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Fearless
On April 4 our city burned, but my mother was unflinching.
Even at the age of 7, I was accustomed to people coming in and out of our house at all hours of the day and night. My parents ran the NAACP and organized civil rights marches from our living room, and published a militant newspaper from our basement. On any given night, there were revolutionaries at our dinner table, college kids singing freedom songs, union workers painting picket signs, people arguing passionately about strategy and politics and race relations and whose turn it was to go pick up the fried chicken from Stefanich’s.
But this night — April 4, 1968 — was a night like no other.
The murder of Martin Luther King had triggered an uprising of rage and grief all over America, including my quiet, working-class town of Joliet, Illinois. My father was out on the streets that night as the madness reigned, trying his best to protect and redirect the young students who were rioting, burning, protesting, and in danger of being shot. It was my father — the first black lawyer our town had ever seen — who would be in the newspaper and on the radio the next day.
But it was my mother who was home with us kids.
She opened the door a thousand times that night as people streamed into the house, weeping, screaming, hysterical. It was my…
