MEMPHIS, TENN. -- Roy MacGregor is working his way from the heartland of America to Shanksville, Pa., where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed last Sept. 11. His journey began in Oklahoma City and is taking him through Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas and Tennessee as he heads east for the anniversary.

The choice of words does not strike Johnnie A. Morton as ironic or coincidental. It's just the way he remembers the early morning hours of Sept. 11, 2001.

"I had a dream," he begins, standing directly below Room 307 of the Lorraine Hotel, where on a cool April evening 34 years ago an assassin's bullet blew the knot out of the necktie of Martin Luther King Jr. as the civil-rights leader stepped onto the balcony for a quick smoke.

He speaks as Dr. King's famous words from the 1963 March on Washington -- "I have a dream" -- echo regularly from the corridors of the National Civil Rights Museum that took over the Lorraine in 1991.

"I had a dream," Mr. Morton repeats.

"I dreamed an airplane was falling out of the sky. I dreamed it crashed and was burning and a lot of people were dead. It was about 4 o'clock in the morning, and I woke up my wife and told her, and she just told me, 'You're weird,' and went back to sleep."

But Mr. Morton could not go back to sleep. He stewed through the rest of the night in his home in Greenwood, S.C., unable to shake the image, and was up and watching television when the first plane struck the World Trade Center's north tower four hours and 45 minutes after his dream.

"I still feel odd about it," he says. "Maybe if I could have ciphered it out I could have called somebody -- but they would have just said I was crazy."

He has come to Memphis to see where Dr. King, his hero, died -- just as he has been to Atlanta to see where he is buried. At 55, Mr. Morton has lived through most of the stories told here -- Montgomery, Birmingham, Mississippi.

As a black American, Mr. Morton knows the importance of civil rights and the sacrifice of those who fought for those rights and, at times, died for them.

Most Americans will say that little, if anything, has changed a year since the terrorist attacks. They notice it mostly at airports. A man like Mr. Morton, a veteran with more than 20 years in the National Guard, also notices far more security around military establishments. There is, of course, a great deal more, as always happens when a nation like the United States declares itself at war. In the Civil War, they shut down newspapers sympathetic to the South; in the First World War, they criminalized dissent; in the Second World War, 110,000 Japanese Americans were sent off to internment camps.

About 1,200 people were detained in the days after Sept. 11, but the number is uncertain, as is what has and will become of them. New legislation has also widened police powers, including the right to secret searches -- yet hardly a voice has been raised in protest.

A Gallup Poll of 2,519 U.S. citizens conducted in April and May found that 78 per cent of Americans are willing to give up certain freedoms if it leads to greater security. Almost as many would also endorse national identification cards.

"If it's going to be for safety," Mr. Morton says, "I don't mind giving up some of my civil rights."

Across the street from the museum, Jacqueline Smith has a rather different perspective. Also black, Ms. Smith despises the National Civil Rights Museum, and for 14 years and 234 days she has stood here to denounce it as a Hollywood abomination of everything that Dr. King stood for. She is particularly opposed to a $10-million extension that will include artifacts from Dr. King's convicted killer, James Earl Ray.

"It's nothing but a tourist attraction. All they're serving up in there is emotionalism," Ms. Smith says.

"Well, I say, cry me a river. Tears won't feed children, will they?"

What she would do instead is turn the old hotel into housing for the homeless, and instead of the war on terrorism she would see America embrace Dr. King's teachings, including non-violence.

"Why attack Afghanistan?" she asks. "Two wrongs do not make a right."

She fumbles among the papers covering her makeshift sidewalk table and comes up with the words Dr. King delivered during a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Christmas Eve, 1967, the last Christmas of his tragically shortened life.

"Human life is too sacred to be taken on the battlefields of the world," he told the congregation.

"Our world is sick with war. If we don't have goodwill toward men in this world, we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own instruments and our own power."

Ms. Smith folds the card and hands it over.

Something else Dr. King said, she says:

"We must either learn to live together as brothers -- or we are going to perish together as fools."

Sept. 5: A Civil War buff from the Ozarks who blames George W. Bush for Sept. 11