2. Hard to decide. Not to diminish the significance of Juneteenth, I'll go with MLK.*
3. Bill Self
*As an already liberal, (Due to having a mother who believed in justice and an older brother who was a liberal and who I looked up to and wanted to be like.), anti-war, pro-civil rights person at such a young age, and having lived through John Kennedy's assassination in Nov of '63, and all the turmoil-riots, etc. that followed LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act in '64 and the Voting Rights Act in '65, MLK's assassination on April 4th, 1968, was a huge. It felt very much like the ongoing attempts to bring justice to all Americans was hopeless, because the forces of racism and evil kept killing the most prominent people leading the effort. Then, likely the most charismatic and effective leader to come, Robert Kennedy, was assassinated only 3 months after MLK. To say the times felt dire, is an understatement.
Meanwhile, as your older male friends were being drafted into the military, (My 19 y/o marine neighbor was killed.), and the US had ~ 550,000 troops there, Nixon was lying to us leading up to the Nov '68 election, telling us he had "a secret plan to end the war". On the contrary, he was working behind the scenes with Henry Kissinger's help, to prolong the war so LBJ/Hubert Humphrey couldn't end it and score a win leading up to the election, and the war didn't end for another ~ 6 years, after another > 20,000 Americans and who knows how many hundreds of thousands of additional Vietnamese died...for nothing! Nothing. It was a very, very dark time in the US.
#dontgetmestarted
Abraham, Martin, and John
