Content Producers Remember Martin Luther King's Assassination

Some AC Content Producers remember April 4, 1968, with alarming clarity: the tension, anger, rioting and the assassination of Martin Luther King. Below are nine accounts from CPs who ranged in age from nine to 20. They recall how King's death affected their families and friends and how their neighborhoods continued to change.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s Passing
Kim Hagen, only nine when King was killed, says Dr. King's memory is not just for people of color. Her compelling narrative of a preteen's thoughts on race and class in 1960s America vividly portrays a tragic few months in our country.
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My Memories of Robert Kennedy's Indianapolis Speech
jcorn's parents gasped and her mother cried when Dan Rather broke the news of King's death. And it was Bobby Kennedy's speech in Indianapolis shortly after King's murder that crystallized the assassination for jcorn.
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A 10-Year-Old White Girl's Perspective: Remembering King, Kennedy
In Springfield, Massachusetts, 10-year-old Carol Bengle Gilbert remembers racial integration in her fourth grade class, rules of playground fighting and King's death. But it wasn't until the murder of her idol, Bobby Kennedy, that the seriousness of 1968 came into focus.
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In Southern California, the Day After Martin Luther King Died
For Maxx, it wasn't April 4, 1968, that resonates. It was the day after when her friends in a mixed-race neighborhood were no longer cordial and a trip to the hospital cemented in her the repercussions of MLK's death.
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In Rural America, Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King's Death
Allen Teal recalls that many around him in 1968 felt King's death was a great event. It was often repeated that maybe blacks would now remember their "place" and get over this civil rights nonsense.
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Remembering Martin Luther King's Assassination in New Orleans
The Eye Doctor, who was a junior at Tulane in New Orleans in the spring of 1968, remembers the media reporting about the threat of violence and riots. In his neighborhood, they never materialized.
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The 1960s, Race Relations and the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King
Gary Davis had just graduated from high school in 1968. Race relations were worsening, but the assassinations of King and Bobby Kennedy only underscored that the tension in the country was about more than just race.
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The Death of Dr. Martin Luther King
Mark Whittington remembers quite clearly when word of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination came on the news. He says it was one more atrocity that occurred in 1968, that hell year in which everything and everyone seemed to go crazy. He was 11 years old.
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I Had a Nightmare, While Martin Luther King Had a Dream
In the diverse neighborhoods of Chicago in April 1968, Richard Davis found that King delivered a mixed message that ignited passions on all sides.
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