Martin Luther King, III

King, Martin Luther, Jr. (1929–1968), orator, political strategist, essayist, and leader during the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on 15 January 1929, the child of Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr., and Alberta Williams King. Alberta King's father, Rev. A. D. Williams, helped found the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP and pastored Ebenezer Baptist Church, which King, Sr., commanded after Williams's death. Both preachers rocked the Ebenezer walls with their thunderous folk sermons while Alberta King played the organ and organized the choir. King, Jr., grew up immersed in the doctrine of Christian love and in the music and oratory of African American Baptist worship.

In 1948 King, Jr., earned a bachelor's degree from Morehouse College, where he heard Benjamin Mays, his father's friend and president of the college, preach during chapel services. Electing to become a minister, King studied at Crozer Theological Seminary and at Boston University, where he received a PhD in theology in 1955.

Early in 1954 King assumed his first pulpit at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church of Montgomery, Alabama. When Rosa Parks was arrested in December 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, JoAnn Robinson and the Women's Political Council initiated a bus boycott. As leader of the boycott organization, King gave his initial civil rights address to an overflow crowd at Holt Street Baptist Church, inspiring his audience to continue the boycott. By the time the protest ended a year later, he emerged as a national figure in the struggle for racial equality. Appearing in 1958, his book about the boycott, Stride toward Freedom, articulated the politics of nonviolence.

In 1956 King began an oratorical marathon that lasted over twelve years, attacking segregation in approximately two thousand speeches and sermons as he hopscotched the nation.

In 1963, orchestrating a major civil rights campaign in Birmingham, he answered critics with his famous essay “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. His demonstrations served as morality plays in which non-violent demonstrators met police who used fire hoses, German shepherds, tear gas, or billy clubs to preserve white supremacy. Such brutality shocked millions watching on television. In 1963 he delivered “I Have a Dream”, the climactic speech of a massive March on Washington, the most important American civil rights rally to date. Sometimes helped by ghostwriters, he also wrote many essays and five books, including Strength to Love (1963), a collection of sermons.

He consistently advocated nonviolence in the quest for racial equality and peace—an approach drastically different from that of Malcolm X, a more radical leader whose refusal to eschew violence made King seem more reasonable to whites.

For years scholars attributed King's ideas to his exposure to Euro-American philosophers and theologians, whom he studied in graduate school. Recently, however, a group of researchers led by James Cone has challenged this view, arguing that King's theology and oratory sprang mainly from his boyhood training at Ebenezer Church.

Many of King's sermons echo earlier texts by African American pastor Howard Thurman and by such white Protestant ministers as Harry Emerson Fosdick, Robert McCracken, J. Wallace Hamilton, and George Buttrick. Borrowing sermons was common practice not only for King, but for many other preachers, black and white.

King buttressed arguments with literary quotations. He repeated and elaborated riveting phrases that often incorporated lyrics from patriotic songs and hymns. Enjoying interaction with audiences, he mastered the traditional call and response of African American pastors. His crescendoing baritone voice, rolling cadences, and anticipatory pauses mesmerized not only African American Christians accustomed to such electric delivery, but also millions of others.

Late in his career, King attempted not only to achieve civil rights, but also to stop the Vietnam War and to eliminate American poverty. Facing threats upon his life, he journeyed to a garbage workers' strike in Memphis, Tennessee, to deliver “I've Been to the Mountaintop.” He recalled the Exodus and other epochal events in Western history, claiming a similar importance for the present struggle. The mayor of Memphis was a “pharaoh,” and his slaves, the garbage workers, could achieve justice only through unity. At the end King dramatically compared himself to Moses, who, standing atop a mountain, could glimpse the Promised Land. Amid shouts from enraptured listeners, he assured,“I may not get there with you;” but “we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”

The next day King died when shot by a hidden gunman.

Like King, James Farmer, Medgar Evers, John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer, Diane Nash, and dozens of others volunteered for jail duty, choreographed dramatic confrontations, and risked their lives. King distinguished himself through his language. Simultaneously perfecting and politicizing a robust black pulpit, King translated the traditional African American demand for equality into an idiom that many whites finally tried to understand.

Bibliography

• Harry Emerson Fosdick, Hope of the World, 1933.
• David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1986.
• Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1986.
• James Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America, 1991.
• Keith D. Miller, Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Its Sources, 1992.
• Clayborne Carson, ed., The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4 vols., 1992 -.
• Anita Haya Patterson, From Emerson to King, 1997

Keith D. Miller

civil rights activist

Personal Information

Born Martin Luther King III in 1957 in Montgomery, Alabama. Son of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King.
Education: Morehouse College; majored in political science and history.

Career

Elected to Fulton County Board of Commissioners, 1986; defeated in race for county chairman, 1993; founded Americans United for Affirmative Action, 1996; elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 1997, taking office on January 15, 1998, and serving until January 2004; president and chief executive, King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, January 2004--.

Life's Work

To grow up in the shadow of anyone is a difficult task, but to grow up as the namesake of one of the most important men of the twentieth century requires a Herculean effort. Such is the fate of Martin Luther King III, who was all of ten years old when his father, famed civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. A shy child, he became even more reticent living in the spotlight, and it was not until his stint on the Fulton County (Georgia) Board of Commissioners that he began to emerge from his father's shadow. In 1998 he invited further comparisons with his father by taking over as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the civil rights organization his father founded in 1957. It is a comparison he expects and for which he is prepared. As he explained to Kevin Chappell of Ebony, "The question will always be raised, 'How is your leadership compared to your father's?' There is nothing I can do to prevent people from drawing that line since this is the organization he started.... But I understand that you have to prove yourself to people. I believe that all of the skeptics over a period of time will be supportive."

Born in 1957 in Montgomery, Alabama, to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King III grew up in Atlanta where his grandfather and father preached at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. He was the second child and eldest son, and life was far from typical for Martin III and his siblings, but they did not know it at the time. "As a child I was never told or even thought that he was famous," King explained to William Greider of Rolling Stone. "Daddy was just doing the preacher's job--even though many times there were cameras around. As a child I really didn't tune in to what he was speaking about. So he was just a regular father to me--other than the fact that he was gone quite frequently."

His father was, more often than not, on the front lines of the then burgeoning civil rights movement that was sweeping through the South. With a fiery passion, the elder King preached of racial equality while advocating nonviolence even in the face of the most blatant forms of hatred and intolerance. On numerous occasions, Dr. King and others would be arrested in their peaceful demonstrations. "One day at school one of the little kids said, 'Your father's a jailbird,'" King reminisced to Greider. "And I came home crying. And my mother explained to me why my father was going to jail. She said, 'Daddy's going to jail to make this world a better place for all of God's children.' Well, I went to school with a new kind of pride and determination. Now I remember watching the news and seeing daddy on TV every night, but I didn't think that he was doing anything unusual because all my contemporaries were the children of the movement fathers--Andy Young, Hosea Williams, Dr. Ralph Abernathy.... When daddy went to jail, all of them would go. So I thought, 'That's what all fathers are supposed to be doing.'"

On April 4, 1968, when Martin III was ten years old, his father was assassinated in Memphis. "I guess it was 6:30, and we heard it on the local news," he told Greider, "and ran back to our mother's room, looking for a response--like 'What's going on?' And then she sat down with us and told us daddy had been shot and that we didn't know what the situation was but he was probably hurt very badly." While on the way to the airport to fly to Memphis, Coretta Scott King learned her husband was dead. Upon her return to Atlanta, she told her children. "She sat us down and told us, 'When you see him, he won't be able to talk to you, to hug and kiss you, to respond to any of your needs. He will be in a state of rest. And when you see him, he will look like he is sleeping, except he won't be breathing; he's gone home to live with God."

For awhile, until the arrest of James Earl Ray who was convicted of the murder, the King family lived under heavy security, but Mrs. King insisted they return to normal, and the children went back to school immediately. As the eldest son, Martin III took it upon himself to become the man of the house and, much to the displeasure of his brother and two sisters, became a heavy-handed enforcer. "They hated me," he confessed to Vern Smith and John Leland of Newsweek. "I hated myself now that I think of it." As Martin III and his siblings grew up they have gotten closer and closer, a result of living in a fishbowl atmosphere. None of them have married and, since leaving college, Martin has lived with his mother in the King family home they bought in 1965.

Although he attended his father's alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta, it was there Martin III began to call himself "Marty" in an attempt to distance himself from the shadow of his father. "I didn't want special treatment," he told Smith and Leland, "and I didn't want to be put in the position of having to lead until I was ready to." Nor did he wish to follow his father into the pulpit. Though it was never discussed with his father while he was alive, grandfather Martin Luther King, Sr., made it clear he desperately wanted to see his grandson as a preacher. Instead, Martin III majored in political science and history and, following graduation, worked on voter registration campaigns, lobbied for legislation to make his father's birthday a national holiday, and eventually ran for political office.

In 1986 King won a seat on the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, the Georgia district that includes Atlanta. While on the commission, King often faced criticism by those claiming he was not using the influence of his family name to accomplish more. Additionally, he had his share of controversy while in office, beginning in 1990. While delivering a speech, King told his audience that "any man who has a desire to be with another man has a problem." This outraged gay rights activists and prompted an apology from King who later called his remarks "uninformed and insensitive." King was also under scrutiny for hiring his cousin as a top aide and delivering a county contract to a company owned by his college roommate.

In 1993 while running for county commission chairman, it became known that King owed about $200,000 in back taxes and penalties on income he received as speaking fees. Although he settled with the federal government and paid the debt in full, the story cast a pall over his campaign and King lost in a shocking upset. Following his defeat King spent time quietly doing small speaking engagements but returned to the public eye in 1997 when he initiated an organization to support and maintain affirmative action. Formed in the wake of California's Proposition 209, which would have outlawed affirmative action policies in that state, King labeled the group Americans United for Affirmative Action. King would spend little time as head of the organization as he was being courted to succeed Rev. Ralph Lowery as the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the historic civil rights organization founded by his father in 1957.

The decision to accept the position came with much trepidation. "I didn't take on this responsibility very easily, and in fact, it took me about five months to come to the conclusion that this is what I wanted to do," King told Ebony's Chappell. King says he was essentially "drafted" into the position by SCLC board members who valued his leadership skills. His predecessor, Rev. Lowery, also expressed confidence in King. "This position provides him with a unique opportunity to assert his leadership and to proclaim his vision of America," Lowery declared to Chappell. "He will be able to lead this organization in participating in the redefining of America.... He doesn't have to live up to his father's image. He can establish his own image and leadership, not by trying to duplicate and replicate his father; but by exhibiting a brand of leadership that emanates from his own personality, his own vision, his own commitment."

For his part, King is confident he can bring something new to the organization. As only the fourth president of the SCLC--his father was succeeded by Rev. Ralph David Abernathy following the elder King's assassination, and then Lowery--King was the first one who was not a minister, but in fact, more of a politician. "I bring, I believe, the ability to bring a number of people together," he told Vern E. Smith of Emerge. "I think we've got to build coalitions in the future that in the past have not been so strong. The main thing is to involve young people." Additionally, King has to heavily involve himself in fundraising for the organization, a prospect which almost made him reject the job. King took over the SCLC on January 15, 1998, the day that would have been his father's 69th birthday.

"I've always had a passion," he asserted to Emerge's Smith. "People may not have known it because I don't always articulate it, but in this particular environment and with this organization, I think people are going to see a different kind of Martin." Whatever kind of Martin is seen, he is sure to be compared and contrasted with his father, although he hopes to be an extension rather than an imitation. "I see myself as hopefully being able to enhance the dream that Martin Luther King, Jr. had," he told Rolling Stone's Greider in 1988. "It obviously is not gonna happen today, this week, next month or even five years from now. It may not even happen in my lifetime. It may be a hundred years. But it is a dream that can happen."

As leader of the Conference, King on August 26, 2000, led a rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Called Redeem the Dream, the event commemorated the thirty-seventh anniversary of his father's famous March on Washington. Earlier that year, on January 11, he joined with Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network to initiate a Stand-Up for Justice campaign to politicize against the second-degree murder conviction of a thirteen-year-old boy in Oakland County, Michigan.

In the spring of 2001 King brought his message to the WISDOM Television Network, as the host of a television talk show, called Wisdom of Dreams, to highlight the achievements of otherwise unsung heroes. Accomplishments notwithstanding, King lacked some of the charisma of his famous father, and his leadership of the SCLC generated political tension among the board members of that organization. In June of 2001 the SCLC board placed him on administrative leave for one week, citing issues including insubordination, obstinate behavior, and poor performance in raising funds. Reinstated to the presidency, King continued in that capacity for another year and a half. In November of 2003 he announced that he would step down as head of the Conference in January of 2004, indicating further his intention to succeed his brother, Dexter Scott King, as president and chief executive of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta.

Unable and unwilling to shed his birthright, King's place in history remains to further the work of his slain father. When asked in a 2005 interview with Ebony to discuss his father's message in a post-911 context, King said, "My father's view were unequivocal, and I have found them to be invaluable to me as guidelines for prayerful consideration of current events and issues.... One of my father's most profound insights was a unified theory of peace ... He believed that the most powerful method for achieving both peace and social justice was nonviolence, and this remains the touchstone of my commitment to his legacy."

Further Reading

Periodicals

• Ebony, January 1998, p. 124; January 2005, p. 46.
• Economist, November 8, 1997, p. 36.
• Emerge, February 1998, p. 40.
• Jet, January 19, 1998, p. 4; August 13, 2001, p. 36; December 8, 2003, p. 4.
• New York Times, October 30, 1993, p. A6; November 2, 1997, p. A29.
• Newsweek, April 6, 1998, p. 48.
• PR Newswire, January 11, 2000.
• New York Times, November 19, 2003, p. A23.
• Time, August 10, 1998, p. 29.
• Rolling Stone, April 7, 1988, p. 62.
• USA Today Weekend, January 16, 1998, p. 4.

— Brian Escamilla