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Martin Luther King III new SCLC head
Will lead civil rights group his father founded
November 1, 1997
Web posted at: 5:58 p.m. EST (2258 GMT)ATLANTA (CNN) -- The eldest son of Martin Luther King Jr. has been selected to head the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights group King helped found and lead to national prominence in the 1950s and 1960s.
Martin Luther King III, 40, was elected president of the SCLC Saturday by the group's board of directors. He will take over from the Rev. Joseph Lowery, the group's retiring president, on January 15, his father's birthday.
In accepting the post, King recited a portion of his father's famous "I Have A Dream" speech, in which he expressed the wish that his four small children would someday live in a world without discrimination.
"As one of those four little children, I must remind you that while my father clearly had a dream, that one day is not today. The day that my father dreamed of has not been realized," he said to an audience at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, where both his father and grandfather preached.
Faces high expectations
King pledged to use the coming months to assess the SCLC's strengths and weaknesses. He said he would visit chapters across the country and meet with community leaders to develop plans to combat racism, inadequate education, attacks on affirmative action and overpopulation of prisons.
He faces high expectations as he takes over at the SCLC, which in recent years has failed to maintain the prominence it had at the time his father was assassinated in 1968.
"He is picking up a hell of a responsibility, because Dr. King's movement in America today is deader than he is," said Hosea Williams, a former SCLC executive director.
But Lowery says he is confident King can live up to the legacy of his family's name.
"He's certainly been exposed to the civil rights community in unparalleled fashion," Lowery said. "The name Martin Luther King still has some magic."
King served as county commissioner
Martin King III is the first, and so far only, member of his family to hold elective office. He served as a Democratic county commissioner in Fulton County, of which Atlanta is the county seat, from 1987 to 1993.
His political career was spotted by allegations of improprieties, including allegations that a staff member, a cousin, misappropriated county-owned cars.
In 1993, King ran for the post of county commission chairman and lost to Republican Mitch Skandalakis, in what was considered at the time to be an upset.
Since that time, the soft-spoken King, who is single and lives with his mother, Coretta Scott King, has been lecturer around the country on issues of human rights and community activism.
In speeches, King has supported the teaching of ebonics and urged blacks not to fight in the Persian Gulf War. He's sided with his younger brother, Dexter, in the assertion that confessed assassin James Earl Ray did not kill his father.
In 1990, he issued an apology after telling a student group in New York that gay people have "a problem."
Fauntroy, Shinhoster also considered
Others considered for the SCLC job were former District of Columbia congressional delegate Walter Fauntroy; Georgia state Sen. Ralph David Abernathy III, whose father also once led the SCLC; and Earl Shinhoster, former acting president of the NAACP.
King becomes the second of the slain civil rights leader's children to move into the leadership of a civil rights group. Dexter King now heads the King Center, an Atlanta-based institution designed to carry on King's legacy.
Lowery, who took over the reigns of the SCLC in 1977, announced this past summer that he would step down. He later agreed to stay on until a successor was named.
Lowery denied that the board delayed making a final decision because of concerns that King didn't have the clout to lead the organization.
"I think (they waited) because they still had others to interview ... and at the time Mr. King was still weighing the possibility himself," Lowery said. "His experience has given him more training than anyone else."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Related stories
- Report: MLK III to become head of SCLC - October 26, 1997
- SCLC's Lowery to remain president until January - July 28, 1997
- Civil rights leader Lowery retiring as SCLC head - July 27, 1997
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