Bimini Big Game Club Also Celebrates Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Connection
OutdoorHub 08.14.12
As Bahamian officials plan a week-long event to commemorate Bimini’s connection to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. this October, the Bimini Big Game Club Resort & Marina already has a plaque at its front gate paying homage to the slain civil rights leader, who was a guest at the resort.
The plaque reads, “Dr. Martin Luther King stayed in cottage #3 at the Bimini Big Game Club. It is documented that he took time out during his visit to work on his speeches, which took place in his room as well as at the poolside.”
Dr. King was a guest at the resort in 1964 when he traveled to Bimini to work on his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. Four years later it is said he was back in Bimini where he worked on completing his “I‘ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, which was his last public speech delivered at the Mason Temple in Memphis on April 3, 1968. He was assassinated the next day.
The historic Big Game Club was a favorite among celebrities and national figures in the 1950s and 1960s, playing host to a who’s who of the day, including Lana Turner, Sammy Davis Jr., Jimmy Hoffa, Rita Hayworth and many more. Novelist Ernest Hemingway, who split his time between Key West and Bimini in the mid 1930s, stayed just down King’s Highway at the legendary Compleat Angler.
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the first black U.S. Congressman, who had a home in Bimini, invited Dr. King to visit the tiny Bahamas out island in 1964. When in Bimini, Dr. King would spend peaceful time in the mangrove flats with boat builder and bonefish guide Ansil Saunders. Saunders, now in his 80s, recalls taking Dr. King to a special spot, which Sanders called the “holy grounds.”
“It’s a place up there where I carry people,” Saunders recalled in a radio interview.
”When we reached there we tied up the boat, some birds were flying overhead, snappers around us and he says, ‘Ansil, what to you do when you have people in the boat that see all this life and not believe in God, what do you say to them?’
Saunders continued: “Dr. King looked up and said, I believe now more than ever in the existence of God. “
On Saturday, October 6th, the Bimini Bahamas Plaque Project and government and community officials will erect a bust of Dr. King designed by sculptor Erik Blome in the Bimini mangroves.
