This week, in marking the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., NPR News launches the first stories in an occasional year-long series called "Echoes of 1968."
The stories that make up "Echoes of 1968" will look back at events that took place in 1968 and follow the reverberations of those events through the past four decades. S tories will include explorations on how suburban communities grew in population and wealth as inner cities lost jobs, businesses, and residents; the influence of government housing initiatives on inner city and low-income housing; influences on the music industry since the founding of Apple Records in 1968; and how presidential politics has evolved since the 1964 campaign, which saw a sitting president not seek reelection, another presidential candidate assassinated, and the Democratic Convention in Chicago disrupted by anti-war protests.
Other stories will look at the evolution of technology in the four decades since Intel 1968 founding, how feminism has grown from a nascent movement into a predominant force in society, and how the space program has changed since the day a manned space capsule first circled the moon. The series will look at the influence of the movie rating system since it was created in 1968, and the effect of creating three-day-holidays by moving and combining remembrance days so they always fall on Mondays.
Overseas, NPR News correspondents will recall the events on the streets of Europe in 1968, from Paris to Prague, and look back on how politics in Europe has changed through the decades, including the fall of the Iron Curtain and the embrace of much of Eastern Europe by the European Union. NPR reporters will also look back to the days of the war in Vietnam, the protracted peace talks to end the war, and the rebuilding and reconciliation that has taken place both within Vietnam and between it and the U.S.
Coming up next:
Friday, April 11 on All Things Considered: Publicly-funded Housing Initiatives
On April 11, 1968, one week after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., President Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark housing legislation known as the Civil Rights Act of 1968. NPR's Cheryl Corley looks back at the evolution of publicly funded housing initiatives from the era of "projects" to an age of "mixed-income" initiatives.
On Wednesday, April 23, Jim Lehrer, anchor and executive editor of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS, underwent a heart valve procedure at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. It was a complete success. Jim plans to be back at full speed and on the program within a few weeks. In the meantime, the program continues in the capable hands of The NewsHour's exceptional team.
