Atlanta – The oldest daughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King combined her love of acting with her passion for social justice as she reminded those remembering her parents Sunday that America has not yet attained peace and racial equality.
Yolanda King urged an audience at Ebenezer Baptist Church – where her father preached from 1960 to 1968 – to be a force for peace and love, and to use the King holiday today to ask tough questions about their own beliefs on prejudice.
“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, 51, said at the end of an hour-long presentation that was part motivational speech, part drama.
The stage and television actress performed a series of one- actor skits 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 King family and Yolanda’s sister, the Rev. Bernice King – Yolanda King told The Associated Press that the King holiday provides an opportunity for everyone to live her father’s dream and that she has her late mother’s example to follow.
“I connected with her spirit so strongly,” Yolanda King said when asked how she is coping with the death last year of her mother. “I am in direct contact with her spirit, and that has given me so much peace and so much strength.”
The King holiday activities were the first since the death of Coretta Scott King, who died last Jan. 31 at age 78 of complications from ovarian cancer and after suffering a stroke five months earlier.
Often referred to as King’s widow, Coretta Scott King has been lauded recently as an activist in her own right. She also fought to shape and preserve her husband’s legacy after his assassination April 4, 1968.
Shortly after his death, she founded what would become the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. On Saturday, she was honored at the annual Salute to Greatness Dinner, a fundraiser for the King Center.
Yolanda King led ceremonies for the event, and the Kings’ youngest child, Dexter, presented one of the awards to Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin for leading the effort to secure the 10,000-document Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection. Coretta Scott King amassed the collection and kept it in her home for decades.
For years, as she worked to establish Jan. 15 as a federal holiday, Coretta Scott King publicly celebrated her husband’s birthday at his tomb and at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Last week, a wreath was laid at the crypt that now houses the couple, and the service at Ebenezer will continue, led by Christine King Farris, Martin Luther King Jr.’s older sister.
“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.”
