By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. shakes hands from the stage at Kleinhans Music Hall, 1967.
The memory of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has been evoked as a universally admired figure amidst the unrest in Buffalo and around the country over the last several days.
But as King was actively working to promote equity and justice, people’s opinions of him and his tactics varied greatly – as evidenced in a review of Buffalo Courier-Express editorials and letters to the editor during the height of King’s activism, from 1963 until his death in 1968.
The opinions of everyday Western New Yorkers during that tumultuous era are eerily reflected in any quick scroll through a social media feed more than 50 years later.
Most reminiscent of an exchange in social media today is the back-and-forth between Lancaster’s Arthur Ryan and Buffalo’s McKinley Sims in the “Morning Mail” in the Courier-Express in late 1964 and early 1965.
During the civil unrest of the 1960s, there were writers to the Courier-Express who blamed the media in “covering up the crimes of negroes,” blamed politicians like Republican New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller who supported King, and challenged the audacity of King to challenge President Johnson.
Western New Yorkers also wrote to the Courier-Express to call King “a sick joke,” to accuse him of fomenting communist subversion, and to tell him to go to Russia if he doesn’t like it here. Another writer described his followers as “hoodlums, hippies, and bums.”
They were far fewer, but there were also letters in support of King. One Chafee woman was never more proud to be an American. Another was impressed by the courage of King and his compatriots. One more letter was sent after King was assassinated in 1968. The letter writer called on the white community to be moved enough to do something for “our Negro brothers.”
One can’t help but wonder what a review of thought and opinions of this current day will look like a half-century from now.
