While working on earning his doctorate at Boston University, Martin Luther King Jr. wed an Antioch College graduate whom he had met as a student at the New England Conservatory of Music.
King, a Baptist pastor born in Atlanta, Georgia, and Coretta Scott King, who graduated from the conservatory after their wedding in Marion, Alabama, had four children.
Two were born in Montgomery, Alabama, when King was a pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church: Yolanda was born on Nov. 17, 1955, just before Rosa Park’s arrest sparked the bus boycott. Martin III on Oct. 23, 1957.
“On King Day, it’s about giving back. It’s about a day on, not a day of,” Yolanda King told Local 10 News Anchor Calvin Hughes about a year after her mother — whose activism as a widow included founding The King Center in Atlanta and lobbying for the national holiday established in 1986 — died of complications from cancer on Jan. 30, 2006, and months before she died of a heart attack on May 15, 2007.
King’s two youngest were born in Atlanta, Georgia, when he was the co-pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church. Dexter was born on Jan. 30, 1961, and Bernice on March 28, 1963. Bernice had just turned 5 when he was fatally shot on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.
During a recent interview with Hughes, Bernice King, 62, reflected on the “day on” meaning of the national holiday of her older sister, whom she described as a creative woman who was an actress with a gift for public speaking.
“It’s a life on,” Bernice King, an Emory University lawyer and Spelman College psychologist, said about her father’s legacy.
Bernice King, who was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1990 and leads The King Center, focused on her father’s six principles of non-violence.
“The legacy of non-violence is something that we have not even tapped the surface of understanding it, studying it, embodying it, and living it the way that my father intended,” she said. “He didn’t get a chance to live long enough to talk about it as a lifestyle.”
Bernice King said there has been intentionality around racism and redlining, the discriminatory practice of denying financial services based on race or ethnicity, and there needs to be intentionality on social justice.
She said she was surprised to learn that her father had earned a “C” grade in public speaking, and she wants young people to remember that you can overcome anything.
“Young people need to study as much as they can about people like my father and what they brought to this world, and they need to understand that he was a human being like them,” she said. “But, you have got to understand the struggles that came before, because that set a foundation, and you are building upon that.”
Dexter King, an attorney and advocate, died of complications from cancer on Jan. 22, 2024, in Malibu, California.
Martin Luther King III, 68, former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, is the chairman of The Drum Major Institute, which his father founded in 1961 to promote civil rights.
“The triple evils my father named, poverty, racism, and violence, are still shaping our nation,” King III wrote on X on MLK Day. “Nonviolent resistance is essential if we are to change the climate and protect our democracy.”
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