At the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the silence was piercing at 6.01pm, 50 years to the minute since Martin Luther King Jr was killed by an assassin’s bullet.
A bell erected off to the side of the balcony where King took his last breath tolled 39 times, once for each year he lived. More than 200 churches and universities around the world joined in ringing their own bells in King’s memory.
Jesse Jackson, who was a young preacher and organizer and was with King that fateful day, stood in nearly the same spot on this half-century anniversary gripping the railing, and helping to lay a wreath.
“From this balcony we decided that we would not let one bullet kill a movement,” Jackson said.
Father Michael Pfleger, a well-known progressive firebrand from Chicago, wrapped up his stirring keynote address just as the bell began to ring. “We may not have been here 50 years ago, but we’re here now,” Pfelger said. “Don’t be an assassin [of King’s dream], continue his legacy.”
The solitary sound of the bell ringing was a rare reprieve from a day that brought pure cacophony to the city that tags itself as the home of – depending on whom you ask – the blues or rock’n’roll. The day featured a laundry list of speakers, performances by Grammy award winning rapper Common, the chants and cheers of demonstrators and, courtesy of the Memphis fire department, even a set of bagpipes.
After the moment of silence ended, the shoulder to shoulder crowd at the National Civil Rights Museum, which was built on and into the Lorraine motel, was treated to a performance by legendary soul singer Al Green, who performed Take My Hand, Precious Lord, the song King had asked to hear moments before his death.
Terrance Warner, a life-long Memphian didn’t have much to say about being at the site of King’s death because as he put it: “What is there to say?”
“It’s hallowed ground. That’s it,” Warner said.
Earlier in the evening, several Tennessee officials were met by a hostile audience. State governor Bill Haslem, a Republican, got the worst of it from members of the Coalition of Concerned Citizens whose boos and jeers largely overpowered the event’s underwhelming PA system. The Memphis mayor, Jim Strickland, also heard a chorus of dissent from the crowd.
But as the sun set on an unseasonably chilly Memphis day, it was all love for civil rights icons like Diane Nash and congressman John Lewis who shared stories with the remaining congregants who made the short trek to the city’s crosstown concourse, where the commemoration’s final planned event was held.
“If the road to defeat Jim Crow led to the jailhouse, we were going to go there,” said Nash, one of the principal organizers of the demonstrations that desegregated lunch counters in Nashville, where she went to college in the 1960s.
“If it went to being beaten up or even sacrificing our lives, we were going to do that.”
