THE PROMISED LAND

There are people in this world who have made other people think. The result of that thinking has led some people to change radically their point of view. The life, and surely the death of Martin Luther King on the 4th April 1968, caused many people to change their point of view.

Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. is fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers' strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival at a Memphis hospital. He was 39 years old.

On April 3, back in Memphis, King gave his last sermon, saying, "We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop...And 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."

In 1964, King became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end racial segregation and discrimination through civil disobedience and other nonviolent means. By the time of his death in 1968, he had refocused his efforts on ending poverty and stopping the Vietnam War.

That 14the week of the year 1968, from Sunday 31st March to Saturday 6th April was indeed a week of turbulence and convulsion in the United States. The siege and battle of Khe Sanh was raging and coming to a close in Vietnam. It is difficult to support the claim of an overwhelming American victory at Khe Sanh based solely on the ratios derived from the official casualty count. In fact, it is impossible to reasonably put the fighting at Khe Sanh in the American win column; neither side won a resounding victory, yet it prompted President Lyndon Johnson's speech to the nation on Sunday 31st March in which he said, inter alia:

"So, tonight, in the hope that this action will lead to early talks, I am taking the first step to deescalate the conflict. We are reducing--substantially reducing--the present level of hostilities. And we are doing so unilaterally, and at once. Tonight, I have ordered our aircraft and our naval vessels to make no attacks on North Vietnam, except in the area north of the demilitarized zone where the continuing enemy buildup directly threatens allied forward positions and where the movements of their troops and supplies are clearly related to that threat. The area in which we are stopping our attacks includes almost 90 percent of North Vietnam's population, and most of its territory. Thus there will be no attacks around the principal populated areas, or in the food-producing areas of North Vietnam. Even this very limited bombing of the North could come to an early end--if our restraint is matched by restraint in Hanoi. But I cannot in good conscience stop all bombing so long as to do so would immediately and directly endanger the lives of our men and our allies. Whether a complete bombing halt becomes possible in the future will be determined by events.  Our purpose in this action is to bring about a reduction in the level of violence that now exists.  It is to save the lives of brave men--and to save the lives of innocent women and children. It is to permit the contending forces to move closer to a political settlement.   And tonight, I call upon the United Kingdom and I call upon the Soviet Union--as cochairmen of the Geneva Conferences, and as permanent members of the United Nations Security Council--to do all they can to move from the unilateral act of deescalation that I have just announced toward genuine peace in Southeast Asia….One day, my fellow citizens, there will be peace in Southeast Asia. It will come because the people of Southeast Asia want it…"

The President went on to discuss his own future in American politics and his views on divisiveness in America, calling upon all Americans to come together.

And yet only four days later Martin Luther King was shot.

With the withdrawal of Lyndon Johnson from nomination for a second term as President, the campaign of Robert Kennedy stepped up, only for him to be gunned down some two months later.

So how were minds changed? The killings may continue, but there is nonetheless an overall distaste towards racial bias, discrimination and segregation. It appears that only religious fervour remains a stumbling block towards peace in the world. That and apparently revenge for past misdeeds and outrages perpetrated by one party against another in the name of the same divinity. Surely it is time to move on, to look over the mountain and see the promised land.

Also on the 4th April, 16 years later in 1984, the Greenham Common Women were evicted. The women's peace camp was set up in September 1981 after 36 women marched from their South Wales homes to the Berkshire airbase in protest at plans to store Cruise missiles there.

More than 30 people were arrested after bailiffs backed up by 300 police officers moved in early this morning. Labour MP Tony Benn who later visited the women said their eviction was another example of the erosion of civil liberties.

"What is happening now is that civil liberties in Britain are being removed by order of the government," he said.

Would you mind repeating that Tony. They didn't hear you that time.