Blacklife; 103; An interview with Coretta King

Knew it! A production of the Mississippi Center for Education and Television, number 103, series Black Lives, program conversation with Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr. Length, program 29, Venice, PBS logo, 8 seconds, date 8, April 26, 1973, direct eventhly. So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.

It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created each other. Those words were Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dramatic conclusion to the 1963 March on Washington. Five years later, still dedicated to the fulfillment of that dream, Dr. King was in Memphis on April 4, 1968, when an assassin's bullet brought his life to an untimely end, on Black Life Tonight to talk about what has happened to her husband's dream and the current state

of the Civil Rights Movement is Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr. Talking with Mrs. King is Bruce Payne, news director of W.O.K.J. radio in Jackson, Mississippi. Mrs. King, the March on Washington and subsequently the I Have a Dream speech captured the hearts and minds of people everywhere as being the ideals of your late husband. Where is the Civil Rights Movement right now? Where is the dream now? I think the dream is alive and well, and I often say this as I speak around the country. And what I mean essentially is that those things which my husband stood for, the ideals of justice, of equality, of brotherhood and peace have been embraced by many more people since his death than during his lifetime.

And people are working throughout this nation to fulfill those ideals. We don't always see them because they are not visible people. In the area of politics, we can see that since 1965, there are 1144 elected black officials in the 11th deep south states. In Mississippi, your state, there are 145 black elected officials. And Alabama, my state, 144. And just recently we sent Andrew Young to Congress, and Andrew Young is a product of the non-violent movement, worked closely with my husband. There is Walter Von Troy, who is the congressman from the District of Columbia, who is also a direct product of the movement. And there are countless, there are many other individuals who have been elected to positions both at the local and the state levels.

Just to me represents the kind of power involvement decision making that my husband knew had to come if a dream was to be realized that black people must be in a position and other minorities to make decisions at the top level that would determine the course of their lives. And we see it happening, we see it coming about. And many times we've said that the movement has gone political. I think that this is very true. In many ways, the electing election of black people and other minorities to public office is a part of the non-violent process for social change, which my husband became synonymous with. And also in the area of economic justice, the last campaign that he led in 1968, the

Pupipus campaign. When he talked about the common issue of economic injustice which affected all people and brought the minorities of the country together, the blacks, the Indians, the poor whites, Mexicans and the Puerto Ricans to dramatize the issue of economic injustice. And that coalition that he put together is still at work. And that is what when we talk about coalition strategies, it's very important that we understand that liberation has to come about, can come about if there are these kinds of coalitions working together. No individual or no group of individuals can really expect to be free until all of us are free.

And we, I think, are beginning to understand his words when he talked about all life being interrelated, that what affects one directly affects all indirectly. And we can never be as individuals totally free until all of us are free. We cannot be free of disease or we cannot be secure economically until all of us are secure. I think that we are moving more in the direction of understanding this and contrary to the feeling and the belief that there is not a common unified kind of thrust. I think that there is, and especially in recent weeks, because most of the people that I've talked about are very much concerned about the dismantling of the OEO programs. And there is a tremendous feeling in this nation against this kind of move. I was going to ask you, Mrs. Gang, since the changes in the presidency of the country

have occurred, all of this has happened basically since the I have a dream speech. What do you think the changes in the presidency, what effects have those changes had on the black stride toward freedom? I think what we have seen is that with the new administration, there was an effort to create a new strategy, a kind of strategy that would create a climate of regression and repression, a strategy that said that we've made tremendous progress in race relations and many people in this country are really not really with this. Black people really have moved too fast and too short of time and the poor people this

nation. So what we have to do is to create an climate and an attitude that this is against the will of the majority, and then we can perpetuate a few privileged people in power. This kind of leadership is not moral leadership, but it is a leadership that is concerned about the powerful few and the vast majority of people have suffered as a result of this. In the previous two administrations, we had the president and the White House that was responsive to the concerns of people. We had what we call a more moral kind of leadership. The problems that we face in the last four years and going into the second administration

are problems that are created by the lack of sensitivity to the needs and the concerns and the legitimate aspirations of people throughout this nation who have been deprived of the abundance of life that the Constitution and that's inherited in the American Dream Theory. So I think that right now, the vast majority of people are very dissatisfied with the dismantling of the social programs that has taken place in recent weeks. Looking back a couple of administrations, what do the loss of John F. Kennedy mean to the nation? I feel that John F. Kennedy's loss to the nation represented in a sense a tremendous, well, it was a tremendous loss in the sense that for many years, we had on the scene a president

who was intelligent, who was responsive to the needs of people who was capable of growing and understanding some of the problems that many presidents had never even really tried to understand and we personally felt in the civil rights movement or the nonviolent movement of the social change that we had friends in the White House during that administration and that did continue into the Johnson administration. But when the death of President Kennedy took place, in many ways, I think we suffered a setback. On the other hand, I think that it created a kind of awareness, maybe by shock, in this nation of the forces of violence that were at work in the nation.

It's one thing to assassinate a black man in this country, but it's another thing to assassinate a president who represents the epitome of all that, you know, that a white man can become in this nation. So that symbol becoming the victim of an assassination, I think, brought about a kind of awareness among some white people in this nation that if it can happen to a president, it can happen to anybody. You know, in June of 1963, Medgar Evers was assassinated in your state. Nobody really got upset about that. President Kennedy was assassinated and I think the whole world became alarmed and they realized that there was a violent element in this nation, a violent element that was sick. I think that sickness is very deep within this nation because since then we've had two assassinations of public figures, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

So I think on the one hand, you know, the man who became the conscience of this nation and who talked about who lived and talked about peace, who won a Nobel Peace Prize, became the victim of that violence which he fought against. And because he became the victim of this violence, I think that too brought an awareness to people's minds and thinking as to the kind of nation and the kind of climate that we had allowed to come into being. And Martin used to say that this nation will be judged not by the violence and the vitriolic words of the bad people but the appalling silence of the good people. Mrs. King, I happen to know that you're concerned with a special project now known as the Martin Luther King Center for Social Change. Many people may not have heard about the Martin Luther King Center for Social Change.

And one of you tell us what that is all about. The Martin Luther King Center for Social Change is the official family sanctioned memorial to the life, the contributions, the philosophy and the techniques and strategies of non-violence. Martin became the symbol of non-violent social change in this country. And when we look back at the period of history from 1955 through 1968, the years of his active leadership in the movement through his death and examine each one of those movements to Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Birmingham movement which brought about desegregation and public accommodations and the Selma movement which brought about voting rights, more voting rights for black people particularly in the south and of course the poor people's campaign

which I think is still continuing that is to bring about economic justice in society. When we examine those campaigns we understand more clearly what the non-violent process is, many people do not realize that the marches and the demonstrations, all of that was not really what the non-violent movement was, that the non-violent movement was under girded by some form of economic sanction, that in every community where we worked we did voter registration because my husband realized that we could never be free until we had political power also. So what we have to do in the center is to help people understand this, we have to interpret to them what non-violence is all about.

But that non-violent approach is a moral approach and he stress the importance of using moral means to achieve moral ends and he often said that you cannot use immoral means and achieve moral ends because in the process you defeat yourself so that violence, that any kind of anything other than a moral way of doing it ultimately will not produce the kind of effect that we need. The center is to reflect the total personality of the man for whom it is named. It is essentially an educational research and social action institution. The concepts of non-violent social change, the strategies of non-violent social change must be systematized so that they can be used for generations unborn to continue to bring

about social change and really to continue the process of democratizing the nation because that is really what it is all about. We say we are a Christian and democratic nation but we have never really lived that way. And what my husband there to do is to become a Christian in the sense I think that it was meant to be. This meant he made a total commitment to those things which he felt were right and which is conscious and sticktated to him were right and just. And then he, through the non-violent approach, he organized programs and implemented them to bring about changes that are far reaching here in the south and across the nation. And I, the other center will continue to do this addressing itself to the major issues of today.

I believe that the target date for the dedication of the center is January 1976. Could you give us some of the events associated with that date? Yes we have set aside January 15th as a matter of fact my husband's birthday, 1976, as the date to dedicate the completion of the center. But January 1974 we will complete in terms of the site development. There are two blocks that we are talking about developing and the two block area around the Ebenezer Church and where his crypt now rests alongside the church are the two blocks that we are talking about, the crypt area and the landscaping around that area is scheduled to be completed by January 1974. The block across the street which will be a community center and a park will be completed by 1975 of January.

There are no neighborhood facilities or community services in that area for the residents of the area will happen to be predominantly black. By 1976 we will complete the entire center which will be a multipurpose building which will house the offices and the programs of the center. We have a library with archives, perhaps the best collection of its kind and the nation at this time. My husband's papers are the central part of that and that will be housed in that area which we call that building which we will call Freedom Hall. We will be doing lectures and seminars, training people and an understanding of non-violence, bringing together individuals, organizations and people who are working for non-violent social change.

Do you feel that there is a need for militants in this country? I know that there were those who opposed some of your husband's ideas and there were more of vocal and more demonstrative and more militant. How do you feel about the need for this type of action and achieving social change? You know I often say that my husband was the most militant of militants and I say that because when we talk about militancy and we talk about power, my husband I think had a definition of power as meaning the ability to affect change. Now if you can affect social change that is permanent and lasting, then I think that is and particularly change in beginning to change in dismal structures that have been in operation for generations. I think a very good example of that is what has happened here in the South. I say that we have, we see now the transformation of two separate lifestyles, black and white, separate but equal so to speak, into one lifestyle.

We have seen these changes come about in the South. So that black people and white people are now able to get to know each other, to feel comfortable about each other and they are working together in government, in my home in the county that I grew up in, the mayor is black and the government is black and white. In the little town of Union Town, Alabama and you know you can name many others in the South, they are more than 30 mayors of towns in the South and they are not all black towns, they are black and white together. To me this is militancy, you know, militancy is not rhetoric, it's being able to develop programs to affect real change and that's what my husband was about. Now you visited my state of Mississippi and there have been changes, changes such as black elected officials, your husband brought his program and his influence to the people of Mississippi. How would you say that Mississippi relates to social change and to the influence that

your husband brought to that state? I think Mississippi has made more progress probably than almost any other state in the Union, specifically because Mississippi was not the battleground of the civil rights movement in the sense that Alabama was. Alabama does have the highest number of elected officials but Mississippi did not experience Montgomery bus boycott or Birmingham movement or a Selma movement. The three major movements took place in Alabama and that's why I think it was much more difficult for the progress to be made in the state where Martin Luther King didn't actually move about on a day-to-day basis but Mississippi was influenced tremendously by what happened in Alabama. My husband visited there a number of times but I think that it is to be commended for the kind of strides that it has made and I have taken great pride in referring to Charles

Evers who dared to run for governor of Mississippi and he succeeded in not getting lynched. Many people in the north and outside think of Mississippi as being a very backward state but I think that the more progress has been made in the state of Mississippi than the urban cities of the north as far as black people are concerned and I was pleased to hear you say that Mississippi and your state has the only commercial television manager in the country. Many people do not know that. They are pockets of progress and places like Mississippi and other communities that we don't even realize that they exist and to me that's real progress and that is a result of the nonviolent movement for social change led by my husband.

Where do you see the civil rights movement now in 1973? I think that we are at the stage now where we have developed a mature kind of leadership that was produced by the nonviolent movement for social change. I'm thinking about Andrew Young, I'm thinking about Congressman Walter Fontroy, I'm thinking about Mayor Dick Hatcher, I'm thinking about Julian Bond, I'm thinking about Vice-Managed Jackson here in Atlanta and I'm thinking about the Black Caucus representatives, the others and I'm thinking about many others across this nation, I'm thinking about the community leaders too, so that we have a, I think we're moving toward a collective leadership approach and no one individual can be the symbol for all people anymore.

I think a man of Martin's magnitude comes once in a hundred years maybe as someone has said once in a thousand years I don't know. We kept looking for such a personality but there are many individuals who are capable of giving leadership and capable of shaping policy at the national level and to me that is the fulfillment of what Martin was all about that we have moved the movement to that point. Now it's true that there are millions of people who are still without jobs and who are still poverty-stricken, with the whole problem of the educational crisis, the housing crisis, the crisis in medical care and all of that, that's still with us but I see now the possibility of the forces of Goodwill coming together again and beginning to work creatively to find

solutions that are going to move us forward toward the realization of Martin Luther King's dream and the American dream. Finally what do you see as your particular role today? I am first of all concerned with seeing that the Suner become a reality, a living reality because it must be about living that was what my husband was about and that the Suner is built and that the Suner is maintained but in that process we will be developing programs that are going to continue to work for non-violent social change and to liberate those people in the society who are not yet free and that's a whole lot of folk and not only in this

nation but throughout the whole world. I want to be a part of those forces who are working to bring about an end to racism and end to poverty and an end to war. The Suner is about reducing the level of violence in our society, our society is so violently oriented, violence is institutionalized, it's perpetrated systematically against those people who cannot speak for themselves, I want to be a part of that force to help liberate those people who are oppressed in any way and that is all I see in terms of my own role is to continue to work to bring about justice, to bring about equality, to bring about peace and to improve the whole human condition in society.

Thank you Mrs. King, the dream almost 10 years later, where it was, where it has come and where it is now. Thank you again. Thank you for this privilege. When we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of us children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholic will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last. Thank you.