A poet looks back into the fire

On Thursday, Michael Weaver?s mother was crying in front of the television set ? “she wept like a baby,” he said ? and by Saturday there was a National Guard truck at the mailbox on the corner, a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the back.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King had just been murdered in Memphis, Tenn., his cleric?s status unable to protect him as so many black folks had hoped. Baltimore was one of more than a hundred cities in Lyndon Johnson?s America to go up in flames in response.