His name is famous the world over. His lineage is mirrored in his face. He wears the mantle of civil rights history. But his words are for today.
Dan Bates / The Herald
“We’ve just observed the King holiday,” Martin Luther King III told students and teachers at Edmonds Community College on Monday.
Twenty years after the first federal holiday honoring his late father, Martin Luther King Jr.’s second-oldest child focused on “how far we have to go.”
“Katrina showed us that,” King said. “Katrina showed us America is not a perfect nation.”
As CEO and president of the King Center in Atlanta, he is a keeper of his father’s legacy of nonviolent social change. King, 48, took questions from EdCC, Central Washington University and area high school students before speaking Monday night at the Lynnwood Convention Center.
Throughout the afternoon, King steered the dialogue toward domestic poverty, an issue shrouded in neglect before it was exposed by the forces of Hurricane Katrina.
“The moral issue of our time is to reduce poverty,” King said.
He sees a country dangerously close to being two countries, rich and poor. He hopes, within his lifetime, to see a nation of decent jobs, housing and health care for all. Those goals were left unmet when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968.
That year, King’s father and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were involved in the “Poor People’s Campaign,” a next step after battles for voting rights and against segregation. “It was an economic agenda that didn’t see fruition,” King said Monday. “In 2006, we’re still sort of there.”
Breaking the chains of poverty, King said, will take what he calls a “coalition of conscience,” with government, businesses, community and religious leaders working together.
He didn’t mince words about his views of the war in Iraq or the current administration.
“This president is preoccupied with war, defense and terrorism. Terrorism is a distraction,” King said. After Sept. 11, 2001, he said, “as a nation, we got lost. And we got into a war we probably can’t win.”
While “we cannot stop fanaticism,” King said he believes solutions to the terror threat lie in his father’s nonviolent philosophy. “The first step is always to sit down and try to talk,” he said.
King touched on a range of topics in a question-and-answer session.
Calling gay marriage “tough for me,” King said he couldn’t speak for his father, but he thinks he wouldn’t want anyone’s rights denied.
He said it would be “appropriate” to honor his father by including his image in King County’s logo.
He’d like to see more young people voting and in leadership positions, with greater attention on funding higher education without saddling students with huge debt.
Of hip-hop artists and other entertainers, he’d prefer they “frame their messages in a more positive way.”
And racism, King said, is not all in the past. When Karen Hendricks, a CWU psychology instructor, said she hears students say “prejudice is not a problem anymore,” King replied, “Well, let them keep living. I experience racism every week, usually in subliminal ways.”
Alex LaCasse, a senior at Mountlake Terrace High School and editor of The Hawkeye student newspaper, said it was “a little surreal” to see the civil right’s leader’s son. “We learned so much about him in school,” LaCasse said.
David Carnahan, 22, head of the Hip Hop Coalition at EdCC, said meeting King was “a real honor.”
They’re right. I walked with King from one building to another on campus. It was both surreal and a great honor. During that walk, King shared a personal memory. As a boy, he’d go with his father and brother to the YMCA in Atlanta. “He’d have a sauna and a massage, and we’d go swimming. He went every week,” King said.
I mentioned to my 7-year-old son last weekend that I was going to see – in person – the son of Martin Luther King Jr.
My boy was amazed. “Wasn’t he from back when George Washington was alive?” he asked. “Martin Luther King Jr. was alive when I was a girl,” I told him.
Even in first grade, my boy understands the historical magnitude of the civil rights leader’s life. He’ll learn that the struggles aren’t long-gone history. The struggles continue.
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
