(blackamericaweb.com) – A steady rain fell Friday in Memphis, Tennessee, but it didn’t deter the scores of people who gathered there to honor the life and legacy of slain civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
King was gunned down on April 4, 1968 on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. He was in Memphis to help organize a strike of street and sanitation workers, then some of the poorest of the city’s working poor.
“Dr. King was like Moses,” said Leslie Moore, 61, who was a sanitation worker in 1968 and is still on the job more than a generation later. “God gave Moses the assignment to lead the children of Israel across the Red Sea. He sent Dr. King here to lead us to a better way.”
Today, the sanitation workers are represented by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The Friday morning rally — which included a dozen or so of the original strikers, along with hundreds of other people, mostly members of AFSCME — was one of two marches to the Lorraine Motel, once a blacks-only establishment in segregated Memphis, now a civil-rights museum.
A line of several hundred people carrying umbrellas in a steady rain set off on the mile-long route.
The three remaining presidential candidates summoned memories of King and gently sought to advance their own strivings as they found greatness in his.
“The quality of his character is only more apparent,” said Sen. John McCain, a Republican who readily told a black audience that he had been wrong to vote against legislation making King’s birthday a holiday.
Like McCain, Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton traveled to Memphis to observe the day. She chose not to speak at ceremonies at the Lorraine Motel where King was shot.
Instead, she spoke in the church where he had delivered his final sermon. Clinton recalled that when she heard the news of his death, “It felt like everything had been shattered, and we’d never be able to put the pieces together again.”
Democratic Sen. Barack Obama chose to campaign in Indiana, where he said King’s pleas have yet to be answered fully.
In Fort Wayne, Obama linked King’s work to the present, saying the dream of economic justice is “still out of reach for too many Americans.”
In Atlanta, Rev. King’s eldest son, Martin Luther King III, and his only living daughter, the Rev. Bernice King, laid a wreath at the tomb of their father.
Martin Luther King III was only 11 when his father was assassinated. His family broke the news to him by saying: “Daddy is going to go home to live with God,” King told CNN.
King’s memories of his father are now fragmentary: kissing him when he returned from his frequent travels, tossing a softball, riding a bicycle with him. He learned to accept his loss, but there were moments when it hurt.
“When I was growing up and I wanted to talk to my father to get advice, and no one was there, it hit then,” he said in the CNN article. “It hit me when my mom would say, ‘Your father would be so proud of you today.’ That was painful.”
Also in Atlanta, a historic exhibit opened Friday at the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic Site commemorating the 40th anniversary of King’s assassination. It invites visitors in King’s own words: “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”
The artifacts and photographs of “From Memphis to Atlanta: The Drum Major Returns Home” chronicle the final days and hours before King’s death to the funeral procession by thousands of mourners through his hometown five days later.
The exhibit began Friday and runs through Aug. 31, incorporating the Aug. 28 anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington in 1963.
The display emphasizes the continuing legacy of King’s mission for nonviolent social change, said Dean Rowley, a National Park Service ranger and curator of the exhibit.
The centerpiece is the wagon that was drawn by two mules as it carried King’s casket more than four miles from the funeral at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he preached, to a memorial service at Morehouse College, his alma mater.
“The purpose of the mule wagon was to show the importance of his dedication to the poor,” Rowley said.
This commitment to his Poor People’s Campaign, Rowley said, took King to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers. It was there that he was struck by an assassin’s bullet.
The exhibit also includes photographs of garbage workers with picket signs; King, Hosea Williams, Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy on the balcony of the motel where he would be shot a day later; the historic image of the fallen King on the balcony the following day as his aides point to the source of gunfire; and four lilies attached by a ribbon to a cross posted on the door of Room 306, outside of which he was fatally wounded.
There are also photos of his widow, Coretta Scott King, and their children at the funeral; the tearstained faces of his father and mother; and another of Coretta Scott King and Harry Belafonte, tears welling in their eyes.
There are artifacts including the death certificate, burial permit and a bill totaling $3,475.89 from Hanley Bell St. Funeral Home.
There are also symbolic red carnations to represent the artificial flowers that King gave his wife about two weeks before his death. Until then, he regularly gave her fresh flowers, Rowley said.
“She thought later that he had a premonition,” he said.
Two months before his death, in a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, King remarked on how he would like to be remembered.
“Tell them I was a drum major for peace and a drum major for justice,” he said.