By MARCIA MOXAM COMRIE

For two of St. Albans own, to remember Dr. Martin Luther King is to have known him.

The time that Barbara Williams Emerson and Andrew Young spent with the legendary civil rights leader forever changed the world and their lives.

Coming Of Age In King’s Shadow

Dr. Barbara Williams Emerson of St. Albans, literally grew up in the Civil Rights Movement under the guidance of her father, the legendary Rev. Hosea Williams and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

According to Emerson, whose father was director of field operations for the Civil Rights Movement and who recently passed away, making a difference is a not an option, it is a necessity.

Andrew Young (left) with King. Photo Courtesy of "An Easy Burden"

"It’s a kind of grounding that says you have a responsibility to try to make a difference," said Emerson, vice president for academic affairs, a newly created position at Audrey Cohen College. "All my positions have been about that – about making a difference," she said.

"The SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] was an organization of which he [Dr. King] was president. I was very young 16, 17, 18 and so were many of the other field soldiers," she explained. "If a particular community had started up its own grassroots movements in response, then the SCLC would go in and provide training. When they had built it up the point where the powers that be would negotiate with them. Dr. King was a coalescing force," she said.

But while most everyone remembers King as a dynamic civil rights leader, many tend to forget that at the time of his death, King was also beginning to broaden his base.

When he was killed in April 1968, he was in the throes of organizing "The Poor People’s March," on Washington. It was an event that was more inclusive than civil rights.

"Dr. King was bringing people together around economics," Emerson explained. "At the time I was at American University in Washington and was involved from that end. It might’ve been his greatest movement, had he lived to see it."

Would Dr. King be proud?

Not necessarily, according to Emerson.

"Political gains are taken for granted," said Emerson. "But there is a huge underclass of people not living the American dream and not living Dr. King’s dream. "There’s a saying that the struggle continues and it does. We’re standing on other people’s shoulders so we cannot become too comfortable in our middle class lives."

Keep The Dream Alive

According to Emerson, if everyone who supported King and the movement did something that he would’ve done, we would be well on our way to realizing his dream.

If everyone just picked something that was "like Dr. King" and just do it over the next year, we would be making a huge difference, she said.

"There’s so much that they could give back. "And I
cannot overemphasize
the importance of higher education in preparing young people for life. I have a son
who taught at Jackie Robinson elementary school [PS 15 in Springfield Gardens] and I spoke there at career day a few times. We have to direct them toward education early because there is a lot of competition for their minds," she explained.

Inspiring A
New Generation

According to Emerson, who moved to St. Albans nearly 30 years ago, the media can and should play a role in informing today’s young people of the blood, sweat and tears shed so that they can enjoy the freedoms they do today.

"The media made Malcolm X an icon and the same thing could be done for the Civil Rights Movement," she said. "After Spike Lee made his movie they all knew who Malcolm was and Hollywood needs to do the same thing for the Civil Rights movement."

King’s Prince

For Andrew Young, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under President Jimmy Carter, working side by side with Dr. Martin Luther King turned him into not only a historian on the movement. It also qualifies him as one of the people who knew and loved King best.

Young, an ordained minister in the Congregation Church, is a New Orleans native who in the late 1950s lived on 200th Street in Jamaica and preached at the famed St. Albans Congregational Church.

It was while living in Queens and working at the National Council of Churches in Manhattan that Young was recruited to return South and work for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and, by extension, King... its president. King was by then, in the throes of leading the Civil Rights Movement and Young became his assistant.

A Book Fit For King

In his 1996 book An Easy Burden, Young, a former congressman and retired Mayor of Atlanta, chronicles the story of King and all the players of the movement.

He dispels myths and reveals truths previously unknown or long forgotten.

Young, like King, discovered Ghandian philosophy in his late teens.

Both men went to college early (at 15) and both came from middle-class families.

Young and King on the Selma to Montgomery March. Photo Courtesy of "An Easy Burden"

They could’ve chosen to accept the racial status quo and lead comfortable, albeit segregated lives. Instead, they heeded the call to make a difference and according to Young, exposure to Gandhi helped shape their method and squared with their Christian beliefs.

"Reading Gandhi, I understood that the Gospel could be applied to a political situation. My parents’ faith inspired me to social responsibility, but theirs was an individual effort, helping one person at a time. Good works and personal salvation impacted the social order indirectly. I realized that it was going to take more than social order. Gandhi described a way for a spirtually based movement to effect such change. I began reading with more and more excitement, continuing with Gandhi’s autobiography and any book on or by Gandhi that I could lay my hands on," Young wrote in the pages of Easy Burden.

Young was also the levelheaded voice of reason when some of the other members would get angry and try to react contrary to the thrust of the movement. He also kept the peace, he says, among members in King’s intimate circle.

"My job was to ensure some balance and keep the infighting from becoming self-destructive," he says in the book.

On The Front Lines

Young said he also sought to protect the women and children in the marches but recalls with humor, the day he was tear-gassed.

"I had inhaled too much gas and started choking and vomiting. It was the same combination of tear and nausea gas they had used on us in Selma. I panicked, the only time during the movement when I think I lost my cool completely. I had been through the mob and knocked woozy in St. Augustine, been in the middle of the attacks in Birmingham and Selma and withstood the vicious crowds in Philadelphia, Mississippi, but this was the first time I was thoroughly tear-gassed. I thought I was going to die. Suddenly, I was just running normally, I would be the last to run. I was always checking to make sure the women and children were safe," Young wrote. "This time I left the children behind and probably ran over some women. I ran right into more gas."

No Laughing Matter

According to Ambassador Young, Dr. King, despite his serious scholarly style, had "a wicked sense of humor;" and in the rare moments when not involved in the planning and execution of a march or speech, discouraged acquaintances from engaging him in discussions on the subject.

On the last afternoon of his life (April 4th. 1968), Dr. King, in Memphis for a march on behalf of striking sanitation workers, engaged in a rambunctious pillow fight with Ralph Abernathy against Young at the Lorraine Motel.

A few hours later he was dead.

He described the scene of the shooting:

"Suddenly we heard what sounded like a car backfiring or a firecracker. I looked across from the motel to see what might have caused the noise, and then I glanced quickly up to the balcony where Martin had been standing at the railing. He was no longer standing. I could see from where I was that he had fallen down, fallen back. I remember that for a moment I thought he was still clowning; he had been in such a playful mood. But he wasn’t moving. I leaped up the balcony stairs and Martin was lying there."

Forever Young

Today, Andrew Young is still active in social causes and is president of "Good Works International" based in Atlanta.

He is also the president of the National Council of Churches of Christ, Inc. in New York City, the same organization he came to New York to work for some five decades ago.

His book, An Easy Burden, is published by Harper Collins and is a must-read read for any serious scholar of the Civil Rights Movement.