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 Jan. 30 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 Rev. 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 Rev. 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 Rev. 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,…
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