The old fraternity’s tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t on the list of official events. It wasn’t open to the public. And it was scheduled for Friday morning, before the big salutes of Saturday and Sunday.
But with Hurricane Irene derailing almost everything else, the Alpha Phi Alpha ceremony became, by default, the sole dedication ritual at the towering new memorial to the fraternity’s most illustrious brother.
Alpha Phi Alpha is Martin Luther King Jr.'s fraternity and the oldest Greek-letter fraternity for African Americans in the country. The organization conceived and pushed for the King memorial. Friday, thousands of "Alphas," clad in their colors of black and gold, gathered at the memorial for a private tribute to King.
The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial
“We’re not disappointed,” said Robert Bedford, 50, an Alpha brother and a university administrator from Chicago, “because we are at least here today to be able to do some form of dedication. Otherwise, perhaps, it would be a total disappointment.”
Amid the dire weather warnings, he said, “we were determined to come, regardless.”
The Alpha tribute drew civil rights icons, as well as members of King’s family and several thousand black-and-gold-clad members of the country’s oldest Greek-letter fraternity for African Americans.
The tribute began with the men and their families assembling at the Tidal Basin, on folding chairs west of the memorial that were to be used at Sunday’s official dedication. (That event has been postponed until September or October.)
There were younger men with their children and old men with canes, hearing aids and wheelchairs.
Even as fraternity brothers and their families occupied the first 20 or 30 rows of seats, workers were removing the rear rows ahead of the approaching storm.
But the Alphas had their weather window, on a sultry summer morning, and were proud of the honor.
The ceremony was emceed by the fraternity’s general president, Herman “Skip” Mason Jr., who shared the stage with King’s daughter Bernice King; his son Martin Luther King III; former U.N. ambassador Andrew Young; and civil rights leaders such as the Revs. Jesse L. Jackson and Al Sharpton.
“We are standing on sacred ground,” Mason told the audience. “We are in a space where many of our ancestors stood, not knowing that generations later we would return to celebrate the unveiling of a memorial dedicated to a man who was a drum major for peace and justice.”
The dedication Sunday was planned for the 48th anniversary of the day King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, a few hundred yards to the north.
Indeed, the haunting words of that speech were sprinkled throughout the Friday morning event.
In his invocation, the Rev. Joseph Lowery, president emeritus of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, asked God to “not let our spirits rest until we finish the task, until justice does roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
King’s daughter delivered a rousing address about her father, saying, “Daddy is standing here now as a constant reminder . . . to the nation that you must forever deliver on the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for oppressed and marginalized people for every generation.”
Sharpton, whose Saturday march for “jobs and justice” was postponed, spoke about the King memorial’s proximity to the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials and the Washington Monument.
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