When MLK Thrilled L.A.—and Me

A Rally in the Sports Arena Changed Me From Picketer to Freedom Rider

In the mid-1950s, when I was a teenager, I moved with my family from Buffalo, New York to Los Angeles. I’d spent my early years on the Lower East Side of New York and had lived all my life in apartments. In Los Angeles, we lived in a house in Highland Park with a backyard and a tree. It was a modest home, with only two bedrooms, so my parents put up a partition wall in the living room to make a third bedroom, which became mine. It was the …