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Growing up King: An Intimate Memoir

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Overview

NO BOOK HAS CAPTURED HOW MUCH I LOVED MY FATHER,
OR HOW I FELT WHEN HE WAS KILLED.

I didn't care about conspiracies, or anybody going to prison. I cared about getting out of prison....Pope John Paul once said the quest for freedom is one of the great dynamics of human history. Such a quest can take many forms. I went back to Atlanta, pictures in my memory. My grandfather's leathery hands lifted in supplication. My grandmother at the organ. Daddy's ascending voice. On my father's crypt, the inscription is simple. Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I'm free at last.

Amen, Daddy, I thought. For years I'd looked in the mirror and seen my father's face trapped in mine. Free at last. Was I? Were we? I go back now to try and find the answers...

He was just seven-years-old and watching television in the family's den when a special news bulletin announced that his father had fallen to an assassin's bullet-a tragedy that would forever scar his adolescence. But as an adult, Dexter Scott King was determined to confront the past, discover the truth about his father's murder, and protect his father's legacy... GROWING UP KING

To a divided country, Martin Luther King, Jr., was a leader who represented shining hope. Yet to his youngest son, Dexter, he was a gentle father who joyfully played with his children. Then the civil rights leader was brutally assassinated...and Dexter found his family's life irrevocably shattered. Burdened by wrenching grief and tremendous expectations, Dexter eventually triumphed over both by proving there was a conspiracy involving governmental agencies to kill his father. Poignant and bracingly candid, GROWING UP KING is an intimate portrait of an unforgettable hero, a loving son, and the unbreakable bond between them.

Editorial Reviews

Scott King, the youngest son of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., grew up in a world that was forever changing as a direct result of his father's life and, more importantly, of his father's death. In this memoir of his own life, King attempts to illuminate the significance of growing up under the weight of his father's legacy, struggling to live up to everything his last name has come to stand for. He sadly records his failure to finish his degree at Morehouse College, a tradition for male members of the King family going back to "Great-granddaddy A.D. Williams [who] was in the Morehouse class of 1898, the second graduating class of its existence." He recounts his first attempt to serve as president of the King Center for Non-Violent Social Change, where he was elected to the position amid controversy from the board of directors, and subsequently resigned after five months. However, King fails to take the reader on any sort of coherent emotional journey through his struggle to become a "King," and the narrative is marred by clunky transitions, uninteresting digressions and a sometimes combative tone at odds with the gravity King gives his subject matter. There are terrific accounts here of the conspiracy theories surrounding his father's assassination, the famous political and entertainment figures that have always been a part of King's circle and an extended family that helped to support and shape the children of a legend, but they are mired in tedious details that detract from the story King is trying to tell.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

-- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Dexter Scott King

DEXTER SCOTT KING currently serves as chairman, president, and CEO of The King Center, based in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information on The King Center, please visit its Web site at The King Center

Bio of Ralph Wiley

RALPH WILEY is one of America's most distinguished African-American writers. A former senior writer at Sports Illustrated and a collaborator on numerous projects, he is the author of Why Black People Tend to Shout and Dark Witness.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Hachette Book Group USA

Filesize

1.60 MB

Number of Pages

320

eBook ISBN

9780446407359

Excerpt from: Growing up King by Dexter Scott King

Chapter 1
SLEEPING BEAUTIES
I felt inadequate to the task at hand, the scene before me, though my role seemed simple enough. Yoki had already shown me a picture of Prince Charming in a book of fairy tales, so I knew what he was supposed to look like. I'd seen myself in a mirror. Didn't see the correlation, didn't think I could ever look like that or act like that. But my older sister kept on insisting I was the Chosen One, who must bend down and kiss my baby sister Bernice, lying on one end of our seesaw, acting dead, like Sleeping Beauty. Yoki was saying, "Let's do this." I was steadily refusing.
"Nope," I said. "Nope, nope, nope."
The corners of Yoki's mouth curled. "Yes--that's what you mean to say. Right?"
She was about to unleash a verbal volley accompanied by a twisting pinch of arm flesh if I wasn't quick enough, which, by the warm, so-called Indian summer of 1967, I usually was.
I was six and a half years old when I asked Yoki, "Why me?" while fixing a pleading eye toward my older brother, Martin III, who stood behind me in the backyard of 234 Sunset, Vine City, Atlanta, Georgia, behind the house where we grew up.
Marty wasn't about to buck Yoki's authority; he grew deaf, looked the other way, whistled.
I'm in my forty-first year now, but thinking of what it was like back in 1967, when I was a boy but six years old, makes me smile. A wry and cautious smile. Yoki was eleven. An eleven-year-old girl isn't to be trifled with by her younger brothers. "You ask too many questions," she said, her calm that comes before a storm; we knew this, and she knew that we knew. Yoki was my terrible older sister Yolanda. Now I know she isn't so terrible. Now I feel I must call her Yolanda. It has more formality--something expected of Yolanda, Martin, me, and Bernice. Ever since I was seven, I've felt I must be formal. But I didn't feel it in '67. Then she was my crazy terrible sister; Yoki-poky, as Daddy called her when we were children and didn't have the responsibilities or memories we have now. Formality, seriousness, certitude--all these are difficult poses to maintain, even if you're a person with perfect equilibrium, with all the drama life throws at you.
Speaking of what life throws at you, just then a green walnut came whizzing over the fence, crashing into our swing, cracking open its unripe cover, its powerful astringent scent filling the air. Could just as well have been a peach, apple, fig, or pecan--each of those species bloomed in the backyards of the small houses in Vine City. Walnuts made more of an announcement when arriving via this kind of air mail. Marty and I looked at each other. We were being paged.
"C'mon!"
One of the neighborhood boys was summoning us without risking an audience with Yoki. Smart move. We'd relocated to Vine City from the Old Fourth Ward in 1965. I spent my first four years in the Old Fourth Ward, up from Auburn Avenue, on Johnson Avenue, in a house the color of the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz. A liquor store now stands where the backyard of the house used to be. What's now Freedom Parkway was once our front yard.
Granddaddy's house in Old Fourth Ward, where the package store now stands, was on a hill, three blocks away from Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he was pastor, two blocks down from 501 Auburn Avenue. Granddaddy's name was Martin Luther King, Sr. He had two sons. The younger was Alfred Daniel King, Sr., Uncle A.D., named for my great-grandfather A. D. Williams, who'd also been pastor at Ebenezer, and who was the father of Alberta Williams King, my paternal grandmother, whom we called Big Mama. My father was the elder son, Martin Luther King, Sr.'s copastor at Ebenezer, among other things.
His name was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

When my mother became pregnant with me, the family was moving to Atlanta from Montgomery, Alabama, where my father had been pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.