It's notes from America, I'm Kai Wright. Martin Luther King was assassinated on April

4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. He was buried on April 9, today, during what's commonly

called Holy Week in the run-up to Easter Sunday. And nothing about life in America would

be the same after that week. The Atlantic magazine's Van Nukeur has made a new podcast

telling the history of this particular moment in the spring of 1968. And he says, it's

one of the most consequential weeks in American history.

When you look at what happened in the actual hour when King was killed, you start seeing

unrest and disturbances in black communities across the country. And they last for days

actually become the largest, some people call them uprisings, riots, unrest, whatever you

want to call it, between the Civil War and the protests for George Floyd in 2020.

Van Nukeur's podcast is called Holy Week, the story of a revolution undone. It charts the

reaction to King's death in cities all over the country, events that laid the foundation

of urban politics for the next 50 plus years. Even before King was killed on April 4, each

of the major players in the Civil Rights Movement were facing a moment of great uncertainty.

President Johnson's White House, the growing black youth movements, and King himself, they

were all at crossroads. For King and the organization he led, they were frankly in a crisis

of identity.

And he was losing support even among lots of black Americans, especially young black Americans,

people who had the movement had been going on for a decade at that point. And there were

lots of people who sort of grew up with it in the background who saw all these big changes

legislatively, who saw these boycotts, but they were still living in poverty in the

ghettos and were still didn't have opportunity. And they were looking to things like black

...