Jason Sokol with Joshua Guild: The Heavens Might Crack

On April 4, 1968 – fifty years ago this spring – a fatal shot rang out in Memphis and quickly rippled across the world. News of Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder stopped people in their tracks and rendered them speechless, moved many to tears and others to celebration, drove some to violence and still others to political activism. Historian Jason Sokol’s The Heavens Might Crack presents a vivid portrait of how Americans – as well as others around the globe – grappled with King’s death, revealing the enduring consequences King’s assassination had for the shape of his own legacy, the course of the Civil Rights Movement, and race relations in America. Sokol discusses his book and the surrounding issues with Joshua Guild, Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Princeton and author of the forthcoming book In the Shadows of the Metropolis: Cultural Politics and Black Communities in Postwar New York and London.