The Rev. Fred O. Doty had invited the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to talk at his church in January 1961, and he was in search of an official to greet the civil rights chief on the airport.
However the L.A. mayor had an obvious scheduling battle.
Council members wished to spend time with their households.
Senators couldn’t be reached. And meeting members have been too busy.
So Doty referred to as L.A. County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn.
“I’d be honored to greet Dr. King,” Hahn mentioned.
Supervisor Janice Hahn recalled the story Wednesday through the unveiling of a bronze statue memorializing the second her father shook King’s hand on the steps of a airplane at Los Angeles Worldwide Airport.
The life-size statue stands close to a church on West Alondra Boulevard in Compton, surrounded by plaques honoring different politicians Kenneth Hahn helped rise to energy.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn meets Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the tarmac of LAX in 1961.
(Huntington Library)
The second between King and Hahn stays essential within the minds of many Black residents within the 2nd District, which Kenneth Hahn represented for 40 years. He was generally known as a champion of civil rights within the district, native leaders mentioned.
L.J. Guillory, generally known as Bishop Guillory, commissioned and paid for the statue.
Guillory mentioned that L.A. politicians declined to greet King as a result of they wished to maintain up the facade that California was higher than the locations within the South the place King was marching for justice.
“California didn’t need the world to know that they have been as racist because the South,” Guillory mentioned. “This was the Tinseltown. This was the land of milk and honey.”
Guillory declined to say who the artist was or how a lot the statue price, joking he’d be divorced if his spouse heard the quantity. The couple, he mentioned, donates some huge cash and time in Compton.
The photograph was taken on Jan. 13, 1961, when King arrived for a busy weekend of occasions.
The Jackson Advocate, the oldest Black newspaper in Mississippi, documented King’s go to, noting that Hahn “prolonged official greetings” on the airport.
On the Ambassador Lodge, King gave “fiery remarks” to journalists about native leaders drawing district boundaries that barred Black voters from honest illustration, in keeping with the Advocate.
“Dr. King said that the ugliness of segregation may be simply as dangerous in Los Angeles as in Georgia, and it does exist within the North and within the West although it might be a delicate, under-the-table kind of segregation” most evident in housing, authorities illustration and financial conditions, the newspaper mentioned.
That weekend, King helped launch the Western Christian Management Convention, which aimed to uplift Black individuals within the West. He collected $1,400 — about $14,600 in immediately’s cash — to help in his battle within the South, in keeping with the California Eagle, a Black-owned newspaper in L.A.
Doty invited King to talk after members of his church grew to become “involved in regards to the repeated shameful incidents within the South” and “sought first-hand details about the creating wrestle,” in keeping with the Eagle.
King spoke to Doty’s packed church Sunday morning after which that night at an occasion Doty organized at Canoga Park Excessive College on the “way forward for integration,” the Eagle mentioned. About 100 individuals flocked to King with questions after his discuss.
After King was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, Tenn., Hahn referred to as King’s spouse, Coretta Scott King, and requested if L.A. County might identify a brand new hospital in his honor.
“He’s like, ‘Mrs. King, I don’t assume you already know who I’m, but when it’s OK with you, I’d like to call this hospital in Watts after your husband,’” Janice Hahn, who joined the Board of Supervisors in 2016, mentioned Wednesday. “She stopped him and she or he mentioned, ‘Oh, no, I do know who you might be, as a result of when my Martin got here dwelling, he couldn’t cease speaking in regards to the white official that was so type to him.’”
That hospital, Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Heart, opened in 1972. The troubled facility closed in 2007 after efforts to reform it failed and was changed in 2015 with Martin Luther King Jr. Group Hospital in Willowbrook.
In November, the Willowbrook hospital’s leaders sounded the alarm that it might run out of cash due to a failed funding mannequin. In contrast to its predecessor, the hospital has obtained excessive rankings from regulators.
Hahn mentioned the hospital was the very first thing her father fought for as an elected official.
“It was an enormous battle as a result of the remainder of the county didn’t all the time consider that that a part of L.A. County deserved the identical issues that everyone else had,” Hahn mentioned.
Kenneth Hahn died in 1997 at 77. In 45 years of public service, he pushed L.A. County to put in freeway emergency name bins, led the event of the county’s paramedic program and helped convey the Dodgers to L.A.
As famous in his Instances obituary, Hahn appointed the late Gilbert Lindsay, who later would be part of the Metropolis Council, as his deputy in 1952 — the primary Black individual to carry such a place within the county.
Janice Hahn mentioned she has thought again to the household story of her father greeting King many instances, together with when in 2020 she discovered about Bruce’s Seaside, an oceanfront property in her district that town of Manhattan Seaside had seized from a Black couple within the Twenties.
“I bought loads of criticism — I had pals who thought I’d misplaced my approach,” Hahn mentioned. “However each now and again, that second helps form the selections that I make too.”
Instances researcher Scott Wilson contributed to this report.
