Fraught politics of US race relations

By Matt Frei
BBC News, Memphis

Martin Luther King's former room at Lorraine Motel feels filled with ghosts

Room 306 in the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis is now part of the Civil Rights Museum in this city.

It has been recreated to show King's last moments before he was shot in the neck by a white racist at 6.01pm on 4 April 1968.

The Dum-dum bullet tore into his neck and then exploded in his chest.

At the moment he was leaning over the railing to talk to his aide, the young Jesse Jackson, who was standing in the car park below. He was telling him to put on a tie for dinner when the single shot rang out. Dr King died on the spot.

Room 306 was left exactly as it was found, frozen in time, crowded with ghosts.

The bed is unmade. There are half-drunk cups of coffee on the table. Room service breakfast hasn't been cleared away. The ashtray is overflowing with cigarette ends.

It is a mundane moment in a far from mundane life interrupted by a bullet.

'Jangling discord'

The untidy room echoes a civil rights campaign that had become increasingly untidy at the time of Dr King's death.

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His campaign to end poverty, which was an attempt to bring poor blacks and whites together in a wave of solidarity, was running into bureaucratic obstacles.

There were growing divisions within the civil rights movement about his tactics of peaceful protest, which many younger activists found anodyne and ineffective.

He had presaged his own assassination in a number of speeches and, as soon as news of his death spread around the country, riots erupted in Baltimore, Washington and Chicago which left dozens dead, hundreds injured and thousands arrested.

As Dr King said himself: "We must transform the jangling discord of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood."

Unfortunately the jangling continues to this day.

Reasons to be proud

What would the man who has now been dead longer than he was alive make of today's America?

Dr King is credited with ending racial segregation in the US

I imagine he would be proud that the mayors of Memphis, Washington DC and Newark, to name but three cities, are African-American.

The governors of the predominantly white states of Massachusetts and New York are also African-American.

Barack Obama, a US senator who is literally African-American - with a black father from Kenya and white mother from Kansas - is not just running for the White House, he actually stands a good chance of getting there.

In cities like Atlanta and Raleigh, there is now a burgeoning black middle class. A black woman who witnessed the racial violence in Birmingham, Alabama, as a young girl is now US secretary of state.

Crime and poverty

But set against these achievements are the glaring failures.

A young African-American man has as much chance of ending up in jail as in college. Some 70% of black children are born out of wedlock.

US race relations remain complex despite progress since the 1960s

A third of black high school students never graduate and the average poverty rate among African-American communities is 25%.

In cities like Memphis, crime is rampant. There is a persistent and bitter debate about who to blame for these failures: social trends, history or the shortcomings of the black leadership.

And in this city, the culture of mistrust between black and white verges on loathing. Shauna, the white owner of a Memphis tattoo parlour, told me that black racism against whites was now "the real problem".

Then she added something I hadn't heard before.

"If Obama becomes president, many people have told me they would just leave the country."

You have to think that this is fringe nonsense. But it serves as a reminder that race relations in America are complex, and that Mr Obama's campaign magic comes up against some very arcane sandbags.

Pragmatism vs presence

The senator has raised twice as much as Hillary Clinton in the last month, a staggering $40m.

Mr Obama's absence in Memphis, for whatever reason, is a sad glimpse into the fraught nature of race relations, strewn with political landmines

He is still the slim favourite to win the Democratic nomination.

But the issue of race has seeped into his campaign like a poison. This is perhaps partly the result of a strategy by the Clintons, who have realised that the only way to defeat Obama is to tie him more closely to African-Americans and dilute his appeal to the white community.

It is also a result of Mr Obama's own issues, especially the handling of the firebrand rhetoric of his pastor Jeremiah Wright. If this had made the news in October 2008, it would have probably lost "candidate Obama" the election.

The senator from Illinois has tried hard to rise above this fray and avoid the poison.

He does not just quote from King's speeches, he has achieved a poignant rhetoric that seems to have captured the doctor's spirit of inclusiveness.

Is Mr Obama's absence from Memphis the result of pragmatic politics?

He regularly calls on both black and white communities to do more for each and other as well as for themselves.

And yet he has failed to turn up in Memphis for the anniversary because of "scheduling issues". It is, I believe, a glaring omission.

The suspicion is that he wants to avoid a photo opportunity with the leaders of the civil rights movement because it might diminish his appeal to white men without whom he cannot win the election.

None of the civil rights leaders here that I spoke to held that against him. The pragmatism of winning power creates its own rules and, unlike Barack Obama, Martin Luther King was in the business of winning hearts and not votes.

Nevertheless, Mr Obama's absence in Memphis, for whatever reason, is a sad glimpse into the fraught nature of race relations, strewn with political landmines.

He may be the best chance this country has to heal the wounds of the past, but the demons of that past may also keep him from ever seizing that opportunity.

Matt Frei is presenting a special edition of BBC World News America from Memphis to mark the anniversary, including a report on the state of race relations in the city. The show airs every weekday at 0030 GMT on BBC News 24 and at 0000 GMT (1900 ET / 1600 PT) on BBC World and BBC America (for viewers outside the UK only).