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A Mournful March

Issue Date: 
January 19, 2016

It was April 7, 1968, and a parade of black and white marchers, some linked arm in arm, walked down Centre Avenue from the Hill District to Downtown. The day had been declared a National Day of Mourning for Martin Luther King Jr., the prominent civil rights leader and clergyman who had been assassinated three days before, on April 4, as he stood on a balcony outside of his Memphis, Tenn., hotel room.