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Remembering 1968

By January 2, 2008No Comments

Bob Herbert in the New York Times on the tumult that was 1968:

On April 3, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis. Violence erup­ted in dozens of cit­ies, and espe­cially in Washington, where a num­ber of people were killed and the fires were the worst the city had exper­i­enced since the British took the torch to it in 1814.

John J. Lindsay of Newsweek magazine said that when Bobby Kennedy was told that King had died, he put his hands to his face and mur­mured: “Oh, God. When is this viol­ence going to stop?”

I was born about sev­en weeks later, and a week after that Kennedy him­self was assas­sin­ated. Add to that the stu­dents riot­ing on the streets of Paris and Grosvenor Square, is it any won­der I’ve been suf­fer­ing from post-traumatic-stress for nearly 40 years? Everyone around me thought the world was about to end.

For your delect­a­tion, here’s a sound of those times: The Staple Singers ver­sion of “For What it’s Worth” (1967 single on Epic Records):

DownloadThe Staple Singers “For What It’s Worth”