After Atlanta: Congress & the NAACP
“Democracy does not run on cruise control. You have to keep your hands on the wheel.” Speech given by Lonnie King before the General Services Administration, February 25, 2013
King left Atlanta before earning his BA in 1962 to attend Howard Law in Washington, DC, where he organized for the Young Democrats and the Urban League. Later in his life, he would write that the demands of his young family contributed to his academic expulsion from Howard before he could earn a law degree; he then moved his family back to Atlanta, where he ran an unsuccessful campaign for Georgia’s Fifth District in the House of Representatives against fellow civil rights activist Andrew Young.
In 1969, Lonnie King was named president of the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP. Their chief concern in 1969 was public education in the city, which was still segregated; through King’s leadership, the organization was finally able to end expensive lawsuits on the issue, and, through the NAACP’s negotiations, the city appointed Atlanta’s first Black school superintendent.
King left Atlanta again when he and his family moved to Baltimore in 1984, where he earned a Master’s Degree in public policy. He started a firm that investigated charges of civil rights violations, and he taught history and public policy throughout the Baltimore area.