King's legacy honored Monday
ATLANTA — Scott Shepherd didn’t fire the shot that killed Martin Luther King Jr., but the former Ku Klux Klansman says he has always felt remorse toward the family of the slain civil rights leader and all who honor his legacy.
He reached for atonement Monday evening, sitting on a dais next to Bernice King, who was 5 years old when James Earl Ray assassinated her father in 1968.
“I want to extend an apology to the King family and everyone out there,” Shepherd said, opening a discussion of race relations at the Atlanta center that bears the elder King’s name. “I, in my past, did a lot of terrible things. I said a lot of terrible things about Dr. King. I didn’t know what I was talking about.”
Bernice King, who admitted “hating white people” as a young woman, accepted Shepherd’s apology. It was the pinnacle of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day that laid bare intense social tensions as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office Friday, yet also offered potential avenues to achieve King’s vision of a just society.
Trump did not publicly participate in any King observances. The holiday came amid the fallout from a public tiff between Trump and civil rights icon John Lewis, an exchange that incensed many African-Americans.
In New York, King Day observers cast establishment leaders as Klan successors. “When men no better than Klansmen dressed in suits are being sworn into office, we cannot be silent,” Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi said at a Brooklyn gathering.
For her part, Bernice King warned of a nation “dangerously polarized” along the lines of race and class. “We are headed to race riots if we’re not careful,” she said. “We can’t just keep this divisiveness going.”
She expressed concerns about Trump, who had met earlier in the day with her brother, Martin Luther King III.
After that private session at Trump Tower in New York, the younger King said Trump pledged to be an inclusive president even as he stands firm in his spat with Lewis. The Georgia congressman initially called Trump “illegitimate,” prompting the president-elect to declare on Twitter that Lewis, who was beaten during the civil rights movement, was “all talk” and “no action.”
Bernice King said Trump has demonstrated “what kind of man he is” and said any transformation is up to God. Changing the nation, she said, rests with people like Shepherd and Daryl Davis, a black musician and author who tries to convince Klansmen to renounce their racist views.
