"King scared some people," said Moore. "He was upsetting the social order. Change makes people nervous, even when it's good for them."
But the day of the assassination, the man who had distrusted King's assault on the status quo suddenly turned remorseful. Watching his father's reaction, Moore was struck by the seriousness of the event. He spent days absorbing broadcasts about King's death.
King was revered at the March home, but March himself didn't realize the impact of the man until the rights leader's death. He began to understand the fight for civil rights in completely new terms. If this legend could fall to an assassin's bullet, all black people and their hopes for justice might also be in danger, he reasoned.
"It changed my perspective in terms of how vulnerable we really were in America," said March, 56, vice president of his family's funeral chain. "If that was his outcome, that meant that no one had any chance at living in America and being black and asking for your rights."
As March watched looters storm a corner convenience store, he became terrified of the riots and worried that the violence would never end. Afterward, however, he began to understand the rage, resentment and disillusionment born of decades of inequality.
But he wasn't prepared to have to explain the complexity of such frustration to white classmates. Some seemed to expect him to be the interpreter of all black experience. Why were blacks so angry? Why were they destroying their own communities?
The burden was on him to explain the enormity of the riots, an event all of America has been struggling to comprehend since those turbulent days four decades ago.
"At the same time you're trying to go to school and be a student, you had to justify and defend the black race," March said. "Here I was in Towson and people were asking me, `What were y'all doing down in the ghetto?' It was tense. Even the ones who were your friends, they were questioning all that was going on."
Foreman learned of King's murder while translating Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars for his Latin homework. In front of the television in his mother's bedroom, he sat fixated, numb.
Grief and fear
At school, many of the Jesuits were grief-stricken at King's death and empathetic to the black students. But from some of his white classmates, Foreman feared a backlash.
