On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I began to reflect and realize that 1968 was a pivotal year in my life.

It was the year Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, the Kent State massacre occurred, Nixon was elected president, and the Vietnam war was raging. Before Kennedy was shot, I had signed up to work on his campaign in Georgia once he was nominated. That, of course, never happened. His assassination took the wind out of my sails and politics wasn’t fun anymore. A Louisville Courier Journal cartoonist had the best cartoon that showed how I felt – a campaigner in with all his buttons and signs was crestfallen.

We began to think about moving to another country. We did not want our sons going to war and were very uncomfortable living in a country that had such hate in it. We began to look to see what English-speaking countries would accept us and what countries were least likely to go to war. (we moved to Canada in 1972)

In my personal life, my mother-in-law was very sick with intestinal cancer and would die in 1969. I had a miscarriage – a pregnancy that didn’t go anywhere. I saw the sac that was connected with the placenta, and nothing was there.

My husband and I went to the Presbyterian Church near Emory U in Atlanta and were active in the Sunday School. After King’s death the church began to have exchanges with black churches. In the fall we began having a series on different religions with a teen group. When we brought in a black man and his white wife to tell the group about the Baha’i religion, my husband was called on the carpet before the Deacons of the church. How dare Paul bring a black person to talk to the teens, and then bring him to the church service without permission. We surmised that the interracial marriage was probably the bigger unspoken catalyst for their wrath, but the hypocrisy of all the interracial exchanges during the year were amplified greatly. We made plans to leave the church.

That was the beginning of my rejection of Christianity. We started going to the Atlanta Unitarian Universalist Congregation in northwest Atlanta, near to where we lived. When we walked in it felt like a breath of fresh air - integrated and dogma free. wow, we found our spiritual home.

1968 was a very pivotal year.