Marten Luther King Jr

At 'Wild Goose,' echoes of Martin Luther King, Jr

SILK HOPE, N.C. -- In his comments during Thursday’s opening ceremony of The Wild Goose Festival at Shakori Hills Farm, Vincent Harding mentioned the obvious -- the festival was overwhelmingly white.

Harding, a close confidant of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., prayed that future festivals would include more people of color. Like so many gatherings of peace-activist types, Wild Goose is comprised primarily of White Geese.

The four-day festival, a unique gathering of religious activists and artists, has attracted more than 1,000 people to a rural site south of Chapel Hill, but the largely Christian crowd is not particularly diverse in ethnicity or race.

While the festival lacks diversity among those laying on blankets on the ground listening to speakers and music, it does include Harding and other African Americans -- two of whom joined Harding on stage during the opening ceremony -- who have been happy to share their stories.

Wild Goose founder Gareth Higgins said the inaugural festival is the first step in “a building process” he hopes will draw larger and more diverse crowds in the future.

“I’m happy with who’s here,” Higgins said. “We made a point of honoring who’s not here.”

Higgins said “the vibe of the festival depends on camping,” and there’s a “cultural reality about camping; the white people do that.”

While some people are commuting daily or staying off-site at hotels, most of the festival-goers are staying in pitched tents or RVs. There is not housing available on the Shakori Hills site.

King died 43 years ago, and Harding is surely one of the best people Higgins could have recruited to represent the spirit of the late civil rights leader and pacifist. King called on Harding to write his 1967 Riverside Church speech denouncing the Vietnam War. King delivered his uncompromising denunciation of the war on April 4, 1967, exactly a year to the day before he was assassinated in Memphis.

Many historians and others think it was that speech -- and not his opposition to segregation -- that led to King’s martyrdom.

In a Friday morning talk, Harding said he spent the years following King’s death carrying guilt because his words may have been the reason King was assassinated.

In 1958, Harding and four of his male friends -- two white and two black -- embarked on a car trip from their Chicago Mennonite church to Alabama to see what was happening in the Jim Crow South.

Martin Luther King Jr. by Mural | Smithsonian.com

"I Have a Dream," Philadelphia (photographed 2009)

Camilo José Vergara began photographing art in poor urban areas in the 1970s. He soon realized that one of the most prevalent figures in the artworks he documented was the civil rights leader. “You have a perfectly dressed man with a perfectly white shirt coming out of the sidewalk,” says Vergara of this Martin Luther King Jr. mural he photographed in an industrial neighborhood between north and central Philadelphia.

Painted by an unknown artist, the mural features an iconic image of King. With the pillars of the Lincoln Memorial in the background and his hand outstretched to an implied audience, King is poised as he delivers his famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech.

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