Activist Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King, Jr., speaks to the National Press Club. King discussed nonviolent protests, gun control and racial inequality in her speech Wednesday. (Tara Longardner/MNS)
WASHINGTON — Activist Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke about our era’s major social issues Wednesday at the National Press Club in a speech entitled “What Would Martin Luther King Say?”
In celebration of her uncle’s birthday next week, King discussed nonviolent protest, inequality, abortion and gun control.
King, like her uncle, is a pastor and civil rights activist, though she focuses on pro-life issues, particularly through her work with Priests for Life, which focuses on abortion and euthanasia, where she is the director of African American outreach.
King talked about the widespread protests against racial profiling and police power surrounding the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, using her experiences growing up in an activist family to call for nonviolent protest, which she said requires a “personal commitment to nonviolent action” on the part of protesters.
She also placed these protests in a broader context. While there’s merit to movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, which aims to raise awareness of the marginalization of people of color through profiling and police brutality, they focus on only one of many threats to human life, King said.
“The death of Eric, the death of Trayvon, the death of Michael, those are terrible,” King said. “But black on black crime is bad, killing of aborted babies is bad, officers killing people on higher scales—we don’t want deaths of anybody.”
King and her family were no strangers to violence. Her childhood home was bombed while she was in the house. In addition to her uncle’s assassination, her father, activist A.D. King, and her grandmother, Alberta King were both killed.
“I’m very familiar with chokings and guns, more familiar than I’d like to be,” King said.
King said she is in favor of stronger gun control laws, but cautioned that restricting access to guns is not a solution.
“We have gun control. What about choke control? ‘I’m going to beat you to death with my fist’ control?” King said. “Just taking away the tools people use to be violent will not end violence.”
In speaking about racial inequality in the United States, King urged people to think in terms of working for equity, not equality.
“We have equal opportunity, but not equal access,” King said. “If you’re Caucasian in America, the doors of opportunity are more easily opened, and that needs to change because we need to see each other as equal—one blood, the same.”
King’s predominant message about race relations was that of nonviolence, like that of her uncle.
“You have to transform the human heart—that’s what Martin Luther King Junior is about, that’s what my daddy A.D. King is about,” King said. “It’s the love that’s going to unite us, not the fighting.”
Tara Longardner/MNS
