As a native Georgian and Atlantan, I have long paid attention to and kept track of our most notable, homegrown sons and daughters. I share a birthdate and year with one of the more famous. We would have both turned 63 this week. We also share our January 30th birthdate, with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We were born I am told only a few hours and miles apart.
Later, at the age of 7, I was in the first grade, active in Indian Guides (a YMCA program of that day), and starting to play soccer, alongside my younger brother Brian Crane. Shortly after Dexter Scott King turned 7, he and his 10-year-old brother, Martin Luther King, III, were watching TV in their den and Atlanta home, when the news broke that their father had been killed by an assassin's bullet. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, TN on April 4, 1968.
A year after MLK Jr.'s assassination, his only brother, the Reverend Adam Daniel King, drowned in a swimming accident. Then, on June 30, 1974, Dr. King's mother, Mrs. Alberta Williams King, 69, was shot and killed while playing the organ in the famed Ebenezer Baptist Church. The shooter killed a church deacon and wounded another member of the congregation. Her husband, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. was not preaching that day but was in the sanctuary, where he rushed across the front of the pulpit to lift his wife's body from the organ keyboard. "Daddy King," as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. was known, died at the age of 84, succumbing to complications of heart disease, a decade later in 1984.
MLK Jr.’s widow, Coretta Scott King, would develop and found the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change, and push for 15 years for a national holiday honoring her husband's memory. That latter work was finally made a reality with President Ronald Reagan signing MLK, Jr. Day into law on November 2, 1983, celebrating Dr. King on the third Monday in January in perpetuity as a federal holiday. Finally, on January 20, 1986, the first formal celebration and national parade celebrating this new federal holiday would take place on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta. ABC News, World News Tonight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgwrKnPK1Hs
Peter Jennings would anchor the newscast that night from Atlanta, and Atlanta's own Rebecca Chase, later Mayor of the City of Brookhaven, would share with viewers the long trail to becoming a national holiday. I covered that first parade as a young TV reporter and stood just in front of surviving Civil Rights legends and giants, former Ambassador Andrew Young, Coretta Scott King, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Congressman John Lewis, Reverend C.T. Vivian, Reverend Joseph Lowery, Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Reverend Hosea Williams among others...
A severe stroke in 2005 paralyzed Coretta Scott King’s right side and robbed her of the ability to speak. She passed five months later fighting complications from ovarian cancer. Yolanda King, the firstborn child of Coretta and MLK, Jr. pursued a career in acting with some success. She only outlived her mother by 16 months succumbing to complications from a heart condition during May 2007.
Dexter King, though not perfect, appeared a taller version of his famous father, he bore MLK's visage, vocal timber, and many of his mannerisms. He would succeed his mother as CEO of the King Center on two occasions, and during his first tenure, he made significant efforts to protect the use and misappropriation of his father's words and image. At the time of that copyrighting, the concept of 'intellectual property' was mostly only the talk of lawyers. Coretta and Dexter King and the King family would later work successfully with the U.S. Park Service to protect the King Birth Home and original Ebeneezer Baptist Church as National Historic Landmarks.
Dexter King, like his father, was also a Morehouse man. And while he spent much of the past two decades with his wife in Los Angeles, Atlanta remained home. While his younger sister, the Reverend Bernice King took over the reins at the King Center, Dexter remained board chair until his recent passing, following a years-long struggle with prostate cancer.
Thanks to leaders and people of faith, like the King family, as a nation and as a people, we have come so very far, and yet, we still have so much further to go. LONG LIVE THE KINGS. God bless Dexter Scott King, R.I.P.
