I Have a Dream

Clive Myrie presents a four-part history series about the events leading up to, surrounding and following the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis in 1968

In 1968, Dr King was in Memphis to support a strike by the local sanitation workers. For the first time those workers and their families tell their own stories, laying bare in often shocking detail the realities of the Civil Rights struggle in the Southern states of the US. In this documentary series we hear first hand of the daily humiliations of the Jim Crow South, of the hope that Dr King brought and of the fallout from his death, the mistakes, the triumphs and what that era means for Memphis today.

There is testimony from a teacher arrested on a daily basis for attempting to break the colour bar in Memphis restaurants; a man who at 6 was the first black child in Memphis to attend a white school; a pastor & councilman almost beaten to death by police on a march to support the sanitation workers; members of the Memphis Invaders, the radical Black Power group who were infiltrated by the FBI for their work with Dr King; a sanitation worker beaten daily by police and too scared to go to hospital to have his wounds healed.

Clive Myrie, a distinguished BBC journalist, newsreader, and presenter, hosts this Radio 2 series. The documentary is interspersed with music that provides the soundtrack for the struggle, including Booker T., Chuck Berry, Quincy Jones, Dinah Washington, B.B. King, Aretha Franklin and Jimi Hendrix.

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