King's widow showed
equality applies to gays
Deb Price,
detroitnews.com (Posted 2-6-06), from the Web, February 12, 2006
Foes of a Tampa, Fla., gay rights
ordinance knew whose voice carried the most weight on civil rights. So, in
1994, when they mailed pamphlets to voters and left fliers on windshields at
black churches, they dared to claim, "Martin Luther King Jr. would be outraged
if he knew that homosexual extremists were abusing the civil rights movement.
Sodomy is not a civil right."
Absolutely not true, King's widow immediately corrected them. Coretta
Scott King fired off a letter to the people of Tampa, urging them "to vote 'no'
on any and all attempts to deny the promise of America to any citizen."
She was alerted by Mandy Carter, an African-American lesbian activist, who
recalls, "It was so painful to watch white extremists, who were never friends of
African Americans, go into the black community to exploit people's fears and
make so many black folks for the very first time actually support
discrimination. But having Mrs. King on your side, well, she's gold."
Nadine Smith, the black lesbian who led the successful effort to save Tampa's
gay rights law, describes Mrs. King's letter as "pivotal."
"I know there were black people who found the repeal effort reprehensible but
weren't going to get involved -- until we distributed Mrs. King's letter," Smith
recalls. "It would have been so easy for Mrs. King to have sat back and
merely preserved her husband's legacy. But she was always out there,
amplifying his message of equality for everyone."
In a 1998 speech, Coretta King said, "I appeal to everyone who believes in
Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream to make room at the table of brother- and
sisterhood for lesbian and gay people."
In later years, she declared all discrimination "equally wrong" and stressed
"there is a connection between the racist, the anti-Semite, the sexist and the
homophobe. They all share a sick need to dehumanize some minority to make
themselves feel more adequate."
Those of us who are gay were blessed to have the consistent support of Mrs.
King, the first lady of the civil rights movement, who died last week. But
she will always have an extra special place in the hearts of the gay African
Americans doing the hard work of countering anti-gay pastors.
"Mrs. King is worth a thousand black preachers running around opposing gay
rights," says Keith Boykin, president of the gay National Black Justice
Coalition.
She gladly added her moral authority to the drives for a federal law to ban
anti-gay job discrimination, for allowing gays to serve openly in the military
and for opening marriage to gay couples.
Mrs. King also observed that the devastation AIDS is causing among blacks shows
gay people aren't the only ones harmed by anti-gay bias: "The heterosexual
victims of AIDS, including children, are also getting an unexpected lesson in
the terrible price of bigotry toward gay and lesbian people."
Her gay friends included Bayard Rustin, who organized King's famous 1963 March
on Washington, and Lynn Cothren, her top aide for decades.
Having lost her husband to hate violence, Mrs. King reached out to the parents
of Matthew Shepard the day after he was brutally murdered for being gay.
In lifting up gay people, Coretta Scott King left our nation an enduring message
worthy of being engraved on every heart: "Like Martin, I don't believe you
can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others."
Reach Deb Price at (202) 662-8736 or
dprice@detnews.com.
|
