King promises to build bridges as SCLC president

By Ernie Suggs

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

There is a new king in town.

Just hours after her election as SCLC president, Bernice King stressed how she plans to get more women involved in the 52-year-old organization and perhaps more importantly – make it younger.

“I look forward to re-engaging people in the work of nonviolent activism in their communities as modeled by my father. The time has come to do as my father urged and organize our strength into compelling power,” King said. “It is time to breathe new life into an old movement for the progress of a people.”

Bernice King isn’t technically a new face to the SCLC. Of course it was her father, Martin Luther King Jr., who was one of the founders of the civil rights group best known for its civil action in the 1950s and 1960s that led to social and legislative changes in America.

But she is a breath of fresh air – for an organization that has seemingly been steeped in old school ways of doing business.

She was always considered the most vocal of her parent’s four children, is an internationally known motivational speaker and hasn’t been afraid to take on controversial issues. She was born in 1963,  at the height of the civil rights movement, so she is able to bridge both worlds.

Asked is she is ready to shake up the organization from the inside, she smiled and said that any organization where the leaders are from another generation should be prepared for change.

“But I believe, with this organization, you cannot do anything without the elders,” she said at a press conference, surrounded by her brother, Martin Luther King III, her aunt Christine King Farris and her Atlanta-based cousins. “But you can’t do it without the youth either.”

King was elected SCLC’s 7^th president over Arkansas Appeals Court Judge Wendell Griffen. She will be the first woman to lead the organization and the third King, following her father and brother Martin Luther King III.

“I am excited for Bernice King and excited for the SCLC. Bernice brings the kind of energy, courage and commitment needed to move this organization forward,” said SCLC interim president the Rev. Byron Clay. “And in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr., carry out the original ideals and mission of SCLC. I am committed to working with her to ensure a smooth transaction.”

Early Friday morning, Clay called both King and Griffen to deliver the results.

“I congratulate Reverend King on her selection and I congratulate the board on making the selection and for giving me the opportunity,” Griffen said later when reached at his home in Arkansas.

Joseph E. Lowery, the SCLC’s longest-serving president, said he has already talked to King and welcomes her election.

“I certainly wish her well. Whatever council I can offer to help her be an effective leader I will provide,” said Lowery, who served as SCLC president from 1977 until 1997. “The country needs an SCLC whose mission is to redeem the soul of America.”

King said it is too early to get into specifics about what she will do as SCLC president. She will take office in 2010.

One of her early goals is to restore the organization’s relevancy, by reaching out to other organizations, attacking key civil rights issues and building its base by attracting younger people.

“Any movement of change happens with young people,” said King, 46. “We have to find ways to reconnect people to the most potent means of social change and nonviolence.”

King was selected in a 23-15 vote by the board members of the SCLC, who either voted in person or by absentee ballot. Board members spent all day Thursday voting and had initially said that the results would be made next week.

That was an early decision that surprised many, including Griffen.

“I regret that we had to wait. Rev. King and I deserve a full explanation for that,” said Griffen, reached at his home in Arkansas. “Not because of the choice that was made, but because it raises unnecessary concerns. The longer you wait, the more it raises inferences of irregularities and suspicions.”

Clay would not say why the board decided to initially wait, although the votes were tallied. But at 10:30 a.m. Friday Clay, along with SCLC attorney Dexter Wimbish and Helen Butler, executive director of Coalition for the People's Agenda, removed a locked bank bag containing the ballots and the vote totals from a locked safe. A reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Associated Press and Atlanta Inquirer, were allowed to witness the transaction.

King's election makes her a rarity – a woman leading a civil rights group.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has never had a female president, although Myrlie Evers-Williams served as a highly-visible board chair in the 1990s.

Elaine R. Jones became the first female director-counsel and president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 1993.

The SCLC’s history with women goes back a little further.

In 1957, Ella Baker was hired as the SCLC’s first staff person. As a woman and not a minister, she was not considered a candidate for executive director – a job that eventually went to the Rev. John Tilley.  But Tilley resigned shortly after taking the position and Baker held the post until Wyatt Tee Walker was hired in 1960. Dorothy Cotton would become SCLC’s most significant female leader as head of the group’s education program and as the only female member of the executive staff.

“We were the first major civil rights organization to have a woman executive director and the first major organization to have women in key roles,” Lowery said. “It indicates a broad and comprehensive perspective on the organization. We have moved beyond restrictions of gender and race.”

Playing on the tangible connection that King has with the SCLC and its history, she asked people to consider where she held her opening press conference. It was in a basement room of the old Ebenezer Baptist Church, the old family church.

The room is where her father celebrated his last birthday before he was killed.

It was also the room where her father and Ralph David Abernathy held the first meeting to form what would become the SCLC. King and Abernathy had to leave the meeting early, because two churches in Birmingham had been bombed.

Coretta Scott King, the mother of SCLC’s newest president, would preside over that meeting in her husband’s absence.

“I am mindful that God calls all of us to raise the standard,” Bernice King said. “God calls all of us to be a King. Men and women alike.”