Growing Up King (36 page)

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.

What tends to happen with leadership (not just black or white leadership) is that the ceremony happens first, the announcement
comes, then leaders backtrack to capture the sacrament, people’s hearts. Lincoln did the ceremony by freeing the slaves legislatively
with the Emancipation Proclamation, but the sacrament was men and women dying in the Civil War, at Gettysburg, at Antietam.
Victim/victimizer, slave/slavemaster having sacrament in their hearts, that was even more difficult to achieve, as seen by
the failures of Reconstruction, the subsequent rise of the murdering Ku Klux Klan, White Citizens Councils, then denial of
suffrage, then, after the turn of the century, the rise in lynchings, the
Birth of a Nation
film, then the Red Summer of 1919, the torching of the economically successful Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921
and the killing of three hundred innocent black people. That whole process of post–Civil War subjugation is what causes there
to still be racism lingering 140 years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. After growing up in an environment
of ceremony and sacrament, I saw more ceremony after my father’s death; but people still felt left out, particularly black
people, who felt downtrodden, needing validation. Other people felt threatened, like whites who railed against processes like
affirmative action. We have all found out together that the ceremony alone doesn’t do it, no matter how much money you put
into people’s pockets, no matter how much wealth a community generates; if the people themselves within their hearts aren’t
right, if they don’t feel good about themselves, don’t feel or get treated equal, things won’t change.

Leadership, whatever and whoever that is, has to do its part, black and white. Both races need to understand that it’s not
just African-American psyche that needs support; white America needs to realize that its psyche also needs reparations and
support— forgiveness, education, and a feeling of security that’s obviously lacking there as well.

The history of America has left us all insecure, I’m afraid. Saying “I’m sorry” or giving out comparatively meager handouts
isn’t the only solution.

Everybody talks about what Dr. King would have done and what the Civil Rights Movement accomplished or didn’t accomplish.
Did it hurt more or help more, in terms of integration? There is validity to the statement that integration opened up doors
and avenues that left indigenous home businesses in the lurch. A lot of this has to do with the fact that some black businesses
were not operating competitively. Free enterprise means competition. You have to be competitive. My father knew integration
meant competition; part of competition is knowing and charging fair market value and delivering goods in a timely and effective
manner. That did not happen many times. Often there were reasons why, often it was kept from happening by outside forces.
Distribution channels were often closed for minority-produced goods and services. In many cases resources weren’t there, loans
were not forthcoming; red-lining for business and private housing was no myth—it happened. It may in fact still happen.

The problem—or solution—was, and is, what’s in people’s heart of hearts. One who addresses this is Magic Johnson. With his
multitude of businesses, from cineplexes to restaurants, he’s saying to black consumers, “We can have nice things, should
demand them, be able to go into a nice theater, shouldn’t have to go to a dilapidated, run-down theater not being maintained,
not showing a first-run feature. We can have a multiplex.” He has one of his chain of Magic Johnson Theatres multiplexes in
Atlanta; it’s one of the most successful. He also put a Magic Johnson’s T.G.I. Friday’s restaurant next to it, and is doing
well. This stems from mentality, commitment, and investment—a way of being. It requires stew-ardship, maintenance. The people
who were fighting for integration didn’t always understand the technical sides of expanding an economy. Look at the 2000 trade
agreement with China: 1.3 billion Chinese can’t be wrong—not as consumers, at least. Any businessman will tell you that as
long as the customer buys, the customer is always right, no matter his politics.

People can talk about the negatives of integration, but look at the positives. The South in particular. Its market share increased
a hundredfold because what was traditionally a segregated, backdoor dollar now came in the front door, en masse, and from
there momentum took over. We all know by now who often sets the consumer trends in the United States. That black dollar and
black aesthetic built up the economy of the South and created opportunities for everybody—just as it had done in the Greenwood
section of Tulsa in the early 1900s. But what we have failed to do post-integration is create opportunities in our community;
we’ve been so busy gaining access and maybe acceptance that we did not build a more permanent infrastructure. In cases we
may have had it, but it was destroyed in the wake of the assassination of my father in 1968, and it was never rebuilt, in
some cases not even now, thirty-five years later. We strive for recognition, so much that we have almost told people we don’t
want to be part of the mainstream. You can’t have it both ways.

I’m just saying that we need to understand—as my father understood so clearly—that we are a minority and the only way you
are going to transform the majority is to assimilate with it to effect change.

Are we colored, Negro, African American, Afro-American? This question is hard because, when you look at the African continent,
it’s made up of many regions, countries, tribes, peoples—it’s a world unto itself; a continent, not a country. It’s impossible
to go back and recapture that which was lost. What can happen is acknowledgment that this is the case.

There has to be a realization and acceptance of where we stand. I was watching Tavis Smiley on
BET Tonight
before Bob Johnson and Tavis came to their parting of the ways. Karl Kani and other fashion designers were on. A woman called
in and said, “When are you ever going to do a cheaper line?” Why is it that black folk or artists are always expected to drop
their prices and give things away, then those same people who ask you to do it will go out and spend top dollar for Tommy
Hilfiger? We’ve got to balance the practical side of it and move on. Right on Auburn Avenue, that area could be a major economic
engine, an additional economic engine for the city of Atlanta. It already has critical mass in terms of visitors and potential
customers. You have people coming here to the King Center, but then they leave. They park, come in, look around, ruminate,
then they’re gone. Why not create a destination where people come down and stay a while—eat and sit and spend time? You’ve
got the beginnings of the infrastructure. All you need is to put the right things there to interest people, so that when they
come, they stay longer than twenty minutes, they stay and spend more money that fuels the local economy.

* * *

We have since made up in terms of the issues at hand with the National Park Service, but there is still the inevitable coexistence.
They’re interested in purchasing our real estate and our buildings. The King Center edifice is a depreciable asset. This is
not land that’s going to be used to build condos twenty years from now. This is historic land. Maintenance is a liability.
Maintaining a fixed asset is only going to get more troublesome. Who will be responsible for it after Mother and us are gone?
It’ll fall into disrepair over time. With the mandate of preserving the buildings and grounds, and doing facility management,
the Park Service makes sense.

And so it happened that our friends and confidants were subject to human nature, human frailty, just as we Kings were; if
we ourselves are subject to all that, then we can all probably rest assured we shall meet resistance until the end—until the
legacy is out of our hands, until we’re in our graves, unmourned, possibly misunderstood. The more I learned, the more betrayed
I felt we were by some of the big names within the Civil Rights Movement. Perhaps they felt betrayed by us. Sadder still would
be not standing up for what you believe. Worse still would be laboring in the wrong, and if proven wrong, refusing to admit
it and go on together to the next problem.

The resistance was from people who, in their hearts, didn’t want to place value or be seen approving placing value on something
African American. Because it’s associated with a black individual, it’s not supposed to command the same respect. We heard,
“Most people donate their papers to the Library.” Those people were presidents still on the public payroll. The government
paid the family of Richard Nixon $18 million for papers, tape recordings, and other materials seized after Watergate. The
Zapruder film, a few seconds of 8mm film of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas in 1963? In 1999, the government agreed to
pay Abraham Zapruder’s family some $15 million for those mere seconds—not the rights to the film, mind you, but the film itself.
The rights are retained by the Zapruder family. I don’t know what it’s all worth. I go by the standards set, appraisals of
the professionals like Sotheby’s and the Library of Congress, and comparative rates paid for the Nixon papers, the Zapruder
film.

There’s been a lot of political posturing about blocking the Library of Congress purchase of the King papers. Whether that
will translate into blocking it into perpetuity, I don’t know.

The journey will be difficult, but in the end we’ll get where we’re going. That’s in my gut—Daddy’s real, spoken legacy will
survive and flourish. In many ways, it is fitting and proper for the lion’s share of his papers to be going to the Library
of Congress. I don’t know why people would object, unless they are objecting to what he stood for. They say, “Dr. King wouldn’t
have wanted this,” or “The papers aren’t that valuable.” Prove that by his five blood heirs. As long as you respect my mother
and siblings, then you can discount me. No need to discount the whole family. Just me. As long as Mother’s angle of repose
is comfortable, and her mind clear, and my sisters and brother are free to pursue their own level of love, peace, and happiness,
then I’m fine. One last move to safeguard Daddy’s legacy and know the truth about his assassination might assure Mother a
final comfort and clarity. This move would be the civil trial of one Loyd Jowers.

I
t had never been confronted in open court. Not for us, by us, the family of the victim.

We were in collective shock in 1968 when James Earl Ray was shot through the legal system as if greased, with first Arthur
Hanes then Percy Foreman as his lawyer. For us, it was hard enough just to accept Daddy’s being dead, to accept what people
said and did in the aftermath, to accept the different reactions from others, to accept what the authorities said about who
killed him. “Try to move on,” I remember people saying. As if. As time went on, deep down inside, all the adults in my family—Mother,
Uncle A.D., Granddaddy, Big Mama, cousin Alveda—felt there was more to it. I, me, Dexter, the last one, ended up as point
man for all those years of muffled questions and suppressed doubts. My family looked to me now. Right or wrong, they looked
to me. For my family. For my father. You tell me—what was I supposed to do?