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You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2018/apr/04/martin-luther-king-events-to-be-held-across-us-to-remember-leader-live-updates
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| Martin Luther King: events to be held across US to remember leader – live updates | Martin Luther King: events to be held across US to remember leader – live updates |
| (about 1 hour later) | |
| To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s death, the Guardian asked nine students from his former school in Atlanta - Booker T Washington high school - to recite the I Have A Dream speech. | |
| In the lead-up to today’s events, demonstrators were arrested during a protest against immigration detention in Memphis. | |
| The protest was part of rolling demonstrations on Tuesday that sought to use the interest in Memphis ahead of the MLK anniversary to bring attention to social and criminal justice issues citizens still face. | |
| The Guardian’s Jamiles Lartey was on the scene in Memphis yesterday: | |
| Bernice King had just turned five years old when her father was assassinated. The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington spoke to King about the state of activism and inequality in the US and what her family faced in the aftermath of her father’s death. | |
| She recalls very little of that day, 4 April 1968. It was a week after her fifth birthday, and when the TV networks began to carry news that her father had been shot in Memphis she was drifting off to sleep. | |
| She has only a pointillist picture of what happened next, the days and weeks of noise and hurt, disjointedly composed out of tiny dots of memory. It was Dexter who recalled the babysitter falling backwards and exclaiming “Oh my God!” when, they surmised later, she was informed that the bullet that pierced their father’s neck as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine motel had taken his life. | |
| Confusion. That was Bernice’s main recollection. Not the confusion of the adults that in turn morphed into anger that set rioting ablaze across the nation. But the confusion of a child for whom none of this made any sense. | |
| As the family was boarding the plane that would take them to Memphis, to her father’s body lying in the casket, Coretta told Bernice that he was dead and that he wouldn’t be able to speak to her any more as his “spirit has gone on to live with God”. The child heard a hissing noise at the back of the plane which she knows now must have been the plane’s engines, but back then it sounded to her just like daddy. | |
| “I said, ‘Well, he’s breathing, I hear him breathing in the back’. And she said, ‘No’.” | |
| Good morning. | Good morning. |
| On this day in 1968, the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated at a motel in Memphis, Tennessee. | On this day in 1968, the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated at a motel in Memphis, Tennessee. |
| To mark the 50th anniversary of his death, commemorative events will be held across the US to remember the inspiring activist leader’s life and to push King’s message of equality forward. | To mark the 50th anniversary of his death, commemorative events will be held across the US to remember the inspiring activist leader’s life and to push King’s message of equality forward. |
| Guardian journalists will be reporting live from these events, including at an all-day celebration at the National Civil Rights Museum, which was built within the Lorraine Motel, where King died at 6.01pm CT on 4 April 1968. | Guardian journalists will be reporting live from these events, including at an all-day celebration at the National Civil Rights Museum, which was built within the Lorraine Motel, where King died at 6.01pm CT on 4 April 1968. |
| We’ll be collecting their dispatches here on this live blog, where we’ll also be sharing images, reports and commentary from commemorative events and demonstrations all over the world. | We’ll be collecting their dispatches here on this live blog, where we’ll also be sharing images, reports and commentary from commemorative events and demonstrations all over the world. |