Buildings that look like the homes of former cotton plantation owners line Central Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee. Like small palaces, they are framed by tall hedges and shaded by ancient white oak trees. Visitors pass through columned gates to gain entry. Charlie Morris lives a distance away. Low-rise bungalows characterize his neighbourhood. Memphis is his home, but he was born just outside the Mississippi River city. White-haired and in need of a walker to get around, Morris is 97.
It's just 10 minutes by car from his home to Central Gardens. The residents of Morris' neighbourhood are predominantly black, while Central Gardens is inhabited overwhelmingly by white people. Two-thirds of the residents of Memphis are African Americans. Like most other major US cities, whites live largely in suburban neighbourhoods beyond the city limits, while blacks are the majority in the city.
Fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr was shot dead in Memphis, laws that separated people based on skin colour have long belonged to history's dust bin. But separate housing is still the norm, and living conditions for the country's black minority are still below those of the white majority. "This is America," said Professor Andre Johnson of the University of Memphis. Among the reasons are hidden racism and the continued necessity for blacks to fight against discrimination and prejudice.
"As long as we keep fighting, there's hope that future generations will not have to talk about things we talk about today." In King's most famous speech, he said he dreamed of a time when his children would "live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character."
The 20th century civil rights icon challenged America to live up to its promise of equal rights for all people. His assassination on April 4, 1968 on the balcony of Lorraine Motel shook the country, but didn't end his crusade. As Memphis and the rest of the country prepare to mark the anniversary of King's death, stories like the one Morris tells of the killing in 1939 of his brother resonate anew.
"The phone was ringing, it was my aunt calling," he said. He was 18, two years younger than his brother Jesse Lee Bond. His aunt told him Bond had quarrelled with a white merchant over a bill for seeds. "Suddenly, shots were fired," said Morris. He learned later that the body of his brother had been violated. "They castrated him," he said in a low-pitched voice holding the death notice saying his brother accidentally drowned.
His aunt, one of the few witnesses to the crime, was told that she would lose her job as a teacher, and possibly even her life, if she told the truth, Morris said. Bond's case is one of the more than two dozen killings of blacks, including lynchings, in Memphis for which evidence exists but justice has not been carried out. A group of civil rights activists is trying to create memorial sites so that the events are not forgotten.
Still the lynchings belong the the fabric of black life in America along with lingering inequality. "You can take any statistic you want, blacks always end up at the bottom," Johnson said. The gap between black and white unemployment rates has narrowed in recent years, but the former is still three percentage points higher than the latter.
Blacks have a significantly lower household income and while nearly 90 per cent of white teens graduate high school only, 75 per cent of African Americans do. Black men comprise 35 per cent of the prisoners locked away in the US, but only 13 per cent of the population. The wealth gap is even more telling. White households have a much higher overall net worth compared with those of African Americans.
Home ownership accounts for a large amount of this. While more than half of whites own their homes, only about 40 per cent of black people do. King recognized the wealth gap, and with his Poor People's Campaign demanded higher income and more jobs for black people. No one looking back at his legacy would doubt that he made a difference. King's birthday became a US public holiday 1983 and a memorial to him opened in 2011 in Washington just a stone's throw from monuments dedicated to US presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.
Over the decades since his assassination much has changed culturally. Many television programmes, for example, pay attention to the image of black characters, universities recruit black students and most major businesses have diversity programmes. African Americans dominate the ranks of professional basketball and American football, and athletes like tennis star Serena Williams are celebrated no differently than white stars who came before them.
And in one of the clearest signs that racism in America has receded, the country elected Barack Obama, son of a black man born in Kenya and a white American woman, to two terms as president. A half century after King's tragic death, many blacks feel they keep his legacy alive by protesting injustices, such as the killings of unarmed black people by police officers.
Others, like Morris, take a more spiritual route. He recalls how his mother talked him out of taking revenge for his brother's killing. After nine years full of hate following his brother's death he found God and today says of his long life: "I can't complain."