This article is by Peter Isackson and is published in Fair Observer:

Americans remember four spectacular and symbolic assassinations from the 1960s. That of President John F. Kennedy, shot in Dallas, Texas, on Friday, November 22, 1963, marks a moment of maximum trauma in modern US history. For three days, television channels ran with no advertising as the nation witnessed not just the sudden disappearance of a youthful president but the unfolding of a complex narrative of criminality that concluded with the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s presumed killer, two days later.

The second high-profile assassination, of the radical black political activist, Malcolm X, in 1965, played out as a mere sideshow. The national media treated it essentially as a black-on-black killing or a settling of scores among marginal political extremists. 

The third assassination, the gunning down of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, shocked a nation already rattled by the JFK assassination and the Vietnam War. King was a black leader considered far more respectable than Malcolm X. The black community reacted with violence as riots broke out in several US cities.

Read the full article here.