The Week That Made Modern America
The widely forgotten story of the week that followed Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, and how it altered the nation’s history, as explained by Vann R. Newkirk II
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“Collective grief can have a way of warping the historical lens,” my colleague Vann R. Newkirk II explains in Holy Week, a new Atlantic podcast series exploring the week of fiery uprisings that broke out across many major U.S. cities following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. I spoke with Vann about what happened during that week, exactly 55 years ago, and how it diverted the civil-rights movement in ways that history is in danger of forgetting.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
