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A King and his presidents: Wilkes-Barre event recalls MLK's White House ties

Martin Luther King Jr. waves to the crowd during the "March on Washington" in 1963.
AFP via Getty Images
Martin Luther King Jr. waves to the crowd during the 'March on Washington' in 1963.

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 56 years ago. With each passing year, David Yonki says people’s memory of the civil rights leader's life fades.

Many people, especially younger generations, know three main facts about King, he argued.

“He marched, he got killed. We now have a holiday,” said Yonki, NAACP Luzerne County Branch #2306 Vice President.

Yonki said people of his generation have a responsibility to tell MLK’s story because they lived through it.

The local NAACP and the Wilkes-Barre Law & Library Association presented a lecture, “Martin Luther King Jr. and his Presidents” at the Luzerne County Courthouse on Friday, Jan. 17.

The third Monday of January — this year on Jan. 20 — is a national holiday commemorating King's birth on Jan. 5, 1929.

Speaking before a crowd of about 30 people, Yonki said that in all his years as a broadcaster and educator, he has met four vice presidents and two presidents. Those conversations, he estimated, lasted a total of 17 minutes.

King, he said, had worked with three presidents — Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson — for 15 years of his short 39-year life.

President Kennedy meets with the leaders of the March On Washington in the Oval Office on Aug. 28, 1963. At the meeting were (from left to right)  Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz, Mathew Ahmann, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, Rev. Eugene Carson Blake, A. Philip Randolph, President Kennedy, Vice President  Lyndon Johnson, Walter Ruether, Whitney Young, Floyd McKissick.
File photo
President Kennedy meets with the leaders of the March On Washington in the Oval Office on Aug. 28, 1963. At the meeting were (from left to right) Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz, Mathew Ahmann, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, Rev. Eugene Carson Blake, A. Philip Randolph, President Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Walter Ruether, Whitney Young, Floyd McKissick.

MLK and his presidents

Chelsea Chamberlain, an assistant professor of U.S. history at Wilkes University, highlighted two themes she said defined MLK’s relationships with his presidents: global affairs and his commitment to nonviolence.

Chelsea Chamberlain, an assistant professor on U.S. History at Wilkes University, highlighted two themes she said defined Martin Luther King Jr.s' relationships with presidents: global affairs and his commitment to nonviolence. She spoke on Jan. 17 at the Luzerne County Courthouse.
Isabela Weiss | WVIA News | Report for America
Chelsea Chamberlain, an assistant professor on U.S. History at Wilkes University, highlighted two themes she said defined Martin Luther King Jr.s' relationships with presidents: global affairs and his commitment to nonviolence. She spoke on Jan. 17 at the Luzerne County Courthouse.

She described King as a leader who used what was happening internationally during a president’s administration as a way to try and convince them to push civil rights forward.

When Eisenhower was elected in 1952, the U.S. was embroiled in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. At the same time, countries throughout Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia fought and started to achieve independence from imperialism, she explained.

“The United States Supreme Court would convince those new nations to ally with American capitalism and to shun Soviet communism,” Chamberlain said. “And yet we had diplomats ... from newly independent African nations come to the United States …[and] experience racism. This hurts the country's reputation abroad, and made these African nations more likely to be sympathetic to the Soviet Union.”

Racial discrimination and violence was “intense, detrimental and embarrassing” to America’s image, said Chamberlain. The U.S. Department of Justice wrote about racism’s global impact in its amicus brief to the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, the case that made school segregation unconstitutional.

King also warned the presidents that each act of violence on Black Americans “was a spark that threatened to ignite black communities' violent rage and response,” Chamberlain said.

But Eisenhower expressed the belief that Black activists “were demanding too much, too fast, too loudly in public statements,” Chamberlain said. He protected the rights of the Little Rock Nine students mostly to show his power to overrule Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus’ attempts to block their entry.

During Kennedy’s administration, King pushed the president to use federal power against state and local officials who used or supported violence that upheld segregation. He urged Kennedy to issue a second Emancipation Proclamation during its 100th anniversary, but Kennedy was worried he’d lose white Southerners’ support.

“If the U.S. stood for equal rights of all Americans and democratic principles and practices here at home, he argued, ‘can we justify the claim to world leadership in the fight against communism and tyranny?’ These specific appeals were unsuccessful,” said Chamberlain.

She added that Kennedy did pass some executive orders and made a rousing televised 1963 speech on civil rights, but King was frustrated with his inaction.

King’s success with presidents leaped with Johnson. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed by Johnson while King was present and King actively campaigned for Johnson.

“Whereas King had been begging Ike to say something, and had begged JFK to do something about civil rights, King praised LBJ’s rhetoric and his decisive actions on behalf of civil rights,” Chamberlain said.

The two seemed fond of each other and kept in close contact, Chamberlain said. You can listen to some of their phone conversations on the LBJ Presidential Library’s website.

Johnson later passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but their relationship faltered over King’s commitment to nonviolence during the Vietnam War, according to Chamberlain. King spoke about his changing views in his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent,” King said during his “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

Friday’s presentation also covered one of King’s greatest supporters, U.S. Supreme Court Judge Thurgood Marshall.

His path to the nation’s highest court was not straightforward.

MLK’s legal backing through Marshall

Kas Williams, associate vice president for Mission Integration and Institutional Diversity at Misericordia University, shared Marshall’s rise through the court system.

Kas Williams, associate vice president for Mission Integration and Institutional Diversity at Misericordia University, spoke about Thurgood Marshall's relationship with Martin Luther King Jr. on Jan. 17 at the Luzerne County Courthouse.
Isabela Weiss | WVIA News | Report for America
Kas Williams, associate vice president for Mission Integration and Institutional Diversity at Misericordia University, spoke about Thurgood Marshall's relationship with Martin Luther King Jr. on Jan. 17 at the Luzerne County Courthouse.

He studied law at Howard University under Charles Hamilton Houston, the NAACP’s first general counsel and who is widely known as “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow.”

“And what Charles [Houston] taught his students was that it was important to use the law to fight,” Williams said.

His students studied and poked holes through Plessy v. Ferguson — the case that made “separate but equal” treatment legal — for practice, said Williams.

Marshall later won in Brown v. Board of Education and Kennedy asked him to serve as a Circuit Court of Appeals judge. Johnson made Marshall solicitor general and later appointed him to the Supreme Court.

Through each phase of his career, Williams said Marshall overcame challenges to his success, including Congress deciding to take an eight-month long recess before appointing him to the appeals court after his nomination.

She asked repeatedly, “Is there a lawyer in the house,” to highlight how his determination paved the way for future generations.

Friday’s lecture ended with music from Don Chappell and Don Sennett, who played songs from the Civil Rights Movement and spoke about its significance. Wilkes-Barre Mayor George Brown, Luzerne County Manager Romilda Crocamo and Wilkes-Barre Law & Library Association President Cheryl Sobeski-Reedy also presented.

Monday event at JCC

The local NAACP is holding a second MLK weekend event, Blankets & Broth on Monday, Jan. 20 from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. at the Friedman Jewish Community Center at 613 S J Strauss Lane, Kingston.

Volunteers will learn how to make fringe blankets from scratch at the event, which will be donated to Ruth’s Place, Keystone Mission, Sara’s Table and The Salvation Army Kirby Family House.

Organizers ask participants to bring their own pair of scissors if possible and a can of soup or broth to donate. Coffee will be provided.

Isabela Weiss is a storyteller turned reporter from Athens, GA. She is WVIA News's Rural Government Reporter and a Report for America corps member. Weiss lives in Wilkes-Barre with her fabulous cats, Boo and Lorelai.

You can email Isabella at isabelaweiss@wvia.org