My Life, My Love, My Legacy

by Coretta Scott King

  His people got back to me, telling me that I could make a presentation to the platform committee, which was like sentencing me to Siberia. I decided that, instead, I would put together a five-minute statement and have my deputy read it into the record at the convention, something that scores of organizations were doing. But even that token gesture was not honored. No time was allotted for my statement.

  Bush sent word back to me, however. “Although I can’t grant your request, I would be pleased if I could welcome you and be your host to the convention. You’d be our special guest.”

  I dreaded every minute of it, but I felt I had to go. I worried because I knew that I would have a lot of explaining to do, and I wasn’t sure that people would understand my gesture as an attempt to move above party politics for the good of the country.

  In the meantime, Bush let his staff know that he wanted me to sit in a special place at the convention, which I did. An aide gestured for me to move to a phone where Bush could talk to me. When I got up, I saw that the phone was right next to Barbara Bush, who had been gracious to me in our few encounters. She reached out to me and said, “Coretta, I really appreciate your coming, and I hope you’re not embarrassed by being here.”

  Trying to put her at ease, I said, “Oh, no, no.”

  When I finished talking to her husband and got ready to move back to my seat, she urged, “Don’t move. Just sit here.”

  There I was stuck. The cameras were right on me and Barbara Bush. The national television audience saw all of it. When I got back to Atlanta, I found there’d been a barrage of calls into my office, most of them angry. Some people were even in tears. Others felt betrayed, afraid that I was going to jump ship and work for the Republicans, as some of Martin’s cohorts had already done.

  It took a lot of explaining, and I am still not sure that many people understood my gesture. Personally, I listened to the speeches at the Republican National Convention, and it was very hard for me to keep a straight face. I didn’t agree with much that was being said. It was a very hard experience for me.

  I decided then and there that although I would continue attending both Democratic and Republican conventions, I would not make any more endorsements. I had more understanding now of why Martin never publicly endorsed candidates. In August 1988, I sent a statement to the press that began:

  On many occasions over the past twenty years, I have been asked by friends seeking high political office in the United States for my endorsement. As a matter of conscience, I have endorsed a few candidates because of the consistency of their lives, values, and philosophy with the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. However, I have always believed that it is my mission in life to perpetuate his dream. His dream pictures a world free from racism, poverty, and free from war and violence.

  This dream is non-partisan. This dream transcends politics and political parties. I believe it is my job to keep the dream before this nation and its leaders. The leaders of our nation are both Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative. It is for this reason that I am not endorsing candidates for public office. I am not endorsing one party over another. A non-partisan position is more consistent with the spirit of nonviolence, which can help build bridges of hope and trust. A non-partisan position can more effectively bring the diverse peoples of this nation together to end racism, poverty, and war.

  For forty years, I had been working in the political system, attempting to make things better for those without a vote or a voice. I may have decided to work differently, but I was not going to stop working.

  NINETEEN

  Injustice Anywhere Is a Threat to Justice Everywhere

  I NOW KNOW that all my life there has been a trajectory, a jagged path connecting me from Nowhere USA to the front door of the World House. When I was a teenager sitting on my porch bench in Marion, Alabama, in the still of the night, with no sound but the crackling of pine cones, I would sometimes look at the moon and wonder what was on the other side. I would also wonder about our big world itself and all the other kinds of people out there somewhere. I knew that one day I would be part of something larger.

  My early yearning was for the better and the greater, for the kinder and the more graceful; it was for the opposite of what I saw in the white people I grew up around, those men and women who looked at me with hate and spite, as if I had committed a crime just by being born black. I had experienced meanness, but I yearned for kindness. I wanted to be part of whatever would bring peace, love, and fairness to wherever I would find myself.

  Working with Martin brought me nearer to becoming a citizen of the Beloved Community of which I dreamed, and the King Center allowed me to advance those efforts, even on an international stage. I had always seen the work we were doing in the movement as part of a global human rights struggle, and I identified with all suffering people around the world, no matter what color they were. In the end, I really consider myself a human rights activist.

  One particularly meaningful and exciting human rights opportunity came in 1977, when President Jimmy Carter appointed me a public delegate to the Thirty-Second General Assembly of the United Nations. I would wager most people have never heard of a UN public delegate. Each year, a few Americans are appointed to these posts by the president. I served with actors Robert Redford and Paul Newman, and with W. Averell Harriman, the former governor of New York. From my vantage point, as a black person born into second-class citizenship and as a woman born into third-class citizenship, the chance to occupy a first-class seat with a window to the world left me both awed and humbled. And my UN role allowed me to expand the message of nonviolence and human rights, to form relationships with world leaders, and to deepen my calling to the World House.

  On March 17, 1977, I was intensely proud to be seated directly behind my dear friend Andy Young, who was then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, when President Carter, one of the first U.S. presidents to make human rights the center of his foreign policy, addressed the UN General Assembly. As expected, President Carter spoke about the major challenge of reducing the staggering arms race. “The Soviet Union and the United States have accumulated thousands of nuclear weapons,” he told the assembly. “Our two nations now have five times more missile warheads than we had just eight years ago. But we are not five times more secure. On the contrary, the arms race has only increased the risk of conflict.” Somewhat less expected, however, was Carter’s emphasis on human rights; he called on the body to commit itself to the peace and the well-being of “every individual, no matter how weak, no matter how poor.”

  He refused to continue overlooking the human rights abuses of our allies, which had been the custom. He was also credited with ending more than thirty years of U.S. political and military support for one of Latin America’s most abusive leaders, President Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua. After too many years of Richard Nixon, it seemed to me that our country was finally preparing to practice at home some of the democratic values we professed to others around the world—as well as moving human rights from the sidelines of foreign policy to the front row. It was amazing to be at the United Nations at that time.

  I suppose this meant so much to me personally because many of those around me were criticizing me for not focusing solely on racism and civil rights at a time when I saw the opportunity, the moral imperative even, to advocate for a variety of issues: global warming, famine, nuclear proliferation, peace in the Middle East, terrorism, drug cartels, gun trafficking, apartheid, gender equality, ending violence against women and girls, and the invasion or occupation of other countries.

  At the United Nations, Andy and I seized every chance to insert nonviolent alternatives into the unfeeling talk of militarism. We put human faces on collateral damage and maintained our stance that poverty was one of the dire consequences of budgets heavily larded with weaponry. We called attention to the ways in which ethnicity and race contributed to disparities in the dispensation of funds for refugees. It seemed that the darker the populace, the fewer th
e resources made available and the slower the distribution of those resources.

  I was a nonvoting delegate in the United Nations; however, it was my job to build healthy, positive relationships wherever I could. How well I understood that so much is accomplished through informal relationships! Wherever and whenever there was an opportunity, I listened, and I spoke out about the value of treating every life with human dignity and respect. I found that I could carry the message of human rights to the Russians, the Israelis, the Greeks, the Iranians, the Cambodians, and whomever else I met in the hallways or spoke to at luncheons and over dinner. If you get to know people and they come to like you, you can influence them. Even with the ongoing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, Andy and I made friends. I remember going to a dinner with the Soviet delegation at which Andy teased them that they looked like Harvard grads: they spoke very good English and looked very American. We would all joke back and forth in this manner, despite the wider political pressures. Our delegation, like all the other delegations, had only one vote. But we had moral persuasion, and I know that counted for so much.

  While I felt good about the idea of the United Nations as a deliberative body with at least the stated goals of peacekeeping, many of our government officials and bureaucrats, especially the Republicans, did not share my view and did not want to fund the UN or its mission. I always disagreed with their assessment. Our involvement in the UN places the United States within the only international forum that currently exists for the consistent promotion of ideals guided by our embrace of liberty, democracy, equality, individual rights, and free market economics. It also allows us to listen to the views of others. In the view of its critics, though, “the U.N. is too messy, too loud, too ineffective; it contains too much of the wrong kinds of colors, religions, and non-religions.” Yet, when I met with the delegates from other countries, I saw their belief that the United Nations was the best hope for peace, and for closing the gap between rich and poor nations.

  Although my UN posting was only three months long, I never really departed. I maintained the relationships I built during my time there, and continued to work for the issues I’d taken on. I also carried with me the lasting impact of getting to share sacred space with Eleanor Roosevelt merely by walking the same halls that she walked and by stepping into the human rights environment she helped create. Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune (the daughter of slaves and the founder of Bethune College, a private school for African Americans in Daytona Beach, Florida) are the two female pioneers I consider to be my greatest role models.

  As a human rights activist, I deeply admired Eleanor’s life. She was called the First Lady of the World, and I identified with the globetrotting humanitarian work she carried out after her husband’s death. Even though she died sixteen years before I walked in the doors of the United Nations, I felt her spirit there. The language we were using, the goals and ideals, the policies that President Carter, Andy, and I employed to champion for human rights—Eleanor laid the framework for all this. She helped create the UN Commission on Human Rights, and as its first chair, she helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the most widely recognized statement of those rights to which every person on our planet is entitled. Its preamble states that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

  While those words sound basic, it is difficult for many nations to accept them. To do so means making monumental changes in their forms of government. Acceptance of that basic preamble requires agreements that allow freedom of speech and religion, pledges to prohibit discrimination and torture, promises to facilitate the right to work, and accordance with the scores of legally binding human rights treaties currently in existence. The Declaration is used as a yardstick to measure governmental performance (or lack thereof) both by UN bodies and nongovernmental organizations. Whether we are talking about oppression, genocide, or sex trafficking, the Declaration guides our path. The hand of Eleanor is forever upon us.

  I also admire Eleanor as a great civil rights leader. When the Daughters of the American Revolution denied Marian Anderson the right to perform at Washington’s Constitution Hall in 1939, Eleanor resigned from the group in protest and helped arrange another concert, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. She also had Anderson perform at a White House dinner. In addition, she arranged the appointment of Mary McLeod Bethune (my two role models were friends) as director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration. To ensure Bethune would be received properly when she visited the White House, the First Lady greeted her at the gate and embraced her. They would walk in arm in arm, smiling.

  I wish I had been there to see those two great women together. When I was working so hard to build the King Center, I thought of how Mary helped raise money for her college by selling pies on the side of the road. Together and apart, Eleanor and Mary left lasting legacies. Their stories inspired me and brought light to my darkest moments.

  Serving in the United Nations was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life, and a role of which I am deeply proud. I had a sense that by being on this world stage, I could grow in my understanding of life-changing issues. Simply being in that environment was inspiring and empowering. Similarly, I was honored when President Carter also appointed me to serve as commissioner of the International Women’s Year Conference. The appointment gave me the opportunity to be a key organizer and participant in the National Women’s Conference, which was empowered by Congress to assess the status of women in the United States and make recommendations to the president and Congress. The event took place from November 18 to 21, 1977, in Houston; it was the first meeting of its type in the United States since the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Approximately two thousand delegates from fifty states and six territories participated in the meeting, which was attended by an additional fifteen to twenty thousand observers.

  Gay rights were without a doubt one of the most contentious issues at the women’s conference that year. Several women’s groups went so far as to advocate for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, and to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman as husband and wife. While I did not issue a formal statement at that time, in private conversations I spoke in defense of gay rights. I could tell from those same private conversations that there was quite a buzz at the conference over my support for gay rights and my conviction that gay and lesbian people and their families deserved to have legal protections, whether by marriage or civil union. But I would not budge.

  I believe unequivocally that discrimination against people because of their sexual orientation is wrong. It is unacceptable in a democracy that protects the human rights of all its citizens. Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and bigotry based on sexual orientation are all forms of intolerance that are unworthy of America as a democracy. If the basic right of one group can be denied, all groups become vulnerable. Those who oppose discrimination and support equal opportunity should stand firm in support of universal human rights. As my husband once said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Furthermore, in the civil rights movement, gays and lesbians could be found on the front line of every campaign led by my husband, from Montgomery to Memphis, and they made many courageous contributions during those long, hard years. At the National Women’s Conference, I refused to turn my back on them, and I will continue to appeal to state legislatures and the federal government, to ensure civil rights protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation.

  In 1993, I made a strong stand for gay rights, speaking out firmly against discrimination in the armed services by writing a letter to the U.S. Congress on this matter. I compared the arguments for banning gay people from military service to similar arguments made against black people. When military leaders said that they themselves were not prejudiced, but were concerned about what “others” might think, I pointed out that this was not very different from businesses that cited “custome
r” preference as justification for their refusal to hire African Americans to work in their stores.

  Another issue for which I was an enthusiastic champion was ending apartheid in South Africa.

  * * *

  FOLLOWING THE SUCCESS of the Montgomery Bus Boycott back in 1955, other boycotts had spread to southern cities in the United States, such as Birmingham and Tallahassee. Much to our surprise, however, in 1957, blacks also launched a bus boycott in Johannesburg, South Africa, in an effort to call attention to their plight and show solidarity with our movement. That protest shook us up. It made us focus our attention on how brutally the white Afrikaners in South Africa were treating those they classified as black and colored. We recoiled at the news of the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, in which Afrikaner police shot at two hundred blacks, killing sixty-nine of them, during a peaceful protest against unfair “pass laws,” which were designed to keep the black and colored populations segregated.

  The greatest apartheid-era catastrophe, however, and the one that galvanized the world’s attention and fueled the movement to boycott companies supporting apartheid, was the one that happened on June 16, 1976, the year before Carter sent me to the United Nations. That June, students were protesting the government closure of many of their schools, and resisting an official policy that required them to be taught only in Afrikaans, the language of the Afrikaners, which most blacks did not speak. As part of this protest, the students organized a march in Soweto. More than 20,000 students turned up to the march, followed closely by the police. Tensions mounted between the blacks and the police. Angered by their plight, the children taunted the police, who responded with tear gas and then with live ammunition. They shot round after round. Children of all ages were gunned down, 360 children in all. Reports showed haunting images of small children, little children like Hector Pieterson, swatted down and killed without thought, like they had no more worth than pesky mosquitoes.