Remembering Martin Luther King Jr

In the spring of 2005, while studying journalism as a fellow of the Diversity Institute in Nashville, Tennessee, my class took a field trip to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis located at the Lorraine Motel where, on April 4, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot by an assassin while standing on the second floor balcony of his motel room.  

As I stood looking through protective glass into room 306 where everything from the rumpled covers on the bed to the half-smoked cigarette butts in the ashtray was frozen in time—everything had been kept exactly as it was the day King was murdered 37 years earlier—I couldn’t help wondering with awe if perhaps a maid or even King himself might not appear and begin going about their business as if neither time nor fate had been interrupted.

But as I peered across the street at the view room 306 offered of the building where the shots rang out and lowered my gaze to the spot on the balcony where King once stood, my eyes were drawn to a very dull but still noticeable blood stain, and my heart sank at the reality and the finality of what I saw.

“If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive,” King once said.

That quote (among others) and the sight of that dull blood stain have remained with me ever since. I thought about them, as I do every year, as I participated in a march with fellow commemorators on Monday in the 25th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King Holiday Celebration in my hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas.

Unlike my moment of realization at the Civil Rights Museum, the ceremony I attended to honor Dr. King’s legacy was not somber but filled with joyful reverence and a theme aimed at continuing King’s dream of racial unity.

“It’s critical that we do this march,” said City Council member Nelda Martinez. “So that we never forget the sacrifice for equal rights and freedom Martin Luther King gave his life for.”

The march route, a 1.5 mile trek that began at the Nueces County Courthouse and ended at the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, consisted of a throng of people of different races, ages , civic organizations and backgrounds holding up banners and singing “We Shall Overcome.”