Political+Unrest

[] - JFK, MJK, Robert Kennedy assassinations

MLK Assassination

At 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 196 8, a shot rang out. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been standing on the balcony of his room at the __Lorraine Motel__ in __Memphis, TN__, now lay sprawled on the balcony's floor. A gaping wound covered a large portion of his jaw and neck. A great man who had spent thirteen years of his life dedicating himself to nonviolent protest had been felled by a sniper's bullet.

Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as the leader of the a Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, he began a long tenure as the spokesperson for nonviolent protest in the Civil Rights Movement. As a Baptist minister, he was a moral leader to the community. Plus, he was charismatic and had a powerful way of speaking. He was also a man of vision and determination. He never stopped dreaming of what could be.

On April 3, King arrived in Memphis a little later than planned because there had been a bomb threat for his flight before takeoff. That evening, King delivered his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech to a relatively small crowd that had braved the bad weather to hear King speak. King's thoughts were obviously on his mortality, for he discussed the plane threat as well as the time he had been stabbed.

RFK Assassination []

JFK Assassination []

President Kennedy was murdered at the [|height of the Cold War], just a year after the [|Cuban Missile Crisis] brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster. While the mythology of a lost Camelot developed in the years since his death, the Kennedy era was marked by a variety of tensions and crises. The civil rights movement gathered momentum in the early 1960s and clashed with resistance, particularly in the South. Kennedy's brother Robert, as Attorney General, launched an unprecedented war on organized crime. [|Cuba] was the most intense foreign policy hotspot - Castro had come to power there during the Eisenhower era and plots to [|overthrow] and [|assassinate him] continued in the Kennedy era. [|Vietnam] was a simmering problem that would only bloom into full-scale war during the Johnson presidency.