“He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land.”
It’s one of Dr. Martin Luther King’s most iconic speeches: “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” his address to striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn. on April 3, 1968.
And it was born on the tiny island of Bimini in The Bahamas.
Dr. King came to Bimini, the little archipelago in the midst of the Gulf Stream 50 miles from Miami, twice — first in 1964, and then in 1968; two speeches emerged from these visits: first, the one he wrote to accept his Nobel Prize, and finally, the one for the sanitation workers in Tennessee.
He sojourned at the legendary Bimini Big Game Club, one of the great adventure capitals of this region, and went fishing with the late Ansil Saunders, who built his flats boats by hand and was the bishop of bone fishing in Bimini (Saunders passed away in 2024 at 91) — joined by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr, a frequent Bimini visitor and vacation homeowner.
If you make your way across the Gulf Stream and come to Bimini, you can see why one of the greatest figures of the 20th century found inspiration here, just as did names like Ernest Hemingway (a moment in time immortalized in Islands in the Stream) and, half a millennium ago, Juan Ponce de Leon, who came here looking for the Fountain of Youth.
When you come to the island of Bimini, and you make the way out into the flats, you begin to understand — when the sounds of boats and golf carts and phone conversations go quiet, and the houses and the roofs disappear, and you’re alone in shallow turquoise water, sheltered in quiet so deep you can practically hear your own heart beat. You turn off the motor of your boat, climb out and find yourself walking on water — three feet of it, all of this somehow taking shape in the Atlantic Ocean.
They call it Bonefish Creek.
“How can people see all this life and yet not believe in the existence of God?’” King told Saunders as he marveled at the scenery here, as the latter relayed to me years ago.
It is hard not to agree, as you feel the breeze and watch the casuarinas shake on little patches of sand and coral so small they don’t even qualify to be called cays.
Six decades later, Dr. King’s legacy endures in Bimini; if you take your flats boat out to the mangroves, tucking your head under the green canopy, eventually you’ll find your way to a clearing and a bust of Dr. King.
It’s something metaphysical; when you get there and admire the statue, you swear you can sense the man’s energy, his power, palpable in a marine oasis in the heart of the Atlantic. You can almost feel what he almost certainly felt here. It’s something you take with you. He certainly did.
This is the sort of place where you can imagine mystics coming in search of the divine presence, a pilgrimage place — a higher plane on a mangrove top.
