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Forty years ago today Martin Luther King was assassinated and the greatest champion of non-violence since Gandhi was lost to the world. David Williamson goes in search of a man who dreamed of a revolution which remains unfinished
MARTIN LUTHER KING is a saint with a soundbite. His four most famous words – “I have a dream” – are etched in the memory and imagination of millions.
But the man was a much more complicated figure – a more interesting and relevant figure – than the campaigner we can glimpse in grainy newsreel footage.
Shortly before he delivered his most famous speech in 1963, he addressed a gathering of about 1,000 students at Harvard. A young man who would one day become First Minister of Wales sat in the audience.
Rhodri Morgan remembers the occasion vividly.
He said, “Maybe it was the type of audience, but it was a very academic and somewhat unemotional lecture, linking theology and political theory. Charismatic it was not.
“Months after I left the USA, he addressed the 400,000-strong non-student throng in the Washington DC March for Jobs and Freedom. Now that was charismatic. It ranks alongside Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and Winston Churchill’s Blood, Sweat, Toil and Tears address to the British people as the finest speech ever delivered in the English language.
“Sadly, he did not live to see his American dream of equality fulfilled. There was a wave of assassinations of American leaders committed to social change and social equality in the mid-1960s – John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers were all gunned down.
“If you raised your head above the parapet in the cause of freedom in the America of the 1960s, you put your life on the line.
“What would Martin Luther King have achieved if he had not been gunned down in his prime? Sadly we will never know.”

icwales.icnetwork.co.uk

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