Life-Changing Moments

I recently read the obituary of Clara Ester in the New York Times.  I know I’m not the only person who’s been ignorant of the role Clara Ester played in one of the world’s saddest moments. 

Clara Ester was a twenty-year-old college student in Memphis in 1968 when Martin Luther King, Jr. came to that city to support striking sanitation workers.  She’d been an ardent supporter of the sanitation workers and even, she confessed later, had protested violently on behalf of the workers. 

Clara Ester attended King’s moving talk the night before he died, the night he said he wasn’t sure he’d live to enter the “promise land” of racial harmony, but then said he could accept that because he’d “been to the mountaintop,” where like Moses, he’d seen that moment in our nation’s future.  Her presence at that speech would have assured her a footnote in history, but her story did not end there.

The following afternoon, she drove to the Lorraine Motel with a friend.  She knew  King was staying there, but she’d primarily come for the motel’s fish dinners.  She was in the motel’s parking lot looking up at King as he stood on the balcony of his room when a loud shot rang out. 

A decade ago, I stood in that same parking lot, looking up to where King was assassinated.  I can’t remember ever feeling as sorrowful as I did that day, thinking about what had happened there and how that tragedy changed our country and world.  As Nina Simone expressed that moment in one of her songs, “Our King is dead.”

That tragic moment changed Clara Ester’s life in a dramatic way.  Running up to the balcony, she knelt down over King’s body and felt for his pulse even as she could see the horrific damage caused by the bullet to part of King’s face and neck. 

Clara Ester’s passing in early July is noteworthy because she is one of the last two surviving eyewitnesses to that horrible moment.  But her life after that moment is also well worth remembering.  Witnessing his death convinced her that King’s non-violent approach to fostering change in our world is the right path. 

She moved to Mobile, Alabama, where she became a lay Methodist minister.  Her ministry was leading a community center that served the needs of both the blind and homeless mothers and children.  The center also offered night classes to help people attain their high school education.  

In the summer of 1958, my father took my brother and me to hear Dr. King speak to a packed auditorium of ministers at a retreat center.  As a ten-year-old, I was too young to remember much of what King said that night, but, looking back now, I can say that I too “felt his pulse.” 

What I mean is this: That night in 1958, Dr. King had just been released from jail for his Civil Rights activities, yet he seemed incredibly full of life.  The fullness of his living was expressed in subtle ways.  He did not shout; in fact, he seemed incredibly calm as he spoke in his slow and deliberate way.  But I understand now that already in 1958, King had been to the mountaintop.  He’d already seen the racial harmony that is our nation’s most important goal and was sharing that vision with everyone present.    

One of the great mysteries of existence is that life leads to death, but death can lead to life.  Clara Ester once said that her life was forever different after that intimate moment with her dying hero. 

I can now see that her life asks a question of me.  If there really is something we call “divine providence,” then I must believe that I, as a ten-year-old boy, was meant to be in the presence of Dr. King that night.  For a few hours, that giant of a man and a small boy  breathed the same air. 

Clara Ester’s life story reminds us that the deaths of saints and martyrs is not so much an ending as a beginning.  King’s last moments gave life and purpose to Clara Ester’s life.  I’m left asking if the same can be said of me.