50 yrs on, son of Martin Luther King Jr to visit city

Kolkata: In 1959, Supriya Munshi (18), then a student of St Pauls College went to the USIS auditorium to listen American Civil Rights Movement leader Martin Luther King Jr, who was on a tour of India.
After the speech, during an interactive session with King Jr, Munshi asked him who his idol was. In reply, the legendary Black leader took out a locket, carrying an image of Mahatma Gandhi and said, “Gandhi is my idol.”
Munshi, now director and secretary of the Gandhi Memorial Museum in Barrackpore, will meet Matin Luther King III, son of King Jr, over lunch at Raj Bhavan on February 26. King III is on a tour of India to commemorate fiftieth anniversary of his father’s visit.
“I will present him with a copy of a cartoon that appeared in Chicago Sunday Mail in 1968. The cartoon shows Gandhi was telling King, ‘The odd thing about the assassins is that they think they have killed you.’ The cartoon is kept at the Gandhi Museum,” Munshi told The Indian Express. King Jr was assassinated in 1968.
He said he will also present a copy of his book, an analogy of 22 of his essays on Gandhi titled: ‘The Millennium Man and Other Essays.’
Munshi remembers King as a huge man with deep, piercing eyes. “He spoke about a new dawn in the world. Had he been alive, he would have been overwhelmed with joy that his dream had come true and a Black man has become the President of the USA,” Munshi said.
King III is coming to Kolkata to meet Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. While the Governor will host a lunch for the visiting dignitary, he will also present him with books on Mahatma. After lunch, the Governor will take him to the Gandhi memorial building at Beliaghata where Mahatma had lived in 1947 August and observed a fast to protest against Partition.
King will begin his visit to Kolkata on February 26 with a visit to the Mother House and later pay floral tributes to his father’s statue at Martin Luther Sarani near Chowringhee. He will also deliver a speech — Fifty Years Later — Realising the Dream.