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WE ALL KNOW WHAT IT FEELS LIKE to witness history as it happens. Anyone reading this is old enough to remember Sept. 11, 2001, undoubtedly the most historic day in our lifetimes. Even before the second tower had fallen, the events of that morning were being described as moments that "changed everything." None of us were quite sure what that meant, but we were all in tacit agreement that nothing would ever be the same again.

Many of us had felt the same way when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. And most of us who remember that day cannot believe that it happened 40 years ago.

Black people were still called Negros in the newspapers that reported Dr. King's death in April 1968. There was a continuing disagreement among blacks (and whites) whether the term "black" was pejoritive. Many whites had just graduated to the use of the term Negro from the still common, but unhip, term "colored." What bears remembering in 2008 is that at the time of his death Dr. King was not the universally beloved icon that four decades of martyrdom have bestowed upon his memory.

In the increasingly radical velocity of the Black Power movement in the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King was demeaned by some as the house Negro of the Civil Rights movement. Too accomodating, too non-violent, too "churchy" to represent the true struggle playing out on the streets of Oakland where a new group called the Black Panther Party led by Huey Newton and a Philadelphian named Bobby Seale was practicing civil rights through the barrel of a gun.

If 9/11 was single day that changed everything, the assassination of Martin Luther King was an epic event in an epic year that changed everything. It started with the Tet Offensive, the turning point in the Vietnam War, followed by the My Lai massacre (which we learned of a year later), followed by President Johnson's announcement he would not seek re-election , followed by the assassinations of King and Bobby Kennedy, followed by the police riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, which led to the election of Richard Nixon, who campaigned on his "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam, which did not officially end until 1975, a year after Nixon was forced to resign from office.