 "Photo: Gingi Edmonds")
Dr. Alveda King is the Pastoral Associate and Director of Priests for Life African American Outreach, spokesperson for the Silence No More Awareness Campaign and niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Dr. King is a former college professor and has served in the Georgia State House of Representatives. She is also a bestselling author; among her books are "How Can the Dream Survive if we Murder the Children?" And, "I Don't Want Your Man, I Want My Own". The Founder of King for America, Inc., Alveda is also the recipient of a Doctorate of Laws degree from Saint Anselm College.
The following is a transcript of a telephone Q&A with Dr. Alveda King and The Campus News at COS.
Could you explain your relation to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to us?
Yes, but first I'd like to give you some background on my family. I don’t think many people know this information and I would like to share it with you. Martin Luther King Senior was an Irish Catholic abolitionist and he married a free African slave woman and she was very much a spirit of Harriet Tubman kind of a woman. In Atlanta he met up with a man by the name of Adam Daniel Williams, people called him A.D. Williams. A.D. was born on January 2, the day after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. And A.D. Williams' dad was a slave preacher, Wallace Williams, and he preached liberty and justice. They were very justice and freedom minded in his family. A.D. took after his daddy and he also became a preacher.
So, Martin Luther King Senior, when he came to Atlanta, he was mentored by A.D. Williams and married A.D.'s daughter, Alberta, who grew up with a spirit of justice and freedom. And as a result, they birthed Christine King, well, Christine King Farris now, Martin Luther King Jr. and my daddy, A.D., who was named after his granddaddy. But daddy was Alfred Daniel and his granddaddy was Adams Daniel. So, Martin was nurtured in a patriarchal kind of environment, so he grew up to be kind of a patriarch of the black people, kind of like a Moses. And Martin was sometimes called the black Moses, and that would have made my daddy, his brother, the black Aaron. And that is some history that people don't know.
Now as I understand it, you grew up in the civil rights movement that was led by your uncle, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Could you share with us some of your memories of what that time was like?
When I grew up, I actually lived in the same house with Martin and my daddy and Christine. When my parents got married, they still lived in that home even when my grandparents moved. So I grew up in an environment of justice and freedom and liberty and the Word of God, especially faith and love. I grew up in the whole civil rights movement that was led by my uncle. He wasn't the first in our family to stand for civil rights, he stepped into it after his predecessors had already been in it. Martin stepped in to become the next leader and then he became recognized for his works. But I grew up cutting my teeth on liberty, justice, love and faith. There's a natural connection between the civil rights movement of the 20th century and the 21st.
But we were all activists in my family. My dad, A.D. King, led the Open Housing Campaign, where I got arrested for peaceful civil rights activism in Louisville, Kentucky. And the Open Housing Campaign later became a national law, The Open Housing Act of 1968. Also my house in Birmingham, Alabama was actually bombed, as was my father’s church in Kentucky. It was a scary time, but we were peaceful and faithful and knew we were shaping the future of America. I see history repeating itself with the current human rights struggle in America.
What do you feel is the current human rights struggle in America?
Abortion is America's current human rights injustice. It is an evil that has resulted in a black genocide in America that was started by Margaret Sanger, who was a eugenicist and racist who founded Planned Parenthood. And she actually said while forming Planned Parenthood, "Colored people are like weeds and need to be exterminated." She even laid out detailed plans on population control and the reduction of the Negro race.
You can read up on this at klanparenthood.com and maafa21.com to get more statistics, but basically since 1973, abortion has reduced the black population by over 25 percent. Twice as many African Americans have died from abortion than have died from AIDS, accidents, violent crimes, cancer, and heart disease combined. So basically every three days, more African Americans are killed by abortion than have been killed by the Ku Klux Klan in its entire history. People think Planned Parenthood isn't following Margaret Sangers racist agenda anymore, but almost 80 percent of its clinics are located in minority and all black neighborhoods.
Now my uncle Martin received a Planned Parenthood award after he died, the Margaret Sanger Award, and they like to try to use that to pretend that Martin would have been on board with all of this stuff, but it's not possible. My uncle spoke out against abortion and infanticide in his letter from the Birmingham jail. My whole family was pro-life. He would never have aligned himself with the killing of innocent children. You can go to my website, priestsforlife.org/africanamerican, there's two parts of a PDF file there, and read the whole story on my uncles views toward abortion.
How did you personally get involved in the pro-life movement? When did you make the switch from civil rights activist to pro-life activist?
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