This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

My earliest memories of Martin Luther King Jr. are of dogs, firehoses, police and the KKK shouting idiotically about some imminent threat to America.

Since I was at least smart enough back then to know that a bunch of night-riding, sheet-wearing *@$$#%$ weren't a nuclear power, I remained more afraid of Russians. It wasn't King who had us practicing hiding under our desks at school.

The civil rights images in my head from back then were gleaned from television news programs I skipped over while flipping through the channels looking for "Hullabaloo," "Shindig" or "Where the Action Is." I was just 14 when King was murdered. I was white and living in the Mojave Desert in April 1968. Somebody got shot? Big deal. Someone was always getting shot in the news.

It wasn't until I started hearing things said about this particular murder that I began having my own thoughts on the matter.

"Somebody finally shut that loud-mouthed [N-word] up," said older white adults. "Now maybe things will go back to normal."

At first, I thought they were talking about Muhammad Ali. He had a big mouth and was always saying things that made people mad. Plus he was a fighter. It sort of figured that someone might have wanted him dead.

But then I heard it was King who was killed. His crime? According to my mother, it was simply wanting equality for "negroes."

Note: That's what socially conscious white people called black people back then. It's changed several times over the years, but more on that in a minute.

After listening to my mother, I started having thoughts of my own on the matter of King. Mostly they were questions. How does someone get killed just because they want things to be fair? It made no sense, even to a teenager.

Later, when I got to high school and the larger picture of King's life emerged in the curriculum, his murder made even less sense. Equal access to employment, voting, education, etc. How do you kill someone for wanting what America stands for?

I asked my father about it. The Old Man, who idolized FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, said J. Edgar had proof that King had communist ties. Maybe that was why he got shot. After all, just about every single American, regardless of race, thought being a commie was bad.

But then the words just sort of fell out of my mouth. "If America treated me the way it treated Martin Luther King and his people, I'd probably be communist too."

That was the first time I left my father even remotely confounded. And it was the first time I realized that civil rights was … well, right.

After years of more thought, some of which went horribly awry and had to be painfully rethought, I concluded that King better understood what America should be than what clueless white people assumed it already was.

But it wasn't until I heard it from the another well-known black person that I managed to sum up how far we've come and how far we still have to go.

During a 2013 panel discussion on the "Today" show on the subject of political correctness, black actor Morgan Freeman said it doesn't make sense that people call him "African-American."

"I'm not African. I'm an American," Freeman said simply.

There it is. That's what we should be shooting for as a country. We won't get there with old-school prejudices, new-school political correctness or any of the things that continue to reinforce and even widen the rift.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.