Reflections/Jonathan Gramling
Apology and Remembrance
We all have those moments in life when we are smacked in the face by reality and are reminded about our own humanity and imperfection.
When I write, I try really hard to express the truth about people’s lives and to express their lives from their point of view. There is enormous power in the written word for thousands of people to see, even in a small publication like The Capital City Hues. It can impact people’s lives in small and big ways. That is why it is so important for journalists to be committed to the truth — things that exist outside of the journalists immediate experience — above all else. It’s a belief that the world is larger than us and we need to accurately express it beyond the course of our everyday lives.
And so I must apologize to Dr. Freida High Tesfagiorgis for an error that I made in my three-part story about her. It is rare that I write a three-part story about any one individual, but Freida had so many fascinating things to say and her life has reflected, in many ways, the Black experience of people moving
to the northern cities from down South to get the manufacturing jobs that offered a higher standard of living. I portrayed Freida’s family as the working poor who lived in a project. That was incorrect.
Freida came from a working-class family. Her father worked in a Ford Motor plant and did metal recycling on the side to support his family of 11 children and a stay-at-home mother. Her father was a proud air force veteran of World War II and so the family was able to live in the LeClaire Courts, housing that was built especially for veterans. It wasn’t a project. Her family was a member of the Reorganized Church of the Latter Day Saints, which helped her attend Graceland College in Iowa.
It’s difficult to admit your mistakes. But as a journalist, it is extremely important that you admit that lest you start sliding down the slippery slope of untruth and manufactured reality, something that Fox TV’s Tucker Carlson started doing a while ago. Swallowing hard and admitting your mistakes leads to my becoming a better journalist because we always must be aware of our own humanity and imperfection.
I thank Freida for bringing my inaccuracies to my attention. I shall strive to do better.
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Our publication date — which I did not meet — was Monday, April 4, 2022. While I was somewhat holed up in The Hues office — a redirected bedroom in a condo I share with my son — I thought there was scant remembrance that it was the 54th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Now I realize that there is a proxy war going on in the Ukraine and that the U.S. Senate is in the final stages of hopefully approving President Joe Biden’s selection of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court, becoming the first African American woman to sit on the Supreme Court. But the assassination of Dr. King was such an earth-shaking event that still impacts the United States and the world today.
I was sitting in my parents’ house, a 16-year-old high school student, when the special bulletin on CBS announced that he had been assassinated. And then for days afterwards, there were the protests and the rioting and the buildings burning and people dying, things that I am sure Dr. King would not have wanted to happen even though he was murdered. In many ways, it took the wind out of the sails of the non-violence wing of the Civil Rights Movement. So much was destroyed.
It also tried to kill the voice of Dr. King who had a vision of America living up to its ideals and its promise for everyone. Indeed he pushed for America’s ideals and promise to become bigger than just the province of white men, especially propertied white men. In some ways, it was the day that the modern civil rights movement died, or at least that chapter.
And while I am loathe to believe in conspiracies because they are simple ways — often pure fantasy — of finding comfort in and making sense of a complex world over which few of us have any real control.
But given that, I can’t help but believe that while James Earl Ray was the triggerman in Dr. King’s assassination, he had a lot of help and support to have the resources to live and travel while stalking Dr. King and knowing where he was in an age before the Internet. It just doesn’t seem possible that he could act on his own.
Dr. King, 54 years later, we need you now more than ever. And we must always remember this sad day in history so that we can continue to make America live up to its ideals. That’s what Dr. King would have wanted.
