Darryl Van Leer was just seven years old the day Martin Luther King Jr. was
assassinated in this riverfront city on April 4, 1968. Still, King’s
life and work have informed everything the performing artist has done
since launching his moving one-man dramatizations of historical African
American figures in 1983.
As the Voices of Civil Rights Bus Tour makes its way across America, we
have watched Darryl transport audiences come to tell their personal stories
of the movement to another time as he re-creates Thurgood Marshall’s
dramatic argument before the Supreme Court in the landmark Brown school desegregation
case, or King’s powerful 1963 March on Washington speech.
Now, at our second stop in Memphis, with the National Civil Rights Museum
at the Lorraine Motel as his backdrop and an audience of veterans of the
Memphis struggle before him, Van Leer stepped before the microphone feeling
challenged like never before. His text this time was King’s last fated
speech at Memphis’s Mason Temple, an address that foreshadowed his
imminent death as the preacher declared “I may not get there with you,
but we as a people will get to the Promised Land. Mine eyes have seen the
glory of the coming of the Lord.”
The next evening, as he prepared to leave for dinner, King stepped onto
the balcony of the Lorraine when a shot rang out, striking him in the head.
As Van Leer set aside the butterflies in his stomach and ignored an occasional
technical problem to re-create King’s tremulous timbre, I watched many
in the audience nod in recognition and wipe away a tear.
“Out of all the places that I have delivered pieces, here was something
different,” Darryl told me afterwards. “I was nervous but I just
tried to be a part of the whole atmosphere. The actual thought that just
a few yards behind me was where he took his last moments brought a lot up
within me. It’s hallowed ground. For me, this was the most magnificent
moment, as far as bringing these characters to life.”
King had taken a break from preparing his upcoming Poor People’s
Campaign to come to Memphis in support of striking city sanitation workers,
men like Taylor Rogers. Seated in a metal chair beside the museum, Rogers
talked about the workers’ “I Am a Man” crusade, and how
a strike for better wages and decent working conditions became a rallying
cry for simple human dignity that would come to be embraced by Memphians
black and white.
“We were tired of being treated like boys,” recall Rogers,
who went on to become president of the Memphis AFSCME Local 1733. “When
things started getting slow, that’s when they brought Dr. King in.”
King first arrived in March to lead a march that ended in violence--an
event Rogers and many others in Memphis believe was sabotaged by King’s
enemies. He returned the next month determined to lead a peaceful demonstration
in support of the workers.
Heavy rain fell on the night of the April mass meeting at Mason Temple
but a standing-room-only crowd still thronged the place, Rogers recalled. “You
could tell by the way Dr. King talked that he knew something was going to
happen. He said, ‘Tonight, I’m not fearing any man.’ You
could tell, you could see the expression on him, you could feel it. People
were crying.”
When word of King’s assassination reached Rogers the next evening,
it was like learning of the death of his own father, he told me. “He
stopped everything to come to see about people on the bottom of the ladder,
people that was nobodies,” Rogers reflected. “That will always
remain in my heart, how he came to Memphis and lost his life for us.”
