As I sat in a small boat on Bone Fish Creek in the Bahamas island of Bimini, an occasional gentle breeze caused the thick rows of mangrove trees on both sides of the banks to sway softly, almost whispering. The only other sounds to be heard were those of the creek's water caressing the boat's sides, causing it to sway softly in its own rhythm where it was docked, just a breath away from the grove of trees. The water stretched ahead a ways before turning sharply out of sight, adding to the privacy of the creek.

According to 76-year-old Ansil Saunders, a local fisherman and boat builder, the stretch of water where we sat in his boat was the exact spot where he sat with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964 as King wrote his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. King came back to the same spot, Saunders and local officials said, in 1968 to prepare a speech for a sanitation worker's rally in Memphis. Three days later he was assassinated.

I sat in the boat with Saunders and several others two days before the Jan. 19 national holiday in honor of King's birthday. It was the first time that Saunders had returned to the spot during the King birthday celebration weekend since King was killed.

"I call this spot holy ground and I can find it day or night," Saunders said."Dr. King told me, 'It's so peaceful here. There's so much life around us. How can people see this and not believe in God?'"

Saunders said on both trips, he and King spent two hours docked on the creek's edge, in the same place, on a boat he'd built.

"We didn't fish because he just came to write. He had a big pad and made a lot of notes. Sometimes we talked, and there were times we said nothing while he wrote," he said looking up to the sky.

It was an amazing experience to be at the very spot where such a great man wrote messages still read today by people everywhere.

I learned that King came to Bimini at the invitation of the late New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell, who lived on the island. It was Powell, a bonefishing enthusiast, who introduced the two men.

"King was a jokey man who kept you laughing and he was so humble," Saunders said. "When Powell had a dinner for him and 14 people, but only had eight seats at the table, King, who was served first, took his dinner and sat on the floor and then so did everybody else."

Throughout Bimini, many locals remember seeing King or have heard stories from their parents about his stays. The Bimini museum has a display that includes King's signed departure card from 1964 framed on a wall along with the flag that flew over the Capitol on the day of the 30th anniversary of King's visit to Bimini.

And like Americans of all races, it's not lost on Biminites that this year King's birthday came the day before Barack Obama was sworn in as the United States' first black president. I thought about that, too, as I sat in the boat at Bonefish Creek. Saunders said he thought about King a lot during the presidential campaign.

"I feel so happy Obama won the presidency and feel that Dr. King is smiling and thinking 'mission accomplished'; his work wasn't in vain."

But I feel the dream has not been totally accomplished because, as a friend said, if it had been Obama wouldn't require so much security.

In the final version of King's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, he wrote that his award helped to open up new roads for blacks and all Americans in terms of hope and working together to overcome common problems. That's so close to what Obama called on all people to do in his Inaugural address, the day after the official King birthday holiday celebration, when he said: "On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord."

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