Fifty years ago, on Sunday, April 7, 1968, a recording of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech played over loudspeakers to 500 Duke students assembled on what is now Abele Quad. This was the first day of the Silent Vigil, organized in response to the assassination of King a few days before. The students had decamped from President Douglas M. Knight’s house in Duke Forest, which they had occupied since the evening of April 5.
