My Life, My Love, My Legacy

by Coretta Scott King

  With unemployment continuing to run in the steady double digits for communities of color, it is sad that the major provisions of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act were not amended. Instead, they were put on a shelf and ignored. I can only imagine how many lives would have been changed or saved if the bill had been taken seriously. Joblessness contributes significantly to the “cradle to prison” pipeline, to inadequate access to health care, to mental illnesses, and to hopelessness, which is a major factor in violent crime.

  U.S. service sector jobs are steadily disappearing. Customer service jobs, for example, have been exported to the Philippines, India, and Jamaica. Or, in the case of supermarket checkout workers, for example, these jobs have been displaced by scanners or other forms of technology. Yet, while the working- and middle-class workers suffer, the wealthiest Americans have gotten much richer. The Humphrey-Hawkins Act, which expired in 2000, might have created a twenty-first-century New Deal, gainfully employing unemployed Americans to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and strengthen our communities.

  In the end, I had to make peace with the bill being less than satisfying, but I found comfort in remembering how Martin dealt with such things. When you achieve a minor victory, you have to take it and make it more of a major victory.

  He showed me this during the Democratic National Convention in 1964. When Fannie Lou Hamer led the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenge at that convention, her small but mighty group asked that the old Democratic Party be unseated and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party be seated in its place, as it was more representative of the people. Martin was the negotiator for the Freedom Party, but that year, they could get only about two or three people seated. The SNCC then attacked Martin as an Uncle Tom, blaming him for the slow progress. I remember how Martin agonized over this situation and how the press was asking him all these questions, and in response, he said, “You know, we didn’t get all that we wanted, but I consider it a victory, and we will continue to work at it. In the next four years, perhaps we will get all those seats.” He felt that if we went back home and told our people that we’d lost, they wouldn’t follow us anymore. I learned from watching Martin’s work, and I tried to help our people see that while we didn’t get all that we wanted in our efforts toward full employment, all was not lost. We did gain something, and that was the way we had to look at it. People need some sense of hope so that they keep on struggling, Martin would tell me. So after the Humphrey-Hawkins Act turned out to be less than I had hoped for, I said to myself, “Maybe we didn’t get all that we wanted, but we need to keep mobilizing and maybe someday we can get a stronger bill.”

  When you are doing something significant and you are even moderately successful, you need to promote it in such a way that people understand what you’re doing and what you’ve accomplished. If you don’t, people will think you haven’t done anything. When you promote what you’ve done, you can then try to understand how to improve upon what you did get: When the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill passed, we should have created an apparatus to monitor its application. But we didn’t have the resources, so nobody really understood what had happened or how to provide proper follow-up or constant vigilance.

  Despite these challenges with Humphrey-Hawkins, I did not come out of that four-year experience bitter, and the experience of learning how to pass a bill was vital for me. I had made many friends in Congress, and I had heard (could still hear) the roar of the masses calling for a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. So I turned to our good friend Rep. John Conyers, still a Democratic congressman from Michigan in the 1970s just as he has been since the 1960s.

  John Conyers is a real hero in the effort to honor Martin’s life and legacy with a national holiday. Year after year after year, ever since Martin died, John, who is also one of the thirteen founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus, persisted in introducing the same King birthday bill over and over. In all, Congress rejected the bill more than seventy times.

  Then, in 1979, following on my decade of speeches about the birthday, in every state of the union, I said to John, “It is time to bring the King Holiday bill to vote on the House floor again.” It was obvious to me that the masses were calling for the King holiday. Some around me hesitated, though, afraid we still did not have enough congressional support. My response was, “You know better than that. If we hadn’t had a small but effective coalition on the inside, we never would have passed Humphrey-Hawkins. There, the cards were stacked against us. Here, I believe there is enough sentiment among the people to help us get this bill passed.”

  John also felt the passion building. He was ready to bring the bill to the floor again. He asked me to come to Washington to meet with Tip O’Neill, the Democratic speaker of the House, and with Sen. Robert Byrd, the Democratic Senate majority leader from West Virginia.

  Only a few short years before, I would have been anxious about meeting with Byrd. It was common knowledge that he’d been an active member of the KKK and that he’d filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. But while I was campaigning for Humphrey-Hawkins, I’d had a chance to meet with him, and he had assured me that his views had changed.

  During that 1979 visit to Washington, I testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and spoke with passion about the bill’s importance and about how I wanted the holiday to be on the actual date of Martin’s birthday. O’Neill and Byrd agreed to go forward with this plan. I went back to Atlanta, but several weeks later, John called me back to Washington to do more lobbying, to call on more congresspersons, and to testify before a joint hearing of Congress. The leadership agreed to use a rule that required a two-thirds vote on the bill for it to pass, instead of a simple majority. Because of that rule change and because some of our strongest supporters were absent when the bill came to the floor, we lost by about five votes in the House.

  Nevertheless, I vowed to keep pushing with the same resolve and faith that I was putting into building the King Center.

  In order for a national holiday to have meaning, it had to be embraced by all fifty states. Just the thought of how officials in some southern and western states regarded my husband was enough to rock the confidence of even my closest friends. As a matter of fact, even Andy Young said, “Do you really believe we’re going to get a holiday?”

  “Yes, we will,” I said firmly.

  Every year since 1969, the King Center had celebrated Martin’s life and legacy with weeklong festivities and awards that began on his birthday, January 15. As the years passed, the Center became the de facto hub of a national holiday celebration. Each year, increasing numbers of Americans, and even visitors from foreign countries, made a pilgrimage to the Center for the birthday week. Across the nation, thousands of governmental agencies (federal, state, and city), businesses, communities, and church groups had also begun celebrating King Week. Although many honored Martin with sincerity and dignity, others failed to capture his spirit or ideology, or they dishonored him with crass commercialization. To achieve some type of decorum and uniformity, the King Center board had to issue a Standards of Conduct for honoring Martin, calling on groups “not to exploit Dr. King’s name or good work for financial, political, or other selfish gain; to commit to nonviolence; and to agree that any fundraising activities designed to continue the work of Dr. King must first address the needs of the only living memorial, namely the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.”

  Meanwhile, year after year, I undertook a letter-writing campaign, reaching out to mayors, state legislators, and governors across the nation, asking them to observe my husband’s birthday as an annual holiday. In 1971 the SCLC had gathered three million pro-holiday signatures, though those weren’t enough to sway Congress. In 1973 the state of Illinois became the first state to sign the King holiday into state law; this bill was sponsored by Assemblyman Harold Washington, who later became Chicago’s first African American mayor. In 1979 we launched a new petition drive, which ultimately resulted in six million signatures. In 1980, I
testified again before the House and the Senate; also that year, Stevie Wonder released “Happy Birthday,” a song celebrating Martin and advocating for the holiday. In 1982, I testified again before Senate and House committees, and Stevie Wonder and I presented the petitions, carrying those six million signatures to House speaker Tip O’Neill and bill floor manager Rep. Robert Garcia of New York in special ceremonies at the U.S. Capitol. While all this work was going on, a miracle was coming in the form of the twentieth anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin’s “I Have a Dream” speech, on August 27, 1983. In December 1982, on the White House Lawn, I announced the creation of a New Coalition of Conscience, a group of organizations to help sponsor the twentieth anniversary of the March. By that summer, there were 750 organizations in that group, and at the top of the group’s legislative agenda was the King holiday bill. Washington felt a groundswell coming. In June 1983, I testified once again before Congress on behalf of the King holiday bill, and in July, first-term congresswoman Katie Hall (D-IN) reintroduced the holiday bill, co-sponsored by Jack Kemp (R-NY).

  On August 2, 1983, the House voted 338 to 90 in favor of designating the third Monday in January as a day to honor Martin. Sensing the mounting support for the bill, Senate majority leader Howard Baker (R-TN) sent the House version to the Senate floor without committee review. A few weeks later, the twentieth anniversary of the March on Washington firmly demonstrated just how much people cared about a holiday for Martin; Stevie Wonder again sang “Happy Birthday,” which had become a rallying cry across America and was on the lips of the marchers who showed up, five hundred thousand strong, at the Lincoln Memorial. The efforts we had begun in 1969 had finally reached the tipping point.

  Yet, even as the bill was gaining traction, Republican senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina staged a filibuster against it. On October 3, 1983, Helms read a paper on the Senate floor entitled, “Martin Luther King, Jr.: Political Activities and Associations,” and gave a three-hundred-page document to members of the Senate detailing my husband’s so-called Communist connections. Some senators were dismayed by Helms’s actions, including Massachussets’s Edward M. Kennedy and New York’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan threw the document to the ground, stomped on it, and called it a “packet of filth.”

  Helms argued that anyone who objected to a King holiday would automatically be dubbed a racist, and urged the Senate not to be bullied into elevating my husband to “the same level as the father of our country and above the many other Americans whose achievements approach that of George Washington’s by making him one of the few individuals honored by a federal holiday.” He mounted a campaign to amend the birthday bill so that the holiday would be named “National Civil Rights Day,” would include no mention of Martin, and would fall on a Sunday, when most Americans were already off from work.

  Fortunately, Helms’s efforts were unsuccessful, and the bill went to the Senate for a vote.

  On October 19, 1983, with all members present, the Senate voted 78 to 22 to make my husband’s birthday a national holiday. The Senate bill was co-sponsored by Senator Ted Kennedy. After fifteen years of lobbying, nine million petition signatures, hundreds of thousands of marching feet, telegrams from around the world, outreach from President Jimmy Carter and Pope John Paul II, the Martin Luther King Jr. birthday holiday was finally a federal law. The bill represented the first time a national holiday was established for someone other than a U.S. president or Christopher Columbus, who is credited as well as discredited as the first European to discover America. The bill, known as H.R. 3706, was the tenth federal holiday established by Congress.

  On November 3, 1983, I, along with my children, Edythe, Christine, other members of my family, and leaders of the civil rights movement my husband led crowded into the Rose Garden. Vice President George H. W. Bush was there, along with representatives Katie Hall and Jack Kemp, Senators Howard Baker and Ted Kennedy, Senator Bob Dole (R-KS), and Samuel Pierce, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. There, we witnessed the signing of the King holiday bill into law by President Ronald Reagan. Martin’s holiday would be celebrated on the third Monday of January, beginning in 1986.

  President Reagan was cordial during the ceremonies and displayed no angst to those of us gathered there, though he had opposed the bill until it was passed by Congress.

  With the stroke of his pen, the holiday was finally law.

  However, national holidays are legal holidays only for federal employees and the District of Columbia. To make it a truly national holiday, our work was still cut out for us. In preparation for the holiday’s inauguration, we had to visit fifty states and forty-two cities, ensuring that each local government was correctly informed about the launch. Having learned from the Humphrey-Hawkins aftermath, we called for Congress to establish a federal commission to oversee how the holiday was institutionalized and to create some uniformity in how it was celebrated across the country. Congress passed that legislation, which President Reagan signed into law on August 27, 1984. I became a life member of the commission and its first and only chairperson. Lloyd Davis, a former HUD official and executive director of the King Center, was the commission’s first and only executive director. Initially, the commission was slated to last for five years, but Congress twice extended its life, and it formally ended its mission in 1996.

  With the federal holiday now in effect for more than a decade, it’s easy to forget how difficult a task it was to accomplish. Just imagine someone locked in a tiny prison for fifteen years, handcuffed and shackled to the floor, able to peep out of only a small crack in the wall. His cries are unheard by the people walking by—except for one woman. She makes faithful daily trips to the prison. With each visit, she beats on the crack in the wall. One day, the wall breaks into splinters, and she sees that there was not just one prisoner, but many who broke free.

  You might say I was the woman who kept beating on the wall. It was a labor of love, a long, hard labor. When the commission began its work in 1984, only twenty-seven states and Washington, DC, observed Martin’s birthday in some manner. Arizona was infamously resistant. All three House Republicans voted against the bill in 1983. Arizona did not vote in favor of recognizing the holiday until 1992, after the NFL moved Super Bowl XXVII from Tempe’s Sun Devil Stadium to San Diego, California, in protest over Arizona’s resistance to the holiday.

  While one of the most recalcitrant, Arizona was not the only state acting out of concert with federal law. In 2000, seventeen years after the law’s official passage, South Carolina became the last state to sign a bill recognizing Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a paid holiday. By then, in all U.S. territories and at all U.S. installations around the world, Martin’s birthday was observed as a national holiday, and more than a hundred other nations celebrated it as well. With the bill signed and with support for the holiday encircling the globe, I searched for proper words to express the joy I felt. The statement I released at the time captures it: “As a nation chooses its heroes and heroines, a nation interprets its history and shapes its destiny.”

  * * *

  IF THE ACHIEVEMENTS of the King Center’s local, national, and international programs and the global influence of the King birthday holiday ever gave the impression that racism had somehow disappeared since my husband’s death, some events in January 1987 were a chilling reminder that Atlanta was still in Georgia, and that Georgia was still in the South, and that the South, as well as the United States, had much further to go toward freedom.

  That January, as we prepared to observe the second annual federal holiday as well as National King Week in Atlanta, Rev. Hosea Williams, then an Atlanta City councilman, was invited by Dean Carter, a white karate instructor from Forsyth County, to commemorate the King holiday by participating in a “Brotherhood March” into Forsyth, an all-white county in Georgia. On January 17 a busload of about eighty African Americans, led by Reverend Williams, arrived in Cumming, Georgia, the county seat of Forsyth, to join Carter. Almost immediately, the
marchers were attacked and beaten by a group of white segregation proponents. Reverend Williams was hit by a rock, and this was shown on the news. The incident drew national attention, and Reverend Williams and Dean Carter vowed to return on January 24 to continue the march.

  I immediately offered my support, and with the King Center as a base of action, I got on the phone and mobilized a team. One of my first calls was to James Orange, who had been an important “ground crew” organizer for my husband and a staffer of the SCLC; he, along with other civil rights grassroots leaders, helped me organize a massive turnout to support Hosea Williams’s and Dean Carter’s return to Forsyth County. Andrew Young and Rev. Joseph Lowery also helped. This was a National Mobilization Against Fear and Intimidation.

  As the day neared, it became clear that the number of people joining us for the march would exceed our expectations. Therefore, we had to quickly add seventy-five more buses to the hundred we’d already reserved. People arrived from all across the country, including civil rights leaders, college presidents, U.S. senators, and other elected officials. On January 24, I, along with several family members, King Center board members, staff, elected officials, and community activists, gathered at the Center to board the 175 buses and other vehicles to transport us to Cumming. As the number of arriving people continued to swell, we realized that even the buses we had reserved would not be enough to accommodate the overflow. Several thousand marchers were left behind to find their own way to Forsyth. On top of that, there were four to six inches of snow on the ground. The Georgia FBI unit, along with seventeen hundred National Guard troops, provided security. William Bradford Reynolds, assistant U.S. attorney general, flew from Washington to join the march. Members of the Guardian Angels also took part.

  But right-wing activists also showed up in force. J. B. Stoner, the infamous white supremacist, was on hand, signing autographs. Former Georgia governor Lester Maddox mingled with about five hundred white counterprotesters, who waved Confederate flags and shouted insults at the marchers. Klan members showed up wearing Klan robes. My daughter Bernice recalls that our bus passed a spot where the counterprotesters had written “Go home ‘Niger’” in the snow. We were pleased that with just seven days to mobilize, more than twenty thousand of us were able to converge on Forsyth County to stand up for justice and equality.