My Life, My Love, My Legacy

by Coretta Scott King

  Will there ever be a true reconciliation out of conflict and violence through nonviolent means?

  Will the disparities between rich and poor no longer exist and will each person have, as Martin wanted, “Three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits?”

  Will the human family lead to the realization of the Beloved Community?

  Will people achieve peace within themselves, each other, their families, their communities, their nations?

  I still believe, as I said once to an interviewer at Ebony magazine, that “because of so many ongoing social ills and injustices, another movement is inevitable. It is interesting how a movement is triggered at a certain moment in history. I can’t help but believe that at some time in the not-too-distant future, there is going to be another movement to change these systemic conditions of poverty, injustice, and violence in people’s lives. That is where we’ve got to go, and it is going to be a struggle.”

  When that struggle comes, those who have been trained in Kingian nonviolence will be ready.

  * * *

  ALL THOSE YEARS we were building the King Center and revitalizing Sweet Auburn, I challenged myself and the Center board and staff to extend our ideals and be Martin’s voice in action. I never stopped speaking out for justice outside Atlanta’s city limits as well as within them, making hundreds of speeches, engaging with blacks, women, the physically challenged, gays, and poor and deprived children. I used my nationally syndicated newspaper column and my thrice-weekly show on CNN to help give voice to my husband’s vision.

  In 1979, the Center’s board of directors drew up its first legislative agenda, which included calling for implementation of the Humphrey–Hawkins Full Employment Act, for full voting rights for the District of Columbia, for the Martin Luther King Jr. birthday bill, for the Equal Rights Amendment, and for ratification of the UN human rights covenants.

  By 1984, the year French president François Mitterrand visited, the King Center had already become an international institution, a World House where people of disparate ideologies could embrace a common ideology of peace. Distinguished international visitors included Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega, Prime Minister Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, the King and Queen of Nepal, and prime ministers, Cabinet-level ministers, and official delegations from Canada, England, India, Japan, Kenya, Liberia, Romania, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, the Soviet Union, West Africa, and West Germany, to name a few.

  And in 1986 during the first national holiday, the King Center, in conjunction with Ebenezer Baptist Church, where I worship, hosted the National Conference Against Apartheid, which was attended by a powerful list of religious leaders (from Rev. Joseph Lowery, then head of the SCLC, to Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa), ambassadors from several nations, U.S. State Department officials, presidents of trade unions and colleges, and heads of prominent South African and international organizations, among others. The national march and parade following the conference were attended by thousands, including former president Jimmy Carter, who was honorary grand marshal. Mrs. Rosa Parks and Peter V. Ueberroth, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, were grand marshals. The U.S. Air Force provided a “Fly Over Tribute” to Martin.

  Also, from the beginning, the Center was a site for important commemorations and celebrations that helped keep Martin’s message alive.

  Every year, starting in 1973, the King Center presented the Martin Luther King, Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize to a world citizen who embodied and emulated Martin’s spirit and mission. Andrew Young, Cesar Chavez, Rep. John Lewis, Rep. Joseph Lowery, Randolph Blackwell, Benjamin Mays, Stanley Levison, Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda, President Jimmy Carter, Rosa Parks, former Atlanta mayor Ivan Allen, Harry Belafonte, Martin Luther King Sr., Sir Richard Attenborough, President Corazon Aquino of the Philippines, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson all received the prize, and in 1990 we presented the award to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last general secretary of the Soviet Union, who brought about massive economic, social, and political changes and helped bring an end to both the Soviet Union and the Cold War.

  One of the Center’s commemorations of which I am most proud occurred in 1988. I had long been concerned about the lack of proper recognition given to the women who participated in the civil rights movement. The King Center organized a conference to address the issue, and was able to get the Division of Continuing Education of Georgia State University to sponsor it with us. This conference, entitled Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, was one of the most historic events held on the issue. Some two hundred women from diverse racial, cultural, economic, and professional backgrounds came together to discuss new directions and a future agenda for women. We honored Rosa Parks at the conference on the occasion of her seventy-fifth birthday, acknowledging her contributions with a special exhibit at the Center and hailing her as the “Mother of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.” A conference room in Freedom Hall was dedicated in her honor. In conjunction with the conference, I established a Trailblazers and Torchbearers advisory board, which included Juanita Abernathy, Joan Baez, Daisy Bates, Mary Frances Berry, Unita Blackwell, Xernona Clayton-Brady, Marian Wright Edelman, Christine Farris, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Rosa Parks, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Modjeska Simkins, Maxine Waters, and Jean Young.

  Even though I acknowledge and celebrate all these and many more King Center milestones and other successes, I was humbled and surprised when a reporter looking for a comparison asked me to name another African American woman who had built an institution from the ground up that was hailed internationally as a tourist destination. I hadn’t thought of my accomplishment in those terms, and the truth is that contributions of all kinds came to the King Center, from labor, civil, and human rights groups; from arts communities, fraternities, and sororities; from prayer warriors and people of faith from around the globe; from corporations large and small; from legislative leaders across the nation, both Democrats and Republicans; and from international diplomatic corps, U.S. presidents, and heads of state from around the world.

  The King Center is a mecca for spiritual growth and activism, safeguarding and championing Martin’s legacy to all nations. It has spurred redevelopment in Atlanta, creating a citadel of diversity that helped attract the 1996 Summer Olympics and that continues to draw visitors from around the globe. I never expected to see so many people close to me who wanted this child of mine stillborn. Nevertheless, out of much pain and with much prayer, the King Center came forth. As with my flesh-and-blood children, I am a proud parent.

  In the decade after Martin’s death, it was of utmost importance to me to put my children first, to make sure they knew how special and loved they were. I could see the difference that this was making almost daily. I remember Martin III telling me, “Mama, a kid can live without a father, but no kid can make it without a mother,” yet all my children knew they had to share me with my fifth child.

  There were times of agony and times of joy, but there are no regrets, especially when I see what the Center means to the world.

  This miraculous Center was conceived in me, and birthed by thousands of midwives—and my other children will finish raising up this sibling of theirs to independent adulthood when I’m gone.

  EIGHTEEN

  We Must Learn to Disagree Without Being Disagreeable

  IN A TRULY democratic society, we would not still need the Voting Rights Act to protect people of color. But we do. Subtle and sophisticated forms of discrimination persist today, including gerrymandering, manipulation of polling hours and locations, and burdensome rules designed to depress minority voting strength. Perhaps the largest group of disenfranchised citizens is the six hundred thousand residents of the District of Columbia, the majority of whom are people of color. Our struggle for voting rights will not be complete as long as the people of the District, who pay taxes and serve our country in the military, do not have voting representation in the House and the Sen
ate.

  So, when all is said and done, am I satisfied with the progress made since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act?

  No. Not yet.

  But by the early 1970s, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which so many blacks and whites in the civil rights movement marched, bled, and died for, was opening the gates of political empowerment for a historically disenfranchised people. Many of our ancestors, including my parents and grandparents, were disqualified from voting either by poll taxes and grandfather clauses or by the terrifying specter of armed vigilantes. Here was a new day. Millions of blacks in the South were finally citizens of the land their ancestors had helped build through the inhumane institution of slavery.

  Voters still had to be educated and registered, suits had to be filed to break down intractable obstacles and unethical backroom practices, and worthy candidates had to be found, along with the large sums necessary to back them. For us, voting, a short walk to the ballot box for most Americans, still often seemed as complex as buying a house and being expected to bring our own basement and roof. Step by bloody step, we had to build a system that connected us to the democratic order, an order designed at the birth of the nation to keep black Americans locked out. And my goal at the King Center was to continue the nonviolent flow of the movement so that more and more of those whose race, class, or gender had left them voiceless and invisible would become heard and seen, and would have full access to the American Dream.

  When the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, fewer than 300 blacks held major elected office in the United States. By 1972, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, there were 88 black mayors, 140 judges and magistrates, 13 congressmen, 246 state legislators, 740 city councilmen, and about 675 school board members. Although those estimated 2,000 black elected officials constituted 0.4 percent of the 521,760 elected officials in the United States overall, these numbers were a real step forward for Black Power, which had started from so far behind.

  In 1972, Black Power politics was riding a wave of passion and energy, calling for a crusade to organize around the self-interests of race and for breaking ties with white backroom party bosses, such as Chicago’s mayor Richard Daley, who counted on the black vote to win, but who refused to share resources. Emotionalism, that drumbeat of the masses, was at a peak. “The hands that picked cotton in 1964 will pick a president in 1972,” vowed Jesse Jackson.

  So I waded deep into these waters, and became involved, for the first time ever, in presidential politics. While Martin never endorsed candidates, because he felt that would leave him most free to be critical of both parties when necessary, I had, for years, endorsed candidates in Atlanta and in other local elections, and it had proved to be equal parts empowering and complicated. I had won some political skirmishes, lost some, and was even publicly humiliated several times. But in light of the high stakes in play in 1972, I felt I had no choice but to exert my influence at the highest levels.

  My quandary centered on whom to endorse. For decades, I had been fighting for the right to vote, to elect decent politicians. However, I soon learned that selection, not just election, was the key. Fortunately, we were not bereft of decent choices for the Democratic presidential ticket. Among them were Congressman Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota; Senators Edmund Muskie of Maine and George McGovern of South Dakota, Hubert Humphrey, who had been vice president in the Johnson administration; and Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman in Congress, who made history by entering the race.

  My main focus was ridding our nation of Richard Nixon and his reactionary policies on race, war, and poverty. During his presidency, I had made several trips to the White House to talk to him about civil rights. We weren’t exactly strangers. I first met Nixon in 1957, when Martin and I had traveled to Ghana. Nixon was there as vice president, representing President Eisenhower, and Martin had just been featured on the cover of Time magazine. Nixon had read the cover article, and he complimented Martin. On that occasion, he was funny, witty, and approachable, but Martin never really trusted him, because of the smear campaign Nixon had waged against Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas of California, whom Nixon had falsely targeted as a Communist sympathizer.

  It still stung, too, that Nixon had refused, and then blocked, funds for the King Center. At one point, frustrated by his recalcitrance, I essentially called him out. Everyone who knows me would agree that, in the nonviolent spirit, I go out of my way not to be offensive; nor do I use intemperate language. But I was at a press conference, and the media were asking me questions about what the Nixon administration had done for my husband’s memorial. I answered that Nixon had not done anything, because he was too busy playing to a southern strategy that denounced black people via coded language and negative stereotyping.

  While I didn’t use the exact word racist, by the time I was finished describing Nixon’s uncharitable and discriminatory actions, it was obvious what term best described him. One of my Republican advisers soon got word from the Nixon camp asking that I “please soften” my statements concerning the president.

  In 1972, then, while still trying to figure out whom to endorse, I considered Hubert Humphrey. He was a friend to labor and to the civil rights movement, though he had proven to be wishy-washy on the Vietnam War, which incensed peace activists and did not endear him to me as a candidate. Also, I thought Nixon would easily defeat him.

  Then there was Shirley Chisholm. In 1971 she and I had both appeared at Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity) program in Chicago, on a panel dealing with the criminal justice system, and there, during a lull in the proceedings, she leaned over and filled me in on her planned history-making run for the White House.

  “Oh, that’s wonderful,” I said, trying to be careful to encourage her without promising my endorsement. She certainly was a bold, uncompromising person, and a strong advocate for the people in her congressional district in New York, but I was still assessing the field.

  Much of 1971 had been devoted to male candidates talking about who among them would be the broker for black America. There were several strategies. One involved organizing the estimated twelve hundred black delegates going to the convention in Miami into a single bloc and brokering that bloc for platform concessions for black America. There were several black agendas to which candidates had to pledge themselves to earn the black vote. Most included commitments to appoint black Cabinet members, to consider a black person as running mate, and to put forward plans for national health insurance and full employment.

  The other, rather dramatic strategy for amassing political power was to create a black political party that would put forth its own presidential candidate. This strategy evolved from the call for unity at the National Black Political Convention, held in Gary, Indiana, in March 1972. It was the first time black Americans had held such a gathering in forty-four years. Gary was a majority black city with a newly elected black mayor, Richard Hatcher. More than eight thousand people showed up for the convention, all looking for a way to flex their new political muscle.

  This was where I first met Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, who, years later, would become one of my very best friends. We were on a panel together, and as two women, both of whom had lost their husbands tragically, we instantly identified with each other and greeted one another warmly.

  For many, the call for a separate black political party was the perfect pitch. Many felt that the Democrats were taking blacks for granted, while the Republicans were ignoring them. The idea of a third party, or a third political force, was championed by Rep. John Conyers, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Imamu Amiri Baraka (né LeRoi Jones). At that time, hardly anyone believed that a black third-party candidate could win a national presidential race, but the thinking centered on what man—they were not thinking about women—could become a spoiler by denying either of the two parties a majority in key states that had a significant number of black voters. The men were strategizing among themselves, strutting around like peaco
cks as they argued over which of them would emerge as the top power broker.

  Then, in a surprising move, New York Democratic congresswoman Shirley Chisholm stole the black kingmakers’ thunder by using the convention to announce her own bid for the presidency. Privately, a few of the men condemned her as a pawn of New York mayor John Lindsay, but publicly, they were at a loss for words. They could not afford to openly or publicly attack her; nor could they jump in the race themselves and run against her.

  There was no shortage of private jabs aimed at Chisholm. Once she caught wind of these putdowns, she roared into a meeting room where some of her detractors were gathered and let them have it. “Brothers, please get off my back. I am not here to compete with you or fight you. Use me as an instrument. If I were to tell the whole truth, I would say that not everyone here is fighting to liberate us. Some have been exploiting us.”

  I respected her courage, but I didn’t see how she could win, insulting men like that.

  One night shortly thereafter, Jesse called me. “Shirley’s going to call you; she’s trying to get all her ducks in a row. I advised her that she needs to call on you and Maynard Jackson.” Maynard was then vice mayor of Atlanta, and he would be elected Atlanta’s first black mayor the following year.

  Sure enough, Shirley called. We talked for quite a while. Much of the conversation focused on how smart she was. She said her husband had told her that so many of the men were against her because of her brains. After going on and on, she asked me for my support.

  “At this point,” I told her, “I am not endorsing anyone. I certainly encourage you to run; it’s wonderful. We need more women in politics. I wish you all the best. If I decide to support you, I will get back to you.”

  Not long afterward, and after consulting Andy Young and other advisers, I called Shirley back and explained to her that I would probably go with McGovern because he looked like the strongest candidate and the one who could accomplish my purpose: defeating Nixon. She was calm and understanding.