Recherche, Recherché

Margaret and I were musing, this morning, about great events of the past — Pearl Harbor (for our parents’ generation), the Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK’s assassination for ours — and the extent to which we were aware of them at the time (I myself was quite unaware of Pearl Harbor). Our conversation wandered thence to the assassinations of 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy.
 
While thinking about Dr. King and his televised presence (sometimes I think I’m the only Episcopal clergyman over 50 who doesn’t claim to have marched beside Dr. King), I realized that as much as I admired him, as much as I was startled by his death, I was all the more captivated by Shirley Chisholm. Partly because of the nature of television coverage (favoring elected officials) and partly because I had gotten older, in her 1972 run for the presidency, and Barbara Jordan in her role as a member of the House Judiciary Committee that indicted Nixon, were the figures whose presence still vividly stir my admiration.

2 thoughts on “Recherche, Recherché

  1. You may not have marched with MLK but you heard him speak in person in Brunswick ME in the mid ’60s!

  2. (True — but that ruins my disclaimer. And since so many other Episcopal clergy my age seem to claim to have been in Montgomery or Selma or on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, I content myself with my absent respect. But yes, thanks!)

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