Tag: Martin Luther King

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Opinion The Last Word

Who Is Coretta Scott King?

Plenty of history books magnify the mission of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was an American champion for the marginalized. While I celebrate his birth each January — and join in remembrance on the anniversary of his April assassination — allow me to shout from the rooftop that the historical impact of his wife, Coretta Scott King, goes largely uncelebrated. As a writer devoted to researching the Civil Rights Movement, I consider America’s lackluster regard for Coretta to be a crying shame.

Coretta’s legacy of social action and promotion of peace deserves to be widely extolled in books and the naming of schools and streets. Without her fortitude, it is likely Dr. King would not have reached his full stature as a civil rights leader. It is also likely that without Coretta’s tireless campaign to establish the King holiday, national and international deference to Martin’s name would be less prominent and shining. If this sounds like an exaggerated assertion, think again.

In 1956 when Dr. King denounced segregation and was a voice for nonviolent protests during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, white segregationists bombed the parsonage where the Kings lived with their firstborn child, Yolanda. While Martin was leading an evening strategy meeting, Coretta and their 10-week-old baby were home when the explosion blasted the front porch to pieces and blew a hole in the living room wall.

No one was injured, but the explosion was a sure reason for Coretta to quit the protest and leave Montgomery for safety. Coretta’s parents, Obadiah and Bernice Scott, lived in Heiberger, Alabama, 80 miles west of Montgomery. Mr. Scott drove to the parsonage expecting to carry his daughter away from danger. Coretta told him, “I am going to stay here with Martin.”

Montgomery was not Coretta’s first encounter with racial terror. When she was a teenager, segregationists set the Scotts’ house on fire. Mr. Scott raised pine timber on the family’s 300 acres. It was the mob’s intention to break his entrepreneurial spirit, but smoldering embers did not make him flinch. He built a new home. Years later, he purchased a lumber mill and segregationists also burned it to ashes.

With faith in a power greater than himself, Coretta’s father stood steadfast in Heiberger to, finally, open a thriving grocery store that served all citizens in Perry County. Just like the song, Obadiah Scott wouldn’t let “nobody” turn him around. He was Coretta’s model of courage. And during the Montgomery bombing, Coretta followed his example. Like her father, she stood unflinching in the face of fire. Coretta then went on to march beside Martin during the Civil Rights Movement from its early days in 1956, until her husband’s assassination on April 4, 1968.

Imagine the outcome if Coretta had abandoned Martin and the movement in Montgomery. If she had fainted in the face of fire, would anyone blame Martin for leaving Montgomery to save his marriage? Absolutely not. But the inward call to pursue freedom in Jim Crow America also weighed heavily in Coretta’s soul. Therefore, Martin never had to choose his family over the movement. And privately, when Martin wanted Coretta to adjourn movement work and be content with motherhood, she reminded him, “I have a call on my life, too.”

During their 13 years marching in the name of civil rights, Martin suffered violence, death threats, and constant trumped-up jail charges. It was Coretta’s disdain for tears, her unwavering words of encouragement, and midnight prayers that helped her husband stay the course. Martin called her “Corrie,” his “brave soldier.”

Few Americans understand the impact of Coretta’s warrior spirit because history books do not adequately explore her life as an activist, leader, and prophetic voice of liberation. Magazines from the ’60s overlooked the bravery in Martin’s warrior woman. Photojournalists rendered her portrait in elegant, unchallenging tones. And from patriarchal pulpits after Dr. King’s murder in Memphis, Black preachers encouraged Coretta to stay pretty and silent, while they jockeyed for positions that once belonged to Martin.

Black male leaders of the movement did not grasp that Coretta was the seed of Obadiah Scott. Burnished by fire, she was incapable of reducing her light. Coretta Scott King followed her own mind. And after Martin’s death, for the next 15 years, she used her voice to promote principles of nonviolence as she rallied the nation to establish a federal holiday to honor Dr. King, a drum major for peace.

As for Martin, Coretta, and the mystery of love, some people believe that marriage is a divine union where two hearts become “one flesh.” If that is true, let me propose a new tradition. Whenever you remember and celebrate the name of Dr. King for his efforts in human rights, be sure to praise and amplify that fated love, who wielded courage to walk as one with him. Her name was Coretta Scott King. She was born April 27, 1927. Martin called her, “Corrie.” She was a woman, wife, and warrior on the battlefield for freedom.

Alice Faye Duncan is a Memphis educator and the author of Coretta’s Journey; Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop; and Yellow Dog Blues, a NYT/NPL Best Illustrated Book selection in 2022. Visit her at alicefayeduncan.com.

*This piece was originally printed in the Dallas Morning News.

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Art Art Feature

“A Requiem for King”

Ernest Withers’ photographs illustrating Memphis in 1968. (Photo: Abigail Morici)

Last month, to honor the 55th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the National Civil Rights Museum unveiled “Waddell, Withers, & Smith: A Requiem for King,” an exhibition highlighting three Memphis-based artists whose work responded to King’s assassination and the Civil Rights Movement: self-taught sculptor James Waddell Jr., photojournalist Ernest Withers, and multimedia artist Dolph Smith.

“It goes to show the levels of Dr. King and how many people he impacted,” NCRM associate curator Ryan Jones says of the exhibit. “He didn’t just impact people who were civil rights leaders and human rights activists; he impacted people who were artists. And so this goes to show what he meant as a man and that people here in this great community of Memphis have channeled and responded to something that has been a dark cloud over the city in the past 55 years. Dr. King impacted the hearts and minds of so many citizens.”

Each of the three artists were born and raised in Memphis, Jones says, and all served in the military, with their respective services being turning points in their artistic careers. Withers, a World War II veteran, learned his craft at the Army School of Photography. He would then go on to photograph some of the most iconic moments of the Civil Rights Movement, including King’s fateful visit to Memphis, the priceless images for which line the exhibition’s walls.

“We can’t tell the story of the modern Civil Rights Movement without the role of photography,” Jones says, and truly, Withers played one of the most significant roles in documenting that history, capturing approximately 1.8 million photographs before his death at 85 years old in 2007.

At the same time Withers was documenting King’s Memphis visit and the aftermath of his assassination, James Waddell (who happened to later be photographed by Withers) was serving in the Vietnam War and didn’t learn what had happened in Memphis until weeks later. For Waddell and his family, King’s death marked a period of pain and grief — “His relatives compared the assassination to a death in the family,” reads the exhibit’s wall text.

“[Sculpture] was his way of reacting to the tragedy that had happened,” Jones says. “He said that living in Memphis and being a native Memphian and not doing the work would be something he would never be able to get over.” So when he returned home, Waddell channeled this grief in the work now on display — an aluminum-cast bust of King and Mountaintop Vision, a bronze statue of King kneeling on a mountaintop with an open Bible. “It shows he’s humbling himself to God,” Waddell said of the sculpture in a 1986 interview in The Commercial Appeal with Anthony Hicks. 

James Waddell’s Mountaintop Vision (Photo: Abigail Morici)

Initially, as the 1986 article reveals, Waddell planned to create an eight-foot version of Mountaintop Vision as “the city’s first statue of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” “The time is right, because Memphis is beginning to voice an opinion that there is a need for a statue,” Waddell told The Commercial Appeal. “This will be a tool for understanding.”

Waddell, who has since passed, said he hoped “to see the finished piece placed at the proposed Lorraine Motel Civil Rights Museum, Clayborn Temple, or in Martin Luther King Jr. Riverside Park.” Though that eight-foot version never came to fruition, at long last, the smaller version of Waddell’s Mountaintop Vision can be seen not only in a public display for the first time, but also at the National Civil Rights Museum as he once had envisioned. 

Dolph Smith’s The Veil of the Temple Was Rent in Two (Photo: Abigail Morici)

Meanwhile, Dolph Smith, who had long since returned home from the Vietnam War, was in Memphis the night of King’s assassination. As Memphis was set ablaze that night, he and his family stood on the roof of their home, watching the smoke rise around them. He vowed to never forget that date — April 4, 1968. In his personal calendar for that day, he wrote, “If this has happened in Memphis, then now I know it can happen anywhere. It is so hard to believe a man’s basic instinct is to be good.”

In response to what he called “an unspeakable tragedy” and the public uprising that arose from it, Smith took to the canvas. For one piece on display at the museum, titled The Veil of the Temple Was Rent in Two, the artist ripped an American flag, placing photographs of the Civil Rights Movement in between its tears, as Jones says, “to show the extreme divisiveness that the assassination caused.”

In all, Jones hopes the exhibit will show the reach of King’s legacy extending beyond April 4, 1968, all the way to the present day. In one of the videos projected on the exhibition’s walls, Smith, now at 89 years old, speaks on the importance of witnessing artwork like the pieces on display. “If you make something and it just sits there, it’s unfinished,” Smith says. To him — a painter, bookmaker, and educator — in order for a work of art to be “finished,” it has to be shared, for the mission of the artist is not simply to create but to spark conversation, to encourage self-reflection, and in cases like that of Withers, Waddell, and Smith, to activate progress.

“Waddell, Withers, & Smith: A Requiem for King” is on display at the National Civil Rights Museum through August 28th.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Way to Nonviolence

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Photo: Unseen Histories | Library of Congress | Unsplash)

More than 60 years ago, as many are aware, civil rights activists began organizing to desegregate businesses in Birmingham, Alabama. By the spring of 1963, tensions were at a boiling point due to a series of sit-ins, boycotts, and demonstrations designed to draw attention to racial injustices in the city. On April 12, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Birmingham for not having an official permit.

In his germinal “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King, while incarcerated, laid out the principles of nonviolent protest and social change. His message was that each voice — and life — is worthy of respect, dignity, and equality. And, love is the answer, not war — or hate. Deep down, we are alike more than we are different. When I taught freshman writing at Northwest Florida University, Cape Fear Community College, and Shepherd University, this was my favorite essay to teach. Every semester, without fail, his impassioned plea for nonviolence garnered more discussion and reflection than any other piece we studied. Many of the resulting student essays made me cry.

In his letter, Dr. King differentiates between two kinds of peace. “Negative peace,” as King explains, is the absence of tension; it’s an attempt not to rock the boat or cause conflict. Whereas, “positive peace” is the active pursuit of justice. Rather than opposing people “on the other side,” as peace-builder Ryan Wallace writes: “Positive peace challenges the status quo to make way for a more just world, expecting conflict to follow.” Instead of using violence to make change, peace-builders use nonviolent direct action.

King writes: “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. … We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

It is crystal clear that in the United States we are seeing the effects of a violent culture in our schools and on our streets. So too, violence and violent conflict, rather than natural disasters, are now the primary driver of forced displacement and refugee flight worldwide. While conflict is inevitable, violence is not. It is merely one way of dealing with our differences. It’s time we move beyond violent conflict and toward nonviolence.

A wise friend once shared with me that as peace-builders, we are not merely “anti.” While many of us are anti-racist, anti-discrimination, anti-oppression, we are also standing up for something. Rather than being just anti-war, we are for peace. By default, being merely “anti” can easily lead us into creating enemies or creating an “us” versus “them” situation. Taking this type of warlike approach — in word or deed — ensures defeat. This is why Kingian Nonviolence Principles encourage people to “fight injustice, not people.” We must keep an open mind and heart — and embrace the principles of nonviolence — as we seek to dialogue with others and make change. As A.J. Muste said, “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.” It may take longer to collaborate and negotiate, but the results are longer lasting, and everyone benefits.

Everyone is connected to everyone else, and all that must be achieved for universal change is for the momentum to build enough to create a tipping point for good. Each person makes this so every day from the inside out. Each person can challenge themselves to learn and grow, as each personal realization is literally a realization for the planet.

Rest assured, peace and nonviolence aren’t just hearts and rainbows. There is growing proof that nonviolence is practical. It works. In 2011, social scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan demonstrated that nonviolent movements are twice as effective as violent movements in achieving their goals. In their book, Why Civil Resistance Works, they share the data they collected from 323 protest movements between 1900 and 2006. They found that 53 percent of the nonviolent movements “managed to achieve their goal, usually a change of regime, compared with 26 percent of the violent movements.”

In his letter, Dr. King also touches on our interdependence. He writes: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

Let us each become a “vehicle” for this monumental shift toward a more evolved way to manage our conflicts. Though a challenging endeavor, peace on Earth is possible … and it’s coming. Since my first peace journalism trek in 2013, much has changed. People are waking up, becoming engaged, and taking action for what they believe. The soil is ripe for pioneering peace activists and peace journalists to rock the world.

Susan Beaver Thompson is a peace journalist and grant writer for United Way of Southern Nevada.

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Book Features Books

Tavis Smiley on the Death of a King

Tavis Smiley recalled it as a defining moment: the day he was given a set of LPs featuring the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.

Smiley — national broadcaster, talk-show host, and author — was 12 years old when he received those recordings while he recuperated from the beatings he’d received from his stepfather. Growing up in small-town Indiana as a member of a large black family in a largely white community, Smiley hadn’t had King on his radar, but as Smiley said recently by phone from Los Angeles, King did more than change his life:

“He saved my life. He redirected me. In those speeches — in the reassurance of his voice — King talked about the power of love, how love was the only force capable of turning an enemy into a friend. Here I was trying to figure out my life, and I hear King talking about love. He was talking about a nation, but he might as well have been talking to me as a child. I was going to have to love my way through this situation. Hatred was not an option. I would have to love my enemies, love those who used and exploited me, and forgive those I was angry with — including my parents.”

Smiley’s heartfelt response was an answer to why his latest book, Death of a King (Little, Brown), perhaps means more to him than any of his previous books. It was a question asked in anticipation of Smiley’s two upcoming Memphis book signings. He’ll sign and discuss Death of a King on Friday, September 19th, at the Booksellers at Laurelwood at 1:30 p.m. and at the National Civil Rights Museum from 6 to 8 p.m.

It certainly won’t be Smiley’s first time in Memphis. He was here in April to celebrate the National Civil Rights Museum’s redesign (which Smiley said exceeded his expectations). And he certainly doesn’t claim that his Death of a King competes with the “heavy-lifting” of King biographers Taylor Branch, Clayborne Carson, and David Garrow.

What Smiley and his collaborator David Ritz (along with researcher Jared Hernandez) have here, though, is a dramatic retelling of King’s final and pivotal year. What kind of man had King become during those 12 months? That is the question at the heart of the book, and it opens on April 4, 1967, the day the life of Martin Luther King would undergo fundamental change. He was readying for his speech inside Riverside Church in Manhattan — a speech denouncing America’s involvement in Vietnam, the third component in the triple threat to American democracy as King saw it: racism, poverty, and militarism. There were additional, more personal challenges, too, not the least of which the dissension inside the ranks of the civil rights movement and the rise in black-power rhetoric. King’s gospel of nonviolence was losing ground.

“Everybody had turned on him: the White House, the media (including the black media), black organizations,” Smiley said of the difficult position King found himself in. “We may think we know King, but we don’t know him unless we too wrestle with what he endured” — and recognize the toll that the pressure and the tension took on King physically and mentally.

The subtitle of Smiley’s book is “The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther’s King Jr.’s Final Year,” and that title, Smiley said, is “pushback” on the sanitized, sterilized image some may have of King. But the “real” King will come as no disappointment to readers. It came as no disappointment to Smiley himself:

“It is so rare to come across someone who truly is as advertised — King as truly who I thought he was. That was a beautiful realization for me. But that doesn’t mean King was perfect. He was a public servant, not a perfect servant. At the center of his working witness is this primary mission to love and serve others. He was the real deal.”

And by the time King heard of the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, he was given real hope — hope that he could build a bridge to the movement’s militants; hope that Memphis would direct national attention to the country’s poor of all races.

Death of a King comes with its author’s own hopes. “I’m hopeful that, of all my books, this will be the one that will empower the greatest number of people, will enlighten the greatest number, the book that years from now people will continue to refer to as the most accessible,” Smiley said. “Not the definitive book on King’s last year. That would be arrogant of me. But I want everyday people to understand the real story, the true story of Martin Luther King Jr., the man they maybe do not know.”

Categories
Calling the Bluff Music

Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Legacy, Assassination

Martin-Luther-King-Jr.jpg

Forty-six years ago today, civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis.

A pastor, humanitarian, and activist, King traveled to the city to support the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike. Thirteen hundred African-American sanitation workers refused to labor until they received the same wages and treatment as their white colleagues.

On April 3rd, 1968, a day before his death, King visited Mason Temple Church of God in Christ to deliver his last speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” The verbal presentation touched on the sanitation workers’ decision to go on strike due to being treated unfairly, the overall importance of equality and unity, among other things.

One of the most popular people involved with the civil rights movement, King was both a public figure and target. And on the night he delivered his speech at Mason Temple, he alluded to the possibility of being murdered in the future because of his popularity and influence. He conveyed that he wasn’t concerned about being harmed by hateful white men and that he was simply determined to carry out God’s will.

Ironically, King would be shot and killed the next evening. On April 4th, 1968, he was shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, a location that has since become part of the National Civil Rights Museum, around 6 p.m. A bullet from a Remington Model 760 rifle entered his right cheek and traveled through his neck severing his spinal cord before lodging into his shoulder. The 39-year-old was pronounced dead at the now-defunct St. Joseph’s Hospital at 7:05 p.m. that same night.

After his death was publicized, cities across the country, including Memphis, spiraled into a frenzy and rioted. This resulted in dozens of deaths and many more injuries.

Two months after the assassination, James Earl Ray, an escaped convict, was captured and charged with King’s murder. He admitted to fatally shooting King but renounced the confession days later. He alleged that he confessed as a result of extreme pressure from law enforcement and being threatened with the death penalty. Ray, ultimately, pled guilty to the assassination and received a 99-year prison sentence rather than the death penalty.

Years before he died, Ray attempted to withdraw his guilty plea and secure his innocence. He claimed that the assassination was a conspiracy spearheaded by a man named “Raoul.” Many others, including King’s family, also believed that more took place than what was being publicized. The King family supported Ray’s allegations that he was innocent. However, they claimed that Loyd Jowers, the owner of Jim’s Grill, a restaurant located near the Lorraine Motel, was involved with the assassination along with government agencies and the mafia.

Jowers himself also claimed that there was a conspiracy involving the mafia and the U.S. government to kill King. He claimed that Memphis police officer Lieutenant Earl Clark was actually responsible for King’s murder, and Ray was simply a scapegoat.

Only God knows who is truly responsible for the assassination of King. But countless people are aware of King’s contributions to the civil rights movement, primarily with the end of segregation in the South. To many, he’s one of the most influential and groundbreaking individuals in American history.

Nearly half a century since his assassination, things are significantly different than they were when King fought for economic equality and social justice. No longer can establishments avoid employing people or providing fair wages because of their race; equality has a more substantial presence. Of course, there are still a lot of issues plaguing society, but thanks to the contributions of people such as King, the opportunity for prosperity is no longer solely dictated by the color of a person’s skin.

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