Growing Up King (35 page)

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.

T
he 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 acquiring 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.