The title of the CNN documentary is based on the King inference, and this great book:
AMAZON.com: Manchild in the Promised Land is indeed one of the most remarkable autobiographies of our time. This thinly fictionalized account of Claude Brown's childhood as a hardened, streetwise criminal trying to survive the toughest streets of Harlem has been heralded as the definitive account of everyday life for the first generation of African Americans raised in the Northern ghettos of the 1940s and 1950s. When the book was first published in 1965, it was praised for its realistic portrayal of Harlem -- the children, young people, hardworking parents; the hustlers, drug dealers, prostitutes, and numbers runners; the police; the violence, sex, and humor. The book continues to resonate generations later, not only because of its fierce and dignified anger, not only because the struggles of urban youth are as deeply felt today as they were in Brown's time, but also because the book is affirmative and inspiring. Here is the story about the one who "made it," the boy who kept landing on his feet and became a man.
"Landing on his feet": I, and a lot of others of my "certain age" can recall what we were doing/thinking/acting out the day after April 4, 1968. April 5th was a sunny, sad Friday in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The teachers at Bethlehem Community Center gathered us together and told us: to this day, I have no idea why.
Perhaps they were overcome with grief, as my parents were; as my sister, who had put her life on the line for the movement numerous, nervous times. I don't think they meant to injure us any more than the circumstances warranted.
Honestly, we already knew, responding with our tears: The news of King's assassination spread pre-Internet, through my segregated community in viral fashion; word-of-mouth, neighbor, beauty parlor, barbershop, water cooler and eventually a kindergarten of grieving children with full appreciation of the gravitas of our loss. We took our nap at the usual time: no lessons, no play.
Some of us determined within ourselves to be Sputnik's Children, that he would be a seed sacrificed, and we...would be his harvest!
Related Amazon Link: Sputnik's Child, by Fred Ledley
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