U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with reporters from the South Lawn of the White House, Sept. 16.Alex Brandon/The Associated Press

The evening of April 4, 1968, will live as one of the darkest days in U.S. history. When an assassin’s bullet pierced the head of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., it was as if the country had declared war – on itself.

Riots broke out across the nation in what some called the greatest eruption of social unrest since the Civil War. President Lyndon Johnson would deploy nearly 60,000 National Guardsman and Army troops to assist the police in quelling the violence. At least 43 people were killed and 27,000 arrested.

President Johnson appealed for calm, saying he felt the pain of many of the protesters.

Robert F. Kennedy would be assassinated a few months later. Simmering rage over the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war, meantime, began boiling over on American college campuses. Student protesters were being shot and killed by police.

In Portland, fears grow that Trump’s crackdown is coming and will make life worse

As a 13-year-old watching this all unfold on our family television set in Ontario, I was scared. We had relatives in the U.S. who were distraught by what was........

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