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put me a little above the world and gave my own judgments a new authority. I did not become a Nietzschean superman, free to define the world on my own terms. But a new voice, and a new will, opened within me. If anything, this experience was a passage to higher self-esteem.
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    Ten years later, in early June of 1968, I was sitting with my parents in a hotel room in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, watching my mother across the room silently crying. I was to graduate fromcollege that weekend, and my parents had driven up from Chicago for the ceremony. While they slept that first night—and while I embarked on a weekend-long graduation party—Robert Kennedy was shot and killed in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Greeted with this news at breakfast, my parents—especially my mother—were as shattered as I had ever seen them by a public event. My mother was a strong, even commanding, woman, and I had seen her cry no more than a few times in my entire life.
    And probably what happened next was triggered precisely by the fact that tears were so uncharacteristic of her. But the mere sight of her sitting by the hotel window, eyes wet over the assassination of Robert Kennedy, sent me into a paroxysm of rage. She had said quite clearly what saddened her. And it had nothing to do with any silly feeling for the Kennedy mystique. She had never particularly liked or trusted any of the Kennedys. She was sad, she said, because Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, coming on the heels of Martin Luther King’s assassination, meant that history had lost a chance. She kept repeating that history had lost a chance. But the idea that racial overcoming had come to depend on the presidential bid of this arrogant little Kennedy sent me over the top. I had by then come into a new, uncompromising idea of what it meant to be black. Blackness had suddenly become that year—well before even King’s assassination—more and more defined as a will to power, as an imperative by masters rather than a plea by slaves. So it was slavish to think that black advancement was somehow dependent on the good offices of a white man without half the gravitas of black leaders like King or James Farmer or Malcolm X. Thus,for twenty minutes I berated the newly assassinated candidate with more fury than I might have mustered for George Wallace, who—it was vogue to say—was at least an honest bigot.
    The fact is that we live different lives than our parents, no matter how much we love them and they us. We have a separate experience to contend with. My parents were classic civil rights people. I had grown up watching them struggle against an unapologetically racist America. In their generation protest had to be persuasion, since they were vastly outnumbered in a society that took white supremacy as self-evident truth. Like most people in the King-era civil rights movement, they were Gandhians because nonviolent passive resistance was the best way to highlight white racism as an immorality. Their rejection of violence, even as a weapon against racial oppression, gave them the extraordinary power of moral witness—the great power of the early civil rights movement. What could America think of itself when passive freedom riders were beaten or when a little black girl in crinoline and pigtails—an image of perfectly conventional human aspiration—had to be escorted into school past a screaming white mob?
    This kind of moral witness transformed America forever, and its very success meant that it had, in fact, persuaded America. But what do all the postures of Gandhian passive resistance look like when the enemy has been persuaded? Suddenly the nonviolence that looked courageous in the face of the mob looks a little obeisant and supplicating when the mob disappears, when the government itself passes laws ending the segregated way of life the mob stood for. My parents believed with all their hearts in the moral power of turning the other