King Week Interview

Okay, you ready? All right, Mrs. King, King week 95 begins on Sunday. You have a number of activities scheduled next week. If you could, could you tell us about some of them? Yes, we have quite a few activities that deal with young people youth, and we also have activities that deal with teachers and counselors, people who are working with young people. We have, for instance, a youth against violence program where we have a lot of at risk young people, who we've been working with here in the Atlanta community for several years now, and we bring them together during King week, but we were working with them on a pretty much weekly basis with law enforcement personnel, law enforcement, and correctional

personnel. And I was here in this next door, really from where I am now, for a session once with these young people. And I was just fascinated with the fact that they, after two days, had come around to understanding the power of non-violence, and how they could be empowered through non-violence to make a change in their lives. And one young man said, you know, I realized that this non-violence can help me make a difference in my life. And before now, I didn't know anything about policemen. All I knew that they would do would be to bust my buddies and put us in jail. He said, but I now see that policemen are like everybody else. They're human. And it was just so amazing, you know, how they were buying into it. And I've said, you know, and I've seen this happen before, if young people have an alternative to the violence in their lives, to becoming drug addicts and peddling

drugs, and wasting the way their lives, they will buy into it. And we have to just somehow reach out and try to get to enough of them to do that. So this is the kind of thing that we're doing here. During King Week, they will be in a, as I understand it, in a forum in which they will be given testimonies in terms of how this experience has affected them and the changes in their lives. We also have a, starting from kindergarten through eighth grade program, which we call celebrate difference, trying to help them understand and prepare them for the world in which we live today, because we live in a multicultural society. And young people have to be prepared, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, you know, to have a world view, we don't just live in our neighborhoods or in our cities or even in this nation, because through the technology of the media, we have a world brought to our doorsteps.

So we know instantly what is happening anywhere in the world. I'll turn on CNN for that, Matt, and you realize that. So they have to realize that they have to get along with other people they have to learn to understand the cultures of other people. And we're trying to say to them is, you know, people have more in common than they have that is different. And if when they have difference, let's celebrate that, because that adds to it enhances you. And so we have these young kids brought to us. And I think this time it probably in the World Congress Center. From the public schools, we select them. They are selected and brought to us about more than 2,000 of them on over two day period. And they are taught about Dr. King's principles of nonviolence. The teachers start preparing them beforehand, because we have prepared several years ago a volume which is called the infusion model of the teachers of Martin Luther King Jr. And we take Martin Luther King Jr.'s teachers

from kindergarten to 12th grade. And we infuse into the school curriculum those teachings at every level. And so some of these young people who come to us have already been prepared. So they'll start talking about the principles of nonviolence and the six steps in the methodology of how you apply those steps and have to, when I go to visit with them and give them a little pep talk and ask them some questions about Martin Luther King Jr. It's always gratified where they know what nonviolence means, you know. What does nonviolence mean? They start telling me. You know, you love people. And you don't fight back and you know, things of this kind. So this to me is very important because young people need to get an early start. And this is why in the King's Center have focused on teaching Martin Luther King Jr.'s principles of nonviolence and the steps of application at every level. And we also have a program called the Teaching

for teachers, counselors, parents, and of course administrators come to it. And that infusion model that I just spoke about is demonstrated in workshops and the teachers are very excited about it. They have found that it has made a tremendous difference in their classrooms because young people now understanding how they can be empowered through nonviolence, how they can begin to resolve conflicts. They don't have to, you know, because when you teach them the process is then based on the principle, then they begin to see how it can be applied. So they'll think twice before they, you know, lash out at somebody because you can do it physically, but you also can do it verbally. I mean, nonviolence is not only physical violence. It is spiritual, it's psychological, it's verbal. I mean, we do violence

a lot of times just by putting people down, you know. But nonviolence says you are in noble human personality. And so anyway, those are some of the programs that we have. We also have another program where we recognize people in the communities of the various neighborhoods throughout Metro Atlanta. We have hundreds of people who apply for these awards that we have. We offer about six awards in various areas of peace and justice in voter registration and education and youth, youth, youth activities, senior citizens, and so on. I don't remember all of them right now, but what we, we conceived this program about 17, 18 years ago as a way of recognized people who were unsung heroes and heroines in their neighborhood, who were working to help other people and to make a difference, like Martin Luther

King, Jr. talked about what it means to be great. He said, to be great means you have to be a servant, you serve. And so this year, we are using, as I mean for King Week, you know, a theme that speaks to the importance of doing service on the national holiday. Our theme is, you know, is king and nonviolence in action, empowering future generations to serve. And the Federal Holiday Commission's theme is do something to help somebody. And Martin said, anybody can be great. Everybody can, I'm sorry, everybody can be great because anybody can serve. And so in that speech in sermon that he preached a couple of months before his assassination, he talked about the fact that you

don't have to have a PhD degree to serve. You don't have to know Einstein's theory of relativity to serve. You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love. And you can be that servant. And so the whole emphasis on service is, it becomes very important. So this community award rally recognizes people who have been in the community serving in the spirit of Martin Luther King's union. And it's so interesting to see all of these people come out to support their loved ones, their friends who are being recognized. And it's always, you know, an integrated group, I mean, it's youth. And it's very gratifying because some of these people may never get listed in the newspapers. But here they are lifted up and identified with Martin Luther King's union. And I thought that was very important because so often awards have to be given to people who've done something and distinguished themselves on the national

level. But we need to recognize people, you know, just ordinary citizens. And your programs are seem to be, programs aimed at helping young people seem to be a key component of King William. Absolutely. It's very important we feel to focus in on youth. As a matter of fact, from the very beginning, the King's son always felt that he was important to reach that generation. And whatever period he existed in 1968, I felt it was important to reach that generation of young people who were going to be the future leaders. So we were trying to talk about the college students back then. I mean, there was a very confused period after Martin Luther King did know which direction to go in. And I said, let's get to these young students because they're going to be the next leaders and help them understand Martin Luther King's union's teachings. So we set up a program in 1974 called the Scholars Internship Program, which was a program in the theory and practice of Martin Luther King's union's

philosophy. And we also had, it was undergraduate undergraduate and graduate students. So students started coming here from colleges across the country and in the area and for a quarter and our semester. And those students and some of the people who are leaders and various communities today are some of the students that came through our program. One of them here locally is Reverend Timothy McDonald. And he went to Barry College and then he came to the King's center. And he tells this very powerful story about how he didn't believe in nonviolence. And he was going to prove that violence worked. And he went through this whole scenario about how he, as he went through this program and he could say, no, it doesn't work. And he kept doing things and it was working. And he said, that's a fluke. I mean, it's really not true. And finally he went on to graduate school at the Emory University and he decided to try it out with

the administration over there. They had a problem. And he said, you know, I followed the steps, exactly, and it worked. And he said, so the King's center, he said the other day, he said, the most powerful influence on my life of any organization. And so this is saying a whole lot. Now, you could have testimony, as I'm sure, about that, from many young people. Because most times when we had, we had about 13 to 14 this past summer. And many times they are the majority of white. Because the program that we provide, some help for them. We put 11 accommodations. We used to give us stipend. But they have to pay and the instruction. They have to pay to come here. And they have to live. And it's their food and lunch. And we give them a place to live. But sometimes the black students just don't have the money to come. But we always have an

integrated group. Sometimes we had an authentic Muslim Catholic Jewish person. Of course, you always have the Protestant. And they were all standing around talking and they said, where else can we find this kind of experience where we can just live together. And so a lot of what you learn is after hours is even when you go to college. I mean, you start interacting with others and you learn so much just by the sharing experience and so on. So I'm very, that program started in 1974 and is still going. And so it's a leadership development program, which is very, very, I think important. Because my perception, my belief is that if we train people how to be peacemakers, how to, in the philosophy of nonviolence, if they embrace it, then they will become peacemakers. They will learn how to resolve conflicts peacefully

without violence. They will be empowered so that they know that they could make a difference. And so often young people don't know what to do. They don't think there's anything they can do. So if we can help them understand that it starts within, that you have the power within you to make the change. And this is what it does. We have the workshops during the summer, for instance, and people come in from across the country and a lot of young people. And they begin to see this, this is for me. I mean, and then they start thinking about all the things they've done the wrong way and how they can now begin to apply and get the results, get better results, apply this philosophy. And it makes a tremendous difference for them. They go back excited and motivated and say, look, there's something I can do about this. I got this problem. And they bring their problems to us. And that's the way we teach them. You bring your problem and we tell you how you can use the philosophy to, you know, to resolve the problem, to resolve the conflict,

like to solve the problem. So this is basically what we are about. I mean, we're not a social service organization, though we do some social service. We have a full time person on our staff that's a community outreach person who does nothing else but that 365 day or three or whatever, do many days we work. And we've had for many, many years. But we also get involved when there's a crisis like when there's hurricane. Our tornado, I guess it was, hit Florida, Southern Florida. I mean, we collected a lot of goods, two or three truckloads, huge tractor truck trucks and carried them to Florida. And I went down and met with the people to kind of give them some encouragement. We stayed in there for a period of time, went back and some of our people set up playgrounds with the children and so on. So, I mean, we do things like that, but we know those abandoned projects.

What we're trying to do is change public policies so that people can change their lives and to help change individuals about how they perceive themselves and the power that they do have and how they can use it. And then the other thing we do is vote education and voter registration plus get out the vote. You know, once you get people registered and you don't get them out the vote, then, you know, it doesn't help a whole lot. So this person who does the community outreach also coordinates a coalition of get out the vote efforts. So every election in this town, we have this get out the vote. Headquarter here at the King's Center. We put in our phones. We have lots of phones and we set them up and we have volunteers come in. We have the list of people who are registered from the city registrar's office. So we know who they are. So we call them up and tell them to go to the polls and vote. And on the day of the election, the turnout is light in a district.

And the people who are there will call us and say, look, we haven't had many people today. And so we get on the phone. We start talking. We offer rides for them. Because some people have to have rides to get there. So this is the kind of thing that we have been doing. But our major focus, again, is on the non-violence education and training and largely focusing on young people. So those are some of the things that we do. And of course, King, we have, you know, we have other programs. We have cultural programs. We have labor management government. We have seminars where they come together and talk about how they can work to solve the problems of our society. We have a public interest hearing where I'm not sure what the focus is going to be. But it's always on a major issue. And we have people participating throughout the community. We have a religious services where people's spirits need to be uplifted.

Some people come here just for that purpose during King Week. Because the fact is that you have to be in a situation where you, with other people, and you see that you have lack in white and Asian and Native American and Hispanic and, you know, and Muslim and Christian and Jewish and Buddhist all together. And you look around and you see that in the ecumenical service. It used to be the ecumenical service. Now the commemorative service, but the same people come. And you sing the songs of, you know, not the great hymn, the great music of the ages. But you also sing the Lingaro spirituals, which you call Lingaro spirituals, the church hymns. And most of the people there have some identification with that. Even if they're not a Christian, they also have an appreciation.

And there's a very great feeling of uplift and hope. You know, and you feel connected to this mass of humanity. Because if you experience this in miniature somewhere, then it's easy if you identify with the world situation, with the global situation. Because we live in a global village today. And so that is an important part of it. It was the movement provided that for people. It was like you felt like you're a part of a family, a fellowship. So anybody who was in the movement felt connected. And so today when we talk about that, sometimes people feel that they're left out because they weren't in the movement. And we have to be very mindful of that. But it's not meant for that. But there was that sense of belonging. And a lot of people, young students came to South. And they found a sense of belonging.

Because there was. It was like a family. You know what that means. I mean, the ideal family situation. Some people don't know what a family is. Unfortunately today. But anyway, we have always said that the king's son must be an institution. But it also has to have that sense of family. We should never lose that. Just go one final question, Mrs. King. This is your last king wake as Chair and CEO. You're turning it over to your son, Dexter. What do you see as the future of the king's interhere and king wake? Well, I think the king's son has a tremendous potential. Especially with a new leadership. That is, that has a vision. I think that can take us into the 21st century. Today, the technological changes that has come about, you know. Those of us who are in my generation have a hard time trying to understand it. You know, younger people do understand it.

And I've always felt that somehow we could do more with what we had in terms of using the technology to get the message out. Well, my son Dexter can do that because this is of his generation. And he has a great vision for the future. He has absorbed so much from what he has seen and what he's lived out. Because the way I've raised my children, you know, it was always a part of their lives. It was a way of life for them too. And so it's like you build on what's already there and then what's already within you. And so with this younger generation out there waiting for leadership and young people identify with their own kind. And not many older people have stepped aside to allow young people to emerge. And this troubles me because what will the future be? If we don't encourage young people in the leadership role and help them.

So I'm very happy about this. I'm very pleased because I think things are going to move on and they will be even... I think they should be an even greater opportunity for service than what we've tried to offer. But you're not going to retire? Oh, no, I'm not retiring. I mean, even if I weren't with the King of Santa and was doing something else, I've always felt that, you know, I won't retire. I mean, I have lots of projects on the burner and I had to put them on hold. I will be very busy, but first of all, I will be available to support the center and dexter in any way I can. I mean, you know, after all these years, I mean, this is something I created. I mean, you know, and lived at 365 days, weeks and days a week on call 24 hours a day. And so you don't just walk away and not be concerned.

And if there are problems and concerns here, I'm available to be supportive. And we'll do no dexter know that he will be able to get my support wherever I'm needed. But I am not in charge of anything. And I hope the time will come in a not too distant future when I can be freed up from that sense of responsibility and that weight that I've been carrying for a whole of these years. Thank you. Thank you very much.