Martin Luther King, Jr.: Death of a Dream or Birth of a Dream?

If spoken words were to audibly echo throughout time and celestial space, surely one of the most compelling and most eloquent of those would be the Martin Luther King, Jr. speech, “I Have a Dream!”

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"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal'," In front of 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in the US capital in 1963, Dr King told gave his memorable speech. "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

"Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring—when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

This April 4^th marked 40 years since the voice was silenced. Or was it? Dr. King was a charismatic and brave hero battling for racial equality from the 1956 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama to non-violent protest marches in the 1960s. Time Magazine honored Dr. King as "Man of the Year" with a feature story and cover photo, January 3, 1964.

A Nobel peace prize winner, Dr. King was just 39 years old on that fateful Friday, April 4, 1968. At 6:01 p.m., a shot rang out. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been standing on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, lay sprawled on the balcony's floor mortally wounded with a gunshot wound to his jaw and neck. A great man who dedicated himself for thirteen years to nonviolent protest had been cut down by a sniper's bullet.

Violence and controversy followed. In outrage of the murder, many blacks took to the streets across the country in a massive wave of riots.

BACKGROUND

These events followed a grisly history of slaves brought over from Africa to live lives being treated as less than human. Subject to the will of slave masters and later, after slavery was abolished, in the deep south of the US, blacks were told not to eat where whites eat, not to get a drink of water where whites go and not to use the same bathroom facilities or hotel facilities. They were to be remanded to the back of the bus, the seats in the front to be reserved only for whites.

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