Growing Up King

by Dexter Scott King

  The King Center has the other, greater half of Daddy’s papers. Those at BU only go up to his years in school at Boston, his early years to his formative years, so to speak, academically to probably about 1960, maybe through his doctoral dissertation; we have copies of those as well.

  Mother’s feeling at the time was to just bring everything under one roof, and we felt it made sense for people to come to one place.

  Boston University disagreed, in the person of its president, John Silber. I’d never before met anybody so rigid. I’d been told he was that way, that you really couldn’t talk to him about this issue. But you couldn’t convince me of that until I met him face-to-face. My brother, Martin, and I went up there as a last-ditch effort, before going forward with a trial. What happened was almost offensive. Dr. Silber is a man of average height and medium build, clean-cut, edgy, like flint, and a partial amputee, one arm. He told us how it was not really “our place” to decide what Dr. King’s wishes were, and asked who were we to judge; he said the King Center was no more than temporary housing and he didn’t know how long it would be around, but he knew that Boston University would be there throughout time, into perpetuity. Basically, those were his points.

  But what right did he have to tell the family that a man’s legacy is temporary; that his work, and we, his heirs, my mother, are temporary?

  Martin and I moved uncomfortably in our seats. Wood and leather creaked. We’d heard this man was stern. He said things that to our ears sounded self-righteous. He said, “When my father died, he had a very special document that was written in German and he left it, willed it to my brother. You know, that really upset me because my brother didn’t even speak German and I spoke German. I was the one proficient in German literature.” Dr. Silber talked about how he had to accept that, and live with it, and what right did we have to come in and go against our father’s wishes? I was staying with his logic until he brought Daddy and our situation into it. He’d found a way to invent the wishes of my father, to invest them with his own brand of logic and interpretation.

  And both Martin and I could see he was intractable. We left the meeting deflated.

  Dr. Silber, as we knew he would be on his home court, was effective in rallying support, in effect villainizing the King family and King Center. People who otherwise probably would’ve been supportive got caught up in the issue being polarized. “Dr. King belonged to everyone.” “He was a son of Boston too.” Who were we, then, coming to tell them what to do? It got to that level, at which you can’t win. At least, I can’t. People lose their perspective, and the plainer aspects of right and wrong and ethics and morals, and none of that matters anymore. I’ve often wondered, since Daddy was held in such high esteem, if there wasn’t some inevitable backlash against the next generation, his children. I do know we all learned to walk on eggshells.

  What I don’t know is if anything could have been done differently to salvage that situation. We were up against it, there in Boston: the case was so technically driven that even the lawyers, never mind the jury, hardly knew what was going on. The judge gave the jury instructions that, in my opinion, were confusing. It was very technical, and the feeling was that she, the judge, seemed sympathetic to BU and President Silber. I felt there was no way we could have won up there.

  So, we lost that portion of the King papers—the physical property but not the copyright. We never physically had them, but the principle of losing something that seemed rightfully ours was disheartening. But we moved on.

  We had another incident over intellectual property rights with the late documentary producer Henry Hampton and Eyes on the Prize. I met with Henry Hampton and his people up in Boston, and it wasn’t so much Henry, but rather his people, who believed that they had a right to exploit my father’s intellectual property and not get permission. We were very clear: If it is truly fair use, go about your business, but once you start making Dr. King the focal point, using his copyrighted speeches and selling the video in Blockbuster stores, as you are doing now, we’ve got an issue. Our policy is simple: If you make money, the Estate should get the industry’s standard royalty.

  In January 1997, we announced that we had entered into a co-publishing agreement with Time Warner Trade Publishing to make available to the public my father’s vast body of writings and to re-publish his out-of-print books. We made this arrangement in hopes of introducing his message of nonviolence to future generations.

  With this agreement we really had an obligation to protect our rights. Many decisions hinged on the following question: Now that we are in business with a major multimedia publisher and player, what will that publisher look like paying for rights we in the past haven’t been able to protect?

  The National Park Service came to us in 1980 at the request of Mother to manage the historic district in which the King Center resides. Initially, once legislation was passed in Congress officially designating this district, the NPS had scant resources to maintain it. The district was the stepchild of the Park Service, because my father still was not seen by many conservative politicians as being worthy of having any national honors. This was before the creation of the King holiday. Consequently, the NPS only had a few of its people operating from one of the row houses across from my father’s birth home and it gave tours through that home.

  Over the years our locale became a more popular tourist destination, and it attracted more resources; as it attracted more resources, the NPS started acquiring more real estate. Eventually, the National Park Service became the largest landholder in this immediate vicinity. They knew about our interest in building the King Dream Center, but they were interested in building a Park Service Visitors Center that would house exhibits on my father. Two centers would be redundant.

  One of the NPS’s first big moves was to acquire the old Ebenezer Church through a land-swapping arrangement. In this land swap, the National Park Service got a long-term lease on the original historic church, adjacent to the King Center, in exchange for land that it owned that would go to Ebenezer to build a new church. I think Ebenezer got cash as well. Maybe it was a good move for Ebenezer. I knew as the land-swapping deal was being made that I was blinded by my strong personal ties to the old church and my family. I’d seen my grandfather preach there. I’d listened to the music of my father’s sermons there. My grandmother had been shot down there. Now you can’t even worship there as part of an ongoing regular church service—which especially affects visitors from around the globe who have never had the opportunity to worship in this historic sanctuary—because of the agreement with the NPS, which is governed by separation of church and state issues.

  Because the Olympics were coming to Atlanta in ’96, the Park Service wanted to have the best face on the King Historic District, particularly for the foreign visitors. The city of Atlanta wanted its best face forward too. The legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was one reason Atlanta was chosen as the venue for the ’96 Olympics in the first place. The NPS sought a $12 million allocation from Congress to make improvements to the King Historic District, including the construction of its proposed visitors center. They solicited my mother’s support, saying it was crucial for its success. Mother finally agreed, but she had two requirements for her support. First, the King Center had to be given control over the exhibits at the new visitors center. We wanted to make sure that exhibits were consistent with the Center’s message. Second, a portion of the allocation had to be given to the King Center to help with the refurbishment of its infrastructure in preparation for the Olympics. My mother was led to believe that these conditions had been agreed to. But in the end, the NPS got the $12 million allocation and these conditions were not met. However, a few months into the conflict Congressman John Lewis facilitated a meeting between the Park Service and us, where we resolved our differences. As Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt expressed at the dedication of the visitors center, sometimes struggle and conflict in the end serve to strengthen a relationship through better understandin
g.

  Ever since that light hit me outside Room 306 at the former Lorraine Motel (now the National Civil Rights Museum) in the early 1990s, ever since I stood on that balcony where Daddy stood, I knew eventually I’d ask, “Why?” and “How?” I knew when I asked it wouldn’t be for revenge or profit. I would seek only to help right the listing ship of my own family.

  My cousin Isaac Farris, Jr., was the impetus—he convinced me to look at the assassination. I had busied myself with issues around the King Center, but I hadn’t forgotten that light hitting me on the balcony. Isaac was the first from our circle to read William Pepper’s Orders to Kill. In this book, Pepper details a broad conspiracy involving organized crime, governmental agencies, and individual coconspirators behind the assassination of my father. Isaac called me and said, “Dex, I think Pepper’s got something. I’m not saying he’s right or wrong, but he’s got something.” As a result, I said I’d read the book. Isaac was aggressive and said, “Why not set up a meeting with Pepper?”

  Pepper flew in from London and we met in the living room of Isaac’s home. Isaac, Phil, and I were at the meeting. We listened to him intently. After he left, we came up with a plan of action. Isaac looked at me gravely. “The first thing is to confront James Earl Ray,” he said. There is a closeness between me and Isaac. Goes back to childhood. He was my first playmate and confidant, outside of my brother and sisters. Also, he’s my blood relative. We battled. We played together. We took whippings. Our parents were near-interchangeable. There is a trust, a respect, a knowledge beyond the spoken. “First thing is to confront Ray…” Isaac said.

  The media proceeded to paint our quest for answers as our getting some type of payoff, where we were puppets and Pepper was puppeteer. We were doing it so a movie would be made, another example of trying to cash in on our name. Of course none of this was true. But, unfortunately, many people tend to rely on what they read in newspapers. I grew up trusting the media because they had been fairly generous to my family and to the Civil Rights Movement; they had, for the most part, kept a spotlight on the injustices of the day. As a child growing up in the eyes of the media, constantly having photojournalists around, I bonded with some of them and felt very comfortable around them. But now that some in the media have turned against my family, I have become wary of a few bad apples that unfortunately can sometimes spoil the whole bunch. I know how often our intentions and views have been cleverly misrepresented. This is not to say that all of our coverage has been bad by any means. For instance, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran an article entitled “Tasteful Marketing of MLK,” which discussed in detail the positive approach we have taken toward the licensing of my father’s name, image, and copyrighted words. Now I read the paper and watch television critically. I don’t swallow everything. I can’t blame people for not knowing the interior motivation of my mother, my siblings, my extended family. But how can it be hard to understand that like any other family in our situation, we wanted to learn the truth behind my father’s murder? We needed to confront the issue of the assassination, look at it squarely; we would not shy away from it just because people got upset about it and said, “Don’t look any closer at this.” If there was nothing to hide, why not?

  What kind of man would I be if I went along with that? Who could respect such a man? You can put seeking the truth off to one side, especially within the same generation, or, in our case, my uncles, my aunt, my mother, my grandparents—they put it off to the side. My siblings and I did too, for a long time. But then there comes a time when you just can’t keep hiding from it anymore, when it’s affecting your life so profoundly, so deeply, it no longer can be ignored except at peril of your own life, health, sanity. Even if people make sour faces, even if the pundits say you’re “wrong,” even if sanctified folk say it’s “part of God’s plan.” In putting it off to the side, we’d left Daddy on the battlefield. We hadn’t gathered his remains, taken them home, honored them properly. I was elected by my family to go over books like Orders to Kill to try to make sense of it all.

  Most people view my father’s assassination as a world event, another moment of collective horror, as it surely was. But as time has passed, they seem to have forgotten that it was equally a very personal event; that it was the defining tragedy in the lives of my mother, my siblings, and me. We needed closure to find real peace.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Meeting

  How did not just the life but also the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., my father, define not just me, my brother, sisters, cousins, and our generation, but also the whole of a generation behind us, the whole of the hip-hop nation? How can that be, when there was no hip-hop nation in 1968?

  Oh, but there was a hip-hop nation in 1968. The whole continuum of fashion, music, film, videos, canvas artistry, advertising, and whatever helps define that generation after ours, was already being influenced by the actions of the children of 1968, who would become their parents.

  It gleamed in the eyes of the youth of all denominations, combed up and Vaselined down, flirting with their eyes while filing down the rain-slicked street into the fortress of Mason Temple, behind the Fowler Homes housing project, south of downtown Memphis, on a rainy April night of that year. The hiphop nation, who would be in their twenties and early thirties in the year 2000, were the future children of the children then filing into Mason Temple.

  Mason Temple is world headquarters of the Pentecostals—Church of God in Christ. It all comes out of the church—music, activism, social gospel, culture—all from the influence of the black church. It often takes a form of music. In Parting the Waters, author Taylor Branch sensed it: “The spirit of the songs could sweep up the crowd, and the young leaders realized that through song they could induce humble people to say and feel things that were otherwise beyond them.” On Wednesday, April 3, 1968, youth of an R&B and gospel world joined the aged, coming by bus, car, and foot to hear my father. And what he gave them was knowledge.

  [If] the Almighty said to me, “Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?” I would take my mental flight by Egypt [“Yeah”], and I would watch God’s children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather, across the Red Sea, through the wilderness, on toward the Promised Land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn’t stop there. [“All right”]

  I would move on by Greece, and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides, and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon [Applause], and I would watch them around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality. But I wouldn’t stop there. [“Oh yeah”]

  … I would even go by the way that the man for whom I’m named had his habitat, and I would watch Martin Luther as he tacks his ninety-five theses on the door at the church of Wittenberg. But I wouldn’t stop there. [“All right”]

  I would come on up even to 1863 and watch a vacillating president by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn’t stop there. [“Yeah.” Applause]

  I would even come up to the early thirties and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation, and come with an eloquent cry that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” But I wouldn’t stop there. [“All right”]

  Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty and say, “If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.” [Applause]

  … Well, I don’t know what will happen now; we’ve got some difficult days ahead. [“Amen”] But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. [“Yeah.” Applause] And I don’t mind. [Applause continues] Like anybody, I would like to live a long life—longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. [“Yeah”] And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. [“Go ahead”] And I’ve looked over [“Yes sir”], and I’ve seen the Promised
Land. [“Go ahead”] I may not get there with you. [“Go ahead”] But I want you to know tonight [“Yes”], that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. [Applause, “Go ahead, go ahead”] And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. [Applause]

  Listen to all of that speech sometime. It covered the entire social fabric of the time. Then it was over. And then… pandemonium. Fast-forward past him exiting Room 306 at the Lorraine at approximately 6 P.M. the next afternoon, standing on the balcony, about to go back in the room for his coat, past the report of a single rifle shot; then past infernos, and sirens everywhere; Bobby Kennedy shot in L.A.; Afros blooming, braiding, locking; Ali saying, “I ain’t got nothing against them Viet Congs”; Uncle A.D., an expert swimmer, drowning; Jimi Hendrix showing “The Star-Spangled Banner” could be done in amplified electric; Superfly, The Godfather, and The Mack all written, shot, or released within nine months of each other in ’72; my blessed grandmother, shot down from the pulpit of my church where I grew up; George Clinton stepping out of a silk and wool double-vented suit and tie in the mid-’60s, cutting the conk off his head, and becoming godfather of a new grooved nation—Puff Daddy’s daddy. No one has yet covered Clinton’s “(I Wanna) Testify” (1967). James Earl Ray always did say he wanted to hum along to that.