The MLK-Ghana Connection

Some of you might have noticed that on the occasion of the historic resignation today of Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, President Obama made a curious reference to Martin Luther King hailing Ghana's independence from Britain on March 6, 1957.

Quite honestly I did not know this, but at the invitation of Ghana's then new Prime Minister elect Kwame Nkrumah, Dr. King traveled to Ghana (called the Gold Coast before independence) with his wife Coretta Scott King to attend the independence ceremony. Turns out VP Nixon was there too – who knew! What strange bedfellows ending up in a new West African nation. About a month later, Dr. King delivered a sermon called Birth of a New Nation.

While we're on this "Egypt-generated" subject, here's another six-degrees-of-separation phenomenon: Nkrumah and Egypt's Gamel Abdul Nasser were friends and admired each other, and Nkrumah married an Egyptian, Fathia Rizk.