It would, he said, more than double the capacity for passenger trains between Britain and the Continent, cut the journey time from Paris to London by half an hour, to two and a half hours, and give a major boost to rail freight.Costing nearly £3bn, the line will be privately operated and financed. Mr Mawhinney conceded the line would have an impact on the environment. That responsibility should be left to the people who lived it.”And there matters stand. Today’s violence and despair serve merely to burnish the legend of the man. But, his descendants ask, for whose benefit? They challenge the assumption of a conscience-laden white America that it may be trusted to look after the monuments of a race it so long oppressed. The family described the Park Service as “poorly qualified to interpret the people’s history.

Dexter King maintains he is the victim of a smear campaign: the money the family’s museum centre would raise would further the goals of the King Center. The answer alas – given King and the whole history of race in modern America – is fiendishly complicated. Orthodox liberal America was outraged: an Atla n ta paper pub lished a cartoon showing King’s widow, Coretta, and Dexter dreaming dollar bills.Who owns history ? The question is simply put. During his lifetime King placed his speeches and writings under copyright, and the newspaper had to pay a fee of $1,700, plus costs.But surprise occasioned by that episode paled beside the astonishment in mid-1994, when King’s son Dexter announced a $60m plan for the Martin Luther King Jr Time-Machine and Interactive Museum at the site. Then things started to go wrong.In retrospect, the first warning came a couple of years ago, when USA-Today was sued by the family after it published the text of the 1963 “I have a dream” speech.

The Park Service came up with a $12m (£7.6m) scheme, which Congress again approved, containing an enlarged visitor centre, a memorial w alk, decent parking, and a new community centre and gym for the entire neighbourhood At first the King family welcomed the project. By 1992, facilities were overwhelmed, while the Atlanta Olympics, promising hundreds of thousands more tourists, were only four years off. Today all pretence at peaceful co-existence between the two bodies has vanished, submerged by the sheer popularity of the man they honour.
Last year 3 million people visited the King birthplace, making it the third most popular site operated by the National Park Service in the country, exceeded only by the Statue of Liberty and the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. In 1980 the district was declared a national historic area by Congress, and placed under the administration of the US National Park Service. Two years later, the King family set up its own Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Change at the site, to preserve and promote his legacy. The story revolves around a few rundown blocks in south-eastern Atlanta, containing the three-storey house where King was born in 1929, St Ebenezer’s Church, where he prayed, and the crypt where he lies buried.

Thus far, the only winner is the tiny minority that believes America would have been better off without him. But such disputes at least were relevant to the civil rights crusade. Not so the demeaning dispute surrounding the 1995 celebrations Who owns Martin Luther King, it might be summed up. It has also signalled that there seems to be no chance of him being reinstated.. Washington – Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day. This year, though, it has been hard to concentrate on the deeds of the towering hero of modern America’s struggle for racial equality, shot dead in that modern American annus horribilis of 1968.

T rue, this most recent of public holidays has seen controversy before, mostly over the refusal of a few outposts of white supremacy to mark the occasion. In Manila on Sunday, jubilant Vatican officials said an estimated four million people gave the Pope his biggest welcome ever. “The singer has more success than the song,”the leftist daily Liberation commented of the Pope.The Vatican has said Mgr Gaillot aroused “anxiety and negative reactions”. In Germany, eight theologians expressed outrage, calling the sacking a “gratuitous papal act”.The Pope is currently riding a wave of popularity during his visit to the Far East. “And this wound will be very hard to heal.” He said in an interview with the conservative daily Le Figaro that the Church would work to avoid a schism.Only four bishops have been sacked in France since 1945, three of them for being pro-Nazi during the Second World War.About 5,000 people protested in Evreux on Sunday against their bishop’s sacking and thousands of others demonstrated elsewhere.About 70 per cent of French people say they are Catholic. Fewer than 10 per cent, however, regularly attend Mass.Thousands of Catholics in Belgium also demonstrated for Mgr Gaillot.