January 15, 2007

Remembering Dr. King

By Bob Weir
"I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood."   -From MLK'a speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC 8/28/63For those who don't remember or choose to forget, April 4, 1968 was another day that will live in infamy. I was working the 4 to midnight shift with my partner, Leroy Spivey, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. We were on radio motor patrol during an unusually warm spring evening in the predominantly African-American neighborhood. It would get a lot warmer before the night was over. We had been working together for about a year as the first black and white (referred to as "salt-and-pepper") team in our precinct, and one of the first in the city. The tour of duty in the high crime area had been pretty much a routine affair during the first half of our shift: burglaries, robberies, vehicle...(Read Full Article)