Let Freedom Ring: Dr. Alveda King Remembers Her Uncle Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Hello World,

As if you did not know, today marks the 48th anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. King’s delivery of his magnificent “I Have a Dream” speech in our nation’s capital. Today is also the day that the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial, which is located on the national Mall, was to be officially dedicated in front of thousands of people. However, due to the emergence of Hurricane Irene, the official dedication has been postponed to September or October, according to various new reports.

However, I still want to honor Dr. King and his dream today as well as highlight the accomplishment of having his monument on the National Mall, the first time an African-American has been honored in such a way on the National Mall!

Dr. Alveda King, center, next to her cousin Bernice King and other members of the King family

I was able to interview Dr. Alveda King, niece of Dr. King and daughter of his King’s younger brother Rev. A.D. King, about her uncle, his dream and other issues…

On the dedication of the memorial:

I think it’s wonderful to remember my uncle. With me being a preacher, I’ll be giving honor to God for blessing us with the gift that He gave to us through my uncle Martin Luther King Jr.

Her favorite memory of her uncle:

My favorite memory of my Uncle Martin were the times that our families were together. My father Rev. A.D. King is his brother. He and Dr. King live together in the kingdom of God now. They are in heaven together. But our families during their lifetimes were together very often – Christmas, Thanksgiving, summer, swimming, just fun. I remember we were at our Uncle Martin’s home one year. Daddy was playing the violin. And Uncle Martin was talking and laughing. We called him Uncle M.L. actually because my Dad was A.D. Alfred Daniel Williams King and Martin is Martin Luther King Jr. So they were laughing, and I was a young teenager, and I walked through, and I remember my uncle laughed and said, “A.D., you gonna have to watch it because the boys are going to be after her. She is gonna be a very pretty lady.” It affirmed me and made me so happy.

Reflection on Dr. King’s death:

I was about 18. I got married the next year. My uncle was killed in ‘68. I was born in ‘51. So I was either 17 or 18 I guess. And the next year I got married. My daddy walked me down the aisle, and a week later, he was killed as well in our swimming pool.

On the realization of Dr. King’s dream:

I believe that the world will remember and should remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I think the most important thing for everyone to remember is that he loved God and he loved his family. And he was very much loved by us. I think I noticed in “USA TODAY,” there’s an article and it says with M.L.K. memorial opening, the dream has come true. Dr. King’s dream was really that we would all have the love of God in our hearts toward each other. The main part about his dream was advancing the kingdom of God and the love of God. And I do see that increasing in the world, and I think that’s true.

And I ask people as the dream is realized, has the “check for insufficient funds,” have those funds been made good? We are still struggling with the economy and many social issues, but I believe as we learn to love each other as brothers and not perish as fools, as my uncle said, we all have to learn to live together as brothers and sisters, I might add, or perish as fools. So as we move closer to that agape love, that God of kind of love, I believe that we will all overcome.

On the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, particularly for young people:

I like to remind people that David in the Bible pleased God in all things except the matter of Uriah the Hittite, and we know that he committed adultery and killed Bathsheba’s husband. Paul used to kill Christians. Mary Magdalene was the woman caught in the act. But the redemptive power of Christ. I want young people especially to realize this, when you stumble, get up. And then as you mature in Christ, you don’t stumble as much. None of us are perfect, but God is perfect. The blood of Jesus, the perfecting blood of Jesus His son can help us, can cleanse us, and then the power of the Holy Spirit.

So these are things that my uncle understood, my father Rev. A.D. King understood, my grandfather Daddy King. I’m understanding it more and more every day as I continue to mature so these are principles that young people and mature people can embrace.

 And like I say, if you make a mistake just get up and keep going. If you can remember the days that when you were learning to ride a bicycle, when you fell off, you didn’t quit riding your bike. You got back on. When you were on the skating rink, if you fell over, you got up and kept skating. If you were at the bowling alley, if the ball went in the gutter, the next time you took it and you made a spare and found your strike. So these are the ways that we advance in life in Christ. And I do want to encourage all young people to live accordingly.

Dr. Alveda King is a civil rights and pro-life activist and founder of King for America Inc. which endeavors to “to assist people in enriching their lives spiritually, personally, mentally and economically.”

Dr. King also made an official statement regarding the dedication of Dr. King memorial…

Thank you God for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr….and Thank you God!

Any thoughts?

Soul Mates: Dr. Martin Luther Jr. & Coretta Scott King

Hello World,

As you know, I love to write about love and marriage. In fact, I have dedicated a whole section on my blog to married couples, Soul Mates. While I know that many people do not believe in soul mates, I would like to believe that God has a hand in orchestrating great love stories that end in marriage. Tomorrow, we will officially celebrate the life and contributions of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  But from Dr. King to President Obama, their wives had a hand in making them great men. While I will never get the opportunity to interview Dr. King and Mrs. Coretta Scott King, I still want to feature their story on my blog. So I have decided to post interesting quotations about their marriage. Read, enjoy and take note…

  • Born and raised in Marion, Alabama, Coretta Scott graduated valedictorian from Lincoln High School. She received a B.A. in music and education from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and then went on to study concert singing at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, where she earned a degree in voice and violin. While in Boston she met Martin Luther King, Jr. who was then studying for his doctorate in systematic theology at Boston University. They were married on June 18, 1953, and in September 1954 took up residence in Montgomery, Alabama, with Coretta Scott King assuming the many functions of pastor’s wife at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. (from The King Center website)
  • While studying music, she met King, then pursuing a PhD at Boston University. “…he was looking for a wife. I wasn’t looking for a husband, but he was a wonderful human being,” she told an interviewer. “I still resisted his overtures, but after he persisted, I had to pray about it…I had a dream, and in that dream, I was made to feel that I should allow myself to be open and stop fighting the relationship. That’s what I did, and of course the rest is history. ” (from About.com)
  • Martin, about their first date: “So you can do something else besides sing? You’ve got a good mind also. You have everything I ever wanted in a woman. We ought to get married someday.” (from About.com)
  • She was studying music at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston in 1952 when she met a young graduate student in philosophy, who on their first date told her: “The four things that I look for in a wife are character, personality, intelligence and beauty. And you have them all.” A year later, she and Dr. King, then a young minister from a prominent Atlanta family, were married, beginning a remarkable partnership that ended with his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968. (from The New York Times)
  • Her first encounter with the man who would become her husband did not begin auspiciously, as recounted in “Parting the Waters,” by Taylor Branch. Dr. King, very much in the market for a wife, called her after getting her name from a friend and announced: “You know every Napoleon has his Waterloo,” he said. “I’m like Napoleon. I’m at my Waterloo, and I’m on my knees.” Ms. Scott, two years his elder, replied: “That’s absurd. You don’t even know me.” (from The New York Times)
  • Still, she agreed to meet for lunch the next day, only to be put off initially that he was not taller. But she was impressed by his erudition and confidence, and he saw in this refined, intelligent woman what he was looking for as the wife of a preacher from one of Atlanta’s most prominent ministerial families. When he proposed, she deliberated for six months before saying yes, and they were married in the garden of her parents’ house on June 18, 1953. The 350 guests, elegant big-city folks from Atlanta and rural neighbors from Alabama, made it the biggest wedding, white or black, the area had ever seen. (from The New York Times)
  • Even before the wedding, she made it clear she intended to remain her own woman. She stunned Dr. King’s father, the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr., who presided over the wedding, by demanding that the promise to obey her husband be removed from the wedding vows. Reluctantly, he went along. After it was over, the bridegroom fell asleep in the car on the way back to Atlanta while the new Mrs. King did the driving. (from The New York Times)
  • “I had no problem being the wife of Martin, but I was never just a wife. In the 1950s, as a concert singer, I performed ‘freedom concerts’ raising funds for the movement. I ran my household, raised my children, and spoke out on world issues. Maybe people didn’t know that I was always an activist because the media wasn’t watching. I once told Martin that although I loved being his wife and a mother, if that was all I did I would have gone crazy. I felt a calling on my life from an early age. I knew I had something to contribute to the world.”  (from The Washington Post)
  • The Kings had four children: Yolanda Denise King (November 17, 1955 – May 15, 2007) (October 23, 1957 in Montgomery, Alabama), Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King (January 30, 1961 in Atlanta, Georgia), Bernice Albertine King (March 28, 1963 in Atlanta, Georgia) All four children later followed in their parents’ footsteps as civil rights activists. (from Wikipedia)
  • Scott King became an activist in her own right, as well, carrying messages of international peace and economic justice to organizations around the world. She was the first woman to deliver the Class Day address at Harvard University and the first woman to preach during a service at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. When King was assassinated outside a motel room in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, Scott King channeled her grief into action. Days later, she led a march through the streets of Memphis, and later that year took his place as a leader of the Poor People’s March in Washington, D.C. (from ABC News)
  • And to carry on that legacy, she focused on two ambitious and daunting tasks. The first was to have a national holiday in his honor, the second was to build a nationally recognized center in Atlanta to honor his memory, continue his work and provide a research center for scholars studying his work and the civil rights era. The first goal was achieved despite much opposition in 1983 when Congress approved a measure designating the third Monday in January as an official federal holiday in honor of Dr. King, who was born in Atlanta Jan. 15, 1929. (from The Washington Post)
  • Over 14,000 people gathered for Coretta Scott King’s eight-hour funeral at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia on February 7, 2006 where daughter Bernice King, who is an elder at the church, eulogized her mother. The megachurch, whose sanctuary seats 10,000, was better able to handle the expected massive crowds than Ebenezer Baptist Church, of which Coretta was a member since the early 1960s and which was the site of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral in 1968. (from Wikipedia)

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Any thoughts?

I Love the A (aka Peace Up. A-Town Down Shawty…)

Hello World!

Yesterday, I was chatting it up with a teenager at my church. She moved from L.A. about a year or so ago and forthrightly told me that she plans to return to her hometown as soon as she finishes high school and will attend UCLA or Pepperdine University. And then she started listing reasons why she loves L.A. and is not as enthralled about the A…As she eloquently listed her reasons from the A’s lack of a beach to most of her family living in L.A., I found myself being slightly ruffled while trying to appear understanding…But then again, after she finished, I got it…I love my city too…Most people who grew up in a particular city or hometown have an affinity for it like other…Although I was born in Hays, Kansas and my family hails from the best Caribbean isle in the world – Jamaica, I have lived in the A since I was six years old and claim it as my hometown…

A friend of mine hipped me to this cool website last week named Atlanta Time Machine, which includes pictures of various structures and interesting locales the city from years pasts juxtaposed with the same structures and locales now. Read an article about how the website came to be here.

Below  are a few pictures from the website…

This theater was located in the infamous West End, specifically 960 Ralph David Abernathy Blvd., SW, which was named Gordon Street in 1946…

And y’all see how times have changed…the same location as of 2004…

A pic of the Decatur branch of the First National Bank located in downtown Decatur or the Dec if you are straight from the A…apparently no date information is available about this postcard, but obviously it was long time ago…

And the same location as of 2004…no bank in sight…

I did not know that the A has a replica of the White House…it’s located at 3687 Briarcliff Road NE…I might have to check that out…Someone needs to invite President Obama to take a look if it hasn’t been done already…

You know I had to post a picture of a church…This is Mt. Moriah Baptist Church as of 1963 located at the 200 Ashby Street SW…

And now 200 Ashby Street SW is 200 Joseph E. Lowery Boulevard…Hmm, I prefer the older architecture…what say you?

To peruse more of these wonderful photographs, please go to the website…

And now I will offer my Top Ten Ways to Know if the A is Your Hometown

10. You remember the A before the 1996 Summer Olympics…It seems that the A attracted so many people after the Olympics that fateful and beautiful summer of 1996, but I think the A was a world-class city even before…

9. You remember when Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway was Bankhead Highway and Metropolitan Parkway was Stewart Avenue…Although the names have changed, I still think Bankhead Highway and Stewart Avenue when I am driving on these thoroughfares…

8. You remember Freaknik at its prime…Read my post about Freaknik memories…

7. You remember when black people did not live in Clayton County…

6. You remember when no one had heard of T.I., the self-proclaimed King of the South and Ludacris was a radio deejay named Chris Lova Lova. And you remember when rapper Kilo Ali was on the rise and everything Raheem the Dream made was  the jam…

5. And speaking of jams, you remember the show “Atlanta Jams,” a A-version of “Soul Train.” I once appeared on the show, and yes, Mom, that would mean that I did visit a night club before I turned 18 years old…Sorry Mom, I had to do it..

4. And speaking of night clubs, you remember Mr. V’s Figure 8 on Campbellton Road…I don’t think I actually visited the night club because it was one of the hot spots in the ’80s and the early ’90s…but I do remember passing by the night club and wondering what went on there as I sat in the back seat of my parents car…

5. You rode in the Pink Pig ride on top of the now closed Rich’s department store in downtown…

4. You remember the first  Martin Luther King Jr. holiday celebration after it became an official federal holiday..Thank you Lord!

3. You remember being scared Wayne Williams was going to snatch you out of your bed in the middle of the night…Google him if you are not from the A…

2. You remember when nearly everyone you met in the A grew up in the A…

1. You remember the A before it the A or the ATL and was just simply Atlanta…

 

What do you remember? Any thoughts?

 

And I have to give a special shout out to DJ Smurf now known as Mr. Collipark! Benjamin E. Banneker High School Alum Baby…