Mourning Coretta King

I am sad to learn that Coretta Scott King passed away yesterday. She was an inspirational figure. She did much to preserve her assassinated husband's legacy and continue his work.

In the early and mid-1980s, I worked as a writer and editor for the Africa press service of the U.S. Information Agency in Washington. I traveled several times to Atlanta to do reporting at the King Center for Non-Violent Social Change. Mrs. King and Martin Luther King's sister Christine Farris were both unfailingly welcoming and forthcoming with information about the center's activities and goals.

Given the Reagan administration's suspicious and negative attitudes towards King and the U.S. civil rights movement, it was surprising to me that I would be received so kindly and openly at the King Center. I worked for Reagan, after all (that's a pretty embarrassing admission on my part). If you remember, when asked in 1983, during a press conference at the time that the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday was being instituted by an act of Congress, whether he agreed with Senator Jesse Helms' charge that King was a communist, Reagan replied: "We'll know in about thirty-five years." He was referring to FBI surveillance tapes on King that a court had ordered sealed until 2027. There he went again! Reagan missed a great opportunity to just say no, I don't think King was a communist. It was a pointless and insulting comment by the U.S. President.

I spent a week at the King Center in 1984 or '85 and wrote an article about the center, which had only recently opened, for a U.S. government publication. The slanted editing that my USIA editors did on that text was a big factor in my decision to leave the USIA a year or so later. But the article, my original version, was eventually reprinted in a magazine published by the Smithsonian Institution, and Coretta King was asked to review it.

Around that time, I was assigned by USIA to cover a press conference Mrs. King was holding in Washington DC at the Department of Education. At the conclusion of the press event, Mrs. King stayed to answer questions informally. I went and spoke to her privately. She remembered me, at least vaguely, and she complimented me on the article, which she had just finished reading. She said she was surprised that I had been able to learn so much about the King Center in just one week. In reality, she and her sister-in-law deserved much of the credit for that, because they were so willing to spend time talking with me. Mrs. King's praise was one of the hightlights of my career as a political writer/propagandist for the U.S. government.

I read in the paper a few weeks ago that the King Center has fallen on hard times. That is also a sad development. I'm sure Mrs. King's declining health has been one of the reasons for the turmoil there.