“Outside a woman walked along the wet street-lamp sidewalk through the sleet and snow,” began the eighteen-year-old Ernest Hemingway in one of his early efforts for the Kansas City Star. His admirable little story—turning an unremarkable evening of soldiers fox-trotting with young women from the Fine Arts Institute into something significant—ran on April 21. Young Hemingway had come to Missouri the previous October at his uncle’s urging and spent six months covering Kansas City’s “shortstop run,” seeking out newsworthy action along the strip from the hospital to the police house and Union Station. There were the usual brawl victims to interview in the emergency room, he could chase down a fire truck, or a man burning up with influenza might stagger off the train and cause a panic at the station.

When his editor at the Star sent young Hemingway to cover an ordinary YMCA dance, he got back a story that centered on a streetwalker outside the hall. The chaperone at the dance had been a Miss Winifred Sexton, Hemingway noted, and the function’s sponsors were the War Camp Community Service. After an evening of popular tunes, including “The Long, Long Trail Awinding,” a “girl in red, surrounded by a crowd of men in olive drab, seated herself at the piano, the men and the girls gathered around and sang until midnight. The elevator had stopped running and so the jolly crowd bunched down the six flights of stairs and rushed waiting motor cars. After the last car had gone, the woman walked along the wet sidewalk through the sleet and looked up at the dark window of the sixth floor.”

Hemingway’s colleagues at the Star were impressed by his making something out of so little, and the story ran with the headline MIX WAR, ART AND DANCING. As his six-month apprenticeship was coming to an end, Hemingway wrote to his parents back in Oak Park, Illinois, on April 19: “Everything is going fine down here. It is raining hard now and has been all day. I put my old macinaw on and turn the collar up and let it rain…. I’m enclosing a couple of the tank stories. Some of them go pretty good.”

Hemingway left the next month for New York, and transport to Italy, where he served as a volunteer in the Italian ambulance corps. In later life Hemingway claimed that the Kansas City Star’s style sheet, with its warning against adjectives and insistence on “vigorous English,” had been the best guidance he ever received as a writer.

In March a strike by city garbage collectors had brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to Memphis, Tennessee, where he hoped to lead the union’s action against the city government; on April 4, as he stood talking in the early evening with his friends on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, the great civil rights campaigner was killed by a small-time holdup man and criminal bumbler named James Earl Ray. Ray, who had checked into Bessie Brewer’s rooming house nearby as “John Willard” and who was remembered by her only for his dark suit and “silly smile,” fired one 30.06-caliber shot from a bathroom window, 205 feet from King’s motel. By evening King was dead, Ray had slipped town for Canada, and riots burned from one end of the country to the other.

James Earl Ray had tried and failed as an Army man, bank robber, burglar, and forger; he had dropped his wallet in one holdup and rolled out of his getaway car in another. His only previous success at anything seemed to be escaping from the Missouri State Prison in April of 1967. But at the time of his jailbreak the idea of Ray at large evidently had not terrified local law enforcement; they had put fifty dollars on his head.

Despite his previous failures, Ray made a successful escape this time to Toronto, but not without leaving behind his rifle, binoculars, some clothes, and a fingerprinted beer can. He stayed a month in Toronto, then, as “Mr. Sneyd,” traveled to London on a Canadian passport he had bought for eight dollars, before visiting Lisbon, where he stayed five days at the Hotel Portugal. Ray returned to London and lived in a series of hotels before the police were tipped off by some unusual phone inquiries he made to newspapers about finding work as an African mercenary. On June 8 Scotland Yard detectives seized him just as he was stepping onto a Heathrow flight to Brussels.

Even as Dr. King’s leadership tragically ended, his tactics were being adopted by college students across the country for a host of purposes. An April 23-30 sit-in at Columbia University was the most visible of more than two hundred sizable college demonstrations held between January and mid-June. The Vietnam War had come to dominate the campuses, where buildings were defaced, occupied, even bombed. Fellow students could be rated on how far they would go: sit in, lie in, chain themselves to things.

Columbia University planned to build a new gymnasium on two acres of Morningside Heights Park that it leased from the city. Residents of the Harlem neighborhood nearby would be able to use the ground-floor pool and basketball court of the proposed gym, while the upper floors were to be devoted to student athletics. Some student and local leaders saw the deal as a “land grab” offering “separate but unequal” facilities. Mark Rudd, firebrand of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), having failed to achieve much with a petition drive earlier in April urging Columbia to disengage itself from the Pentagon-connected Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), saw a more promising target in the gym. He led a ceremonial march on the construction site, to the student chant “Gym Crow must go!” Rudd’s Columbia SDS chapter denounced the university, which owned $230 million in Manhattan properties, as a slumlord needing to be stopped. The university’s president, Grayson Kirk, took an equally intractable stand. Their demands unmet, the students seized Hamilton Hall on April 23 and shut in three college officials for more than twenty-four hours.

During the resulting stand-off, Rudd and other white student leaders were evicted by sixty of their black fellow students who objected to their leadership and may have had other plans for the siege. Rudd and company moved to Low Library, which included the president’s office, on April 24. The students claimed that Kirk had made himself a war criminal by allying the university with the IDA, and they treated his office accordingly. Fayerweather Hall, the social sciences building, fell next, followed by two more. President Kirk’s offer to cease the gym construction did not satisfy the more than 700 occupiers. When Kirk ordered the buildings cleared on April 30, the black students holding Hamilton Hall surrendered it rather easily. Those holding the other buildings weren’t so malleable, however. According to the report of the incident’s investigator, Archibald Cox, the New York City police struck next with “violence on a harrowing scale,” subduing a sympathetic crowd that blocked them and arresting 698 students to end the strike.

Rudd was one of seventy-three students who received one-year suspensions for their part in the takeover. Grayson Kirk resigned later that year. The Columbia siege, along with demonstrations at Berkeley, would serve as models for stagy campus protests over the next generation.