Forty years ago today Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a sniper as he stood on the balcony of a motel in Memphis.

I was in India on that day, in a village 100 miles outside Bangalore, winding up a two-year stint as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I and my team were packing up, arranging for long term survival of our projects with the village leaders, and saying good-bye to friends we would most likely never see again in this lifetime.

The news of Dr. King's murder was a shot heard halfway around the globe. We realized that we had left our country bound on a person-to-person peace mission. Most of us had participated in civil rights activities before our Peace Corps tour of duty.

We realized then we would be returning to a country far different from the one we had left, where leaders for reform and for civil rights were gunned down in broad daylight and where efforts to establish justice would be met with threats, violence and death.

It was a dark time.