As we laid Ralph to rest, there were absolutely no hard feelings on my part or on the part of my family. We still had unconditional love for Ralph. Speaking at the funeral, Martin’s sister, Christine King Farris, described “the Ralph I remember is, like a member of our family … Uncle Ralph.” And in the years afterward, I never lost touch with the Abernathy family.
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AS THE KING Center developed, I was able to both dialogue with powerful leaders, including prime ministers and presidents, and participate in protests alongside rank-and-file working people of all races. I met with many great spiritual leaders, too, including Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama, Dorothy Day, and my friend Pastor Robert Schuller, of the Crystal Cathedral. By the mid-eighties, I could more richly appreciate the influence that God had given me to make a difference in the lives of others. It allowed me to pick up a phone and have my calls put through to presidents, queens, princes, mayors, governors, heads of state, and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. These calls enabled me to help somebody, to promote good people, to intervene in situations that were going wrong. I even witnessed the historic handshake between Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman Yasser Arafat at the signing of the Middle East Peace Accords in 1993.
In 1984, in Washington, DC, I met with the ambassadors to the United States from forty African nations; we discussed ways to strengthen economic and diplomatic relations and focus more attention on resolving the issues of poverty and hunger. The meeting was arranged by Raouf Ghoneim, from the Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt, and hosted by G. Toe Washington, ambassador to Washington from the Republic of Liberia.
In 1988, in preparation for the Reagan-Gorbachev talks, I served as head of the U.S. delegation of Women for a Meaningful Summit in Athens, Greece, and in 1990, as the USSR was redefining itself, I was a convener of the Soviet-American Women’s Summit in Washington, DC.
Some of my most unforgettable and remarkable experiences came through meeting various world leaders. Some, such as Indira Gandhi and Corazon Aquino, became my dearest friends. Some of my international interactions, however, are memorable because of the unexpected incidents that occurred. On June 10, 1994, Emperor Akihito of Japan and his wife, Empress Michiko, visited the King Center after lunching with President Jimmy Carter. I think I will always remember that day because of what went awry. For fourteen centuries, Japanese citizens were taught that the emperor was a direct descendant of the sun goddess. Although Akihito’s father, Hirohito, renounced the notion of godhood, even the slightest hint of disrespect is viewed as shockingly unacceptable by the emperor’s countrymen. We knew this, and we knew that, for whatever reason, it was not customary for the emperor to shake hands with people.
Yet when the emperor arrived, Rev. Hosea Williams, one of my husband’s former aides, grabbed his hand and lectured him, saying that he found “Japanese people to be very disrespectful of black Americans.” He loudly challenged the emperor, telling him, “We spend thirteen billion dollars a year on Japanese products. And not a single black American has a Japanese franchise.” The emperor just smiled and nodded. I know he doesn’t speak English very well, so I wasn’t certain he understood. The New York Times, on the other hand, understood very clearly what was happening, and ran an article on it.
On a sadder note, I also responded to the call from my friend Corazon Aquino when her husband was assassinated on August 23, 1983. Corazon and I had met at the United Nations, and we became fast friends. When her husband, Benigno, was killed, I broke away from my trip in Africa to be by her side. Her subsequent rise to the presidency of the Philippines was quite spectacular. She considered herself to be an ordinary housewife, but when her husband was killed, Corazon, usually attired in her signature yellow dresses, led a people’s revolution that in 1986 toppled the twenty-one-year authoritarian rule of President Ferdinand Marcos and restored democracy to the Philippines. She became the first female president in Asia. Over the years, we enjoyed teasing each other about our shared nickname. Her formal name is Maria Corazon Sumulong Cojuangco Aquino, but she was called Cory. My husband and a few close friends always called me Corrie.
Another one of my closest friends was Indira Gandhi, the first female prime minister of India and one of the first women elected to lead her country in the modern era. She remained in office close to twelve years, which set a record. I first met her when Martin and I toured India in 1957 and visited with her father, then the prime minister. Indira was serving as her father’s chief of staff. Later, when she became prime minister, I returned to India to accept the Nehru Award for Outstanding International Leadership from her.
Indira was elected in January 1966. At that time, as the world’s second-most-populous nation, India had 1.2 billion people. In 1982, following the world premiere of Sir Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi, CBS (which had produced the televised version) paid my expenses so that I might attend a reception at Indira’s home. As usual, she was dressed in an elegant handwoven sari. Unlike the palatial estate of her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira’s home was very modest, a place where even the very poor would feel comfortable visiting. In fact, she had become a champion of the poor, and had found acclaim as the leader of India’s Green Revolution. Her administration took on the problem of serious food shortages, which affected mainly the extremely poor Sikh farmers of the Punjab region, increasing crop diversification and food exports as a way out of the problem. Indira’s strategy opened up new job opportunities as well. During my visit, we talked about our hopes for ending the arms race, and she confided in me her worries about a growing extremist, separatist Sikh movement in India, which was threatening to divide the nation. In our public addresses, Indira and I both called vigorously for an end to the Vietnam War. Through the United Nations, in her capacity as a leader of the nonaligned nations, and through my syndicated columns, press conferences, and talks with the Nixon administration, we pressed our antiwar message. We also garnered criticism at the highest levels for doing so.
By watching her close-up, I came to understand some of the strengths and perils of women at the top, particularly the ways that women can be condemned for doing exactly the same things for which their male predecessors are praised. On the brighter side, as early as the 1950s (and partially because of Mahatma Gandhi’s commitment to the advancement of women), I saw how some Indian women held much higher positions than women at home. There were women in Parliament; in 1959, even the chief justice of India’s Supreme Court was a woman. Imagine that! I know that, someday, women in the United States will lead our country, not only in the highest court of the land but at the top, as president.
On October 31, 1984, I received the heartbreaking call that I think she had been trying to warn me about. Indira had been assassinated. It was so agonizing, so shocking. According to reports, her trusted bodyguard, who was a Sikh, pulled out a .38 revolver and shot her at point-blank range. Another bodyguard, also a Sikh, then took out an automatic weapon and fired thirty rounds into her body. She died on the way to the hospital.
Immediately, I thought about how crazy these assassinations were. I believe firmly that people at the highest levels must plot and plan such things. I just can’t believe that someone’s own bodyguard would do such a thing unless he or she had been paid to do it. To make matters even more horrible, years later, on May 21, 1991, Indira’s son Rajiv, who’d followed in her footsteps as India’s prime minister and was such a beautiful person, was also assassinated.
Before Indira’s death, however, she helped us establish a permanent memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, whose birthday we celebrated annually at the King Center on October 2. We have a Gandhi Room in our Freedom Hall, which contained his sandals, his eyeglasses, his walking cane, one of his prayer rugs, and a very nice picture of him. Indira personally ensured our receipt of many of his original possessions.
I miss my friend. She was such a brave soul.
The American civil rights movement and the King Center helped provide the leadership and inspiration as well as the training i
n strategy, tactics, and the moral capacities of nonviolence that captivated nations from Europe to Asia, from Africa to Central America. As early as 1989, we saw free elections in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Brazil, and Namibia, Africa’s last colony. We witnessed hundreds of thousands of people marching through the streets of Berlin and Beijing, Budapest and Pretoria, Moscow, Warsaw, and Prague, singing “We Shall Overcome” in a host of languages. They sang in Bantu and German, Tagalog and Polish, sang the same song of freedom we once sang in the streets of Birmingham, Montgomery, and Little Rock. The U.S. Information Agency published and distributed materials on the King Center in the Russian language throughout the Soviet Union.
When Daddy King, Mama King, and my sister-in-law Christine King Farris visited Hungary in 1978, they found no fewer than five churches named after Martin. The Solidarity movement in Poland also used the documentary Montgomery to Memphis, which we use as a nonviolence training film at the Center.
Students in the Chinese Freedom Movement were photographed in news magazines carrying signs and wearing T-shirts that displayed the words “We Shall Overcome.” Martin often challenged world leaders to create a new foreign policy, one that would replace the evils of racism, poverty, and militarism with a new set of values dependent on moral power rather than military might.
Shortly before his assassination, Martin had strongly urged the institutionalizing and internationalizing of our nonviolent strategies. He felt they were vitally needed to continue the flow of democratic movements around the world. And without a doubt, institutionalizing and internationalizing nonviolence is our goal at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.
We walk and work where Martin would have walked and worked if he had been allowed to live. As we continue expanding the cause from civil to human rights, we are committed to keeping alive Martin’s dream of nonviolent global policies that, whenever possible, choose diplomacy over war and always show respect for human lives over hate, revenge, and bitterness.
TWENTY
Happy Birthday, Martin
AS YOU MIGHT have noticed by now, I can be a very determined woman. When I have put my mind to something, with hard work and God’s grace, it has usually come to pass. Perhaps nowhere has this process been more obvious and more useful than in my efforts to establish Martin’s birthday as a national holiday, observed now in all fifty states and also in more than one hundred nations. Only a few close friends and religious leaders believed this holiday would ever happen, but I never really doubted. I understand that sometimes a hard task simply requires that one person is particularly chosen to hear the charge, the divine calling, and to step out on faith. The people, the resources, the strategy will follow. That’s what happened with me and the King holiday.
At the heart of things, we who believed in the King holiday had to have a vision. We also had to attract the best minds and map out a blueprint. The vision and the planning took time, and training. Many of the skills I used were ones I’d never even thought of developing until I had to use them. I learned how to lobby members of Congress. I organized a coalition of 750 political, religious, labor, and civil rights groups. I also had to experience failure—or results that were less than my expectations—and this failure taught me more about winning than many of the ventures I had previously labeled a success.
Often when writers or commentators speak about the holiday, it is said in a short sentence or a fleeting breath. There’s no depth to it; no recognition of the hard work and the miracles it took for the holiday to come into being; no attempt to fully convey and do justice to the process or to the thousands of people around the world who directly involved themselves, providing their time, talent, and funds to help. Nor does any mention of the holiday properly demonstrate how God can use anybody to accomplish the most impossible feats.
God certainly used me.
John Conyers, a Democratic congressman from Michigan, first introduced a bill to establish Martin’s January 15 birthday as a federal holiday in April 1968, just four days after Martin was assassinated, but the road to achieving passage of that bill was fifteen long and winding years, and there were a lot of twists and turns in the road.
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I HAVE ALWAYS had a burning desire to alleviate poverty through good jobs, and by the mid-1970s, the double-digit unemployment rates among blacks, Hispanics, and the residents of Appalachia were worrying me deeply. In 1974, I helped develop and cochaired the National Committee for Full Employment with Murray Finley, president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU). Our goal was to pass comprehensive legislation to address employment opportunity that, if enacted, we hoped would be as far reaching as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Even though, in the end, our committee won fewer battles than we expected, the fight for full employment moved me inside the complex system of legislating. I saw how laws are made and, even more important, how good laws are broken and ignored. I was able to operate in a different way from Martin, who achieved victories as an outsider applying pressure on the inside power brokers. Times had changed; the movement had opened the doors to us. We had more legislators on the inside who were sympathetic to our causes. Still, I had to learn which doors to go through and how to properly use the influence I possessed. The drive for full employment was the bridge that brought me to an understanding of the art of lobbying. To be successful, we had to build strong coalitions. And I began to see that one of my strengths was as a coalition builder.
My work fighting for full employment deeply convinced me that jobs that pay fair wages are an answer to many of the social and economic problems that afflict so many nations. Unemployment is often blamed solely on individuals, who are depicted as too lazy to work. In reality, the bulk of the problem is global, and involves the tax breaks and low wages that entice nations such as ours to move corporations offshore or overseas, and to exploit cheap labor, in Asia, for example. On the line are the lives of decent, hardworking people who want to cross over into the dignity of work but who remain caught in the barbed-wire trap of historic global exploitation.
Whenever I could bring the issue of unemployment into a debate or a panel discussion, I was not timid about addressing it. Following on my work with the National Committee for Full Employment, I was also cochair of the Full Employment Action Council, and in 1977 that council organized Full Employment Week, a national demonstration for jobs involving more than a million people in more than three hundred cities and towns.
As it happened, a bill addressing the necessity for full employment was making its way through Congress in 1977. Rep. Augustus Hawkins (a Democratic congressman from California) had offered what became known as the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill, after Sen. Hubert Humphrey cosponsored it. Once I understood that this bill was already in the works, our mission became to support it. Murray Finley and I brought a lot of labor on board. We spoke to labor unions and at rallies, meetings, and conventions, trying to educate people about the need for full employment. We traveled all across the country.
On these travels, whenever I talked to the average person, especially students, I never felt that there was a lot of excitement surrounding the employment bill. Yet, when I added that we should have a holiday in honor of Martin’s birthday, I would always get loud applause. My first mission was to make people understand that unemployment was a pressing issue that needed national attention. But I sort of tucked away that response about the birthday holiday for a later time. I began to feel that there were very strong national feelings in favor of the holiday.
As I tried to promote the full employment bill, I kept saying to my speechwriters, “Look, we’ve got to use the kind of language that’s going to reach people and get them excited—get them disturbed.” We tried to paint a vivid picture of what unemployment was doing to families and so on, but it felt too much like an intellectual argument. That worried me; still, I stayed with my assignment. I wanted so deeply to help bring down poverty ra
tes, and I didn’t want to drop the ball. The Full Employment Action Council determined that the correct measurement for full employment would be around 3 percent, which was considered negligible. This was the guiding formula we used in making our argument.
From the start, critics claimed that we were coming up with another welfare plan, so we immediately had to disprove a negative and demonstrate that our plan was not welfare. We were also hampered by the fact that we did not have the financial resources of the Business Roundtable, a group that was lobbying against the bill.
In the end, the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act did pass, and Jimmy Carter signed it into law on October 27, 1978, though by the time it passed, it was too watered down to make much of an impact. First, there was language in the bill which called for the impeachment of the president if certain measures were not achieved. Well, nobody was going to do that! Maybe that’s why Congress passed it: they knew it would not be taken seriously. Second, while our good friend President Carter supported the bill, he was lukewarm about it; he could see businesses did not want it, and he needed their support. In addition, the president had the responsibility of implementing the bill, yet most of the jobs it affected were in the private sector. This was something no president could directly implement or enforce.
The act set specific numerical goals for the president to achieve. It stated that “By 1983, unemployment rates should be no more than three percent for persons aged 20 or over and no more than four percent for persons aged 16 or over, and inflation rates should not be over four percent. By 1988, inflation rates should be zero percent.” The act allowed Congress to revise these goals over time. If private enterprise appeared to be falling short of the goals, the act expressly allowed the government to create a “reservoir of public employment. These jobs are required to be in the lower ranges of skill and pay to minimize competition with the private sector.”
My Life, My Love, My Legacy Page 31