Dr. King Freed Both Black And White Races

My two sons are observant, a trait that I like to believe they got in large part from their old man, the career newspaperman.

The older son, being the observant soul he is, has noticed more than once that when his father hears a snippet from a sermon or speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that his dad gets deathly silent.

“Why are you like that, Dad?” he asked me the other night after he had witnessed me mesmerized yet again by a clip of Dr. King speaking to Memphis sanitation workers the night before he was gunned down in the west Tennessee city on the Mississippi River in April 1968.

Before I could think of a well-thought-out answer to Matt, I blurted out, “Son, there has been no other national leader like Dr. King. There has been no other leader, black or white, in my lifetime who could move people with words and rhetoric like he could. All these years after his death, his words still speak to my soul. He freed both the blacks and whites, and don’t you ever forget it.”

Matt left the room and I do not really know what impact, if any, my answer had on him. I hope that long after I am gone that my older son one day remembers what I said the other night. I spoke the truth.

There are people in our country, in our state, region and community who still hate Dr. King. I know what the haters have said and still say about him. I know they love to tell about his infidelities and the rest of it. I know that he was the target of such hatred that it eventually led to his death. Those same haters hate those of us who champion the cause of minorities and the poor.

Dr. King knew his death was coming. If you doubt me listen to his speech to the sanitation workers in Memphis. I have heard all his speeches that are recorded. That Memphis speech was his second best public oration, second only to the “I Have A Dream” speech. In that Memphis oration, he told the workers that he might not enter the Promised Land with them. Listen to his words at the end of that magnificent speech:

“Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

He knew his end was at hand. He felt he was ready to go. This agent of change was swept up in the violence he sought to end.
All these years later, it is clear to me that he freed not only his own people, but all people. When you hear John Stennis, a crusty old Mississippian, tell his young U.S. Senate colleague, Joe Biden, that Dr. King and the civil-rights movement “freed my soul,” you begin to understand the man that I have so admired for all these years.

Years after Dr. King was murdered, I became friends with a former FBI agent in my native North Carolina. I was working at the Asheville Citizen-Times in those days. I noticed that whenever I wrote anything complimentary about Dr. King that I would receive a letter to the editor — yes, we called the letters column there as we do here “Backtalk.”

At some point in the 1980s before my parents died, I was asked to return to my old hometown about 50 miles from Asheville near the Tennessee border and speak to the Spruce Pine Lions Club.

After I had spoken that night, a small man approached me and introduced himself to me.

He was the former FBI agent who had taken exception to my editorials on Dr. King.

He was a member of the club. After the other Lions and their guests left the room, the agent who had retired after 40 years with the FBI and I spoke virtually in private.

I asked him what he had done in the FBI.

“I can’t tell you that,” he replied. “You will put it in the paper.”

“No, I will not, at least not for a long while.”

We bantered back and forth.

At last, he told me he had been a wiretap expert in the FBI.

There was a long pause between us. We both knew what was coming next.

“Did you wiretap Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.?” I asked.

There was another long pause that seemed to last for an hour.
“Yes, Mr. Gunter, I did.”

“Why did you do that?” I inquired.

“Because Mr. Hoover hated Martin Luther King. We did what Mr. Hoover in those days told us to do. We knew more about Dr. Martin Luther King than he knew about himself.”

The agent and I became good friends despite our differences and he died while I was living and working in Florida.

But I just know that some of those wiretaps were at the root of stories in recent days about Dr. King.

The FBI at one point sent an audiotape that contained sounds of Dr. King in compromising sexual positions. The design was that the tapes would prompt the civil-rights leader who had just received or was about to receive the Nobel Peace Prize to commit suicide.

That misconduct by J. Edgar Hoover and others in the FBI, yes, including my friend, if he was involved, and I bet he was, was far more despicable than anything Dr. King may have done in violating his marriage vows.

Fast forward to last week. I happened to catch most of a CNN documentary on Dr. King. It went into much detail about the King assassination. Among the people interviewed was Andrew Young.

The young CNN reporter asked Mr. Young, who in 1968 was one of Dr. King’s chief aides, if he believed all these years later if James Earl Ray acted alone in killing Dr. King.

Without batting an eye, the Reverend Young, who rose to become mayor of Atlanta, said, “I don’t believe he acted.”
Mr. Young believes, and so do I, that a multi-layer conspiracy was behind the King assassination that went at least as high as the FBI.

I am digressing a bit from my major theme about Dr. King’s eloquence and power to move people with words. But I never have understood how a man (Mr. Ray) who had at best a grade-school education and a past as a two-bit crook could flee the country on a fake passport after the King assassination. He was arrested in London. More on that another day.

Barack Obama reminds me a little of Dr. King. He has certain mannerisms and his eloquence can be magnificent. But I am here to tell you that no one over the past six decades has had the entire package — the passion, the temperament, the education, the soaring rhetoric — of Dr. King. He really knew that he and his people had a date with history. He was a perfect match for the time and the mission, and, yes, I believe that God brought him to the calling that became the civil-rights movement.

I grew up in the South. I grew up in a family whose patriarch (my paternal grandfather) literally had risked his life to save that of a black stranger who came to our town. I attended the first interracial college in the American South (Berea) and my only regret all these years later is that I did not join some of my Berea classmates and Dr. King and march on Selma, Ala. I integrated, broke the color line of every newspaper I have worked on, including The Journal, but I have not done enough for racial justice and racial equality.

We still have not made it to Dr. King’s Promised Land. But we have made huge strides. When I see my younger son, who has been and is the target of sheer police harassment akin to what blacks have experienced for years, I have hope for the future, and for this reason. My son Mark is colorblind. He may have as many, if not more, black friends than he does white friends. It is his generation and the ones to follow him that give me hope that even more racial progress will be made. I am counting on Mark and his generation. Ours is a world of diversity.

One distant day when those Americans of Mark’s generation are no longer young, I hope they remember Dr. King’s greatness and understand his power with words, his power not only to move people, but mountains. I consider it one of the great blessings of my generation that we came along at a time when we saw Dr. King at work and marveled at his courage and eloquence. His death and that nearly five years before it of President Kennedy still haunt those of us of a certain age.

Dr. King was one of a kind and I believe that only God could have given him that instrument, his voice, to battle for racial justice when to do so put one’s life, career and net worth at risk. He paid the price for our freedom just as surely as soldiers did on foreign battlefields and all of us who survive him stand on his shoulders and on the winds of his words.

Amen.