My sense memory of April 4, 1968 is of the
amber light in the college coffee shop after
a rehearsal of my play, when I heard the news.
I didn't want to hear it, to think about it--how
could the possibilities opened by LBJ's withdrawing
from the election be hammered shut so fast? Or
even the possibility that we would get a moment to
catch our breaths, and think of something else. Oddly,
I'd just cast the daughter of a minister in a small part,
a high school girl who would be the first African American
on our college stage in at least my years there. Some of us
had marched with her father through the Galesburg streets,
just as I'd marched behind Dr. King in 1963. She was shy,
but she was reaching out to a different world represented by
that strange campus in her own hometown. All of us had
a long way to go. But he would not get there with us. Not
everybody then thought of him as a great American. But
he was.
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