They were on the way to Selma, or maybe Montgomery or Birmingham. One of those places marked in the consciousness of those of us old enough to remember the late 1950s and early '60s. Their seating on the plane was by happenstance. One the young, hotshot reporter from what was then the Knight Publishing Company, the other an ever-more-famous preacher named Martin Luther King Jr.

My father was the reporter. He and King had a long chat, and my Pop said many times over many years that King had been an affable, soft-spoken fellow. Charismatic, to be sure. But a very down-to-earth guy. They would encounter each other several times during the course of the civil rights movement. King's unsurpassed eloquence gave things a face and a voice. There were multitudes of others in the trenches, their names still known among those who participated in the movement, but not nearly as well-known as their courage deserves.

Still, most of them acknowledge that without King, things might have moved more slowly -- a stunning prospect indeed, when you consider that there's moving still to be done.

King would have been 75 today. It's hard to believe, again for us "boomers" and older folks, that he was but 39 when he was shot by assassin James Earl Ray in Memphis. He seemed much older. Certainly much wiser than anyone in early middle age. And with the bravery of 10, or 20, or an army.

We tend, in educating kids both in school and with our own sort of oral histories at home, to emphasize personalities, the most famous, the most glamorous. Come Monday, the official holiday honoring King, schools will have held classes and discussions on what might have happened had King lived, what he accomplished in his short life, etc.

But in watching some of the old newsreels and reading some of the histories of that era, I wonder if the real point of teaching young people -- again, whether in the classroom or the living room -- about this period ought instead to be focused mostly on the events, the oppression, the inequality, the maddening injustice of it all. Some of them, perhaps, will have difficulty believing that there really was a time here in the land of the free and the home of the brave when powerful fire hoses tore the clothes and bruised the bodies of our fellow citizens. A time when some of those citizens were dragged into the woods and murdered with a rope, absent any rights to a fair trial. A time when redneck law officers beat people for sport.

And through it all, the endless cruelty and indignity to which all people of color were subjected. The treatment belittled them, which it of course was designed to do. It belittled the smallest and the greatest. I don't think he'd mind me mentioning this, so consider that John H. Baker Jr., who was sheriff of Wake County for nearly a quarter-century and certainly one of the community's most admired citizens, couldn't go in some restaurants or drink from the same water fountains as everyone else when he was growing up in Raleigh.

How Martin Luther King Jr. was able to continue to preach nonviolence, to counsel those in his marches and demonstrations not to fight back, to stay with that message through his own visits to jail cells, or murderous bombings, or the killing of civil rights workers...amazing. And evidence, perhaps, that one of the old saws of American history -- that difficult times always seem to deliver to us great individuals capable of getting us through -- is true.

The fear, though, is that because these violent times seem so unreal to many youngsters today, they will be forgotten with the passage of time. That's not just dangerous, in that ignoring past evils opens the way to new ones. It would be unfair to those who shed their blood and gave their lives and to the leaders who deserve as many pages in history books and as many monuments as others who shaped, and saved, this country. Because it's quite possible that without the nonviolence promise that accompanied the civil rights movement, this country would have been the site of a revolution.

And so, while we can, let's show the films and bring forward those who remember to testify about their experiences in classrooms and museums and libraries all over this country. It is always painful and always, for those who grew up insulated from it, embarrassing that all this was going on around them. But the living history of it must not be lost as the generations who had vivid memories of this era leave us. There's the legacy, part of it anyway, to really honor Martin Luther King Jr. -- not just celebrating the heroes, but seeing to it that we pass on to the next generation the remembrance of those times. Those horrible and transcendent times.

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