Because of the reverence with which he is remembered today, it can be easy to forget the hatred many Americans had for Martin Luther King Jr. when he was alive.
But Dr. Peter Rogers, 71, of Westerville hasn’t forgotten. His experiences living in the South at the time of King’s death have stayed with him for decades, and they are the subject of the book he wrote, With Malice Toward None: The Night Martin Luther King, Jr. Was Killed: A Memoir, released in December.
The title of the book comes from a quote spoken by President Lincoln during his second inaugural address.
Rogers, a Cleveland native, was a medical student at the University of Tennessee in the late 1960s. In 1968, at age 25, he was living in a fraternity house with 19 other medical students – all of them white males, many of them Southerners, some of them racists and a few of them menacing racists.
They were having a fraternity meeting the night of April 4.
“One of the fraternity guys came crashing through the front door and told us Martin Luther King had been killed – had been shot in Memphis – and it was party time,” Rogers says.
To Rogers’ horror, his fraternity brothers began breaking out the alcohol and celebrating King’s death with fervor, prompting him to swiftly depart for the apartment of some more like-minded friends.
“I decided that I could not grieve among fools, so I left,” he says.
On his way, though, he happened to pass by the university’s main hospital and spotted a hearse pulling into the hospital, with police cars on either side of it. He watched as King’s body was taken out of the hearse and wheeled into the hospital, then was told by one of the accompanying police officers to “go mourn somewhere else.”
“It was just one of those experiences that nothing can prepare you for,” Rogers says.
As the night went on, Rogers encountered another police officer who told him, “If (African-Americans) start looting, we can shoot them.” Because his friends lived near the back of their apartment complex, he had to walk through most of the complex to get there, and encountered many more drunken revelers along the way.
Before that night, Rogers was a civil rights sympathizer. He was in tune with efforts to achieve equality and had been disturbed by graphic videos on the news of black people being beaten, but had taken little action to further those efforts.
Afterward, he became active in civil rights efforts.
“After Dr. King was killed, you had to get off the fence,” he says.
The next day, he and some white friends attended a memorial service for King at a mostly-black church. They were initially distrusted by other patrons; many thought these well-dressed white people were undercover police officers. Pastor and longtime King ally Andrew Young asked the congregation to welcome them, and became more forceful when members were reticent.
“Then he said, ‘Welcome them now,’ and that changed everything,” says Rogers.
Rogers considers that event to have been the first real spiritual experience of his young life.
His further efforts in pursuit of civil rights included participating in a march, during which his life was threatened and National Guardsmen sent along for protection showed little interest in protecting anyone. He also told the Memphis Press-Scimitar, a local newspaper, about police officers bringing beaten black men into the hospital where he worked, handcuffing them to beds and beating them more. The action cost him his friends.
“It was like I had taken a stand for Communism or something,” Rogers says. “But I know what I saw, and it was wrong.”
He also met and began a brief relationship with a young black woman, referred to in the book as “Miriam” – all of the names of people mentioned in the book, save those such as Young whose names are well-known, have been changed – that further familiarized him with the plight of the black community in the U.S.
“It was probably dangerous to be in an interracial relationship,” says Rogers.
He had been working on the book since 1986, when he published a short story on his experiences the night King died and was inspired to put together a more comprehensive account of the night and the events that surrounded it.
Rogers is board-certified to practice pediatrics and addiction medicine. He started out in pediatrics, finding it the most intellectually challenging of his options, but currently only practices addiction medicine, which he has been doing since 1985. He works at Premier Care of Ohio, a treatment facility near on Dublin Road near Marble Cliff, and a clinic in Cincinnati.
Besides writing With Malice Toward None, Rogers has served as editor or co-author of six medical textbooks. In addition, in 1984, he wrote a A Private Practice, a book about how his addictions to drugs and alcohol affected his medical practice. The book – written under a pseudonym, Dr. Patrick Reilly – was featured on National Public Radio and The Oprah Winfrey Show.
It was his own experience with addiction that pushed Rogers into addiction medicine. After 13 years of substance abuse, he went into treatment in 1979, and six years later, he got a job as medical director of an adolescent dependency program in Cleveland. He still finds working with addicts rewarding.
“I love to see that little glimmer of hope,” he says.
Rogers has spoken about his experiences at several colleges, including North Canton-based Walsh University, and was also a guest at a New York University writers’ conference, where he spoke just before Slaughterhouse-Five author Kurt Vonnegut.
He has been in central Ohio since 1999 and in Westerville since he and his wife, Emilie, married 11 years ago. Rogers has four grown children – two sons and two daughters – from a previous marriage.
With Malice Toward None is available online via Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com.
Garth Bishop is editor of Westerville Magazine. Feedback welcome at gbishop@cityscenemediagroup.com.
