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Gareth Morgan - Where are you Martin? |
It didn’t take long to uncover how revered Martin Luther King is in his home town of Atlanta. We tried to locate the birthplace, church and neighbourhood of Dr King from the tourist guides distributed around all the hotels. Sadly it is not a recommended destination. For a one day visit to Atlanta the brochures recommend visiting the Coca Cola factory and CNN. For two days, add the Aquarium, three - the Jimmy Carter Library & Hard Rock Café, four – the Botanical Gardens and Museum of Natural History.
We didn’t really need reminding how begrudgingly the White South still regards the emancipation of African Americans, the Civil War it lost and for that matter, the voting and general rights entitlements that Lyndon Johnson’s Voting Rights and Civil Rights Act enacted. It was further evident when we found the King Centre and were stunned at the dearth of visitors there. Apparently the Coca-Cola factory and Aquarium had long queues.
When a white taxi driver can’t believe that you’d bother to visit the King centre and another white salesman declares “all that crap is ancient history and irrelevant now”, you’re reminded bluntly that denial reigns supreme amongst Southern Whites. It’s another demonstration of the political revivalism of fundamentalist White Christianity that energised during the King years, and has now swung the South so decidedly from being a Democrat stronghold to these days being the foundation of George W Bush support.
It’s easy to forget the racist George Wallace was a Democrat; that Carter interrupted the evolving run of Republican presidencies only because Nixon was a criminal and he lost it because of his racial-balancing school bussing programme; that Reagan won the presidency despite his strong opposition to the Civil Rights Bills in the 1960’s; that it was Clinton’s charm offensive and Ross Perot’s splitting of the Republican vote that delivered the second exception of a Democrat presidency and that George W is the epitome of where America has been gravitating for 40 years.
Who will forget that map illustrating the change in the distribution of red states that has underpinned the Bush presidency? That solid colour red in the South where there’s not a blue to be seen, has much to do with the insecurity of white Americans.
For us the visit was one of those dramatically moving days that these global wanderings throw up, with hardly a dry eye in the team, much as had been the case when we visited Gallipoli last year. The King centre itself is incredibly well done, with statues of Kunta Kinte (the slave biographed in Alex Haley’s book, “Roots”) and Mahatma Ghandi (from who Dr King had learnt the power of non-violent resistance) guarding the entranceway.
The centre provides a comprehensive audio-visual history of the Civil Rights movement highlighting how the victory in the Civil War in 1865 won only a short-lived freedom for rights of African Americans. Those Reconstruction years lasted only until 1877 before superstitions – sanctioned by prominent intellectuals and religious leaders – led to disenfranchisement of the liberated slaves. In 1883 the Supreme Court declared as unconstitutional a Civil Rights Bill that Congress had passed in 1875, and that enabled Segregationists to enact the infamous “Jim Crow” laws in the former Confederate States. Hatred of Blacks was demonstrated in over 3,600 lynchings that occurred between 1877 and World War I.
Many of course remember the second Civil War – which began in 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled racial discrimination in schools was unconstitutional, and was taken to the streets in 1955 when Rosa Park’s arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, led to the bus boycotts and further protest led by Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
Sitting in the Ebenezer Baptist church listening to recordings of Dr King’s speeches and reflecting on the day in 1974 when his mother was shot in this sanctuary as she played ‘The Lord’s Prayer’, one can’t help wonder what the fear is that underpins so many white Americans’ resentment of other races.
For all the hardship of the African American struggle for economic and social justice, at least it can be seen as making progress, albeit with setbacks. That contrasts dramatically to the message from a site we visited the next day where the Europeans had conducted ethnic cleansing of Native Indian Americans before and during those Civil War years as they forcibly moved them west along the Trail of Tears.
After Atlanta we moved to Chattanooga, famous not just for its Choo Choo kitch, but more importantly as one site where the Cherokee nation was forced to commence its fateful exodus West under the “Indian Removal Act” of 1830.
As we ride on to Nashville to explore the origins of Country Music, we can’t help but have the words of Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech of 1963, resonating in our ears.
“Free at last, free at last.
Thank God Almighty we are free at last”
Nor his fateful words on the day before he was assassinated in 1968,
“I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know as a people, we will get to the promised land. And I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man”.
As we contemplate George W Bush’s neo-conservative America where the imbroglio in Iraq is the result of doing God’s work, where in the aftermath of Katrina there’s been a surplus of offers for housing for displaced whites, but blacks turned away 66% of the time, it’s difficult not to conclude that the US is a nation that runs on fear & racism.
The Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta where Martin Luther King was co-pastor with his father and in which his mother was shot dead.
The house where Martin Luther King was born and lived until he left for College.
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