In the wake of our march, Oprah Winfrey arranged to broadcast her daily TV show from Cummings, the first time she aired a show away from her home base of Chicago.
Despite the violence that had greeted the marchers on the seventeenth, this incident was also a reminder of how much things had changed, and of the vital roles the civil rights movement, the King Center, and the King holiday had played in advancing race relations in the South: An abundance of whites joined us for the January 24 march, and the law was on our side.
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THE KING HOLIDAY had been established and the King Center had evolved from a few filing cabinets in my bedroom to a staff of more than 60 welcoming about 2.5 million visitors every year, but I felt the urgent need to keep adding thunder to the left, to keep the voice, vision, and values of a humane, peace-seeking society at the top of the national agenda. The movement had to hold on to the social, economic, and political gains we had won while continuing to break through closed doors and glass ceilings.
As Martin had used sermons and books to challenge our political leaders and institutions, I used speeches, forums at the King Center, and hundreds of syndicated columns and television commentaries on CNN to continue presenting an alternative vision of what an equitable and just society should look like. I saw the media as a valuable tool, one that allowed the voiceless to have a role in participatory democracy. Without the media coverage of the marches and bloodshed of the movement, we would not have touched the hearts of good people across the nation.
The Reagan administration, however, thought otherwise. It was so bothered by my critique of national and international affairs that I was banned from appearing on Voice of America, the official external broadcast organization of the United States, and from traveling on any government-sponsored trips as a representative of the United States. I was thought of more as an enemy of the state than a public servant.
I had worked my entire life to make the dispossessed full participants in the American Dream. The Reagan cold shoulder was just a replay of how I ended up on President Richard Nixon’s unofficial list of enemies. Of course, I am not naïve. If the Reagan administration had loved me, that would have meant I was not doing my job, that I had failed in my task of, as the great journalist Finley Peter Dunne wrote, “Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.”
During the Reagan years, I had much to say about the administration’s painfully regressive policies, which cut survival funding for the working poor and their families. In America in 1989, one child out of every four was living in poverty—and fully half of all African American children were living in poverty. Yet, instead of increasing funds to fight hunger and homelessness or increasing access to health care, Reagan imposed draconian cuts on subsidies for the poor. In fact, he was excoriated for going so far as to advocate cutting school lunch budgets and allowing ketchup and other condiments to count as vegetables. And while subsidies for survival necessities such as school lunches were on the chopping block, the Pentagon was awash in hefty increases. One report in the Detroit Free Press showed that military spending had increased by $164 billion while programs for the poor were cut by $50 billion.
In 1990, President George H. W. Bush chose to react to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait with bombs, rather than with sanctions and diplomacy. That mission, called Operation Desert Storm, set the stage for a full-blown oil war disaster in Iraq a decade later, during the presidency of Bush’s son George W. Bush. Under the false premise that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction, the younger Bush led the United States into a war that resulted in thousands of lives lost unnecessarily, and billions drained from our domestic economy.
During the Reagan and Bush years, I used my voice to push for a new war on poverty instead of a continued war on the poor. I was not just pleading the case for welfare; I was still arguing for a no-nonsense national commitment to full employment: a job at a decent wage for everyone who was able and capable of working. Such a policy would also include a higher minimum wage, a national health care system, and an expansion of public works. In the private sector, governmental incentives could encourage corporations and unions to create job training and child care opportunities in depressed communities, so that mothers would not have to put their children at risk in order to work and support their families.
Later, during the Clinton administration, I did not quiet my call for a more targeted war on poverty. Nor did I stop advocating for an end to supply-side trickle-down economic policies, which had resulted in double-digit joblessness and left one out of five black workers unemployed. While President Bill Clinton did not support our agenda to the letter, he did bring about major improvements over the Reagan and Bush years. Studies show that 7.7 million people were lifted out of poverty during Clinton’s term, compared with only 77,000 during the Reagan years. President Clinton’s economic legacy included a balanced budget and the creation of 22.7 million jobs, which dramatically decreased joblessness among people of color. According to the Department of Commerce, from 1992 to 2000, unemployment fell to 7.6 percent from 14.2 percent for African Americans, and to 5.7 percent from 11.6 percent for Hispanics. I appreciated the job growth under Clinton’s administration, although I was very disappointed about the “three strikes, you’re out” 1994 crime bill, which Clinton signed into law and which sent so many African American men to spend most of their lives in jail.
I battled the government on many other fronts. Just as Martin and I had pushed to end the Vietnam War, so I tried to bring that same passion to my outcry against the rush to war in the Gulf and challenged the warmongering maneuvers of President George H. W. Bush, which unfortunately escalated into disaster under his son. As early as August 1990, I was pleading with the administration of George H. W. Bush to choose diplomatic options to resolve conflicts in the Gulf. A war would benefit only the oil companies and arms dealers, I warned, leaving in its wake many thousands of widows and heartbroken children, financial disaster for U.S. taxpayers, and increasing terrorist retaliation against the United States.
Unfortunately, just as Martin was demonized for speaking out against the Vietnam War, I was harshly criticized (sometimes by other civil rights leaders!) for advocating caution, compromise, and diplomacy instead of rushing full steam ahead into war. In my heart, I have always been patriotic. I love my country, the land for which so many of my fellow citizens sacrificed their blood on battlefields both here and abroad. I do not mean to say that the United States should not have a strong defense; I advocate driving down a different road to get there. True homeland security ought to be more about providing health care for every citizen, more about protecting civil liberties, more about protection of pension assets for retired people, more about gun control and about protecting Americans against domestic hate crimes; more about feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, and making sure there is quality education for every child and a job at a decent wage for everyone who wants and needs one. This is how we make our country safe and secure for all citizens.
I will never stop sounding off about justice for all, regardless of the steps backward our country might be making. I will fight on and await the Zeitgeist. There is something about the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the time. Martin used to preach about this. The Zeitgeist pushes people from the dullness of yesterday into the bright sunlight of tomorrow; it is a time when all the alarms on the human clock ring. Someday, once again, those alarm bells will ring.
TWENTY-ONE
Our Children
FOR ALL THAT I shared with Martin and all the uplifting work I have done and continue to do, in my life my greatest joy has been my children, Yolanda, Martin, Dexter, and Bernice. I’ve always felt that nothing I did would mean anything if my children did not know I loved them, if they were not strengthened by what they saw in me every day. I strove always to be a role model, with consistent character and values. In front of them and in private, I sought to live an ethical life. Integration for me is not merely a civil rights issue, it is a soul issue, and thi
s means integrating your personal beliefs into your public life. There should be no difference between public morality and private morality. What I preached publicly I tried to live out privately in front of my children.
Over the decades, my children have achieved so much, but they’ve also endured their own private struggles, many of which came with the weight of bearing the King name. As a young mother, I remembered the words Rose Kennedy once shared with me, about training the oldest child to help with the youngest, and passed this style onto my firstborn, Yolanda, whom we called Yoki.
Yoki was twelve years old when her father died. While he was alive, she’d already been forced to deal with the King name, which can bring a blessing or a burden, depending on where you are, in Atlanta or the world. As early as the mid-1970s, Martin was the most famous man most Atlantans had ever known, and it was difficult for our children not to understand the specialness of our name when it was being emblazoned on street signs, schools, T-shirts, and, later, the King Center. Yoki was the only one of our children educated from elementary to high school entirely in the public system, as Martin and I had wanted. In the years following Martin’s death, I took the other children out of public schools for security reasons.
As a child in elementary school, Yoki demonstrated an innate ability to handle her own problems. One day, she came home and told me that that she was tired of people asking her, “Is your daddy Martin Luther King?” So when the teacher stepped out of the classroom, she turned to the other students and said, “Look, all I want is to be treated like a normal child.”
I was pleased with her response. To live a normal life as their best selves is all Martin and I ever wanted for our children.
Yoki always had strong opinions about what she wanted to do with her life. As a younger child, she, along with our older son, Martin, and the Abernathys’ three children, Juandalynn, Donzaleigh, and Ralph III, were the first to integrate Atlanta’s Spring Street Elementary School, and Yoki insisted upon attending Grady High School, the integrated public high school her friends went to. In 1972 she graduated with honors from Grady as the best all-around student and went on to the all-women Smith College, where she studied drama and graduated with honors in 1976, with a B.A. in theater and African American studies.
Yolanda started showing her theatrical talent when she was only seven. At nine, she wrote her first play, Riches and Royalty. I was amazed that she even knew how to properly format it. Not only did she write it, but she cast her siblings in it and produced it with costumes, all in a day and a half. The plot concerned children of the world bringing gifts to a queen, and she dressed Marty as Chinese, Dexter as African, and Bunny as East Indian. When it was over, my sister, Edythe, who was the drama teacher at Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, quipped, “Next time, give yourself two weeks instead of a day and a half.” But in a child’s world, a day is like an eternity. The fun of Yoki’s theatrical pursuits continued: When she was eleven, her backyard production of Sleeping Beauty came to an early end when the script required six-and-a-half-year-old Dexter to awaken the princess, his sister Bunny, with a kiss on the lips.
Understanding her precocious talent, I steered Yoki to a children’s drama workshop in Atlanta that had been launched by Walter Roberts and Betty Lou Bredemus, the parents of the famous actress Julia Roberts and the actor Eric Roberts. Ironically, while Yolanda was receiving spectacular coaching and I enthusiastically supported the theater, the association drew our family into quite a controversy. Walter cast Yolanda, who was only sixteen, as a prostitute in the play The Owl and the Pussycat, in which she kissed a white boy. This caused an uproar around Atlanta.
Yolanda defended the role, telling me, “Mommy, I want to do this because there is nothing in the character with which I can identify. If I can do it well, then I can prove to myself that I can be a better actress.”
Word got out about the forthcoming production, and soon the church people began calling Daddy King, telling him that if Martin were alive, he would never have allowed such a thing, etc. My mother also got wind of the controversy, and was concerned. And my sister, Edythe, told me that if I did not stop Yoki, I’d live to regret it. However, Andy Young advised that, although it was a rough play, we shouldn’t stop her.
Despite this conflicting chorus, I had already made up my mind. I knew my girl, and I knew that she had a right to make a mistake, even though she was Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter. If she made a mistake, she would learn from it.
Sure enough, the media attacked me and the play. Some criticized Yolanda’s diction. She was playing the role as a southern black woman who had not been tutored in proper English, while, in contrast, the white lead had a polished British accent. Somehow people seemed not to understand that this was just theater.
I took on her critics, telling them, “She is Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King’s daughter, and she certainly knows how to talk.”
After the run of the play, I was getting ready to go on a vacation with my friends Dr. Robert and Lettie Green when Yolanda gave me a little note and asked me to open it after I got on the plane. My heart started beating faster; I thought that maybe something disastrous had happened. Was she going to tell me she was pregnant? I was nervous to read it. But when I finally did open the envelope, I read a sweet note thanking me for allowing her to express herself and for “taking the blows for her.”
Interestingly, when Yoki was a child and said she was going to be an actress, Martin asked me to tell her not to say that. “What’s wrong with being an actress?” I asked him. Always acutely aware of how critically people judged preachers, he simply said, “It’s the image.” So I think if Martin had lived, she would have had a harder time becoming an actress.
After graduating from Smith, Yoki went on to New York University, where she received a master’s in fine arts in 1979. She and Betty Shabazz’s daughter Attallah Shabazz went on to found a theater company called Nucleus, which created an original play aimed at teenage children called Stepping into Tomorrow.
Yolanda always demonstrated a strong sense of social justice in the projects she took on, even playing Rosa Parks in the NBC TV movie King. She played Dr. Betty Shabazz in the film Death of a Prophet, with Morgan Freeman; and Medgar Evers’s daughter, Reena, in Ghosts of Mississippi. She also played Judge Esther Green in the hit CBS series JAG.
I was proud of her confidence and poise. Seeing her in these roles called to mind a day when she came home from middle school and asked me, “Mama, why are Negroes ugly?” She told me she had heard this stark, brutal conclusion at school.
I reached under the living room table and produced a couple of issues of Ebony magazine. I flipped through the smartly colored pages and pointed out to her the many beautiful women of color. They were fashionably dressed and intelligent. After our conversation, I was happy the case was closed. But was it? The very next day, Yoki came to the conclusion: “Well, I think white people are ugly.” I simply picked up a copy of Ladies’ Home Journal and showed her images of beautiful white women, also fashionably dressed and intelligent. It took a while for her to understand that there is beauty in all races. Later, I taught her that beauty is more than skin deep, and beauty is as beauty does.
One night, when Yoki was at Smith, I got a very strange call from her about her appearance. “Mother, I want you to tell me the truth about something that’s been bothering me,” she said. “Did you and Daddy find me in a garbage can while you were traveling in Korea?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked her, baffled.
“Some kids at school were saying that I look Oriental and that I’m a Korean and you found me. Now tell me the truth.”
Yolanda was so serious that I had to convince her that I’d carried her for nine months, and that she was a whopping nine-pound, ten-ounce baby. I think many kids must go through this stage of discovery, because Bernice also went through a period of thinking she was adopted because she didn’t look like anybody else in the family. Finally, I found
a picture of me when I was about nine, and showed it to her. It looked just like Bernice. The older Bernice gets, the more she favors me.
As an adult, Yolanda was very instrumental in setting up the arts component of the King Center. She started cultural affairs programming for the Center while she was still in graduate school, and after she graduated from NYU, in 1982, she felt she needed to come work at the Center as a way of “paying her dues,” as she used to say. She then established the King Center’s Cultural Affairs Department, with the help of her aunt Edythe. I had long felt that the King Center was not complete without drama, dance, music, and visual arts as ways of promoting nonviolent social change, and Yoki knew this. On the advice of Edythe, she formed an advisory committee with Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Maya Angelou, and others. She showcased so much talent; she produced; she acted. She directed a production of James Baldwin’s play Amen Corner, and Mr. Baldwin visited the Center to see that production.
In addition to overseeing the annual entertainment salute to Martin as part of the King Holiday Week, starting in 1982, Yoki’s department put on Kingfest, a summer-long performance and visual arts festival that brought in national artists, featuring gospel, jazz, country, bluegrass, rock, and many other kinds of music. It was one of the few popular music festivals in Atlanta during those years. On certain Saturdays and Sundays, June through August, thousands of people would come and enjoy the artists she brought into the Center, including War, the Ohio Players, George Howard, Ramsey Clark, Tony Terry, Boyz II Men, and Vickie Winans. For each Kingfest, the Dream Team, which consisted of friends and associates of Yolanda’s in the acting industry, would put on performances, humorous vignettes that dramatized issues of local, national, and international concern. These performances were created using Martin’s philosophy and methodology of nonviolence. She also showcased a lot of local talent. Kingfest included a Kids’ Day, when all the performances and visual art were provided by local children, and a Nonviolent Film Festival, which taught visual literacy. Through Kingfest, Yoki sought not simply to entertain, but also to utilize the universality of the arts to help bring together diverse segments of the community and to offer local artists’ wares and a health fair, with free health screenings. And she inaugurated Kingfest International, where acts from all over the world showcased their culture, music, and food. You know, Martin loved the arts, music in particular.
My Life, My Love, My Legacy Page 33