Ben Kamin

Rabbi Ben Kamin is an op-ed contributor to The New York Times, a columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and a renowned multi-cultural expert.

Nothing like Sunshine: A Story in the Aftermath of the MLK Assassination

Ben Kamin

Ben Kamin was keynote speaker at the 2010 Anniversary of MLK assassination at the National Civil Rights Museum, located at the Lorraine Motel. The photo below (September 30, 2010 ) shows Rev. Samuel "Billy" Kyles (the last living witness to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), Ben Kamin, and Audrey Kamin on The Balcony, outside Room 306, The Lorraine Motel, Memphis.

A coming-of-age story based in the 1960s, Rabbi Ben Kamin has written a definitive personal expression about race, friendship, and his personal love for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This is a story that spans a four-decade search for a lost high school chum, a deep misunderstanding, and a coming to terms with an America painfully evolving from the assassination of MLK to the promise of Barack Obama.

The book is a remembrance of Kamin's life at Cincinnati's aging Woodward High School, a microcosm of the 1960s and of America itself, as well as a detailed account of Kamin's search — for his friend Clifton, for America, for the key to understanding what race relations really are in the United States. Simultaneously, it is the story of the emerging rabbi's exploration of the legacy of his spiritual mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — from Cincinnati to Cleveland to Memphis to New Orleans and other points — while constantly bringing him home to Clifton and "the heaving hallways" of that high school.

EXCERPT:
"We were afraid, we were wary, we were in danger in those days, but we actually had personal feelings of connection and intimate affinities with many of the men and women who led us in politics, music, poetry, and social justice. And we mourned the martyrs of the time, the iconic Kennedy brothers as well as Dr. King, but also a host of guitarists and lyricists and writers and countless, faceless soldiers, nurses, chaplains, and students and housewives who marched and even died in favor of a better society that cherished values more than valuables. And the words of the more famous ones—from the Beatles to Bobby—are words that we remember, as clearly as we remember the words of our parents, or the first movie we saw with that certain date, or what transpired in the city high school which I attended from the inception of the federal government’s civil rights legislation in 1964 through to Woodstock and the Apollo moon landing of 1969 and, finally, to the bloody coda, just four weeks before our graduation from Woodward—the Kent State massacre of 1970...I truly believe that, from time to time, across six years of secondary school during a decade unique in American history and social cataclysm, a group of youngsters became colorblind. Being together—around a Bunsen burner, on the raw tiles of a locker room and shower, in the heaving hallways of a Friday morning pep rally, at a lunchroom strike protesting lousy food, precipitated some level of tolerance."

CONTENTS
Chapter 1. Room B4 / 3
Chapter 2. The Ville, New Orleans, and Prayer Feathers / 21
Chapter 3. Room 306 / 35
Chapter 4. Memphis Voices / 45
Chapter 5. “What kind of country was that?” / 63
Chapter 6. “I was protecting you, man” / 83
Chapter 7. “Thank God we ain’t what we was” / 101
Afterword. Lightning, Forty Years Later / 127
Bibliography / 133
Acknowledgments / 137

Reviews

"No single writer living in America today can communicate the black-white story more evocatively than Ben Kamin."
- T. George Harris, former bureau chief TIME- LIFE, senior editor of LOOK magazine, founding editor of PSYCHOLOGY TODAY and SPIRITUALITY AND HEALTH

"The very particular nature of the narrative tells us in a more general sense about what was lost in the 1960s on the civil-rights front, and what can be retained-and built upon-in the new millennium through persistence, mutual understanding and love." -
PHILADELPHIA JEWISH EXPONENT

"There is no bitterness in this book. There is revelation, a true mirror of America at a point in time, and even today." - LAURA HARRISON McBRIDE, publisher and editor

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