SCHULL resident Bill Hogan will be celebrating Martin Luther King Day in West Cork on Monday, January 20th.
The six months that Bill spent working in Martin Luther King’s office in Atlanta, Georgia, were preserved in a scrapbook made by his grandmother.
Bill explained how the connection was first made saying: ‘I had been involved in the committee for non-violent action (CNVA) and was in South Georgia, on a peace and civil rights project, when we all got arrested. But the sheriff let us out after President John F Kennedy was assassinated.’
Bill said he and two of his friends – one of whom was Bradford Little, a friend of Dr King’s – went to Atlanta and where he was given a job as a mail clerk in Dr King’s office, as well as being appointed a go-between with the mayor Ivan Allen.
‘I started working in Dr King’s office in November 1963. It was a very dark time because the president had just been killed. I was just a young fella, only 19, at the time,’ he said.
‘I remember meeting Dr King in his office and him leaning over to me and asking me if I would like to be his mail clerk. I said, “of course” and started the following Monday.
‘My job was to help with the post and deliver mail around six or seven offices. I also had to help answer his mail. My other job was as a messenger between Dr King and the mayor of Atlanta, who was pro-civil rights.
‘There were big demonstrations in Atlanta that winter led by students and I was involved with that and trying to get the hotels and restaurants desegregated.
‘As someone who was carrying private messages between Dr King and Ivan Allen, I kind of became friends with him. I remember the mayor telling me that I had a very historical job working with Dr King.
‘During the demonstrations in Atlanta I got arrested a couple of times. It was an extraordinary experience. But I continued to work there for six months before going to work with a student group in Kentucky, which was called the Gandhi Corps.’
Following the assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968, Bill left the US to live, study and work in Costa Rica for 12 years before making West Cork his home in 1980.
Ahead of the January 20th celebrations, which Bill will mark with a gathering at his home, he told The Southern Star: ‘Isn’t it strange that Dr Martin Luther King is now a national hero, with a national holiday. It’s classic American hypocrisy because they killed him.’
