A History Lesson

This unpublished letter-to-the-editor was sent to the New York Daily News "Voice of the People" via e-mail on May 1, 2015.

Dear Editor:

I don't excuse or condone the actions of the rioters and looters in Baltimore. And Voicer Andrew Keats is correct when he stated that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "didn't sit at home waiting for an excuse to steal, destroy and riot." However, Keats paints a rose-colored depiction of the civil rights movement and Dr. King's peaceful and nonviolent marches. He overlooks the fact that despite Dr. King's nonviolent protests against social injustice, he was still thought to be a lawbreaker, an agitator, and a Communist dupe, if not an outright Communist, by Southern segregationists, conservative religious leaders, and J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI.

Sincerely yours,
Charles Michael Smith

Three Milestone Events To Revisit

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi, the 50th anniversary of the Watts Riots in Los Angeles, and the 30th anniversary of the police killing of the 17-year-old Harlem honor student Edmund Perry, a case which became the subject of a nonfiction book and a 1991 TV movie called Murder Without Motive: The Edmund Perry Story. This would be a good time to commemorate these events by reading books written about them.

 Two books I own and plan to read are Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness by Robert Conot (Bantam, 1967), which is about the Watts Riots and Best Intentions: The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry by journalist Robert Sam Anson (Random House, 1987).

 The Chicago Tribune called Conot's book "something Capote's will never be--a work of potentially historic importance." The reviewer was probably talking about Truman Capote's crime classic, In Cold Blood.