Georgia Powers & Celia Mudd: Reclaiming Untold Stories

She was uncomfortable with rumors distorting her relationship with Martin Luther King Jr. But Georgia Powers realized that her life, like many, contained secrets and hidden truths. One concerned her ancestry.

Commentary by Greg Guma

Our lives are haunted by secrets — things kept from us by society, friends, even our own families. Just when we think the whole story is on the table, another revelation forces us to reconsider how we look at the world, our leaders, and ourselves.

        This was brought home for me during several visits to Kentucky, where I spent time with one of that state’s most beloved civil rights leaders, Georgia Davis Powers. Invited to discuss a book she wanted to write about one of her ancestors, I learned surprising things not only about the suppressed history of a Black family, but also about the life of Martin Luther King Jr.

Georgia Davis Powers in 2004

        Powers, who died in 2016, was the first African American and the first woman to be elected to Kentucky’s State Senate. That was in 1967. She served five terms over the next 20 years and was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention four times between 1968 and 2004. She was also State Chair of both Jesse Jackson for President campaigns. 

        By 1967, she had already participated in countless marches held for open housing in Louisville, as well as marches for sanitation workers in Memphis and St. Petersburg. Along the way, she had gotten to know King. 

        On April 4, 1968, he was assassinated on the balcony of a Memphis motel as he prepared to support striking Black sanitation workers there. Although James Earl Ray initially confessed to the crime (later recanting), doubts about the full circumstances persist. For example, former FBI agent Donald Wilson, who investigated the murder, later presented evidence he claimed to have found in Ray’s car — slips of paper that might support charges of a conspiracy involving federal agents. But Wilson hadn’t produced the evidence earlier, he claimed, because he didn’t trust other investigators and feared for his family’s safety. 

        The King family questioned the official version and was eager to see Ray get a new trial before he died of liver cancer.

        In a way, it is easier to accept that King was the victim of a secret conspiracy than to face other facets of his life. As Powers put it, "He was a great man — but he was still a man." 

        Like Bill Clinton, whose accomplishments as president were overshadowed by the relentless investigation of alleged personal misbehavior, King was hounded by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who hoped to discredit the civil rights leader by exposing alleged "womanizing." For decades, many civil rights leaders dismissed such charges as mean-spirited attempts to sully King’s memory and discredit his historic achievements.

        Powers certainly had no intention of doing that. On the contrary. She had worked closely with King, organizing to end discrimination in public accommodations and employment and pass open housing laws. During her first term in the Kentucky legislature, less than a month before King’s death, she spearheaded passage of a statewide open housing bill.

        But her relationship with King was more than professional. As she revealed in her 1995 book, I Shared the Dream, their work together had led to a love affair that continued until the last moments of his life. Keeping that secret for almost three decades, she went public only after other civil rights leaders released inaccurate accounts of their relationship and the events surrounding King’s death. 

        She was particularly upset by comments in an autobiography written by Ralph Abernathy, King’s close friend and confidante. Though willing to attribute Abernathy’s misstatements to illness and a poor memory, Georgia Powers felt compelled to set the record straight. "When Dr. King’s life is researched," she wrote, "I want the part relating to me to be available in my own words. It is my own history as well, both the good and the bad."

        It began with mutual admiration, she explained, and "progressed into a deepening friendship in which we shared opinions, confidences, and laughed often." She called him "M.L.," and he called her "Senator." But King was under tremendous pressure, and ultimately turned to Georgia for intimacy and emotional support. Although they sometimes discussed issues and strategies, his main unmet need was time to let his hair down and set his cares aside.

        "Some people called him a prophet, and compared him with Jesus," she recalled. While she also believed that he was divinely inspired, "I knew Martin had all the imperfections, foibles, and passions of a mortal man." A meticulous person with an affection for silk suits, he enjoyed laughter and jokes, barbecued ribs and soul food, not to mention the company of attractive women. In short, "he had a good appetite for life."

        King also had a strong sense that he wouldn’t get to see his visions come to pass. Tired and melancholy one night, he told her, "I’m just as normal as any other man. I want to live a long life, but I know I won’t get to."

        Powers was in Memphis with King on the day he died. The previous night he had confided, "I’ve never been more physically and emotionally tired." On April 4 they waited most of the day to see if a temporary restraining order against the planned demonstration would be lifted. But King was adamant. Regardless of what the court decided, he promised, "We will march on Monday." 

        When Abernathy asked whether he feared what might happen, King answered slowly, "I’d rather be dead than afraid."

        As the meeting broke up and the group prepared for a soul food dinner, King brushed past Georgia on his way out the door. "I’m looking forward to a quiet and peaceful evening," he said softly. "Don’t make any plans." They were the last words he ever spoke to her. Moments later he was shot.

        Looking back, she regretted that her actions may have hurt others, especially King’s wife. But despite those feelings, she never regretted her decision, realizing that it wasn’t merely a tawdry affair. "When we were together," she recalled, "the rest of the world, whose problems we knew and shared, was far away. Our time together was a safe haven for both of us. There we could laugh and speak of things others might not understand. He trusted me, and I him, not to talk about it."

        As the years passed, however, Georgia became increasingly uncomfortable with the rumors that distorted their relationship. She also realized that her life, like so many, contained secrets and hidden truths. One concerned her own ancestry; although she didn’t know the identity of her father’s father, she eventually learned that he was White. Another involved her great aunt, Celia Mudd, who was born into slavery in 1859 but eventually inherited the rural Kentucky farm on which she had spent all her life. As a child, Georgia often asked how it happened. For her parents and other family members, it was apparently a story better left untold.

        Nevertheless, over the years she managed to uncover much of the true story. The key was a will dated March 15, 1902, in which Sam Lancaster, whose father had bought the Nelson County farm over 60 years earlier, left it to his most trusted employee — the former slave whom Georgia Powers knew as Aunt Celia. That fateful decision led to a court battle with Sam’s surviving brother, and the predictable rumors that Celia and Sam had been lovers. But a medical examination proved conclusively that this was impossible. At the age of 42, Celia Mudd was still a virgin.

        Although the case went to Kentucky’s highest court, most newspapers declined to report about it. A Black woman inheriting more than 500 acres of land from a White man apparently wasn’t considered news. Neither was the fact that Celia Mudd went on to become a local philanthropist, admired by Blacks and Whites alike.

        In 2003, I visited the farm on which Aunt Celia spent her life. Stepping into the old slave quarters where she was born, I reflected on how much we still don’t understand about that time, when Whites, however “humane” they tried to be, believed that Black people were no more than property. I also thought about how we too often choose to ignore or downplay the racial inequities that continue to this day. Over the next months, we co-authored a novel, Celia’s Land, based on her ancestor’s extraordinary journey. To learn more, go to Plantation Politics and other chapters of The Inheritance posted online. 

        Until our collaboration, Celia’s story — either before or after her legal struggle — remained virtually unknown. Once she won in court, she began a second life, got married and became a role model and beloved benefactor for her community and members of her family. She paid for her sister’s children to attend Catholic school, hired relatives to work the farm, and actively encouraged the young women in her family to pursue their dreams. Although she never had children of her own, she became a mother for many. 

        “I want my people to progress,” she explained, “and the only way they can is to have an opportunity for an education. If it means leaving the country, so be it.” She lived long enough to see many of her nieces and nephews graduate from high school.

        Celia’s life, as well as Georgia’s, says much about how to handle uncomfortable truths with dignity and grace. Rather than arguing about who needs to apologize for which past wrong, whether it is slavery or a personal mistake, what we need more is the strength to face our own and society’s secrets — to openly acknowledge them, but also to reconcile and forgive. 

        After all, even role models are just human beings.

THE INHERITANCE by Greg Guma

Chapter One: Plantation Politics

Chapter Two:  Masters and Slaves

Chapter Three: Unhealed Wounds

Chapter Four: Obstructed Justice

Tyeastia Green Resigns Again: Racism or Competence?

BURLINGTON, VT — Questions and controversy surrounding Tyeastia Green’s resignation and work as Minneapolis’ Director of Race and Equity continue to make headlines. But not so far in Vermont, where she held the same job in Burlington only a year ago and also left amidst controversy. 

When Green resigned in Burlington, Vermont, the initial reason she gave was feeling “unsupported in her role.” State Sen. Kesha Ram backed her up, reporting that conversations in City Hall “made her feel truly unwelcome” and “made it clear the systemic change she was trying to bring was unwelcome.” Green later clarified, saying she was heading back home to Minneapolis to take on a similar position. 

Max Tracy, then Burlington City Council President, called her departure “a devastating loss to our city." He blamed Mayor Miro Weinberger and attempts to control the management of Juneteenth, a major event Green promoted and organized. Her departure was followed by more resignations from the City’s Office for Racial Equity. 

The troubles in Minneapolis and Burlington have similar roots, and some say her influence in Burlington continues. The only Vermont coverage of her most recent resignation appeared in the Vermont Daily Chronicle, which reported that the main focus in Minneapolis is her apparent failure to raise sufficient funds, and subsequent misstatements and cover up. 

On March 13, 2023, Green resigned under pressure, amidst allegations about another marquee event, the Feb. 25 Black History Month expo at the Minneapolis Convention Center. The expo dramatically undersold, with around 3,700 ticketed attendees compared to the 20,000 predicted by Green. It is under investigation by the City’s audit committee. 

Since Green’s resignation, she has faced allegations she made false statements to city council members regarding donations. She told council members the lack of funding was due to a meeting she had with ethics office attorneys, who told her she couldn't directly receive money from private entities as it violated the city’s ethics code. "When I was fundraising for this event, I guess I wasn't allowed to do that through city rules," Green said. "The money we had received from corporate sponsorships we had to return."

“Bush Foundation offered us $3 million dollars but they had some stipulations that we could not satisfy," Green added. "I would say we had about probably $200,000 in funds from organizations." The Bush Foundation has issued a statement saying it made no such offer. Details of the $200,000 allegedly pledged by other organizations have not been revealed.

A week before resigning, however, Green accused city officials of undermining her work. In a memo to the Minneapolis operations officer, the mayor and City Council members, she described her experiences at the city as “toxic” and “anti-Black.” Since her resignation in Minneapolis, Burlington has decided to conduct its own internal audit of the city’s racial equity department. Green welcomed the review, but added that Mayor Weinberger “wanted to uphold white supremacy culture.”

In 2012, Alliant Techsystems, a Minnesota-based arms manufacturer, paid Green $100,000 to settle a race discrimination lawsuit. According to the suit, Green applied for a job to provide IT support for executives.  Although a recruiter initially told her that she had the job, management rejected her and hired a white male instead. 

An Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) lawsuit charged that the official reasons for the decision were a cover for race discrimination. Specifically, Green said that the company’s recruiter advised her to take out her braids after her first interview to appear "more professional" in the interviews that would follow. Green initially followed the instructions, and was told afterward that the company wanted to hire her.

Then the recruiter allegedly called her again to inform her that she would need to meet with the company’s information technology director. By then Green had replaced her braids. She went to the meeting and shortly after was told that the company decided to hire another candidate for the position. 

(Updated 3/24/23)

City of the Future: Universopolis or Blade Runner?

Boosters like to think of Los Angeles as a multicultural mosaic. But maybe, like much of America, it is really Babel, a place with too many identities, conflicting claims and mutually exclusive aspirations. These days it looks like we are heading into a dark future, a deadly version of the “Blade Runner” scenario.

By Greg Guma

High above the traffic-clogged Hollywood Freeway, MCA/Universal was constructing a new Los Angeles, a city without crime, homelessness or racial strife. Thirty years ago, that was the vision, a $100 million ($220 million today) poverty-free zone of shops, offices and restaurants to be called City Walk, the latest and grandest attempt to create an idealized L.A. 

Meanwhile, in the real city below, a cauldron of crises boiled over.

In April and early May of 1992, one of the worst urban riots in U.S. history dramatized the racial and economic inequities that plagued the city. Two days into the upheaval —often called an uprising —after four policemen were acquitted of beating Rodney King, a charred and deserted Tinseltown was occupied by more than 4000 National Guard troops. There was an eerie resemblance to war-torn Beirut.

According to market researchers at MCA, which had been purchased in 1991 by Japan’s Matsushita, the appeal of City Walk was that, for many Angelenos, reality had become a daily hassle and a looming nightmare. Critics warned that the project could become another sign that L.A. had given up on itself. In any case, it looked like the latest installment of what was already known as the “Blade Runner” scenario.

In that prescient 1982 film, Los Angeles in the 21st century was a menacing “world city” marked by culture fusion and economic stratification, a sunless and polluted place, overcrowded with Latino and Asian drones who barely looked up at the fortresses of the wealthy. In “L.A. 2000,” a city-sponsored report that generally touted Los Angeles as THE city of the future, University of Southern California professor Kevin Starr warned in similar terms of “a demotic polyglotism ominous with unresolved hostilities.”

As dire as that prediction sounded at the time, in some way the present was worse. Many residents numbed themselves to life in an urban battleground. During the riots, mesmerized TV viewers watched looting, arson and gunfire in the streets as though it was an episode of the latest mini-series. Meanwhile, as shops were being firebombed and drivers beaten on live TV, film crews gathered footage for a TV movie slated to be called “Night of a Thousand Fires.”

California, and especially Los Angeles, had often been a crucible of social change that later spilled over to the rest of the nation. The city’s modern developers, people like railroad king Henry Huntington and Bank of America founder A.P. Giannini, had envisioned a city that could extend its reach clear across the Pacific, “the ocean of the future.” They and other capitalist dreamers created marvels like commercial strip development, freeways and the consumer credit system that transformed the nation’s buying habits.

In many ways, Southern California embodied the American Dream. The confluence of climate, capital and demographics had made it an international city that also served as the world’s image capital.

But the riots unmistakably demonstrated that there was trouble in paradise. By the last years of the 20th century a water shortage, along with air pollution and a traffic surplus, threatened to end the fantasy of endless growth. More than half of L.A.’s surface area had been given over to roads and parking lots — and it still wasn’t enough.

But the main threat to the white American dream, the one expressed through metaphors of flood and invasion, was the transformation of Los Angeles into a city populated mainly by brown and black immigrants. Soon, went the predictions, the city would be more than 40 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Asian, 10 percent Black, and less than 40 percent European-American. And that’s pretty close to how it worked out.

As David Rieff noted in his book, “Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World,” the rest of the country, and possibly the world, would likely follow the L.A. model. “Even Japan, with its fantasies of racial purity, has immigrants nowadays,” he wrote. “As for Europe, the only real question, for all the talk of Fortress Europe, is how many immigrants will come from Turkey and the Maghreb, Central Africa, the subcontinent and the Caribbean.”

Rieff saw the city as, at the very least, a national archetype. He pointed out, for instance, that Hispanics would outnumber blacks in the U.S. within 20 years. And he was right. By 2020, although White people were still in the majority, the nation’s population was 18.7 percent Hispanic, 12.4 percent Black, and 6 percent Asian. Hispanics also top the list in California. States with the largest Black population start with Texas, Florida and Georgia. 

No longer an extension of Europe, Rieff observed, the United States was becoming instead “an increasingly nowhite country adrift, however majestically and powerfully, in an increasingly nonwhite world.”

The status of Asian newcomers to the city was another key factor in the riots. Blacks were, of course, enraged by the verdict in the Rodney King case. But they were also bitter about the light sentence given to a Korean shopkeeper who, in 1991, shot and killed Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old Black girl. That fueled resentment concerning the emerging dominance of Korean-American merchants in Black neighborhoods.

Racial competition and hostility had emerged as the region’s central political issue. Asian felt despised. Blacks were enraged. And Latinos, the most exploited and least acknowledged ethnic group at the time, complained that they deserved more and better jobs. Presiding over this powder keg was Mayor Tom Bradley, an uninspiring and ineffectual political leader.

Rieff suggested that Bradley, the city’s first Black mayor, might also be its last. He was right again, at least so far. His successors were White and Hispanic: Republican investment banker Richard Riordan (1993-2001), lawyer James Hahn (2001-2005), state legislator (and lawyer) Antonio Villaraigosa (2005-2013), and former City Council President Eric Garcetti. The first two were White, the next two Mexican-American and Spanish. 

During the riots, two of the most effective public figures were Chicano, State Senator Al Torres and actor Edward James Olmos. “Our modern metropolis is returning to the enduring Pueblo de Los Angeles of years past,” Torres predicted. Unfortunately, things didn’t pan out that way. As Rieff’s narrative poignantly noted, many houses in west L.A. (the white enclave) were already surrounded by walls, while “caution” signs on the 16-lane San Diego Freeway were illustrated by a family in desperate flight.

Calling this another chapter in the triumphant story of the American “melting pot” was seriously misleading. In the past, immigrants had changed their names and assimilated, becoming as much like White protestants as they could. By the end of the 20th century, however, they built mosques and Buddhist temples, demanded signs to designate neighborhoods like Little Tokyo and Koreatown, and refused to speak English.

L.A. boosters still like to think of their city as a multicultural mosaic. To Rieff, a generation ago, it looked more like a bouillabaisse of cultures. But maybe, like much of America, it is really Babel, a place with too many identities, conflicting claims and mutually exclusive aspirations. Are White Angelenos only pretending when they claim to embrace multiculturalism? Or, is their real goal to make L.A. an imperial capital of Pacific Rim trade and finance?

To a large extent, the city’s economic life still depends on the exploitation of the nonwhite poor, the undermining of unions, and re-industrialization based on a bifurcated economy — high-tech manufacturing and struggling, small enterprises with low-paid workers. Apparently, being a “world city” means taking advantage of foreign capital, trade and skills, combined with Latino and Black sweat and desperation.

To be honest, while I lived in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, the future still seemed hopeful at times, the harbinger of what Mexican author Jose Vasconcelos once called “Universopolis” — a place where all the races of the world are melded into a final “cosmic race.” But even then I suspected that it was more likely to become an advanced imperialist state, one that encompassed its colonies within its own borders.

In those days I was also partial to Salman Rushdie’s multicultural prediction. It remained possible, he imagined and I hoped, that immigrants and longtime residents would not so much assimilate as leak into one another, like flavors when you cook. Perhaps L.A., as well as the nation, could eventually mutate beyond racial division and exploitation. 

Perhaps a cultural bouillabaisse might be the first course of a deeper transformation, one as profound as the rise of nationalism. But these days it looks like we are heading instead into a dark future, a deadly version of the “Blade Runner” scenario.