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else's property. And when years later, we were told that the war in Vietnam was "a war of Northern aggression", we knew we had heard that phrase somewhere before.

We've come a long way since I was a schoolboy. Our common national understandng of our past and present is generally greater now than it was then, even if all the details aren't crystal clear. And our understanding of history is clearer, even though we still argue over what that history means.

One part of the history we know more abour is the history of the mid-century movement for civil rights. Whether called that, or the black struggle or the freedom fight, we know more about it now than ever before.

In a few years, for example, we will have a pretty clear understanding of what Martin Luther King did and said and thought and where he was nearly every week of his life between the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 until his murder in Memphis in 1968.

The increase in our knowledge about one of the 20th Century's most notable figures has come about, at least in part, because of the continued and increased interest among Americans in King, in the movement associated with him, and the times which produced him and other other notable figures in our common past.

Looking at that movement from today, we see a different view of the events and personalities of that period.

Instead of the towering figures of Kings and Kennedys standing alone, we now see an army of women and men.

Instead of famous speeches made to multitudes, we now see