My Life, My Love, My Legacy

by Coretta Scott King

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  SHORTLY AFTER REVITALIZING Martin’s birth home, we bought the adjacent house at 503 Auburn Avenue and used it as temporary administrative offices for the King Center. Next, as part of revitalizing the Auburn neighborhood, I went to work on building a community center, which would include a gymnasium, a game room, a library, an early learning center, community services, and a fountain, as well as a separate natatorium. The community around the proposed Center badly needed social, cultural, and recreational resources for children and young adults. To provide for these necessities, I had to do some serious lobbying with officials in the city and with the Nixon administration.

  Cutting a path through the Nixon labyrinth was no easy task. For years, I’ve known that the FBI was smearing me as an anti-American subversive. The media also reported that Patrick Buchanan, Nixon’s speechwriter, had warned the president against meeting with me on the first anniversary of Martin’s birthday, claiming that such a visit would “outrage many, many people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a demagogue and perhaps worse. Dr. King is one of the most divisive men in contemporary history—some believe him to be a Messiah, others consider him the devil incarnate.”

  Still, I appealed to President Nixon for funds. After all, he was elected to be the president of all the people, and we were trying to build upon what was good and proper about our country, an effort we hoped even Nixon would want to be part of. I called his office and told him that we were building a memorial for my husband and needed his help for the community center. Through one of his deputies, we were promised help, and told that he would get his best people working on it.

  That never happened. Later, we were told there was no money. And later still, we learned the real reason: beyond Nixon’s personal dislike for the King family, Herman Talmadge and Richard B. Russell Jr., two U.S. senators from Georgia, had scotched the funding. Subsequently, Nixon passed word to all his Cabinet directors and heads of various agencies that there would be no money for the community center or the memorial. There was a rumor of a bizarre idea: the Nixon administration would offer us a recording of the 1970 birthday White House concert for Duke Ellington, which we could sell to raise money. This was an insult. Of course we appreciated Duke Ellington, but we were against the administration trying to pass off his birthday concert as monetarily significant.

  Yet, as the Scripture teaches, just when Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac, a ram in the bush appeared as a substitute. There is always a ram in the bush. In this case, the ram that saved the day was George Romney, secretary of HUD. As the former governor of Michigan, Romney had made high-level appointments of African Americans. Through that pipeline, he tapped Lloyd Davis, a former member of the Kennedy administration (and, it turned out, a future executive director of the King Center), and assigned him to review our application for funding; Romney wanted to ensure that all equal opportunity and fair housing requirements had been met, and since they were, he made sure discretionary funds were directed to us. With those funds, along with matching funds raised by me and other grants, we amassed the estimated three million dollars needed to build our community center and provide much-needed social and recreational services. We held the ribbon-cutting ceremonies during King Birthday Week in January 1976.

  At the community center, we had an early-learning center, a reading academy (thanks to additional Right to Read funding from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare), and neighborhood services to train young people in nonviolence. We were also able to provide direct housing and food assistance to Sweet Auburn residents in need, and if there were problems our staff could not handle directly (whether with utility bills, child care, transportation, or employment), we referred those in need to the proper agencies. In addition, we maintained a presence on corporate and nonprofit boards, which allowed us to channel aid to needy communities through personal networking.

  Seeing how the community center made a difference was thrilling to me. And the natatorium, the Olympic-size swimming pool, connected by a walkway to the community center, was used by many local swim teams and also attracted national swim meets. It was one of the nicest pools in Atlanta, which also made me happy. One reason I wanted that pool was because in Marion, Alabama, where I grew up, we were not allowed to swim in the public pools, which were for whites only. And as a child, I almost drowned trying to learn to swim in a pond, which looked like a big, dark hole to me. I was afraid to get in that pond in the first place, and after I did, I never learned to swim. I wanted the next generation to have a different experience. Similarly, I’d never learned to play tennis, because we didn’t have tennis courts in Marion, so we constructed two courts near the natatorium. All the things I didn’t have as a child, I tried to provide through the community center. I put in early-learning programs because I remembered how my lack of early training made it difficult for me to keep up in college. To see the children coming to the early-learning center was really gratifying.

  Of course, over the years, a great many extraordinary entertainers, from Flip Wilson to Stevie Wonder to Michael Jackson to Bono, visited the Center and contributed to its work. But another Atlanta cultural issue I was blessed to be able to address during the 1970s was opera. Blacks in Atlanta, as in other southern cities, had not been allowed to attend opera performances during the days of segregation. As a concert singer and someone who loved opera and the arts in general, I wanted this barrier to come down. I worked with Rudolf Bing, the general manager for the Metropolitan Opera, to make tickets available to blacks—and to members of all races. And because the Fox Theatre, where operas in Atlanta were performed, was teetering on the edge of financial collapse, I worked with local residents to save it, restore it to its original grandeur.

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  BY 1980, AFTER our major campaign of lobbying the White House and Congress, the King Center board of directors and I succeeded in getting legislation passed to establish the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site. And in 1981, after years spent collecting the largest inventory of civil rights documents in the world related to the modern civil rights movement, including an oral history project, the Center formally opened the administration building, which houses the King Library and Archives. And in 1981, after years spent collecting the largest inventory of civil rights documents in the world related to the modern civil rights movement, including an oral history project, the Center formally opened the administration building, which houses the King Library and Archives. The building was opened for staff, the library and archives were opened to scholars and researchers from around the world, and, initially, the Center was also able to offer exhibitions to the public in the building. In addition, that same year, we worked with the City of Atlanta and the U.S. Department of Labor to train youth to provide services to senior citizens, such as minor home repairs and escort assistance, which helped two underserved populations and provided a service model for the nation.

  On January 15, 1982, as part of the weeklong observance of Martin’s fifty-third birthday, we celebrated the final construction of the Freedom Hall Complex. This completed the entire building phase of the Center. Until 1982, when we used the term Center, we were referring to our organization, a work-in-progress housed in temporary offices. But in 1982, all our staff and programs were finally in their own administration building. We had come home at last. The completed complex also consisted of the International Chapel of All Faiths, the Freedom Walkway, Freedom Hall (a conference center with meeting rooms and a 250-seat auditorium), the screening room, the reflecting pool, Martin’s crypt, which sits on a circular island in the center of the pool, and the eternal flame, symbolizing Martin’s lifelong commitment to justice and peace.

  The idea of a reflecting pool had come to me during my visit to the Taj Mahal in Agra, India, during my book tour in 1970. I saw this beautiful reflecting pool leading up to the mausoleum of white marble built by Emperor Shah Jahan in 1653 in memory of his third wife. It is a symbol of love. Martin’s crypt was also a labo
r of love. At one end of the pool are several tiers, with five fountains on the top tier representing the five races in humanity and water cascades down from them, reminding me of that Scripture in the Book of Amos: “Let justice rain down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Inscribed on the white marble crypt are Martin’s famous words “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.”

  I believe it is only right that the caring community that helped produce a Martin Luther King Jr. not deteriorate but remain creative, vibrant, and illustrious. Sweet Auburn is part of a legacy that keeps producing something better. Today, the neighborhood offers us all a unique opportunity to experience the environment that produced the man who sacrificed his life to save us. And within it stands the King Center—both a social and a sacred space, a pilgrimage destination with an estimated one million visitors from around the world every year, and most of all, through its educational and training programs, an epicenter for nonviolent change, both societally and interpersonally.

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  FROM THE VERY moment the Center began, with meager resources and a dispersed and inadequate administrative home, it still managed to do what mattered most: continue Martin’s unfinished work through education, research, advocacy, and nonviolence training. We did not allow the naysayers or our own missteps to bog us down or distract us from our mission.

  Martin believed that each person could make a difference, and I believed that the King Center could help each person obtain the tools to make that difference without violence. Even before we opened our doors, we offered education and training for every age group. At the preschool level, the children sang songs and learned poems in the spirit of nonviolence; our emphasis was on love and concern for the kids. And our programs for college students soon included a scholars’ internship program, through which students learned Kingian nonviolence and got on-the-job training from internships in government offices or in social service organizations, where they had a chance to apply the principles they had learned at the Center; they also received credit for their learning and work from their colleges or universities. By 1980, eighty students had gone through that program. Also, even before we had a building, we had an Institute on Nonviolence, which brought adults from as far away as California and Maine for weeklong and summer workshops.

  In its first twenty years the Center led more than twenty educational programs and more than a dozen community and public affairs programs, such as the new Coalition of Conscience and the American Indian Forum.

  At the core of the Center—its heart and soul—has been nonviolence education and training, which we have provided to tens of thousands of people through the years. In one 1984 program alone, we partnered with the FBI to train twenty-five thousand young people in nonviolence. Also, every year we bring in about 300 young people to our Summer Institute on Nonviolence. We also host the top executives of law enforcement groups, judges, and prison personnel. Our goal is to use my husband’s philosophy and strategies to demonstrate alternatives to violence. The Center’s police training started in the early 1990s because of Charles Alphin Sr., a St. Louis police captain, who began visiting the Center on his own time in the 1980s to learn the techniques of nonviolence; he then applied them in the communities where he worked. Eventually, with his help, our Summer Institute for Youth expanded and included family members Martin III, Bernice, Derek, Vernon, and Angela Farris as trainers.

  In an effort to test the value of our nonviolence program, Charles began bringing busloads of youth from St. Louis to the Center for nonviolence workshops. One particular youth was a gang member who had been involved in a drive-by shooting. A kind judge let him out of juvenile detention to attend our workshops, along with 20 other youths. When he returned home he vowed not to fight anymore, despite being harassed for his decision. When he was released from detention he returned to the Center to delight us with his turnaround; he became active in our training programs and completely changed his life.

  After Charles retired from the police force in 1992, I encouraged him to come to work for the Center as a trainer, and later, after I promoted him to director of education and training, our police training programs expanding nationally. A youth and law enforcement training at the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles was one of many such programs. One of the success stories I am most proud of is our work with the police department in Miami that credited us with helping it prevent the kinds of riots that occurred in Los Angeles in 1992 after acquittal of the white police officer involved in the beating of unarmed black motorist Rodney King.

  After those riots, the Los Angeles PD called upon us for assistance in keeping the peace. We attended a summit with gang leaders—the Crips and the Bloods—at the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in Watts. I listened and spoke and later invited gang members to the Center, facing strenuous objections for doing so. XXXOG is the highest level of gang memberships, yet Charles Rachal, a XXXOG Crip leader, and Bobby Lavender, a XXXOG Blood member, were among the nine gang leaders who accepted my invitation. On the heels of the training, I became fond of both men. We exposed any number of gang members to Kingian nonviolence as a lifestyle. It was gratifying to see how these young people, coming to the Center from various urban communities with no understanding of nonviolence at all, could choose Martin’s teaching as a viable antidote to violence.

  By 1984 the King Center had expanded its role as an international institution. We incorporated and pulled from what we had learned on the battlefields of America to build training materials that were in tune with diverse cultures and could be translated into various languages. We embraced the vision of the Center as a “world house,” where people of disparate ideologies could embrace a common ideology of peace. We trained some of our staff members to become globetrotters, to literally stand between warring factions without being labeled spies or intruders. In 1985, the Center used Martin’s birthday week to focus attention on world hunger and poverty, which were at unprecedented levels and which represented violence in one of its ugliest and most basic forms. I spoke about the conditions in some developing nations where the annual average income is less than three hundred dollars. Our brothers and sisters in those countries lack even a survivable diet; they take in a daily deficit of calories and nutrients that hinders the growth of their bodies and minds and permanently handicaps their countries. We issued a charge for all nations to wage an unconditional war not on any nation or people, but on poverty, racism, and violence. In 1989, we continued our efforts to get the U.S. corporate community to further its divestment in South Africa, as a nonviolent way of fighting apartheid; we also used the Center’s offices and facilities as a nonviolent forum in which the opposing South African parties might mediate their differences and work for national reconciliation.

  From the beginning, our trainings drew on Martin’s scores of books, speeches, and sermons, but we turned to three sources in particular to teach his worldview and his concept of Kingian nonviolence: “The Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” a chapter from his book Stride Toward Freedom; the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which is in the book Why We Can’t Wait; and “The World House,” the last chapter from his 1967 book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?—as well as excerpts from his Nobel Lecture, and his close identification with the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi.

  We gleaned from Martin’s writings the clearest statements on nonviolence, and abbreviated them to become the Center’s Six Principles of Nonviolence, which, along with Martin’s Six Steps of Nonviolence, are the basis of everything we teach.

  The Center’s Six Principles of Nonviolence are:

  1. Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people. It is an active, not a passive, form of resistance to evil.

  2. Those who practice nonviolence must seek to win friendship and understanding from their adversaries, and not try to vanquish, humiliate, or defeat them.

  3. Those who practice nonviolence recognize that evildoers are not evil people, and that they
are often victims of systemic injustice themselves. Therefore, we seek to defeat injustice and not people.

  4. Unearned suffering for a just cause is redemptive because it can educate and win the hearts of adversaries and the public. This understanding empowers the nonviolence practitioner to accept suffering without retaliation, so as to advance the victory of a just cause.

  5. Nonviolence is rooted in unconditional love instead of hate. By recognizing that all life is interrelated, nonviolence resists violence of the spirit as well as of the body.

  6. Faith in the ultimate triumph of justice empowers the nonviolence practitioner to endure suffering and defeat as temporary phenomena, knowing that justice will prevail because God is just and the universe is on the side of justice.

  We have always coupled these Six Principles of Nonviolence with the Kingian Six Steps of Nonviolence:

  1. Information gathering. Gather as much data as possible about the problem and the conflict from all sides.

  2. Educate the community about the information we have gathered.

  3. Make a personal commitment to solving the problem and resolving the conflict nonviolently, checking motives along the way.

  4. Negotiate. Meet with the opposition, discuss differences, and try to come to a win-win resolution. If negotiations fail, only then do we go to step five.

  5. Direct action. Direct action can take the form of economic withdrawal, such as boycotts or picketing, or marches, protests, or other types of demonstrations.

  6. Reconciliation. The goal is to reestablish community and, ultimately, to create the Beloved Community, about which people have heard me talk so often.

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  I AM SO proud of the ongoing education and training in nonviolence that is the heart of the King Center’s work.