Me, My Dad and MLK

      I was some age in the mid-single digits. For it was sometime in the mid-1950s.

      My dad, who edited the newspaper for a left-leaning union, was attending a union convention up in the Catskills somewhere. My mom and I went along.

      Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a strong supporter of labor unions—particularly left-leaning labor unions. And those unions, to their great credit, were early supporters of the work Dr. King was doing as one of the most aggressive leaders of the Civil Rights movement.

      So, Martin Luther King, Jr., was speaking at that union convention somewhere in the Catskills—at least that is how I remember it. And my mother, as I recall, handed me—a shy kid—a piece of paper and a pen and pushed me toward the front of the room.

      The autograph, my wife got it framed, now hangs in a corner of our living room. And, on three occasions, it has occasioned visits, in mid-January, to a grandkid’s class.

      On the most recent such occasion, in advance of this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day—that is, in my granddaughter’s second-grade class last week—I was delighted, after showing them the autograph, to hear the students recite from memory some sentences from Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Then I asked if they knew how many people had been at the “March on Washington,” and again was rewarded with a many-voiced and impressive response: “two hundred and fifty thousand.”

      That gave me an opportunity to show them the two other photos that also hang in that corner of my living room. One shows a middle-aged man with glasses taking notes as he sits beside a better-attired man who turned out to be exactly the same age.

      That was my father, Bernard Stephens, interviewing John F. Kennedy for the labor press during the 1960 presidential campaign. It was once the main attraction in that living-room corner. Not for kids nowadays. It took the class a few minutes before someone came up with that well-attired man’s name and significance. (Something like showing us, when we were seven, a photo of William McKinley.) And it is hard to argue that JFK’s presidency had much lasting significance.

      The other photo that shares that corner shows my dad, who helped organize a (left-leaning) Committee to Integrate Baseball, interviewing Jackie Robinson in the dugout at Ebbets Field. The kids seemed more impressed, probably appropriately, with the first African American allowed to play baseball in the major leagues than with the JFK photo.

      And that final framed exhibit gave me occasion to brag a bit about my dad’s exemplary involvement in the Civil Rights movement; to note that he had participated in planning meetings for the March on Washington; and to mention that he was on the (crowded) stage at the March on Washington.

      Then I mentioned that my dad had been asked by a reporter, at the time, how large the crowd was.

      His answer: “two hundred and fifty thousand.” (I have written about this before for this website.)

      This stimulated some discussion with the second graders about the difficulty of crowd-size measurement. But soon enough we returned to the subject of discrimination, of the many groups that have been subject to such discrimination and of the importance of Dr. King.

      And I left impressed with the students and their teacher, and with the realization that MLK is now better known among (very) young people than JFK.