I lived in Raleigh. We moved to Raleigh in 1959. I was 15 years old in 1968 I was a freshman at Harding Academy. Surprisingly enough, I didn't know any black people at the age of 15. My first African-American friend was Larry Carter who came to our school our junior year.
On the day of Martin Luther King's assassination, my grandmother, my mother, and I where in Kansas City, Missouri for spring break. We were there to visit family. We heard about the murder on the news and immediately I noticed my mother become scared. Then I became worried too.
In those days we only had two newspapers and my dad worked for one of them. You see, the African-American community was already boycotting the newspaper which was driving my dad crazy.
We came home the next day, and my mother and my grandmother were nervous that the roads would be blocked off on the bridge coming in from Arkansas. At this point James Earl Ray had not been captured. As we came down the roads in Arkansas there was a highway patrol car every 200 yards. At the bridge, there was a police presence but they were not blocking off the bridge. They were just shining their lights in to see who were in the cars.
Most of the riots were happening in the black community in South Memphis, but not in my neighborhood. I stayed home for the next three or so days and my father didn't come home, instead he stayed at the newspaper office.