Picture a seventh grader on a living-room rug in April 1968, a history project spread out in front of him and a girl he likes sitting close enough to matter. Then a television set at the end of the room changes everything in it. The picture goes to a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, and to a face the whole country knows, and nobody in the room says anything at all. Her parents sit down. Somebody turns the volume up. The two of them hold hands, because there is nothing else to do with their hands. Outside that room the spring keeps its schedule anyway — a cross-country meet with a ribbon and a savings bond at the end of it, a ball game his father promises to take him to and does not, bomb drills under the desks in May, an argument at the dinner table that finally empties one bedroom in the house. Part 7 is the two months when the news stops being something that happens to other people, and a boy finds out what he will spend, and how far he will travel, for somebody who needs him.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was shot on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. He was thirty-nine years old. He had come to stand with striking sanitation workers, whose complaints were old: dangerous trucks, no pay when a man was injured, and wages low enough that full-time workers qualified for public assistance. Their walkout was an act of open defiance in a city whose leaders had refused for years to listen. Within hours the news reached nearly every home in the country, and within days more than a hundred cities saw violent unrest.

The country answered the assassination in two directions at once. One week later, a fair housing law made it illegal to refuse to rent or sell a home because of race, the last great civil rights law of the decade. The movement itself was turning north and toward money: not only the segregation signs of the South but rents, wages, schools, and jobs in northern cities. King had been planning a poor people's march when he died, and in May his colleagues carried it out, building a camp of plywood shelters on the capital's lawn.

Robert Kennedy, then running for president, heard the news in Indianapolis, climbed onto a flatbed truck, told a crowd that had not yet heard, and asked for calm rather than revenge. Two months later he won the California primary election and was shot as he left the ballroom. For children, none of this could be avoided, because a single television set stood in most living rooms and a bulletin could interrupt any program at any hour. Millions of them learned that spring what the adults around them looked like when the adults were frightened.

No right or wrong — tell someone nearby what happened in this part. Can’t find anyone? Tell yourself out loud. The moment you teach it, you truly understand it.