A three-day weekend event to commemorate Bimini’s connection to the late American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is scheduled for October 5-7, 2012.
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the first black U.S. Congressman, who had a home in Bimini, invited Dr. King to visit the tiny Bahamas out island in 1964. During this trip, Dr. King work on his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Four years later it is said he was back in Bimini where he worked on completing his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, which was his last public speech delivered at the Mason Temple in Memphis on April 3, 1968. He was assassinated the next day.
When in Bimini, Dr. King would spend peaceful time in the mangrove flats with boat builder and bonefish guide Ansil Saunders. Saunders, now in his 80s, recalls taking Dr. King to a special spot, which Sanders called the ‘holy grounds.’
“It’s a place up there where I carry people,” Saunders recalled in a radio interview. “When we reached there we tied up the boat, some birds were flying overhead, snappers around us and he says, Ansil, what do you do when you have people in the boat that see all this life and not believe in God, what do you say to them?”
Saunders continued: “Dr. King looked up and said, I believe now more than ever in the existence of God. “
On Saturday, October 6th, the Bimini Bahamas Plaque Project and government and community officials will erect a bust of Dr. King, designed by sculptor Erik Blome, in the Bimini mangroves.