Vancouver (2) - Martin Luther King

4^th April 1968 is one of those dates, like 22^nd November 1963, that is imprinted in my mind. In April ‘68 I was preparing to leave the city of Vancouver after a life-enriching year. Fifty years ago today Bill Riches*, my flatmate, took me to his favourite drive-in cinema and burger bar in New Westminster for a farewell treat. As we were driving back to our flat a newsflash came on the car radio: “Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed today in Memphis Tennessee.” Bill’s only words were: “Good riddance!”

Watching the movie “Selma” again this week reminded me of the drama, brutality and tragedy that played out on streets in North America whilst I was living there. North of the 49^th Parallel in the haven of Vancouver, we mostly lived our lives and went to work as if those dramatic events were someone else’s problems, not matters in which we were likely to get caught up. When Bill uttered those two shocking words I was confronted for the first time in my life with the reality of bitter racial prejudice.

For me growing up in 1950s Nottingham it was commonplace to meet “darkies”, as West Indian immigrants were called; with cheerful faces and richly cadenced voices some of them issued my two-penny bus tickets on the ride to town. For sure they felt isolated far from home and there is no doubt prejudice stalked them wherever they went. Did locals feel threatened by them? Was state violence perpetrated against them? I think not.

In 1968 the U.S. Civil Rights movement was reaching a crescendo in its (eventually) effective campaign for the rights of poor people and the right for black people to vote. Nonetheless, my friend Bill was one of many young people in Canada and the USA who had grown up in families where colour prejudice was open and unashamed. Earlier in my stay out west I witnessed some indigenous First Nations people of British Columbia living on squalid reservations. Burned wrecks of motorcars littered their villages; empty beer bottles were strewn along the roads. My all-male, white, college educated friends looked at the drunks with pity and told me these folk would forever be unemployed. There was a distinct racial divide even in Vancouver, a city where few African-American faces were seen.

Eight weeks after my night out with Bill, (I was back in Vancouver for a last month of farewells to family, friends and work mates), we were all stunned by yet another political assassination – this of Robert Kennedy in a Los Angeles hotel. How could this happen? What was going wrong? In many ways the sixties were years of hope, abandonment of austerity and optimism despite Viet Nam, the Cuban missile crisis, Bay of Pigs and threats from Soviet Russia with the Cold War. Yes, there were countless reasons for the urban violence and slowly these unwound. Despite – or because of - the violent events of 4^th April and 6^th June 1968 the fortunes of many black people in North America took an upturn in the decades that followed, punctuated occasionally by the white police’s aberrations such as the beating of Rodney King in a Los Angeles gutter in 1991. Some black people do say today things have not changed much for the better, there is still a racial divide in some areas.

Looking back to fifty years ago it is salutary to consider how - despite Putin, Trump and Kim playing their paranoid power games – now the streets of America are mostly devoid of politically motivated violence. We have moved on. The paradox is that in living in a global community we have become more insular and less bothered to violate others in the name of concerted political action. Or have we? There are mass killings; there are still many more black people dying violent deaths than white people. Maybe we are in a lull before once more city streets become a fresh battleground where unemployed whites, blacks, Latinos and Mexicans give way to their rage over the obtuseness of a President. It happened in 1968. It could happen again, and not just in the USA.

*Not his real name.