Free Republic

In the spring of 1968 I was a college senior about to graduate. It was a troubled but hopeful moment to be coming into adulthood. The civil rights movement and the peace movement were converging in the nonviolent fight for racial justice and to end the Vietnam War. Martin Luther King Jr. was the most charismatic leader on both fronts, the poetic prose of his speeches soaring with critical idealism, his pacifism increasingly militant as he made the connections between domestic deprivation and foreign intervention. On April 4 King was murdered in Memphis. It was a brutal blow to the...