As the oldest boy, Marty was the one who had bonded most with Martin. He traveled with him, occasionally marched with him, and played basketball and biked with him. In fact, I purchased similar bikes for both of them the Christmas before Martin was taken from us. I remember on the day of the funeral how little Marty, who was ten, sat on the edge of my bed and said, “It just makes me so mad that I don’t have a daddy.”
Sometimes I wonder which is worse: never to know one’s father, or to know and love him only to have him tragically snatched away. Even ten years after his father’s death, Marty would on occasion take visitors down to the basement to share with them his most treasured possessions, tucked away in the bottom of a closet, objects that had belonged to Martin: a pair of denim jeans, a ministerial robe, a straw hat, a busted tan briefcase, and that purple bike, which still looked brand-new. Marty longed for the experience of riding off on those bikes with his father. Even into adulthood, Marty has said that he has never understood why anybody would dislike his father enough to kill him. From a moral as well as a human view, I have never understood it, either.
Marty was named Martin III despite my objections. In the back of my mind, I could foresee the problems a son might encounter trying to match the exploits of a famous and anointed father. I worried that Marty would grow up suffering from depression over the loss of his father or be crushed by the burden of his name. Even as a small child, the name posed a problem.
Marty and Yoki were among the first black children to integrate Spring Street Elementary, a public school in Atlanta. The day after enrolling, Marty told me that a little boy had walked up to him and said, “What’s your name?”
“Martin Luther King the Third,” Marty replied.
“Oh, your daddy’s the nigger preacher.”
Marty answered, “The word is Negro.”
Despite his strength, I understood how the word hurt Marty. He knew it was an insult, and I am sure it was the kind of thing he became sensitized to. When he was about eight years old, he started playing football and baseball, and one Saturday morning I took him to football practice, and he said, “Mommy, you see those big boys over there?” I said, “Yeah, what about them?” He told me, “They came up to me and asked me what was my name, and I told them I didn’t know.” I asked him why he’d done that, although I knew why: because he believed they would be hostile to him and beat him up if he revealed his name. That just tore my heart out, understanding that Marty had a great name but that it could also bring him pain.
Even before Martin died, the teasing was too much for Marty, so after Martin’s assassination, I felt the need to transfer Marty to a private school called Galloway, which was predominantly white and turned out to be a good experience for him. I transferred Dexter and Bernice there as well. At Galloway, Martin became captain of the basketball team and was very popular. The principal said that Marty would often lecture other students about the evils of smoking, drinking, and the use of drugs.
At sixteen, Marty served as a page to Sen. Edward Kennedy. This was the same time that Caroline Kennedy served as a summer intern for her uncle, and the job turned into a lasting friendship between him and Caroline and John Kennedy Jr. In 1975, he graduated from Galloway. And one year later, while a student at Morehouse College, at the age of nineteen, Marty served as a consultant to President Jimmy Carter’s election campaign. A few years later, he was a staff aide to Atlanta mayor Andy Young. In 1979, Martin graduated from Morehouse like his father and grandfather before him. He received his B.A. in Political Science.
Over time, he developed a passion for extending the social justice movement that his father and I had championed. He marched. He led protests. He went to jail. But he also left little doubt that he was intent on following his own passions and being his own man. Much to the surprise of some close to him, who had concluded that it was only natural for him to choose the ministry as a career, like his father and his grandfathers, he went another way.
He was the first of our children elected to political office.
On June 9, 1986, he announced his candidacy to become a commissioner on the Fulton County Commission, in Georgia. In explaining his decision, he said, “I’ve been blessed to be able to travel all over the world and meet all types of people.” The privilege of those kinds of experiences had helped him to see how important it is to give back to the community that helped develop him. He understood that in the 1960s most of us could not be in the political arena. It would take years to accomplish things then that today can be done with the stroke of a pen. He saw the political process as the most direct way to help massive numbers of people, whether with jobs, with health care, or with housing. That is why he opted to run.
His association with Sen. Ted Kennedy also fueled his desire to launch into politics, and in 1986 both Caroline Kennedy and John Kennedy Jr. campaigned for Martin III, who was elected a member of the Board of County Commissioners in a landslide, beating a Democrat who has served there for thirty years by an 8 to 1 margin. He served until 1993.
The Fulton County Commission had about thirty-five department heads, almost all of them white males, but once elected a commissioner, Marty proved that in this virtually all-white arena, he was not going to be the Invisible Man. He worked hard to create the Department of Contract Compliance and Equal Employment; to ensure that the commission had a diverse workforce in terms of leadership; and also to ensure that people of color and women were able to gain government contracts through a system that had previously locked them out. When he came into office, probably fewer than 5 percent of the county’s contracts went to women, small developers, or African American businesses. It was the same problem I had confronted when building the Center. I found that the best way to change low numbers of minority contracts was to tackle the numbers head-on and to demonstrate to both employers and workers that diversity, if given a chance, could be a win-win position for everyone. Martin did much the same thing, except from the inside. In 1987 he was named vice chairman of the National Labor Relations Committee of the National Association of County Officials.
Another program he launched inside the commission was A Call to Manhood, which was designed to provide “fathering” and mentoring to young children who were displaced and at risk for becoming school dropouts and being thrust into the prison pipeline. So many young boys are without fathers to give them attention, so they get attention in other ways, from gangs or drug dealers. Martin initiated “rite-of-passage seminars” for the youth and found them successful role models and tutors. When he left office as commissioner in 1993, both the contracting programs and A Call to Manhood stayed in place. A nice legacy.
As time went on, I could see that Martin III had several deeply planted, inbred “movement” values. If you engage in a serious conversation with him, you will see these values shining through. World peace, antipoverty, nonviolence—these are his concerns, and they are the three branches of the same tree. Like all my children, he has been involved in the King Center over the years, and at the Center, his passion was organizing youth workshops on nonviolence, which attracted young people, including gang members and other activists, from around the world.
Keeping the spotlight on the poor is vital to Martin. He is steadfast in his belief that the plight of the poor—of children who go to bed hungry, of homeless families sleeping in parks and under bridges, of the sick who can’t afford to buy their medication—must become central to our nation’s political discourse and to our media.
Martin III has a novel idea that I think would go a long way toward addressing poverty. He is looking at creative ways to revitalize the Martin Luther King Jr. thoroughfares. All over America, he says, there are close to a thousand of those thoroughfares, and unfortunately many of these streets bearing the King name are blighted. He applauds those politicians who led the way to name these avenues after his dad, but he is bothered that they did not follow through with funding for them. What a difference it would make if the government and business communiti
es got behind a revitalization of these streets. With the right funding in these areas, people could have decent schools and housing so they could sustain themselves. This alone would help create a notable number of jobs and make a dent in unemployment. Unfortunately, so far, other political priorities have overshadowed this idea.
Marty’s beliefs have also led him to become an outspoken opponent of the death penalty. He is fond of saying, “If we believed in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, most of us would be without eyes and without teeth.” I am also proud of his campaign to thwart the continuing tragic cases of police shootings of unarmed black men.
In 1997, I was proud that he was unanimously elected the fourth president of the SCLC, during the fortieth anniversary of the civil rights organization Martin cofounded in 1957. As president, Martin III helped establish new SCLC chapters, led protests to change the design of the Georgia state flag, which still featured a large Confederate image, and to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds in South Carolina.
He also held hearings and focused national attention on police brutality. At the thirty-seventh “I Have a Dream” anniversary, on August 27, 2000, Martin III and New York activist Al Sharpton led a gathering of thousands at the Lincoln Memorial, where they demanded an end to police brutality and racial profiling. I introduced both Martin and Al Sharpton at that gathering. The crowd grew enthusiastic as it became obvious that neither of those two were going to sugarcoat anything. Martin is somewhat quiet and soft-spoken, but his words flame with passion and power. He told the crowd that America has not fulfilled his father’s vision for racial justice, and he took the police to task for too many cases of police brutality and too many fatal shootings of unarmed men. On the minds of many there was the police shooting of Amadou Diallo. He was an unarmed immigrant killed in a hail of forty-one bullets the year before in New York City. At the rally, organizers focused attention on how unarmed black men were more likely to be shot by police than unarmed white men, how black men were too often randomly searched without cause, and how too often a routine traffic stop could turn fatal for blacks. Martin told the crowd that he was still awaiting the day “when we can raise our children to respect police first, and fear them last.”
He also seized the occasion of the “I Have a Dream” anniversary rally to hold public officials accountable, just as Martin and I always tried to do. The day before the gathering at the Lincoln Memorial, Martin III and Rev. Al Sharpton met with Attorney General Janet Reno and with top aides to President Clinton to demand that the federal government withhold funds from any police department that practiced racial profiling or showed a pattern of brutality. The tragedy of the 9/11 attacks scuttled that approach, because fears of terrorism resulted in demands for more funding for, not more oversight of, police. Holding police accountable is not something Martin has given up on; it is a necessary change that is still a work in progress.
In 2003, Martin cosponsored the fortieth anniversary of the historic March on Washington with human rights organizations from across the country. Before the media, he clarified his role. “I know I can’t be my father,” he told them, “but what I can do is to take the message that was the blueprint that he left for us and I can share it with others and hopefully take the legacy to the next level. I was raised in a family dedicated to public service. It is only natural that I would feel compelled to continue the work. Why reinvent the wheel when it is clear that there is much work to be done? If we can come anywhere close to what my father envisioned, I know we’ll have a better nation and world. So if I had a dream, it would be to see that the vision that my father gave his life to achieve is manifested. I firmly believe everyone in America deserves a decent job with decent pay.”
Keeping the dream alive is not a mere slogan or headline with Martin. It has captivated him. He conceptualizes it and in ways large or small continues to reshape and repackage its tenets of peace, justice, and fairness for the next generation. Sometimes he steps back into politics to achieve the goal.
He is clear about his own style of leadership. He describes it this way: “My leadership style is to try to build a coalition and not be confrontational unless I have to be. I try to build support among, first of all, my staff. If the staff doesn’t agree, I try to hear out everyone before I make a decision. Although some leaders lead dictatorially, I believe you can lead in a coalescing way. When you disagree, you don’t humiliate someone because you disagree. You want to hear their point and then you want to bring them around, so I try to use persuasion as a leadership tool and try to see the best in everyone. I want to bring the best out of everyone.”
I know that he thinks that today, when there are so many terrific and seemingly irresolvable problems, it is a time for new forms of leadership to emerge. For example, he challenges the business community to try putting people before profits by paying livable wages and providing health care, all of which should be in the business’s self-interest. To Martin III, worker rights, such as a livable wage and health care, should be the headlights of a business’s mission, not the taillights.
On the whole, I believe that while carrying Martin’s name has been difficult for Marty, he has not crumbled. He has worn it well. He often told me that he knows better than to try to do what his father did. Martin Luther King Jr. was a national leader at twenty-seven; on the cover of Time at twenty-eight. If Martin had to compare himself to his father, he often says, he would have “flunked.” Actually, “failed miserably” is how he puts it. Instead, he wants God to help him enhance what his father did.
April 4, the anniversary day of his father’s assassination, usually saddens Marty, and though he has come to terms with it, he admitted to me, “On that day for many years, I would shed tears. Our father is gone, but because of the holiday and the many observances, it’s like he’s enshrined in time. He will be forever young. That is the one wonderful way of thinking that helped me get through it.” He also told me, “The sad thing for me and my siblings, as adults, is not having had the opportunity to have a conversation with him, and that’s what we’ve probably missed. Those are the things that there’s nothing you can do about, but the ten years that we were together were incredible. We all will have fond memories forever.”
What a feeling of comfort for me to know that Martin III is making a difference and paving his own way as his own man.
Perhaps because he was the older son, he wants to protect people. He even felt he was my protector. I take comfort in that, too. He has spent long evenings with me, patiently waiting in my bedroom until I finished my phone calls. He sought my advice on politics, love and marriage, business relationships, inner healing—whatever was in his heart. Even when he had his own house, he would come over most every evening to check on me, or just stay with me. It often seemed like he had never left home. For that, people whispered about him being a “mama’s boy.” It surprised me to hear that people did not know that my house, the one I raised all my children in, was now in a drug-infested part of the city, an area none of my critics would dare walk in, let alone live in. In fact, my house in Vine City was broken into twice. Once, when I was at home, Martin happened not to be at the house, I fell asleep sitting up in my bed after reading some papers. I was briefly awoken by a noise and thought a picture had fallen, and I just went back to sleep. I discovered that a burglar had been there only when I woke up the next morning and Pat, my beloved personal assistant, arrived and told me that a brick had been thrown through the living room window, which faced the front of the house. A walkie-talkie that had been in its charging station in the kitchen was missing. Only by the grace of God did I avoid being beaten, raped, or murdered.
The police eventually caught the man who broke in. He was a drug addict, and had sold the walkie-talkie to someone, who ended up using it, which allowed the police to trace it back to the burglar. During the interrogation, the burglar apparently told the police that he had actually stood over me for a spell, considering what to do with me. They discover
ed that he was responsible for the rapes and murders of three elderly women in the neighborhood. Why did he leave me unharmed? Maybe he recognized me from the pictures in the living room. Or maybe he saw a picture of Martin and me in the bedroom. I know for sure that it was just not my time to die—which is to say, I was grateful that Marty would come to watch over me and put my safety before his own comfort or pleasure.
Deep inside Martin III are the will and the strength to love unconditionally. We talk about this sometimes. He sincerely believes—much as both Martin and I, and of course much like his “Granddaddy” Daddy King, believed—that love is the antidote to racism and self-hatred. “His source of love that springs forth outward begins within,” Martin likes to say. People really have to develop a true love for themselves. It helps to take account of one’s self by writing down all the bad and good qualities you have and strive to eliminate the bad. Then say, “Even though I have those problems, I love me.” He feels that you really have to love yourself before you can even begin to love other people. In 1990 he showed his ability to correct a wrong when he made a disparaging remark about homosexuals. After meeting with gay rights leaders, he apologized and referred to his words as “uninformed and insensitive.”
Just imagine a hot sunny day, Martin and me sitting in lawn chairs in our backyard, sipping lemonade and chatting about our children, as proud parents do. I could see Martin and me scrambling to conclude what qualities our eldest son received from each of us. I think we would conclude that in some ways he resembles both of us: tender-hearted, passionate, determined, patient. And even with the weight of carrying the King name, he has found a way to achieve inner peace and outer strength as he faces the ups and down of trying to advance the causes he was born and bred on, but doing things his own way. He has taken the advice I offered to all my children: not to become a prisoner of the King name, but rather to “Always be your own best self.”
My Life, My Love, My Legacy Page 35