Holiday Planning Panel Omits Abernathy

Thousands of former friends and colleagues will gather here Monday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but his once-closest confidant will be 3,500 miles away in Alaska, feeling frozen out of the holiday’s main observances.

“No, I won’t be marching in Atlanta on Monday; I’ll be taking part in a tribute to Dr. King in Anchorage, Alaska,” the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy said in an interview this week. “I wasn’t doing anything here, so I was free to accept when I was invited to go to Alaska.”

Former Top Aide

Abernathy, King’s top aide in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, feels he was blackballed from the planning and main activities surrounding the first federal observance of the slain civil rights leader’s birthday.

“We marched from Montgomery to Memphis in the civil rights movement and he died in my arms, but I guess I wasn’t good enough to be on the planning commission,” said Abernathy, who helped King found the SCLC and was president for nine years after his friend’s assassination in 1968.

Abernathy was with King on the balcony of the Memphis, Tenn., motel when King was shot to death and fell into Abernathy’s arms.

31-Member Commission

In referring to the “planning commission,” Abernathy meant the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday Commission, a 31-member group set up last year to plan, coordinate and execute Monday’s observance of King’s 57th birthday.

King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, the commission chairwoman, could not be reached for comment.

“Certainly, nobody was more qualified than me to serve on the commission,” said Abernathy, pastor of Atlanta’s West Hunter Street Baptist Church.

James Karantonis, director of the commission’s office in Washington, noted that the law setting up the panel ordered that it include eight members of Congress, four from the executive branch, Mrs. King and two family members, plus two from the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Social Change in Atlanta, headed by Mrs. King.

“Those initial 17 members then got together and chose the remaining 14,” he said. “And, frankly, given that the commission had no money and only a short time to get this thing networked, we had to rely on people that, while they believed in what Dr. King stood for, had clout and constituencies.”

Former Aides Included

Abernathy noted that former King aides Andrew Young, mayor of Atlanta, and the Rev. Joseph Lowery, SCLC president, are on the panel. He said he took no solace from the explanation that precedence was given to fund-raisers.

“I would have thought I would have been the top person on the commission, but I wasn’t even selected to be on it at all,” he said. “Martin Luther King and I went to jail together 19 times, we prayed together and shared many triumphant moments together. We were great friends. But I was passed over for a bunch of people who never even marched a day with Dr. King.”