Read their full recollections.

I was a 20-year-old junior at Howard University in Washington, D.C., when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. On that day, I was in the midst of the customary physical and psychological challenges of pledging Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, founded at Howard in 1908.

Howard was in a class of its own among historically black colleges and universities — known as the citadel of black education, with a legacy of producing some of the nation’s top black leaders: Justice Thurgood Marshall, writers Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, poets Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Pauli Murray, among others.

I remember on that day cautiously watching our dean of pledges walk slowly down the steps to the basement where our pledge line was cloistered. She somberly announced the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was dead, killed by an assassin’s bullet as he stood on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel where he had gone for the Poor People’s Campaign.

We all gasped. Some of us screamed. Everyone was in tears. She then turned on the television and we watched in silence what we couldn’t see from the basement: Outraged people, young and old, had taken their anger to streets. D.C. was in flames. Some of my line sisters began praying. The TV then showed rioting in other cities across America. I was scared. I needed to get back to my off-campus apartment. We all needed to go “home.”

I can’t remember how I got back to campus, just that I was crouching down with a line sister behind her yellow Volkswagen. I was terrified when a brick zinged close past my head. The U Street corridor looked like a war zone, but we thought we could make it to her parents’ house on 15th Street. We parked on a side street; her worried parents were relieved to see us and welcomed me to spend the night.

The next morning, we could still see smoke and smell the burned remains of the 14th and U Street businesses, largely black businesses, that had been burned, destroyed.

I am deeply grateful to the legislators who were unrelenting in their decadeslong pursuit of a national holiday in honor of Dr. King. For me and many people who lived through this era, “a day on, not a day off” is my mantra. The National Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington is a gift to our nation, as is the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Echoing in my ears … “I’ve been to the mountaintop … And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”

The land might not be all that has been promised, and ugliness and inhumanity continue to tear its head, but slowly but surely things are much better, and we continue to work on it.

As a Silver Life member of the NAACP, I am proud of the meaningful work of the Santa Fe Chapter across areas of education, health, social justice, politics, workforce and economics. It does my heart and mind good to participate in the work of our diverse chapter, including our annual MLK Day Celebration at the New Mexico Capitol, which draws 400 participants annually.

Every year on April 4, the clarity of my experience on that day 50 years ago looms large. It saddens me when steps are taken backward and reinforces the truth and importance of Dr. King’s written and spoken words today and his dream for the world our children and grandchildren will inherit tomorrow.