Tuesday, May 29, 2001

Each day, "Mississippi Journey" profiles someone the students met on their tour. Today: Tennessee State Representative Kathryn Bowers, a Democrat and African American from Memphis, who is in her eighth year in the state legislature.

The neighborhood that I grew up in was in the south Memphis area. It's the second-oldest African-American community in Memphis. And people who all lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in basically owned their own homes. We didn't have a lot of rentals. In the time that I was a child, it would be middle-income level for black people. Not for whites, but for blacks.

You know, of course, Dr. King got killed here in 1968.

The day that Dr. King got killed, I was at work. I was working at the time for a beauty supply. I was an assistant buyer. I heard it on the radio. I worked very long, hard hours. It was like five or six o'clock in the afternoon. Of course, before I could leave work to go home, they had issued a curfew. They wanted everybody to stay in and not go out.

But it was a very shocking and devastating thing. That a man of Dr. King's caliber you know, could be assassinated. It was unbelievable. It just can't be true. And you came to the reality that it was true.

I drove home that night. You were almost like in shock. Because I had been to hear his speech the night before. It was like this just can't be true. This man has been shot, he's been killed right here in Memphis, Tenn. People just didn't want to believe it.

At the beauty supply where I worked, the position I was in was the first time that they had ever hired an African American to be in that position. So it meant that, for all practical purposes on a daily basis, basically I was working with whites as opposed to blacks.

The next day, so many of them expressed their sympathy. They apologized for what had happened to him and one or two said, "I don't have any prejudices. I wouldn't mind you living next door to me." And of course, you know, with Dr. King being assassinated, you had a tendency to have a little anger. And it was just the way he said it to me, "I wouldn't mind you living next door to me."

So I just like thrashed back, "You wouldn't mind me, but what about somebody else?" You know, 'cause that was the way it sounded to me, like "I don't know about another black person, no, but you I wouldn't mind." And so I just kinda went off on that person.

It really was just a devastating thing. And of course, Memphis hasn't really gotten over it yet. The city has not been able to grow as it should, economically, because of the serious racial problems that we have here.