Growing Up King (22 page)

Is this man standing on his own two feet, or is he being propped up by Mama?

I didn’t understand it then, but in subsequent years I came to. What made it worse, the same person who made these requirements,
who said he supported me, later switched the resolution and made a statement to the media when I wound up resigning five months
later; he said, “We never really expected Dexter to be in charge. In fact, he was a president in training.”

President in training?

It’s always been about Mother, but I was an easy target. What I have come to find out is that people who had been gunning
for my mother for years took it out on me. I’ve had people tell me that I got hit so hard on a lot of issues because there
were long resentments from years back. Human nature, petty jealousies from the most stunning, disappointing quarters. And
in the black community, you have issues because of her being the “First Lady of the Movement.” I have such a hard time with
all these people always saying, “Dr. King… our leader… my man…” and yet stabbing her in the back the whole time. I was just
like some boxer in there trying to duck punches, and getting hit, but I didn’t at the time know much of this was premeditated.
I didn’t recognize Machiavellian behavior. That was my failing.

Why can’t I just go on and live and be happy being selfish? This is the conflict: not only do I know the way the system works
from what I’ve experienced, but I also saw what it did to Dad. And I was not just the kid who’s scared, and saw that his dad
was assassinated. We’d gotten to the mountaintop and seen not the Promised Land, but rather the truth, the very matrix itself,
and we as a family seem sometimes to have a heavier burden now than we did before.

Somehow I thought that I would be able to just help, and I still believe this, maybe it’s just my fallacy, but I hang on to
the fact that I can still do this—help out—and at the same time be Dexter, protect that part of me that’s mine, that’s private,
or that just wants to get home safe at the end of the day. There’s a side that does not want to necessarily belong to the
world. I’ve seen what the world can do to a good man, then not look back, except to put him on a pedestal once he’s gone.
I’m reminded of all these noble athletic teams named after the noble red man. We have one in Atlanta— the Atlanta Braves baseball
team. When did these Native Americans become recognized as noble? After they were dead. There was a time in this country when
the only good Indian was a dead Indian.

The media has always portrayed my father in this very serious light, as a public icon. Do you bring him down off the pedestal
and humanize him, or do you keep him up on the shelf? Maybe you keep him on the shelf, humanize the family, the wife, the
mother, the children, the daughters, the sons, do what comes natural, obliterate them, since they’re still living. Maybe you
go beyond that, in this insatiable celebrity- and media-driven society. Maybe you don’t just humanize—maybe you humiliate
too. History puts Dad on the shelf, not people. The truth is, too many see history as largely irrelevant, passé, so they put
it on the shelf until it’s convenient for their purposes.

In Isaac’s words, I “had the biggest pair.” Unlike me, he could get away with saying something like that publicly, in a relaxed,
informal vernacular. Actually, my father would’ve probably gotten a kick out of that description. But I felt I had an image
to live up to now. Isaac was probably less guarded, but between the two of us he probably needed to be less guarded.

There was another, less obvious dilemma. Once my father’s cause came into prominence, a lot of local connections were almost
severed, with the exception of my grandfather. When my father was growing up, his family was plugged in locally. I must be
honest, it’s almost a shame to say it, but after he came to prominence, a fear developed. In Atlanta in the ’50s and ’60s,
there was a large section of black society, including the preacher-teacher class, that felt, “Hey, we’re straight. We don’t
necessarily need to integrate.” It probably was the James Crow Esquire example of separate but near-equal, meaning the infrastructure
for some blacks in Atlanta wasn’t such a low-grade thing. Houses in the black community, for blacks who could afford them,
were as nice as houses in some white communities. Blacks could buy nice cars, there were restaurants here serving them. No
need to go over to Lester Maddox’s place to get met by an ax handle. Black chefs here were as good as white ones. There were
places in Atlanta for talent to express itself. The colleges, education, even on lower levels, the schools, were as good as
the white schools. People here weren’t anxious to upset the apple cart. Many of them were fine with the status quo. The extension
of that today is in people who write editorial columns saying they see the King family as an embarrassment, like something
of another era, something that is no longer needed, a sort of civil rights history exhibit.

There was and is lingering resentment because of this history. There were a lot of successful, intelligent, well-to-do people,
right there on the King Center board, who had resentments. My grandfather didn’t encounter it as much. My father? That’s another
story. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying everyone liked my grandfather. He was a driven man. Such men are never universally
liked. The resentment I’m speaking of against my father was from his generation. Don’t rock our boat. You might spill our
champagne. We don’t need you anymore. Go on home now, preacher and children alike. And this mentality was about to land on
me, on us all, and land hard.

A
ll my mother wanted was for the King Center to do its work, spread the legacy of my father’s methods, carry out his mission
of peace and brotherhood, and be a repository for mementos and artifacts of his life. The King Center was finally about to
be completed as an edifice, a place where the people of the world could commiserate and peacefully reflect near his remains.

Nothing angers Mother quicker than for someone to say she was an ornament my father picked up. She’ll tell you in a minute
that she began to earn her stripes as an undergraduate at Antioch College in the late ’40s, early ’50s. She spoke out on human
rights issues from the beginning. She spoke out against the Vietnam War before Daddy. She went to Geneva in 1962 for a disarmament
conference—Daddy encouraged her, but she’d supported conscientious objectors since they were some of her fellow students at
Antioch.

Mother—think what you will of me, her wayward third child. Some board members had their own motives. So my being elected to
the position of president was a real soap opera. We had to line up votes before a January 1989 election. Mother and I went
around, met with board members, soliciting their support. Some I met with one-on-one; some she met with me. One in particular,
though not on the board now, is still close by. He told us we had his support. Broke down in tears while meeting us in a suite
on the upper floor of a downtown Atlanta hotel the day before. The next day the rest of the board members waited downstairs
to take the vote. He was looking at me, talking to Mother and me about how much character he knew was in me. He asked if I
had any skeletons in my closet.

I said, “No,” and quoted the Bible: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I acted as a child. But
when I became a man, I put away childish things.” He broke down and said, “You have something more special than somebody who
has a degree or credentials.” That stung. It always stung back then. I didn’t know to let my sincerity be my credential. I
was still insecure. “Okay,” I thought. “I didn’t graduate from Morehouse, I’ll never live that down in some circles, but how
long will it be held over my head?”

I think his concern was genuine, but I also think he didn’t have any backbone. The next morning, he tried with the attorney
to hamstring me by changing the resolution. I’m being brought in as president and he’s trying to change the language on the
resolution behind the scenes, so that when it’s agreed to, a legal glitch would make me a puppet, a figurehead.

Fortunately, the King Center’s attorney, Archer Smith, alerted us. There was, then and always, a lot of legal action around
the King Center and my father’s legacy, in the form of the King Estate. Whether one was asking Boston University for the return
of a portion of my father’s papers, or asking
USA Today
not to publish my father’s speech without permission, or any one of a dozen legal disagreements, attorneys were always working,
either for the King Center or on behalf of the King Estate, two separate entities. So it was Archer Smith, who had always
been loyal to the family, who blew the whistle. We found out on the morning of the meeting. We were in a suite, in a hotel
downtown, Mother and I sitting there while we were being converged upon by eight to ten people who did not have our best interests
at heart; we did not meet them all at once, but one or two at a time. The board meeting was convening downstairs in a meeting
room. We were up in the suite when one of the prominent board members, a businessman, came in saying, “We don’t have the votes,”
telling Mother, “If you don’t have the votes and if you go forward, you’re going to be embarrassed.”

Mother—I’d never seen her like this. She was near tears. She looked at me, through me, and I don’t know what flashed in her
mind—her deceased husband, their lives, twenty-one years since his assassination, twenty years working to make the King Center
vision come alive, and now—“They’ve betrayed us,” she whispered. I saw her face in mine.

She told the man, “I’ve gone around and met with all of you; I was told I had the votes. Now you are telling me, today, at
the eleventh hour—no? There’s a credibility gap. A big credibility gap.”

I can still see the hurt on her face—that sweet, full, butter-scotch angel’s face I’ve seen above me all of my life. I have
to be honest. Those people became my enemies for a while for hurting her. I kept telling her, “They aren’t with you, Mother.
They’re here for their own purposes.” She began to take her earrings off and then put them back on. She does that when she’s
either nervous or has something she wants to say. Maybe she didn’t want to see it. I don’t want to say she’s naive; that would
be putting her down. I was naive. But that was changing. She has good intentions and takes for granted that other people do
too. It’s a country trait, it can be a downfall. She believes in the goodness in everybody. I tend to be more skeptical. I’ve
seen what happens. But then, so has she.

Mother said, “There’s a credibility gap.” Another board member ignored her, saying, “If you go forward with this nomination
of your son as president, then I’m stepping down.”

These votes of no confidence made me more determined, whereas before I might have been a little unsure about stepping in,
fearing that I was doing it because my siblings and mother elected me. Now it was more personal. A faction of the board was
not going to have me under any circumstances. They were fighting to the death on this one. Finally somebody else came in,
another wealthy, prominent Atlantan; he called off the dogs and said, “We need to let this one go.”

People downstairs were getting wind something was funny, because we hadn’t come down yet. The nomination and voting should
have been taking place. At some point Uncle Andy came up and said we had the votes; he and the wealthy, prominent Atlantan
had twisted a few arms. I don’t think Uncle Andy knew what was going on at the time. He was always true-blue ever since that
April day when he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis pointing toward where he thought the shot had come
from. Also when he was a congressman, and later a UN ambassador during the Carter administration, and after that, as mayor
of Atlanta; now he was downstairs dealing with the grassroots portion of the board, the King loyalists. Sure, there were some
people in the loyalist crowd who may have had general concerns about an unproven person coming in, but if Mother said, “I
believe this is the right thing,” they weren’t going to question it. They may have said, “Dexter, what’s your plan for this?”
But I had eight to ten board members against me who were telling me, “Look, you’re not qualified, you don’t know jack, and
we’re going to show you don’t know jack.” I was very hurt by the lack of support from people who I had not only looked up
to but who, frankly, had also benefited from the efforts of my family.

We all went downstairs, the vote was taken, and I was elected.

Nobody voted against it. People who were against it had left the room because they didn’t want to be on record. At that point
they had shown their cards. The sad thing is that some of these people, I could have worked with them then, and in fact later
did work with some of them. These are black businesspeople who were known across the state and country at the time, but they
just could not deal with me alone—couldn’t trust me without an academic pedigree that was familiar to them. “If it was Martin,
we’d support it,” I was told.