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Author Speak At Event Commemorating King

Klint Lowry/SUNCOAST NEWS

Author and retired social worker Emily Garland addresses the West Pasco Historical Society at their annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration.

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By KLINT LOWRY | The Suncoast News

Published: January 19, 2008

NEW PORT RICHEY, Fla. - NEW PORT RICHEY, Fla. - Like any good writer, Emily Garland wanted to find a unique theme when she agreed to speak at the West Pasco Historical Society's annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration.

"I hope to come at it from a little different angle than just a litany of his life and what he accomplished," Garland said prior to stepping up before a standing room only gathering at the old schoolhouse in Sims Park on Saturday.

"Most people already know that. I want to get deeper into the method that he used."

Garland was not part of King's inner circle during the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. She does not have personal, behind-the-scenes anecdotes to share.

She did, however, grow up in rural Georgia, during the days of Jim Crow laws and through the days when the Civil Rights movement arose to battle segregation.

The effects of the movement were part of her life personally, and then professionally as she earned a degree in social work.

Garland's career has been in the people business. Between 1972 and 1977, she founded and ran the Lula Belle Stewart Center, in Detroit. The agency was recognized as a national model for providing services to pregnant and parenting adolescents.

Later, she wrote a book, "Giving a Voice to the Ancestors," an account of her family's history.

"The book starts in 1840, when part of my ancestors were enslaved, and the other part were the masters keeping them enslaved," Garland said. "And then one of my great-grandmothers was Native American. So I bring in all those perspectives."

It's through this personal and intellectual prism that Garland has studied King and his work. The essence of her speech was that while we remember the biography and idealize the image of King, it's his policy of passive nonviolence that is important to remember.

"The only way to defeat violence is through nonviolence, not more violence," Garland said. King took that cue from Mahatma Gandhi and from Jesus, and it was this approach that was the key to his success.

It wasn't an approach that was easily accepted at first, Garland recalled. But it was imperative, because a lot of people in the movement didn't know how they could possibly expect to succeed or even survive using a philosophy of nonviolence when the people opposing them are turning the hoses and the dogs on them, or worse?

"It's just not human nature; it's superhuman," Garland said.

When Klansmen are lynching people, torturing people, cutting off people's fingers and giving them to their children as souvenirs, was King saying they should love these people?

"And the answer came back a resounding 'yes,' " Garland said.

King espoused the concept of what is known as agape love, a love for humanity that supersedes any individual's actions.

"This is the same message Jesus taught," Garland said, and that gave the followers something they could relate this message to.

The philosophy was that in the long run, people in the other side would see the nonviolence, and their own humanity would be touched by it.

The year prior to King's death was probably his saddest, Garland told the audience. It s during that time King is known to have lamented, "They never knew me."

In all the reverence he receives today, it is easy to forget that King was facing some of his harshest criticism near the end of his life, including dissension in his own ranks.

Many people, for example, had questioned the civil rights leader being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

After winning the prize, King wanted to show that the principles behind the Civil Rights Movement applied to issues of human rights and peaceful coexistence around the world.

"He began to broaden his mission, to broaden his work," Garland said.

Working with young, violent offenders, his message of nonviolence was often met with skepticism. Why should they accept nonviolence when their own country is in the middle of a colossal act of violence in Vietnam?

This prompted King to begin to take a more active role in the antiwar movement, speaking out publicly.

"When he did that, all hell broke loose," Garland said. "He was accused of being a communist, that he had no business going there – what was he trying to do?

"Back then he was sad, because his own people were turning against him."

There was a lot of misunderstanding back then, Garland said; King was right that he wasn't fully understood in his own time. But hopefully, as King's birthday is observed each year, the full meaning of his message will come through.

"We didn't know him back then," Garland said. I hope we know now what he stood for – that it wasn't only about freedom for black people; it was about world peace."

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