April 5, 1968 – the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. As a freshman college student in Washington, D.C., I will never forget that Friday. The day before, I had made a date to visit my girlfriend who was a student at a Catholic women’s college on the other side of town. Unaware of the civil insurrection – aka riots – that were already underway in D.C.’s black neighborhoods, I took a cab to visit my friend one last time before she flew home for the two-week long Easter recess. We spent an hour or so on the lawn outside of her dorm, but there was tension in the air as we spotted smoke from burning buildings looking to the west of her campus – the direction that I would have to travel to return to my own school two and a half miles away. As I said farewell to her and several of her classmates as they headed off to Washington National Airport in one of the last taxicabs running that day, I confronted the question of how...(Read Full Post)