MLK’s daughter honors her parents

Errin Haines

ATLANTA — The eldest daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King evoked the civil rights movement while reminding those remembering her parents that America has not yet reached the promised land of peace and racial equality.

“We must keep reaching across the table and, in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, feed each other,” Yolanda King said Sunday at Ebenezer Baptist Church during a presentation that was part motivational speech, part drama.

Yolanda King, 51, spoke a day before Monday’s celebration of the civil rights leader’s birthday, the first since the death last year of her mother, Coretta Scott King.

Yolanda King told The Associated Press the holiday provides an opportunity for everyone to live her father’s dream, and that she has her mother’s example to follow.

“I connected with her spirit so strongly,” she said when asked how she is coping with her mother’s loss. “I am in direct contact with her spirit, and that has given me so much peace and so much strength.”

The stage and television actress performed a series of scenes that told stories including a girl’s first ride on a desegregated bus and a college student’s recollection of the 1963 desegregation of Birmingham, Ala.

After the performance — attended by members of the extended family and Yolanda’s sister, the Rev. Bernice King — Yolanda King and her aunt, Christine King Farris, signed copies of their books, and Bernice King posed for photographs with attendees.

On Monday, Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King preached from 1960 to 1968, was to be the venue for more remembrances and speeches. The keynote speaker was to be Dr. Otis Moss Sr., pastor of Olivet Institutional Baptist Church.

In West Columbia, S.C., several hundred people gathered Monday morning for a breakfast prayer service honoring King.

The Rev. Brenda Kneece, 45, executive minister of the South Carolina Christian Action Council, said King set the standard for sacrifice and vision.

“The vision became even more powerful because he understood the risks he was taking,” Kneece said. “It’s very important for our children to know that his sacrifice didn’t win the war. We still have to keep at it.”

In New York, rallies, speeches and volunteer efforts were to mark the King holiday, some invoking the Iraq War, the conflict in Sudan and local tensions surrounding the fatal police shooting of a black groom.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the Rev. Al Sharpton and Gov. Eliot Spitzer were expected to attend a forum, joining Nicole Paultre-Bell, whose fiancée was killed by police in a barrage of 50 bullets in November.

The Rev. Herbert Daughtry, the national minister of the House of the Lord Churches, said he would lead an act of civil disobedience outside the Sudan Mission in New York.

New Yorkers also planned to volunteer on the holiday in a spirit of service, such as knitting blankets for babies born to mothers with HIV/AIDS, painting murals, building homes, revitalizing their community and making fleece scarves for the homeless.

This year’s holiday comes on the day King would have turned 78. King was assassinated while standing on the balcony of a hotel in Memphis, Tenn. on April 4, 1968. His confessed killer, James Earl Ray, was arrested two months later in London.

Coretta Scott King died last year on Jan. 31 at age 78. An activist in her own right, she also fought to shape and preserve her husband’s legacy after his death.

Shortly after his death, she founded what would become the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. For years, she worked to establish Jan. 15 as a federal holiday, which became a reality in 1986.

“When you see the commitment my parents exhibited ... it was not for fame or fortune,” Yolanda King said. “The best sermons are those that are lived.”

(Associated Press)