Martin Luther King

When Martin Luther King was assassinated, I was three years old. Surprisingly, I do have a memory, not of first hearing about the murder, but of the aftermath. I remember seeing the cover of Newsweek, and I may also have seen rioting on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, which my parents watched. Anyway, I remember asking my mother who Martin Luther King had been, and whether he was himself black or white; she told me that he was a black man who had been trying to help other blacks.

Whatever his personal faults and errors, he appealed to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature, and worked, at great personal risk, to set grave injustices to rights. Let us honor him accordingly.