Martin Luther King Jr., had reason to be pensive as he stood on the second-floor balcony outside Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel. During the previous year, he had endured increasing derision and disappointment.
Rather than realizing the dream he described at the 1963 March on Washington, he had witnessed a nightmare of rancorous racial conflict. After a protest march in Memphis disintegrated into rioting and looting, King faced withering criticism. "Get me out of Memphis!" he told his closest associate Ralph Abernathy. Many of his aides had objected to the Poor People's Campaign in general and saw the Memphis sanitation workers' strike as a particularly unpromising diversion.
King knew that he must return, however, because news articles about the strike now focused on the risk of violence rather than on the absence of justice. Struggling to overcome despair, King relied on his religious faith to repair his optimism. A month before his last trip to Memphis, he had explained in a sermon at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church that "life is a continual story of shattered dreams." Like Gandhi, who had "died with a broken heart," King felt discouraged in his own struggle "to build a temple of peace." Speaking to a congregation that included people who had known him since childhood, he questioned whether he had lived up to his own ideals.
Nevertheless, he remained convinced that God would judge him "by the total bent" of his life: "I want you to know this morning that I'm a sinner like all of God's children. But I want to be a good man. I want to hear a voice saying to me one day, 'I take you in and I bless you, because you try. It is well that it was within thine heart.'"
Soon after this moment on the hotel balcony when a camera recorded his somber gaze, King would deliver his final speech to a rally at the Bishop Charles Mason Temple in Memphis. He told his audience that the world was "all messed up," but he also gave reassurance "that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars."
He was pleased that God had allowed him to survive a stabbing in 1958 and had given him the opportunity to live during a period of historic change: "He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything."
Clayborne Carson
Media Studies Journal 12 (Fall 1998).