Peacework

King's Spirit in Memphis and Seattle

"The spirit of Martin Luther King was alive in the streets of Seattle during the November 1999 nonviolent resistance to the World Trade Organization. King gave his life for resisting such policies. I was conscious of that connection during the battle in Seattle because of a trial happening simultaneously in Memphis. While the world watched fifty thousand demonstrators confront the WTO, I was in Memphis attending the only trial ever held for the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. At its conclusion on December 8, 1999, twelve jurors, six black and six white, decided King had been assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government.

What we could see in the Memphis trial and the Seattle movement in the streets was a double apocalypse. The first revelation in both Memphis and Seattle was of the power of nonviolence, a revelation that happened in spite of systematic efforts to cover it up. The truth revealed in Memphis was that what Dr. Martin Luther King was doing in the Spring of 1968 so threatened the power structure of the United States government and corporate powers that government agencies assassinated King. The truth revealed in Seattle was that a nonviolent movement against corporate greed, following in King's footsteps, could prophetically bring the WTO meeting to a halt.

There was a second revelation in Memphis and Seattle, a revelation complementing the power of nonviolence. That second revelation was of the violence of the system. In the Memphis courtroom, I heard seventy witnesses reveal the details of a prophet's murder by the same system that was at that moment tear-gassing, pepper spraying, and shooting rubber bullets at thousands of nonviolent witnesses in the streets of Seattle. In Memphis, in the wrongful death lawsuit filed by Martin Luther King's family against tavern-owner Loyd Jowers and other "unknown" co-conspirators, the witnesses revealed how security had been systematically stripped from Dr. King on April 4, 1968. Thus when King was summoned onto the balcony of the Lorraine Motel by a knock on his door, a gunman waiting in the bushes across the street (not James Earl Ray) shot King easily and escaped unchallenged with the assistance of government agencies. In Seattle, in the demonstrations to shut down the meeting of the World Trade Organization, the witnesses in the streets revealed, by the police reaction to their sit-ins, the massive government security supporting free trade agreements.

Martin Luther King gave his life for confronting nonviolently the same evil that is embodied today by institutions like the World Trade Organization: a system of exploitation, poverty, war-making, and environmental destruction. His life was taken because the ruling powers knew the same secret King knew and was trying to share with us all: that a system of poverty and war would turn into ashes, and a new US and world would rise from those ashes if we the people discovered within and among ourselves the power of nonviolence. King was murdered to keep the world of nonviolence from being made flesh among us, to keep that transforming vision from being embodied in Washington, DC, in the militantly nonviolent Poor People's Campaign he had envisioned for tens of thousands of impoverished people from every race and background.

The final purpose of King's life has been forgotten. His hope was to shut down Washington in the Spring of '68 by massive civil disobedience until the United States government agreed to eliminate poverty. He was in Memphis, supporting the sanitation workers' strike there, as a prelude to the Washington project. Both King's economic goal and his revolutionary means to dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it are analogous to what happened in the streets of Seattle."

Jim Douglass is a peace activist and author who lives in Birmingham, Alabama. His most recent book is The Nonviolent Coming of God (Orbis 1991).

Transport Memphis to Seattle via Trams

US cities currently operating Australian "Trams" There are presently five U.S. cities operating Melbourne W-Class trams. In addition to the cities listed below, San Jose also has one car, and at one time New Orleans operated a group of them on their Riverfront Line (subsequently sold to Memphis). Most operators have added doors and folding steps in place of the original open doorways and fixed running boards found on the W-2 cars. In Memphis the cars have also received pantographs in place of trolley poles. Seattle and San Francisco operate theirs with a two-person crew, while Memphis and Dallas operate with a single person crew.
Memphis Dallas	Seattle San Francisco