OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
My Dinner With Dr. King
By WILLIAM HOOD
Published: April 3, 2013
FORTY-FIVE
years ago, the Rev. Dr. and Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr. went to a small dinner
party in Atlanta, not far from the campus of Emory University. It was a quiet
January night in 1968. I was one of the guests.
Our
hostess, Wanda White, was a young public-school teacher. In the fall of 1967,
she worked with Mrs. King, helping with her schedule, as well as other personal
and professional responsibilities. During a conversation, Wanda asked the Kings
over for a low-key dinner. They accepted, and Wanda invited some of her close
friends. (All of us were white.)
My best
friend, Larry Shaw, and I were invited to the dinner. He came from a long line
of salt-of-the-earth skilled tradesmen anchored in Appalachian South Carolina
and the red clay fields of Georgia. My father was a successful industrialist in
Birmingham, Ala. We anticipated the approaching dinner with the empty-headed
excitement of young people who rarely think beyond their own self-interest.
For us,
in fact, the thrill was primarily in meeting a real-life celebrity. Wanda’s
corgi heard the Kings’ car before we did. He rushed to the door and flipped
over to offer his belly in greeting as the Kings stepped in. As Mrs. King bent
down to give him a scratch, Dr. King asked to use the telephone. I took drink
orders. Knowing that the Kings were Baptists and most Baptists — white Southern
Baptists anyway — didn’t drink, I made sure to tell Mrs. King that we had
nonalcoholic beverages.
“I’ll
have a Coke, thanks.” She seemed shy and a little nervous. I was, too.
Dr. King
was neither shy nor nervous. When he came back, I asked him the same question.
“Any Baptists here?” he asked with a smile. “No, sir,” I said. “We’re all
Episcopalians.”
The grin
blossomed into a smile. “Good! I’ll have Scotch on the rocks.”
Mrs. King
blurted, “Well, I’ll have cream sherry.” Everyone laughed, and the early
stiffness relaxed.
At the
table Wanda, Larry and I regaled the Kings with tales of our common avocation,
breeding and showing purebred dogs. (For days afterward we wondered whether the
Kings were more bemused than amused, but they were good sports for all that.)
Larry told them about the boarding kennel he ran to support his show dogs, and
I talked about my graduate studies in art history.
Gradually
the conversation moved to more serious topics, and Dr. King himself talked
about the blight of poverty on our national life, as well as his feelings
against the Vietnam War. Of the three of us, only Wanda had turned her moral
attention to issues beyond race, which seemed to be one of the only things that
preoccupied Southern liberals in those years. Self-absorbed as I was, only
later that year did I begin to realize how prophetic his words were.
After
dinner Dr. King asked Wanda if he could use the telephone again. When he came
back, he settled onto the sofa next to me. I tried to think of something clever
to say, but before I could speak, he asked why I was studying for a Ph.D. in
art history. He asked what I thought art could accomplish that other forms of
communication could not. I remember that he said that he’d rarely discussed
art, or even thought much about it. As I stammered an answer I cannot recall,
he listened with the concentration of someone who genuinely wanted to
understand. Never before, and rarely since, had I witnessed such authentic
humility. It was so simple, so powerful a form of energy that for a few moments
it freed me from bondage to myself.
A
conversation that cannot have lasted more than 10 minutes ended up changing the
way I thought about my life. When I got back to New York, my viewpoint toward
earning a doctorate shifted. The determination to use my education to become a
famous scholar gradually made room for a half-baked resolution to become a
useful art historian. I began to consider the moral or religious content of
Renaissance art; and once I got a job teaching art history at an institution
whose values encouraged me to develop that ambition, teaching became a means
for me to help students identify and examine their own values. That remains my
goal. The short conversation I had with Dr. King had a lasting effect.
The next
morning Mrs. King called Wanda. We learned that after dinner he’d called to
tell the person who would pick them up to come at 11:30, rather than 10:30, as
planned. She thanked Wanda for a pleasant evening. She also told Wanda that she
and Dr. King were looking forward to inviting us to their home, perhaps when I
returned from New York.
Of
course, there was no next time. A few minutes before 8 p.m. on April 4, 1968, I
arrived at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University to give my first
seminar report. As soon as we walked out of class at 10, we learned that Dr.
King was dead.
William Hood is a professor emeritus of
art history at Oberlin College and a visiting professor at the Institute of
Fine Arts, New York University.
