Mrs. King

How does one write about the death of a friend, a neighbor, a humanitarian, the mother of a martyr, a pillar of strength and a woman of great and quiet dignity? These phrases, though inadequate, are intended to describe the late Mrs. Alberta Williams King.

I remember Mrs. King. Like most black women, Mrs. King had her strength tested early and often during the tense and turbulent days of the civil rights movement. As the wife of a fearless husband, living in an era when black men were not to show signs of manhood--an admonition that Rev. King Sr. ignored--Mrs. King was ever mindful of the most dreaded possibilities relating to her husband's safety. Time and time again I would watch her stand by his side as he spoke out against racial intolerance and insults to the human spirit.

She was an Atlantan. Her father had founded the church in which she was slain. Members of the Ebenezer Baptist Church and most of us who worked closely with her son, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., knew her as Mother King. It was not difficult to call her mother. She was first and foremost, and with great pride, a wife and mother. She was a black woman of unspoiled ideals, living a life of example and challenge that gave meaning to the latent and elusive concepts of love and respect for human worth.

Her quietness and humility were not to be mistaken for weakness or passivity. Indeed, her presence was a positive force, which had great and obvious impact on Martin Luther King Jr. She saw the vanity and emptiness of false pride and puffery. She knew that movement and progress did not just happen. Hers was a constant admonition to young (and old) black men and women to maintain a constant vigilance for our share of life's resources and to use those resources for the protection and advancement of those who had known the sting of bitterness and oppression.

One writer in eulogizing the late Anna Eleanor Rosevelt wrote:

"....She would have wanted it said, I believe, that she well knew the pressures of pride and vanity, the sting of bitterness and defeat, the gray days of national peril and personal anguish. But she clung to the confident expectation that men could fashion their own tomorrows if they could only learn that yesterday can be neither relived nor revised."

These words are equally applicable to Mrs. Alberta Williams King.

Walter J. Leonard, special assistant to President Bok, is a native Atlantan, a former activist in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a close friend of the King family.