Fifty years ago Wednesday, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death in Memphis, Tenn. The Pioneer Press condemned his assassination the next morning in a rare front-page editorial as “another national tragedy, a disgrace, a shame to bear.”

Here is the editorial in full:

“This brave man, Dr. Martin Luther King, so foully assassinated, must have known that while he preached nonviolence, personal danger was always his companion.

“Whether or not one was always ready to go along with Dr. King’s full philosophy, there always was great admiration for his courage and for his mission.

“And now we have another national tragedy, a disgrace, a shame to bear. For while our country has not cornered the market on the warped, the criminal and the bigoted, we have indeed maintained the conditions that made it necessary for Dr. King to struggle so, to annoy us sometimes and eventually make us aware of our national sickness.

“While we might be inclined to say here in Minnesota that we are not responsible for some affliction in Memphis, it simply won’t go down.

“This is one country. We have to share this burden. We let idiots have guns. We tolerate conditions that make demonstrations necessary.

“How much can we stand before this country decides either to come to its senses or to perish?”