It was today, the 4th of April, in 1968, that the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King, Jr was shot while standing on the balcony in front of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. After the police and FBI arrived, during all the confusion, people running around, agents trying to get a handle on what had happened, one agent informed his superior on a walkie-talkie how he just heard Coretta Scott King say that Martin’s dream would never die. There was, I gather, a pause. Then the agent’s superior instructed him to, “Find out what that dream was.”
That line about that dream has been the subject of several of my reflections over the years. And it continues to haunt me.
I understand he was scheduled to speak that evening and was actually on that balcony shortly before talking to the band leader Ben Branch who was going to play for the event. He asked that Ben play Take My Hand, Precious Lord. These appear to have been his last words.
Between all that and what he did in those mere thirty-nine years he had, no wonder the lovely Episcopal Church designates today as a feast for a saint.
And, of course, there is that dream…
Icon by Robert Lentz
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