40 Years On

Of course, I processed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. But as a sixth grader it didn't really register as something other than 'news'. This was the late 60s when you'd listen to Uncle Walter every night and learn that 49 more soldiers had died in Vietnam. Death was common.

On the other hand, Bobby Kennedy's killing, two months later was surprisingly unsettling to someone too young to be worried about such things. It took me right out of the class picnic.

In honor of Dr. King's life, some links that might not come up in the top 10 in a Google search:

A Miami Herald article on the garbage worker's strike that brought King to Memphis in the first place.

A column by the same writer on Robert Kennedy's response to King's death. I especially like:

Robert Kennedy was, in many ways, not the first person you'd choose for the job of racial reconciler. He was rich and white and born of privilege, his upper crust roots audible in every exhalation of that Brahmin accent that pronounced ''chance'' as ''chawnce'' and turned ''whether'' into ''whethah.'' Nor had he always been a devotee of the civil rights movement. To the contrary, he had regarded it warily, concerned over its potential to embarrass his brother John, the president. Indeed, it was Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, who loosed J. Edgar Hoover's FBI to spy upon and harass King.

But Kennedy was also that rarity, a man with the capacity to change. It is hard to say when that change occurred in him. Maybe it was somewhere in his dealings with intransigent, stand-in-the-doorway Southern potentates who refused to protect the rights of peaceful demonstrators or abide by the Constitution of the United States. Maybe it was that night King and his followers were trapped in a church by a howling, riotous mob of whites, and Kennedy had to send federal marshals to rescue them.

And to connect it a bit (and it's all connected) are there any modern presidential candidates that would quote Aeschylus in an extemporaneous speech?