street that is being sponsored by the city's sanitation workers union, said that the world had been reborn many times since 1968. Yet he sees how the anxiety over Obama's safety runs in counterpoint to the elation over his successes.
"That is a question I am hearing among the brethren," he said.
Modern history does not permit such worries to be brushed off, regardless of whether the source of danger is seen as some dark unnamed force, or simply a deranged person driven to lash out at a Kennedy or a King, a Wallace or a Reagan.
Alma Powell, the wife of Colin Powell, spoke bluntly about her fears in 1995 when Powell was weighing a run for the Republican presidential nomination.
"He would probably be at much more risk than any other candidate because of being a black man in this society," Powell said. "A lot of crazy people out there."
In a speech on Sunday night, Michelle Obama, the wife of Obama, lightly traced the twisting byways of that anxiety.
"There are still voices, even within our own community, that focus on what might go wrong," she said in Atlanta. "It's not just about fear, people. It's also about love. I know people want to protect us and themselves from disappointment and failure, from the possibility of being let down again -- not by us, but by the world as it is. A world that we fear might not be ready for a decent man like Barack."
For Epps, who was instrumental in persuading King to come to Memphis for the sanitation workers, the history of that moment leads him not to worries, but to strategy.
"When they cut down the leader, the work is going to go on," he said. "Get rid of Mrs. Clinton, you have Mr Obama. You get rid of both of them, you get Mr Edwards. A flock of geese will move to protect the lead goose from the hunter."
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