I was 18 when Martin Luther King jnr was assassinated, on April 4 1968. Apart from the stunned expression on my father's face as he and my brother Ben discussed the news, I cannot truthfully recreate the mood except to recall that the memory was still fresh of the death under suspicious circumstances of Chief Albert Luthuli, on July 21 1967.
Both were Nobel peace laureates, honoured by the world community for their untiring commitment to the cause of human rights. In a way, then, the two martyred men became somewhat interchangeable in my mind.
Young black people at that period - following the banning of the ANC and the PAC in the 1960s - had gravitated towards the Black Consciousness Movement, which sought to fill the political vacuum.Steve Biko's dictum "Black man, you're on your own" was still to gain wider currency, but we knew instinctively that we needed to augment our collective knowledge of the state of politics in our country - a country that was at once cut off from and still connected to the wider world.
We knew that the government - their government, à la Malcolm X - operated a tight censorship regime to keep us ignorant while raising white children on the poisonous staple of racial superiority. This was the incentive for us to investigate how others in similar situations were dealing with their problems. Books became important.
In our family, it was Ben who could acquire banned literature. I remember reading Why We Can't Wait, King's most eloquent document on his commitment to the Civil Rights Movement.
He makes a plea for future generations, embodied in the discrete though similar destinies of a black boy in Harlem and his female counterpart in Birmingham, Alabama, who both squirm under the jackboot of poverty. Poverty, he maintains, is a national problem affecting black people everywhere. Injustice anywhere, he writes, is a threat to justice everywhere.
In our informal reading circles, we pitted King against the more militant Malcolm X, entranced by the latter's incendiary language in his advocacy of retaliatory violence. King's philosophy of nonviolence against a patently violent force seemed doomed to failure, some of us reasoned.
After I came across a copy of Life or Time magazine that featured a special on black America, I had to rethink the kind of obstacles King faced.There is a series of photographs documenting various stages and outrages attendant on the civil rights struggle. There is the rubble of the 16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, bombed in a racially motivated act that killed four little black girls. There is King being booked in a police station, face puffy from a recent altercation with the law; there are grainy images of the aftermath of the hysteria of a lynch mob, the black body hardly bigger than the cold embers of a burnt tyre.
What chilled me, however, was not so much the savagery by so-called civilised people as the juxtaposition of innocence and, well, madness suggested in a story of a six-year-old Ruby Bridges accompanied by burly federal agents en route to integrate a New Orleans elementary school, following a ruling by the courts.
This was on November 14 1960, and the little girl looks determined as she goes down the steps, satchel in hand. It occurred to me that the kind of people King sought to confront and proselytize with human understanding - and love - would have welcomed violent confrontation because that would have been an engagement in a language with which they were all too familiar.
It took a lot of courage to practise nonviolence in the US, where violence, according to the late poet H Rap Brown, "is as American as apple pie".
When black Canadian poet Dionne Brand was in Johannesburg for the Culture and Development Conference in April 1993, she shared some thoughts on the Civil Rights Movement. It was not an accident that Rosa Parks was the one black woman who'd refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, thus starting the movement.
There had been younger, possibly more militant women who volunteered to upset, as it were, the racist applecart. King, who reasoned that the struggle would be long and bloody, and would need people with stamina for what would lie ahead, dissuaded them. Parks had that enduring strength. For him, black people had to be the creators of a democratic society.
There are many today who question King's philosophy, some going as far as impugning his legacy. Writing about his sense of loss after both King and Malcolm X were dead and buried, James Baldwin directs a plea to black people that they "must make certain that our children never forget them. For the American republic has always done everything in its power to destroy our children's heroes, with the clear ... intention of destroying our children's hopes."Perhaps Baldwin's warning was informed by grief or a lack of faith in his countrymen's intentions, because, while there might be critiques of King's philosophy and direction, they are counterbalanced by works - including children's books - that bring his contribution to the making of modern America to the fore.
His particular brand of nonviolence has not invited the unfavourable gaze, as has been the case, for instance, with Mohandas Gandhi, where injudicious - and racist - writings have surfaced, dirtying his escutcheon.
Closer to home, in the historical revisionism attending both Luthuli and Nelson Mandela's legacies, critics using today's lenses are examining the past. While leaders should never be treated with uncritical adulation, there must be an understanding of the trajectory of history.
There is as direct a line linking the '60s civil rights struggles to the Black Lives Matter movement as there is one connecting the ANC's Defiance Campaign of 1952 to the current push towards meaningful economic transformation to benefit the black majority.
The trouble confronting today's world - a world where inequality has reached unacceptable levels - can be attributed to an absence of empathy. Infantile leaders straddle the world.The moneyed of the land everywhere are empowered to buy - and trade in - human flesh. It's a world that needs more Martin Luther Kings and people of conscience to remind it of the need to feel.
Hopefully, it will happen, as in the words of poet Sonia Sanchez:
The earth has tilted dear Martin
As we awaken each morning to an eternal alarm clock called hope.
• Langa's latest book is 'Dare Not Linger', the sequel to Mandela's 'Long Walk to Freedom'...