Hundreds join day of 'consecration' on 49th anniversary of King's death
Gordon McGillivray came from Scotland and Jesse Jones came from across town to join hundreds of people at the Lorraine Motel for the 49th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination.
The nearly three-hour event culminated with the laying of a new wreath on the motel balcony where the civil rights leader was fatally shot at 6:01 p.m. April 4, 1968. The crowd on Tuesday joined in a moment of silence at 6:01.
McGillivray looked the part of a tourist: Panama straw hat, shorts, boat shoes, T-shirt and an Olympus camera hung across his neck. The research chemist and his family had already planned a road trip across the South before learning a month ago about the King anniversary events. "Just felt compelled,'' he said of making the civil rights ceremony part of their vacation.
"I was a young child growing up in the 1960s. He was just such an inspiring person, Dr. Martin Luther King. And as a young child I was aware of that fact.''
Upon seeing the motel and the balcony for the first time Tuesday, McGillivray said, "I was choked, absolutely.''
If McGillivray looked like a tourist, Jones dressed like the son of a leader of the 1968 sanitation workers, whose strike brought King to Memphis 49 years ago.
Jones wore a black T-shirt with the same declarative statement his father, T.O. Jones, and other sanitation workers wrote on protest signs: "I AM A MAN.''
Jesse Jones is painter who took the day off to attend the events and because he's on a mission.
The striking sanitation workers of the 1960s have never received the honor they deserved, he said. "And I'm here to make sure they understand I'm looking for honor for my father and the other sanitation workers that have never been recognized,'' he said.
Jones and McGillivray heard speeches, prayers, powerful solos, a recording of a King speech and a keynote talk by Dr. Gwendolyn Boyd, a social justice activist, 22nd national president of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority and first black female to receive a degree in mechanical engineering from Yale.
"I lift my voice for one who was undeniably the most influential and inspirational person of the 20th Century,'' Boyd told audience members who sat or stood in mid-80s temperatures. A gentle south wind provided some relief.
The ceremony at the National Civil Rights Museum was part of a daylong series of events. At noon, a rising civil rights leader from North Carolina told several hundred at a noon "public rally'' that he came to Memphis not for a celebration of King's life, but for a consecration and to continue the civil rights movement.
"... This is not a praying time, this is a movement time,'' Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP, told several hundred people in the sanctuary of Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church.
Barber, pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, started leading "Moral Mondays'' protests at the North Carolina capitol in 2013. He's spoken out in opposition to voting restrictions and North Carolina's transgender bathroom bill that was repealed last week, and for living wages as well as making healthcare more accessible.
"Dr. King understood and we must understand that there must be a moral army that doesn't just go along to get along,'' said Barber, "no matter who the president is, Democrat or Republican. We are not of those who just go along to get along.''