Far from Dreams

This week the United States commemorates the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, the champion of civil rights who dreamed of a future in which people would be judged by their character and not for the color of their skin.

“The hopes and dreams of King have not been fully realized but we are much closer” said A.F. Michael Muff, a minister of the Church Faith Overcomes of Fayetteville (North Carolina) who was nine years old when King died, shot in Memphis.

“The younger generations have been freed from prejudices, they are learning that we are all human, equal, with the same flesh and blood, all sons of God,” he added.

In the afternoon of April 4th 1968, King, thirty-nine years of age, went out to take a little air on a balcony of the Hotel Lorraine, the only hotel in Memphis which accepted blacks. The preacher had gone to this city in Tennessee to support a protest by cleaning workers.

King, afflicted with depression, had already passed the peak of his carrier and the movement of his peaceful protest was facing the impatience of younger groups who proclaimed his “Negro power” and were bordering on the recourse of violence.

“God has permitted that I arrive at the mountain summit and from there I have seen the promised land,” said King the night before his death, before the faithful congregated in Mason Temple. “And it is possible that I won’t go to the promised land with you.”

“I am happy tonight. Nothing worries me. I don’t fear any man. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” he added.

A bullet, shot from the other side of the street, penetrated him on the right cheek and reached his spinal column. King died a little bit later in the St. Joseph Hospital.

“We had gone for a ride with my father in our 1955 Ford” remembered Mugg. “On the radio the music was interrupted and they gave us the news of the death of Dr. King. I see the image of my father, furious, who cursed, ached and was disappointed.”

The assassination, which took place in the violent year of protests, spread around the world and provoked disturbances in 125 U.S. cities in which 46 people died, 2,800 were wounded and more than 26,000 were arrested.

The action for which the accused man, James Earl Ray, judged and condemned for the assassination of King, died in 1998 in prison while denying his guilt, has given rise to various theories of conspiracy which range from the mafia, to supremacist white groups, to different agencies in the government.

The concepts of civil disobedience, resistance and peaceful protest embodied by King have marked the scrambles of figures such as the Polish Lech Walesa, the Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchu, the South Africans Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela and the Argentinan Adolf Perez Esquivel and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.

And four decades after the assassination of King, two people of color-–Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice–have been at the forefront of U.S. foreign relations and a black politician–Senator Barack Obama- has real potential to reach the White House.

But according to a study done by the Christian Science Monitor, in the United States even today 67 percent of blacks suffer from discrimination when they are seeking employment, 65 percent when they buy or rent homes, and 50 percent when they go shopping or to a restaurant.

In urban areas, half of young blacks do not finish high school, and six of every ten will go to prison before reaching 30 years of age.

“If King were alive now, he would be anguished and disappointed,” maintains Charles Steele who now presides over the Conference of Christian directors of the South where King formerly presided. “The United States, in many ways, continues to be a racist country. Perhaps even more so, but it is subliminal and incorporated in the system.

The Hotel Lorraine, converted into the National Museum of Civil Rights, will be at the center of the commemorations this week, while the promoters of the monument for King in Washington Mall continue to be caught up in internal disputes over the funds necessary for the tribute.