Longtime civil rights activist Gwendolyn F. Green can never forget some of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last words to her and how prophetic they turned out to be.
Green was working for then-state Sen. Mervyn Dymally when she was asked to invite King to speak at the California Democratic Council’s annual convention in Anaheim on March 16, 1968. Green had worked with King and his wife, Coretta, for the past eight years in various administrative positions with King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and its fundraising affiliate, the Western Christian Leadership Conference.
King, who led his nonviolent, civil rights campaign, had grown weary but agreed to come out and gave a memorable speech at the convention, she said. After attending a benefit at a Beverly Hills home that night with celebrities including Marlon Brando, King told Green at his hotel that he thought the end was near.
“He told my daughter and I that he knew his number was up and that he knew he was going to be killed,” Green, 88, of South Los Angeles recalled recently on the property of First African Methodist Episcopal Church. “Everything was going against him. … He felt he wasn’t able to control many of the organizations (fighting for civil rights) and get them to react in a nonviolent way. So many things were pressuring him to be partisan. He was tired. He just said he thought his number was up and that he would not see us again.”
On the one hand, Green said she wasn’t surprised. She knew that he and Coretta were deeply committed to the cause and were willing to die for that commitment. On the other, she said, “even though you believe in it, you don’t think that 17 days from then you’d be taken out.”
When Dymally, who later became a U.S. congressman, called to tell her King had been shot on April 4, she said she went through “all the necessary screaming and crying,” verified the news with the wife of Andrew Young, King’s aide, and then flew out to attend the massive and chaotic funeral in Atlanta with her daughter.
Green said she feels blessed to have worked with King and his wife. Green, who became active in civil rights issues as a child in Oakland, worked as an administrative aid for Western Christian Leadership Conference, a group of Southern California ministers charged with doing fundraising and holding rallies in support of King and the civil rights movement. After young protesters were attacked with police dogs and high-powered hoses in the South, King contacted the president of the organization’s board, Rev. L. Sylvester Odom, and said they needed their help.
“They really needed funds to fight this because it was too massive,” Green said.
Green was the point person, setting up rallies and fundraising events. And in 1965, she served as assistant director for the SCLC’s Summer Community Organization and Political Education Project, traveling to six southern states to provide voter registration and education at a time that blacks were harassed and put in jail for trying to register to vote. For several months, she worked directly with King, Young, civil rights leader Hosea Williams and King’s entire Atlanta-based staff.
King “was very easy going,” Green said. “He was brilliant and had brilliant people working around him. I was thrilled to be working with him and to be a part of history.”
Green also traveled with Coretta King, a noted singer, when she gave several concerts to raise money for the cause. The two became very close, she said, and remained friends until her death in 2006.
For Rev. William Monroe Campbell of Mount Gilead Missionary Baptist Church in South Los Angeles, meeting Rev. King was also a powerful experience.
Campbell heard King speak several times as a youth at Second Baptist Church, which strongly supported the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the civil rights movement.
When he was about 17, Campbell recalled hearing the prominent civil rights leader speak of being “a drum major for justice.” The teen was struck by one statement in particular — that “if you’re a street sweeper, sweep the streets like Michelangelo’s paintings” — since Campbell’s dad was, in fact, a street sweeper who was well-regarded for his diligence.
“I heard it in a very personal form,” Campbell, who today lives in Altadena and is vice chairmen of the SCLC of Southern California, said. “It reinforced my sense of encouragement to be the best possible person that I can be.”
In 1969, Campbell was chairman of the Black Students Union at George Pepperdine College — then located in South L.A. — when campus security guard Charles Lane fatally shot 15-year-old black teenager, Larry Kimmons, who had come to the campus to play basketball.
Campbell felt “utter dismay,” he said, that a kid could be shot by a guard at point-blank range “when he had done nothing to deserve that.” The judge disregarded a recommendation to give Lane jail time and the guard was eventually fined $500 and placed on probation.
The tragic shooting fueled anger at the campus, with Campbell and other students boycotting classes and participating in demonstrations until the administration shut down the school for about a week. College officials entered into negotiations with the students over their demands, Campbell said, and eventually established a black studies program on campus and hired black faculty.
Campbell, 66, said he and other students were influenced by King’s principles and methodology to effect change.
“What we did was in accord with the methodology that had been advanced by Dr. King,” Campbell said. “It meant that I and we did not have to passively accept mistreatment, abuse, discrimination and oppression. That we did not have to be passive and yet we could honor an ethic of nonviolence.”
In fact, when a student wanted to put a bomb in the piano in the college’s auditorium, Campbell said he stopped him from doing it, telling him that this was going to be strictly a nonviolent campaign.
“That kind of thing wouldn’t help or advance our cause,” he said.
King, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, was on the apex of a broader community force that worked to advance civil rights issues, Campbell said. The question is not what King means to society, he said, but which values emerged from a movement in which King was a primary moving force.
That is recognizing “the worth and value of every citizen,” he said, and “taking steps as needed to ensure the honoring of the rights and values of every citizen.”
