- Marie Laure
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- Jan 19
- 3 min read
Some historical figures take on a bigger than life persona and encountering their legacy brings them to life again. It feels that way for me with Martin Luther King, Jr. because I have walked in places where he had---not once, but three separate times---first as a graduate student at Boston University School of Theology.
Sometimes when the halls were quiet, say on a Friday afternoon, I would imagine him bounding up the stairs, two at a time, when he studied in those same classrooms. I wondered if already he had sense of his profound destiny to come. What would it have been like to be there when he took his PhD, and then,Senator John F. Kennedy delivered the Commencement address? Sometimes, I would stop to think about the day I heard MLK was shot and killed. I was fifteen years old. My mother always had the TV on in the living room, and that evening I was standing there as she sat on the floor with needle and thread and yardstick to measure a hem on my new floral dress when the news broke. I watched the black and white screen flickering chaotic scenes. He was dead. My mother was silent. I cried.
Years passed, and I came to live in St. Augustine, Florida* where Dr. King had been jailed during the Civil Rights movement. He had come to sit with young, Black students who defied authorities by sitting at the local segregated "Whites only" lunch counter. The St. Augustine Four were not served lunch, but were arrested and jailed by local police. King himself was jailed when he sat down at the same Woolworth's lunch counter to eat.
When I first arrived in St. Augustine, that lunch counter memorialized the legacy that had led to violent outbreaks against Black people by the Ku Klux Klan in the Plaza de la Constitucion across the street. Today, Woolworths no longer exists and the memorial is long gone. For the past 41 years, each MLK Day, community organizers have led a silent march to that Plaza to commemorate the man who walked with hundreds of other Black people--- eventually resulting in the Civil Rights Act.
A few years ago when I visited Atlanta, I sought out the Ebeneezer Baptist Church where MLK had been a preacher alongside his father---and where he was baptized, ordained, and eulogized. His ethos fills the space. His voice recordings play in the silent sanctuary for visitors to sit and hear what he said when he moved through his life with purposeful hope that we need from a leader today:
All we say to America is, "Be true to what you said on paper." If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.
The Ebeneezer Baptish Church is a National Park* as is the MLK memorial in Washington D.C., which up until today, offered a "fee-free" day for visitors on MLK's birthday (now replaced by DJT's own birthday). If you go, your spirits will be lifted by one man who spoke truth so eloquently.*** Martin Luther King's words ring in our minds just by thinking them: "I have a dream. . .I've seen the Promised land...I may not get there with you". . .
"Let Freedom Ring"
