Nightmare on Elm Street

50 years ago today JFK was killed in Dallas.

As a kid, I heard about this event through the eyes of my parents who were at the impressionable age of 18 when the shots rang out from the book depository and into Kennedy’s head, according to the story.

My parents were high school seniors in Texas, far away from the events by European standards in terms of distance.  It would take you six and a half hours drive time if you hopped in the car today and drove from Dallas to Corpus Christi.  It took even longer fifty years ago, when Dallas and Corpus Christi were both racially segregated cities. My parents’ families had moved from the north to Texas when they were both young. So they never really felt a connection to the Lone Star state where they spent most of their childhoods. Still, my parents told me that Kennedy’s murder felt like it had happened in their backyard. They were ashamed to be from Texas when the nation went into mourning. It was their fault that Kennedy was slaughtered.

Both of my parents were seniors in high school that year and preparing to go to Washington, DC, to college to study in order to enter into lives of public service. They didn’t know one another when Kennedy was shot, but they were both Kennedy Democrats who took the idea of service to the nation extremely seriously. It goes without saying that Kennedy’s assassination was probably the defining moment of their youth. I know this because they can describe what they were doing that day, for almost every hour, and then for some days after that. About a year later, my parents met because they were sitting in two separate sections of the same college-level political science class taught by the same professor. They still didn’t know each other. But their professor saw so much similarity in the papers they wrote about Kennedy’s assassination (probably the essay topic of every political science course taught in the nation in those years) that she suggested they meet one another. Within a year, they were together in Washington, DC.

I don’t think either of them saw Kennedy as a great politician but rather something like a placeholder for an idealistic new worldview of the post-war generation. So it became easy, in the years that followed Kennedy’s death, for my parents to move on to doing the work of public service and policy that flowed from Kennedy’s unfulfilled promises. When I ask them what those days were like, they always say they were “strange times”.

They really had no hope of a normal college life, my parents, because in the spring time of their last semester of senior year in Washington, they were taking a taxi home to their apartment from a movie with some other friends when they were caught in the middle of a riot born from the rage over the assassination of MLK.  This event, too, left a lasting impression on them. One of horror, in fact. Their car was chased by another car in a parallel lane by a group of black men with guns pointed not at my parents, the white college kids, but at the taxi driver, a black man. The gun wielders evidently felt he should die for the sin of being an “Uncle Tom” by shuttling these white kids around. Now that they killed Martin, it was time to fuck passive resistance and kill the brother collaborator. For several blocks, guns were drawn, windows opened, screaming and weaving through traffic at high speeds. And the taxi driver saved my parents by managing to escape the attackers with his speed and intimate knowledge of Washington city streets. No shots were fired on that day on my parents or on the magic chariot driver who saved them all from death.

By the time RFK was assassinated a few months later, my parents had just graduated college and were preparing to get married and move away from Washington to start work in politics. But I never could get them to describe their experience of the events of that day because every time we got to the part of the story where the final murder was taking place, my parents grew quiet. They never cared to talk about conspiracy theories or reasons or the evil forces at work that killed these three men. While in many parts of the US, especially among African-Americans and their white allies, mourning them in public and in private rituals is something of a secular national religion, my parents only ever wanted to talk to me about their experiences in those times. Not speculations. I remember my mother “misplaced” one of my books on Lee Harvey Oswald when I was 13 and though we traveled to Texas many times to visit relatives when I was a kid, my parents never wanted to stop in Dallas. We sped straight on by, as fast as possible. What a time that was.

(The artist Kerry James Marshall discussing his work, Memento #5, with three angels on the top for JFK MLK RFK)