I've Been to the Mountaintop

Delivered the day before his death.

I had forgotten King was assassinated in Memphis, until I read a sign on Beale Street that casually mentioned it as a factor in the area's decline.

I remember his assassination vividly, as I watched television alone one night and they interrupted programming to announce it. I had no idea who he was, but I went and told my mother, and she knew all about him. Like the JFK assassination, my experience of this event is colored by the reactions of the people around me. By the time Bobby Kennedy went down, I was politically and culturally savvy enough to have at least a partial grasp of it's meaning on my own.

I had seen signs for the Civil Right Museum; I had not realized it incorporated the Lorraine Motel, as well as the rooming house from which the shots were fired. I'd had the impression the hotel had become derelict, and possibly torn down. Obviously this is not the case.

Ben and I will go to the museum later today.