A Dream DeferredBy David FlemingSide by side, thirty one years ago, Andrew Young, Martin Luther King Jr. and hundreds of demonstrators attempted to cross over the murky waters of the Alabama River using the Edmund Pettus Bridge, near Selma, Ala., on their way to Montgomery to demand voting rights for blacks from Alabama governor George Wallace. They were met at the foot of that bridge by police on horseback, armed with nightsticks and tear gas in what quickly became one of the bloodiest encounters of the civil rights movement.Earlier this month, Young, the organizer of the original march, former mayor of Atlanta and an ACOG co-chairman, crossed that same quarter-mile bridge carrying the Olympic torch. A few days later King's widow, Coretta Scott King and his son, Dexter Scott King also carried the torch. These were all meant to be circle-closing gestures, supposed to help put more distance between the "new" South and its racist past while symbolizing the essence of the Atlanta Olympics--the fruition of MLK's dream of a "beautiful symphony of brotherhood."
Almost a week into the Olympics, it all appears to be nothing more than the same old lipservice force fed to the city's minorities in order to snag the Games. Black churches in the South continue to burn. Atlanta's poor and homeless, most of whom are black, have been tossed aside to make way for the Olympics and many of the sparkling venues you see on TV. And MLK's legacy got nothing more than a brief nod at the opening ceremonies before the pickup trucks and dancing oompa-loompas took over. "The model here is something that will help the world solve its problems in the future," Young said recently on Meet the Press, staged at the athlete's village. "But we don't want to say that we've got the problem solved. We've come a long way, but we still have a long way to go."
A few blocks from Young stood Centennial Olympic Park, which, despite being
surrounded by a glut of sponsor's exibits, a sickening array of carnival merchandise
tents, screaming street preachers and overflowing garbage, is crowded 20 hours
a day. Less than three miles east the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic
Site is practically empty. The contrast between the two area's bodies of
water--Centennial Park's packed water fountain, which has become a public
shower area with gutters in the form of Olympic rings, and the peaceful,
artistic nature of the reflection pond on Auburn Avenue--is startling.
The centerpiece of the site is the MLK Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, founded by King's survivors. Near here is the King gravesite surrounded by a reflecting pool and an eternal flame. The area also includes the house King grew up in. On a tour of the house guides whisper tidbits about King's legendary competitiveness in athletics and his extreme dislike of piano lessons. King, in fact, once took a hammer to the keys and, later, removed all of the screws in the piano stool, causing his instructor to fall to the floor. Down the street is Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King, the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964, and his father preached. This is also the spot where King's body was viewed after he was murdered in April 1968 and where, in 1974, his mother, Alberta, was fatally shot by an assassin while she was playing the church organ. Desperate vendors outside the church, who claim downtown hotels are warning visitors to avoid the dangerous neighborhood here, beg for your patronage as you walk by while a group of just four people are inside the church watching a film featuring some of King's many sermons at Ebenezer. Officials at the church had expected the streets to be filled with crowds of up to 150,000 per day. There are less than 150 people here right now. "The people who came to Atlanta are just Olympic minded right now," said a tightly coiled J.D. Davis, Ebenezer's director of external strategies, trying hard to hide his disappointment. "We hope as the Olympics wear on they will spread out and realize Atlanta has a lot more to offer than just athletics and commercialism." The few people here are mostly foreigners. Annick Vartanian, a speech teacher from Paris, France, called ahead because she figured it would be packed, then ended up being able to park 20 feet away from the gravesite. "It's sad, really," she said. "We're staying with a family in Atlanta and when we told them we wanted to come here they asked us, 'What for?'" Said vendor Janine James, "There's a lot of friction between ACOG and this area. They used Martin Luther King to get the Olympics, they pitched the idea of his Dream speech finally coming true and promised to make this a central area of the Games. But when we got here, no streets were blocked off, no events were planned and no answer was ever given to us from ACOG. They turned their back on Martin Luther King." "It's just typical of the South, really."
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