I pushed for all construction to have 50 percent minority participation, and in the end we exceeded that benchmark, with more than 60 percent participation. We were so proud of that accomplishment. To me, this set an example of how affirmative action and job creation can be a plus, rather than something to fight about. I always believed that we had a unique opportunity among other African American families to continue the democratization of America, so we had to press to get the most equitable results out of whatever we did.
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BEYOND ESTABLISHING THE physical site, I had to build the right team to staff and run the Center, which also proved, especially initially, to be an experience fraught with growing pains.
In the early days of the Center, other ideologies were competing with our strategy of nonviolent social change. Hundreds of riots stemmed from Martin’s death, and police brutality was rampant. We saw the rise of Black Power and black nationalism, which captured the attention of many young people. For example, Stokely Carmichael, as chairman of the SNCC, made a radical departure from the agenda of former SNCC director John Lewis, who had been by Martin’s side during the movement and who had been severely beaten as they attempted to march peacefully across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. As Carmichael rose to prominence, he made it clear that white members, once actively recruited to the SNCC, were now no longer welcome.
Carmichael’s slogan of Black Power and the SNCC’s new hostility toward whites caught on as the rallying cry of a younger, more radical generation of black civil rights activists. A clash of values between integration and separatism ensued. Carmichael vocalized his intention to build “a movement that would smash everything Western civilization had created.”
Despite our commitment to nonviolence, overtones of black nationalism and separatism attempted to make their way through the doors of the King Center via our first executive director, Dr. Vincent Harding. A beautiful human being and history professor on loan to the Center from Spelman College, Vincent was the noted author of There Is a River and Hope and History. In the sixties, he had worked with Martin as a mediator between white and black communities. By the early 1970s, however, Vincent had started pushing Malcolm X’s thinking over that of Martin’s, denouncing whites and pushing for separatism. Of course, it was an apprehensive time. We saw more cities exploding in flames. Angry people were lashing out violently. Many blamed the government, the establishment, for Martin’s death. There was so much confusion in this period.
Even as I was trying to launch a nonviolent training institute within the Center, Vincent was propagating the view that “Nobody is interested in nonviolence these days,” and he went about hiring several young staff members who supported his separatist views. In fact, he went so far as to set up the Institute of the Black World inside the Center as an effort to attract more militant proponents to his side. Seeing what was happening, I told him in no uncertain terms, “There will never be any element in the Center where people, no matter who they are or what color they are, cannot participate. Martin wouldn’t have stood for this, and I will not stand for this.”
In addition to our ideological differences, Vincent did not know much about money management; we found that he was spending funds that should have gone to pay taxes to the IRS. In light of how Martin had been harassed and accused of tax fraud, we were shocked. At a board meeting, Vincent finally told us, “Look, the IRS is going to come and close the doors if we don’t pay the money we owe.” Daddy King, then a board member, fired back, “Vincent, you had no right to spend the government’s money.” That mismanagement pushed the Center into financial crisis. In an effort to fix the problem and raise the money needed to pay those taxes, we had to take a severe step backward, which meant cutting staff. We were forced to give many of our employees only two weeks’ notice. You can imagine the fallout.
Determined to pick ourselves up and move forward, we called a press conference to introduce our next executive director, Dr. Julius Scott, also a distinguished scholar. He would go on to become president of Paine College in Augusta, Georgia.
When I arrived at the press conference to announce the Scott appointment, the furloughed staff members were there with picket signs, passing out a very derogatory statement about me to members of the media. Naturally, I was caught off guard, but I announced the appointment as best I could. The press was not interested in reporting our efforts to move forward, though. They focused on the negative, and it took a while to live down that series of incidents.
Vincent Harding went on to establish the Institute of the Black World independently of the Center, and for the two years that Julius Scott served as executive director (on loan to us from and paid for by Spelman), we successfully developed the Institute on Nonviolence at the King Center, where, under the sponsorship of the National Education Association, we trained educators, labor leaders, community organizers, faith leaders, and students. This institute has been an especially rewarding program for me over the years, because I continue to meet people we trained in those workshops and hear about the wonderful things they are doing. But back then when Julius’s time was up, we didn’t have the money to pay a new executive director. That was a tough time.
Our search to run the Center ran into other snafus in the early seventies. Probably the most bizarre incident involved Thomas Porter, a graduate from the Antioch School of Education in Seattle, Washington. He had convinced us he was a pro at organizational structure. He also convinced me he was a convert to nonviolence, although I had heard otherwise. I believe in redemption, so I did not hold that hearsay against him. No one believed in him but me; and we soon found that I had made a mistake. Right away Tom started making demands and publicly saying things that embarrassed us. I took him with me to the Democratic National Convention in California, when I endorsed George McGovern. Junius Griffin, who at that time was the publicist for Motown, picked us up in a Rolls-Royce limousine; after that, Tom started giving people the impression that I was running around in big limousines, which the King Center couldn’t afford. Then I took him to a black leadership meeting, where he embarrassed me by using foul language. He made a big fuss because I didn’t get him a room in the main hotel, where McGovern was staying. I told him I wanted to meet with him when we returned to the Center, but he had the nerve to present me with a negative evaluation of me and the Center. I advised him against putting those things in writing, “because you can’t take it back.” Instead of apologizing for his behavior, at the next board meeting he said, “I have to have absolute control of the budget.” Andy Young countered, “Tom, you must be planning to resign and go back home.” So we gave him three months’ severance, and he left. Our next mistake was that we did not fire Tom’s assistant and staff hires, and they sent negative information about the Center to the board and others from whom we were seeking help. When we discovered all this, we had to fire Tom’s assistant and staff, leaving only two people staffing the Center. We kept the whole thing quiet, but we had to close the Center for six weeks until we could regroup. And regroup we did. We kept regrouping.
We then brought in Calvin Morris, whom Andy had recommended. Calvin was a good speaker, but he did not have the best administrative skills, and all he wanted to do was to speak and preach. And then, he left to work on his doctorate.
As the Center developed, hundreds of staff members with favorable opinions of our work made themselves known. We eventually found excellent directors who helped us stay on course, and in 1979, People magazine’s opinion poll named me “the most effective among women leaders.” Still, early on, press about the Center sometimes blamed me for the challenges we encountered finding the right director. “Hard to work with,” they said.
Looking back, those hard early years building a staff were just a few backward steps in what was overall a great march forward. In the decade between 1978 and 1988, we were blessed with several wonderful leaders, such as Maxi Jackson, who came in 1976 but had to leave to resettle his family back in Michigan; Lloyd Davis, on
loan from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), who became the Center’s first executive vice president; followed by Harold Sims; Dr. William (Chip) Wheeler; Quincy Carswell; and Sunny Walker. These men put the icing on the cake, implementing programs essential to our commitment to nonviolence and social justice, activities that kept the Center bustling with commitment, excitement, and purpose.
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I AM ALSO quite proud of the part the Center has played in revitalizing the Sweet Auburn neighborhood around our complex, an area that has become one of the nation’s leading tourist sites, adding millions of dollars to the economy of Atlanta. Even more important, that revitalization made attractive housing surrounding the Center available to low-income residents.
During the early 1900s, Auburn Avenue, which is east of downtown Atlanta, was the center of life for upwardly mobile blacks. Famous names and black establishments were trademarks; patriarchs such as Alonzo Herndon, John Wesley Dobbs, and Rev. A. D. Williams, Martin’s maternal grandfather, set a tone of pride and dignity. Businesses thrived, such as the Atlanta Daily World, the nation’s first black daily newspaper; the Mutual Federal Savings and Loan; and the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, one of the largest black-owned institutions in the nation. The Top Hat nightclub, later named the Royal Peacock, hosted top performers, including Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Gladys Knight and the Pips. A church aristocracy, which included Bethel AME, Wheat Street Baptist Church, and Ebenezer Baptist Church, provided a spiritual foundation. By 1960 the Prince Hall Masonic building on Auburn Avenue housed the SCLC offices as well as a historic radio station. And, of course, in 1970, Martin was interred on Auburn Avenue on what today are the grounds of the Freedom Hall Complex at the King Center.
It was around 1960, however, shortly after Martin and I moved to Atlanta, when I saw the handwriting on the wall. Urban blight and the migration of wealthier blacks to the suburbs (in light of desegregation plans) left behind lower-income families without recreation or access to health care and other services. By the 1970s, scores of residential buildings had become eyesores and were being razed. Once-prosperous businesses had become shells of their former selves.
I hoped to promote the preservation and restoration of this neighborhood, this valuable motherlode of black culture and history, partly by locating the Freedom Hall Complex of the King Center in the Auburn area. But the very first beacon in this neighborhood preservation would be the house where Martin was born.
One year before Martin’s assassination, I met with Atlanta’s mayor, Ivan Allen, to retain his help in restoring Martin’s birth home; I had learned that this historic block was slated for demolition, and I wanted to give the community where Martin grew up a facelift, to help change its destiny from deterioration to revitalization. I began to lobby for the home to become a National Historic Site, and the birth home became the first completed portion of my vision for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Historic District; at first, we offered tours of the home; eventually, we invited the National Park Service (NPS) to partner with us to give regular tours to visitors. The birth home, a two-story Queen Anne frame structure, was built in 1895 and purchased in the early 1900s by Reverend Williams. Mama King (Mrs. Alberta Williams King) grew up in that house. When she gave birth to Martin on January 15, 1929, Daddy King jumped up and touched the ceiling, leaving a handprint, which we embossed so it would remain. The house was and still is just a stone’s throw from Fire Station No. 6, where Martin had chased fire trucks as a boy and just a few feet from the King Center Freedom Hall Complex.
The designation of Martin’s home as a historic site made him the first black American whose birth home earned recognition from the National Register of Historic Places. Because of our efforts, Ebenezer Church subsequently received a similar designation, and these efforts opened the way for additional funds for the Auburn Avenue restorations from state and private preservation organizations. We also received funds for the restoration of the birth home from sororities: Alpha Kappa Alpha, the grand chapter of Sigma Gamma Rho, and the Atlanta Alumnae chapter of Delta Sigma Theta. Work on the restoration of the home was completed in 1974.
Mama King worked diligently with me and Christine on the restoration, and took special pride in supervising the painting, wallpapering, and selection of most of the furniture. She played an indispensable role in helping us complete the birth home. Unfortunately, a tragic turn of events made it so that she wasn’t with us when the home was dedicated in 1975. On June 30, 1974, she was shot and killed at Ebenezer while she sat at the organ playing “The Lord’s Prayer.”
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MAMA KING, WHOM Daddy King called Bunch, was not a public figure, but she was deeply loved within the family and at her church. Indeed, Mama King had much more influence than one might guess. Martin used to say, “You know who the real pastor of this church is? Mother.” Sometimes she would call Martin at 6:00 a.m. and tell him in her heavy voice what she thought he should be doing at the church. It seemed she never slept! She also did a lot of grandmothering, and would take care of the children from time to time while I traveled. Sometimes she watched after my kids, Naomi’s kids, and Christine’s kids at the same time. They would all play together, and Mama and Daddy King would get so much joy out of having all their grandkids together.
On that awful Sunday morning, the church pews were full as Mama King began to play the organ, the melody flowing through the sanctuary. She had a natural talent for music, and she served as the minister of music, directing some of the choirs at Ebenezer. Some of the deacons remembered that a young man, definitely a first-time visitor, came to the sanctuary just before service began and asked, “Is Reverend King preaching today?” The deacon responded “No.” An usher seated the man near the front, to the left of the pulpit, on a pew right next to the Hammond B-3 organ where Mama King was seated. Daddy King and Christine were sitting in the first pew, to the right of the pulpit.
As Mama King was playing “The Lord’s Prayer” the young man shouted, “I’m taking over this morning!” There was a popping sound, and Daddy King saw Bunch’s hand fly to her face. Blood ran through her fingers; she fell forward, holding her side. The bullets were still flying. The young man had two guns, one in either hand, and he started shooting wildly across the church. He shot and killed one of the deacons, Edward Boykin. Another member of the congregation was also shot, but later recovered. Other deacons restrained Daddy King, who was frantically trying to reach his wife of forty-eight years.
The man pointed his weapons at the choir members and even at Daddy King’s grandson Rev. Derek King, who was in the pulpit that day. The man kept trying to fire, but he had emptied his guns’ chambers. He became frightened and tried to run out of the church. Derek tackled him and started beating him. If the police had not rushed in, the young man, later identified as twenty-three-year-old Marcus Wayne Chenault, might have died on the spot.
All these intricate and heartrending details were relayed to me the moment my plane landed. I had been in Chicago, giving a speech for the National Educational Association; Dexter had already gone to church earlier with his cousins. He was at the store across the street from the church when the shooting started. When I called the house to wake up the other children for Sunday school, I called too late; I had forgotten that Chicago is an hour behind Atlanta. As soon as Dexter heard about the shooting, he ran back across the street to the church, and before Mama King was moved to the ambulance, he saw her in a pool of blood. Still, in retrospect, I was comforted that all of my children, at least, were spared the horror of seeing their grandmother, whom they adored, shot down in front of their eyes in church, of all places.
A few weeks after the murder, Daddy King insisted that he meet with Chenault in prison. When he asked, “Why did you do it, son?” Chenault rambled on about Christians being his enemies. He was completely incoherent, making no sense at all. Eventually, he was found guilty of the attack and sentenced to die in the electric chair.
Ironically,
Andrea Young, Andrew Young’s daughter, happened to be a lawyer with the firm that aided indigent prisoners and was representing Chenault; she was working to get his sentence commuted to life in prison. She came to me for advice, and I told her that while I didn’t believe in the death penalty, she had to talk through the case with Daddy King and Christine, who were suffering tremendously. He had lost both his sons and she, her two brothers. First Martin and then A.D., who was found dead in his own pool under suspicious circumstances a year after Martin’s death. Now, tragically, he had lost his wife and Christine had lost her mother.
Watching the way Daddy King handled himself was a great inspiration to me. It was wonderful to see forgiveness and the love of Christ flow so freely. I remember him saying, “There are two men I am supposed to hate. One is white, and the other is black. James Earl Ray is a prisoner in Tennessee, charged with killing my son. Marcus Chenault is in a Georgia penitentiary after killing my wife. Nothing that a man does takes him lower than when he allows himself to stoop so low as to hate someone. I love the lesson of love triumphing over evil too much to make room in my heart for hate.”
Our family had suffered so many tragedies in six short years. They kept us on our knees, praying for strength, and we found the strength to push past our pain and continue on our mission, which we had been uniquely challenged to carry out. Sooner or later, our Comforter would come. We had to keep growing, keep building, and keep moving on.
My Life, My Love, My Legacy Page 23