When John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, I’d turned seven and was in the first grade. I’ll never forget Ms. Collins, a white, lay-teacher at our segregated Black, Catholic school, rolled in the TV so we could see what had happened. When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in April 4, 1968, I was 12, and my Black community was on FIRE. And then, two months later, they killed Bobby Kennedy on June 5, 1968 — because they thought he might just change shit for us Black folk — again, we were on FIRE.
