Cities don't commit crimes, but Dallas continues to feel guilty all the same. Fifty years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, many in the city are still burdened by the memory of that day — and the sense that, in some way they cannot put into words, they were responsible.

I hadn't appreciated the pervasiveness of this view in one of my favorite cities until I spent some time there this month participating in a symposium on the assassination organized by the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. I had been invited to talk about the lingering effects of Kennedy's death on our politics. I wound up learning a great deal about the way that Dallasites continue to carry the trauma.

One participant described his work with black teenagers. These young men, he said — kids born in the 1990s — referred constantly to the burden they carried because they're from the city where Kennedy was killed.