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 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.
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.
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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.