[dropcap]M[/dropcap]artin Luther King Jr. delivered his legendary “I’ve Been To The Mountaintop” on April 3, 1968 in Memphis, before a cheering audience of thousands and despite a storm warning. He assumed his preacher stance and philosophical phrases as he warned his audience in closing: “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!”
Sadly, and like Moses, King did not make it to the Promised Land. Wednesday marked 50 years since his assassination the day following his Memphis address. He was famous for his civil rights activism, for his sermons as a Baptist preacher and for his social reform campaigns. However, King’s representation of the black oppressed population, not just in 1960s America but worldwide, transcends all his other responsibilities even 50 years into the future.
In the mid-20th century, King was an unwavering pillar but sometimes his fellow African American brothers and Christian leaders questioned his decisions and threatened to withdraw their support. Lives were lost. King’s four young children, to whom he famously referred in his “I Have A Dream” speech, were raised in the ugly faces of animosity and violence—all because of the color of their skin that seemed to obscure the content of their character.
“After he was gone,” one historian writes, “King became safe and ethereal, registering as a noble moralist. It became hard to remember why, or even that King was the most hated person in America during his lifetime.”
King was hated, perhaps as is Allen Chastanet in some areas of our polarized nation. Some may blame that on his policies regarding a proposed dolphin park (earlier also proposed by the previous Kenny Anthony administration without any noise) and the DSH project in Vieux Fort. There is also anger in some quarters over the Sab Wisha hotel project in Choiseul. His halting of the construction of St Jude has been, for some, like adding salt to their wounds, despite the prime minister’s insistence that his decision is based on sound expert advice. Recently I heard a Gros Islet woman say of Allen Chastanet: “He selling our passports, what will that white man not do? He selling the whole of Saint Lucia just now. And all he saying while my children hungry is give him three years.”
To return to the aforementioned historian and the deceased civil rights activist and Nobel winner. “The King that we need to remember is the one who keenly understood what he was up against.” Murderously hated, King never wavered in his fight to take Black America with him to the “mountaintop”. Truth be told, even his fellow preachers often discouraged his marches for justice. His “Letter From Birmingham Jail” offers irresistible proof of that.
Was the discouragement and criticism by his own indicative of their lack of vision? Or was it simply that they could not see the mountaintop that, if only in his dreams, King had looked over. Could the earlier cited negative attitude to Allen Chastanet’s proposals simply be small-island, oppose for opposing sake politics? Or is Chastanet intent on taking fellow Saint Lucians with him to the local equivalent of King’s mountaintop—as seen in his own dream?
At the start of his 2018-2019 Budget Address, on the 50th anniversary of King’s “Mountaintop” speech, the prime minister said: “I promised Saint Lucians that governance under my stewardship would no longer be business as usual; that our country was sick and dying from business as usual; that we would put an end to business as usual—or die trying.”
Something about Chastanet’s last three words—“or die trying”— is eerily reminiscent of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was fatally shot by James Earl Ray as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine motel in Memphis, the day after he delivered his “Mountaintop” speech.
May The Force be with all of us!
