Martin Luther King Jr. In Grosse Pointe / Martin Luther King Jr. In Grosse Pointe

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the Grosse Pointe High School auditorium on March 14, 1968, to a crowd of more than two thousand people. In a speech entitled “The Other America,” King depicted two worlds within the nation: one where white families flourished, and another where black families struggled due to inequality. Nearly two hundred protestors from Breakthrough, an anti-communist group based in Detroit, picketed outside the high school and heckled King during his speech. The protestors criticized King for his opposition to the Vietnam War. King allowed a few hecklers to voice their opinions during his presentation. At the end of the speech he received a standing ovation. Just three weeks after he visited Grosse Pointe, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Speaking here in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. described “two Americas”: “One America is beautiful for situation…. In this America children grow up in the sunlight of opportunity. But there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair.… Thousands of young people are deprived of an opportunity to get an adequate education … the schools are so segregated … that the best in these minds can never come out…. “However difficult it is to live amidst the constant hurt, the constant insult and the constant disrespect, I can still sing we shall overcome … because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”