Sunday, January 24, 2010
Opinion, Atlanta

The King Center goes Dutch

And Atlanta looks to land the 2018 World Cup

Frits Huffnagel, vice mayor of The Hague, with Atlanta Councilman Kwanza Hall.

By Stephanie Ramage

Last week, the King Center here in Atlanta officially launched its partnership with the City of The Hague in the Netherlands. The short-term goal is to establish a King Center for those engaged in the fight for equality and civil rights in Europe. 

    “That Center in the future will hopefully function for all organizations in the European Union and Europe as a whole, which are committed to Dr. King, his ideals and thought, his memory, his legacy and his peaceful and nonviolent struggle for civil and human rights, equality and peace and against institutional and latent racism and segregation," Frits Huffnagel, vice mayor of The Hague, told those gathered to remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church on the King holiday. "The Hague feels exceptionally proud to be the host of the future European King Center.”

    My friend Sam Cherribi, a sociologist at Emory University, has been the facilitator of the talks between Isaac Newton Farris Jr., a nephew of Dr. King and the president of the King Center, and Dutch officials. Cherribi is a former member of the Dutch parliament who has written extensively about Muslim immigrants in Europe and the challenges they face there—even 40 years after they first migrated on work visas at the invitation of some European governments, among them the Dutch.

    When the political winds shifted to the right in Europe after 9/11, under a barrage of anti-immigrant rhetoric, Cherribi, who had immigrated to Europe from Morocco as a teenager, was voted out, but his work in ethnic, religious and race relations has continued. In the past few years, the Netherlands has once again embraced its heritage as the world’s most tolerant country.

    The MLK Center’s Farris and his team have carefully and quietly built the Atlanta-Hague partnership over the past year, with support from Merrill Lynch-Europe under the leadership of Ricardo Fakiera.

    At the end of a long MLK Day, a day that Huffnagel described as “very emotional,” The Hague delegation gathered over dinner at Livingston’s at the Georgian Terrace. I joined them, along with acting Dutch Consul Ewoud Swaak and his wife Kimberle. 

    Atlanta City Council President Ceasar Mitchell and Councilman Kwanza Hall stopped by despite a grueling schedule on which they had balanced raising funds for earthquake victims in Haiti and honoring King at functions throughout the city. They huddled for a moment about how to meet their Haiti obligations and have a substantive audience with The Hague officials, and it was decided that Mitchell would depart for CARE International’s offices, while Hall would stay a while longer, go to CARE and then come back later to spend more time with the visitors.

    Huffnagel, who is Mitchell’s counterpart at The Hague, hugged Mitchell farewell, and Hall sat down for what was to become a watershed moment in Atlanta-Europe relations. The talk turned to The Hague’s role in international civil rights—it is, after all, home to the International Court of Justice, the august body that hears the trials of war criminals and tyrants, most recently for the cases against Charles Taylor, Slobodan Milosevic and the murderers involved in the Rwandan genocide. Hall immediately recognized that if The Hague is the world’s arm of justice, then Atlanta, home to the MLK Center (an organization in which Hall’s own father had a founding role), CARE, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Carter Center, is the world’s arm of mercy.

    Hall and the Dutch looked for some way to help Atlanta and The Hague bring awareness to their parallel global responsibilities, and it was Kimberle Swaak who found it: lobbying to bring the 2018 World Cup to Atlanta.

    Why not? Atlanta has come a long way since the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games in terms of the size of its international community. The United States is one of the countries being considered to host the World Cup, the single largest sporting event in the world—it dwarfs the Super Bowl and has the added advantage of attracting foreign money. Besides, Atlanta is already one of the 18 American cities listed by officials as being a suitable place for World Cup matches.

    President Obama met with FIFA’s president last summer to lend his support to locating the event in the U.S. The winning country will be announced in December, and that is when Atlanta should be prepared to jump into the fray to secure its World Cup goal. SP