Black Atlanta Weekend

On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2006, the intrafamily squabble over his Center for Non-Violent Change reminded me of my visit there in 1982. I had Greyhounded to Atlanta to attend a press conference at the Center. But I had assigned my Afro-American Lit Class a TV assignment, Maya Angelou’s Sunday evening appearance on PBS. She’s far from one of my favorite writers, even black writers, but her exemplary life had motivated my white students to get into the meaning of the Civil Rights Revolution.

So I checked into the pricey Westin Peachtree Plaza, a jazzy John Portman open high rise atrium topped by my favorite watering hole in America, The Sun Dial. But first I checked out the TV in my upscale room. No PBS channel. I couldn’t believe it. I went down to the lobby to buy TV Guide or the Atlanta Constitution.

Both were sold out late on Saturday afternoon. So in desperation I called a hotel engineer to see why there was no PBS on my set. Alas, he had put a sizable bet on the football game being televised on CBS, and I had to finally manhandle the search myself. I fiddled the manual dial until—Lo and Behold, the supercilious brow of William F. Buckley, Firing his Usual Lines, suddenly materialized on the TV set. I was ready for Maya.

I decided to play tourist on Peachtree for an hour or so before dark, and finally at dusk retired to The Sun Dial. For visitors it had marked each sector on the dial with sites of interest: it appeared to me that anything more than ten feet high had been marked for outsiders—with one notable exception: nothing Afro-American had made the cut. Amazing, especially for Andrew Young’s now calculatedly friendly capital of the New South. I went back to my room to ogle Maya.

Pooped by the long bus ride, I went to bed early, and awoke as I usually do in the wee hours of Sunday morning. I decided to kill some time creatively by sneaking a look at the Sun Dial with no sun. To my amazement, there was another person already there, looking with great deliberation through a pair of binoculars at what looked to me like completely deserted streets at five o’clock of a Monday morning. He was a young black man, and I joshed him about being an early riser. “Heh,” he joshed in reply,”it’s my job. My first job out of Medill School of Journalism up in Chicago. I’m a traffic reporter for radio station WATL-FM. Things will pick up pretty soon. I just wanted to get used to it up here.”

I told him about my hassle getting Maya Angelou on my room TV, and he acidly replied: "Not too much interest in PBS with the businessmen and tourists stopping at the Peachtree.” His friendliness prompted me to tell about my surprise at the fact that there were no black institutions marked on The Sun Dial. “You can be sure they don’t miss that lack of information either. As long as they can see in which direction the Braves play, they’ll be content.”

I told him I was here to do a piece on the King Center. “Ah, yes. Today’s the big day,” as he pointed in the darkness in the direction of the Center. I talked to him briefly about my writing the first curriculum for the Annenberg School of Communications at Penn, and how I was planning to retire from teaching at the end of this semester and try free lancing.”Well, that can be a tough row to hoe, but good luck.” “You, too, on your first media job. I get the same kind of kick I used to get from teaching from getting a piece published in another newspaper or magazine. My mother just died so I’m free to wander around.” We shook hands, and I split to order breakfast at the nearby McDonald’s.

The press conference wasn’t a very big affair, and I found myself seated in the front row, just a few feet from Jesse Jackson on my left and Coretta Scott King on the right. I waited patiently as they did the main business of explaining how the King Center was doing and what their current plans were. As the conference rumbled to a close, I raised my hand and observed. "As a journalist from Philadelphia, I was astonished this morning to find not a single trace of Black Atlanta along the periphery of the Sun Dial. Why is that?”

There was a painful pause, during which Jesse Jackson laid the most baleful look on me I had had in a long time! Finally, Mrs. King broke the awkward silence: "I’m glad you brought that up. Six months ago I raised the same question with the manager of the Peachtree Plaza and didn’t get a very satisfactory answer. I thought of going to the Westin management in Seattle, but I got tied down with other things I couldn’t put off. I really wanted them to list the Center there.”

When I got back to Philly, I wrote an irate letter to the president of the Westin chain with copies to their Peachtree man. First I told him how hard I had to work to get a TV which played PBS, and then how disappointed I was at how completely the Sun Dial ignored the black side of Atlanta. In due course I got a very fulsome letter in which the Westin head said he and his chain were great supporters of Public TV and that the next time I used a Westin hotel you can bet there’d be PBS access, and that he would contact their Peachtree man and see if they couldn’t make the Sun Dial shine on all aspects of Atlanta, white, black and whatever.

I popped into the hotel the next February to take a pitstop at the Sun Dial on my way to Montgomery for the dedication of the new Maya Lin monument to Dr. King. Hmm. Still no black Atlanta University. And no King Center. Hmmmm. Aha. Here’s one mark—Ebenezer Baptist Church, the congregation that three generations of Kings headed. You can see how the PR thinker thought: no Cracker Aristocrat is going to have his drinking upset by a Baptist Church with a strange name. Well, Mrs. King, you can’t win them all! On the positive side, there was the most intellectually and aesthetically attractive Black History exhibition in the hotel’s lobby that I have yet seen. Little steps. In the right direction.

The King family squabble, a function of Mrs. King’s disabling stroke, is very sad. I met Yolanda in 1976 when I was interviewing people for my San Francisco weekly radio show, “Museroom West" over KALW-FM, the public station of the Unified School District. I had flown down to the opening of “Selma!” at the Huntington Hartford Theatre (strangely situated on Vine and SELMA street)!

I was disappointed that this musical on the crucial episode in King’s fight for rights did so poorly at the box office. Groucho Marx, leaning on his girl friend/nurse’s arm, had arisen from a sick bed to pay honor to his friend King. One young fool was bugging the sick Groucho for an autograph. I crudely shamed him to flee.

After the premiere performance, there was an after party at the Brown Derby. I asked Redd Foxx why he was investing his hard earned “Sanford and Son” money in this very speculative “Civil Rights Musical”: "So the black entertainers coming after me won’t have to put up with the shit I had to,” he replied tartly, half friendly and half pissed. Yolanda, sitting next to him, was more even keeled. “We have to use any and all means to keep my Father’s message in focus and continuing to make for non-violent change.”

It is so sad that their father’s great movement seems to be guttering out with an $11 million neglected rehab bill while two of his children got six figure salaries. For Tommy Taylor, the Vegas song and dance man who was the star of “Selma!”, it was a chance for him to Do Good with his entertainer’s talents.

On my serendipitous bus trip to Montgomery it was my good fortune to sit next to a Rosa Park ringer. There is a kind of moral grandeur in those kind but tough black women who suffered through the transitional generation from DuBois to King. I’m always amazed at how humble and deep they so often are. Theirs were the kind of daily lives that nurtured the Kings who changed so much.