The dreamer died, but not the dream

By Darrell Laurant

Published: April 6, 2008

The Rev. Martin Luther King could not have planned it any better.

Just a few weeks after Barack Obama’s landmark speech on race relations in America, along came the 40th anniversary of King’s assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968 — a pointed reminder that the “bad old days” weren’t that long ago.

And the very fact that the shooting for which James Earl Ray was convicted is termed an “assassination” says a lot about King. That is a weighty word, with implications of high status. You never see a headline that reads: “Man assassinated in domestic dispute.”

To be assassinated, you must — to paraphrase Jesse Jackson — be Somebody.

Given that, Memphis was swarming with civil rights groups last week. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (once led by King) was there in force, along with the Urban League, the Church of God in Christ, and Jackson’s PUSH/Rainbow Coalition group. The National Action Network, led by Al Sharpton, scheduled its annual convention at the Peabody Hotel.

These visitors weren’t in town to go to Graceland. Rather, they stood in line outside the Lorraine Motel (where King was shot down), packed into the Mason Temple (where their hero gave his “I Have a Dream” speech for the last time the night before he died) and coalesced into a two-mile march through downtown Memphis on Friday.

And before the march, which took place in a steady rain, The Rev. James Coleman of Providence Place in Lynchburg delivered an invocation at Memphis City Hall.

“It was absolutely a life-changing experience,” he said later.

He talked about how King had given the world his dream and that not even his death could take it away. He invoked all of those who have yet to achieve greatness themselves, but would do so thanks to King’s sacrifice.

Of course, Coleman came to Martin Luther King secondhand. He was only three years old when James Earl Ray sighted on that motel balcony and squeezed the trigger, so his knowledge of King comes from others.

“I took a course on the Preaching of Martin Luther King at Duke Divinity School, and that made a big impression on me,” said Coleman, a board member for the National Action Network who drove down to Memphis with Providence Place associate pastor Javaughn Colbert. “He was not a perfect man, but a man of great vision and great commitment.”

And King’s vision scared people — as it turned out, the wrong people.

I’ve yet to find anyone who thinks that James Earl Ray acted alone. Always described in the media as a “drifter,” he was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport.

So where did a “drifter” get the money for international travel? Why would a man with no history of racially connected violence get the urge to commit that particular crime?

It would be nice to know the answers, but the point is basically moot. If someone did pay Ray to kill King, that someone was probably an older member of the late 1960s power structure and is long dead now.

“Our march in Memphis was not to protest anything,” Coleman said. “It was to affirm.”

Memphis has a black mayor now, and a member of City Council there commemorated Friday’s anniversary by donning stained coveralls and joining the city’s trash collectors on their early morning run (it was a sanitation workers’ strike that brought King to Memphis).

“We are going back with the intention of recommitting ourselves,” Coleman said. “We may not have been able to save the Dreamer, but we still have the dream.”

Encouraging words. Yet if he were here, Martin Luther King would probably say to everyone who was in Memphis over the weekend: “Stop talking, and start doing.”