The Promised Land
Martin Luther King did not get there, gunned down 50 years ago – but he has left a legacy we’ll all celebrate in 2018
There have been 45 presidents of the US since Britain’s King George was sent packing. The US, though, has had three Kings, who have left a lasting legacy. Next year is the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, BB King was King of the Blues and Elvis was The King of Rock’n’roll. In this series, we look at how they changed their country and the world.
IT has been a long journey getting here – 6,800km, 24 hours, two flights and a three-hour drive through the seasons. But it has been a longer journey still for America – 50 years and counting. Fifty years since the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King. Sixty years since the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till by two rednecks, the life that was famously not ‘worth a whistle’. A hundred years of Jim Crow segregation laws and lynchings until the civil rights movement overcame in the Sixties. And 400 years since the first slaves were transported in coffin ships from Africa. But we are here now.
Here in Jackson, Mississippi, for the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights
Museum and Museum of Mississippi History on a momentous morning in December, with hope and unseasonal Christmas snow (at least for this part of the world) in the air.
We are here with victims and descendants, while the rest of the world is watching for President Trump. He is inside for his own private visit.
We have much to look back on and much to look forward to, with 2018 set to be marked by a year of commemorations of Dr King, entitled MLK50.
We started off on this journey in Memphis at the Mason Temple, where an under-the-weather Dr King was persuaded in 1968 to speak to the congregation.
He told his followers that he had been to the mountain top and seen the Promised Land, before cautioning that he might not get there with them.
OUR guide, Ekpe, is an ordained minister, like Dr King, and is representing the most arrested family of the civil rights movement as the youngest of 14 children.
It is 50 years since the darkest of dark days for that movement, but Ekpe has an instant recall of April 4, 1968 – the day of Martin Luther King’s assassination – and how, even as a child, he felt that his world could never be the same from that day on. It is a privilege to be in his company.
We will meet his niece Alana too on this journey. She will escort us around Memphis’s Slave Haven museum, where she proudly talks of her roots and how the family had managed to trace them back to west Africa.
For those who wish to trace the roots of author Alex Haley, who for many of us was our first introduction to the African-American story through his groundbreaking TV series Roots in the Seventies, his boyhood home is nearby in Henning, Tennessee.
Haley was a contemporary of Dr King, a fellow son of slaves, adding his important narrative to the unfolding story of the march to freedom.
In April 1968, Dr King was writing his own final chapter. He had come to Memphis to support the sanitation workers, who were striking for equal rights with white council workers. Two AfricanAmerican workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, had been crushed to death in a compressor. Black workers were exposed daily to dangerous working conditions and could not afford to be off work; they would not be paid if they were off sick or late.
The two deaths were the final straw for their colleagues.
Dr King was to be met with opposition from the authorities, who accused him of stirring up trouble. Undeterred, he warned that he would return if nothing was done.