Muncie Times, Muncie, Delaware County, 7 February 2002 — Page 17

The Muncie Times, February 7, 2002; page 1

KCNG FROM PAGE 1

a nonracial United States of America. She said the country lacked the kind of leadership that was epitomized by her late father. “I believe if our nation is going to excel to the level that is expected of it, it is going to going to need great leadership,” she said. “If Martin Luther Ring Jr. was anything, he was undoubtedly a great leader.” The youngest child of Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King was 5 when her father was Med by an assassin’s bullet on

3 compounded by the fact that within the next couple of years she also suffered the deaths of her maternal uncle and maternal grandfather. She told hundreds of people who crammed into Emens Auditorium that what the country needs now is commitment to finish the work that her father started and to build a country where human beings are more important than greed and materialism. “My father was a great leader because he espousal integrity and lived up to it. It means nothing if you espouse something but don’t live up to it,” she said. “My father was a great orator, but that’s not enough. He connected. He talked the talk and walked the walk. He introduced nonviolence to America, not just talked about nonviolence. He lived nonviolence. It was, in fact, a way of life. It is easy to follow a leader with integrity “Tbo many leaders (today) lack integrity. “In many ways, we’re still a hypocritical nation. Every 15 years, we have to reintroduce the Voting Rights Act. Blacks have no right, in the (U.S.) Constitution to vote, except through the Voting Rights Act “We need leaders with integrity, who are willing to challenge the way things are. Martin Luther King was a fearless and courageous leader because he challenged the status quo. My daddy didn’t go along to get along. He was true to what his calling was. He was not hying to be popular.” Miss King said what the country needs are leaders who have the courage to effect change and to face the consequences of their actions. Tbo many people, she said, are afraid to take unpopular actions or stands. Referring to 1955 when her father led the, ultimately successful, boycott to

desegregate the South, she said: “My father said the tragedy ...was not the work of the (police and sheriffs) water hoses and the bad people, but the silence of the good people who were afraid (to speak out). “Fearless leaders are what we need,” she said. She said at the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s there were too many people who remained too silent because they did not want to send out the “wrong” signals by criticizing racism m housing, voting and employment Real leaders, she said, are those who are not afraid of personal danger or discomfort. In the 1950s, she said, a deranged woman stabbed her father at a book signing ceremony. That did not intimidate him. “He did not let the stab wounds stop him,” she said

dominated the audience, she said, “Don’t be complacent. If you have to make a sacrifice here, it’s all right. People left school in the 1960s to fight for justice. ‘Martin Luther King said a real leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of opinion. %u have to be willing to take a position against the status quo and challenge the status quo.” Real leaders, Miss King continued, are those who are willing to make a commitment to what they believe in. She said those behind the now-famous 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, which catapulted her father to national civil rights leadership ranks, wanted a one-day commitment. But the first day was so successful in keeping African Americans off the racially segregated school buses

Rev. Bernice King poses with local resident, Lois Abram

In 1955, a terrorist bomb exploded outside the house where Dr. and Mrs. King lived. In response to those acts of violence and attempted intimidation, she quoted her father as saying, “If you have not found something worth dying for, then you’re not fit to live.” She said the United States of America today is yearning for fearless leaders in the mold of Dr. King. “Leaders must be fearless. Students, today, have become complacent. That’s tragic, “ Miss King said. “If you let evil continue, you’re an accomplice.” Tbrning to the studente, who

that they extended. It lasted 382 days. When it was over, racial segregation—which required that blacks should sit in the back of the bus and should surrender, when required or ordered, their seats to white passengers—had ended. Before that, African Americans had become so incensed with the practice that, for more than a year, they stayed off the segregated buses. “Imagine having to walk, for 382 days, everywhere you wanted to go. Do you have that kind of commitment? That’s what’s. wrong with this generation. They don’t want to

give up too much. Their attitude is, Don’t expect too much from me.’ “Every great movement in the world was fueled by young people,” Miss King said. ‘Until you make a commitment, you’re just coasting along. Wake up America. It’s a new day. Commitment is so important, if we’re going to see changes in thiscountiy.” She said her father was so committed to change, to making conditions better for the downtrodden, that he put himself and his family on the line. He refused + o be deterred by the divide and conquer tactics of the enemy. “The strategy of the divide and conquer tactics in this country is to make people self centered and selfish and live their lives concerned with our own comfort and not worry about ottos. Its a tragic spirit in this country. We don’t care about others. It’s about me, myself and I. We don’t care about others or whom we step over to get what we want “No matter how we got to this country, whether by slave ship or luxury liner, we are all in this boat, called America, regardless of how we got here. “If you have done nothing for others, then why are you here? You think God put you here, on Earth, because you’re afi that?’ Miss King also said great leaders care for others and are problem solvers. Her father, whom she frequently held up as the kind of leader that the country needs, was the kind of person who was a problem solver, one who took on personal responsibility for solving issues, instead of analyzing them, complaining about them and

Inaction will lead to atrophv. Then you become replaceable. It doesn’t matter who caused the problenLyouliave luhelp solve it The Good Samaritan helped the battered man. He did not stop to ask who had beaten him.” Miss King also took direct aim at racism in the United States. She referred to a recent front page USA Today stbiy which showed that there was not a single African American or Hispanic among the country’s 50 state governors. Racial and ethnic minorities make up more than 27 percent of the country’s population. She also said it was no accident that there were very few racial minorities or women heading the country’s Fortune 500 companies. “Poverty, racism and war were the three evils that my father spent his life fighting. There are still here. Sinister forces— selfishness, arrogance and elitism—are behind (the division of the country into) superior and inferior races and the idea that we must bow down to one particular race. God has not laid that down. That is elitism,” she said, “that is being perpetuated by the media and by education. “If you look at American history, you are not going to find too much of my history in the books. There will be little snippets about slavery, the

my fath. Speech.’ “That was not his greatest speech, just his most famous because it is the safest. Black inventors are ignored in the history books. We weren’t just slaves or cotton pickers. We were inventors. Most people don’t know that a black man invented the ironing board. They don’t know that Egypt, which had the world’s first, university, is in Africa. They want to put Egypt, which is in Africa, in the Middle East” She said arrogant and elitist writers and historians have been engaged in a campaign to ignore the contributions of black inventors and to make black children ashamed of being

“don’t focus on problems. They spend their time on solutions, mu must be part of the solution. If not, you’re part of the problem.

w , lose speaking style, message and oratory are eerily reminiscent of her father, said Dr. King was killed, not by James Earl Ray who confessed and was sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime, but by sinister forces disturbed over her father’s criticism of the Vietnam War. In feet, she said, the same forces that killed President Lincoln also assassinated President John F. Kennedy, Dr. King and U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

KING SEE PAGE 18