The police found this burglar eventually, he had taken a King Center two-way radio from the house; she’d had it placed in the battery charger. The cops found him because he was talking on the two-way radio, believe it or not. King Center security heard him, and asked for his location. The police were able to locate and apprehend him, interrogate him, do an investigation; they found he’d stood over my mother for a long time considering whether to kill her. Then he saw a picture of my father. He was also responsible for three rapes and the murder of an elderly woman in the neighborhood. We were left with the fact that he didn’t touch my mother. We figured either he must have recognized some King family possession in the living room, or he recognized Mother, or maybe he saw a picture of my dad in the bedroom. That’s what he claimed. Something scared him off. We don’t know what, but thank God, he didn’t harm her.
After that happened, I was more concerned for her safety, even though she doesn’t worry about it. I would have moved her out of there then. She said no. But I think she was ready by the end of the ’90s. The issue became, could she afford to do it? We began to have conversations with the National Park Service about them buying the house and turning it into a National Historic Site—it was one already anyway, unofficially, and had been since our father was killed. It would make more sense if the Park Service bought the house from her. She can’t buy much house today, not for what she paid for that one. At her age, the question becomes, does it make sense for her to buy a house? Maybe a condo? I only knew it made sense for me to help her do whatever she wanted to do.
I had long talks with Mother about what would be the right thing to do with my father’s legacy as it relates to her care and comfort. What would he have done in this situation?
We knew he was very self-effacing about monies, as they dribbled in to support the struggle against segregation, as they came to the SCLC or Ebenezer Baptist Church. But he won that struggle, posthumously. Would he have put a price tag on things like his own papers, or his ancestral home, or his own intellectual property, or his image, as far as commercial use of it went? Would he want us to benefit from it if we could? I’m sure he would, mother said, because he licensed his intellectual property and writings to support his family while he was alive. He put a value on himself. What struggle would he support now? Would he want his widow imperiled? I had to guess in the end. I made an educated guess. To help his wife seemed to be a good guess, or a guess I could live with, even if nobody else could.
I asked my mother about this—could a man risk alienating his family from the rest of society by trying to do the right thing by his family? She said it was a dilemma, all right, but that life is full of them. She thought it made more sense to think—or know in your heart—that he would do whatever he could, not for himself, necessarily, but certainly for his family.
People have compared my family with the Kennedys. But the Kennedys had wealth. My father’s generation of Kennedys, JFK and RFK, and their siblings and cousins—they were born into wealth. In fact, I don’t know too many folks who have made it on their own. Wealth begets wealth. Auctioning Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s belongings—that’s okay. The Kennedys have had the privilege and luxury of being seen and even at times portrayed as do-gooders, humanitarians, public servants. But they also have had the luxury of many resources already accumulated when they got here.
Often academics and historians come to do research with us among all Daddy’s documents at the King Center, then later they complain that “Most people donate their papers,” but most of the people who “donate” things, the Carnegies, Rockefellers, DuPonts, Fords, have means, fixed asset accounts, stock investments; they sit on boards, have corporate equity, other assets, things of material value that made them able to afford their admirable philanthropy; and I’m sure they get a tax benefit from giving away something of value. But nobody talks about that. It seems the heirs of Martin Luther King are held to a higher standard—a higher standard of poverty.
I had a conversation with an editorial writer who has been consistently critical of my family. She said, “I didn’t know your mother was still living in Vine City. There was a rumor she lived in Buck-head. In a mansion.” That’s my point. There are myths out there because people don’t ask questions. Frankly, a lot of them don’t want to know answers. They’d rather keep the mythology going; if they were to find out it’s false, then they’d have to ask themselves—why would this woman be living in Vine City if she can afford to move someplace else? She has to be out there earning her keep like everybody else. What would make her so unique that she could just exist without having an income? Her husband was prematurely taken away, so she was the primary breadwinner for the family for so long, until we all grew up. Her youngest child was five years old when her husband was killed.
What would you do?
Because of who she is and because of the expectation the public has put on her, she has to have an infrastructure around her just to move. We can’t have it both ways. If we want her to be this myth, if we want the legacy to belong to the ages, be fair with the woman; if not, it would be a disservice to the man.
But for some reason, with some people of my father’s generation, there’s this expectation that if you’re not struggling or suffering, then you’re not correct; you’re supposed to stay in poverty. We’re the only ethnic group that includes some who actually fight being affluent. Some of us actually apologize for overcoming economically. No other ethnic group does that. People who come from so-called Third World countries, they come to this country and see it as the land of opportunity. They’re trying to distance themselves from their impoverished past. They want to get ahead; in America, the land of opportunity, you can.
As a family, we are different from the Kennedys or the Bushes not only because of ethnicity and our lack of inherited wealth. We are different because their celebrity has a tie to officialdom: Senator Kennedy, Attorney General Kennedy, President Kennedy, Vice President Bush, President Bush—the list seems endless. Meanwhile it was almost like Daddy was an unofficial President, of black people, of progressive people, of peaceful people. His title was never officially bestowed. This was what I could do, for him—maybe and probably it was all someone like me could do for him. I could do this best by staying quiet and observing and letting others figure it out. To put him in the record properly. Our struggle was born out of tragedy. To overcome this legacy and get to the Promised Land was the new cause. Whereas, with the Kennedys, it was kind of reversed; patriarch Joe had made a fortune. Our family legacy was working to bring the least of people into the mainstream, to be economically empowered, ultimately. Would that not include us? Or would it preclude us?
JFK was popular and had a mystique, Camelot. My father’s mystique was as this ascetic, pious, supermoral holy man—it was taboo to bring him up in certain ways. Poverty makes it harder to uphold this mystique. With resources, you have the luxury of helping people, giving back. That’s not taking anything away from the Kennedys or anybody else, but they had choices. We had to take what was given, make the best of it, as the downtrodden always do; the least of these always must be more prepared, twice as good, ahead of the game, because you have less to work with, and no margin for error. You must be more resourceful, even if extraordinary resourcefulness is not in your nature. Or was blasted out of you, early on.
CHAPTER 19
A Way Out of No Way
The Library of Congress had first approached my father two years before his death about acquiring his papers. My mother remembers it clearly. In 1997, at the time of contention between Stanford and Emory universities over where the researchers’ copies of Daddy’s papers and other civil rights collections housed at the King Center should end up, we heard from the Library of Congress again. Here’s what happened.
Both Stanford and Emory are fine universities. It was a winwin. We wanted the papers in the best repository. Then the Librarian of Congress, Dr. James Billington, wrote a letter to Mother expressing an interest in acqui
ring my father’s original papers held at the King Center, saying why the Library of Congress is the best repository for this important part of history. The conversation had been initiated with Daddy thirty-odd years ago. We went with that sense of propriety.
The Library of Congress has many historical papers from prominent African Americans—Frederick Douglass, Thurgood Marshall, Booker T. Washington, most recently Jackie Robinson, and some others. It was thought to be the logical place to make papers accessible to future scholars. The way we left it at that time was, we’d let things cool off between Stanford and Emory, because the print media in Atlanta were killing us, as usual. A few local scholars made a big deal about the papers leaving the South and going to Stanford, where historian Dr. Clayborne Carson was already in the process of collating them, and among other things was using them to cobble together The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as other works, like The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.
An antagonistic professor at Emory University was one of those voices saying it was problematic if the papers left the South. The professor may have spoken up because Stanford seemed on the verge of having one-upsmanship over Emory. Emory came to the table and tried to scare Stanford off; then Emory came to us and said they were interested, sent some people in to look at the papers. We wanted some African-American involvement; Emory put together a consortium of Atlanta University Center’s Woodruff Library, Emory’s library, the Atlanta History Center, and the Auburn Avenue African American Research Library. This consortium came and met, through the good graces of Dr. Chase, president of Emory. They then decided they needed to come in and look at the papers. The professor from Emory said, Don’t let the papers out of the South. But then, after the Library of Congress came in, that didn’t seem right either. When it comes to Daddy’s legacy, some people are too hard to please.
The truth may be that people don’t want us, as the heirs, the estate, to benefit. We’ve tried to avoid looking at it that way, but that seems to be the bottom line. This would confirm their remembrances of the generosity of spirit that they saw in my father, which our critics falsely assert is not us, though they do not really seem to harbor it in themselves.
Bringing in Sotheby’s was Phil Jones’s idea, and it was a good one; it would be our way of authenticating the value of the King papers. We knew they were valuable. For years we had said Daddy’s papers and his estate had value. One of the residual effects of slavery is that anything African American is judged to be valueless, especially intellectual property. You have to prove twice that it has worth. It’s not a question of your word. It’s a question of a collective psychological scarring. We brought Sotheby’s to the table. We knew they’d auctioned valuables from some of the most prominent institutions and families in the world, including the Kennedys.
We needed an independent appraiser, a reputable professional firm that had expertise in appraising documents and manuscripts. Sotheby’s came in and appraised, and valued the King papers collection at $30 million.
Later the Library of Congress got an independent appraiser to come in. He appraised the papers at $30 million-plus. These appraisals were done independently. We set no price. Afterward, the professor at Emory began saying the papers were overvalued, and not worth what these two independent appraisals said they were. His low estimation of the papers’ value was ironic, given that his access in researching his book had helped win him a Pulitzer Prize.
We met with the personification of the Library of Congress in August of 1999. Mother, myself, and Philip met with Dr. Billing-ton, the Librarian of Congress, his deputy, General Donald Scott, an African American, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D–Ga.), and Jim Clyburn (D–S.C.), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. The latter two came to us and said they thought it was a good time to secure this collection in the Library of Congress archive. They thought the climate was right, and most important it should be done to further place Dr. King in his rightful position in national history. They said, “We want to do this, but we want to keep it very close to the vest, because we don’t want it to get bogged down in political posturing.”
We expressed how we did not want to be put in an awkward position of having to justify the move of the King papers to the Library of Congress. Dr. Billington reached out. Representative Clyburn felt he had the support to get this done in the House, and he wanted to champion it. He wanted the Black Caucus to make this a priority. Clyburn is a passionate man. He popped into the meeting.
Billington spoke the most. He’s a man of precise bearing, erudite, scholarly, probably in his early sixties, but in no need of glasses. He is clean-cut, fairly tall, not given to overstatement, or to suffer fools. He spoke of the two hundredth anniversary of the Library, how the King papers would be a great gift to the nation from the Library of Congress, about how Dad was misunderstood, how people thought of him as “just a minister,” which was admirable enough, but that he was much more. Dr. Billington talked about Dad’s scholarly side, how he was versed not only in philosophy and religious texts, but also in anthropology, sociology, and Gandhian techniques—that Daddy was a learned man of deep spiritual thought, what old folks in the church would call “God-troubled.”
I could tell Dr. Billington had read about my father’s works, and understood that this was more than an African-American preacher who led a few marches. Dr. Billington put him in the context of a new American revolutionary along with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Ben Franklin; when you think of the Civil Rights Movement, you think of a new era of leadership, taking the country on a leap forward in its independence and freedom of mind, of heart, of spirit.
The papers take many forms: book manuscripts, typewritten; an amazing amount of handwritten material, such as the Nobel Peace Prize handwritten speech; a lot of his working papers from when he was preparing speeches, and hundreds of sermons; his letters that he sent and received, amazing letters, from and to Eleanor Roosevelt, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, JFK, Josephine Baker, Jimmy Hoffa—more letters from more historical figures than I should even try to list here. And many of his annotated books. He had a library of books that he read and reread; he would write in the margins, so it’s actually a dialogue between him and great authors.
Fascinating stuff.
You can go in among my father’s papers and stand a real chance of going blind, there’s so much dazzling material. You can see his thinking in these papers, you can see what form it took, where his thinking was shaped, how it evolved, developed over time, how it changed. You can see the development of an entire important period in American history. How anyone could say it was not worth any certain dollar figure is beyond me. You can see some of his earliest notes from school; when he would prepare for a sermon or speech in the seminary, he would write on little three-by-five index cards. On every subject, he would have an index card or cards that described his thoughts on it. The volume of his collection in terms of the actual number of pages, I’m not exactly sure of; I’ve seen different numbers and estimations, but from culling through the papers and studying estimates I’d say at minimum several thousand pages or pieces of text-bearing documents. There was a question of whether the document count should include annotated books, so the actual estimate varies. It is a most comprehensive collection.
It’s wrong.
I believe that the knowledge of the suffering black Americans have done holds back some white Americans, causes them to fear black Americans, to fear retribution. But African Americans are a forgiving people.
My father represented the closest that African Americans came to having a singular sense of oneness. His mission was sanctioned and even sanctified by God. You can’t go into a home with occupants of a certain age without seeing a photo of our father—particularly that old photo of him, JFK, and RFK. Langston Hughes said it: somebody’s got to tell my story—“I think it will be me.” The key is controlling your destiny. Putting yourself in the picture.
Yes, my siblings and I are the sons
and daughters of Martin Luther King, Jr., products of our environment, but we’re also our own individual men and women, and we have our own views about politics, love, relationships, life. We don’t want to be relegated to running from who we are; we want people to know us presently and in the future rather than from the past; the past is history and not very pretty, and we have to know what happened so we can make it over. That’s what we’re grappling with—to understand the past, yet somehow get beyond it, as the children of Martin Luther King. And we are in some ways emblematic of the whole. There’s a reactionary posture with some in black leadership, having a reverse effect in terms of moving forward because what we’ve done in an effort to promote ourselves as people has isolated us to a point of having to renegotiate what we’ve already achieved.
Racism today is not as overt. But a posture is taken by some in black leadership in which everybody who has a different opinion than it holds is wrong. The majority will not respect and embrace you if you don’t allow room for diversity. The very thing they are saying they want, they don’t include. Black leadership has to be able to pass muster. We still have the problems, we still have crime, we still have poverty, we still have lack of education and resources. I made a commitment when I had that epiphany on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, in terms of coming back to the King Center, picking up the mantle to try and help Daddy’s legacy somehow; I never saw myself as a traditional leader. Rather, I saw myself as a behind-the-scenes institution builder who was not just going to give speeches and try to inspire people. I do believe in at least trying to create or preserve lasting things, human diamonds, like my sisters Bernice and Yolanda, my brother, Martin III. Don’t focus only on the symptom, focus on the cause as well.
Growing Up King Page 26
