Forty-five years ago today Martin Luther King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, TN. It was the height of the civil rights era.
As for me, I was five month pregnant and sleeping on a rollaway bed at my Mother’s one-bedroom apartment in St. Louis. I’d come to visit her and her husband because my own husband was away on his annual two week military assignment. Given my condition, it seemed nobody wanted me to be alone.
Ironically, on June 6, just two months later, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in California. By then, my husband and I were together in Michigan. But the shocking news had the same
effect.
What was our country coming to? How could we murder prominent leaders?
The question is salient today. Remember the most current murders of a north Texas district attorney and his wife. Remember Gabby Giffords. Returning further into our historical psyche, remember various attacks on Presidents in the last century.
I’m no longer a young woman bearing her first child; in fact, I’m no longer young at all. At the same time, I have the same thoughts I had while sleeping on that narrow rollaway. What’s happened?
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