Even today Patricia Pearson, daughter of the late Jacksonville civil rights leader Rutledge Pearson, still gets jumpy when the telephone rings.
It's a symptom that she hasn't been able to shake since she was 9 years old - because in her household, the voice on the other line was as likely to utter a death threat as a sales pitch.
"I remember that we received several phone calls over the years from the Confederate underground, saying that we were going to die," Pearson told an audience at a Jacksonville Bar Association luncheon honoring her father.
"But regardless of these efforts, the tide of racial segregation, discrimination and injustice turned because both black and white, young and old people in Jacksonville were empowered to fight."
Both Pearson and one of her father's former students, Patricia Moman Bell, shared their memories of the former Jacksonville NAACP president. Bell talked about his dynamism as a ninth-grade civics teacher; as a man who loved the Constitution even as America wasn't living up to its promises when it came to black people.
And although the thought of her father being killed - a caller once told Pearson's mother, Mary Ann, that her father was not going to live out the year - tormented her, the movement he was leading inspired her.
"In these meetings you would hear and see such nationally known leaders as Thurgood Marshall," Pearson said. "... Medgar Evers [Mississippi NAACP leader] was the first banquet speaker for the branch in 1963."
Yet, the decade that people like Rutledge Pearson and Martin Luther King Jr. helped to define through racial progress would also be defined by racial violence - both by white racists resisting change and by black people frustrated with the slow pace of it.
Evers was killed in 1963 by segregationist Byron de la Beckwith. Four years later, Rutledge Pearson was killed in a suspicious car crash on his way to organize Memphis laundry workers.
Then in 1968, King, who would have celebrated his 79th birthday this month, was slain on the balcony of a Memphis motel.
Riots also erupted in cities throughout the country. After Detroit exploded in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders to examine the causes behind the violence.
It found that the nation was moving toward becoming "two societies, black and white, separate and unequal."
But thanks to leaders like King and Rutledge Pearson, and to the landmark legislation like the 1964 Civil Rights Act, legal segregation is history.
Violence, however, isn't.
Except that now, in struggling black communities, the violence isn't being directed toward symbols of oppression, as it was during the riots of the 1960s. It isn't being directed toward stores that overcharge, or toward dilapidated streets and structures that black people were confined to because pervasive housing and job discrimination kept them from improving their lot.
Today, many young black people are directing violence toward each other.
Such violence is, in many ways, rooted in the same frustration that led to the riots of the 1960s. The sense of isolation and powerlessness has increased as black families have broken down, and as jobs have left urban communities, and this country even.
The crack cocaine trade has rewritten all the rules, and violence is a grim tool of that trade.
Frustration with an oppressive system no longer fuels violence as much as self-hatred and the pursuit of materialism does. On top of that, the glamorization of guns as tools for wielding power infects youths of all races and ethnic groups.
That's why leaders like King and Rutledge Pearson are so sorely missed.
Neither man condoned the rioting that took place during the 1960s. But chances are things would have been worse, and change more difficult, if they hadn't been around to teach black youths more effective ways to turn their yearnings for freedom and opportunity into reality.
King used nonviolent resistance to show the legions of young people who followed him the power in that; a power that illuminated the righteousness of their cause by exposing the cruelty and wrongness of their enemies.
And Rutledge Pearson taught his students that knowledge was power, and that they could channel that knowledge into forcing national and local leaders to make the Constitution's guarantees apply to black people, too.
No doubt, a lot of racial progress has been made since King and Rutledge Pearson lived; when a ringing telephone was enough to induce anxiety in his 9-year-old daughter. That progress is what is being celebrated today.
But the violence and nihilism that now has homicide as the leading cause of death for black men aged 18 to 24 threatens to upend that progress. Because even though King and Rutledge Pearson died violently, they met their end fighting so that black people would get the chance to pursue better lives. Not early deaths.
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