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While SCLC Burns, Bernice King Delays Taking on New Role

By Paul Shepard on Jun 3rd 2010 11:38AM
Filed under: News, Profiles, Race and Civil Rights

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Bernice King Delays Taking Role at SCLC

The house that her father built is burning. The once-proud civil rights group the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is being swept away in the flames of public infighting and courtroom battles among its leadership.

Bernice King, daughter of SCLC founder Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and possibly the one person who might save the SCLC operation (if it should indeed be saved at all), was elected president and should have taken office at the start of the year.

Instead, she sits on the sidelines of the fray and watches, and waits and negotiates and ... you get the picture.

At exactly the time the SCLC needs a strong hand to decide which of the warring factions of SCLC will remain and help her pull the group from the abyss, King is absent in the eyes of the public.

Now I'm not privy to all that's going on in the background. It is possible that King is separating the wheat from the chaff among the remaining so-called leaders and is developing a grand plan to bring social action, not public infighting, to the top of the SCLC agenda.

If the SCLC is to survive, it will have to develop a new strategy to deal with the often-difficult-to-detect brand of racial prejudice employed against black and brown people today.

It is possible that the SCLC will have to enter into a fuller and more public partnership with Latinos, who are now sharing the brunt of overt racism in America.

I hope King is spending a lot of time considering the SCLC's relevance and where the group is headed in the coming years. If so, and if she is up to the job, the SCLC just might find its purpose.




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