From our dorm windows, we witnessed the fires and heard the gunshots; armed National Guard troops patrolled our city streets in camouflaged armored vehicles.

The enormous import of the death of this famous player on the national stage would finally sink in, leaving an indelible memory.

The following month, along with about 50 other guys my age, we traveled on a pre-scheduled men’s choir tour through the South. One concert stop was in Memphis. Our driver thought it would be “educational” for us to drive by the Lorraine Motel over on Butler Avenue where Martin Luther King had been shot.

It was.

We got in line behind other cars and vans and buses and waited our turn, up Butler Avenue and making the right turn on Mulberry street. From our Greyhound Bus window, we examined the non-descript two-story motel, a modest lodging for such a famous personage, with those classic aqua doors and the now iconic sign on the street corner and there, on edge of the second floor balcony –

“There!” one of the guys said, pointing. “That’s where he was when the shooter got him!”

I was twenty years old, come to think of it, a long time ago. But the image of Dr. King there, laying on his back in a pool of blood with his friends – Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young among them - that memory is imprinted in my mind as clearly as any that I carry anywhere in the gray folds of my aging brain. Today, I stood on that same corner. Fifty-two years later.

We are traveling with a seminary professor who teaches an entire course on the revered champion of Civil Rights. We stood there together on that corner, in the presence of an historic event that changed the world. We remained quiet and still, and let our spirits soak it in.

Maybe the Museum of Civil Rights at the Lorraine Motel is overkill. I don’t think so. Somehow, they rebuilt that corner so that the memory of this unconscionable, monstrous event will never go away. Inside, not a detail of the shooting or the events that preceded and the followed are left unaccounted for. But the purpose of the place has been expanded to address the struggle for the freedom of enslaved Africans brought to America and all the generations that followed - for a recognition of citizenship, for human rights, for access, for equal treatment, for justice and for a level playing field. It is a drama that has played out since the first wave of the enslaved were picked up by the Portuguese and delivered to Virginia in 1619. And it continues to this very day.

Back in 1968, I suppose I was among the many who assumed that fifty years would be enough time for us to achieve parody among the races. But resistance to equality among the races remains fierce - as it has throughout history, not just here, but around the world and since the beginning of time.

Yet the preamble of our Declaration of Independence declares what my Sunday School teacher taught me: every person has been made in the “image of God.” Or as that preamble states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”

As we wandered through the museum, there were many poignant moments for me – like sitting in a mock prison cell, listening to an audible rendition of the Letter from a Birmingham Jail in which MLK scratched out an urgent appeal to clergy from every denominational background to join him in the battle. Few did. The letter went mostly ignored. Silence reigned. Indifference, too.

In my world, that silence and indifference continues.

I listened again to his speeches on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, and imagined being there, electrified by that soaring rhetoric – “I have a dream today!” And then that intense speech, thankfully recorded, at the Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ) while Dr. King was in Memphis to advocate for the Sanitation Strike the night before he died. “I have been to the mountain top… I’ve seen the other side… I may get there with you…”

But “… I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

I watched that speech as I sat in a Museum theater next to a black brother close to my age. His wife was there with him. As the speech ended and we pondered just what happened the following fateful day, we looked at each other. Eye to eye. Man to man. Tears flowed down both of our faces.

I don’t know him. He doesn’t know me. In a that one moment of memorable, powerful solidarity, we were one.

There is so much more I want to tell you.

We ate our lunch at a classic soul food joint – the Four Way Soul Food Restaurant; and reviewed the photos of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and a host of other notables who have also lunched there on neckbones and black-eyed peas and fried catfish and cabbage and chitterlings.

And then that afternoon, the hours we spent at the Stax Museum, home of American Soul Music. Some of the greats launched their careers here - like Otis Redding, Booker T and the MGs, Sam and Dave and tunes like “Sittin’ at the Dock of the Bay,” and “RESPECT” and “Soul Man” and “Try a Little Tenderness.”

The museum includes a hardwood dance floor there with a life sized video surround image and sound from old Soul Train re-runs. The more courageous of our group jumped in, busting moves as we all clapped along.

It was a welcome contrast to the heaviness and power and revelation of the Lorraine Hotel.

Tomorrow – we’re off to Selma.

But not until after we spent a late evening on Beal Street with live Memphis blues accompanying a heaping stack of BBQ’d ribs and a tall IPA.