“Get ready, George Washington,” he said. “There’s a new neighbor on the Potomac. Get ready, Mr. Jefferson. There’s a new neighbor on the Potomac. Get ready, Mr. Lincoln. There’s a new neighbor, and we are all coming to help him move in. We brought our luggage. We brought our food. Guess who’s coming to dinner?”
The Alpha Phi Alpha brothers had come to town because King was a member and because the fraternity had been first to come up with the idea for a memorial.
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
Members headed for the memorial shortly after 7 a.m., boarding buses at the Mayflower Hotel. They wore black-and-gold-striped bow ties, gold blazers and black-and-gold ball caps, and they represented several generations.
“It’s a day that I was wondering would ever come,” said Luther Elliott, 71, of Colesville as he waited in the hotel lobby to head to the memorial. “I’m excited. We are hopeful that the intent of his life is carried on. We’ll see how it works out. These are difficult times.”
Jared Green, 31, a civil engineer from Somerset, N.J., was present with his wife, Camille, 31, a radiation oncologist, and their sons, Lukewinston, 4, and Jonathan, 2.
“It’s a proud moment,” Green said of the memorial. “It just feels right as far as the timing, as far as the magnitude, as far as the location and position.”
John T. Warren, 49, an Alpha from Tampa, said he grew up in Montgomery, Ala., the site of some of the civil rights movement’s bloodiest battles.
“My mother and my father called me and said make sure I take plenty of pictures, because they lived it,” he said during the ceremony.
“My father was thrown in jail with Dr. King,” he said. “It brought tears to my eyes last night. My mama said: ‘You know what, you gotta go stand for us. You gotta see it for us. Then, when you come home, I’ll see it in your eyes.’ It’s something.”
As the tribute concluded, hundreds of the brothers gathered at the base of the 30-foot-tall statue of King, locked hands and spontaneously broke into the fraternity’s hymn:
College days swiftly pass, imbued with mem’ries fond, and the recollection slowly fades away.
Our renowned A Phi A and dear fraternal bond, may they ever abide and with us stay.
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