Martin Luther King finally honoured in Washington after 43 years

Tens of thousands turn out for official dedication of memorial – the first monument to a non-president on the Mall

In 1968 the African American fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha had a dream. It would build a monument in Washington DC to honour one of its members who had been gunned down just weeks before as he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis.

It may have taken 43 years, and several bitter controversies, but on Sunday that dream was finally realised.

Tens of thousands of people, mainly African Americans, from all over the US gathered at the National Mall in the centre of the capital under a cloudless autumn sky to see the official dedication of the memorial to Martin Luther King Jr.

"We honour this man because he had faith in us," President Barack Obama told the crowd. "That is why he is on this mall, because he saw what we might become."

Obama said that the monument marked "a black preacher, of no official rank or title, who somehow gave voice to our deepest dreams and our most lasting ideals; a man who stirred our conscience and thereby made our union more perfect".

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