The summer of our discontent

A civil rights hero gunned down, an Ivy League campus shut down, another Kennedy shot, and 1968 turned surreal | Mindy Belz

On an evening in 1968 I leaned over my dad's olive-green armchair, coming into our den at the sound of a special news bulletin, and asked: "What's an assassination?"

With two of my uncles serving in Vietnam, it was normal in our house to center dinner conversation around the television and the evening news. Reports of death and a steady, low-boil anxiety about events in Southeast Asia also were normal. But the bulletin that drew me into the room that cool spring evening was about an event closer to home. In Memphis Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. The sight on our black-and-white television set of the cordoned balcony at the Lorraine Motel persists in my mind as the first time I remember hearing the word spoken, "assassination," and seeing an ashen shock register across my parents' faces.