e are careening westward on U.S. Highway 78, and my children are reading aloud the last speech Martin Luther King Jr. delivered, now called the "Mountain Top" speech. First Keith. Now Nikki. I am cursing every museum we've visited the past five days that didn't have any more tapes of this speech. Hearing King's words without the riveting inflection, the soulful syncopation; the mournful cadence is like listening to gospel music with no keyboard, no harmony, no hands clapping. But they read on during this four-hour drive, the last leg of a trip that began in Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church and has touched history in Tuskegee, Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham. They are stumbling over the grander words, stopping every so often to absorb and decode. I'm explaining what King meant when he talked about the humiliating days when "Negroes were just going around ... scratching where they didn't itch and laughing when they were not tickled." We talk about the great irony in hearing him compare the Good Samaritan to those who would stand up for the striking garbagemen in Memphis: "The question is not, 'If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?,' " Nikki reads. " 'If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?' That is the question." I've never heard most of this speech, but even with Nikki's emotionless monotone, I tremble when I hear the transition into King's final, familiar passage: "And then I got into Memphis." I hear the voices in the crowd rise in the Mason Temple. I hear King foretell his death in an 11th-hour show of militant defiance. I don't need the tapes anymore. "Like any man, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now." I'm saying the words with her. Singing them, really. "I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seeeeen the promised land." And then we got into Memphis. I was 9 years old when James Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King Jr., and what I remember is that the next day, we hung a black sock on the railing in front of our house because the rumor in New Orleans' 9th Ward was that the Black Panthers were going to burn all the white people's houses, so we had to hang something on the front porch to let them know that black people lived there. Now we were rolling past Beale Street toward the Lorraine Motel. It was early evening, Thursday, cold and drizzly, just like April 4, 1968. We found the motel almost accidentally, it's marquee beckoning from the shell of a wilted neighborhood, and if I could adjust my eyes to see in black and white, it would look just like the pictures I'd seen of the balcony where King fell dying, staining the cement with his blood. Eugene Brown was sitting on a miniature wall in the courtyard when we got there. He was wet, shivering, alone. In his lap was a worn scrapbook, spilling over with the tattered edges of yellowed newspaper clippings. He sat expectantly, with no obvious purpose, carefully sheltering his memories from the moisture. We were drawn to him. His father was among the sanitation workers demanding to be treated and paid as men when King came to Memphis. Mr. Brown said he was 20 then, though his leathery mahogany face, deeply creased and uncomfortably humble, looked older than 48 years on this day. "I had got home that day and a bulletin came on said King got shot," he told my children and me as he looked down, tenderly unfolding each fragile clipping as he leafed through the book. "Then another bulletin came on said he was dead. I was shocked. That's all. Just shocked." The National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel is a historical masterpiece, and you might spend three hours touching, reading, and feeling. Listen to people talk about the desegregation of Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. Rest at a dime-store lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi, as a tense sit-in demonstration is about to explode. Peer into the burned-out shell of a Freedom Riders' Greyhound bus and imagine the madness of choosing between that fiery death and the murderous crowd waiting outside. The children touched, read, lingered. I barely saw any of it, hurrying them along, drawn beyond curiosity to the second-floor balcony where this pilgrimage would end. We're upstairs now. I can hardly breathe. King is on the TV screen to my left saying good-bye to America ("And I've seeeeen the promised land.") and Mahalia Jackson is singing, "Precious Lord, take my hand. Lead me on, let me stand," in the dead-end corridor ahead. Two rooms were preserved when the Lorraine Motel became a museum. Rooms 306 and 307. They are on either side of the glass-walled corridor. Just beyond the door ahead is the balcony. I'm standing between the rooms. The last time I felt this kind of dread and sorrow, I was about to walk into the hospital room where my mother lay dying. Tears keep clouding my eyes. They never reach my cheeks because I'm not prepared to explain their presence there. My children are standing close to me as we look into the rooms: one with a bed neatly made, the other alive with dirty dishes and rumpled spread. There's a wreath hanging on the balcony outside where a prayer service will be held in a few minutes. Nobody here is talking. The courtyard prayer service attracted fewer than 20 spectators and a handful of reporters, most of whom left as soon as they had enough quotes to do the proforma story about another off-year assassination anniversary. As the balcony full of ministers prayed ("Protect us from the danger of forgetfulness.") and provoked ("I am a racist in recovery."), Nikki looked over the tiny audience. "Why aren't there more people here?" she asked. I didn't give much of an answer. I was impressed that she thought it was important enough to wonder. We had come a long way. Benjamin Hooks was the final speaker. We'd seen the former Memphis judge's name in the museum twice that day. Once outside Room 306 in a story about King's last hours, the second at an exhibit that opened that night. His was the most prominent name on a fateful telegram beseeching King to come to Memphis to support the sanitation workers' strike. "The strike was failing," he told my children and me at a public reception that night. "We needed him to come and breathe life into it." When we were done talking, Hooks, retired as Executive Director of the NAACP, put his arms around Nikki and Keith and hugged them, smiled for a picture, then disappeared into the crowd, back into the history books. It was the last picture on the roll, and as the camera buzzed, rewinding the film, the children's fading attention collapsed onto chocolate-covered strawberries and assorted hors d'oeuvres. "You'll look at this picture one day and understand how special it is," I told them. They nodded and chewed. We started for home that night. People want to know what my children learned on this journey. They wonder aloud if the kids really absorbed much. Some wonder quietly if it was a good thing to expose them to such a concentration of historical ignorance and bigotry. I don't know. I don't know. I suppose it will be years before I do. All I know is that the picture of their past and mine now has more depth, more dimension, more colors and shades than all the stingy American history books I've read in 38 years. I know that I have bettered the odds that they will look at the degradation and danger of their past and find courage and pride, not the shame that has loitered in my soul until now. We drove 2,000 miles for that lesson. I'd drive 20,000. Two hundred thousand. History learned this way is real. It breathes. It bleeds. It cries. It rejoices. It's not easily dismissed, nor easily forgotten, because it's no longer just what you read in a book or saw on a grainy film clip. It embraces you and draws you so close that it becomes more than just a lesson. It becomes you.
Starting Out Atlanta Tuskegee Montgomery Selma Birmingham On the Road Memphis Poynter.org Home Page Keith Woods teaches at The Poynter Institute. For more information about Mr. Woods, see his Faculty Bio page or contact him at kwoods@poynter.org. Family photographs provided by Keith Woods. Historic photographs courtesy of the Associated Press, which holds the copyrights and reproduction rights to the images. Design, illustration, and HTML programming by Mary Morales. ©1997 The Poynter Institute for Media Studies.