Three weeks ago, on a quiet Tuesday morning, I stood outside the door of that small church. A notice outside informed me that it was closed for restoration. It was 10 am, there was no one else; in fact the entire King memorial site looked deserted.
"Good morning," a black man greeted me as I walked to Dr King's burial site, where I read today, someone had placed three white carnations on the reflecting pool surrounding his grave, with a piece of paper that said 'Dream Realised.'
I was told that a million visitors visit Dr King's memorial site every year, but that morning, apart from a black family at Dr King's museum and two Oriental women taking pictures outside his family home, there was no one else.
In contrast, at the Arlington cemetery in Washington, DC, where along with American soldiers, lies John F Kennedy, there were innumerable people on a hot afternoon. I hope the absence of people at Dr King's memorial was an aberration, and not a reluctance to acknowledge a hero whose achievements dwarf anything JFK did in his brief tenure as America's president.
Image: Mahatma Gandhi's statue at the King memorial site. Martin Luther King, Jr, admired Gandhi. On his visit to India in 1959, he said: 'I go to other countries as a tourist, to India I come as a pilgrim.'
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