“Maynard,” I countered, “you are the number one citizen of this city and it would be appropriate for you to do this.” He still couldn’t take the lead, so I turned to Jesse Hill, my board chairman, and asked him to start raising the funds needed to bring in Nelson and his wife.
In the meantime, I went off to South Africa and Zambia, where I worked to convince the ANC and others how important it was for the Mandelas to come to Atlanta. We also needed to raise a few hundred thousand dollars, which was difficult; white people in Atlanta were not eager to raise funds for the ANC, which many associated with communism. So I went to Coca-Cola. I had a very good relationship with Donald Keough, the president and chief operating officer. He told me that he found the cause appropriate and was happy to support us in any way he could, but he feared a backlash. He didn’t think it was wise to be publicly identified with the ANC, but he was happy to support us anonymously.
Then, suddenly, the positive flow was interrupted.
Randall Robinson apparently got wind of our plans. If Coca-Cola was involved, he said, his group was going to boycott the company. In other words, he was going to encourage the ANC not to allow the Mandelas to come to Atlanta.
Soon, we began to hear rumors that the Nelson Mandela event had been canceled. I first heard this from Harry Belafonte. He told me it was Randall’s doing. And he said he’d told Randall, “You have to be out of your mind. We can’t let this happen.” Harry and I pushed back, and managed to get the Mandela trip rescheduled. However, the back-and-forth had tired Nelson out, and some of his activities had to be curtailed. He was just overwhelmed. And our staff was unnecessarily overwhelmed. What was so disconcerting was that Randall Robinson had apparently urged this boycott; I heard that over and over, from many trusted sources.
In any event, a few months later, the Mandelas visited us at the King Center as part of their tour of Canada, the United States, and Europe. I, along with Mayor Jackson, Georgia governor Joe Frank Harris, and the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, then president of the SCLC, met the Mandelas’ chartered jet when it landed at Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport. We greeted them as they deplaned and walked down a red carpet to their waiting armored limousine.
On the evening of June 27, 1990, about fifty thousand people crammed into Georgia Tech’s Bobby Dodd Stadium at historic Grant Field to hear Nelson speak. It was my pleasure to introduce him. In his speech, he linked the struggles of the poor and powerless around the world to the great freedom expressions of the American civil rights era under Dr. King, and he thanked the Center’s board and staff for their support “in their just cause for freedom and opportunity in a one-person, one-vote democracy South Africa.”
Before his address, he pulled up to our Center, which he called the home of the civil rights movement, through a huge cadre of police cars blocking the street to allow the arrival of his entourage. He met privately with my family and staff and took part in ceremonies, during which we presented him with the King Center’s International Freedom Award for 1990. He also laid a wreath at my husband’s crypt.
The reaction to the visit by Steve Klein, the King Center’s public relations person, summed up the event for many. “When he came through the door, everyone’s jaw dropped,” Klein said. “The Center has been visited by heads of states, prime ministers, presidents, kings and queens. But those visits didn’t measure up to Mandela’s. He was bigger than royalty. Mandela is somebody who actually earned the tremendous respect of people all over the world. He didn’t inherit it.”
My daughter Bernice put it this way: “Outside of Jesus Christ and my parents, he is the one. He had such a very calm spirit, very dignified … a forgiving spirit. It was so comforting for me to see him.”
As I witnessed the enthusiastic outpouring of support from Americans of all races, creeds, and national origins who flocked to greet this world citizen everywhere he traveled, it felt like further proof that my husband was correct when he reminded his supporters that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
* * *
IN 1992, TWO years after Nelson’s visit, the King Center became directly involved in South Africa in advance of that nation’s first truly democratic national elections. The U.S. State Department gave the Center a grant to create a curriculum and to train South African activists in the principles of Martin’s nonviolence philosophy. We were told that our help was needed to counter what State Department officials feared would be riots and murders when those first free elections were held.
It was widely assumed that the climate was ripe for violent confrontation on many fronts. In South Africa, 35 million black Africans had suffered excruciating violence under white rule, represented by 4.3 million white Afrikaners. We understood the possibility of violence both from people who were being forced to give up their power and from people who had been birthed in the crucible of violence and oppression. We were notified of horrific acts erupting between the various tribes, all of them arguing over the contents of the new Constitution being drafted and the outcome of the first national election.
When the call came for the Center to participate in the training, we were ready. I had been to the region several times; we knew the terrain would be different, but we also knew that we had shared experiences. As civil rights activists, we had all been on the firing lines of terrorism in America. From personal experience, many King Center staff knew what it felt like to be shot at or wrongly imprisoned, to have their homes firebombed or to be denied the right to vote. We also had a few staff members who had worked in South Africa.
Our three senior trainers, Harold Sims, Dr. Bernard Lafayette, and Charles Alphin Sr., incorporated bits of language that reflected the South African principle of ubuntu (which conveys a fervent belief in respect for human life) into the King Center teaching materials, including into the Center’s six principles of nonviolence.
In South Africa, one great advantage in teaching the principles and the steps was, by good fortune, already having a supportive institution in place there. In the mid-1980s, Rev. Joseph Tshwane, a South African student at the Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, had come to the Center to study Martin’s principles of nonviolence, as scholars and students from all over the world continue to do. He was a charismatic figure and a recording artist, affiliated with a Presbyterian church. He had asked us for permission to establish the King-Luthuli Transformation Centre in Johannesburg. After consulting with local leaders in South Africa, including Bishop Desmond Tutu, the King Center helped Tshwane found the King-Luthuli Transformation Centre in 1987. Tshwane understood how to integrate Kingian principles with the ubuntu respect for life. In 1992, when the peace-training preparations for the 1994 election began, the preexistence of the Transformation Centre helped us avoid the appearance of imposing a Western concept on South Africa’s people.
The combined ideologies of the King Center and the Transformation Centre and our shared emphasis on nonpartisanship also helped us avoid trouble from the heated divisions that had flared up between Mandela’s party, the ANC, which was primarily Xhosa, and the primarily Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party, headed by the powerful chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. So, as the unprecedented election, the first in which all South African citizens could vote, neared, seeds of nonviolence were planted, but we were aware that seeds of violence were plenteous as well. Alarming news headlines in papers such as the London Daily Mail predicted a race war, fueled by right-wing whites. Reports of potential all-out violence between the ANC and the Zulus also increased. Chief Buthelezi warned his followers to brace for violence and even death. Townships around the country were rife with violence. The ANC’s headquarters in the Shell House in Johannesburg were bombed in April 1994, two days before the election. Nine people died, and the Zulus were blamed for this attack. Meanwhile, ANC guards had reportedly shot eight demonstrators.
Our staff, working alongside South African activists, were armed with little more than their Bibles and their faith that a peac
eful transition was not only necessary but achievable. All around us, emergency plans were being made. There was a scheme in place to airlift up to 350,000 Britons out of South Africa should the country slide into chaos. Shortly before the election, our State Department recommended that all American workers leave South Africa, because of the virtual certainty that violence would overwhelm the country. Nevertheless, our small staff persevered.
In an effort to maintain our nonpartisan image with the different groups, our trainers wore aprons with the King Center emblem embossed on the front and the King-Luthuli emblem on the back. These men and women might have been killed if they had appeared to be siding with the wrong faction.
As our aides traveled through the countryside, South African police often searched their automobiles for materials that could be construed as propaganda to benefit one side or the other—materials we did not carry. Despite the potential for violence, our methods were so successful that the U.S. State Department rescinded its prior order for all groups to leave South Africa a week before the election.
Charles Alphin Sr. told us that we ended up being the only American group allowed to stay. We had helped train more than three hundred thousand people to do something they had never done before: participate in a truly democratic election.
A great example of how far South Africa had come in terms of race relations was the awarding of the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize to F. W. de Klerk, the white former president of South Africa, and Mandela. They shared the honor for their work in ending apartheid. De Klerk was the seventh and last president of the apartheid era. When he took office in 1989, he released Mandela from prison the next year and lifted a ban on the ANC that had been in place since shortly after the Soweto riots in 1976.
In 1994, not a lot of activists in or out of South Africa had put as much faith in a peaceful outcome as I had. But shortly after Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, I heard white Afrikaners say that they expected blacks to start shooting whites, and they were shocked when this did not happen. And in another chapter of the same story, after the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the United States, these men, women, and children did not respond to the brutalities of their imprisonment with violence toward their former masters. That, too, is amazing. It is God’s work, and it’s important for me to say that.
That, overall, peace was maintained in South Africa in April 1994 is also a credit to Nelson Mandela. He set the tone of calm and stability by the sheer force of his personality and the power of his negotiating skills. Rather than calling for anger or revenge, Nelson’s philosophy, which so closely paralleled Martin’s, emphasized reconciliation between all people. If he could emerge from twenty-seven years of imprisonment and forgive his captors, it seemed possible for his supporters to do likewise.
On April 27, 1994, Nelson and the African National Congress won the election with 62 percent of the vote; Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party earned about 10 percent.
On May 9, 1994, news photographers captured my jubilation as I danced the toi-toi with Nelson at the Carlton Hotel in Johannesburg, celebrating his victory. As I glanced over my shoulder, I saw even uniformed police officers dancing. On that remarkable evening, I listened joyfully as Nelson praised Martin for helping provide the climate, and the King Center for helping train thousands of participants in the tactics of nonviolence. Nelson made the transition from twenty-seven years of imprisonment to his role as leader of his nation—all without massive bloodshed.
As I stood beside Nelson, I thought of how Martin had once said he was prepared to die to see his dream of a society in which blacks and whites were equal become a reality. And there we were, Nelson and I, joined in an embrace of victory. This great freedom fighter lifted my hand as we danced alongside the thousands of jubilant celebrants. We were two symbols of the rich harvest of the long-suffering, yet fruitful, revolution on the part of the dispossessed, an uprising that miraculously changed the oppressors as well as their oppressed. Nelson’s election was one of the largest nonviolent democratic transitions of the twentieth century. Few thought they would ever witness the patient and peaceful assembly of millions of South Africans, who queued in lines that extended for miles to vote, braving the threat of bombs planted by those still living out the emotional scars of apartheid.
I personally felt a sense of unapologetic joy on that night. I saw God’s timing in this miraculous historical breakthrough. I had prophesied that divine intervention could not only save but also redeem South Africa. The Holy Spirit works through people. You do all you can, and then God takes over. He creates the breakthroughs in our lives that make these kinds of miraculous historical events eminently possible. When God decides a change is coming, He uses people who will be obedient to His purpose and will. Then miraculous things begin to happen. That election was a powerful vindication of nonviolent resistance and its message, so often stated by Martin: “We must either learn to live together as brothers or we perish together as fools.”
* * *
SADLY, DURING THE years we were working on peacekeeping in South Africa, Jesse Jackson and several of the men who had been my husband’s top aides were, once again, involved in opposing the Center’s efforts in the United States. In past years, I had been wounded by Jesse’s self-serving moves; then in 1990, the year Nelson was freed from prison, I felt that Randall Robinson, leader of TransAfrica, and others were putting their interests in the way of our doing our best work in support of those we were called to serve. These critics, sometimes publicly, sometimes secretly, stated that it was wrong for the King Center to be involved at all in South Africa; they argued that we should stick to civil rights. I felt these criticisms were a painful burden, especially as some of these critics had worked closely with my husband. Although I was carrying out the same mission as Martin, they now seemed to be working just as hard against me as they had worked with him. But as the biblical story of Joseph demonstrates, what some mean for evil, God will turn around for our good.
Why am I talking about the sordid side of leadership now? Because future leaders need to know how to work together as a team, and how to avoid infighting, which hurts many and helps no one. Overall, our efforts on civil rights would be more effective if personalities, inflated egos, turf issues, and jealousies could be set aside for the bigger picture. How much more could be accomplished if we could work together rather than against each other?
Yet, despite the problems I’ve had, I have no hard feelings toward Randall or Jesse. In fact, in 1993, I presented the Reverend Jackson with the Martin Luther King, Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize, the Center’s highest award. Jesse has made many valuable contributions to our country. No matter what has happened to me personally, the cause is greater than any individual. All people have human frailties. Certainly, I am no exception. In all honesty, I hurt like any human being, but I have fought very hard not to allow my private wounds to blot out the good I see in others.
I took the same approach with Ralph Abernathy, who died of a heart attack shortly before Nelson Mandela’s historic visit to the United States and to the King Center. People often ask me how I felt about the negative accusations he made in his autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, where he claimed that my husband slapped around a spurned lover and then left his room to stay with another woman until the wee hours of the morning the night before he was killed.
If Ralph were to be believed, on the evening of April 2, 1968, after Martin, a deeply religious man, made one of the most prophetic and anointed sermons of his lifetime, “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top,” he descended from the pulpit and engaged in this sordid behavior. First of all, I know my husband, and this would have been totally out of character for him. I also had a conversation with Martin earlier that evening. And although I do not need to rely on any of Martin’s aides to substantiate or vouch for his whereabouts, not one of them said they saw or heard anything like what Ralph alleges occurred.
These kinds of revelations were mind-boggling, especially comin
g from Ralph, my husband’s closest confidant, counselor, and cell mate. They ate and drank together. They marched side by side during the protests that brought down Jim Crow segregation in the South. When my husband was shot down, it was Ralph who cradled him in his arms as the blood seethed from his wounds. All this makes Ralph’s incredible falsehood about his best friend especially disturbing.
Many people have asked me to react to Ralph’s claim. Before now, I could not divulge my deeper feelings. I issued a very guarded statement to the news media, but what I really felt was this: I knew Ralph had run into financial difficulty. Scandal sells books; fidelity does not. Bad news about the unsavory behavior of a good man is a better page-turner than anything I have to say about my husband, a man who felt so guilty about the smallest infraction or sin that he could not carry the weight of it without telling me. As his wife, I know my husband. If Martin had an affair, I would have known it. I don’t have one instance of proof of Martin’s infidelity. Not one. The fact that Ralph said those things about Martin does not make them true.
I was in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1990, celebrating that country’s tenth anniversary of independence, when I learned that Ralph had died on April 17 in Atlanta. I issued a statement, which in part read, “When our home was bombed and our lives were threatened, he was there. His strength as a tactician and a counselor to Martin during our struggle has been eloquently recorded in Martin’s own writings and in the annals of the American civil rights movement.” I hurried back for the homegoing, which was held at West Hunter Street Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Ralph had served for many years as pastor.
My Life, My Love, My Legacy Page 30