Acton, Mass. — For Carole Simpson, it was a meeting well worth the wait. The year was 1966. For Simpson, then a 24-year-old rookie reporter, a hard-won interview with civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. not only helped Simpson’s career, but helped tell the story of the civil rights movement as it unfolded in parts of the country where segregation was playing out as much by custom or class as by law.
Simpson, who retired in 2006 from ABC News to become Leader-in-Residence at Emerson College’s School of Communication in Boston, is the scheduled keynote speaker at the 10th annual Martin Luther King Jr. breakfast sponsored by Acton’s No Place for Hate Committee.
At ABC News, Simpson served as anchor of the weekend editions of “World News Tonight” from 1988-2003 and a senior national correspondent. She was the first African-American woman anchor of a major network evening news broadcast. Recently, she shared thoughts on meeting King, his legacy, and what challenges lie ahead.
Last year, at Wellesley’s Martin Luther King Jr. breakfast, you said that when you met Martin Luther King Jr., “I ended up having a very successful career that I owe in large part to Dr. King.” Please tell me what you mean by that. What I hope to share is the fact that I probably would not have had the career that I have had were it not for Martin Luther King Jr.
I covered him in Chicago when he moved his civil rights campaign to the north. I scooped all the reporters as a 24-year-old…You have to know that Chicago is a very competitive news town. He was coming to Chicago, and Mayor Daley [Richard J. Daley] and everyone were wondering, “What is he coming here for? We don’t have segregation laws here.”There was all this questioning, and Daley was calling him a “carpetbagger,” things like that. We got word that he was coming to O’Hare Airport at 3 p.m. in the afternoon. Of course, we all got to the gate where he was expected to arrive…silly us, they took him down the tarmac, and they didn’t take him through the gate at all.
There was a hotel where he stayed for speeches and things like that, so we all headed there. But I just had a feeling that because everyone was chasing him, I should try the hotel around the airport. I started going, hotel after hotel, asking, “Is Dr. King registered here?” Of course, nobody would say “Yes.” All famous people use some kind of pseudonym when they check into hotels. I went to five hotels, and got to the fifth hotel, and there was something about the way clerk looked and said, “No, he’s not here.”These were all gut feelings. I thought, I bet he is here. I took the elevator and stopped at each floor…I got to the last floor, the seventh floor. There were a lot of black men. I said, “This is it. He has got to be here.” I went toward the activity. Some man said, “Young woman, what are you doing?” I said, “I want to talk to Dr. K.” He said, “Dr. King isn’t going to talk to you. He is going to have a press conference at 10 a.m. tomorrow. He will see you then.”“But, I want a scoop,” I said.
“You may as well go home,” he said. “He is going to rest.”I decided I wasn’t going to leave. I plunked myself by the elev. I waited from 7 p.m. that night until 7 a.m. in the morning. Then, I saw activity down the hall. I was so tired, so hungry. It was wintertime, and I had been sleeping on the cold marble floor. I got myself together and must have looked a wreck. Then I saw him come down the hall. He looked like a god. He had made so much news, and I was this lowly reporter, and here he was. I was so thrilled. He said, “Young lady, are you the one who has been here all night trying to see me?”
I said, “Yes,” and he said, “Why would you do that?”
I said, “Because I’m the only black reporter on the radio here in Chicago, and if you told me why you were here, it would really mean a lot.”He leaned down and said, “I’m here to challenge the segregated housing patterns, and I am going to make a direct challenge to Mayor Daley.” He was right – all blacks lived on the south side, and all whites lived on the north side.
He laughed and said, “Don’t’ you tell anybody!” and he got on the elevator and said, “Young lady, I expect big things from you. You are going to go places.”I raced to the phone. It got on all the wires. And it was three hours before the press conference. Everyone was wondering who Carole Simpson was on WCFL radio in Chicago. He was at the height of his powers and getting attention and everything at the time, so it was a really big story.
I went to the press conference, after 10 a.m. after having spots all morning long, he gave me a little thumbs-up and a smile. If someone like that tells you, ‘you are going to be great some day,’ you take that in. I just worked hard the rest of my career to do that, always feeling because Dr. King said it – I’m going to be somebody. I just wonder what would have happened, had I not stayed there, had I not suddenly been on all the reporters’ lips.
How can communities make the meaning of Martin Luther King Jr. Day successful beyond events such as breakfasts and gatherings?
Well, I think mine has made a difference, just because how many people are left who actually knew him, or talked to him?
I went on to cover all he did in Chicago, so I went on to cover his northern campaign, but because of my personal knowledge of him and experience of him, I think people come away with a more “human” person.
I try to make it very personal, and how I felt about him, and those kinds of things.
I think it’s because it’s a real life story that it has more resonance than speaking about what Dr. King tried to do, I saw it and watched it, there are going to be fewer and fewer people alive who witnessed it.
So I think they come away from a more grounded perception, as a person, as someone who was funny – like the way he said, “Don’t tell anyone” – and giving me inspiration, to go on in my career,
I think it goes beyond the typical Martin Luther King Jr. event.
How can that meaning resonate in local communities, beyond the events themselves?
[The event is taking place at Congregation Beth Elohim, where No Place for Hate Chairman Sal Lopes is a member of the synagogue’s Brotherhood.] One of the things I also want to talk about is that there have been tensions between black and Jewish people. I know how much the civil rights success depended on the largess of Jewish Americans, who literally funded Dr. King – they put up money, places to stay and so on. I plan to talk about that quite a bit, too, that the Jewish community was integral to the success of the movement. It’s ridiculous to be hating on each other. It was really important, and I want them to know that those of us who were there know that.
Your new book [“News Lady,” a memoir] talks about your career but also about African-Americans in journalism. Journalism faces many challenges these days, what if any special impact does that have for African-Americans trying to find their way in this field?
It does. There are fewer black correspondents trying to find their way in this field. There are fewer today than in the 1980 –“the last hired, first fired” approach hurt a lot of people of color, when they cut they cut according to seniority. I was upset and have spoken about it the cable networks, not seeing any black people after 2 p.m. in the afternoon on television. MSNBC put on [activist] Rev. Al Sharpton. That wasn’t what we had in mind. There were many black journalists…a lot of opportunities.
This question seems to come up every year around Martin Luther King Jr. Day. A lot of people wonder about the work that still needs to be done on the civil rights front. Do you have thoughts about what the current civil rights battle might be?
I just got back to Iowa for the Iowa caucus. All you had to do was listen to what those candidates had to say. These candidates have to say, coded rhetoric – black people are the poor ones, black people are the ones on welfare – so racism is alive and well.
Because of Dr. King, we have a black president for the first time – but my God, the poverty level is disproportionately black and Latino people. And nobody in this campaign is talking about how 17 million children go to bed hungry every night, and 16 million people are below the poverty level, and struggling. It’s very frustrating to hear the candidates talk, and going off on social issues -- and not talking about how the problems in the country and the money we could spent on the wars could be used. It has been called, and I believe it, “the nation’s unfinished business,” which is race, and why it is important to point out those things on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which I will, and poverty.