Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is gunned down
In Chicago, 5,000 federal troops were dispatched to quell the sniping gunfire, street fighting and raging fires. Five died in Baltimore where Governor Spiro Agnew ordered 6,000 National Guardsmen in to arrest over 500 looters. A white graduate student was pulled from his car and stabbed to death while attempting to drive through a black area of Cincinnati, and entire sections of the nation’s capital went up in flames. But these were just cracks in the surface from ripping off a scab of complacency that had only just begun to heal over the JFK amputation. The real damage was deep within the nation’s soul as we lost another limb to a cancerous genetic human defect; A reminder that beneath the bandages and restraints of civilization, we’re just animals that tend to kill our own. Within a week, the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was signed into law in an attempt to cauterize the wound. But as a practical matter, hate and distrust continued to ooze in black and white and would fester for years to come.