Coretta Scott King and Letter from Birmingham Jail

Micheal,

I was struck yesterday on our ride back home to Washington, having just played Whiskey Creek Golf course in Northern Maryland near Baltimore, during which, as I recall, we...and Gene Kilby also... played extremely well, about the parallels in our lives...we are about the same age, we were raised in a 'southern' culture, we lived in many of the same places including southern Germany, California, and for 35 years on Cambridge Place, NW in Washington, DC and we... not least... have shared another heretofore unknown interest...

Let me explain...somehow our conversation moved yesterday from an Aspen Institute seminar which you moderated years ago that included Ray Hagin ...the infamous..now convicted felon sadly... the mayor of New Orleans during the Katrina disaster...and his elegant..as you recalled...mother...

to Coretta Scott King...my memory was stirred by your recall of Hagin because I remember Mrs. King as elegant.. 'regal'...and also very shy. 

I am, then, reminded of a time in the early 90s when I attended an event...maybe a Business Roundtable... in Washington...during which Mrs. King was to be inaugurated as a member of an advisory committee. She had arrived early without an entourage and had found her way to the empty meeting room filled with round lunch set-up tables...probably led there and left alone by a staffer who had no idea who she was.

I attended the meeting representing a late-arriving IBM senior executive...Jim Cannavino... and I got there early myself also....and so she and I occupied a large dining room alone for a few minutes ...although soon the room began to be filled with members of the 'board'...and all, while appearing to recognize Mrs. King...it seemed to me.. seemed reluctant to approach her...she was 'iconic' ... and also she was so reserved...

So following the advice that Katherine and I gave to Lauren when she was eleven or so and first went ...with many trepidations... to summer camp, that she 'adopt' the camper who seemed to have no other friends as a means of calming her own fears, I sat down next to her and Mrs. King and I began to talk...our conversation smoothed, I suspect, because of my southern accent...even though I had made an effort to lose it, unsuccessfully, even after 60 years away from the 'south.'

There is something about language and accent that does moderate unfamiliarity...

The meeting started and I moved away to my designated table, but I would catch Mrs. King's eye occasionally and she would smile...at a friendly face I suppose...and I talked with her at length during 'breaks' in the meeting ...again no one approached her...I introduced her to Jim Cannavino who had by then arrived...as well as to several other business executives who were sitting at other tables.

After meeting Mrs. King, and being 'taken' by her...and with some encouragement from me... Jim decided he would like IBM to contribute to the King Center in Atlanta, and asked me if I would arrange the details...the money...about $200K would come from his budget....

IBM was maybe unique in its delegation of budget authority to its senior executives without detailed corporate review...so with his imprimatur, I flew down to Atlanta and saw Mrs. King and the executive director of the King Center and discussed with them several projects that IBM might sponsor...

What NGO organizations like the King Center want is unrestricted money because they always have trouble just meeting general expenses...so we agreed to a contribution to general funds and a special fund to create a presentation of Letter from Birmingham Jail for the King Center...aside from 'Letter' being a powerful statement ..Gandhi's influence is clearly in it.. and one of my favorite literary pieces ... it was 'typed' on an IBM Selectric typewriter for posterity by a secretary in the Southern Leadership conference office from pieces of paper smuggled out of the Birmingham jail ...remember the 'golf' ball electric typewriter...a little piece of trivia...

I worked with an IBM Division headquartered in Atlanta who already had a project underway.... identified as 'Illuminated Manuscripts'...that included a spoken version of Letter from Birmingham Jail... as well as narrated excerpts from Black Elk Speaks, Ulysses, Hamlet etc...illustrated with video from the Civil Rights era....to create a visual presentation of 'Letter' in the King Center... as the first exhibition visitors would see upon entry.

(Unfortunately, I cannot locate a copy of the software today...and it's no longer in the King Center...the technology having been long surpassed...but I will keep looking...but I have identified a reading of the 'letter' by Anna Deavere Smith sponsored by the Aspen Institute... which in many ways is superior.)

So, over the course of a year, I met with Mrs. King several times...occasionally taking her out to lunch....I took her once to a very fancy hotel in downtown Atlanta and caused a stir because she was a very public figure...so over time, we became good acquaintances... if not friends...

Of course, time passed, and I never saw her again until she died in 2006.

and then, amazingly, you related to me the quite remarkable coincidence that you used Letter from Birmingham Jail...a piece you admired...in many discussions, you moderated at the Aspen Institute...and, of course, you must have had a hand in the Anna Deavere Smith performance.

As an aside,

Jim Cannavino was President of IBM's Personal Computer Division..and had access to IBM's fleet of jets. I would occasionally fly from Washington to Laguardia, drive a rental car to Armonk, and meet him at the private airport near there to fly on to a meeting...Once we met with Bill Gates in Seattle...Microsoft, as you know, developed the first operating system... DOS...for the IBM personal computer.

We discussed the fateful decision the first President of the PC Division ...Don Estridge...made when he did not reserve IBM ownership of the DOS operating system when it was installed on IBM compatible PCs... many argue that he made a huge mistake...but I would argue that his strategy in publishing the specs of the IBM PC and relying on third-party software and inviting other companies to build compatible functions that would fit into the universal slots in the IBM PC was the reason the PC was so successful.

Bill Gates acknowledged at that meeting that he had not been prescient enough to have deliberately sought the exclusion but realized later that it was a stroke of good luck...

Don Estridge, incidentally, was offered the Presidency of Apple by Steve Jobs but turned it down....Jobs ...by the way... pursued an entirely different strategy with the Apple 'personal computer'......creating all of Apple's functions in-house...but with the iPhone, he modified the approach to invite third parties to create apps...a decision that many think was the true stroke of genius.

Jim Cannavino later left IBM and headed up Ross Perot's new company Perot Systems after Perot sold EDS to General Motors...