On the Funeral of Coretta Scott King (My New Birth Rant)

For those of you that don't know, I live in the Atlanta suburb of Lithonia, about 15 minutes east of the downtown area. Lithonia isn't very large, so for the longest time, it was rare that we ended up in the news. But with the building of the Mall at Stonecrest and the woes of the city's government, Lithonia has made the news rounds more and more frequently as of late. Most notably, Lithonia is also home to New Birth Missionary Baptist Church. Led by Bishop Eddie Long, New Birth's 25,000-member strong congregation is the largest in the entire state of Georgia.

My home is, quite literally, right across the street from New Birth, and its presence is unavoidable in my community. I had my high school graduation at New Birth. New Birth is even my polling place. And in case you need a visual aid, here you go.

At the beginning, New Birth's presence was simply a nuisance. Between New Birth and the mall, traffic was (and is) so bad on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings that everything from revitalized road construction to the presence traffic cops have been implemented in order to alleviate the congestion. Most notably and frustratingly, New Birth's fireworks display every year finds its patrons parking on both sides of the road throughout the neighborhood and even on my neighbor's lawns.

Normally, a person like me would be thrilled that Presidents Bush, Clinton, and Carter, along with much of the Congressional leadership in Washington, as well as Georgia's state leadership, would be coming to town. But I'm not. That is because by December of 2004, New Birth went from being a minor nuisance to, for me at least, a negative force in the community, particularly when it comes to our relationships with the world around us.

First was a march organized by Bishop Long and the daughter of the late Dr. Martin and Coretta Scott King, Rev. Bernice King. Although the march aimed to confront several issues of morality within the black community, the most notable of these talking points was the banning of homosexual marriage. My outrage was not necessarily at their opposition to gay marriage. I wrote back in 2004:

Although I disagree with discrimination against homosexuals, I can understand how individuals come to have those beliefs, particularly when raised in an environment that maintains that homosexuality is a sin. I won't blink when people opposed to homosexuality decide to get together and have marches like this; they are enjoying their Constitutional right.

Rather, my opposition stemmed from the fact that Bishop Long and Rev. King had the audacity to bring Rev. King's father into this spectacle. The AJC reported that "Long organized the demonstration and carried an Olympic-style torch lighted from the eternal flame at the King Center, where the march began." Part of me wonders whether or not this has anything to do with Bernice King's wanting to keep the King Center out of the hands of the federal government.

Thus, when I discovered that Ms. Coretta Scott King's funeral would be held at New Birth, I could not help but see the irony as she had been a staunch advocate for gay rights. Noted Ms. King:

"Gay and lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil union," she said. "A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriages."

But if only that were where the irony ended. The AJC reported back in September:

In 1995, Bishop Eddie Long established a nonprofit, tax-exempt charity to help the needy and spread the gospel.

But it was Long, leader of the largest church congregation in Georgia, who became the charity's biggest beneficiary.

The charity, Bishop Eddie Long Ministries Inc., provided him with at least $3.07 million in salary, benefits and the use of property between 1997 and 2000 — nearly as much as it gave to all other recipients combined during those years, tax records show.

The article later introduces this doozy:

Long, 52, defended his compensation during an interview about his charity. He's transformed New Birth, based in Lithonia, from a 300-member church to a 25,000-member megachurch with a global presence, according to the church's Web site.

"We're not just a church, we're an international corporation," Long said. "We're not just a bumbling bunch of preachers who can't talk and all we're doing is baptizing babies. I deal with the White House. I deal with Tony Blair. I deal with presidents around this world. I pastor a multimillion-dollar congregation.

"You've got to put me on a different scale than the little black preacher sitting over there that's supposed to be just getting by because the people are suffering."

The obvious irony of this being that Dr. Martin Luther King, who not only dealt with domestic leaders such as Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, to leaders as far away as India's Jawaharlal Nehru, lived modestly. When King campaigned for poor people in Cleveland and Chicago, he lived among them in the slums and ghettos of those cities. Jonathan Alter writes:

On Jan. 26, 1966, King, his wife, Coretta, and their four children moved into a third-floor walk-up at 1550 South Hamlin in North Lawndale, by then known as "Slumdale." Once a middle-class Jewish neighborhood, the area had filled up with blacks streaming north after World War II. The entryway of the building on Hamlin was used as a toilet by the neighborhood, and the apartment was tiny. "You had to go through the bedrooms to get to the kitchen," Coretta remembered. The landlord had quickly slapped a coat of paint on the apartment when he learned the identity of his new tenants (originally signed up under a false name), but it didn't help much.

Thus, New Birth's hosting of Coretta King's funeral doesn't really sit well with me.

With that said, I completely understand why New Birth was selected as the site for Ms. King's funeral service. Not only is Bernice King an associate minister at the church but it has a seating capacity of 10,000. New Birth is certainly a logical choice. But that doesn't mean I have to be 100 percent comfortable with that reality. It just saddens me that the last real bearer of Dr. King's legacy is no longer with us. Her children, as much as they may work to preserve the name of their father, did not and could not have the type of intimate relationship with him that their mother did. Her intimacy with Dr. King gave her a level of understanding about his mission that none of us could ever imagine.

And that's the real tragedy in all this. Of the current and former presidents, dignitaries, national and world leaders, and in general, people in a position of power, all of whom are expected to attend Ms. King's funeral on Tuesday, how many are even familiar enough with her husband's life's successes and failures to honestly say that they are working to make the world as he envisioned it? Because I fear that after all of this week's pomp and circumstance, it will be business as usual, only to once again be gift wrapped in feel good rhetoric every 3rd Monday of January.

Don't get me wrong. I will still try to attend the viewing on Tuesday morning (the funeral doesn't actually begin until noon), but all of this will certainly be at the back of my mind.