“I remember when it came over the news and everyone was sitting in the living room crying,” Usher Sawyer III said.
“I can remember hearing a lot of gunshots and people screaming.”
Sawyer, now a Matteson village trustee, was 12 the day the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, April 4, 1968.
He was living with his family on the 11th floor of a Henry Horner Homes building on Chicago’s West Side, home to some of the fiercest racial riots in the city.
“When you looked out the window, you could see fires that were burning on Madison Street, and people were running back to the projects with furniture and clothing and all kinds of stuff. It was just like a marathon.”
“When we got up there on Madison Street, people were looting,” Sawyer said. “They were tearing the place to pieces. At the end of that, it was like living in hell. It looked like the whole city, the whole world was on fire.”
Sawyer described a scene of violence: Chicago police clubbed men and women over the head with blackjacks and batons, locals attacked police officers, and innocent people were dragged from their cars and beaten on the streets.
The anarchic mood, Sawyer, said, reflected a feeling of hopelessness among the black community, their leader now slain.
” That’s how people looked at Martin Luther King Jr., as a modern day John the Baptist. He was the one to prepare the way, the way paver,” Sawyer said.
“For him to be assassinated - he was like the hope for the black race - it was like we were pretty much left at the perils of the world.”
“It was a sad time in the history of all of us,” Sawyer said Wednesday. “Whatever peace or understanding we assumed we were headed to as a people, it was lost or taken away that day.”
The Rev. Ollie Carter Jr., a pastor at New Faith and Hope Outreach Ministry in Dolton, was 24 when King was killed.
He was living in Chicago’s Grand Boulevard community, a neighborhood torn up in the the post-assassination riots.
“The streets, at first, had a serenity to them,” Carter said. “It was the black quiet before the storm. Everybody in the black community was extremely friendly and affectionate toward each other.
“Then all hell broke loose. Folks were out burning and rioting and looting - it went on and on and on.”
South suburban residents, many of whom watched the riots unfold on television, were left to sort out the intense racial tensions for themselves.
Park Forest resident Douglas Price said he was mugged outside St. James Hospital in Chicago Heights sometime after King’s death.
“I just had a knife held to my crotch as they took my wallet and watch and made reference to the fact my father had killed Martin Luther King Jr.” Price said.
“I was sick to my stomach, and I felt like a punk, a wimp, and then I had to listen to a police officer for an hour and half tell me that we were going to whip some N-butt. It was like a double assault.”
Dorothy Furnace, then a teacher at Gavin School in Chicago Heights, said her sixth-graders were heartbroken over the loss.
“The sixth-graders were up in arms about the whole thing,” Furnace said. “They didn’t understand how people could be so mistreated.”
King already was established in Chicago Heights, Furnance said, having marched through the city in the fight for fair housing.
“The church in the African-American community acts as a sounding board, and the churches kept things calm in Chicago Heights,” Furnance said.
The scene in Park Forest, then a mostly white community, was more quiet.
“You said you feel sorry and it was wrong and it was terrible, but I don’t really know if the people in Park Forest may have understood the rage going on in other parts of the country,” Park Forest resident Jerry Shnay said.
“One of our sons’ closest friends was a young black man that lived down the street from us. They were African-American, and it devastated them to a great extent, but I have no idea. I never wanted to or was able to ask them, how did it affect you? Just like a death in a family, you work through it all you can.”