Birthday Celebration for Dr. King Under Way : Civil rights: The Atlanta events are being held amid anger and fear over recent bombings. The KKK plans to march.

ATLANTA —  Civil rights activists, amid a climate of anger and fear from apparently racially tinged bomb murders in the South, Friday launched the annual celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday on a wave of hope and a promise to go global with their quest for equality.

The celebration’s events begin Sunday and run through Jan. 15, which would have been the 61st birthday of King, the world’s best-known civil rights leader.

The speeches, a Jan. 15 march, assorted workshops and other activities attended by well-known personalities will occur amid a dizzying set of world events, some inspiring happiness, others bringing despair, all serving to heighten interest in the birthday of King, who was murdered in Memphis in 1968.

Eastern Europe’s season of revolution reinforces rights activists’ hope for positive, nonviolent change, but the recent rash of bombings and attempted bombings recalls the angry days of racial strife that tore America apart, the lynchings, beatings and stands in the school-house doors.

And today, the Ku Klux Klan plans a march at the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta.

Nevertheless, Coretta Scott King, the slain civil rights leader’s widow, sees an opportunity for progress.

“We are optimistic about mankind’s possibilities as we begin the last decade of the century and of this millennium,” Mrs. King told a news conference here.

Citing similarities between the civil rights movement that swept the nation to change during the 1960s and the current “freedom explosion” in such East Bloc countries as East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, Mrs. King said: “In the last year, we have seen hundreds of thousands of people marching through the streets of Berlin and Beijing, Budapest and Pretoria, Moscow, Warsaw and Prague, as well as Namibia, singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ in a host of languages. The same song of freedom we sang in the streets of Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma and Little Rock is today being sung in cities around the world.”

She went on to assert that “now is the time to organize a global, nonviolent movement,” based on her slain husband’s nonviolent teachings, “to put an end to the scourges of poverty and hunger, racism and bigotry, war and militarism.”

When asked about the mail bombs that killed an Alabama federal judge and a Savannah, Ga., attorney last month, Mrs. King acknowledged that extra precautions will be taken for this year’s birthday celebration because of “tension and anxiety,” but she defended the klan’s First Amendment right to march.

Many civil rights activists have said that the klan march today and another one planned for Jan. 20 are an effort to capitalize on the two fatal bombings and two attempted bombings in which devices sent to an Atlanta court building and the NAACP office in Jacksonville, Fla., were defused.

The bomb victims were Judge Robert S. Vance of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, who had been on a panel that ordered desegregation measures in DeKalb County, Ga., and Robert Robinson, a lawyer who had participated in a school desegregation suit, representing the NAACP in Savannah.

Federal investigators believe the murders were committed by a racist individual or group. Threatening letters have been mailed to numerous people around the South, bolstering that theory.

As the crimes remain unsolved and participants from around the world begin gathering in Atlanta to celebrate Dr. King’s birthday, concern had arisen that the bombings and the renewed attention to hate groups would overshadow the celebration--and possibly even cancel it.

Rights activists sought to put such fears to rest.

Newly inaugurated Mayor Maynard Jackson urged people to focus not on the klan but on “the root problems” afflicting society, such as poverty, drug abuse and joblessness. “We don’t stop life,” Jackson said. “Life moves on.”

A klan rally protesting the King holiday last year turned violent when thousands of counterdemonstrators set upon a small band of white supremacists, hurling bricks, bottles and stones at them. None of the marchers were injured, but several National Guardsmen and police officers were struck. Forty-two people were arrested on various charges stemming from the melee.

Fearing the worst this year, especially in view of the aggravated racial climate, law enforcement officials plan extra efforts to keep counterdemonstrators apart from the white supremacists.

And, local officials are urging people to ignore the march.

Jackson said the klan rally “is not worthy of your attention. Stay home, go shopping, rake leaves . . . do whatever you do on Saturdays. There’s no sense in wasting your time on that. Leave them alone, and let them say what they have to say--to each other.”

As for the civil rights march that will climax the nine-day celebration of her murdered husband’s birth, Mrs. King said it will go on. “I’ll be there with my family, my friends and all the King supporters.”

Threats are nothing new to her and other prominent public figures, Mrs. King noted. “There have been threats on my life,” she said, “and, of course, my husband’s life was constantly threatened.”

In the wake of the bombings and amid threats of more attacks that were vowed in a recent letter, Mrs. King said: “The precautions one should take--we always try to take them.” But she added: “To talk about this only invites people to do more of this kind of violence.”