Down South, where white folks queue at the Coca-Cola factory

The church where Martin Luther King's mother was shot and killed. Picture / Gareth Morgan

Each week, the Weekend Herald updates Gareth Morgan's latest motorcycle trip through the American heartland. This week it's the heart of the old South

***

It didn't take long to uncover how revered Martin Luther King is in his home town of Atlanta.

We tried to locate the birthplace, church and neighbourhood of Dr King from the tourist guides distributed around all the hotels. Sadly, it is not a recommended destination.

For a one-day visit to Atlanta the brochures recommend visiting the Coca-Cola factory and CNN. For two days, add the Aquarium. Three, the Jimmy Carter Library & Hard Rock Cafe. Four, the Botanical Gardens and Museum of Natural History.

We didn't really need reminding how begrudgingly the White South still regards the emancipation of African Americans, the Civil War it lost and for that matter, the voting and general rights entitlements that followed Lyndon Johnson's voting rights and civil rights acts.

It was further evident when we found the King Centre and were stunned at the dearth of visitors. Apparently the Coca-Cola factory and Aquarium had long queues.

When a white taxi driver can't believe that you'd bother to visit the King centre and a white salesman declares "all that crap is ancient history and irrelevant now", you're reminded bluntly that denial reigns supreme among Southern whites.

For us, the visit was one of those dramatically moving days that these global wanderings throw up, with hardly a dry eye in the team, much like our visit to Gallipoli last year.

The King centre itself is incredibly well done, with statues of Kunta Kinte (the slave portrayed in Alex Haley's book Roots) and Mahatma Gandhi (from whom Dr King learned the power of non-violent resistance) guarding the entranceway.

The centre provides a comprehensive audio-visual history of the civil rights movement, highlighting how the North's victory in the Civil War in 1865 won only a short-lived freedom for rights of African Americans.

Those Reconstruction years lasted only until 1877 before superstitions sanctioned by prominent intellectuals and religious leaders led to disenfranchisement of the liberated slaves.

In 1883 the Supreme Court declared as unconstitutional a civil rights bill that Congress had passed in 1875, enabling segregationists to enact the infamous "Jim Crow" laws in the former Confederate states.

Hatred of Blacks was demonstrated in more than 3600 lynchings between 1877 and World War I.

Many, of course, remember the second civil war which began in 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled racial discrimination in schools was unconstitutional, and was taken to the streets in 1955, when Rosa Parks' arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery led to the bus boycotts and further protest led by Dr Martin Luther King jnr.

Sitting in the Ebenezer Baptist Church listening to recordings of Dr King's speeches and reflecting on the day in 1974 when his mother was shot in this sanctuary as she played, one can't help wonder what the fear is that underpins so many white Americans' resentment of other races.

For all the hardship of the African-American struggle for economic and social justice, at least it can be seen as making progress, albeit with setbacks. That contrasts dramatically with the message from a site we visited the next day where the Europeans had conducted ethnic cleansing of Native Americans as they moved them west along the Trail of Tears.

After Atlanta we moved to Chattanooga, famous not just for its Choo Choo kitsch, but more importantly as one site where the Cherokee nation was forced to commence its fateful exodus west under the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

As we ride on to Nashville to explore the origins of country music, we can't help but have the words of Dr King's famous "I have a dream" speech of 1963, resonating in our ears.

"Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty we are free at last."

As we contemplate George W. Bush's neo-conservative America where the imbroglio in Iraq is the result of doing God's work, where in the aftermath of Katrina there's been a surplus of offers for housing for displaced whites, but blacks are turned away two-thirds of the time, it's difficult not to conclude that the US is a nation that runs on fear and racism.

* Latest travel blogs and photos from the Backblocks America road-trip are on www.worldbybike.com (see link below).